Thread: Fatty Bolger
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Old 11-05-2015, 09:42 AM   #7
Faramir Jones
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Tolkien and Aristotle

Your wishing Tolkien could have written something as you suggested, jallanite, reminds me of how all of us have wished he were still around, or brought back to life, so we could ask him about this and many other things. However, I think it's just as well things are as they are, for this reason.

In Part 1, Chapter 1 of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, published in 1605, the small squire of the title went mad with all his reading of knightly romances, and trying to make sense of what was in them:

Over conceits of this sort the poor gentleman lost his wits, and used to lie awake striving to understand them and worm the meaning out of them; what Aristotle himself could not have made out or extracted had he come to life again for that special purpose.(My italics)

So even the great Greek philosopher would have been confounded by the problems being wrestled with by Don Quixote! Might Tolkien have, had he been brought back to life, been equally confounded by the problems argued over by us fans?
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