(urth) traveling north

[Jeff Wilson]

On 6/5/2010 6:01 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
> On 6/5/2010 11:59 AM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
>> On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 4:32 PM, Jeff Wilson<jwilson at io.com> wrote:
>>
>>> It's my understanding that was how it started with he drawing distant
>>> time
>>> and CS Lewis drawing distant space, but as it took on a life of its
>>> own it
>>> became increasingly allegorical and less literally our world. Though
>>> with
>>> events like the Bending of the Roads, pretty much any discrepancies
>>> can be
>>> explained away.
>>
>> No; Middle-earth (or, more properly, Arda) goes back to long before
>> his famous "bargain" with Lewis. He began writing what would become
>> _The Silmarillion_ during WWI.
>>
>> The product of the "bargain" was never completed.
>
> 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 >