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Old 06-03-2002, 01:41 PM   #21
Child of the 7th Age
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Sting

Regarding Lembas --

I certainly think you could look at the drafts in terms of Lembas to see when Tolkien put this idea in and how he developed it.

In Letter 210 Tolkien clearly says Lembas has a religious significance, although he does not define it. He also says it is a device for making credible the long marches with little provisions.

The latter might tie more into manna which helped Jews get across the desert. However, you were supposed to get manna every day from God, except on Friday when you collected a double portion to avoid work on Shabbat. Lembas comes from an immortal creature, but definitely not a god.

Lembas is said to have fed the will and given strength to endure which does sound more than a simple food substance. In Letter 213, Tolkien mentions that one reader views Lembas as a derivation from the Eucharist, but he neither agrees with or denies this connotation.

So I guess we can be fairly open ended and make our own individual decisions how we would view Lembas.

Littlemanpoet -- Did you get this idea from the beginning of Lost Tales? I think Christopher Tolkien said that later his father focused on theological and philosophical questions rather than on myth or poetry as he had initially done. Doesn't he call this trend "problematic"--perhaps CT saw it as problematic because it made his job as translator more difficult. It's possible that CT would view it as problematic, but not the rest of us who would enjoy the additional philosophical/theological comment.

This is just such a hard question. I'd have to be a whole lot more comfortable with HoMe to be able to answer this in a meaningful way.

Emotionally, I would have to say that I like some of Tolkien's later ideas--the essay in Morgath's Ring for example with Finrod, but don't like others such as remaking the flat world into a round one. But this is no way to set a standard for deciding what is "canon". I've never done much exploring in the Silm project on this site. Don't know if they get into any of that or not.

At this point, I would only say that we will never have Silm the way Tolken envisioned it because he left it finished half-way. Whether it's his son or some other editor, only part of Silm really belongs to JRRT. I wouldn't have any trouble with different editors adopting different standards for deciding what to put in their own version of Silm. as long as I knew right up front what criteria that individual had adopted to make the decisions.

sharon, the 7th age hobbit

[ June 03, 2002: Message edited by: Child of the 7th Age ]
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