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Old 01-21-2020, 04:56 AM   #17
mindil
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Join Date: Mar 2017
Posts: 47
mindil has just left Hobbiton.
I have a very, very strict filter on my internet, and for years it blocked the registration confirmation email - don't know why. So I couldn't post at all and gave up trying. This week I figured I'd give it another try, and I don't know why it worked now, but here I am.

As for Tolkien being Aelfwine, my take is this:

In this world, Tolkien was an author, editor and translator (as am I, but not on his level). He produced good literature. That requires being selective and adaptive - i.e. editing - in what one produces.

Even assuming that the legendarium refers to something real - an assumption I like to take for aesthetic purposes - it is uncontestable that Tolkien must have adapted the material to make it suitable for presentation to readers in our world. In his appendices, he even discusses some such adaptations.

What I wish I could do, and hope some other fans will undertake to do, is to try to pick apart the "authentic" material from the literary inventions. By using the drafts of the texts and Tolkien's biography, I started to do that a few years ago, but saw the project was way to large to do alone, and now I can hardly contribute to it.

In any case, my assumption (based on the material, but I forget how I got to this), is that there are a small number segments of the legendarium that Tolkien witnessed personally, in a way that allowed him to interact with the events (he "fell into ME"); a larger number of segments that he witnessed personally in ghost form, as it were; about the same number of segments that he heard first-person accounts about, in live form; a few more first-person accounts that he heard in ghost form; a great many that he heard second-hand accounts about in live form; quite a few that he heard second-hand accounts about in ghost form; and finally a chunk that he saw written, either live or ghost. All these experiences happened in ME, at various ages, from childhood till late middle age, at which point he became unable to travel to ME anymore.

If this becomes a strong thread of its own, I'll try to go back and see how I concluded this, but it was at a stage when I was reading HoME and the like quite closely. In any case, sorting out which sort of exposure created which parts of the legendarium, and which parts were mildly or heavily adapted for storytelling purposes was a goal that I thought very worthy of a forum that was producing the New Silmarillion.

For a tiny example of what I mean, consider how Tolkien could have thought that Strider/ Trotter was a hobbit for so long. Clearly, he had not seen Trotter at that stage of the writing; he must only have heard about him. And he must have heard about him from someone who felt no need to clarify anything about who Trotter was. The whole "gold that does not glitter" part, as we see in HoME, was added by Tolkien much later, after he himself discovered that Trotter was Aragorn. It may have happened, or it might have been added by Tolkien to spare his readers the kind of mistake that he had made. The original story Tolkien heard about the Prancing Pony incident must have been told by someone who felt that Trotter's identity was so well-known there was no need to explain it. This would be long enough, but not too long, after the War of the Ring that the story was a favorite tale in general circulation.

Still, why assume it was a hobbit? Perhaps Tolkien heard the tale told by hobbits - but we don't find Common Speech understandable by outsiders; Tolkien must have heard the tale told by elves. Or perhaps, after hearing so much elvish and common speech in his First Age researches, he was able to understand Common Speech? In which case, if Trotter was presented in the Prancing Pony story, told by hobbits, as someone who became a close friend of the hobbits, with a hobbit-like name, Tolkien might have just assumed that he was a hobbit, too. For a while, he tried to reconcile Trotter's personality with hobbit-nature by thinking he was [I forget the name], the renegade hobbit that had been over-influenced by Gandalf.

Tolkien clearly got the story in batches - we are always seeing "the tale as foreseen from Lorien" and such. Possibly some segments were cut off by Papa Hobbit sending his attentive listeners off to bed, at which point, ghost-Tolkien lost his link to ME, and only reconnected at some other point in the tale. It was only when he learned the Rivendell segment that he realized that Trotter was a Dunadan. Even then, he kept the name Trotter for a long while. Most likely, the Common Speech name could be translated either way, as Strider or Trotter. When Tolkien thought it was a hobbit, the translation Trotter felt more appropriate. Much later, he rethought the translation, realizing that no one would have nicknamed Aragorn Trotter, and that the proper meaning must have been Strider.

If anything, this mistake provides evidence that Tolkien must have been working from authentic material, because nothing about the hobbit Trotter character fit "Trotter" as a nickname. The character should have had a nickname more like Hiker or Adventurer. The only reason Tolkien could have called him Trotter was because his nickname really was the CS for Strider/Trotter, and Tolkien did the best he could with it, for a hobbit, since Strider would work even less well for a hobbit. Once Tokien realized that Trotter was Aragorn, everything fell into place.

Anyway, this kind of thing can be done all through the legendarium. I had a bunch of insights about Saruman and why Tolkien at first thought that a giant tree would have captured Gandalf instead. Similarly, why Tolkien was so unsure whether Beren was a man or elf. About the different Earendil versions. I don't remember most of them anymore. So much for a long-shuttered filter.

But there is no doubt that Tolkien as a child sat in the Cottage of Lost Play, and that he managed to return to Tol Eressea as a young adult, quite in defiance of usual custom. He found the way through the lane (whatever its name is) when he was a child in (wherever his mother took them), and later, when he spent hours alone in his room, he was traveling to ME either live or in "dreams." That for publication purposes he created an imaginary character Aelfwine - well, what would you do? The rest of BoLT is real, with limited editing. LoTR, of course, was heavily edited, and the Hobbit perhaps even more.

That's all I can spare for a while. I'll check in sometimes to see if this goes anywhere. Thanks for the compliment.

Mindil
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