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Does anyone else find it hard to believe that this is a made up tale?!!!
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When I was a teenager I might have agreed with you, but these days, nope. It's a story. I think it's a great story, and it's fun to immerse yourself in the history and speculate about it as if it were real, but it's still just a story.
However, when I say "just" a story, I don't mean that it's not important, only that it's definitely made up. However, stories have real power and I consider LOTR to be among one of the more powerful ones I've ever read.
The Iliad had a similar effect on me. The Iliad was indeed based on the physical reality of Troy, but at its heart it's a literary effort like the LOTR, not a true history - unlike Herodotus who attempted to write real history without any attention to continuity or character development.
I remember trying to explain to a friend of mine who loved to read, but wouldn't read anything but non-fiction, why stories are important.
They're not real, but the best ones are true in the deepest most psychological sense of the word. Stories make sense of our world. They take us out of our current reality, but in doing so, they expand our perceptions of the real world. They don't need to have had physical presence, or to have really happened, to be true.
Erg... I didn't explain it to my friend very well either.