noWizardme
Gondolin
Aug 10 2020, 10:59am
Views: 3478
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Things I CAN know about Middle-earth
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You're quite right - there are some things we have to take the author's word for in fantasy, or we can't join in at all. The author tells me stuff that I have to take as axiomatic, or give up the story - such as the only means of destroying the Ring being the one that is attempted. I feel I can and do 'know' those things about Middle-earth because Tolkien says them (using characters as mouthpieces rather than his hobbit-era mechanism of addressing the reader directly). I suppose this Author Power is the fantasy equivalent of real-world knowledge that a reader could bring to a novel set in, say, modern Birmingham, or Regency London (or on a helicopter trying to get up Everest in the 1950s).
Similarly, I suppose that I would most likely accept an explanation by Tolkien of Bombadil, Balrog Wings, Eagle Flights to Mordor etc. unless the new explanation threw everything into confusion or contradiction. We'd then know the answer, in the sense I was using the work 'know' when we started out. In the absence of this though, we're left to deduce from the axioms we've been given -- or imagine the answer for ourselves (and then encounter to our joy or frustration other people whose imaginations have functioned differently!)
I'm now already Wondering (in a reply to squire than becomes a bit of a scatter of talking points) why and how Middle-earth comes to attract these deeply analytical reader responses - but I think you have a good part of the answer - Tolkien himself was willing carefully to explain lots of things, thus inviting us into a game of pretending to be Middle-earth historians (or scientists or whatever). The game is limited by us being historians with only one source (Tolkien), or scientists who can't gather more data.
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"You were exceedingly clever once, but unfortunately none of your friends noticed as they were too busy being attacked by an octopus."
-from How To Tell If You Are In A J.R.R. Tolkien Book, by Austin Gilkeson, in 'The Toast', 2016 https://the-toast.net/...-a-jrr-tolkien-book/
(This post was edited by Ataahua on Aug 10 2020, 8:44pm)
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