The atrocity of the Akallabêth

[Son of Númenor]

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

...this does not mean I think it has no structure or internal meaning. It has a lot of this, and it is good mental exercise to argue about that. And no matter how much I simply relax into the poetics of it all and like to speculate (it is after all fantasy, which encourages this sort of thing like no other literature can, apart from Poetry, which is perhaps even more like that), it is about a whole other world and there are boundaries, rules and frameworks.

But then who is to say that even what we read is correct if we choose to fully immerse into the concept of the secondary world? Like in the real world, how do we know that what we are told is the truth?

But that way madness lies...

The funny thing about Tolkien is we have access to such a wealth of words about his personal life, and we have three major works which exist as part of self-contained, utterly paradoxical cosmology. But that's not all we have. We also have access to other maddening pieces of information:

1) The finished product of the Trans-moral (Silm) was tampered with by people other than J.R.R. Tolkien
2) Tolkien himself was furiously revising major principles of the cosmology (orc - immortal Elf or Man doomed to die?) until his death - as well as offering seemingly contradictory statements about the books (i.e. it is fundamentally Catholic but is only an adventure story)

The question to ask is this:

How does a Trans-moral Cosmology give birth to a children's Faerie Tale and a Moral Epic, and how do the Faerie Tale and the Moral Epic force their Creator to revise the Trans-moral Cosmology?

Where you see madness I see Keanu Reevers saying, "Whoa!"