NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/alt/fan/tolkien/2022

Text File | 1993-01-23 | 2.8 KB | 51 lines

Newsgroups: alt.fan.tolkien
Path: sparky!uunet!stanford.edu!agate!pasteur!cory.Berkeley.EDU!librik
From: [e-mail] (David Librik)
Subject: Re: Geography of M.E. Was:(Re: Blue Wizards?)
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
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Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1993 10:05:21 GMT
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[e-mail] writes:

>I read in some book of criticism that Middle Earth is our own earth before
>the dawn of recorded history. Tolkien envisioned it as a system of myth
>which would take its place beside the gods and myths of the ancient Greeks
>and Romans. Primarily he intended it to be a system of myth for his own
>country to call its own, saying at some point that England had no myths, no
>magic, no past to truly call its own. (I disagree, just think of Arthurian
>Legend.)

But Tolkien knew what the Arthurian Legend really was.  Arthur is a hero of
the British -- that is, the Welsh, the real British.  The whole Arthurian
story is about how Arthur, King of the British, kept the invading heathen
scum (the English) conquered for many years, but how eventually he died and
the British were overrun, driven out of most of their country, enslaved,
divided, and eventually conquered entirely.  But don't worry, said the
prophecy of Merlin, some day Arthur will arise again, and put all the English
to flight or to the sword, and the Welsh will have Britain back again.

Tolkien, understandably, thought this didn't really count as "a mythology for
England."  And being twenty years old and very imaginative (not to mention
bored to tears in an Army training camp) he decided to write them himself.
The original conception of the Silmarillion was a set of stories told by the
Elves to Eriol, an English mariner, who sailed to the Elvish island of Tol
Eressea.  (This was originally England, and Eriol sailed from Europe; later
Tolkien decided that Eriol sailed from England.)  The Eriol story didn't go
away, by the way, and JRRT kept trying to rewrite it and turn it into a book of
its own -- first as "The Lost Road" and then as "The Notion Club Papers".

I think Tolkien is quite explicit about the fact that Middle-Earth is our
own Earth, in an imaginary historical past.  He was interested in paeleo-
geography, and you can match up most of Middle-earth with Europe.  (Mordor,
for instance, is the volcanic area in the central Mediterranean; the Misty
Mountains (or is that the White Mountains) are now the Alps, etc.  The
comparison is pretty loose, though.

- David Librik
[e-mail]