(urth) traveling north: imagined geography

[David Stockhoff]

That's really interesting. I've been pondering the imagined geography of 
Middle-earth my entire life, and it's always seemed to me that it is a 
re-imagination of the early medieval world projected forward from an 
ideal past which itself was projected backward from an early medieval 
world distilled from reading way too much medieval literature. It 
represents several orders of idealization, in other words. (John Crowley 
kind of addresses this literary process in his novella Great Work of 
Time.) For example, if there were Irish legends of Western isles of 
afterlife, then there were origins to that fact. Since those origins do 
not lie in a geographical past, they must lie in an imaginary past---and 
by "imaginary" I don't mean "not real" but rather very real: "more real 
than real." What did the old bards actually imagine? Tolkien thus 
supplanted the historical roots of the romance with his imagined 
romantic origins of the romance. And while the Orcs and Easterlings 
plainly express the insecurity (fear of absorption of the West by the 
East) of Orientalism (perhaps African/Arab and Arab/Asian, 
respectively), the relationship is not a simple one; Tolkien didn't 
simply say, Hey, I need some scary Mongols and Saracens. Rather, he 
said, What's scary about what Europeans feared about the Mongols and 
Turks and Saracens? Where did it come from? How to make "sense" of it? 
And of course his Orientalism was not a medieval one in the first place, 
but a 20th century one. his Orcs are more central than the Easterlings; 
who are less "processed" and less interesting. (I don't think we ever 
even "see" them; they literally lurk at the far edges of an imagined 
map.) Regarding what I mean by "sense": Take as an example the influence 
of Blake on the description of goblins in The Hobbit, which contains 
language very similar to "satanic mills." ------------------------------ 
Message: 2 Date: Sat, 05 Jun 2010 18:09:55 -0500 From: Jeff Wilson 
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Subject: Re: (urth) traveling north Message-ID: 
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> >
> > My point remains that around this time (1936 or so) he placed the
> > setting we know as Middle Earth in the literal past, slightly
> > overlapping the historic era, with bloodlines continuing to this day
> > allowing retrogression from our time to that. Things accumulated and by
> > the 70s he was reported saying it was in an imaginary world rather than
> > an historical one.
>   

I cut that loose a bit early. I just now reviewed a BBC interview from 
71 and he says:


> > T: Oh yes, they're the same word. Most people have made this mistake of thinking Middle-earth is a particular kind of Earth or is another planet of the science fiction sort but it's just an old fashioned word for this world we live in, as imagined surrounded by the Ocean.
> >
> > G: It seemed to me that Middle-earth was in a sense as you say this world we live in but at a different era.
> >
> > T: No ... at a different stage of imagination, yes.
>   
> > http://web.archive.org/web/20040911093705/www.geocities.com/misctolkien/TolkieninterviewBBC1971.txt
>   

-- Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com IEEE Student Chapter Blog at < 
http://ieeetamut.org > ------------------------------