Davem wrote:
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It strikes me that when most of us come across a magnificent stone building - columns, gargolyes, flying butresses, etc, our first, instinctive, question is 'What's it for, why was it built, why is it there?' Not 'I wonder where the stone came from?' And even if we do ask the latter question it usually follows the former, because we assume there is a reason for things to exist.
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When I come across such a building, my chief response is not to ask anything - rather, it's to
enjoy the sight of the building. I may ask questions about why it's there later, but what I am generally chiefly interested in is the
thing in itself (not to sound too much like Kant, I hope) rather than in the circumstances surrounding its creation.
So it is, for me, anyway, with Tolkien's work (or with any literature). My chief interest is in LotR, the Silmarillion, and The Hobbit
in themselves, as great and magnificent stories, rather than in the circumstances of Tolkien's life which caused them to be produced.
And does this not suggest another possible answer to the "why" question? I am, as I type, sitting in a dorm room in a great and, I think, magnificent stone building, complete with gargoyles, vaulted ceilings, archways, and towers. Why was it built that way? It is, after all, in the New World, and was built no more than about a hundred years ago - certainly not a 'genuine' piece of Gothic architecture. I rather think that it was built this way because people
enjoy Gothic architecture. The arches and gargoyles are there
for me and the other inhabitants - to create a certain atmosphere, to give us aesthetic pleasure, etc.
So why can we not say the same about Tolkien's work? Why can he not have written it
for us - to read, to enjoy, to be moved by? Why can he not have created his Legendarium because he thought stories are valuable in and of themselves, not merely as means to some other end?
For that matter, why can he not have created it
for himself, because he enjoyed writing stories? I myself spend a good deal of time writing fiction and composing music, for no other reason than that I enjoy doing those things. Now, of course, my skill in neither of these fields is even on the same order of magnitude as Tolkien's skill at storytelling; nevertheless, I don't find it hard to imagine that his motivation was the same as mine.
Or, as Feanor of the Peredhil so concisely put it:
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Presumably it had something to do with telling a story.
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