[littlemanpoet]

Originally Posted by Helen

But I suspect that The Author of The Story (by which Tolkien did not mean himself) is busily laboring in the garden of your own soul. I look forward to the flowering and then the fruit.

Bless you.

Originally Posted by davem

I think we can see that, rather than being a project his father would have disapproved of, HoME does in fact do exactly what Tolkien pere wanted his Silmarillion to do & perhaps does it better than he could have done it himself....

It's ironic that what is being described in answer to my assertion, that Tolkien created this heterogeneous diversity of text and narrative over a lifetime, is probably not what Tolkien intended. Rather, it's how his mind worked and his artistic endeavor sorted itself out. He certainly was not scientific, but his template has now been laid for others to follow. Nobody does it, so far, because, outside of it being an unacceptable idiom in publishers' minds (spectres of "valid criticisms"?), it may be too gargantuan a task; besides, one would have to be an expert in philology or at least linguistics, or be able to feign such expertise.

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

Does anyone know what else Christopher has done? What was his academic field aside from Middle earth?

I think Christopher followed in his father's footsteps in philology, and taught Anglo-Saxon at Oxford.

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

lmp, you are yourself an accomplished writer. You understand how to intersperse dialogue and exposition, action and reflection. Is this something that you suspend when you read initially and do in retrospect? I guess what I am asking is, what do you mean by enchantment and by tearing apart the tower to see the stones? (Yes, I know the Tolkien allusion.)

Thank you for your kind words, Bb. To answer perhaps both questions, the more I learn about the craft of writing, the harder it is to achieve Secondary Belief, including my rereadings of Tolkien. It's a fact of life that with gained knowledge comes the loss of ....not innocence ... but simplicity of perception, I suppose, the desire to recapture which may have something to do with a desire for Eden or Middle-earth. That's probably why the 'mythic unity' concept is so important to me. Any analysis is by its very nature a dividing, a paring apart, and thus a loss of the enchantment that story brings.

So whereas it may not be the misspent life I originally asserted, there is still a loss occurring each time Christopher's commentary interrupts (yes, a loaded word) the story, because story creates mythic unity while commentary necessarily de-stories (destroys) it. So whereas we have a great treasury bestowed to us by the kindly and well meant efforts of Christopher, I can't help thinking that it undoes (unintentionally, I'm sure!) what JRRT was trying to do. And also, JRRT's own later analysis and attempts to harmonize his legendarium away from mythology toward a modern mindset was mistaken and harmful to his original purpose.