Re: About the Nextarillion.
Posted by: Anonymous User (---.in-addr.btopenworld.com)
Date: July 31, 2003 01:10PM
Will send pronto.
I'd love to see the essay --- perhaps it remains unfinished as a tribute to the author's 'style' !!!!
I think I would agree about not getting into settling details as fixed; there is a need to have some kind of frame of reference, but there is also room for matters to be left 'unexplained' by the author, and see his various efforts as possibilities we are free to muse over. Life is full of things unexplained. Ball lightning is strictly 'impossible' and everyone knows it happens, but no one is pulling their hair out about Electromagnetic theory. Speaking as a Physics graduate this is intellectual cowardice for the scientific community (there's no money in researching it I suppose) but the matter is, in this 'real' world, still unexplained, and very likely to remain so for a long time.
I do think Balrogs are incapable of flying, or else they certainly would have; the question would then be whether they wanted wings, as they would have been an expression of their personality (assuming all agree they are Maiar). The idea of a saying such as 'Balrogs might fly' is an amusing one, unless you live near one.
Beginning on 'Myths transformed' the appearance of sections I - III is of a man who thinks his time has gone. 'You can't do that anymore'. I wonder if in the fifties and sixties, an era of terrible Science Fiction 'B' movies and open mouthed adoration of 'science', JRRT simply felt that a 'fairy story' would be laughed at. The replacement versions (as far as I have read them) are TRIPE. They have the appearance of being the result of a loss of confidence in the acceptability of what was previously written, rather than a rewrite because of an inspired or 'better' version. Perhaps being postponed uhtil the seventies did 'The Silmarillion' a favour, as the climate was by then more accepting of the material. Anyway, you hear an enraged first reaction. Orcs etc. follow shortly, and I'll bet JRRT wouldn't have used MY solution, which is rather Ffordian!
FWIW the 'possible' Catholic side I detected was that JRRT had left Elves and Men contacting their 'God' only through intermediaries (priests in a sense) i.e. the Valar, and men barely at all. If you count Tuor as 'numbered amongst the Elves' and disregard his contact with Ulmo, that pretty much leaves men abandoned. However JRRT did not think that appropriate, it seems rather that he did not want to handle 'overt' religion yet felt uncomfortable about exactly the same aspects as I did, hence the content of 'Arthropod' and the early voice of Eru. So the point does not even occur. Other than that, I really must ask a Catholic about that ONE sentence. Whoops, there's one downstairs.