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Originally Posted by Child of the 7th Age
OK, I am going to raise an idea here that is probably preposturous. Yet I can't help wondering.... Many cultures have stories of little folk leading a secluded life alongside the big folk, but largely hidden from view. They are given many different names, but the idea is widespread.
Do we have some kind of a collective memory that taps into what happened in the distant past? Some kind of radar that could take a people that really existed and make them part of a folk memory? And is it possible that some people are better at this than others.....they are sensitive to these distant memories in a way that others are not? Could Tolkien be someone with a special gift: the gift of reconnecting with archetypes that once really existed in some form or fashion and make up part of our human past? Is this one of the things we sense when we read his works?
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This sort of idea is right up my alley - it seems this sort of intuitive "memory" could exist as a part of the collective unconscious, which is not so far fetched considering the parallels between mythologies of distant cultures, for instance. It could provide an explanation for the way Tolkien "resonates" with so many readers, producing an almost religious passion for his world and stories; he not only used the existing mythology, but built on it with an intuitive grasp of the collective memories of humankind. Maybe far-fetched to some, but it makes sense to me. I have always believed the psyche transcends time and space; no, actually as Campbell said, I don't need to have faith...I have experience.
The question of whether these stories would be reduced somehow if there were evidence for some historical basis is interesting. I think in this case such evidence, and its implications, would be an incredibly exciting discovery in their own right, with such fascinating implications, that it wouldn't be the least bit of a let down. It would be something akin to Edgar Allan Poe's essay "Eureka", which describes the big bang theory; science confirming what an artist intuited speaks for the power of intuition and imagination as being, perhaps, above science - and that's an exciting thought to me.
There seems to be new evidence, now, that the hobbits do in fact represent another human species, and that they used tools and fire :
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...tv_hobbit.html
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