I have to say I'm not really connecting with these ideas of Tom as Time & Goldberry as Space. For me Middle Earth is 'real', as real as this world, & I tend to think of the inhabitants as 'beings', not 'characters'. There's something RJ Stewart says in The Underworld Initiation, along the lines of , The inhasbitants of the Inner worlds are REAL within their own dimension, & not figments of your imagination - if you treat them as such, they will respond as such. OK, not entirely relevant to a work of literature. But I do experience Middle Earth as a true, valid, inner reality. I think the danger of pushing allegory & analogy too far is that you 'break a thing, to find out what it is made of'. I can see similarities between Tom & Merlin, etc, but for me, Tom & Goldberry are 'real' beings, within their own world, & if you push interpretations too far, the whole thing is likely to unravel for you.
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