One Thing That I Think Tolkien Did Wrong and Jackson Did Right

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by Ozban

Constructing scene with hundreds of thousands involved, you just do not not care about neccesities of physics. Mass. velocity, friction, does that really matter in Middle-Earth? I think it might be the same case with JRRT. He told us about the time, when The World changed. Cataclysm, and no less. Apocalypse, told perhaps by another point of view... But shedding The veil just leads us to another Age. Does it not? And what matters then? Physics? Thought? Conviction? Belief?

From Letter 210:

The Lord of the Rings may be a ‘fairy-story’, but it takes place in the Northern hemisphere of this earth: miles are miles, days are days, and weather is weather.

From John D. Rateliff, The History of the Hobbit, The Fifth Phase, Timelines and Itinerary, vi. The Wandering Moon, note 2:

Tolkien of course was not alone in creating this shift: Joyce’s Ulysses, where both of the major characters’ actions can be followed hour-by-hour and street-by-street through a single day on a Dublin city map, pioneered this mode in the realistic novel a decade and a half before Tolkien began work on his magnum opus.

But Rateliff exaggerates. In medieval times Wolfram von Eschenbach in his Parzival is obviously working from a conceptual map of places, exact times, and genealogies and in the immense Prose Lancelot large sections are consistent with one another down to counts of days and agreement with what the current weekday names must be in sections hundreds of pages apart.

See Morgoth’s Ring (HoME X), edited by Christopher Tolkien, Part 5 Myths Transformed. Tolkien’s earlier fantasy writing had contained much that could be just put down a pure fancy, not realistic at all. Accordingly Tolkien must now consider that the tales told in the Silmarillion and the Akallabêth are traditions passed down among Men and mingled with inventions of their own. As Tolkien writes:

The High Eldar living and being tutored by the demiurgic beings must have known, or at least their writers and loremasters must have known, the ‘truth’ (according to their measure of understanding). What we have in the Silmarillion etc. are traditions (especially personalized, and centred upon actors, such as Fëanor) handed on by Men in Núnenor and later in Middle-earrth (Arnor and Gondor); but already far back — from the first association of the Dúnedain and Elf-friends with the Eldar in Beleriand — blended and confused with their own Mannish myths and cosmic ideas.

In short, in intent, The Lord of the Rings does not contain anything intentionally not congruent with what is known today of physics, mass, velocity, and friction.