doesn’t sound like you believe or understand blessings and curses. That’s ok.
“doesn’t sound like you believe or understand blessings and curses...” [ckilmer, post 85]
That’s perfectly possible, but I’m not sure what the implications are, in attempting to comprehend the real world.
Literary critics are forever seeing patterns where no real-world interaction exists. Not too many English-lit majors have a grip on reality that is any surer; they are free to draw any and all parallels they can dream up, but defending such in a credible manner is something else.
JRR Tolkien was a philologist first and foremost: gifted with an extraordinary imagination, he created languages. Then he dreamt up peoples, societies, and locales who spoke those languages. All entirely fictional. And - unlike many (most) authors of fantasy and science fiction - all of his worked together pretty decently, on its own terms. So much so, in fact, that readers were seduced in numbers unprecedented. Hardly any fan of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings can deny that Middle Earth is so compelling, so wondrous, that at times they’ve wished it were true; that it ought to be real.
But neither work can be properly understood outside the cosmology and made-up history Tolkien imagined for them: The Silmarillion barely scrapes the surface. The dozen-plus volumes of additional material compiled, edited, and published since its appearance by Tolkien’s son Christopher helps in obtaining perspective.
Forum members might find it interesting to read Tolkien’s essay “On Faerie Stories”, and additional works like Leaf by Niggle and Farmer Giles of Ham.
Critics and lit students have written a lot of words about Tolkien’s writings, but few have perceived the central truth that The Lord of the Rings is a tragedy: a final act (not a very big one either) of the entire alternate cosmology sketched out in The Silmarillion, which itself is a tragedy.