Dark Sun <snippage> is a well-wrought RPG setting, but doesn't have the dense patina of "deep myth" that Middle-earth does.
To be blunter, at least in what I have read of it it doesn't have much to say. Not that there is an absence of possible, even promising, material - tyrants, slaves, wild nomadic elves and halflings, etc. But I don't feel that it does much with them other than catalogue them.
That is one reason why REH's Conan, despite sharing many of the same tropes, is (at its best) better.
Tolkien clearly stated that he wasn't trying to write allegorically, but just tell a good story. What meaning and symbolism arose out of his tale was up to the reader.
<snip>
Middle-earth took on a life of its own and wasn't meant as a soapbox
When Tolkien denies that he is writing allegorically, he does not mean that his writing is devoid of meaning/symbolism. He is using "allegory" in the strict sense, of each element of the story standing for something else, and hence the sequence of events in the story actually telling some other story (in the very strictest sense of allegory, that would be a Biblical story).
And Tolkien is not writing on a "soapbox". It's not didactic. (Contrast eg Pilgrim's Progress, or even A Christmas Carol.)
But Tolkien very obviously is trying to deal with a range of motifs, both Christian and non-Christian. He has at least two treatments of a Fall: the Noldor, and then Numenor. He has at least one treatment of an Incarnation: Gandalf. That is not to say that Gandalf is a figure of Christ - as Tolkien says, he is not writing an allegory.
Part of this depends upon the notion of "good story". As Tolkien conceives of a good story, it is not simply a sequence of surprising or superficially amusing events. A good story has a certain emotional heft. That heft comes from its deployment of, and allusion to, enduring cultural motifs.
Tolkien wasn't interested in using his creation as a vehicle for his philosophical or political ideas
I'm in no position to judge his
intentions, not having read his letters or biographies. But it's virtually impossible to read Tolkien and not notice that he is a conservative Catholic.
And no one can write a creation story, two accounts of the Fall through disobedience to the divinity, and an account of an inspiring teacher being killed when he takes the burdens of past wrong upon himself (made manifest in the Balrog) and then returns in a higher form and leads the right-minded to triumph, simply by accident. These are explorations of Christian motifs, though divorced from a Christian framing.
Tolkien became prominent, academically, for his study of Beowulf, which is also a mixture of Christian and non-Christian elements.
Tolkien was, in many ways, a Romantic in the tradition of Coleridge. Coleridge believed that have the capacity to go deeper that surface imagination, what he called fancy--which is what is behind most of fantasy today, and is largely a matter of re-arranging pre-fabricated parts--to a deeper, truer imagination (or, to be accurate, two forms - secondary and primary, but the differentiation isn't entirely relevant to go into). But when engaging true imagination, one is not analytically making allegorical choices and literary strategies, nor is one assembling parts from other sources. All of that is part of the process, but much of it comes later, in drafts and revision. True imagination is diving into an Other World, learning its language, and expressing it in form.
I don't think there is any disupte that Tolkien, like Coleridge, is a conservative romantic.
But I think your account of Coleridge is slighly incomplete. For instance, your characterisation of Coleridge leaves it open that REH is writing in the same mode, but of course REH's fantasy is about as far from Tolkien's, and from Coleridge, as it is possible to get whilst still using some of the same tropes of swords, kings and wizards.
Coleridge thinks that, at least in the right conditions, the right person is able to access truths. The notion of "truth" here is crucial: it is subect to constraint. On Coleridge's account, the imaginings of a colliery worker, however sincerely recounted, are not accessing truth, because the social/cultural/economic situation of that worker will have utterly distorted his/her access to what is deeper. (For more on Coleridge, I refer you to Raymond Williams' "Culture and Society".)
I don't think that when Tolkien was dreaming up Lothlorien he was thinking, "I want to make the fairy wood trope believable." That is more of an analytic approach to sub-creation which Tolkien, again and again, stated he did not employ, at least not as the leading force.
<snip>
Literary critics might agree with you, but the artist--and perhaps other artists--wouldn't agree with you, I think.
I don't accept Coleridge's account of the epistemology and metaphysics of artistic creation.
Somewhat similarly, I don't accept accept Schopenhauer's account of musical composition as a type of unmediated access to the noumenal. So while I greatly admire Wagner's work - especially the Ring and Parsifal - I don't think Wagner's own theory of his composition of them is correct.
So whatever Tolkien's subjective experience in writing about Galadriel and Lothlorien (which, as I said above, I say nothing about), what it is in fact is an attempt to produce a story of a fairy queen - very well known in the mediaeval and post-mediavel literary tradition that Tolkien was an expert on, and infuenced by - which fits within the framework of a modern (though not modernist), and hence essentially naturalistic, novel. My own view is that in this respect it is a great achievement.
I would shift it slightly and call it "internal consistency," which Middle-earth is still unsurpassed for.
It's not just "internal consistency". It's "external consistency". That is, consistency with the cultural motifs upon which Tolkien draws. If Tolkien's account of elves was internally consistent, but failed to be consistent with the tradition of fairy stories, then his work would have failed.
