[Child of the 7th Age]

Lalwendë,

Thanks for that final reference on the funeral. I had totally forgotten it.

_________________

Also, the other day I was blithely reading a Tolkien interview from the NYTimes of January 1967 when my jaw dropped open. Some of the ideas expressed in these two paragraphs seemed to bear an odd resemblance to our discussion in this thread! (The italics are mine)

"Hobbits," Tolkien says, "have what you might call universal morals. I should say they are examples of natural philosophy and natural religion." They are certainly capable of extraordinary bravery and humaneness; living in burrows, their creator declares, doesn't amount to anything like an animal kink.

"People still love thatched houses; they pretend it's because they're cool in summer and warm in winter, and they'll even pay a bit of extra insurance. We found German trenches which were often very habitable indeed except that, when we reached them, they faced the wrong way about. And have you been to England's oldest pub, the Trip to Jerusalem? It is carved out of the solid rock of Nottingham Castle. I went to Nottingham once for a conference. I fear we went to the Trip to Jerusalem and let the conference get on with itself."

"Animal kink!" I love it. First, Littlemanpoet you're obviously going to have to duke it out with the Professor if you persist in your belief that living in burrows is further proof of the Hobbits' essential animal nature. Then again JRRT had a solid reputation for contradicting himself. If we searched more intensively on the web, I can probably find another interview where the author argued the exact opposite. I say that with considerable amusement and affection!

Secondly, who said that a German trench couldn't be the original prototype of Bag-end?

Seriously though, what leaps out at me from these brief consecutive paragraphs is how JRRT's mind leapt from one subject to the next, making these interesting connections that would never have been evident on the surface of things. I can see how this can be wonderfully creative, yet make it difficult for someone to finish anything they start. And, perhaps more importantly, it also means it's difficult for us or any other so-called critics to nail down the origin of many of the ideas and concepts he's used. They've just gone through too many permutations.

I confess that my own mind works similarly, but only in one exceedingly humble respect. When I try to do housework, my mind flashes from one task to the next and consequently nothing whatsoever actually gets done!