What's "real," anyway?

[tar-ancalime]

I am free to question the existence of God, or the depiction of women in Hamlet, because it’s a mirror that’s been held up to a nature that I share with Shakespeare (in which he and I get to decide for ourselves if there’s a God and what he – or she – is like). I don’t have that option with Tolkien – in his world, the moral landscape includes Eru, whose actions and nature are a certain way. The reality of Middle-Earth is fixed and beyond my control in a way that the reality of Shakespeare’s Elsinore is not.

Again, sorry, but I don't agree.

Shakespeare's Elsinore is just as fixed as Middle-Earth is: you can question God, women, and hosiery fashions till you're blue in the face, but you won't change Elsinore. As I said in my last post (rather obtusely, I fear), once the work of art exists it's fixed. We can interpret, question, and otherwise layer on ideas, but we don't change the art or the world it inhabits. No literary world is entirely the same as the one we inhabit--that's what makes literature different from journalism. And it seems to me that the difference between Shakespeare and Tolkien (not the only difference, of course, but the relevant one) is one of degree. Each author has invented a moral landscape and both moral landscapes are mirrors held up to the world we inhabit. You and Shakespeare are free to believe in God or not, and the inhabitants of Middle-Earth would be free to believe in Eru or not (is there any evidence that most hobbits even know of Eru?). You the reader have to accept Eru as a given, but only insofar as any reader must suspend disbelief in order to get through a work of literature. In other words, when reading Shakespeare you can't question the existence of Hamlet. The two worlds are very similar in that you must accept certain aspects of them at face value--the only difference is which aspects they are.

Thank you for starting this thread, by the way--this is much more fun than working on my dissertation!