[davem]

I think its clear that Tolkien felt a need to tie his mythology into the modern world - hence the Translator conceit - that these stories have come down to us from ancient times & are not Tolkien's own 'invention'. Hence the original of the Legendarium stories is the Red Book.

Right from the beginning transmission is an essential element in the mythology - so it is as much history as myth. The first link in the chain is Eriol/Aelfwine, an Anglo-Saxon. In one of the latest developments we have the Notion Club Papers. The interesting thing there is the change from transmission via a book to transmission via dream & vision. The Legendarium comes down to modern Englishmen not simply through a book but through their very DNA. They are connected with the living past through their dreams & visions.

Of course, what's important here is not that it is Englishmen per se who have this connection with the mythic-historical Legendarium, but that the past is alive in modern men (cf Merry's dream in the Barrow of being slain by the Men of Carn Dum). The past is not a series of 'dead' events, but is in some way still 'happening' in some eternal 'now'.

Yet, the attempt to tie the Legendarium into England & its inhabitants is still there. It is not that he is attempting to re-create a 'lost' mythology - though he does take the fragments of Northern lore/myth/legend & attempt to explain them or account for them - why are there references in the Eddas to 'Light' & 'Dark' Elves, what is the difference, why are they different? Tolkien 'invents' the idea of the Calaquendi & the Moriquendi in response to this puzzle (see Shippey's essay in Tolkien Studies vol 1).

So, Tolkien believes there was once a more or less coherent Northern mythology, one which he sets out to 'reconstruct' (as he does with language itself in his professional life). Language, words, names are 'living' things - they evolve, & it is possible to work backwards & find their earlier forms, meanings & references.

There was once another way of explaining the world, a mythological account. It survives in words & names of course, but it also lives on in the minds, the blood, the DNA of our cells.

So, was he attempting to give us England's 'lost' mythology? I think he was - in a way: he wanted to explain the aspects of myth & legend that survived & fit them into a coherent, overarching myth (or worldview).

The question is whether there ever was such a single, coherent worldview, or whether there were actually lots of diferent, competing, myths, bits of all of which survived. Language itself perhaps provides a possible answer. Most modern languages can be traced back to a single Indo-European original. Did Tolkien believe the speakers of that language had a single mythology which, as the language itself fragmented, followed that fragmentation. Work back to the original language & find the original myth - how come, for instance, so many cultures have stories of races equivalent to Elves (Naiads, Dryads, Sidhe, Alfar, etc).

In Tolkien's Legendarium we are still linked through time to that mythic past, & that link is passed on through language (both written & spoken) & inherited in our genetic makeup. 'Blood' is central, not in the way it was misused by the Nazis, but in that it is like a 'river' which carries, transmits, the living past down to the present.

It seems that Tolkien wanted to emphasise the central importance of the past in the present, that we moderns are not a new, seperate, thing, but rather part of a story stretching from a lost mythic past & on beyond us into an unknown future.

So I'd say the Legendarium both is, & is not, a 'mythology for England'.