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03-28-2003, 02:50 PM | #1 |
Haunting Spirit
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Did Tolkien mean to make this relation?
I've been reading The Book of the Lost Tales I, and there is a place called Tol Eressëa or the Lonely Isle. In his commentary, Christopher Tolkien says that his father is referring to England. Why is that? I mean, is he trying to tie our world into his?
Sorry if I don't make any sense... [img]smilies/confused.gif[/img] [ March 29, 2003: Message edited by: Lady Iverin ]
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~O Elbereth! Gilthoniel! We still remember, we who dwell in this far land beneath the trees, Thy starlight on the Western seas.~ |
03-28-2003, 03:23 PM | #2 |
Shade of Carn Dûm
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I won't go into much detail because I'm not sure if this is correct or not and I don't want to tell anybody the wrong information. To my understanding, Middle Earth and Tolkien's whole world is what our world was very, very long ago. That's why if you look at a map of the fourth age of the whole Tolkien world, it resembles our world today. I'm not sure about this though so correct me if I'm wrong. [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]
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03-28-2003, 03:35 PM | #3 |
Shade of Carn Dûm
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Tolkien wanted to make a legend for England. He noticed that many other countries had myths and legends and wanted England to have one too. Middle-earth, is supposed to be the earth millions af years ago.
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03-28-2003, 03:43 PM | #4 |
Haunting Spirit
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I see. Well, if that's true, then are there other relations made in his books?
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~O Elbereth! Gilthoniel! We still remember, we who dwell in this far land beneath the trees, Thy starlight on the Western seas.~ |
03-28-2003, 04:12 PM | #5 |
Haunting Spirit
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You might be interested in this article: An Analysis of Endor (II)
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03-28-2003, 04:51 PM | #6 | |
Spectre of Decay
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In the Lost Tales, Tol Eressëa breaks to become Ireland and modern-day England, Scotland and Wales; Kortirion is the city of Warwick, and Tavrobel is Great Haywood, also in Warwickshire.
Tolkien had this to say on the subject (see the commentary to The Cottage of Lost Play for more details): Quote:
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03-28-2003, 04:58 PM | #7 |
Ghost Prince of Cardolan
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I don't like the idea of Middle Earth having once been our world....it doesn't seem as good, and it feels like we're the reason it's so much worse now than then. I don't mean things like Sauron and Melkor, but the rest of it, the really good people. So I'd like to go on thinking about ME as really existing, just in another place...if you don't mind. [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]
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03-29-2003, 03:37 AM | #8 |
Illustrious Ulair
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Galadrieloftheolden, I think that was Tolkien's point, loss of an older, more beautiful world, & the slow, steady descent into this one.
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03-29-2003, 07:49 AM | #9 | |
Spectre of Decay
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Plus, of course, he couldn't very well invent a mythology for England without setting his work in the far past of this world. Tolkien makes a lot of references in his writings to the Fall, and blames this for humanity's inability to create a perfect world. Being a Christian he believed that Man once lived in a state of innocence, which was lost, and which we all miss at some level and long to retrieve. Here he talks about the sense of exile from Eden:
Quote:
[ March 29, 2003: Message edited by: The Squatter of Amon Rûdh ]
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03-29-2003, 08:23 AM | #10 |
Cryptic Aura
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Without in any way denying those quotations from the Letters or Tolkien's other works, I would like to say that introducing this aspect of the Fall brings out important qualities of LOTR which might not be as readily appreciated in simply reading Arda as early England. IMHO
So, kudos, Squatter, for taking this discussion to the level of philosophical meaning. This seems in keeping with Tolkien's own feelings about simple and rigid allegorical equations between things, which he claimed in the Foreward to the second edition of LOTR as being too restrictive, limiting, and closed. Thank you also for putting the elves in the clear light of their foibles and failings. I remember a post of Rimbaud's some time back which also expressed a similar non-fanciful interpretation of them. This is, I think, one of the treacherous grounds in reading Tolkien, to idealise or romanticise the elves. I am of a mind to copy your post (and find Rimbaud's), to use whenever I need to help gamers at Rohan overcome such limiting depictions of them in their characters. Bethberry Edit: I felt my first draft of this post did not adequately address previous points, so I added the first paragraph here. I had in mind the Numenor thread. Davem, thanks for the link to your thread. I had missed it, not having enough time these days to follow Books closely. [ March 29, 2003: Message edited by: Bethberry ]
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03-29-2003, 08:56 AM | #11 |
Illustrious Ulair
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Bethberry, I can't help but agree about the way Elves are idealised. Its a trap too many of Tolkien's readers fall into. Tolkien himself was very clear. In letter 154 he writes:
But the Elves are not wholly good or in the right. Not so much because they had flirted with Sauron; as because with or without his assistance they were 'embalmers'. They wanted to have their cake & eat it; to live in the mortal historical Middle Earth because they had become fond of it (& because they there had the advantages of a superior caste) & so tried to stop its change & history, stop its growth, keep it as a pleasaunce, even largely a desert where they could be artists, & they were burdened with sadness & nostalgic regret. A bunch of us actually went quite a way down this road, exploring the Elves attitude to mortality, time & death in another debate - http://forum.barrowdowns.com/cgi-bin...1&t=003050&p=1 especially in the second half of the debate. |
03-29-2003, 01:28 PM | #12 |
Haunting Spirit
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Ok, I kind of understand where you stand Squatter, but how can Middle Earth evolve into Europe? I thought that it all but ended. It would have taken alot of work to make it what it was in Tolkien's time. Also, are there not only men in our time? What happened to the hobbits? And any others who remaind in ME. I believe I am confusing myself more.
