I suppose this sums up the problems I have with the Narnia books (& with most fantasy novels - the only ones that have really drawn me in, apart from Tolkien's - even the 'lesser' works like Niggle & Roverandom - are Hope Mirlee's Lud in the Mist & John Crowley's Little, Big). The 'reality' of Tolkien's works is due to a number of things - principally perhaps the time he took developing them. Tolkien's novels are not 'word processor' novels; they were written out long hand, amended, begun over & over, & we have all the texts, all the failed attempts, & since CT has made them available, all those versions now exist alongside the works published during Tolkien's lifetime. Trotter is a 'real' Tolkien character for me, for instance.
In a sense, all these texts add to the reality, because I think that's how they served Tolkien himself - they provided different angles, & he could explore Middle earth in numerous ways through this approach. Gergely Nagy has shown (The Adapted Text: The Lost Poetry of Beleriand) how in some of the versions of the stories certain poetic phrases have been lifted from the early versions like the Lost Tales or the poetic Lays & placed in the prose versions. This gives a sense of the'final' versions (if we can speak of such things) being constructs put together from earlier 'lost' versions of the stories. Take a passage from the Silmarillion, (ch 13, Of the Return of the Noldor. we have the prose 'version' in the book, but as Nagy points out, it seems to have been constructed from a 'lost' verse original:
Quote:
and even as the Noldor set foot upon the strand
their cries were taken up into the hills & multiplied,
so that a clamour as of countless mighty voices
filled all the coasts of the North;
and all the noise of the burning of the ships at Losgar
went down the winds of the sea as a tumult of great wrath
and far away [all who heard that sound were filled with wonder]. Nagy, in Tolkien Studies, vol 1
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Whether we consciously pick up on this at all, on some level we recognise, with the different styles we encounter even within a single paragraph, that it is a 'construct', & that some other texts, which we don't have, lie behind what we do. This gives an illusion of 'depth', as Nagy points out.
With other writers, who don't have that wealth of background material to draw on, we don't get that sense, so the story, however 'psychologically complex' the characters may seem, is 'one dimensional'.
When Tolkien adds to that fragments of ancient myth (see Shippey in the same volume 'Light Elves, Dark Elves & Others: Tolkien's Elvish Problem), fairy story, folk lore, things we know, or half-know & so recognise on some level, his 'secondary world' takes on a feeling of 'reality'.
As John Crowley states in Aegypt 'There is more than one history of the world' - there is the 'mythic' history, the 'artistic' history, running alongside the 'facts' that we're taught in school - which is the 'real' Arthur? - there's the fifth century Romano British warlord who fought a desperate defensive war against the invading Saxons, with ordinary swords & spears, & there's the Arthur of legend, guided by Merlin, & with his magical blade Excalibur uniting his people, sending off his knights on the Quest of the Holy Grail (another 'variant history', this time of the Church), & falling in battle with his nephew Mordred, embodiment of evil, but who did not truly die &, (like other heroes, including Finn MacCool) is only sleeping, & will awake when his land & people are in need.
Tolkien's 'history' is an alternative to the 'facts', yet both histories contend in our minds (& hearts). Tolkien's creation is speaking the 'language of the heart', & our hearts respond to its 'truth', because there
is more than one history of the world.