Tolkien the Metafictionist

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

Oh well. I tried.

I believe it was in The Letters, or Tree.

Enough.

I stated why I interpreted your long explanation like I did. I interpreted it normally. You have not attempted to justify your special interpretation using real in a unique way, normally unused by others. And I don’t find the statement “partakes of our own history”in Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien or in Tree and Leaf. Tolkien never, in my opinion, expressed himself so vaguely and unintelligibly that I recall.

Possibly the statement or something close to it is in Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien or in Tree and Leaf. Or it may be somewhere else. But it is up to you to locate it if you want me to take it seriously.

As far as I understand now, you believe that Tolkien’s writing in The Lord of the Rings possesses sufficient verisimilitude to make it feel real to you. At least that is more-or-less true for me usually while reading it. But at the same time I know that there are no Elves, Dwarves, or Orcs, in the real world and that Tolkien was intentionally writing fiction, even fantasy fiction. And I personally commend him for the excellence of his verisimilitude. But I find in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” the strong opinion that, in most cases, fairy-stories were not supposed to be real.

But Tolkien is not consistent in his essay. He finds a eucatastrophe (happy ending) apparently essential or almost essential, to fairy-stories. Yet he also considers the Arthurian legend, I assume as told in Le Morte d’Arthur, a true fairy story, despite its tragic conclusion. He believes that Christian and other religions matters don’t belong in fairy stories, yet identifies Jesus’ resurrection as the perfect true fairy story.

I hoped you might have some light to shed on such matters, but apparently not.