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Old 06-29-2016, 06:58 AM   #42
Nerwen
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Nerwen is a guest of Galadriel in Lothlórien.Nerwen is a guest of Galadriel in Lothlórien.Nerwen is a guest of Galadriel in Lothlórien.Nerwen is a guest of Galadriel in Lothlórien.Nerwen is a guest of Galadriel in Lothlórien.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Balfrog View Post
I note that the Tolkien strongly implied on several occasions that the tale didn't contain conscious allegory. Yet nevertheless he was quite happy to bring in the poem of Fastitocalon into Middle-earth lore in the 1962 Adventures of Tom Bombadil. It is supposed to have been attributed to Sam Gamgee with its ultimate source unknown but from earlier times.

With the character Fastitocalon allegorized as Satan (maybe effectively Morgoth) per Letter #255 – without a shadow of doubt, his myth touched upon allegorical ideas.
But it's not Tolkien's allegory:
Quote:
Originally Posted by JRRT
The poem on Fastitocalon is not like Cat and Oliphaunt my own invention entirely but a reduced and rewritten form, to suit hobbit fancy, of an item in old 'bestiaries'. I think it was remarkable that you perceived the Greekness of the name through its corruptions. This I took in fact from a fragment of an Anglo-Saxon bestiary that has survived, thinking that it sounded comic and absurd enough to serve as a hobbit alteration of something more learned and elvish

(...)


The notion of the treacherous island that is really a monster seems to derive from the East: the marine turtles enlarged by myth-making fancy; and I left it at that. But in Europe the monster becomes mixed up with whales, and already in the Anglo-Saxon? version he is given whale characteristics, such as feeding by trawling with an open mouth. In moralized bestiaries he is, of course, an allegory of the Devil, and is so used by Milton.
He's talking about how he borrowed the monster from Anglo-Saxon lore, where it apparently has that meaning. But, unless I am much mistaken, the poem "Fastitocalon" in "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil" describes a creature of Hobbit folklore- not one supposed to really exist in Middle-earth. That is, it's a fiction within a fiction. Now, in context "Fastitocalon" could in fact be allegorical without having any bearing on whether "The Lord of the Rings" or any actual characters therein are. In saying his story is not allegorical Tolkien does not logically rule out some Middle-earth cultures having the practice of creating allegorical works, since these would exist on a different level of (un)reality.

Hope I'm making sense here!
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