[Aiwendil]

Davem wrote:

A more interesting question in the context of this thread is how we judge the 'canonicity' of Tolkien's Faerie. Do we base our judgements about what is 'correct' in Tolkien's vision, ie, which versions of the stories & which of Tolkien's interpretations of them we include as 'authoritative' & which we reject, on what Tolkien does with what he finds & Faerie & brings back to us & presents as Middle Earth (or Faery), or do we base our judgement on how accurately he reports Faerie to us?

but statements about Faerie made in it may conflict with the 'truth' of Faerie - maybe he chose not to accept something he found there because it conflicted with some tenet of Catholicism - was there any self imposed restriction on what he reported to us?

Again, Middle-earth is not Faerie. Looking for a coherent story of Middle-earth (the sort of thing that the Revised Silmarillion project is doing) is quite a different thing from looking for a coherent picture of Faerie (whatever that may mean). I think there is no such thing as "accurately reporting Faerie" since Faerie is not a self-consistent place. Nor is it quite right to imagine Tolkien peering into Faerie and writing down what he saw.

Or is Tolkien's Middle Earth to be taken as Art, a thing in itself, which has a value solely in & of itself? Or, to boil it down, should we see the Legendarium as being 'for' something - either for something in this world (to teach us about this world, our place in it & how we should live) or as a pointer to the Road' out of this world (the way over the Mountains), or should we simply 'experience' it as having no meaning beyond itself?

This is part of what I was getting at earlier. I would choose your last option - Middle-earth has no meaning beyond itself, if by "beyond itself" we mean "other than itself". It is simply art, with value in itself. Its value derives neither from "meaning" within our world nor from its access to Faerie.

But then we get stuck, because Tolkien is using ancient symbols, myths, traditions. He is dealing with 'eternal' themes - death, love, sacrifice, beauty & those things are what strike the deepest chord in most of his readers, so we are forced to ask whether what we are responding to is simply Middle Earth itself, or what it points us towards, & requires us to confront - or at least offers us the opportunity to confront.

I don't think that this is a problem. Tolkien said that Allegory and Story converge in Truth, so that the better an allegory is, the more easily it can be understood merely as a story in its own right, and the better a story is, the more "applicability" it will have to the real world. Now by "Truth", Tolkien may have meant "religious truth". But I don't think that religion is necessary to the idea; "Truth" can merely mean the observed facts about our world.

If Middle-earth - or any fictional place - is to function as the setting for a story, it must be believable. And naturally, believability or self-consistency is tied in a way to realism, since the real world is by default the most self-consistent, the most believable world. Good story -> self-consistent setting -> believable setting -> realistic setting -> applicability to the real world.

I think this is the solution also to your dilemma:

Tolkien can't have it both ways - he can't claim on the one hand that fantasy (including his own creation, presumably) is about seeing 'in a brief vision that the answer may be greater—it may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world' - ie, claiming that it points us towards something greater, more 'real', 'truer', & at the same time denounce the 'purposed domination of the Author', & leave it all up to individual interpreatation, or 'applicability'

First, I think we ought to replace Tolkien's talk of "evangelium" here with a more general "truth" (and, again, it does not matter to the structure of the argument whether this is religious or scientific).

If indeed the claim, then, is that good fantasy shows us truth, then it is not at odds with his denunciation of the "purposed domination of the Author". For if good stories must be, to a certain degree, like the real world, then good stories will naturally reflect truth, even without the purposed domination of the author. This is what I think he means by "applicability" - that characteristic of good stories whereby, despite being written without any intention of allegory, they contain themes and similarities to the real world that we can pick out.

I think Mark12_30 is saying something similar:

The domination of the author in allegory is due to the one-on-one correspondence, indicating that the author chooses where the reader is allowed to look. That tends to actually limit the truth that can be revealed. A faerie story like LOTR, or Sil, or Beowulf or Sir Gawain, in removing this one-to-one, opens up the view. (struggling...)

In other words, in a simple allegory, the author puts the themes and parallels in first, and constructs the story to fit them. The result is that the parallels are always straightforward and always simple. X in the story means A in reality, Y means B, etc. But in works written primarily as stories in themselves, the themes arise haphazardly and less straightfowardly - and, if the story is good, more realistically. I do think that pure allegory has certain advantages, but obviously this natural characteristic of the themes in a pure story is a point in its favor.

Where I think I may disagree with Mark12_30 (though I'm not sure whether I interpret her post correctly) is that I do not think that this applicability is the purpose of fantasy. I don't think that fantasy exists in order to expose us to certain truths; I don't think that the reason for the self-consistency of a story is that it allows us to swallow the truths it reveals to us. I think that the value of a story is the story itself, as a work of art to be experienced and enjoyed; the self-consistency, the applicability - all are tributary to this.

Davem wrote:

The question is, what is his motivation? To give us a believable, convincing secondary world, or to present us with a 'parable' aimed at converting 'those with ears to hear'?

This is a nice way of putting the question I was attempting to answer in the previous paragraph (and before) - I would choose your first option. But - and I suppose this is an important reservation - I would alter "a believable, convincing secondary world" to "a good story". As I said before, I don't think that LotR would have been great art if it had just been about Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves, etc. going about their daily lives. The setting of the story if of great - even critical - importance, but it is nothing without plot.

Of course, this may be mere semantics. For I suppose that by "secondary world" one could mean not just the place but the history - the sequence of events, in which case the term has plot built into it.

I suppose this brings earlier statements of mine about the nature of Faerie into question, & I may have to change my spots! Faerie becomes not a coherent 'state' or reality underlying this one, but a source of images, stories, concepts, which an author is free to make use of for whatever purpose he chooses

Agreement! This is what I was getting at with my "not a place" arguments.

but if he makes such choices, he is choosing for a reason, & has something to say, a position he wants to put forward, & whether he intends it or not, he is to some extent 'dominating' the reader.

Well. In a sense, every author must "dominate" the reader - for the author chooses exactly what words the reader will read. But when Tolkien speaks of "purposed domination" I think he means something much stricter - the author's domination of the "applicability". I suppose that allegory is just applicability that is utterly dominated by the author. An author can choose which images, which concepts to put into a book without dominating the applicability. You do have a point though - every author, in choosing which words to use, which images to present, etc., must to some extent dominate the reader. But, like many things, I think this is a matter of degree.