Quote:
Originally Posted by TheLostPilgrim
This quote by JRRT is interesting: "once upon a time... I had in mind to make a body of more or less connected legend... I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched."
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Let me now expose myself as the total
ignoramus I am in regards to Tolkien scholarship, but I can just relate to what he says there.
Think of a scholarly mind enthusiastic with medieval history, a time in many senses different but yet similar to ours. We don't have any accounts of the history written from an all-knowing "God's eye perspective", the "full account" or the "definitive version", but a concentration of stories about the Scandinavians (vikings) written up by the monks coming in there, another with the British Isles (some older accounts, some more concentration later on figures like Arthur or even later, Robin Hood), the myths of Perceval from France later incorporated into the Arthurian legends, the Niebelungenlied bringing in many of the features of some older scattered notes (and the things shared with
the Edda) and after that followed by scores of accounts... while some other thoughts, ideas, narratives are mentioned just here and there, some probably nowhere.
So isn't Tolkien just going for the "real thing" here? Some legends are more connected, wealthier in detail and in variance, while some are more scetchy, more scattered, more unfathomable? Like with real history from where we have to draw from - and of which he was himself so fascinated about?
The real history has gaps and discontinuities as well as overlapping and different versions of things.
So as an author, leaving the gaps was also intentional, as a call to incite the imagination of the reader? And if so, then isn't that exactly that which made him (and us reading his stories) curious and enthusiastic, which made him (and thence us) fall in love with the thing as it can never exhaust itself? Just because there is no "definitive version".