Quote:
|
Especially if one considers that much (or most) of the original history to have come from prose or song, then translated (and translated again and again etc.), one can easily get mixed messages as to who is "greatest".
|
The problem with this argument is that in reality, the stories WERE NOT PASSED DOWN...Tolkien, for as much as he claimed to have "discovered" elements of his tales and to have been working on how they came to be in existence today when the history was supposed to take place years and years ago, created every story that we have from his own mind... he may have made revisions, but one can hardly consider that as the same as passing down stories from generations to generations...and again...Tolkien, as a philologist, choose his words carefully...since he was ulitmately the one writing the "final" stories as we would see them (or as he was working on them to become final) he wasn't restrained to believe whatever a past "story teller" communicated to him...
...as much as Tolkien wanted a mythology that incorporated elements of many of the tales we have today in various cultures, we must remember that his works didn't actually form the trunk from which all these various branches with similar elements came from...therefore, the work of this one man is what we are to consider...