Did Tolkien mean to make this relation?

[Lady Iverin]

I've been reading The Book of the Lost Tales I, and there is a place called Tol Eressëa or the Lonely Isle. In his commentary, Christopher Tolkien says that his father is referring to England. Why is that? I mean, is he trying to tie our world into his?

Sorry if I don't make any sense... [img]smilies/confused.gif[/img]

[ March 29, 2003: Message edited by: Lady Iverin ]

[Goldberry]

I won't go into much detail because I'm not sure if this is correct or not and I don't want to tell anybody the wrong information. To my understanding, Middle Earth and Tolkien's whole world is what our world was very, very long ago. That's why if you look at a map of the fourth age of the whole Tolkien world, it resembles our world today. I'm not sure about this though so correct me if I'm wrong. [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]

[Carlas]

Tolkien wanted to make a legend for England. He noticed that many other countries had myths and legends and wanted England to have one too. Middle-earth, is supposed to be the earth millions af years ago.

[Lady Iverin]

I see. Well, if that's true, then are there other relations made in his books?

[Maerbenn]

You might be interested in this article: An Analysis of Endor (II)

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

In the Lost Tales, Tol Eressëa breaks to become Ireland and modern-day England, Scotland and Wales; Kortirion is the city of Warwick, and Tavrobel is Great Haywood, also in Warwickshire.

Tolkien had this to say on the subject (see the commentary to The Cottage of Lost Play for more details):

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 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.

[GaladrieloftheOlden]

I don't like the idea of Middle Earth having once been our world....it doesn't seem as good, and it feels like we're the reason it's so much worse now than then. I don't mean things like Sauron and Melkor, but the rest of it, the really good people. So I'd like to go on thinking about ME as really existing, just in another place...if you don't mind. [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]

[davem]

Galadrieloftheolden, I think that was Tolkien's point, loss of an older, more beautiful world, & the slow, steady descent into this one.

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Plus, of course, he couldn't very well invent a mythology for England without setting his work in the far past of this world. Tolkien makes a lot of references in his writings to the Fall, and blames this for humanity's inability to create a perfect world. Being a Christian he believed that Man once lived in a state of innocence, which was lost, and which we all miss at some level and long to retrieve. Here he talks about the sense of exile from Eden:

I do not now feel either ashamed or dubious about the Eden 'myth'. It has not, of course, historicity of the same kind as the N[ew] T[estament], which are virtually contemporary documents, while Genesis is separated by we know not how many sad, exiled generations from the Fall, but certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of 'exile'. ... As far as we can go back the nobler part of the human mind is filled with the thoughts of sibb, peace and goodwill, and with the thought of its loss. We shall never recover it, for that is not the way of repentance, which works spirally and not in a closed circle; we may recover something like it, but on a higher plain. ... Of course , I suppose that, subject to the permission of God, the whole human race (as each individual) is free not to rise again, but to go to perdition and carry out the Fall to its bitter bottom (as each individual can singulariter). And at certain periods, the present is notably one, that seems not only a likely event but imminent. Still I think that there will be a 'millenium', the prophesied thousand-year rule of the Saints, i.e. those who have for all their imperfections never finally bowed heart and will to the world or the evil spirit (in modern but not universal terms: mechanism, 'scientific' materialism, Socialism in either of its factions now at war).

So yes he did blame humanity for the troubles of the world, but like any good Christian he believed in the possibility of salvation through sincere repentance. His writings show us many examples, such as the fall of Saruman and the downfall of Númenor, of how in an imperfect world nothing good can ever last; but he believed that the Fall was neither permanent nor inevitable. Gandalf, the only Istar who continues with his mission, achieves his aims because he upholds the authority of Eru and does his will in faith. Aragorn's kingship comes after devoting his life to a seemingly hopeless struggle; and Saruman and Denethor are brought down because they become daunted by the strength of the enemy (which also occurs because they try to use his weapons against him, and to struggle against his will directly, for which neither of them has the strength). Unfortunately, as the popularity of the Noldor over the Vanyar attests, living in harmony with one another, and in deference to the divine authority, doesn't appeal to a lot of people as much as strife and tragedy. The Vanyar are an unfallen people, whereas the Noldor are more like us: given to folly and to bringing misery on themselves. Their eventual return to the West is the salvation that Tolkien envisages for Man: not a return to the former state of things, but a version of it coloured by the knowledge of their failure and redemption, and appreciated all the more for it.

[ March 29, 2003: Message edited by: The Squatter of Amon Rûdh ]

[Bêthberry]

Without in any way denying those quotations from the Letters or Tolkien's other works, I would like to say that introducing this aspect of the Fall brings out important qualities of LOTR which might not be as readily appreciated in simply reading Arda as early England. IMHO

So, kudos, Squatter, for taking this discussion to the level of philosophical meaning. This seems in keeping with Tolkien's own feelings about simple and rigid allegorical equations between things, which he claimed in the Foreward to the second edition of LOTR as being too restrictive, limiting, and closed.

Thank you also for putting the elves in the clear light of their foibles and failings. I remember a post of Rimbaud's some time back which also expressed a similar non-fanciful interpretation of them.

This is, I think, one of the treacherous grounds in reading Tolkien, to idealise or romanticise the elves. I am of a mind to copy your post (and find Rimbaud's), to use whenever I need to help gamers at Rohan overcome such limiting depictions of them in their characters.

Bethberry

Edit: I felt my first draft of this post did not adequately address previous points, so I added the first paragraph here. I had in mind the Numenor thread. Davem, thanks for the link to your thread. I had missed it, not having enough time these days to follow Books closely.

