[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by LMP

Although I agree with what you say in general, I think you overstate it by calling it "wrong"; perhaps "ill-advised" would be more appropo.

You're right 'wrong' may be the wrong word to use, as it's a loaded term (as proved in this thread!). I mean wrong as in a wrong step, but I can't deny that I also feel there is a little of the intellectual 'wrong' as well. I feel it is a shame when people are introduced to a great book through tiresome means and hence end up despising it. And like H-I has said beautifully already, I feel a gtreat deal of love towards Tolkien's work, and can't bear to see any 'wrong' done to it.

So, what might be better is if I rephrased it as: But what would be ill-advised would be to read the story in the first place seeking to find answers to those things which are in our own world.

Originally Posted by LMP

Hmmm...... I don't know.... there are a couple things that hold me back from this. First, Tolkien says in his letters over and over again that his Middle-earth is NOT utterly different from our own world, but feigned history of an era in this world. Second, whereas the Shire is obviously part of the feigned history, it serves as a sort of mediation between the primary world and the rest of Middle-earth.

I myself can see that The Shire is a reflection of a lost England, but more than that, it is not a reflection of an actual lost England, more a reflection of our own feelings of loss, of how we tend to view the past through rose-tinted spectacles. I too do this, viewing a rural childhood as an enchanted time, rather than bringing to mind the nastier and very real aspects of that lifestyle.

So, while that first step into Middle Earth is not as alien as it could be (it certainly bears more resemblance to our own world than those first scenes of Star Wars, for example), and it provides us with a recognisable mental anchor to remind us of what this quest is all about, it is nothing like a real or tangible place, but more like a bucolic dream or memory altered with the passing of the years. I think Tolkien himself serves to underline that this is a place somehow removed from us by having such oddities as Hobbits, 111st birthdays, a wizard and so on, not things to be encountered in rural England by any means!

Originally Posted by LMP

Third, even transitional fantasies are really immersive. Granted, what the transitional fantasies attempt is more difficult, because by means of the feigned primary world they allow the reader to bring expectations (baggage, sic) to her reading that she might otherwise leave behind; but as you implied, novels and fantasy novels share the characteristic of "feignedness". Thus, the difference between a transitional and an immersive, is that the former (seems to be attempting to) move(s) the reader from the familiar to the strange.

Of course, it could be that Tolkien created that forst step in a way which is a lot more subtle than transitional fantasies, but I would argue that the very oddness of The Shire, and the fact that it represents no England that ever existed beyond the poetic constructs of memory, does make it immediately immersive.

Originally Posted by Bethberry

Is the nature of fantasy/enchantment completely dependent upon this idea of "the strange"? Can fantasy only be about the 'not-yet known and experienced'?

Partly, I think, enchantment depends upon strange and peculiar things, but also much of it depends upon the familiar but somehow misplaced, or out of sync. To take a good example of the 'out of sync', the Oxford which Lyra resides in, from the pages of His Dark Materials, is a fantasy Oxford. It is somehow in a different time, and it is slightly skewed, and very strange indeed. If the definition of fantasy hangs on its being not yet known or experienced, then this definition of fantasy could equally apply to any novel which is about a world we are not familiar with, from Persuasion's vision of Regency Bath to Trainspotting's late 20th century urban Scotland. So for the genre of fantasy, there must be more to it, and I think it is the fact that whole worlds are created which have never existed at any point in time - if they had existed, then it would become either historical fiction or allegory, and would not be fantasy. So there is more to it than it simply being composed of that which we do not know.