[Child of the 7th Age]

How did Child see those historical links?

My ears are indeed burning. And thanks for the kind words, Bb . I have been running around all morning on errands and will unfortunately be doing the same most of the afternoon. While I can't enter wholeheartedly into this very interesting discussion of canon and the role of author and reader, I can at least say how and why I personally approached the text in this way, and how ideas are generated on this particular board.

Bear with me, since what I am saying may sound a bit strange.....

I essentially see it as trains on different tracks. (Actually that's on a good day; on a bad day I view it more as very balky carts!) Tolkien is roaring down one track and Child or Fordim or Bb or whoever are each roaring down their separate track. There are a few points where these tracks intersect and many points where they do not. The trains generally cross at those points where the two conductors share something in common: a way of looking at things, a perception, a field of common knowledge, even certain personality traits. When that happens, when the two trains collide, then something exciting can happen. There can be meaning seen on the reader's part where none was seen before.

The interesting thing to me is that each of us carry different wagonloads of goods with us. I am never going to "see" the philogical implications of certain things Tolkien writes in the way that Shippey does, nor am I going to "see" the literary themes like Bb or Fordim. I'm capable of listening to their discoveries and appreciating them, but I am far less likely to come up with similar discoveries.


But it's more than academic background. It's all the things that have shaped my personality and my life: how I view people, the kind of circumstances I've known, my philosophical and religious beliefs. For example, I have spent a great deal of my life looking at the past and trying to assess the impact of past on present, so I am naturally acutely aware of any situation when this happens, even if it occurs in the pages of a myth. When I notice and read the Letters, I will pick up on those passages where Tolkien reveals his own attitude to the past, whether in terms of Numenor, the Elves, or his view of history as the "long defeat". I will internalize these ideas and when I look at the text a tiny part of me will be able to almost carry on a mental discussion with the professor. It is more a matter of the questions I instinctively pose, rather than flashes of inspiration or anything like that.

It's almost as if you can enter into Tolkien's creative process, following in his footsteps, and that's an exciting prospect to me. At the end of this process, I (or whoever takes the lead) comes out with something we would label an insight. In a similar way, for example, I am acutely aware of "class" issues in LotR....because of things that I grew up with (although my response may not be what another person would expect!).

It is possible, of course, to take this process one step further: to search below the surface. The interesting question to me is why I feel impelled to see things in a particular way-- whether in terms of history or class--and someone else does not. I have been exposed to many ideas and experiences in my life. Only some really hook me and change the way I look at things. Why did history "hook" me, literature "hook" Bb , or geography/geology "hook" Pio ? I wish I could answer that....

In any case, if we set down enought individual insights on a given topic, then you can get a group dynamic going on a board like this. Someone takes Child's insight, relates it more tightly to Aragorn in a different way, and a new insight is born, this one even wider than before. Altogether an interesting process, since none of us could have reached the particular end point we did if we had been journeying solely on our own without fellow companions. So not only are our individual trains intersecting with Master Tolkien: we are also intersecting with each other in some kind of crazy fashion.