Facinating thread and posts!
The unifying factor for me is language. We are blessed to have the author's primary love and talent to be language. Through it, he was drawn into (or pulled back) ME, and with it, he was able to create something so concise in idea and purpose that people of many cultures can not only enjoy but relate to. Here was a man who also understood myth enough to recognize that the essense that translates so well was the truths that lie in the kernal of any myth. At its source of course was language of the spoken word.
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Language, the words we use to refer to the 'things' of experience, affect the way we relate to them, so manipulation of language affects our behaviour, because it determines the way we treat things.
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What other than language (besides visual art and mabye mathematics) decribes our universe? Here was the tool that binds (hehe) the story to the myths. Whats facinating to me is that what is the "real" feeling that we get? This gets into what makes a myth a myth. Is it the use of mythological references that makes the story real, or is it that we feel in our genes that there is something real in the myth that was referenced? Here IMO is the unifyer - we are all on different branches of the same tree, but it's roots we all share.
JRRT's world/myth to me is not the unifyer - its the idea that is presented. The sub-creation is as flawed as it's creator. His mind's eye saw something, and his language presented it to us. But his vision was only a splinter among billions.
Littleman - here is my shameless plug for my own thesis concerning hobbits:
hobbitses