Tolkien the Metafictionist

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

Tolkien says that it partakes of our own history.

That doesn’t sound to me like something Tolkien would say. Where did you find this?

The story is about us.

And who is “us”? Feänor, Beren, Lúthien, Húrin, Túrin, Tuor, Eärendil, Elwing, Elrond, Aldarion, Erendis, Gollum, Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin, Aragorn, Galadriel, Boromir, Faramir, Éowyn, and many other characters, mostly very different from one another?

In other words, it's real. It may not have literally happened, but it's real. It's about reality.

Tolkien writes about a world in which Elves existed, and Dwarves, and Hobbits, and Orcs, none of whom are real according to most people. They never existed according to most and I have read nothing that suggests that Tolkien thought or felt that they ever existed. Númenor or Atlantis also never existed, according to most.

See the definitions of real given by Miriam-Webster at http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/real or those in other dictionaries. In other words, Tolkien’s writings on Middle-earth were not real according to the standard definitions of real.

Tolkien himself in his letters often called his main work, The Lord of the Rings, a romance. He even writes in letter 329: “My work is not a ‘novel’, but an ‘heroic romance’ a much older and quite different variety of literature.”

I admit there is much realism in The Lord of the Rings, as there is in many other romances, such as the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Le Morte d’Arthur, Norse romances of Sigurð, Beowulf, and many others. The Lord of the Rings seems to me to be more realistic than the Mahabharata or the Ramayana or the Finnish Kalevala. But I’ve never heard anyone try to make The Lord of the Rings into a realistic story before now. One of its charms is the elements which are fantastic and non-realistic which you do not mention at all, as is the case with every successful work which is called a romance. You grossly distort The Lord of the Rings by, in effect, leaving out the Ring.

See the definitions of romance given by Miriam-Webster at http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/romance . Only the modern definition of a ‘love story’ of course does not fit. The Lord of the Rings is about reality, as you claim, but also about much that is intended to be very unreal, about faërie.