Did JRRT encourage new ME stories?

[Child of the 7th Age]

I wasn't going to weigh in on this again, but.....

Just to reiterate, I am not really interested in what is going to happen tomorrow or in the next 100 years. My interest in and reading of fanfiction is minimal. My concern lies on a broader scale. I feel this issue boils down to one central question: to what extent can/will the Legendarium be regarded as mythology and/or legend 500 years from now. Myth/legend can legitimately be told, retold, and expanded. No one, for example, would call Thomas Malory or T. H. White "fanficton" writers or look down their noses at them because they stole ideas from someone else. No poster on this thread (myself included) can answer that question with certainty, but I think it is a legitimate exercise (as Davem has done) to ask in what ways the Legendarium comes close to qualifying as "mythology" and in what ways it does not.

Davem,

You point to legitimate distinctions between the Legendarium and other forms of myth. However, I feel you stress these differences to the exclusion of some very important similarities. Specifically, I think that your proposed "tests" for determining what is myth and what is not fail to take into account the very complex and tangled nature of any mythology in terms of its creation and transmission. Your tests rest on certain assumptions about "natural myth" that I don't feel hold true.

Let's start with the question of "who" creates a myth. You see a stark line between "natural" mythology, which is created by "many" authors, versus the Legendarium, which you describe as the product of a single mind and, therefore, totally different. In reality, that distinction is not so clear cut. In 98% of the mythologies in our world, there are two phases of creation. First comes the oral tradition--verbal folklore and its transmission--that normally involves a multiplicity of tellers in a variety of settings. However, the process of telling, retelling, and creating does not stop there. The second phase is when the myth is reshaped , formalized, and most frequently put into writing. Almost always, this involves one or more specific individuals who take the older material and its many divergent and conflicting stories; make significant changes and choices; and eventually come out with a unified narrative, one that is loosely based on the old but which may be strikingly different in terms of emphasis, characters, and plotline. These differences may be so great that the author virtually creates a new myth.

Just look at the Illiad and Odyssey. With few exceptions, classical scholars have come to belive that Homer was a real person who made significant changes to the oral tradition of Greece/Asia Minor and thereby created the 24 books of the Illiad and the 24 books of the Odyssey. (Some have suggested that one writer was responsible for the Illiad and another for the Odyssey but 95% of recent scholarship is agreed that each was the work of a single author, and that this individual put them through multiple revisions before the final draft was produced.) Moreover, most classicists conclude that this involved much more than the simple retelling of an old story: the changes made by Homer were so significant that he virtually created a new story.

We can find the same process of creation and transmission if we look at Norse mythology. What started as loose oral tradition crafted by many minds was formulated and put to paper in the ninth through the twelfth centuries in what came to be known as the Elder (Poetic) Edda and the Younger or Prose Edda. In some cases, we know the names of the specific author.

The second phase of creation when the myth is sorted out by one or more specific persons and set down on paper is absolutely essential. Oral and folkloric transmission is not enough; it is the genius of a Homer or a Snorri (or a Tolkien) that allows the myth to be transformed and passed on to future generations. Without that step, without that specific person, we would be left in the dark.

While there are obvious differences between the role of Homer and Snorri on one hand, and Tolkien on the other, there are also points of similarity that should not be ignored. You have suggested that these works are different because the "natural" myths were based on an historical truth, while Tolkien's world was purely fantasy. It is true that there is a tiny grain of historical truth at the core of the Illiad and the Odyssey but 95% of the characters and episodes in those 48 books are not historical; they are fantasy--the product of Homer's imagination based on the earlier oral tradition. Thus, while Tolkien's Legendarium is "less historical" than Homer's poems, that difference is not as sharp as your posts suggest. Secondly, as Shippey and others have shown, Tolkien draws very heavily on the older mythic creations for his own subcreations. Names, races, themes, symbols--you name it--he derived them from existing myths that reach back into the oral tradition. Is this so different from what Homer and Snorri did?

Secondly, I am not comfortable with your assessment of how JRRT viewed his own work: first seeing it as myth but then consciously rejecting that formula as a result of what happened during the war. As a philologist, Tolkien was always careful about language. In the published Letters, right up to the end of his life, he referred to his writings as "mythology". Why would he use this word if he had rejected the idea of his writings as mythology? In the interests of brevity, I'll give just one example. There is a letter written in 1964 to Christopher Bretherton. It is filled with phrases like this:

....In O(xford) I wrote a cosmogonical myth.
....The magic ring was the one obvious thing in the Hobbit that could be connected with my mythology.
.....so I brought all the stuff I had written on the originally unrelated legends of Numenor into relation with the main mythology.

