[HPFGU-OTChatter] Re: Christians and LOTR

[Kathryn Cawte]

Dumbledad.
 
 
--- In HPFGU-OTChatter Kathryn wrote two statements:
 
1:
> Middle Earth is clearly not our Earth
 
2:
> JRRT was very clear that what he was creating 
> was a mythology for England 
 
Aren't these two statements contradictory? Isn't England part of our 
Earth? I don't think that the myths of a country are intended to be 
(or used as) just stories, just fictions. So in that sense Middle 
Earth would be more upsetting than the Potterverse.
 
I also remember Tolkein saying that when he first read Saxon (?)
English it felt as if he already knew the language. 
 
 Me again -

darn I was hoping that had slipped by. I realised after I had said it that
it didn't make sense. He did say he was trying to create a mythology for
England and the hobbits vaguely correspond to England as a nation as I
recall. I meant that it doesn't really correspond to our world in the way HP
does. While it is supposed to be an ancient past of some kind I guess in the
way that other mythologies talk of a time when great deeds happened it
really doesn't fit into our world the way things like HP do. You couldn't
plot the location of Isengard or Minas Tirith in the way we can guess at the
location of Hogwarts. People reading LOTR can look out of a window (unless
they live in New Zealand) and clearly see that they are not in Middle Earth
and are not likely to bump into an elf or a hobbit walking down the street.
But Harry Potter lives in our England. We know people that resemble the
Dursleys or Dean or Seamus. It doesn't take much imagination to wonder if
there are hidden places that we muggles can't access all around us. That
makes it a threat to people who worry that kids can't tell fiction from fact
in a way that LOTR really isn't.

K