[Gurthang]

I understand perfectly. Tolkien didn't think about putting stuff like trees marching or Atlantis(Numenor) into his writings. They were just sitting in the back of his head, and then came out into the story. When the story was being composed smoothly, the influence of other works he had read came out.

Tolkien was a master at this. He soaked up all the good parts of Macbeth, Atlantis, Beowulf, the Edda, and countless other works, and used what he had absorbed to write a really beautiful tale. I agree that he was a master of both metareference and intertextuality, and that's what keeps us in ME. When we read it for the first time, the story wasn't something we'd seen before, but it still seemed... almost familiar.

One thing I'd like to bring up is that there comes a point when some people look at writings and say, 'Hey that looks like....'. Immediately rumors of plagiarism fly. There is a rather fine line between plagiarism and metareference, and its a pretty big deal when an author crosses it.

Tolkien never came near that line, but still used metareference extensively. That's why we love LOTR so much, it sort of brings all the best together.