Dumbing down the Books

[Essex]

Eurytus,
Your point:

As to your fist point, seriously unless you can find a quotation to support this then you cannot make that point. Tolkien wrote the Book of Lost Tales as a mythology for England and had somewhat abandoned the idea by the time he was tidying up the Silmarillion, hence the vanishing of concepts like Tol Erressa being the British Isles.
The LOTR was simply NOT written as a mythology for the UK. Sorry but it simply is not true. It was written, at the request of his publisher as a sequel to the Hobbit. The fact he started to ape the style of the Silmarillion by the half way point does not change this.

Ok, so I’ve picked up ‘Letters’, haad a very quick scan, and what do I find?

Letter 124 To Sir Stanley Unwin
[Allen & Unwin had passed on a reader's enquiry as to whether Tolkien had written an 'Authentic History of Faery'.]

In parts it states:

…it (lotr) is not really a sequel to The Hobbit, but to The Silmarillion….. I feel that it is tied to the Silmarillion. It (the Silmarillion) has captured The Lord of the Rings, so that that has become simply its continuation and completion

Therefore the Lord of the Rings has completed the work that was started on the Silmarillion i.e. a Legend for England.

To continue:

131 To Milton Waldman[After Allen & Unwin, under pressure from Tolkien to make up their minds, had reluctantly declined to publish The Lord of the Rings together with The Silmarillion, Tolkien was confident that Milton Waldman of Collins would shortly issue both books under his firm's imprint…. with the intention of demonstrating that The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion were interdependent and indivisible.]

In parts it states:

But an equally basic passion of mine ab initio was for myth (not allegory!) and for fairy-story, and above all for heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history, of which there is far too little in the world (accessible to me) for my appetite…….

Also – and here I hope I shall not sound absurd – I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing………..

The Hobbit, which has much more essential life in it, was quite independently conceived: I did not know as I began it that it belonged. But it proved to be the discovery of the completion of the whole, its mode of descent to earth, and merging into 'history'. As the high Legends of the beginning are supposed to look at things through Elvish minds, so the middle tale of the Hobbit takes a virtually human point of view – and the last tale blends them…….

The sequel, The Lord of the Rings, much the largest, and I hope also in proportion the best, of the entire cycle, concludes the whole business – an attempt is made to include in it, and wind up, all the elements and motives of what has preceded: elves, dwarves, the Kings of Men, heroic 'Homeric' horsemen, ores and demons, the terrors of the Ring-servants and Necromancy, and the vast horror of the Dark Throne, even in style it is to include the colloquialism and vulgarity of Hobbits, poetry and the highest style of prose.

Is this proof enough for you that lotr, as part of the whole, was Tolkien’s version of a mythology for England?