Quote:
Originally Posted by Tar-Jêx
I never thought of that as a sci-fi sort of thing. I interpreted it a very different way. I read it as though Rumil was telling us that the true answers were lost long ago, and that it was impossible to try at retrieve them, unless you could relive the past and be there to hear it for yourself. The use of 'wastes' brought me to believe that Rumil was speaking quite negatively, lamenting the loss of valuable information. I never considered that it could've been the 'space' part of space/time. I can see the connection between 'wastes of time' and sci-fi after reading wastes like that, but it seems to obscure to be true. It's more likely that it was meant for Rumil to sound negative that nobody can tell Eriol anything, rather than it being lost forever, probably in the infinite.
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I'm not trying to argue that Tolkien is doing anything particularly scientifictional. Mostly, I wanted to remark on the coolness of a phrase that caught my eye as I was reading. And then, before I wrote anything, I figured I'd think the phrase through--and double-check the definitions of "wastes"--and the fact that it's normally applied to space rather than time struck me as an appropriate encapsulation of Tolkien's way of doing things: it's a very archaic-sounding phrase, and indeed it is an older, less-freqent use of the word to refer to dimensions of space, but it's still a twentieth-century image that it creates, substituting time for space.
Not that I'm saying Tolkien was necessarily thinking about all this--he may have just been having Rúmil make a subtle joke about "wasting time."