[ March 29, 2003: Message edited by: Bethberry ]

[davem]

Bethberry, I can't help but agree about the way Elves are idealised. Its a trap too many of Tolkien's readers fall into. Tolkien himself was very clear. In letter 154 he writes:

But the Elves are not wholly good or in the right. Not so much because they had flirted with Sauron; as because with or without his assistance they were 'embalmers'. They wanted to have their cake & eat it; to live in the mortal historical Middle Earth because they had become fond of it (& because they there had the advantages of a superior caste) & so tried to stop its change & history, stop its growth, keep it as a pleasaunce, even largely a desert where they could be artists, & they were burdened with sadness & nostalgic regret.

A bunch of us actually went quite a way down this road, exploring the Elves attitude to mortality, time & death in another debate - http://forum.barrowdowns.com/cgi-bin...1&t=003050&p=1
especially in the second half of the debate.

[Lady Iverin]

Ok, I kind of understand where you stand Squatter, but how can Middle Earth evolve into Europe? I thought that it all but ended. It would have taken alot of work to make it what it was in Tolkien's time. Also, are there not only men in our time? What happened to the hobbits? And any others who remaind in ME. I believe I am confusing myself more.

[Elrond Jr]

The way the relationship between Middle earth and real earth was described by some one was that middle earth is basically like a piece of history pullen out of the real earth. Almost like a period of lost years that was missing. So it has been pulled out somewhere along the line and has been written over in the line of history and forgotten about. So it is actually like another world, or one that never was, therefore keepings its specialness.

[Scott]

As for the "missing" peoples...
I think that what could have happened is that they just blended in with the men. Everyday I see people and think to myself, "Man, she looks like she could be and elf," or, "Wow, that dude is as about as stout as a hobbit." I think that that was kind of what Tolkien was trying to do in the mythology. He made his different races have various qualities otherwise seen everyday in today's world and built the people around them. I've also seen people who I've thought resemble orcs, but I won't go there [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img].

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Ok, I kind of understand where you stand Squatter, but how can Middle Earth evolve into Europe? I thought that it all but ended. It would have taken alot of work to make it what it was in Tolkien's time. Also, are there not only men in our time? What happened to the hobbits?

The fate of the Hobbits is, I think, adequately explained in The Lord of the Rings in the section of the prologue entitled Concerning Hobbits:

Even in ancient days they were, as a rule, shy of 'the Big Folk', as they call us, and now they avoid us with dismay and are becoming hard to find. ... They possessed from the first the art of disappearing swiftly and silently, when large folk whom they do not wish to meet come blundering by; and this art they have developed until to men it may seem magical.

Nothing happened to the Hobbits, they simply do not wish to be seen because we are too big and clumsy. In the early legends, the remaining Elves faded and their stature diminished as Men grew larger, so that they become what we would call 'fairies'. The Ents would naturally have died out eventually, since they could not reproduce; I don't know what Tolkien's intentions were for Dwarves and Orcs, but it must be remembered that this is just a story.

As for Tolkien's mythology developing into the modern world, this is supposed to have happened gradually over time. The Elves were supposed to have left for the West long before Anglo-Saxon times (c. 550-1066 a.d.), so that a gulf of millennia is supposed to separate the current age of the world from the events of The Lord of the Rings. This is clever because we have very scant historical records of England before and after the Roman occupation, in fact up until the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity and the resultant rise in literacy. The legends of King Arthur date from the turbulent years immediately after the Roman departure in 411 a.d. and this (or the period before the invasions of Julius and Claudius Caesar) is a perfect place in which to set fictional history simply because there is a lot of blank space to fill in the historical record during that period. If we spread our net still further back in time there are hundreds of thousands of years intervening between the first evidence of modern man and the first written records: recorded history is a tiny fraction of the story of mankind. When we examine the extent to which Europe has changed since the Roman empire it becomes easy to see how Tolkien's world could have developed into modern Europe, even though we know that it didn't.

That being said, Tolkien's stories are legends, not a history. The myths of Middle-earth would (were they natural rather than artificial legends) bear the same relation to modern England as the mythology of ancient Hellas bears to modern Greece. Also it must be remembered that the creation of a 'mythology for England' was only the starting point of Tolkien's legends. His work eventually grew beyond any such boundaries.

[ March 30, 2003: Message edited by: The Squatter of Amon Rûdh ]

[Lady Iverin]

All right, I believe that I'm thinking like a child now. Poor me. Well, of course his words are myths, but I'm looking at it as continuing the myths to modern age. I mean, even though it's not real, it doesn't mean that we can't relate to the legends of Tolkien nowadays.

Nothing happened to the Hobbits, they simply do not wish to be seen because we are too big and clumsy. In the early legends, the remaining Elves faded and their stature diminished as Men grew larger, so that they become what we would call 'fairies'. The Ents would naturally have died out eventually, since they could not reproduce; I don't know what Tolkien's intentions were for Dwarves and Orcs, but it must be remembered that this is just a story.

All right, I understand what he means now. But, I do think it's rather cruel to kill off so many races just to make it seem that ME men evolved into modern day man, which of course is just a story.

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

He didn't kill them off. Most of the Elves sailed into the West, the Hobbits hide from view. The fates of the others are my own speculation and therefore not necessarily valid.

Having said that, species die out all the time under the dominion of Men. We're not very good custodians.

[ March 30, 2003: Message edited by: The Squatter of Amon Rûdh ]

[Lady Iverin]

Having said that, species die out all the time under the dominion of Men. We're not very good custodians.

I suppose that's true, but I still wish that I knew exactly what happened to all the other races except for the Elves and Hobbits. Does anyone know where to get any info on that? It would help.