Well, let me try my hand at getting "back to the topic at hand."
One of the points which I see many of us making, and making it repeatedly, is how LotR affects us so deeply because it has, if I may borrow a phrase, "a felt reality."
The latest discussion to tender this view is
littlemanpoet's Mythic Realities thread. I would like to use
lmp's summation as a general example of this argumnent, without of course holding him responsible for the entire range of the debates we have had. (I could as easily have found quotations from
davem, SpM, Mark 12_30, Fordim, Child--to name only those who have, from my experience, made the claim many times.)
Quote:
2. Tolkien created something he could believe in. I do not mean this only in terms of Secondary Belief, although that is certainly important. This provisional answer harks back to davem's fascinating statement which seems true to me:
Quote:
I think we respond to Tolkien in the way we do because on some level we feel we're learning (or re-learning) something important.
I think that Tolkien was answering questions like, "what story/events in the past could have generated a name like Earendil?" His language capabilities (as drigel has said) made him singularly gifted to posit believable answers to such questions.
3. Tolkien wove feigned language, history, myth, and folklore into a believable if seamy fabric. The very seaminess of it is part of its charm.
4. The works were never completed. This is an additional aspect of the feignedness/life-likeness.
5. The content is real; that is, we feel its realness in our bones. Tolkien has modified that which really was to fit his corpus.
6. Tolkien was a realist and modern who straddled the "great divide" between the pre-modern and modern eras . Tolkien was born in the pre-modern era, and loved it. He lived through the change to the modern era, and while mourning the losses that accompanied it, had a modern man's mindset, and was therefore able to communicate all he knew from myth to a modern audience such that we could make it our own.
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Can we apply this statement to the question of Celebrian's experience: "
a believable if seamy fabric ... The content is real; we fell its realness in our bones." I've put the bolding in because this is the crucial point.
What is a real or believable interpretation of "poisoned wound", of "tormented"? Do we acknowledge historical fact and reality, that victims of kidnapping and capture, particularly during war or animosities, are frequently raped? That 'rape' is an act of power and bullying rather than an act of sexual desire?
Or, do we say that reality consists of being a gentleman who wishes not to spread evil by naming it? (Sorry,
Helen, I don't mean to single you out just because you described Tolkien as a gentleman. To me, being a 'gentleman' is a duplicitous act that has little to do with virtue.) Is it an act of reality to say that if we ignore evil it will go away? And if naming the act makes readers uncomfortable, how in Eru's name must the act itself make the victims feel? I am not talking about "graphic details" but about a simple suggestion of an abominable act.
History and psychology also show us that the reality of a code of silence about horrid and despicable acts such as rape or child abuse or pedophilia in fact creates complicity with the act. When society does not allow the crime to be named, the victims are doubly harmed. Their voice is denied and their pain is turned inward.
This happens not only to victims of sexual assault but also to soldiers in wartime who were not allowed to admit their fear, their pain, their fright, even their cowardice.
Is this what happened to Celebrian? The quotations above, that Elrond was able to heal her physically but not emotionally/mentally/psychologically suggest very much to me that Tolkien understood the trauma of a code of silence. He himself uses the code of silence to undermine it. Great poets and great writers have been doing this for centuries, turning words back upon their audience to suggest what their true meaning is.
I suppose, though, that there are other definitions of 'real' besides historical fact and psychological experience. Yet if we are to say that Middle earth touches us so deeply because it is real, because it makes the secondary world a truer experience than the primary world, then I think we have to face the possibility that Tolkien was using indirection very deliberately to unveil an ugly reality.