Should we think of ME as a real place?

[Nogrod]

I'm afraid the way you pose the question creates more problems it helps us to solve... (althought that's also the way all the good questions end up doing. )

But I can't see a problem between Tolkien's quasi-mythology and actual mythologies in contrast to the world and how it "really" is.

Originally Posted by Farael

But at the same time, the laws of existance itself in Middle Earth are unlike that of modern Earth. I can tell you with a degree of confidence near-absolute, that it is impossible to pass on your own vital energy into a piece of jewlery, no matter how talented a jeweler you may be. Not to mention that sunlight comes, to the best of our knowledge, from the natural equivalent of a nuclear armagedon by H-bombs which happens fortunately far enough from us that we get to bask in the glow of it rather than be anihilated. In Middle Earth, sunlight comes from a celestial barge that carries the fruit of a tree from whence all light originally came.

In the Scandinavian mythology the thunder was Thor riding his chariots over the sky and throwing bolts down on the Middle-earth inhabitated by humans... In Greek mythology it was just craft for Zeus to turn himself into a swan to charm a female to have sex with him. Etc. Still we would not venture to say they had imagined a different planet of which their tales told about. It was that mythology's way of depicting this world.

So maybe we could just say that Tolkien's mythology - like all mythologies - have their particular view of this world we live in embedded with diffent kinds of beliefs and explanations to different things occuring, to how one should lead one's life and so on.

An interesting spin off from this question surely is whether we can compare mythical worldviews to our more or less scientific contemporary view of things with the clear-cut division into natural and (non-existant) supernatural things. Or in which way the people long time ago perceived the notion of truth or explaining things.

I mean we have some interesting remnants in our contemporary thought and speech of some different ways of perceiving things to be true or right.

Like when you say your dearest mate is "a true friend".

Or when after seeing Amelié you say that "it was so true", or "it was so right" (as Amelié finally gets the man). The poetic truth that is: how the world should be as to fulfill the norm of beauty-goodness-truth -thing (kalos) which in the end is the absolute "truth".

[Meriadoc1961]

I guess I really do not see the contradiction, either. Tolkien created a mythological world that, nonetheless, was still THIS world which existed in a very ancient, pre-historical (or lost historical) setting. And although we may not see many of the peoples and races that figured so predominantly in the books, they still are among us, but choose to remain hidden from us as men have been sundered from them throughout the long centuries.

Merry

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

On first sight, there is no problem with taking Tolkien's world like any other mythology. It is just a Secondary world, as Tolkien himself calls it (for more, read his essay On Fairy-Stories, I am not going to elaborate here) - and through the "Secondary faith" we can see it as true. Like any other tale. That has nothing to do with the Primary world or the Primary faith. I guess the source of the topic's question is: what if part of the demands of the Secondary faith is that I include this, our, real world's past and natural laws and other things in it in order for the Secondary world to become true for me?

Well, fortunately, personally I don't have this problem. Now speaking only for myself: when I read a sentence like "It is plain indeed that in spite of later estrangement Hobbits are relatives of ours: far nearer to us than Elves, or even than Dwarves," I can accept it without bothering myself whether archaeologists ever found a Hobbit or a Dwarven skeleton. For me, M-E, despite the fact that it sometimes tries to look as a part of our world, is secluded and it's a Secondary World which is connected only to a "Secondary Primary world", i.e. an unreal Primary world, not the world I really live in. For me, believing that Moon is a vessel by the Secondary faith does not contradict in my mind with that Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon, believing that Elves exist by the Secondary Faith does not interfere with my knowledge about the world population and believing in Ilúvatar by the Secondary Faith does not contradict the First Commandment. And vice versa. When we here, at the forum, really choose to scientifically analyse some problem, like whether the Dragons could contain fire in their belly, and we see it contradicting this world's physics, and we don't want to simply give up, I say: why not, let's continue. But the Secondary World first. If we come to the conclusion that either dragons could not have spit flames at all or either our physics is wrong, then we must step inside this Secondary primary world and say: yes, our physics are wrong (while this, of course, does not mean that we are going to preach about that on universities).