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davem:
I think so much of Tolkien's capacity for creating the sense of 'enchantment' in his readers comes down to this - we don't feel he is 'revealing' new things to us so much as 'reminding' us of things we have forgotten. So rather than being amazed by our encounter with a completely unknown 'new' world, we feel at once 'at home' in Middle Earth
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Agreed and shared
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Of course, we are then back to the idea of some kind of 'pre-existing' 'Other world', which we all 'once' knew. But then, how close are we to saying that some other 'explorer' may get things right about that world, which Tolkien may have got 'wrong'?
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Quite close, I daresay. (Platonism again, eh?) [b]But[/i] that does not eliminate the 'canonicity' of what Tolkien wrote a tiniest bit. Analogy (or a short story, may I say so?) is as follows:
Let us suppose that there was a person all of the mankind remembered to an extent, or in some subconscious way. Let us further suppose that some genius of a painter produced a portrait of the person, and quite a good one, so all the onlookers agreed that the likeness was very great indeed. But, as each one of the onlookers had their own, however dim, memory of the person, their agreement was ill-matched. Some said that nose was reproduced all right, but ears were slightly differed from the real thing, others said eyes should have been blue instead of green and so forth. Otherwise, they said, the portrait was very good and as near a real thing as it may be.
(What I'm driving at, that portrait as a portrait,
fait accompli was no more than the portrait but no less than it. So, as far as being a portrait, it was a 'canon'.
As far as likeness to the real person is concerned, the
portrait produced by any one painter, is not a canon. It is just particular way of communicating)
So, in a story I have been telling you, another painter has risen with the times and has produced another portrait of the person, which, as selfsame onlookers agreed, was even closer to the original than the first portrait. But noone came up with a rubber, razor and brush to defile the first artwork and bring it 'closer to real likeness', for, as an artwork, it was 'canon'.
Yet many were drawing caricatures, scatches, drafts, reproductions, copies and so forth of an artwork as an artwork