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Originally Posted by Child
If Tolkien really wanted to pen a mythology, how could be be content with his world becoming "static and dead", subject only to the back and forth dialogue of critics?... At heart, they are scholars; what I really want are storytellers.
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I think in Tolkien's more generous moments, he himself would have encouraged such an attitude. I always think of several choice
Letters quotes:
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A few years ago I was visited in Oxford by a man whose name I have forgotten (though I believe he was well-known). He had been much struck by the curious way in which many old pictures seemed to him to have been designed to illustrate The Lord of the Rings long before its time. He brought one or two reproductions. I think he wanted at first simply to discover whether my imagination had fed on pictures, as it clearly had been by certain kinds of literature and languages. When it became obvious that, unless I was a liar, I had never seen the pictures before and was not well acquainted with pictorial Art, he fell silent. I became aware that he was looking fixedly at me. Suddenly he said: 'Of course you don't suppose, do you, that you wrote all that book yourself?'
Pure Gandalf! I was too well acquainted with G. to expose myself rashly, or to ask what he meant. I think I said: 'No, I don't suppose so any longer.' I have never since been able to suppose so.
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Of course The L.R. does not belong to me. It has been brought forth and must now go its appointed way in the world...
--Letter 328
I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.
--Letter 131
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Tolkien seems to have adopted the attitude that if there was anything transcendent in his creation, then it came through him rather than from him. I don't think that last -- "other minds and hands" -- was an idle wish, and to me it seems kind of sad that Christopher, who was such an intimate of his father's in the creation of Middle-earth, became his father's archivist rather than wielding the pen as a storyteller in his own right.