Firstly, many thanks for continuing to write about and investigate your interpretation of Middle Earth's geography. Also, please forgive the epistolary form of this comment; this is how I write. Tolkien probably had a hand in this, as did Michael Moorcock and so many other fantasists. We are all, after all, part of the same tapestry of thought, for all that it is unravelling. Also: I work in videogames, and I've been honoured to encounter some of the great fantasist writers as a result. Therefore, please also forgive any name dropping. As blessed as I have been with these encounters, it is a small curse to be disliked for talking about it.
I worked on a videogame series known as Heretic Kingdoms, which has been an adventure, and last year somebody in Eastern Europe wrote to me in order to ask whether I was a scholar of Eastern European history from the fall of Roam to the Middle Ages, because he could relate my fictional history of the Heretic Kingdoms to actual events in the region. Reading everything he had put together was dazzling. But of course, I am a Brit and entirely ignorant of the history around the base of the Ural mountains. Then again, it's not that I'm not well-read. Even if his detailed mappings of my fictional timeline onto his historical one were beyond possibility, the confluence of influence could still remain. I wish we had a word for this kind of synchronicity that would not reduce it to coincidence, as it is a deeply meaningful force in thought.
Conversely, you sometimes write as if you can prove your vision of Tolkien's motives by gathering evidence, as if what you were doing were a scientific investigation. But it isn't. It's a historical investigation. We have forgotten, almost entirely, a lesson I learned from my philosophy mentor, the dear departed Mary Midgley: that the sciences are not the only means of uncovering or assembling truths, and that there are other methods that are not only valid, but actually better suited to some of the tasks we face. I write this point not as a criticism of what you are doing (which I love) but as a general criticism of our time. This process of uncovering connections is invaluable whether or not there is any question of 'proof', which is something I have learned through my own pursuit of similar conceptual excavations (e.g. connecting the Grand Theft Auto games to Elite, which I have 'proven', and to Paradroid, which I probably never win). Even if you had not discovered Rockall, your process of investigation would still have had merit, and still have been worth writing about. I hope that if you had not found it, you would still have shared your thoughts about it.
Now for what little it's worth, I always thought that Middle Earth was supposed to be our world in the distant past, and this for several reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, the arrogance of my youth when I would leap to a conclusion first and ask questions later. Secondly, the actual text of The Hobbit, which directly tells us that the world of the mid-twentieth century is ages after Bilbo's adventures, and that goblins are responsible for the most diabolical of our weapons and that golf was invented by a hobbit. I always thought (ignorant as I was of 'Midgard' at the time) that 'Middle Earth' meant 'the Earth between the lost Golden Age of the past and the future time of now This is clearly a mistake. But that thought was always embedded in me.
It perhaps goes without saying that the fantasy genre as it emerged in the twentieth century was steeped in the idea of fantasy realms not being 'other dimensions', as we have it now, but earlier ages of our own planet. I recently worked on a Robert E. Howard game, which alas was cancelled, but thoughts about his work are fresh on my mind. Howard of course was a key golden age fantasy writer and part of H.P. Lovecraft's writing circle. He expressly tells us the Hyborean Age where the Conan stories are set is in our past, and there are many other short stories he wrote that set up these kinds of 'lost ages' - to the extent that up until Michael Moorcock and Roger Zelazny reframed fantasy worlds as 'other dimensions', the 'lost age' conceit was the norm. Surely Tolkien must either have encountered this from the early twentieth century fantasists or else was steeped in the same literary forces that made this the default understanding of both high fantasy and sword and sorcery.
Moorcock, whom I got to know as well as any fan can know their idols while working on one of my philosophy books inspired by his work, seems also to have had a similar drive, even as he invents the literary multiverse that gave birth to the physicist's hypothetical multiverse. At the end of the Elric saga, when the White Wolf blows the horn of fate, the lands of the Young Kingdoms shift and are reformed. Moorcock never says if Europe is the geography that follows, and I never thought to ask him alas, but I think it interesting that a British writer (even one grumpy at Tolkien for reasons that amount to London vs Home Counties) who helped shift us from 'lost ages' to 'other dimensions' was still steeped in that very same literary tradition. (Zelazny, as a US citizen, had no such historical formation to draw against).
