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#15 | |
Itinerant Songster
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: The Edge of Faerie
Posts: 7,066
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I agree with Formendacil, but would like to go a little deeper (surprised, anybody? I thought not.
![]() His faith was also a key element. I recently read Carpenter's take on Tolkien's motivation for the Sil and the Legendarium. Qualifier: Yes, it's an authorized biography, but that doesn't necessarily mean that everything in it is complete accurate; just quite likely. p. 103: Quote:
But I think I may have stumbled across the critical element to at least a few of the six preliminary answers I offered above. It is something that I already knew, but failed to connect to this discussion, namely how Tolkien went about sub-creating the entire mythos. To summarize Carpenter, Tolkien had two approaches. First, he carefully created names in his made-up languages. Then he asked himself, "how did that name come to be?" A typical philologist's question. So he subcreated stories that explained the names. It was in the stories that the second, and to my mind more crucial element arose. In the heat of writing the story, Tolkien would come up with a good sounding name on the spur of the moment, following his artist's sense rather than his philologist's care. Then he would go back and see the name he had created, and ask the philologist's question: How did that seemingly impossible construction arise? Now, most writers (I have done this myself), when faced with these problems of inconsistency, take the seemingly obvious way, and remove the inconsistency. Not Tolkien. His approach was to research the linguistics, to search out the histories, the myths, the legends, and figure out how the inconsistency actually fit after all! Now, will this approach not more likely create a legendarium that feels more real than the cleaned up stuff most writers write? But they way, writers are taught to do the obvious thing, and perhaps rightly so, since Tolkien was the linguistic genius and none of us can possibly hope to get anywhere with his approach. |
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