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

[Parmandur]

I actually meant it in its more modern sense of "a different universe" rather than the pseudo-religious connotation.

Though that usage comes from Tolkien's Beowulf scholarship and Platonist philosophy, nevertheless.

 

[Mannahnin]

I actually meant it in its more modern sense of "a different universe" rather than the pseudo-religious connotation.

I figured.

One big post-Tolkien shift in fantasy was the increased prevalence of the idea of making a fantasy world ostensibly completely unrelated and unconnected to our world.

Prior to Tolkien a super-common, if not the predominant, device was having a character from our world travel in time or through dimensions into a fantasy world, or the literary device of setting the fantasy in our own world's prehistory or history. Despite (ironically) Tolkien having used the latter device, his worldbuilding was inspirational to a lot of later writers in terms of trying to make deep, rich worlds without any direct connection to our own.

I'm not sure if "secondary world" is the most common term for that concept, but it's definitely one I've seen.

 

[Hriston]

I don't think it's semantics.

You're quibbling with me about the meaning of the word neolithic. That's semantics. You are, of course, correct, and I considered not (mis)using it in my OP (which was copy/pasted from the other thread which used the term) and in my thread title but had difficulty finding another convenient label for the range of real-world dates I wanted to discuss. Prehistoric seemed too vague, covering all of Time up until the beginning of Ancient history around 3,000 BC (in Mesopotamia and Egypt) and conjuring images of cavemen and dinosaurs. It’s also subject to the same kind of objection as neolithic due to the existence of writing in the legendarium from its invention by Rúmil.

Clearly, it was a mistake to use neolithic because, rather than suggest a specific time-period as I had intended, it seems to imply in the minds of many posters strict conformity to a model used to identify an archaeological period by its package of cultural traits, inviting the reader to become an archaeologist of the Third Age and evaluate its level of cultural development according to the "evidence" found in the LotR. This wasn't my intention at all, and by using the term, I wasn't holding myself up to be such an "archaeologist". I think now, after doing some light research, it would be better to use a term from the geologic timescale because it describes the timing and relationship of (geologic) events and is based on objective relationships between rock layers rather than "measures" of human cultural activity, so I'm editing the OP and thread title to replace Neolithic with Greenlandian which I hope will clarify my intentions with regard to this thread.

All this thread started due to your reply to @Reynard 's request of suggestions for Neolithic settings, which was clearly a request for suggestions for settings whose inhabitants had a cultural and technological level mirroring what we believe characterized Neolithic people on Earth.

It wasn't clear to me. The OP of that thread calls the Neolithic a "time period" in its first sentence. I took that literally and responded by talking about fantasy I consider to be set in that time period.

If you simply used Neolithic as the range 10000-4000 BCE but not tied to specific technology levels, why in your reply to one of my previous posts you asked me to clarify which cultural and technological aspects of Tolkien's stories I didn't think matched what is attested for Neolithic people,

Because it's difficult to engage with your points if I don't know on what specific passages of text you're basing your assertions.

and pointed out that we don't really know a lot about common folk lifestyle in Middle-Earth,

Because it isn't talked about very much in the books. A lot of what posters have asserted in this thread seems like it's based on their personal mental picture rather than any specific textual reference.

and also that archeological record is incomplete?

Because it is. It's delusional to think modern society has perfect knowledge of what the past was like.

To me that sounded like you were implying that outside of the main cultures depicted in the books, Tolkien imagined most people living a Stone Age life.

I make no claims about what JRR Tolkien imagined other than what's represented in the words he wrote in his fiction and letters. The premise of this thread is he made a statement about the real-world time-period in which he imagined his stories to have taken place and that what is understood about that time-period, both currently and in Tolkien's own time, can inform how we might imagine and how Tolkien himself might have imagined the setting of his stories.

But if your point is simply that Tolkien imagined LotR having taken place around 6000BCE despite the fact that the cultures depicted in the book were significantly more advanced than actual Earth societies of the time, we are in total agreement.

