Davem wrote:
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I suppose this simply rephrases the question of whether there is some underlying objective 'reality' - because otherwise we would simply accept everything Tolkien wrote as 'fact' - why is it that some statements by Tolkien would feel 'wrong'?
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Again we come to the "underlying reality" idea, which, I must confess, I still don't really understand.
Is this underlying reality just a convenient shorthand for referring to some
specific fictional reality, such as "Middle-earth as Tolkien would have intended it if he had lived long enough to come to a final decision on everything?"
Is it a Platonic reality - the "essence" of Middle-earth - that exists, factually, on a different plane from our reality?
Is it a literally real place?
At different times, it has seemed to me like each of these contradictory definitions was intended.
But, like The Saucepan Man, I must say that I find it odd to maintain both the fundamental importance of the author and the objective existence of Middle-earth. It seems to me that you can't have it both ways. If Middle-earth has an objective, independent existence and Tolkien was merely "discovering" then you cannot see his work as essentially a manifestation of himself, any more than you can see the Pelopponesian war as a mere manifestation of Thucydides.
On the other hand, if art is really to be thought of in the modern way as a manifestation of the artist, then Middle-earth's origin, in fact its entire existence, is in Tolkien himself, as an artist.
Personally, I don't go for
either view - Middle-earth as a real place or art as a manifestation of the artist. But my point here is simply that those two views seem to me to be inconsistent.
As for why we are capable of feeling that certain parts of the text are "wrong" - I see no real mystery about this. For a fact about Middle-earth to seem incorrect it only need contradict, explicitly or implicitly, another fact or set of facts about Middle-earth, one that the reader in question takes to be "true". In the case of The Saucepan Man's example about Gollum - here, based on the facts given in LotR, The Saucepan Man concludes that Gollum would have acted in a certain way had he regained the Ring at Mt. Doom. Tolkien's claim contradicts his conclusion, so he considers Tolkien's claim wrong. The contradiction need not be simple or literal.
In the case of Myths Transformed, I, at least, feel that the new cosmology was "wrong" in the sense that it damaged the story. There was no need for, nor in fact possibility of, Tolkien making the Silmarillion scientifically believable; hence the contortions he went through trying to achieve that believability only harmed the story. I don't need to hypothesize that there is a real Middle-earth and that it started out flat in order to come to this conclusion.