Tenacious davem.
"If you seek for her as hidden treasures..."
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Originally Posted by davem
But if that was the case Tolkien is on pretty shakey ground in claiming his there is no 'meaning' in his stories, or at least no intentional 'meaning' for us in the 'primary' world,
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Wasn't that statement of his (oft repeated) more in response to "Is the Ring the A-bomb? Is Sauron, Hitler?" I don't interprest that statement to mean "My stories will never transcend." Totally different statements. IF you read "On Faery Stories", he *expected* a good tale to transcend. But that is totally different than preaching or allegorizing. When a story transcends, the reader is brought to a place where Truth is revealed. But in a faerie story, (vs allegory) the author releases control of Which Truth to the combination of Reader and Truth.
I don't think Tolkien would have denied (at all!) that he was reaching for transcendance in his stories. What is eucatastrophe if not that?
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because what he is doing is attempting to change the way we think & behave, to change our philosophy & worldview, our whole value system, make us all into his 'ideal' medievals, his fellow TCBS-ites.
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THis is different, by the way, than saying he wanted to convert us all to catholicism.
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So everything he wrote, was written for a purpose, with a goal in mind - changing the way we think about the world.
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Yes. He says that is what Faery stories are good at.
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But then how come we can read the stories & experience them as having an internal 'reality', & don't feel we're being 'preached at'? Does it mean that Tolkien failed in what he was attempting, but succeeded in doing something he hadn't set out to do at all?
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If you read On Faery Stories, what you describe is exactly what he says a faerie story should be As quoted by H-I:
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If he indeed achieves a quality that can fairly be described by the dictionary definition: “inner consistency of reality,” it is difficult to conceive how this can be, if the work does not in some way partake of reality. The peculiar quality of the ”joy” in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.
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