Ren
Member
Last night I was listening to the Tom Shippey seminar on Tolkien's Beowulf. Fascinating!
He speaks about how the story of Beowulf exists in a kind of mythological limbo, a pagan story written by a Christian englishmen, allthough it never mentions England or Christ. So it was left ambiguous: not Christian, not religous, not really pagan.
He then explains Tolkien learned from that and made Middle-Earth a mythological limbo as well. That means the pagan mythology has to be conform with Christian believes. As such there has to be the one, Eru, the omniscient, the father of all, Ilúvatar.
Now, coming back to season 2 in the Silm Film project. We discussed that it was actually a mistake that the Valar brought the elves to Valinor in the first place. It was also a mistake that the Valar freed Melkor from imprisonment, which forced us to write the Valinor story in a way that the Valar, in particular Manwe, do not look like fools.
But it never occurred to me that this might have been Tolkien's intention from the beginning. The Valar are just Demiurges and in order to make them distinct from Eru as subordinated beeings, they were deliberately set up to make mistakes and wrong judgements. All in the service of the concept of a mythological limbo.
I know Corey has talked about the different depiction of the Valar and their decisions in the Silmarillion and the History of Middle-Earth seminars, but it never hit me so directly that it might have been intentional. Is that just my perception and crit-fic on Tolkien or is this actually the case?
He speaks about how the story of Beowulf exists in a kind of mythological limbo, a pagan story written by a Christian englishmen, allthough it never mentions England or Christ. So it was left ambiguous: not Christian, not religous, not really pagan.
He then explains Tolkien learned from that and made Middle-Earth a mythological limbo as well. That means the pagan mythology has to be conform with Christian believes. As such there has to be the one, Eru, the omniscient, the father of all, Ilúvatar.
Now, coming back to season 2 in the Silm Film project. We discussed that it was actually a mistake that the Valar brought the elves to Valinor in the first place. It was also a mistake that the Valar freed Melkor from imprisonment, which forced us to write the Valinor story in a way that the Valar, in particular Manwe, do not look like fools.
But it never occurred to me that this might have been Tolkien's intention from the beginning. The Valar are just Demiurges and in order to make them distinct from Eru as subordinated beeings, they were deliberately set up to make mistakes and wrong judgements. All in the service of the concept of a mythological limbo.
I know Corey has talked about the different depiction of the Valar and their decisions in the Silmarillion and the History of Middle-Earth seminars, but it never hit me so directly that it might have been intentional. Is that just my perception and crit-fic on Tolkien or is this actually the case?