The Lord of the Rings as [Greenlandian] Fantasy in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien [edited title]

[Bedrockgames]

I am not a deep Tolkien fan (I have only read the trilogy a handful of times and the hobbit a couple of times). But I always assumed he was doing the same sort of thing that Howard was doing, which was shifting things far enough back in time that he didn't really have to worry about real history (anything that is out of place can just be explained as forgotten to time). Though I will say the Lord of the Rings seems a lot less kitchen sink than Conan

 

[Parmandur]

Yes, that's the point here, IMHO. Tolkien built a mythological past that was clearly before and outside of history and, as far as I know, he had no interest in mapping it to historical records and archaeological evidence.

Well, his original conception of the Simirillion had a much more aggressively tied to real history frame story, with an Anglo-Saxon voyager encountering the Elves and receiving their history, and the Anglo-Saxons being descended from Elros.

And his unfinished time-travel novels, The Lost Road The Notions Club Papers, explicitly tied Middle-Earth to 20th century Oxford Don's (Tolkien's literary legacy would be fascinatingly different if he finished those psychedelic weird fiction works).

But, no, I doubt he really was interested in a serious playing of them in time. And his latter versions of the Simirillion moved away from the frame entirely, which is reflected in the final "canon" version.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Sometimes people have ideas. Then they get older and wiser, and realise those ideas were bad.

 

[Parmandur]

Sometimes people have ideas. Then they get older and wiser, and realise those ideas were bad.

I think you may be right that Lewis may have proven in the 50's that "alternate unicerse" was a viable fantasy frame story, and that impacted Tolkien in a way he wasn't Mayne aware of as an option in 1916 when he conceived hia original frame story.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I think you may be right that Lewis may have proven in the 50's that "alternate unicerse" was a viable fantasy frame story, and that impacted Tolkien in a way he wasn't Mayne aware of as an option in 1916 when he conceived hia original frame story.

It’s also possible he stumbled across something by REH and realised it was cliche!

Although I feel Tolkien was more the sort of person who would read Wodehouse for pleasure.

 

[Reynard]

I never read LotR as anything other than second world fantasy.

 

[Parmandur]

It’s also possible he stumbled across something by REH and realised it was cliche!

Although I feel Tolkien was more the sort of person who would read Wodehouse for pleasure.

Per L. Sprague de Camp, Tolkien did like Conan:

“[Tolkien] said he found [the anthology] interesting but did not much like the stories in it [...] We sat in the garage for a couple of hours, smoking pipes, drinking beer, and talking about a variety of things. Practically anything in English literature, from Beowulf down, Tolkien had read and could talk intelligently about. He indicated that he ‘rather liked’ Howard’s Conan stories.”

Was Tolkien a Robert E. Howard Fan? — DMR Books

When Lin Carter casually remarked that Tolkien “rather enjoyed” the Conan stories, I doubt he expected that decades later Howard fans and Tolkien fans alike would still be curious about the specifics. Which Conan stories did Tolkien read? Let’s find out!

dmrbooks.com

 

[Ruin Explorer]

So are the Great Pyramids, so is a lot of megalithic architecture. And they're built by literal Atlanteans who've been gifted by the gods with superiority of mind, body, and longevity. That's the fantastical element.

No, they aren't.

That's just hippy bollocks. The Great Pyramids were built by normal humans. IN THE EARLY BRONZE AGE. Not even in the Neolithic. If you mean the structures in Middle Earth, so what? That doesn't make you able to built that simply cannot be built with Neolithic technology.

I think what you're trying to express is that the Numenoreans were in the late Iron Age, in terms of their culture and technology. But you seem to think that Neolithic is simply a fixed time period or something.

In Ancient Egypt, the Neolithic lasted until the Protodynastic period, c. 3150 BC.[2][3][4]

The Great Pyramid of Giza[a] is the largest Egyptian pyramid. It served as the tomb of pharaoh Khufu, who ruled during the Fourth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom. Built c. 2600 BC,[3]

Furthermore, the Great Pyramids are extremely impressive but relatively simple structures. Being able to build them absolutely does not mean you can build structures like those described in Middle-Earth, nor FACTORIES, which you seem to be studiously attempting to avoid. Further still, we'd find ruins of all these structures if they'd existed as recently as the Neolithic. You simply couldn't erase that from the archaeological record.

The Neolithic lasted for thousands of years, so it's quite possible for it to be thousands of years after some event in the Neolithic and for it to still be the Neolithic.

No, it wouldn't. Absolutely not. Especially not in a European-style climate, where Mesolithic tended to end later and the Neolithic to start later and finish later.

Neolithic - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

What do you even think the Neolithic is?

 

[Parmandur]

I never read LotR as anything other than second world fantasy.

It honestly reads better that way...but the fragments of The Lost Road and The Notions Club Papers are a wild ride, worth checking out. Ancestral memories, reincarnation, time travel...very very weird fiction.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Potatoes. Not known in Europe until the 16th century.

And tobacco, probably other New World stuff if we looked closely.