Davem wrote:
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The texts are our means of accessing that 'imaginative' dimension, & the 'fact' that we may each percieve that imaginative dimension slightly differently, does not in itself mean that we are not experiencing the same thing
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It's not just a matter of individuals seeing things differently, though (that's only part of it). Tolkien saw things quite differently at different times, and the texts contradict each other.
Actually, I'm not sure to what extent our disagreement is real. You say the texts describe a place; I say the place is described by the texts. The crux of the disagreement would seem to be causality - whereas you think of the fictitious place giving rise to texts about it, I think of the texts as creating the fictitious place.
It's almost a moot point, except that I think your way of thinking about it gives rise to a pseudo-problem about canon. That is, if you say, as you do, that Middle-earth is a place and that the texts were written about it, then it makes sense to ask the question "what is the
truth about Middle-earth?" Which facts really correspond with Middle-earth and which do not? Was Gil-Galad the son of Fingon or the son of Orodreth? If we apply a correspondence theory of truth to the texts then these questions make sense, and it is troubling when there seems (as often happens) no good way to answer them.
The problem is resolved by looking at things from my perspective. There is no single truth about Middle-earth because there is no single, original Middle-earth. It is of course true that you can take various coherent sets of statements from the texts and use as the basis for the imaginary place. But there's no need to be shocked or dismayed when you discover that someone else has taken a different set and done the same thing.
Of course I don't deny that archetypes and such are objectively real psychological features. But let's not confound these archetypes with the facts about Middle-earth. The archetypes are present in countless works of literature stretching back over thousands of years; many, if not most, of these works of literature contradict each other. They involve the same archetypes but the
specific facts they assert are in contradiction.
So I certainly would not be averse to saying that, in a sense, the texts of the Silmarillion, LotR, and
The Hobbit are about objectively real archetypes. But the specific, self-consistent reality of Middle-earth arises
from them.