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I would like to think that all of that doesn't really have anything to do with interpretation, which is arguably wholly inadeqaute at answering questions within the Legendarium. Condemning. Calling the oligarchic Ruffianism a worker's class revolution is a perception noone in Middle-earth would likely have had either.
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This goes right to the heart of the questions I’m wrangling with
Sharkû. I could not agree more that getting at the historical ‘facts’ of Middle-Earth has little to do with interpretation – for the factual evidence in the primary world you go to the source documents or the archaeological relics or whatever (although these, as any historian worth his or her salt will tell you, are never ‘purely’ objective and factual, but let’s leave that to one side as Too Much For Me To Get Into At The Moment…); for the facts of the secondary world we can and should go to what the sub-creator of that world has put down.
But where interpretation is not only adequate (I like your turn of phrase) but necessary comes to the non-factual questions that are really important – questions like our view of the governmental structure of Gondor. I concede your point that “
condemning Gondor's autocratic ruler from a modern point of view does not yield anything useful about the
facts of the monarchy in the Legendarium”, but this does not get us off the difficult hook raised by the fact that most of us are not big fans of autocratic forms of government, and that given our druthers we would rather not have a King thank you very much. And yet, we are induced by the magic (and I use that word carefully and in its fullest sense) of Tolkien’s story-telling art to celebrate and even long for the Return of the King. By this I mean to say that while we may not get a better understanding of the “facts” by “condemning” the text, we must still – as responsible readers –
evaluate (rather than condemn) this form of government in order to better understand the
applicability (Tolkien’s word, via
Bêthberry) of that form of government to a world that has replaced/outgrown kings.
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There are places where Tolkien gave little-to-no-information (what happened in those Ered Luin, anyway? What was the culture like out there?...) And in those areas, we are free to let our imaginations run wild. Where he is mum, we may speak freely.
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I’m not so sure I can accept this without comment
Mark – am I
really “free to let my imagination run wild?” Can I ‘make’ the people of Ered Luin into creatures with six arms and wings, who eat nothing but the bark of oak trees and kill their enemies by bombarding them with sea-shells…just by imagining them as such? Interestingly, as soon as you say this, you seem to back away from such an absolute freedom of the reader by insisting that “if we want to re-arrange Tolkien's world, we may do so, but let's not call it Tolkien's 'canon' in the process.” So you would seem to be suggesting that the “freedom” you talk of is a lot more complicated than it would appear: I can “re-arrange” the world, but without having any kind of ‘real’ effect on it? How much freedom is that? It sounds more like the freedom of the deranged man to say what he wants about the world, since, as everybody knows, he’s mad and therefore harmless: we already know what the ‘truth’ is so let him have his little say.
Frankly, I’d like to think that there’s a bit more room for me in the sub-creation of Middle-Earth than that!
