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

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

All right, Bb, great, you have actually said things I wanted to include in my post at first, but then decided that they are too off-topic. But now, I can say it was you who started about that, so it's not entirely just my fault

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

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.)

Certainly. However, let's be careful on not mixing things together. One thing is that fiction does not belong to the era of imagination. Quite so. Another is SF: now we have SF which is not in fact a story with the primary goal of being "'just' a story", but has a message (some G.Orwell, 1984 or such). Then, there is SF which is mainly a story and has no other value, what more, we cannot even hope to meet those characters, unlike the Elves or Dragons (example: Star Wars - the only way you can meet people from there is a certain fake, when you and your friends dress up as Darth Vader and go fighting with fake lightsabers). But then, there is also a SF (or similar) literature which tries to appear "real", but the story is unreal (like a story that right now, aliens have landed in South American jungle and nobody noticed them, except for a group of random travelers and a secret NASA mission).

To this third thing - Michael Crichton said that we have lost our myths, and thus now, we are making "techno-myths": conspiracy theories about the world governments, secret scientific experiments, dealings of alien invaders with human beings etc. There is quite some truth on it - that is a sort of our modern Béowulf. Although, I think Tolkien did not probably approve of this, he would have liked to preserve the "magic myth", not the "techno-myth".

And now to a completely different thing, again:

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.

But these are two different things. Or rather, many different things. There is a dragon and a dragon, there is a real dragon who is real in the Faërie and a real dragon who is real in truth, and therefore is dangerous.

I could say it simply: I am certain I would have liked to meet a Dragon, however at the same time of course I would not have liked to really meet him, just like Tolkien did. I would like to read about Dragons, but to read about them the way that I would believe they are real (Tolkien calls this "Secondary Faith"), but at the same point, of course not really believing that they are real! I hope you understand what I mean. But anyway, I will elaborate a bit on the subject.

First, there is one important difference - which many people don't understand, I think - there is a big difference between a belief in a Secondary-world Dragon living in the forest next to my home (whether I am a child or adult) and a belief that such a Dragon comes from the Primary World and really exists here. I could compare it also to the way some people believe in aliens (for they have taken the Dragons' place, in many ways, at least by their function. Certainly not by their beauty, though). Although I do not know of anybody who would believe in aliens coming from the Secondary World like people do believe in Dragons. But people in general cannot believe in Dragons anymore the way some of them do believe in aliens: our ancestors perhaps did.

So, that's one thing. There is this, kind of, "pathologic" Secondary Faith, which even becomes Primary. In the sense, that you start to believe that if you go out at night, there will really be the Dragon (or aliens) and eat you (or kidnap you).

Then there is this Secondary Faith, which is believeable: that is the way the Middle-Earth is believable for me, for example (and for many of us, I am sure). Even now I really cannot say that Middle-Earth does not exist, because I won't be telling the truth: it does. The same way as you can still encounter an Elf in the woods, if you are lucky (children have generally more chance of that happening). This chance, however, was not bigger for our ancestors any more than it is for us (cf. what Bethberry said about the elves not belonging in the era of ignorance). It is the same. Our ancestors were perhaps more prone to the thing I mentioned in the paraghraph above. (Hmm... or were they... *thinks about whether there is a difference in how many people believed in dragons and how many people believe in aliens*)

The thing Bb spoke about in her last paraghraph is yet something different. That is about real things which actually are there and we don't know about them. But they are things which exist in the Primary World, come from the Primary World, and have nothing to do with Faërie at all. They are serious threats and the only connection they have to the Dragons are, like you say, Jungian: people disappear at night in the forest, and the villagers say it was a Dragon who did it. But that is the psychologisation of mythology, or the psychology-based creation of mythos, which is there as well, but it is another thing which needs to be separated from the Fantasy itself.