Lastly, I worked on the Discworld games where I had the honour and privilege of getting to spend time with the late Terry Pratchett. We enjoyed talking about other fantasists together, the few times we were in the same time and space (mostly press junkets promoting the games), and we discussed Moorcock's dislike of Tolkien the first time we met. Pratchett told me (and I don't know if this has come out elsewhere) that he wanted to become a fantasy writer after writing to Tolkien and getting a reply. It was a life changing event for him. Tolkien wrote back to every fan, and Pratchett committed to do the same. This means, I presume, that there is a huge undiscovered world of Tolkien epistles to be discovered. Just imagine what treasures might lurk out there, like those lost recordings of Patrick Troughton Doctor Who that occasionally appear and rock fans worlds!
I hope these thoughts are welcome, and please accept my grateful thanks for sharing yours.
With unlimited love,
Chris.
PS: I am a US immigrant these days, but over in my home land for the Summer, back in Manchester where I have lived most of my adult life. I have several times balked at writing to you about the protests and the riots, which you mentioned recently. I may yet. What stops me is the fear that we will not end up talking together about it. That's fine. It just gives me pause. I write comments online as if they were letters because nobody will write letters any more. But for me, like Pratchett and Tolkien, the letter was a sacred trust. I feel duty bound to continue writing in the form. Many thanks for your patience in reading this one.
Tolkien was plagued by recurring dreams/blood memories of being at the drowning of Atlantis, setting precedent that he could have known of the existence of Doggerland beyond the academic landscape of the time.
Ticmanis currently resides in Germany working in software and seems to remain stubbornly offline, with the exception of liking a post on LinkedIn 2 weeks ago. Here's hoping you can get in touch with him
I mean it’s not like Mordor was like the Bronze Age civilizations of Anatolia at the time which was ruled by a tyrannical sorcerer king whose functioning depended on things like sedentary lifestyle and slave labor for his fields and armies of relatively weaker soldiers compared to those of his neighbors who subsisted in a much better diet since that this would mean that the free peoples were hunter gatherers, pastoralists and metal workers and it isn’t as if these align with existing known cultures of those areas, I mean it’s not like there’s a culture in the Caucasus region where the dwarfs would be that was known for making stone fortresses and cities inside mountains, being the first known culture to smith a variety of metals and for having an enmity with the hunter gatherer peoples of the Central European plains, and it isn’t as if these hunter gatherers would look like superhumans from the perspective of more settled cultures of hominids of this period and so these comparisons show that they’re nothing like dwarfs and elves, cause that would be crazy right?
Also it would be absurd to say Gondor existed in that region I mean there’s no indication of an independent high culture that predates the Aryan invasions there that had an independent language and relatively advanced architecture and ritual practices right? Well except the Etruscans but that doesn’t count because they totally just came out of the ground there.
Breathtaking! There's much more than just academic diligence evident here; reading this has reinvigorated the perpetual fire of my own fondness for Tolkien's luxuriant imaginings. Thank you.
Amazing that a writer could keep all this history, ( remember it wasn't until the late 1960’s the concept of floating Continents thro out Earths evolution became not theory but confirmed ) science & mythology all matching. We must remember his son who carried on with following of the tale ( from his fathers written down story line but if I remember rightly…. The tale’s ending wasn't completed and the son had to try honour the myth the best he could. Amazing! Please forgive me those who may feel that my thoughts do any dishonour to your love of the Myth
Makes one understand Lovecraftian protagonists a bit more, that feeling of aligning supposed fiction to veritable geology that 'should not be'. Reminds me of the Darkest Dungeon offhand quip:
"Such blockages are unsurprising – these tunnels predate even the earliest settlers."
These deep dives are much appreciated! The lore of Middle-earth is rich, even moreso than I realized, given its connections to Ice Age Europe, which I only discovered through here. Tolkien truly was the master.
Also, 00's internet was a surprisingly fruitful place for LotR discussions. I remember finding a forum discussion from back then, debating on whether the Arkenstone was one of the Silmarilli or not. Lots of good points were made back & forth, although it was never quite settled. Personally, my theory is that the Arkenstone was *not* a Silmaril, but rather was another jewel carved by Fëanor, one of the few to escape the maw of Ungoliant.
Dear Andrew,
Firstly, many thanks for continuing to write about and investigate your interpretation of Middle Earth's geography. Also, please forgive the epistolary form of this comment; this is how I write. Tolkien probably had a hand in this, as did Michael Moorcock and so many other fantasists. We are all, after all, part of the same tapestry of thought, for all that it is unravelling. Also: I work in videogames, and I've been honoured to encounter some of the great fantasist writers as a result. Therefore, please also forgive any name dropping. As blessed as I have been with these encounters, it is a small curse to be disliked for talking about it.
