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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 9251998">I don't think he was thinking that. This is pure speculation anyways. Honestly though most writers have an impulse to explain any decision in terms of consistency. It is pretty intuitive if you have a wretched creature like Gollum he has a backstory that is going to explain his condition. It isn't like you don't have characters like this in stories. I am sure Bram Stoker was not all "Oh no, this can never work, Dracula is a human and humans don't live hundreds of years." He was a human who became a vampire. Gollum was a hobbit who became Gollum. Maybe if the setting didn't have magic and cursed rings, sure, but it does so I just don't see how this introduces anything that contradicts setting consistency or how it is an argument for going against setting consistency. Again, I don't think he would have even considered it an inconsistency when he did. Maybe. I suppose. But it seems very doubtful to me (just based on my own experience who I make things like this in a setting). It also doesn't show cause and effect are an illusion. It doesn't matter what order he invented things in. If Tolkien felt it was important enough to explain, that means he felt cause and effect mattered in the novels and in the world he was creating. Now could he have started with one concept and worked backwards? Sure. But that isn't a violation of setting consistency. If I am planning on introducing something a little unusual, one of my first questions is, okay how do I connect this with the cosmology of this particular setting.</blockquote>

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