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Originally Posted by SpM
In past times, myths and folklore were often considered to be "historically" factual, and yet they nevertheless provided a link (imaginatively, at least) to Faerie.
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Is Faerie an 'actively' exsting state - either an 'inner' psychological, or an 'outer' other dimensional one - which is accessible, or is it a 'dead' record of past beliefs, only existing in texts? Is Middle earth 'Faerie', or is it an 'it is said', a 'we have heard' account of Faerie. If Middle earth was Faerie, then Faerie was an historical epoch of our world, & is no more - unless it has survived in the will of Morgoth which suffuses all matter, including our bodies, so Morgoth continues to live in some sense in us.
If Middle Earth is an 'it is said', a 'we have heard' account of Faerie', then it cannot have been a real historical epoch, it is merely a variety of accounts by different people, all with their own biases, of something else. What I mean is, Tolkien is constantly pointing at something which we can't any longer see, refering us to something else - the distant, ever receding vistas, of time & space. But this is Elvish, in its strictest sense - nostalgic yearning for a past that is forever lost. The texts Tolkien has given us are Elvish things - attempts to recreate what once was. They are 'art'. Lord of the Rings is an Elvish artwork, in the same way that Lorien was. Lorien was a 'living' sculpture, made of the stuff of Middle earth, shaped from memory by magic. But it wasn't the 'real' thing, only a reflection of the real. In the same way, I'd say Lord of the Rings, Middle earth itself, is a reflection, shaped by words ('living shapes that move from mind to mind' - Mythopoea).
So, was Lorien an 'allegory' of Valinor, an attempt to reproduce it, a copy, an idealisation (if we can 'idealise' the IDEAL). Or is the beauty of Lorien merely 'applicable' to Valinor? Or is Lorien 'history repeating itself'. Whatever. Lorien was
not Valinor, however close a reflecton it might have been. In the same way, I'd say that Middle earth cannot be an account of our historical past, because it is 'memories' (internally to Middle Earth), or desire (externally, in that Tolkien created it).
The Legendarium 'points back' to something else, which it attempts to recreate, but it is not the
ding an sich, because, as Tolkien himself has pointed out in On Fairy Stories, we can never get back to the 'original' of any fairy story, because fairy stories grow, like trees in the forest of tales. Middle earth is such a tree - if we were able to go 'back' through the centuries we wouldn't find a more 'perfect' tree, we'd find an acorn - which wouldn't be what we were looking for, or the parent tree which dropped the acorn, or the grandparent tree. We'd never find the 'perfect' version of 'our' tree in the past. Going back into the past from Lorien would lead us to the woods of Orome in Valinor, perhaps, but not to an 'ideal' Lorien. Lorien is itself, an artwork, a inspired by something else. In the same way Middle earth is inspired by something else - by myth, history, dream - it arises out of those things, but it is not those things. Its the 'finger, pointing at the moon'. Question is (probably unanswerable), is that moon still there, so that the finger is pointing to a still existing place (Faerie as another, still existing, inner or outer, dimension), or is it pointing to something that's gone forever (Faerie as an historical epoch of our world).