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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Paul Farquhar" data-source="post: 8799430" data-attributes="member: 6906155">The artist is dead, both figuratively, and in this case literally. And stories are not paintings. The vast majority of Shakespeare's plays are based on older, less well-known stories. Only a few of the comedies are "original IP". And they have been retold in a multitude of different forms, from operas, to movies, to novels, to comic books to science fiction comedy musicals. Like Shakespeare, Tolkien did not create Middle Earth out of thin air. It is based on Saxon mythology, as it might have evolved in the mid twentieth century had the Normans not crushed the culture in the eleventh.There only thing that is TRUE is that there is no true version of a story. And in that sense, they are all equally true (as in not true at all). What do you mean by "valid"? Certainly not all retellings are of equal quality, and not all are of equal legality. But how can you measure "validity" of something that is inherently false?Who is the "original creator"? All stories are based on older stories, as I'm sure Tolkien would explain in one of his lectures (e.g. The Hobbit is a retelling of the 3rd part of Beowulf). You cannot give special kind of status to some "original teller" of a story, because no one know who that is.Which is irrelevant. We can't ask him because he's dead. The various versions of Middle Earth that existed in his mind are gone forever. But that doesn't matter. When you write you don't share what is in your mind, you put something into your reader's mind. It's their imagination that generates the pictures, the voices, and the meanings.</blockquote>

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