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Originally Posted by skip spence
Now you make a good point there. I'd have to disagree though; although his ambition to make his secondary world consistent to both its own internal logic and to the logics of the real world we live in ultimately proved futile, it was also this very ambition which made his works so rich and wonderful to explore.
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Yes, but. My point is he never achieved his ambition. Thus, its hardly possible to take any statement he made about M-e as definitive. One can draw conclusions from statements he did make, but its impossible to be sure that Tolkien himself would have come to the same conclusion - & even if he had there's no way of knowing if he would have changed his mind about it later.
My point is HoM-e is a bad (if not useless) resource for anyone wanting definitive statements, let alone a coherent, internally self-consistent history & physics/metaphysics of M-e. You find the same thing with the letters - people take the letter to Michael about women :
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Their gift is to be receptive, stimulated, fertilised (in many other matters than the physical) by the male. Every teacher knows that. How quickly an intelligent woman can be taught, grasp his ideas, see his point - & how they can go no further when they leave his hand... etc
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as a definitive statement of his views. However, as David Doughan shows in his article in the latest Mallorn Tolkien's views can be seen to change over the years, & his depiction of Erendis seems to reflect that. And he was certainly very proud that he had a daughter, as well as sons at Oxford - plus, as Doughan points out, one can hardly imagine the writer of a letter like that quoting Simone de Bovoir with such approval as he did in the 'Tolkien in Oxford' documentary. Tolkien changed as an individual. His attitudes changed, & his fiction reflected that.
The real problem, as I indicated earlier, is that later changes both to the overall physics/metaphysics may have worked to an extent, but would have devastated the earlier stories - some of which had not been touched for decades. His later theorising on the nature of Orcs is fascinating - but contradicts what he wrote about them in LotR & elsewhere. The stuff in 'Myths Transformed' would have destroyed the Sil which existed up to that point.
A lot of Tolkien 'fans' have constructed a very complex physics & metaphysics for M-e earth which is all their own work, although based in Tolkien's writings - thing is these writings were produced over a period of 60 odd years & don't all fit together that well. I think the problem is that Tolkien managed to create an illusion of M-e being a 'real' place, which worked according to certain rules, a place of facts & figures which could be proven, confirmed & replicated in a laboratory. It wasn't. It was a work of imagination, which Tolkien was making up, changing & evolving as he went along. Just as you could only achieve a 'complete, self-consistent' Silmarillion by excluding more of Tolkien's writings than you included, so you could only achieve such a 'complete, self-consistent' cosmology, history & physics/metaphysics by doing the same thing - & to attempt either rather misses the point (to my mind, at least).
Bombadil is never explained, but explanations have been offered 'in line' with statements made by Tolkien - in other contexts & in regard to other characters. Same with Ungoliant. Some of the stuff in Osanwe Kenta is fascinating - other stuff, like Tolkien's attempt to explain the behaviour of Manwe, is, frankly, unconvincing & doesn't 'fit'. The fate of Balder as given in Rivers & Beacon Hills of Gondor is creepy, but belongs rather to the worlds of Lovecraft & RE Howard (whose work he had been reading around the time he wrote it) than to Middle earth as we know it. The Athrabeth is clearly an attempt to introduce the central aspect of Christian belief into M-e - not because he wanted to turn the Legendarium into a Christian 'allegory', but because he wanted to tie it into the primary world (same motivation as was behind the 'Myths Transformed' fiasco - which it is in the context of the Legendarium, however beautifully written & inventive in itself). But, as Tolkien himself seems to realised, it collapsed rather into a parody of Christianity, & for all the beauty of its language & the truly moving story of the love between Andreth & Aegnor it's unconvincing & doesn't feel like it belongs in the Legendarium - the Eru presented in the Athrabeth is simply not the Eru we encounter everywhere else he appears in the Legendarium. As a stand-alone work it is interesting - like much of the other speculative writing.