What's "real," anyway?

[davem]

I don't think that a sense of 'reality' is dependent on approval. As I said, one major part of the effect is the 'illusion' Tolkien creates of depth & redundancy - all the writings about Middle earth we have are (within the secondary world) 're-tellings' of earlier, usually 'lost' (most never actually written by Tolkien) accounts, so we are constantly being referred back, & further back, to a lost 'original', which itself, even if we could find it, would simply be a report of the actual event, perhaps by an observer of it, but not the event itself. Yet all these layers serve to convince us of the 'reality' of Middle earth, because they're like the layers in an onion, we can keep going back through 'time', getting closer & closer (yet we'll never get to the original event). This creates an illusion that Middle earth is/was a real.

As I pointed out in the Chapter-by-chapter HoME thread, we seem to have the same thing in the early drafts of LotR, where Tolkien seems to have begun with the garbled later accounts (Mad Baggins, Trotter the hobbit ranger who wore wooden shoes, etc), & slowly 'discovered' the 'true' story of the War of the Ring.

The other reason for the sense of 'reality' is the individual reader's response, & that's something which happens within each of us - or doesn't. On some level we respond Yes! or No!, & I don't think that can be explained logically.

Originally Posted by Fordim

And that’s where I come back to Tolkien: do his works share the same reality? Or are they ‘merely’ very pleasing tales, divorced from reality? Or do they create a new or different reality, that in some way is connected to our own?

Well, I suppose 'reality' is a misleading term, because it relies too much on provable 'facts', especially for us post-enlightenment bods. Its probably too misleading a concept, because we tend to set 'reality' up against 'fantasy', & an account of anything must be either one or the other. For me, Middle earth is 'real' within its own dimension; its also 'real' for me, because for all their 'outlandish' forms, the characters who inhabit it speak to me, I understand them & care about them. As to the 'fantastical' nature of Middle earth 'lessening its 'reality':

The heart of man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
man, sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with elves and goblins, though we dared to build
gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sow the seeds of dragons, 'twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we're made.

Yes! 'wish-fulfilment dreams' we spin to cheat
our timid hearts and ugly Fact defeat!
Whence came the wish, and whence the power to dream,
or some things fair and others ugly deem?
All wishes are not idle, nor in vain

Mythopoeia