It seems to me that it is as "real" as a story of its type can be. Certainly we would not expect to encounter elves and Rings of Power in our own world, but in Middle-earth it all seems to make sense. Tolkien hands these events and information to us and we simply accept it, because in Middle-earth that's just how things work.
This thread made me think of some sections in "On Fairy Stories," which I'm sure many Downers have read.
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It is at any rate essential to a gunuine fairy-story, as distinct from the employment of this form for lesser or debased purposes, that it should be presented as "true." The meaning of "true" in this connexion I will condider in a moment. But since the fairy-story deals with "marvels," it cannot tolerate any frame or manchinery suggesting that the whole story in which they occur is a figment or illusion. The tale itself may, of course, be so good that one can ignore the frame.
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and
Quote:
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Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called "willing suspension of disbelief." But this does not seem to me as a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful "sub-creator." He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is "true": it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed.You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in a work of art that has for us failed.
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Whew! I think this sums up a lot of what I was going to say, so I won't repeat it. But the last sentence of the second excerpt I find particularly interesting. Oftentimes have I read books which are not as engrossing as the Lord of the Rings, and the whole time I feel like some kind of outsider, looking at these people in their little world and nitpicking, thinking, "Oh, well
that could never happen," and being generally doubtful. It's like when you really try to like something you are reading, but simply can't get into it, and then it just isn't real anymore.
Middle-earth is not a perfect world; it is very much unlike our own and yet it holds the same truths of friendship, loyalty, love, despair, and hardship which tie it into our own world.