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03-29-2003, 09:01 PM | #13 |
Pile O'Bones
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The way the relationship between Middle earth and real earth was described by some one was that middle earth is basically like a piece of history pullen out of the real earth. Almost like a period of lost years that was missing. So it has been pulled out somewhere along the line and has been written over in the line of history and forgotten about. So it is actually like another world, or one that never was, therefore keepings its specialness.
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03-30-2003, 12:19 AM | #14 |
Wight
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As for the "missing" peoples...
I think that what could have happened is that they just blended in with the men. Everyday I see people and think to myself, "Man, she looks like she could be and elf," or, "Wow, that dude is as about as stout as a hobbit." I think that that was kind of what Tolkien was trying to do in the mythology. He made his different races have various qualities otherwise seen everyday in today's world and built the people around them. I've also seen people who I've thought resemble orcs, but I won't go there [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img].
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03-30-2003, 08:29 AM | #15 | ||
Spectre of Decay
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Quote:
Quote:
As for Tolkien's mythology developing into the modern world, this is supposed to have happened gradually over time. The Elves were supposed to have left for the West long before Anglo-Saxon times (c. 550-1066 a.d.), so that a gulf of millennia is supposed to separate the current age of the world from the events of The Lord of the Rings. This is clever because we have very scant historical records of England before and after the Roman occupation, in fact up until the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity and the resultant rise in literacy. The legends of King Arthur date from the turbulent years immediately after the Roman departure in 411 a.d. and this (or the period before the invasions of Julius and Claudius Caesar) is a perfect place in which to set fictional history simply because there is a lot of blank space to fill in the historical record during that period. If we spread our net still further back in time there are hundreds of thousands of years intervening between the first evidence of modern man and the first written records: recorded history is a tiny fraction of the story of mankind. When we examine the extent to which Europe has changed since the Roman empire it becomes easy to see how Tolkien's world could have developed into modern Europe, even though we know that it didn't. That being said, Tolkien's stories are legends, not a history. The myths of Middle-earth would (were they natural rather than artificial legends) bear the same relation to modern England as the mythology of ancient Hellas bears to modern Greece. Also it must be remembered that the creation of a 'mythology for England' was only the starting point of Tolkien's legends. His work eventually grew beyond any such boundaries. [ March 30, 2003: Message edited by: The Squatter of Amon Rûdh ]
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03-30-2003, 11:31 AM | #16 | |
Haunting Spirit
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All right, I believe that I'm thinking like a child now. Poor me. Well, of course his words are myths, but I'm looking at it as continuing the myths to modern age. I mean, even though it's not real, it doesn't mean that we can't relate to the legends of Tolkien nowadays.
Quote:
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03-30-2003, 12:48 PM | #17 |
Spectre of Decay
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He didn't kill them off. Most of the Elves sailed into the West, the Hobbits hide from view. The fates of the others are my own speculation and therefore not necessarily valid.
Having said that, species die out all the time under the dominion of Men. We're not very good custodians. [ March 30, 2003: Message edited by: The Squatter of Amon Rûdh ]
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04-01-2003, 08:50 PM | #18 | |
Haunting Spirit
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Quote:
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