[jallanite]

Originally Posted by Mithalwen

My main point which you have perhaps chosen to ignoree is that Tolkien knew that his world was created.

I ignored your main point because I agree with it totally and completely. I ought to have mentioned this agreement.

I picked up only on a statement commonly made by Tolkien commentators as though it were by Tolkien when it is not actually by Tolkien. I find that annoying, but understandable, when this statement is wrongly attributed to Tolkien so often, because people blindly accept what they are told. I was disappointed as I would have thought you would have known better. All the more reason to indicate a slovenly error when someone as generally as intelligent as you is making it.

Some claim that it doesn’t matter that Tolkien didn’t say it, because he certainly would have agreed with it. I disagree. Truth matters. And I don’t believe that he would have agreed with it.

Here is an entire thread on the matter: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mythsoc/message/17214 .

I don't agree with your assertion that a mythology for Ngland must be set there.

I did not quite say that a mythology for England must be set there. I suggested:

A “mythology for England” surely should take place mostly in England.

Tolkien’s tales of the first three ages of Middle-earth are, in their finished versions, set in a fictional era before England (or Britain) even existed. Tolkien’s early idea was to connect his legendarium with historic England through the identification of the Lonely Isle with Britain (including England) and by identifying his Eriol with the father of Hengest, Horsa, and Heorrenda (a younger brother of Hengest and Horsa invented by Tolkien).

Tolkien rejected those ideas.

Instead Tolkien connected his legendarium analogically with England in The Lord of the Rings by making the Shire parallel to the English countryside of his youth and giving to the Rohirrim the Old English language and Germanic heroic ideals also found in Old English writings.

What most people would call the mythology of Tolkien’s legendarium (Manwë, Varda, Ulmo and all that) is not particularly English. The Elvish history is not especially English and Tolkien was later quite insistent that his Elves were his own invention, not owing much to the Elves of folklore. The history of Númenor is largely the Platonic story of Atlantis. Arnor and Gondor is largely a calc of the western and eastern Roman empires. Aragorn is more Dietrich von Bern than identical to any English figure. I think he also owes something to the fictional Natty Bumppo (Hawkeye) of the American author James Fenimore Cooper.

We are a nation of Empire builders and Tolkien was colonial born even if at heart a Warwickshre lad. Perhaps because I have roots several centuries deep in Warwickshire soil it's Englishness seems self evident.

Empire builders? Colonial? Tolkien in letter 53:

For I love England (not Great Britain and certainly not the British Commonwealth (grr!)), and if I was of military age, I should, I fancy, be grousing away in a fighting service, and willing to go on to the bitter end – always hoping that things may turn out better for England than they look like doing.

From letter 77:

I should have hated the Roman Empire in its day (as I do), and remained a patriotic Roman citizen, while preferring a free Gaul and seeing good in Carthaginians. Delenda est Carthago. We hear rather a lot of that nowadays. I was actually taught at school that that was a fine saying; and I ‘reacted’ (as they say, in this case with less than the usual misapplication) at once.

From letter 100:

Though in this case, as I know nothing about British or American imperialism in the Far East that does not fill me with regret and disgust, I am afraid I am not even supported by a glimmer of patriotism in this remaining war.

Tolkien clearly and carefully distinguished his personal feelings for England from his personal feelings for Imperial Britain.

The Englishness of the Shire is of course evident to me. It is surely evident to almost all readers. You don’t need to be born in Warwickshire to feel that. Indeed I know at least one person who was not able to read The Lord of the Rings because the early chapters were too English for her.

If you wish to disagree with me, disagree with what I am saying, not with opinions I don’t hold. I am unaware that I have posted anything that would suggest ignorance of the analogical Englishness of the Shire. You rightly blamed me for ignoring most of what you were saying. But you are doing the same, inventing the ignorance that you impute to me.

Tolkien did not say he had ever wished to create a mythology for England. Disagree? Then point out where he said it. He said something like it in the Waldman letter. But he did not say it, and I believe he did not intend to create a fictional mythology that would be believed by Englishmen in place of what he saw as the true religion. Nor did he intend a poetic mythology to be referred to by poets as classical mythology was by custom.

Originally Posted by Galin

I happen to like the Eriol story myself, the question of the Romans aside. It seems a bold move to play England as not yet in the geographical position of England; but as noted Tolkien certainly abandoned this.

Yes, it was a bold move, but one that seems very nationalistic and even racist.