[mindil]

Second, the telepathic reception of Elvish, Westron and the rest can explain everything about JRRT’s endless tinkering with the languages and the names. He had an intense, but totally elusive sense of the feel of those languages, and of the idea of how they work. He found Welsh and Finnish closest to the feel he remembered, and desperate to reconstruct the languages he longed for, he started to re-invent them, using these similar languages as models. Some phonological rules felt right, some grammatical structures felt right, but none were precisely what was at the edge of consciousness, in just the way that so many dream experiences remain just out of reach. So when he wondered what Aragorn’s name was, and tried a dozen options, he was trying to hit the one that felt closest to some slippery sense of what that name ought to be.

Third, JRRT’s affinity for the inanimate denizens of alternate reality (here, Arda) explains why his landscapes are the most vivid parts of his stories.

Fourth, it is likely, Smith of Wooten Major style, that at some point, JRRT stopped having dreams/visions, and had to finish his work on imagination and extrapolation alone. This would account for the radical difference of many of his later changes to the Legendarium.

Finally, I propose that JRRT was visiting Arda from childhood, and that he was a regular guest as a child at the Cottage of Lost Play. Since the stories he heard there were all heard telepathically, he heard them with the understanding of a child – which would make Thu a giant cat in BoLT I, yet later Sauron would be understood as a maia. A child would register Tinfang Warble and Goblin Feet (written up faithfully, though years later), and an adult would register the beauty of the Eldar.

And of course, he himself was Eriol/ Aelfwine. He heard the Silmarillion directly from the elves of Tol Eressea. But how many versions did he hear? And how complete were the stories? Were his dream-visions cut off sometimes? Did they start in the middle or skip essential facts (like Beren being a man/ elf)? These are the things I would love to tease out of a close reading of HoME.