[davem]

Originally Posted by drigel

Nice thoughts about folding in historical influences, Numeronean!

I think about macro timelines as well esp when considering the Catholic/Christian POV, and how it relates to the Great Defeat as well. How the view of our history being a "downhill slide" since Eden. That is pronounced esp when looking at Legendarium elvish history, although being apart from Ea, there is a high-to-low progression. Contrast that to standard scientific view of "its all uphill" since we arose from the slime....

In the Smith essay Tolkien refers to a 'reformation':

The Great Hall is evidently in a way an 'allegory' of the village church; the Master Cook with his house adjacent, and his office that is not hereditary, provides for its own instruction and succession but is not one of the 'secular' or profitable crafts, and yet is supported financially by the village, is plainly the Parson and the priesthood. 'Cooking' is a domestic affair practised by men and women: personal religion and prayer. The Master Cook presides over and provides for all the religious festivals of the year, and also for all the religious occasions that are not universal: births, marriages, and deaths. The Great Hall is however no longer painted or decorated. If antique carvings, whether grotesques like gargoyles, or beautiful and of religious import, are preserved at all it is by mere custom. The Hall is kept rainproof, weatherproof and warm: that is the prime object of any care spent on it. Festivals are mere public assemblies, for talk assisted by eating and drinking: there are no longer songs, music, or dances. The church has been 'reformed'. Memory survives of 'merrier' days, but most of the village would not approve of any revival of them. That a MC (Master Cook) should himself sing is regarded as out of accord with his office.

Perhaps Tolkien was not thinking so much of the Norman invasion as of the English Reformation & the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII. Under ther Protestant Reformers (& later under Cromwell & the Commonwealth) there were, to a great extent, 'no longer songs, music, or dances' - it was (as Flieger noted when she read the essay out at Birmingham) the end of 'Merrie England' - as much of a fantasy as that may have been.

In fact, this whole passage is clearly (if only on one level) an 'allegory' of the Reformation & the rise of Protestant England. That being the case, what are the 'Faeries' in Smith - not 'Angels or Messengers of God' says Tolkien, but it seems they may have had Catholic sympathies!