I make no claims about the actual level of cultural advancement of societies of the time, and my opinion is that Tolkien wasn't particularly interested in describing culture.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

You're quibbling with me about the meaning of the word neolithic. That's semantics

It’s only semantics when there is uncertainty as to the definition. In this case Neolithic is defined by the technology in use, not the date. That’s why the dates are different in different places. There is no uncertainty in the definition that is open to debate (semantics), you are simply wrong.

 

[Hriston]

...iron tools?

I guess I'm failing to express that I'm looking for more than mere assertion, like, do you have a particular passage in mind? I'm not doubting that there could be such a passage, but I'm interested in what language is being used and keeping in mind that meteoric iron is a thing.

 

[Hriston]

Do...you believe that Tolkien actually believed his frame story was real history...?

I'm not sure where this question is coming from. You're asking if I believe he believed what now?

Here's a quote from the beginning of the same paragraph I quote in the OP from Letter #211 which may include an answer to your question (bold text added):

May I say that all this is 'mythical', and not any kind of new religion or vision. As far as I know it is merely an imaginative invention, to express, in the only way I can, some of my (dim) apprehensions of the world. All I can say is that, if it were 'history', it would be difficult to fit the lands and events (or 'cultures') into such evidence as we possess, archaeological or geological, concerning the nearer or remoter part of what is now called Europe; though the Shire, for instance, is expressly stated to have been in this region (I p. 12).​

I think the bolded is of some interest with reference to what he was willing to commit to believing about the "historicity" of his writings.

 

[Hriston]

It is not a "matter of opinion" about material culture present in the text. He goes to great lengths to describe the material culture of every place they visit, even Mordor.

Then it should be quite easy for you to provide actual examples of these descriptions of material culture showing the events of the story couldn't have occurred before 4,000 BC.

 

[Reynard]

Then it should be quite easy for you to provide actual examples of these descriptions of material culture showing the events of the story couldn't have occurred before 4,000 BC.

I find it very weird that you went back and dug up that post from almost a week.ago even after going through the process of explaining that you weren't literally saying the Lord of the Rings was set in the neolithic.

If you want to say that at least some of Tolkien's letters etc suggest that the events of the Lord of the Rings happened in prehistoric tie periods on Earth, and that knowledge of them has since been lost, and anachrilonisms like chain mail and mounted warriors and potatoes are "mistranslations" that's fine,I suppose. But I don't understand why you continue to beat this dead horse.

I don't actually care what the letters and unfinished tales and all that say. The only text that matters is the finished, published books. And they occur pretty inarguably on a secondary world called Arda.

 

[Hriston]

Thing is, I don't think Middle Earth has much of a Geemanic vibe either, though it does reflect some of the mostly forgotten Euhemsrization literature that was the standard narrative of Medieval Germany and Scandanavia, which interpreted the Aesir as Trojan wizards who tricked the Germans into worshipping them as gods.

Well, it's not like Germanic and Celtic is some mutually exclusive dichotomy, and I disagree with regard to Gandalf's odinic qualities. Specifically his exhortations to fight against overwhelming odds are at least reminiscent of the gods last stand at Ragnarök and the, to my mind, germanic ideal to go down fighting. Valhalla and all that.

 

[Hriston]

Smelting is mentioned a great many times in LotR.

Great! Let's get into the details:

1. Where? Can you provide references/page numbers/quotations of what is actually said in the book?
2. What are they smelting? This is important if you're trying to establish a particular level of human technology has been attained.
3. Who is doing the smelting? Are they supernatural/magical beings (or people working for them) or people from "fairy-land" or a "lost" superior culture, or are they normal people like hobbits or Men of Bree, Laketown/Dale, Dunland, or Rohan? I think this is important for determining whether one might expect the activities of such people to conform to what has been established as "typical" by reference to the archaeological record.
4. What actual physical processes are being described, keeping in mind that what we have is a "translation" and that the terminology for a given process in Westron might be untranslatable into English? Also, that the translation appears to have been originally written in English (because it actually was) so is unlikely to be all that faithful to the original Westron.