LotR - an allegory? No, not WW2 this time, I promise... ;)

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Legate of Amon Lanc

I believe it was a sort of self-reflection, like you say, and I think that is the general feeling of the modernising world. If you read On Fairy-Stories, he again says something very similar there plainly - I will quote:

That more or less catches the point. With the growing knowledge of the world, there remained less and less to place the fantasy in, here in the "Primary world". (Tolkien is also saying something similar in his essay about translating Béowulf: by the time of Béowulf, the world of the Men ended by the wooden wall enclosing the village, and further on, the world was unknown and untamed. Not as much anymore.)

However, I am not sure whether Tolkien himself was really as much concerned by this. Even the thing I quote above was something he said in the middle of the polemic on how Elves need not to be small (and thus hide better even in the known world). The Elves do not rely on our knowledge of the world, or on the size of the "Primary World". Actually, Tolkien even said - "to make seem too narrow"! - now doesn't that in fact say that the world seems too narrow for Elves and Men, but in fact, it isn't still?

However I am sure this is just a very general feeling people have, and Tolkien had it as well, I am sure - to think that the world nowadays is losing some of its "magic" (that is not a feeling only a modern man gets when the world gets "modernised", though: I believe it is a feeling every man and woman gets when they are growing up. Because for a child, even a small wood next to their house is sufficient to contain many Elves and Orcs and Ents). But I am not sure that it would have frustrated the Prof to that point to make LotR an "allegory" of that. Maybe it surfaced unconsciously.

In either case, the narration of the Elves leaving was a way to make the Middle-Earth connected to our current world: this is the way it used to be, a long time ago, and now we are in the present, in the Age of Men. There are no Elves: for all of them have left (only a few remained in the woods, somebody lucky might meet them). (And, I cannot resist to say, there are no Hobbits: for they are small and can run away from a Big Person coming - now here poor Prof did after all resort, against all his beliefs, into this "they are small, thus we can't see them" - cf. On Fairy Stories, where he is really strongly against such dealings.)

This way, Tolkien managed to solve the problem of his Middle-Earth having place in our world. A 7th century writer could have said that in the mountains on the horizon, there is a Dragon living there. A 15th century writer could not have said that some are in the land beyond the Sea. A 19th century writer could have said that Dragons live on Mars. Nowadays, one would have to say - and many writers do that - that Dragons live in a different star system, or in a different galaxy. Or - and that's what a postmodern fantasy writer does most often - that in some fantasy world, which has no connection to our own, there are Dragons, Elves, Dwarves or anything...

Tolkien was a great man in the sense that he made his tale believable - on the most basic level - in the Primary World. True, the archeaologists have never found the remains of Barad-Dur, the tomb of Elendil or any mithril weapons, but still - for a common man, it is not an apparent contradiction: they might find some still, perhaps one day. (Well, recently, some have found the Hobbit skeletons, right? )

I have a constant fear that I might stray too off-topic on this thread. I could write a lot more of paraghraphs, but they won't be as much touching the original question. So, let us leave it at that.

Very good point, Legate that the fading of the elves etc was a way for Tolkien to connect Middle earth with our earth!

However, I do wonder if this is a true way to think of dragons, elves, fairies, that they belong to an age of ignorance. I think they belong to the imagination, and the imagination and fantasy is a central feature of the human mind. After all, we have the new (for the twentieth century) genre science fiction which began as a way to imaginatively apprehend what science brings to us (and I don't mean just space science fiction, but SF placed in the here and now or the immediate future.)

Just because we have learnt many things about the earth and the stars does not mean we know everything or that the world operates only according to those rules or that we really understand how those rules work. Sometimes, the things we think we know best may surprise us and we are then faced with dragons where before we were--or thought we were--in control.

Tolkien did say in OFS that he desired dragons immensely but not that he ever wished to actually meet one. Dragons are challenges and while one form of dragon might die out or hide from us, others are bound to appear, like the sudden appearance of the balrog on the bridge or the evidences of global warming. This might be a rather Jungian way of thinking about dragons.

Thanks, Lommie, for raising the question in a new way!

Opps--cross posted with Morth and now have no time to reply to his bitter assertion about middle age!