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That’s the neat thing about truth and reality: we can all have different truths, but we all share the same reality.
And that’s where I come back to Tolkien: do his works share the same reality? Or are they ‘merely’ very pleasing tales, divorced from reality? Or do they create a new or different reality, that in some way is connected to our own?
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I'm not so sure I agree with you, Fordim. Do we all share the same reality?
I suppose in a broad sense we do, in that we're all on the same planet orbiting the sun at the same speed, but each of us inhabits a very small slice of that reality. Many, many things that are very important in my life would seem unfathomable to someone else, to the extent that things I spend hours on each day would not ever enter the consciousness of many other people. My life is just as real as everyone else's, but no one else can ever experience it. Even within the same society, there can be completely different realities. One need look no further than the old stereotypical upstairs, downstairs class divide. Does the master of the house really know what the servants are doing all day? Would he even understand if they told him? (The converse is also true, of course.) Two intersecting yet largely dissimilar realities exist within the same house. This is a weak example, I know. Unfortunately the really good and pertinent examples would be impossible to make, because the one side necessarily wouldn't understand enough about the other side's reality even to describe it. (Which, I'm well aware, is a very cheap rhetorical trick and I apologize for it.)
And now to Tolkien--
I don't think that "very pleasing tales" are ever "divorced from reality." Tales, pleasing and otherwise, are attempts to explain (whether overtly, as in myths, or obliquely, as in other types of stories), describe, reject, or have another relationship to reality. One can continue to put more and more verbs into my previous sentence without changing its meaning at all; the point is that every work of art is necessarily reacting to the artist's reality. The artist's reality is all that s/he knows and is therefore the only basis for art. (Of course I'm including imagination and inner life within the umbrella of reality.)
Going back to your original post, then, Hamlet and LoTR are exactly the same in their relationship to reality. Once the work of art exists it stands alone as another commentary on the "actual" world, and that function is the same whether the work is set in Denmark or Dunharrow, England or Eregion.