[lindil]

I was out walking my hound in the rain, I walked through orchards, through the rain, taking backways and old dirt footpaths, going to the only all night establishment in this backward town of 12,ooo mostly sleeping souls. And as I walked I pondered my lens through which I perceived my world. THere were teachers I knew w/ Osanwe-esque powers, there was my Aldarion and Erendis-like marriage awaiting my return from the latest journey, there was my coming gig as an acoustic minstrel at a wine and chocolate fete', there was my rebellion in taxation against king george II [or is it IV ?] and wondering how best to respond when it seems like a Saruman-type has taken over the country and has gone from white to ... ... anyway... I was thinking and feeling that my strange life was indeed part of a bizzare 'furtherance' of the 'myth' of M-E.

In many respects I think JRRT was the mythological muse for the seeking 'masses' from the 60's upto the present. A stepping stone and touchstone for hundreds of thousands millions of artists, spiritual seekers. I will admit that it has been eclipsed by Harry Potter for many children these days, just as Star Wars was the seminal artistic and indeed cultural experience for many in the late 70's and 80's. A very good case can be made for saying that SW and HP are the fruits of the M-E myth in their creators? The effects of that will perhaps show as the current generation of children become our authors, filmakers, teachers and muscians, etc..Just as the effects of the 70's/80's gen making movies now...Matrix/SW/LotR/HP/Narnia... Fantasy/Sci-Fi is a huge part of mainstream movie-going and has been since SW.

Tolkien did I believe participate deeply, essentially - I would say in the moulding of the 'western mind'. He gave to all who could find there way to it a mythology I never had as a young child. For many he was a near biblical indictment of the curren trends of modernism. Did he hope to hold back the tide of it? Of course not, but he did hope to be true to the myths that had nurtured him as a teenage orphan-linguistic prodigy. And to his very well-informed Catholic Christian ideals.

Do I think it is true? More so than the history I learned a a child!

How so? because it spoke to all of my being, my mind, heart and even changed the way I experienced walking in the forests around my suburban tract mini-mansion. It gave me some template of how people with healthy and vital souls would walk, talk and in various crises involving forces from other levels of reality and wisdom both higher and lower than my own. In short it gave hope as I would now say, that the ideal of Elves was organically 'true' and that therefore there must be a way to that.

I know for a fact that this happened to many of my friends in our teenage years.
The Downs has been proof indeed that it has happened large and small all over the world [except ,maybe the muslim world?!].

So for people like suburban Americans, who had little to no mythical figures [Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, Lincoln and Washington, Paul Revere], LotR and co was soaked up like a sponge, and it went deep!!! Just like myths are supposed to.

Of course in everybody, how we absorb, understand and live out our myths is different, but to me M-E IS the 'real' mythological history for me...