Furthermore, "Middle Earth" is not primarily a catalogue. (Which already differentiates it from many, lesser, RPG worlds.) It is a set of stories: Beren and Luthien, Turan Turambar, Gandalf's labours, Aragorn's restoration, the destruction of the ring. And these stories aren't arbitrary, and haven't been authored just to demonstrate internal consistency. (Indeed, there are certain oddities in respect of internal consistency - eg the well-known failure to use the eagles to fly to Mordor. This shows Tolkien prioritising story, in a rich sense of that word that inclues themes as well as events, over mere consistency.)
I'm not sure if you're read it, but I'd direct you to his short work On Fairy Stories where he discusses what he calls "sub-creation" and "secondary worlds" at length.
I have extracted some passages from "On Fairy Stories" that I take to reflect what I am saying (my page references are to the printing of "Tree and Leaf" in the Ballantine "Tolkien Reader", 1966). For reasons of space, and also because some of those who are reading along may not want to engage with the more theological/religous dimensions of Tolkien's theory of fantasy, I have put the passages into spoiler blocks.
[sblock]Most good "fairy-stories" are about the
adventures of men in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches. . . . [E]lves are not primarily concerned with us, nor we with them. Our fates are sundered, and our paths seldom meet. . . .
[A] "fairy-story" is one which touches on or uses Faerie . . . magic of a peculiar mood and power, at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific magician. . . . [T]he magic . . . must in that story be taken seriously, neither laughed at nor explained away. Of this seriousness the medieval
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an admirable example. . . .
[T]he fairy story . . . cannot tolerate any frame or machinery suggesting that the whole story in which ["marvels"] occur is a figment or illusion. (pp 9-10, 14)[/sblock]Resonances with the LotR are obvious, I think.
[sblock]
t is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural . . . whereas they ae natural, far more natural than he. Such is their doom. The road to fairyland is not the road to Heaven, nor even to Hell, I believe . . .
[C]reative Fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it. . . . Fantasy can, of course, be carried to excess. It can be ill done. It can be put to evil uses. . . . But of what human thing in this fallen world is that not true? . . . Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, becaue we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker. . . .
[A]pproaching the Christian story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospel contain a fairy story . . . But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has ben raised to the fulfillment of Creation.
[T]here is a part of man which is not "Nature," and which therefore is not obliged to study it, and is, in fact, wholly unsatisfied by it. (pp 5, 55, 71-2, 79)[/sblock]That is, fairy stories - and Middle Earth as one of them - are outside a Christian framework (not having entered the primary world and thereby "raised to the fulfillment of Creation"). They deal with nature. But humanity (as conceived of by Tolkien) is intimately located within the (supernatural) world of Christianity, and fairy stories are made by humans. Hence fairy stories serve a different purpose from the study of nature - the way in which they deal with nature satisfies some other aspect of human well-being. But insofar as they deal with nature they are not arbitrary, and are not bound simply by requirements of internal consistency.
[sblock][W]ith regard to fairy stories, I feel that it is more interesting, and also in its way more difficult, to consider what they are, what they have become for us, and what values the long alchemic processes of time have produced in them. . . .
[W]hen we hae explained many of the elements commonly found embedded in fairy-stories (such as step-mothers, enchanted bears and bulls, cannibal witches, taboos on names, and the like) as relics of ancient customs once practised in daily ife, or of beliefs once held as beliefs and not as "fancies" - there remains still . . . the effect produced now by those old things in the stories as they are. . . .
[F]airy-stories deal largely, or (the better ones) mainly, with simple or fundamental things, untouched by Fantasy, but these simplicities are made all the more luminous by their setting. For the story-maker who allows himself to be "free with" Nature can be her lover not her slave. . . .
[N]ot to mention . . . electric street-lamps of mass-produced pattern in your tale is Escape . . . t may, almost certainly does, proceed from a considered disgust for so typical a product of the Robot Age, that combines elaboration and ingenuity of means with ugliness, and (often) with inferiority of result. These lamps may be excluded from the tale simply because they are bad lamps; and it is possible that one of the lessons to be learnt from the story is the realization of this fact. . . . [T]he electric street-lamp may indeed by ignored, simply because it is so insignificant and transient. Fairy-stories, at any rate, have many more permanent and fundamental things to talk about. Lightning, for example. The escapist is not so subservient to the whims of evanescent fashion as these opponents [of escapist fantasy]. . . .
It is the mark of a good fairy-story . . . that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it . . . a cach of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as ken as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality. (pp 19, 31, 59, 61, 68-9)[/sblock]And here we can see how it is that fairy-stories deal with nature. They connect us to fundamental, permanent things. Things that move us to tears. Particularly within Tolkien's romantic, conservative framework, nothing could be further from the arbitrariness of a fantasy that treats novelty as the sole desideratum and internal consistency as the sole constraint on novelty. So far from being an end-in-itself, a fairy story (particularly for modern peope surrounded by "insignicant and transient" things) is a fundamental way in which humanity makes contact with what matters to humanity.
Now as I indicated above, I personally am not an adherent of Tolkien's or Coleridge's aesthetics. So I think explaining why Tolkien's fantasy is better than so much else would have to be approached in a different way. But the two constraints I mentioned in my earlier post - external adequacy (ie honouring some conception that is already alive in the culture), and serving some larger purpose beyond mere world-creation and cataloguing - are in my view certainly part of it.