I worked on a videogame series known as Heretic Kingdoms, which has been an adventure, and last year somebody in Eastern Europe wrote to me in order to ask whether I was a scholar of Eastern European history from the fall of Roam to the Middle Ages, because he could relate my fictional history of the Heretic Kingdoms to actual events in the region. Reading everything he had put together was dazzling. But of course, I am a Brit and entirely ignorant of the history around the base of the Ural mountains. Then again, it's not that I'm not well-read. Even if his detailed mappings of my fictional timeline onto his historical one were beyond possibility, the confluence of influence could still remain. I wish we had a word for this kind of synchronicity that would not reduce it to coincidence, as it is a deeply meaningful force in thought.
Conversely, you sometimes write as if you can prove your vision of Tolkien's motives by gathering evidence, as if what you were doing were a scientific investigation. But it isn't. It's a historical investigation. We have forgotten, almost entirely, a lesson I learned from my philosophy mentor, the dear departed Mary Midgley: that the sciences are not the only means of uncovering or assembling truths, and that there are other methods that are not only valid, but actually better suited to some of the tasks we face. I write this point not as a criticism of what you are doing (which I love) but as a general criticism of our time. This process of uncovering connections is invaluable whether or not there is any question of 'proof', which is something I have learned through my own pursuit of similar conceptual excavations (e.g. connecting the Grand Theft Auto games to Elite, which I have 'proven', and to Paradroid, which I probably never win). Even if you had not discovered Rockall, your process of investigation would still have had merit, and still have been worth writing about. I hope that if you had not found it, you would still have shared your thoughts about it.
Now for what little it's worth, I always thought that Middle Earth was supposed to be our world in the distant past, and this for several reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, the arrogance of my youth when I would leap to a conclusion first and ask questions later. Secondly, the actual text of The Hobbit, which directly tells us that the world of the mid-twentieth century is ages after Bilbo's adventures, and that goblins are responsible for the most diabolical of our weapons and that golf was invented by a hobbit. I always thought (ignorant as I was of 'Midgard' at the time) that 'Middle Earth' meant 'the Earth between the lost Golden Age of the past and the future time of now This is clearly a mistake. But that thought was always embedded in me.
It perhaps goes without saying that the fantasy genre as it emerged in the twentieth century was steeped in the idea of fantasy realms not being 'other dimensions', as we have it now, but earlier ages of our own planet. I recently worked on a Robert E. Howard game, which alas was cancelled, but thoughts about his work are fresh on my mind. Howard of course was a key golden age fantasy writer and part of H.P. Lovecraft's writing circle. He expressly tells us the Hyborean Age where the Conan stories are set is in our past, and there are many other short stories he wrote that set up these kinds of 'lost ages' - to the extent that up until Michael Moorcock and Roger Zelazny reframed fantasy worlds as 'other dimensions', the 'lost age' conceit was the norm. Surely Tolkien must either have encountered this from the early twentieth century fantasists or else was steeped in the same literary forces that made this the default understanding of both high fantasy and sword and sorcery.
Moorcock, whom I got to know as well as any fan can know their idols while working on one of my philosophy books inspired by his work, seems also to have had a similar drive, even as he invents the literary multiverse that gave birth to the physicist's hypothetical multiverse. At the end of the Elric saga, when the White Wolf blows the horn of fate, the lands of the Young Kingdoms shift and are reformed. Moorcock never says if Europe is the geography that follows, and I never thought to ask him alas, but I think it interesting that a British writer (even one grumpy at Tolkien for reasons that amount to London vs Home Counties) who helped shift us from 'lost ages' to 'other dimensions' was still steeped in that very same literary tradition. (Zelazny, as a US citizen, had no such historical formation to draw against).
Lastly, I worked on the Discworld games where I had the honour and privilege of getting to spend time with the late Terry Pratchett. We enjoyed talking about other fantasists together, the few times we were in the same time and space (mostly press junkets promoting the games), and we discussed Moorcock's dislike of Tolkien the first time we met. Pratchett told me (and I don't know if this has come out elsewhere) that he wanted to become a fantasy writer after writing to Tolkien and getting a reply. It was a life changing event for him. Tolkien wrote back to every fan, and Pratchett committed to do the same. This means, I presume, that there is a huge undiscovered world of Tolkien epistles to be discovered. Just imagine what treasures might lurk out there, like those lost recordings of Patrick Troughton Doctor Who that occasionally appear and rock fans worlds!
