[Aiwendil]

Davem wrote:

It is not an allegory of a particular literary theory, becuase too much of it, especially the episodes in Faerie, cannot be 'translated into anything else. They simply 'are'. They don't 'mean' anything in relation to the human world. The battle from which the Elven mariners return has nothing to do with Smith's world. Smith is told by the Birch to leave Faery & never return. So Faery & its inhabitants clearly see themselves as part of a self contained reality, & they are not doing anything 'for' the human world.

This is really picking at minor details now, but I disagree. For here the literary theory is about Faerie. If one felt a need to write in the allegorical equal signs, "Faerie" (the place in Smith) would be equated with "Faerie" (the real Faerie, whether a place or not). It is essential to the literary point that Faerie be self-consistent and not an allegory for the primary world.

The Saucepan Man wrote:

Certainly, I cannot agree with H-I's proposition . . .
since that is akin to saying that, unless one happens to hold a particular belief, one cannot truly understand Tolkien's works. Instinctively, for me, that just seems wrong.

Exactly. However, if we interpret it as Lord Angmar suggests:

[it] was not that you must believe in a (Christian... Catholic) God to 'understand' Tolkien, but that you must realize that Tolkien held strong beliefs in the existence of such a God, and that an omnipotent God is present in Middle-earth, to fully understand where Tolkien is coming from in his writing.

then it is quite a different matter, and I suppose I agree with it.

HerenIstarion wrote:

Absolute Truth re:

Mere logic.

Sorry, but I don't think that it's mere logic, if I am correct in understanding the argument as:

1. There are certain propositions the truth-values of which do not logically follow from facts about the world.
2. Nonetheless, we know the truth-values of those propositions.
3. Therefore, there must be a transcendental source for our knowledge of the truth-values.

You ask:

Suppose I present you with two statements:

1. To rob is good
2. To rob is bad

How do you judge the truth of each statement?

I would not judge the truth-values until I was told the precise meaning of the terms being employed.

The trouble with your syllogism is 2. The correct deduction from 1 is that in fact we cannot know the truth-values of those statements. Moreover, you cannot prove 2 since, by your assumption, the truth-values you claim to know do not follow from facts about the world.

I fear that we are beginning to veer into philosophy of meaning here, a subject with which, if not restrained, I am liable to add several pages to the thread. So I will cut myself off at this point.

I'm inclined to hold that, once author's intentions are known, it is not good to stick to differing interpretation.

There are two quite different matters here. First, there is the author's intention with regard to the content of the primary text, with which subject much of this thread has been concerned. Second, there is the author's beliefs about literary theory; this is what we are dealing with in "On Faery Stories". I certainly don't think that we are obbliged to agree with the author about literary theory (indeed, if it were so, we could never enjoy the works of two different authors with different views on the subject).

As it happens, though, I agree with most of what Tolkien says about fantasy, as far as I understand it. I don't think that the truth of theological claims is at all essential to his point. He seems to understand the "eucatastrophe" as an actual glimpse of the "truth" about God, etc. I think it can be understood just as well as a fictional glimpse of a fictional truth - a fiction that nonetheless is extremely appealing and has a great deal of psychological impact.