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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9071932" data-attributes="member: 71699">In numerous places Tolkien's process is described as being one of multiple passes. Drafts and revisions. In RPG play, a novel situation must be resolved at that time (not setting aside that a common technique is to return to it after play to work out its implications.) The lightning example is of the latter type - RPG in play - and not the former - drafts and revisions.That's okay, we don't need to agree!The technique isn't focused on making folk believe the world laws! It is focused on the use and effect of having the world-laws. The truth-value of imagined facts requires a foundation: why those facts should be believed. In this context, truth-values are not binary (true or false) but probablistic or forceful (I am more or less likely to accept a proposed fact as true). Tolkien says that inside the imagined world, what the author says is true in virtue of its accordance with the laws of that world. The effect is that you more readily believe the author's proposed facts.So to concretely address your concern: it is the truth-value of what authors relate, not the truth-value of the world-laws, that is the target of the technique. In practice, suppose you and I agree on a world-law that elves can fly. If I then say that Jo-elf flies past you, you will more readily accept that as true.Pursuing my point at top, Tolkien was in position to notice the world laws (whether he intentionally architected them or not) and bring his narrative into conformance with them (or let it fall into conformance, if one regards his role as passive on theological grounds). What I'm saying is that we wouldn't have seen the dissent we did over the lightning example, if the relevant laws of the world had been in place first. That clearly offers a technique: doing X foreseeably yields Y. That doesn't depend on Tolkien using it as a technique (consciously or otherwise).Getting back to drafting and revising, another line from On Fairy Stories "The road to fairyland is not the road to Heaven; nor even to Hell" written for a lecture in 1938. So this was around the time of the Hobbit and a few decades before Lord of the Rings was published. Tolkien was thinking on these matters for a great length of time (IIRC he describes thinking about them in one form or another from the time of becoming an orphan... about 12 years old.) That statement from the lecture has obvious applicability to ME elves and is felt in Smith of Wootton Major.It may be that the world-laws Tolkien worked in accord with were not his own, which is also the case for the simulationist who takes up other works as their canonical texts. "For the trouble with the real folk of Faerie is that they do not always look like what they are; and they put on the pride and beauty that we would fain wear ourselves." Tolkien wrote down definite statements about what he thought faeries were like, and worked in accord with those statements. As you say, perhaps he didn't think of that as a technique: nevertheless, it can easily be grasped as a technique!</blockquote>

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