🚀 go-pugleaf

Troels Forchhammer <Troels@thisisfake.invalid> wrote:
> Dirk Thierbach <dthierbach@usenet.arcornews.de> enriched us with:
>> Shanahan <pogues@bluefrog.com> wrote:

[quotes snipped]
> My impression is that Tolkien looked at the transition from myth to
> romance as gradual,

Again, I'd be careful in which sense Tolkien uses "myth" here -- I
have the impression that the "something that does not look real"
aspect of the word is very strong in some of the qoutes.

> That Tolkien imagined the stories of the Silmarillion to belong to a
> mythology didn't mean that he considered all of them to be 'myths' or
> even equally 'mythical'.

Given that the term isn't particularly well-defined in the first
place, I don't think we have to niggle about such details :-)

>> I think both the SIL and the LotR qualify as myths in the above
>> sense because they contain "Truths" about human nature: pride,
>> sacrifice, love.

> I don't think that that is enough for 'myth' -- many stories, and
> nearly all good stories, deal with truths about human nature in this
> way, but I wouldn't consider them as myths for that -- not even when
> the answers they provide (or investigate) can have an ethnically very
> narrow applicability.

Yes, certainly. It's not a sufficient condition.

> The odd thing is that while Tolkien was definitely thinking of the
> Silmarillion (the whole body of writings rather than just the parts in
> the published /The Silmarillion/), his response in letter #180 above is
> to someone who had read /The Lord of the Rings/ and seen in it
> something of the sort that Tolkien had wanted to create.

It's not so odd when one remembers that lots of stuff from the SIL got
"drawn in" in the process of writing LotR, so it's still present and
makes up a large part of the "mythological/historical" background. As
I said, presentation doesn't really matter so much (whether it is told
from a personal or impersonal POV, for example), the material itself
matters.

>> Do they define the boundaries of English culture? Probably not.

> I think Tolkien's view on 'myth' would be primarily philological.

It would play an important role, certainly.

> Venturing onto very thin ice, my impression is that Tolkien had strong
> opinions about the relationship between language, stories and people.
> He believed, I think, that the three parts all influence each other,
> shaping and defining each other, so that a language without myths,
> legends and stories to and in it was dead, and a people was defined by
> its language and the tales in that language.

Yes, I'd agree.

>>> *(Aside: That's why he tried so hard to make the round-Earth
>>> version, I think. So that moderns could read them as myths, not
>>> just as stories. Although it put too great a strain on the tales
>>> as they were.)

> If intended to be read as myths,

But they are not "intended" to be read as myths. Primarily, they are
stories, and as such, there's nothing wrong to tinker with the
"presentation" and tell it in a way that is less offending to people
with a stronger "scientific" background.

It's perfectly possible to re-tell a myth in, say, a science fiction
setting, with a background rigorous enough to make it plausible. /The
Snow Queen/ by Joan D. Vinge may be an interesting example in this
respect.

> My big problem is that the move would, I believe, at the same time as
> it was intended (based on the phrase 'astronomically absurd') to make
> the mythology more credible to a modern mind, have made the wholy
> mythology /less/ credible, as a mythology, to the modern mind.

Why? It doesn't really matter if he starts out with a flat world
that is then transformed to a round world, or if the world is round
from the start. The real problem is that in the latter setting,
some of the devices of the original version (the Lamps, the Trees)
now stand out as somewhat strange. So one would have to change those,
too, and so on, and when those changes pile up, there's maybe not
much left of the original idea.

> The older flat-world version always had to me the the quality of
> something my long-fathers might very well have believed, but the
> projected round-world version lose, IMO, some of that 'authenticity'.

I didn't read up details on Tolkiens projected idea (where exactly
is it in HoME?), but in general, I think one could make an round
world creation-myth with an 'authentic' feeling without any problem.

- Dirk