[davem]

Bethberry:

'Tolkien came slowly to understand the full significance of his mythology--it was not something he planned consciously at the outset, but was led to realise in the very process of his writing.'

Up to a point - yet his mythology grew out of the 'soil' of the TCBS, as much as it grew out of his love of mythology & language, & the TCBS was essentially a High Church/Catholic group of individuals, who had a dream of bringing back 'medieval' moral values & virtues to the modern, secular world. The Legendarium did what he wanted it to do. Or at least it bacame what he wanted it to become.

Of course no-one needs to accept his value system or accept his beliefs, anymore than they need to study Sindarin, or learn the Tengwar, or even read the Silmarillion, to understand LotR. My own feeling though, is that the more you know of the man & his beliefs the more you will gain from the books. I still can't go along with the idea that the art can be totally divorced from the artist.

One can read LotR in two ways, & get different things from both - it can be read as a fairy story, a traditional tale, in which any 'meaning' it may have for the individual is 'imposed' by that individual, who will decide whether the story is relevant to them or not. This seems to be what Tolkien wishes his readers to do with LotR.

But the novel can also be read as the product of Tolkien's mind, moral value system, personal experiences transformed into epic story.

I feel there is something to be gained from both. The first gives us access to Middle Earth, the art, the second gives us access to the man, the artist. The Legendarium is not simply the story of Middle Earth, it is also the story of Tolkien himself. Is the one to be considered relevant & the other irrelevant?

This is why I feel we have to take into account Tolkien's beliefs & values. Take Lembas (& to a lesser extent Miruvor). Can we truly understand what Tolkien is doing if we limit ourselves only to what Lembas is in Middle Earth? Lembas is too much like the Host, the body of Christ - & statements Tolkien makes about it in the story itself & in the letters make it abundantly clear that it is as close to being an allegory of the Host as it is being simply an Elven food concentrate. Now, only a Catholic would come up with Lembas - a non Catholic writer would simply have produced a magic food concetrate, which would not have the symbolic value of Lembas (Yet if we see Lembas as the Host what do we make of movie Gollum taking it & casting it away, & accusing Sam of stuffing his face with it? The point I'm trying to make with this example is that in the movie, Lembas is not a 'sacramental' substance, it is merely a food concentrate, so there is no sgnificance in the way it is treated). If we don't see Lembas in the light of the Host, divorcing what it meant to Tolkien the Catholic from its presence in the story, we won't get a real insight into what Lembas is, even in its Middle Earth form. The fact that it is Galadriel who gives the Lembas to the Fellowship emphasises her 'Virgin Mary' aspect.

That's just an example which springs to mind, & will be better pursued when we get to the relevant chapter. The point is, though, that LotR is full of such symbolism, which is not present on the surface, but it is there, under the surface, & is as much a part of the 'art' as what is on the surface. LotR is a work which contains many primary world elements 'mythologised'.

Is Lembas 'unsuccessfully' mythologised? Should Tolkien have gone further in (Middle)'Earthing' it, so that there would be no reason to connect it with the Host? Yet no Catholic could fail to see the symbolism. And what better way to bring out Galadriel's nature than by linking her with such a life giving substance?

Galadriel as Elven Queen, offering the Fellowship food concentrate bars, or Galadriel as 'pointing to' the Mother of God offering the body of Christ to preserve the lives of those who must Harrow Hell. How important is Tolkien's belief to our understanding of the story?