Tolkien and the Book

[davem]

Originally Posted by Hilde

Do we have any real sort of indication that elves don't indulge in 'making things up' other than Tolkien not including examples? We are generally exposed to the elves in reference to world affairs. Very sober times. But I do not find it hard to believe that the elves of Rivendell in the Hobbit would spin yarns, if of course you concider them truly elves. And that such gifted artists would not play with words just for the love of language, seems unlikely to me.

I'm still intrigued by the fact that Tolkien, for whom sub creation (the creation of a secondary world which exists in the mind) was the highest form of Art, did not include any references to sub creation among the Elves - no mention of Feanor making up tales or composing Epic poems about his equivalent of 'Middle-earth'.

We are given a lot of Elvish poetry in the Legendarium, but all of it is about actual persons/events in their history.

Or are they? Do we know for certain that all these references are to actual events & people? was there no embellishment in the accounts & poems - even in the 're-tellings'? No bias, no stressing one aspect of an event & playing down others?

As I said, this is the thing about written records - they tend to tell you what they are - fiction, history, philosophy, science, & once written down they are fixed. Memory, especially the memory of an immortal, is a much more dynamic process. But its more complicated than that - whose books are they?

(Also, its cheaper & less hassle to alter & amend memories - no typos to put right & errors in the text to discover, requiring one to buy an expensive 'new' edition or make do with the 'inaccurate' version. Chizz chizz....)

Let's look at the Silmarillion - put together by Bilbo: his 'Translations from the Elvish'. His main source? The Elves & books at Rivendell. Now, in the Sil, the Feanoreans don't come off very well. Not quite the villains of the piece, but hardly the heroes.

But can we trust what we're told about them in a work based on the the library & inhabitants of Elrond's House? Would Elrond have been entirely unbiassed as regards the Feanoreans? Would his Mother-in-law, given that she & their father were 'unfriends for ever'?

Both books & memories are consciously or unconsciously biassed, no less in Middle-earth than here, but memory, being a living process, is more malleable.