[davem]

Originally Posted by Raynor

You claim to protect Tolkien's authenticity and heritage, yet you disregard his own view on myths, and his work as myths. I keep getting amused in this thread.
Some are intended enigmas, as Bombadil, some are simply unfinished stories. The very quote you gave leaves room for new stories, provided that "new unattainable vistas are again revealed".

And he also made references to works like 'The Fall of Gil-Galad' ("which Bilbo must have translated" which he never actually wrote, or intended to write. The idea of 'lost' works was deliberate, & adds to the sense of M-e having a 'real' historical existence. The fact that some tales which Tolkien intended to complete remained incomplete actually adds to that sense. Completing unfinished tales & writing new ones would actually work against the effect.

So, like Lewis, you think that myths (or these myths) are simply lies, "breathed through silver"? Again, you would be at odds with Tolkien's own ideas. I am certain you are familiar with the discussion from the Biography which I quoted previously.

So, like (fill in the blank) you like to put words in people's mouths in order to create straw men which you can knock down?

You are confusing Tolkien's views on myth with the nature of myth itself. One person cannot create a mythology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythology.

Historically, the important approaches to the study of mythological thinking have been those of Vico, Schelling, Schiller, Jung, Freud, Lávy-Bruhl, Levi-Strauss, Frye, the Soviet school, and the Myth and Ritual School.[12]

Myths are narratives about divine or heroic beings, arranged in a coherent system, passed down traditionally, and linked to the spiritual or religious life of a community, endorsed by rulers or priests. Once this link to the spiritual leadership of society is broken, they lose their mythological qualities and become folktales or fairy tales.[13] In folkloristics, which is concerned with the study of both secular and sacred narratives, a myth also derives some of its power from being more than a simple "tale", by comprising an archetypical quality of "truth".

Myths are often intended to explain the universal and local beginnings ("creation myths" and "founding myths"), natural phenomena, inexplicable cultural conventions or rituals, and anything else for which no simple explanation presents itself. This broader truth runs deeper than the advent of critical history, and it may or may not exist as in an authoritative written form which becomes "the story" (preliterate oral traditions may vanish as the written word becomes "the story" and the literate class becomes "the authority"). However, as Lucien Lévy-Bruhl puts it, "The primitive mentality is a condition of the human mind, and not a stage in its historical development."[14]

Most often the term refers specifically to ancient tales of historical cultures, such as Greek mythology or Roman mythology. Some myths descended originally as part of an oral tradition and were only later written down, and many of them exist in multiple versions. According to F. W. J. Schelling in the eighth chapter of Introduction to Philosophy and Mythology, "Mythological representations have been neither invented nor freely accepted. The products of a process independent of thought and will, they were, for the consciousness which underwent them, of an irrefutable and incontestable reality. Peoples and individuals are only the instruments of this process, which goes beyond their horizon and which they serve without understanding."

Tolkien could not have created a genuine mythology - mythologies cannot be 'created' by individuals. Tolkien wrote a series of interlinked tales. I don't know if you genuinely do not understand the nature of 'mythology' or whether you're just attempting to score points here, but we have to get our terms right if we're to get anywhere in this discussion. If Tolkien created a 'mythology' then every writer of fantasy stories has also created a 'mythology'. Making up a story with gods & goddesses in it is not 'inventing a mythology' - though that phrase may be a convenient shorthand.

Myths, clearly, are not 'lies'. They were, in origin, religious tales, believed in as completely as the stories in the Bible or Koran. And that's the point - no-one (if they're classifiable as sane) believes Tolkien's stories are remnants of genuine beliefs. Of course, Tolkien played the game of being merely a 'translator' in both the Hobbit Forword & the Foreword to the First Edition of LotR - though that foreword was re-written for the Second Edition & any idea (however tongue in cheek) that LotR was anything other than a fictional work was removed.

Homer drew on a existing mythology (as did Dante) to produce their Art. Tolkien invented a 'mythological' background for his tales.

Its vital to distinguish between mythology & 'mythology' here.