Should we think of ME as a real place?

[Nogrod]

I'm afraid the way you pose the question creates more problems it helps us to solve... (althought that's also the way all the good questions end up doing. )

But I can't see a problem between Tolkien's quasi-mythology and actual mythologies in contrast to the world and how it "really" is.

Originally Posted by Farael

But at the same time, the laws of existance itself in Middle Earth are unlike that of modern Earth. I can tell you with a degree of confidence near-absolute, that it is impossible to pass on your own vital energy into a piece of jewlery, no matter how talented a jeweler you may be. Not to mention that sunlight comes, to the best of our knowledge, from the natural equivalent of a nuclear armagedon by H-bombs which happens fortunately far enough from us that we get to bask in the glow of it rather than be anihilated. In Middle Earth, sunlight comes from a celestial barge that carries the fruit of a tree from whence all light originally came.

In the Scandinavian mythology the thunder was Thor riding his chariots over the sky and throwing bolts down on the Middle-earth inhabitated by humans... In Greek mythology it was just craft for Zeus to turn himself into a swan to charm a female to have sex with him. Etc. Still we would not venture to say they had imagined a different planet of which their tales told about. It was that mythology's way of depicting this world.

So maybe we could just say that Tolkien's mythology - like all mythologies - have their particular view of this world we live in embedded with diffent kinds of beliefs and explanations to different things occuring, to how one should lead one's life and so on.

An interesting spin off from this question surely is whether we can compare mythical worldviews to our more or less scientific contemporary view of things with the clear-cut division into natural and (non-existant) supernatural things. Or in which way the people long time ago perceived the notion of truth or explaining things.

I mean we have some interesting remnants in our contemporary thought and speech of some different ways of perceiving things to be true or right.

Like when you say your dearest mate is "a true friend".

Or when after seeing Amelié you say that "it was so true", or "it was so right" (as Amelié finally gets the man). The poetic truth that is: how the world should be as to fulfill the norm of beauty-goodness-truth -thing (kalos) which in the end is the absolute "truth".