Altogether, he used the words "mythology" and "legend" five times in this letter when talking about his own writings. I don't think he would have loosely thrown around these terms unless they had some meaning behind them.

Another point that bears a closer look is that of belief, especially"religious belief", and its relation to Tolkien's writings. The gist of what you are saying seems to be that Tolkien cnosciously wrote fantasy. Since he did not believe these writings were "true", they could not be true myth.

I agree with your premise. At the core of a myth must lie a modicum of truth and belief. If those elements are missing, the Legendarium is not any form of myth whatever words Tolkien used to describe it. I sat and scratched my head over this for a while, but it was Bethberry's post that set off bells in my head. (Thank you. )

I can't find that source now where Tolkien says he felt like he was merely recording and not creating. I'm sure you folks with the pulse of the Letters and HoMe at your fingertip can find that passage, particularly if you think you can work it round to your side of things as the context and recipient and date must be pondered like the entrails of sacrificial animals.

Just take a look at a letter written to Carole Batten-Phelps in 1971. I am going to quote it at some length, because it is directly pertinent to this discussion of whether or not Tolkien believed what he was saying was true, and exactly where the Legendarium was coming from (the italics are Tolkien's):

I am very grateful for your remarks on the critics and for your account of your personal delight in the Lord of the Rings. You write in terms of such high praise that [to] accept it with just a 'thank you' might seem complacently conceited, though actually it only makes me wonder how this has been achieved--by me. Of course the book was written to please myself (at different levels), and as an experiment in the arts of long narrative and of inducing "Secondary Belief". It was written slowly and with great care for detail, & finally emerged as a Frameless Picture: a searchlight as it were on a brief episode in history, and on a small part of our Middle-earth, surrounded by the glimmer of limitless extensions in time and space. Very well: that may explain to some extent why it 'feels' like history; why it was accepted for publication' and why it has proved readable for a large number of very different kinds of people. But it does not fully explain what has actually happened. Looking back on the wholly unexpected things that have followed its publication--beginning at once with the appearance of Vol. I--I feel as if an ever darkening sky over our present world had been suddenly pierced, the clouds rolled back, and an almost forgotten sunlight had poured down again. As if indeed the horns of Hope had been heard again, as Pippin heard them suddenly at the absolute nadir of the fortunes of the West. But How? and Why?

I think I can now guess what Gandalf would reply. A few years ago I was visited in Oxford by a man whose name I have forgotten (though I believe he was well-known.) He had been much struck by the curious way in which many old pictures seemed to him to have been designed to illustrate The Lord of the Rings long before its time. He brought one or two reproductions. I think he wanted at first simply to discover whether my imagination had fed on pictures, as it clealy had been by cetainkinds of literature and languages. When it became obvious that , unless I was a liar, I had never seen the pictures before and was not well acquainted with pictorial Art, he fell silent. I became aware that he was looking fixedly at me. suddenly he said: "Of course you don't suppose, do you, that you wrote all that book yourself?"

Poor Gandalf! I was too well acquainted with G. to expose myself rashly, or to ask what he meant. I think I said: "No, I don't suppose so any longer." I have never since been able to suppose so. An alarming conclusion for for an old philologist to draw concerning his private amusement. But not one that should puff any one up who considers the imperfections of 'chosen instruments', and indeed what sometimes seems their lamentable unfitness for the purpose.

The contents of this letter has always been mind-boggling to me. Obviously, Tolkien did not worship Manwe or believe that he actually existed, but on some level, there was belief: the belief that the Legendarium was not simply coming out of his own human brain but out of somewhere else. Tolkien's religious beliefs are such that he expresses this in terms of being a "chosen" instrument presumably of providence. Perhaps a number of us would feel more comfortable using terminology and images that draw on Jung. But, either way, aren't we talking about belief...the same kinds of belief that lies behind "natural myth"? What do we do with this letter? How else can we understand the sentiments that are expressed here?

And that isn't even getting into the question of the dreams of Atlantis that came to form the core of the Numenor myth!