[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Ok, I kind of understand where you stand Squatter, but how can Middle Earth evolve into Europe? I thought that it all but ended. It would have taken alot of work to make it what it was in Tolkien's time. Also, are there not only men in our time? What happened to the hobbits?

The fate of the Hobbits is, I think, adequately explained in The Lord of the Rings in the section of the prologue entitled Concerning Hobbits:

Even in ancient days they were, as a rule, shy of 'the Big Folk', as they call us, and now they avoid us with dismay and are becoming hard to find. ... They possessed from the first the art of disappearing swiftly and silently, when large folk whom they do not wish to meet come blundering by; and this art they have developed until to men it may seem magical.

Nothing happened to the Hobbits, they simply do not wish to be seen because we are too big and clumsy. In the early legends, the remaining Elves faded and their stature diminished as Men grew larger, so that they become what we would call 'fairies'. The Ents would naturally have died out eventually, since they could not reproduce; I don't know what Tolkien's intentions were for Dwarves and Orcs, but it must be remembered that this is just a story.

As for Tolkien's mythology developing into the modern world, this is supposed to have happened gradually over time. The Elves were supposed to have left for the West long before Anglo-Saxon times (c. 550-1066 a.d.), so that a gulf of millennia is supposed to separate the current age of the world from the events of The Lord of the Rings. This is clever because we have very scant historical records of England before and after the Roman occupation, in fact up until the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity and the resultant rise in literacy. The legends of King Arthur date from the turbulent years immediately after the Roman departure in 411 a.d. and this (or the period before the invasions of Julius and Claudius Caesar) is a perfect place in which to set fictional history simply because there is a lot of blank space to fill in the historical record during that period. If we spread our net still further back in time there are hundreds of thousands of years intervening between the first evidence of modern man and the first written records: recorded history is a tiny fraction of the story of mankind. When we examine the extent to which Europe has changed since the Roman empire it becomes easy to see how Tolkien's world could have developed into modern Europe, even though we know that it didn't.

That being said, Tolkien's stories are legends, not a history. The myths of Middle-earth would (were they natural rather than artificial legends) bear the same relation to modern England as the mythology of ancient Hellas bears to modern Greece. Also it must be remembered that the creation of a 'mythology for England' was only the starting point of Tolkien's legends. His work eventually grew beyond any such boundaries.

[ March 30, 2003: Message edited by: The Squatter of Amon Rûdh ]