(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


So it's somehow this earth, but without even fictional continuity.


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