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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6357469" data-attributes="member: 42582">This gets into the nature of intention. Tolkien was certainly intentionally creating some things. And he certainly knew that those things had symbolic resonance - for example, he would realise that readers would relate the story of the Noldor, and of Numenor, to the Fall. And Gandalf's transition from flesh to spirit back to flesh to the Incarnation. So at least he intentionally wrote things that he knew would have these resonances.(Just as the mediaeval works that he studied as a scholar deliberately incorporated allusions to Biblical events that their readers would recognise, without necessarily being allegories.)To suppose that Tolkien put these things into his work without noticing, when the work is so deliberate, beggars belief.I have pulled these quotes out because I think they all speak to one of my main contentions. This is that Tolkien's imaginative work is disciplined by something external. You refer to it as "mythic imagination" - for reasons that I will develop below I prefer a different characterisation. But it is not just Tolkien's combination of ideas. There is a discipline to it.This is also in play in his reference to elves having their own laws. And to lightning - lightning likewise has its own laws, and fairy stories about Thor address those laws. Those laws are the laws of Nature (to borrow Tolkien's capitalisation). They are not our laws because, in Tolkien's Christian conception of humanity, humans are not part of nature. Our being and fate is, ultimately, supernatural. (I provided the quotes above.)(In LotR, this supernatural character of humanity is affirmed via the device Doom of Mandos - the Gift of the One to Men. Just as Beowulf makes a pagan tale accessible to Christians, so a Christian should be able to read LotR and affirm its truths, even though the world of Middle Earth is pre-Christian. Though not pagan, at least as far as the Dunedain are concerned - recall Denethor's reference to "the heathen kings of old".)Tolkien's imagination concerns itself with the truths of Nature. Those things that are "permanent and fundamental". He is not just making things up.Of course, different artists might render things differently. Even portraiture will yield different interpretations of the same subject, so its only to be expected that fairy stories grounded in the same Nature will be different. (But they are not all equally good. Tolkien, as per the quotes above, thinks some can be corrupted.)What is the source of this truth? Here, Tolkien has one theory (as you note, it resembles that of Coleridge and other conservative romantics). I have a different one. Which takes me to the next batch of quotes!Board rules prevent me from fully explaining why I disagree with Coleridge. But at the most basic level, I think the idealist (in the philosophical sense) conception of knowledge and perception that underpins his conception of imagination, and access to artistic truth, is untenable. I am a realist about perception and metaphysics, of roughly the form defended by Russell and Moore in reaction to the British Hegelians.One consequence of this is that I don't accept that there are things "permanent and fundamental" which faerie stories are trying to convey. Not Coleridge's idealistic version of this. Not Tolkien's theological version of this. Not Jung's psychologised version of this.I'm talking about what really must have taken place, given that there is no such thing as access to the truth in the sense that Coleridge et al articulate that notion.I think deploying of cultural motifs was absolutely central to Tolkien's process. Shippey, in particular ("The Road to Middle Earth") brings out the ways in which Tolkien drew upon his familiarity, as a scholar, with pre-modern European literature to shape the narrative structure, aspects of the characterisation, etc in LotR. I've already mentioned the religious allusions which he cannot but have included deliberately. Much as our text of Beowulf can be understood as a Christian reworking of a prior, non-Christian story which nevertheless spoke to Christian sensibilities, so I can imagine Tolkien enjoying the idea that a future Christian storyteller or scholar might "discover" LotR and reframe it in a Christian perspective - seeing the ideas of the Fall, the Incarnation, etc located within it, just as in our real literary history Anglo-Saxon monks were able to do this with Beowulf.Tolkien may have been modest or somewhat disingenuous about his writing process in his letters and interviews - that's not uncommon. But he was a foremost scholar of his time on the literary devices, and the cultural motifs, that he went on to use in his work. That is not just about osmosis or "letting imagination go free". It is about deliberate crafting. Not every artist is Jackson Pollock - they can answer to the truth as they experience it, yet be very deliberate. (Look at Vermeer.) Tolkien was not a Pollock of fairy stories. (Not to say he was Vermeer either, but I don't know visual arts well enough to find a fitting analogue.)Whether or not that is true, Tolkien certainly wouldn't have agreed. Nor Coleridge. They are radical anti-relativists. They are concerned with the "permanent and fundamental".For me, REH and Tolkien are poles apart. REH is relentlessly modernist, whereas Tolkien is reactionary both in style and theme. For REH, the pseudo-historical trappings are just that - trappings. They add colour, and a degree of narrative depth because the reader can import into the story his/her own familiarity with the historical periods in question. But whereas LotR is almost a lament (as comes out, not all that obliquely, in Tolkien's attack upon electric street lighting, and technology more generally), REH's Conan is a celebration of the self-made, self-directed, self-envaluated person that is the modernist archetype.For that reason I think it is actually easier to base a fantasy RPG on Conan/REH than Tolkien, because the values are less foreign to the typical contemporary RPGer.A post-modern fantasy RPG would combine REH-esque modernism with a degree of relativist cynicism about the protagonists self-creation. The Dying Earth RPG might be a good fit for this. Which is a long way from Tolkien!</blockquote>

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