The Cosmology of Middle Earth, part two

People deriding fantasy as being escapist must be very fortunate in never having anything they need to escape from. Weird people. Weird, lucky people...

Anyway, in this second part I go up ever so incrementally in scale to look at some of the characters inhabiting Middle Earth : Luthien, dragons, monsters and hobbits. I begin to look at some of the deliberate ambiguities Tolkien introduces to introduce a sense of mythic power and touch on the larger forces at work, and how merely being monstrous is not enough, in Tolkien's world, to be considered truly evil. I also return to some further examples of how Tolkien's tales are not the black and white simple fairy stories they're often made out to be. There are cases when it's clear cut, deeper forces shaping the moral cosmos Tolkien presents, and these are crafted with fiendish attention to consistency - but often the case is far more complex and more real.

But these first two parts are rather small-scale affairs. The remaining sections will look at the grander themes more directly.

#SciFi
#Fantasy
#Tolkien

https://astrorhysy.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-cosmology-of-middle-earth-ii-men.html