Are you Satisfied?

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

The Legendarium is not a closed system, as Mr. Underhill points out with his quotations from Tolkien's letters and Child with her very apt comparison to the Arthurian legends--although I'm not sure it is necessarily necessary to call Middle-earth 'true myth' for this to be so.

Yes, in a way I'm happy that Tokien wasn't able to write more or 'finish' the legendarium as that would have closed off too many holes. Particularly as it's pretty clear that he sought to make M-E more and more orthodoxly 'Catholic' (with his formulations of Eru etc) as he grew older. LotR may express Catholic morality but it is not overtly or wholly Catholic -- it is very easy to read it as expressing an almost animist view. Had he written a companion piece to LotR in his later life, I daresay it would have been more overtly Catholic and we wouldn't have the wonderful ambiguities of the moment, for example, of Gollum's fall into the Cracks of Doom.

Something else that occurs to me is that both TH and LotR were written for Tolkien's children -- he had a specific audience in mind. Any later works would not have been so directly addressed and perhaps would have suffered.

Still want to have confirmation of the winged Balrog though...