traveling north: imagined geography

brunians at brunians.org · 06 Jun 2010, 13:35 · from 2010-June.txt.gz

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From: brunians at brunians.org (brunians at brunians.org)
Date: Sun, 6 Jun 2010 09:35:07 -0400
Subject: (urth) traveling north: imagined geography
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Message-ID: <75bf2ad1cd62c3eca0e0dc3d16056f27.squirrel at brunians.org>

It's rooted in Tolkien's thoughts on deep history.

.


> 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
> <jwilson at io.com> To: The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net>
> Subject: Re: (urth) traveling north Message-ID:
> <4C0AD943.7070304 at io.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1;
> format=flowed
>
>> >
>> > 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 > ------------------------------
>
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