A hundredth re-read of the LotR

[Ibrîniðilpathânezel]

Originally Posted by Nogrod

But looking at the way one may jump from 111th & 33rd birthday - coincidentally or contrivingly happening - to these considerations it really arouses the question whether Tolkien wished, by the selection of those "fitting" birthdays to address the reader that we are in a fantasy or mythical landscape now and there the providence rules supreme? And whether that as a myth portrays to us more what the world should be like, not what it is like?

This makes me hear Rod Serling's voice intoning, "There's a signpost up ahead. Next stop...." Middle-earth?

But I do think this might be a reasonable assessment, that Tolkien wished the readers to know that this was no longer what they think of as the "real world," that they had crossed over into the realm of Myth and Legend -- into Faerie. I suspect that this was why his eventual attempts to rethink his myths in terms of real science (as in the "Myths Transformed" portion of Morgoth's Ring), it ultimately failed. He himself -- his creative mind, that is -- had conceived the whole as Myth, and it was too tightly constructed to take it apart and reinterpret it in Real World, scientific terms. It is a world as it should be in terms of its own subcreational reality, not in any other way. The introduction of the hobbits and the Shire incorporates elements that feel like the world we know, but other things, like the coincidental birthdays, wizardly fireworks, and a magic ring let us know that though we have not entirely abandoned the familiar, we are moving into a world that is not our own.