What's "real," anyway?

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Originally Posted by tar-ancalime

Once the work of art exists it stands alone as another commentary on the "actual" world, and that function is the same whether the work is set in Denmark or Dunharrow, England or Eregion.

Insofar as we are talking about the physical settings of the tales I would agree with this. I can no more visit the Elsinore of Hamlet than I can visit the Shire. I can see the places that inspired these imagined worlds, but that’s about it.

Things are quite a bit different when we turn to the “moral landscape” of the tales, however. The universe that Hamlet addresses is one in which I actually live. Sure, in the play there are ghosts and (probably) a God, and there are kings, and women are regarded in not-exactly the same way they are these days, but all of these things are open to re-interpretation and reconfiguration. The reality of the play refers to the reality of the moral landscape that I live in, so I have a certain authority to tweak the former with reference to the latter.

The reality of LotR, however, refers to the reality of the moral landscape that Tolkien invented. I am free to question the existence of God, or the depiction of women in Hamlet, because it’s a mirror that’s been held up to a nature that I share with Shakespeare (in which he and I get to decide for ourselves if there’s a God and what he – or she – is like). I don’t have that option with Tolkien – in his world, the moral landscape includes Eru, whose actions and nature are a certain way. The reality of Middle-Earth is fixed and beyond my control in a way that the reality of Shakespeare’s Elsinore is not. That reality thus exists in a more difficult relation to the reality I live in.

Perhaps this is why so many people forsake the question of the reality of the tale and leap onto truth – it may not be real (there is no Eru; the world is not governed by a providential hand) but it seems/feels true (we want there to be an Eru; we wish we could believe that the world is governed by a providential hand). But I shudder at the implications of this, since the way I am now describing LotR makes it sound like the kind of deception/sorcery practiced by Sauron!