I hope these thoughts are welcome, and please accept my grateful thanks for sharing yours.
With unlimited love,
Chris.
PS: I am a US immigrant these days, but over in my home land for the Summer, back in Manchester where I have lived most of my adult life. I have several times balked at writing to you about the protests and the riots, which you mentioned recently. I may yet. What stops me is the fear that we will not end up talking together about it. That's fine. It just gives me pause. I write comments online as if they were letters because nobody will write letters any more. But for me, like Pratchett and Tolkien, the letter was a sacred trust. I feel duty bound to continue writing in the form. Many thanks for your patience in reading this one.
Must find Ticmanis
He's the main character
Tolkien was plagued by recurring dreams/blood memories of being at the drowning of Atlantis, setting precedent that he could have known of the existence of Doggerland beyond the academic landscape of the time.
Ticmanis currently resides in Germany working in software and seems to remain stubbornly offline, with the exception of liking a post on LinkedIn 2 weeks ago. Here's hoping you can get in touch with him
⛏️⚔️
As an aside, the reviews of Rockall on Google Maps are worth reading for a good chuckle.
I mean it’s not like Mordor was like the Bronze Age civilizations of Anatolia at the time which was ruled by a tyrannical sorcerer king whose functioning depended on things like sedentary lifestyle and slave labor for his fields and armies of relatively weaker soldiers compared to those of his neighbors who subsisted in a much better diet since that this would mean that the free peoples were hunter gatherers, pastoralists and metal workers and it isn’t as if these align with existing known cultures of those areas, I mean it’s not like there’s a culture in the Caucasus region where the dwarfs would be that was known for making stone fortresses and cities inside mountains, being the first known culture to smith a variety of metals and for having an enmity with the hunter gatherer peoples of the Central European plains, and it isn’t as if these hunter gatherers would look like superhumans from the perspective of more settled cultures of hominids of this period and so these comparisons show that they’re nothing like dwarfs and elves, cause that would be crazy right?
Also it would be absurd to say Gondor existed in that region I mean there’s no indication of an independent high culture that predates the Aryan invasions there that had an independent language and relatively advanced architecture and ritual practices right? Well except the Etruscans but that doesn’t count because they totally just came out of the ground there.
Right?
Holy smokes. Nice work!!
Breathtaking! There's much more than just academic diligence evident here; reading this has reinvigorated the perpetual fire of my own fondness for Tolkien's luxuriant imaginings. Thank you.
basically... it's true, all of it
Amazing that a writer could keep all this history, ( remember it wasn't until the late 1960’s the concept of floating Continents thro out Earths evolution became not theory but confirmed ) science & mythology all matching. We must remember his son who carried on with following of the tale ( from his fathers written down story line but if I remember rightly…. The tale’s ending wasn't completed and the son had to try honour the myth the best he could. Amazing! Please forgive me those who may feel that my thoughts do any dishonour to your love of the Myth
Makes one understand Lovecraftian protagonists a bit more, that feeling of aligning supposed fiction to veritable geology that 'should not be'. Reminds me of the Darkest Dungeon offhand quip:
"Such blockages are unsurprising – these tunnels predate even the earliest settlers."
These deep dives are much appreciated! The lore of Middle-earth is rich, even moreso than I realized, given its connections to Ice Age Europe, which I only discovered through here. Tolkien truly was the master.
Also, 00's internet was a surprisingly fruitful place for LotR discussions. I remember finding a forum discussion from back then, debating on whether the Arkenstone was one of the Silmarilli or not. Lots of good points were made back & forth, although it was never quite settled. Personally, my theory is that the Arkenstone was *not* a Silmaril, but rather was another jewel carved by Fëanor, one of the few to escape the maw of Ungoliant.
Really like to see your searching.
You have seen the maps of ice-age Europe overlaid with middle-earth? (Sorry if I missed that, but wanted to check.)
Also, my shirts:
https://www.apologyapparel.com/products/turin-turambar-the-children-of-hurin?_pos=1&_psq=turin&_ss=e&_v=1.0
yes... those are my maps
Thought so. 👍🏼 Loved seeing them.