[Bêthberry]

Let me echo Child's applause for Squatter's quotation of the first British foreward. What a difference ten years (or so) makes!

Rather than repeat some of the very interesting differences between the two Forewards, what I would like to do is consider some of the well-taken contributions made by others, particularly as they relate to the question of history.

Orofaniel, you suggest, if I have understood your post correctly, that Tolkien, when faced with some of the 'fallow' periods in the writing, would have turned to his own life's experience for inspiration. This is, I think, tempting, but two points make me hesitate to accept such a possibility for a writer like Tolkien. This first is how he talked about 'what gets into the cauldron of story' in his essay "On Fairy Stories". I know we should limit our main discussion here to the text of the Forewards, but I think it is valuable to recognise that for Tolkien, story or narrative had a life or purpose or MO of its own, separate from any private personal experience. (Think of his funny line about the bishop and the banana peel.) If anything from his private life, which, as Child says, he
treated modestly and reticently, did get into the stew, he would, I am sure, include it only if it made sense in terms of the story, not in terms of personal self-expression. Certainly the way Tolkien defended the poem Beowulf as a unified work of art in his "Monsters and the Critics" essay suggests that he valued narrative as artistic expression rather than as personal expression. I think it is us in our post-Freud, post-psychoanalytical age that wants to reduce everything to an author's psyche, but this perspective is only a recent one of the last hundred years and does not represent the kind of understanding of philology or of ancient literature with which a scholar like Tolkien would be familiar.

That Letter provides interesting correlation, Alatariel Telemnar for Tolkien's claim in the Second Foreward that LOTR was "primarily linguistic in inspiration and begun in order to provide the necessary background of 'history' for Elvish tongues." Thanks for providing it here. Being a great fan of words and language myself, I am not sure that this necessarily downgrades the value of his desire to write a good story. It would think they would be complementary. He would want the best story to highlight or reflect his created languages to their best advantage. For Tolkien as a philologist, everything began with words and structures of language, which then moved out to create patterns and order in stories.

Durelin's point about history and epic can, I think, be considered in light of a very interesting historical discovery made in 1884. An entrepreneurial fellow by name of Heinrich Schleimann, acting apparently on suggestions from one Frank Calvert who owned property in Turkey, discovered the ruins of the ancient city of Troy from Homer's Iliad. There are, in fact, nine successive cities on the site. The discovery at the time astounded the nineteenth century world for it showed to people then that Homer's civilization was not entirely fictional but had some basis in historical fact. The new study of archeology was uncovered! It was into this exciting new world view that Tolkien was drawn, as he studied the histories and dvelopments of ancient languages. There was a scholarly impetus to making his mythology appear, as he claims in the First Foreward, as a true history, transcribed by several hands. After all, one way of understanding the word 'mythology' has been to call it linked narratives in a religion that was once believed in, as were the Greek and Roman pantheons of gods and goddesses or Norse ones as well.

Well, I hope this post adds a new flavouring of 'thyme' to the cauldron of our own discussion here. (covers ears to hide from the groans on that one)

Edit: cross posting with Durelin, so I've been referring to the earlier posts and not the most recent.