Headline News: We Have Hobbit Ancestors....

[The Saucepan Man]

Originally Posted by Rimbaud

Well, actually...no. I rather like the fantasy of imagining the stories to be true. That daydream would not be sullied by being ratified.

I agree wholeheartedly with your first sentence, but not your second. The fantasy of imagining it to be true would, for me, be ruined by the certainty of it being so. I have a particular relationship with the works of Tolkien, based upon his fiction that it was true combined with his adoption of mythological (and archetypal) imagery. If it turned out that particular elements of what he wrote were in fact true, then that relationship would be fundamentally altered, and I don't think that it would be for the better. I prefer to think that it might be true.

Fordim, I agree with much of what you say. Save, however, that Tolkien asks us to believe that Elves and Men (and Hobbits and Dwarves) awoke in the form in which we encounter them in his works. They did not evolve from "lower" forms of life. I can accept that within the context of his Legendarium, but it is fundamentally at odds with Darwin's "theory".