Did JRRT encourage new ME stories?

[davem]

Originally Posted by Sauron the White

Allow me to ask this of you and others .... according to current laws, it will be 36 years until copyright expires barring future changes. If the copyright expiration were only a couple of years away, would you be more open to some sort of sanctioned ME stories by others with the blessing of the Estate to publicly and openly differentiate them from the eventual floodgates being opened and every hack writer trying their hand at it with no oversight at all? You probably cannot stop them once copyright expires, but you may be able to carve out a sanctioned vs. unsanctioned niche that would help readers make their choices with their purchasing dollars.

I think the problem is in the way we think of Middle-earth. I don't see it as a fictional world' that other writers can write stories about, but rather Tolkien's attempt to explore & communicate his ideas about myth & language, & to tell specific kinds of tales. There is a strong autobiographical element which colours what he wrote, & that no-one else can re-create.

I can only repeat that this is not about whether another writer can write entertaining stories set in Middle-earth, but whether they would be 'genuine'. What I'm arguing here is that what distinguishes Tolkien's creation from other fantasy worlds (& this statement would apply to Howard's Hyborean Age, Mirlees' Lud in the Mist, Dunsany's Pegana, Peake's Gormenghast, Eddison's Mercury, etc) is what he brought out of his experience. Other great fantasy worlds are great because they are unique. There are lots of generic fantasy worlds out there which anyone could set stories in, but the great fantasy worlds are special because of who wrote them.

In short, what you're asking for is impossible. I've read some good M-e fanfic. I wrote a (so-so) M-e fanfic. The problem is, no fanfic is 100% convincing - there's always something 'missing', some point at which you stop & think, 'No, that doesn't seem right. And its not because the writer is a bad storyteller. Its because they're not Tolkien.

If you haven't done so yet, get hold of John Garth's 'Tolkien & the Great War'. That will spell out to you as clearly as possible why only Tolkien could write convincing M-e stories.

EDIT

Look. If you take CoH as an example, you have one of the darkest, most hopeless, most tragic pieces of fiction ever produced. Its also one the earliest M-e stories Tolkien wrote. It has two 'sources', or two 'seeds'. First, mythological - the characters of Kullervo in the Kalevala & of Sigurd in the Volsungasaga, & second, 'biographical', in that it came into being in the post WWI period, when Tolkien had lived through the horrors of the Somme, & lost two out of his three closest friends. Garth talks about Tolkien 'seeing the world through enchanted eyes'. In other words the myths & fairy stories he had loved since childhood coloured his perception of the horror & loss he knew. There was a kind of 'feedback loop'. Myth fed into reality & reality fed into myth.

What I would argue is that CoH could only come out of a personal experience of horror & loss of the most extreme kind. If another writer who had not had that kind of experience tried to write a tale like CoH they would either produce melodrama or farce. Same with Beren & Luthien - too autobiographical (as is Gondolin - as Garth shows).

Other writers could, as I said, set stories in M-e. They could perhaps write good stories, as good, in their own way as Tolkien's own. But the 'Tolkien' element - which is the unique element in the M-e tales he gave us - would be absent.