How J.R.R. Tolkien Almost Ruined His Middle-Earth Mythology
Tolkien Lore | 17 March 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7YDFGc5j28
First the comment on part II:
Well, for the final thing, I was once upon a time pretty angry at Christopher for not publishing what his father had originally offered Allen and Unwin, as Silmarillion ...
It turns out, I actually owe him a lot.
The rabbit trail of Geocentric cosmology could have not been at my disposal otherwise ...
3:28 "our cosmology does not begin with a flat earth"
After I heard someone say that the Book of Henoch (alias Henoch 1) had a flat earth, I briefly, by the suggestion from Silmarillion, thought to resolve it by stating that the pre-Flood world was flat. God could have done it like that, but probably didn't. It turned out that Henoch 1 is compatible with a round earth, and St. Augustine considered it was written so long ago it would have been at risk of tampering with ... that's how he explains it isn't canonic. A good thing to keep in mind when it says the year is 364 day long ...
"two giant light producing trees"
Well, Tolkien could of course have been taking a suggestion from Day Age exegeses. If trees created on Day 3 were 24 hours earlier than Sun created on Day 4, no problem, but ...
For my part, while I do not see either Old Earth as a viable option taking both theology and science into account, and while I do not see Silmarillion as inspired, or as true, it's about as good a model we get for an Old Earth (i e considerably older than 5500 years or so when Christ was born). As such, it gives a great look at how and why Old Earth breaks down.
One part not included in the Silmarillion is similarily valuable, the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth is a total theological trainwreck, like the Fall chapter in The Problem of Pain, but kind of worse since more explicit.
While I was a few years (beginning after my Catholic conversion and ending before 1998) playing with Old Earth, I actually took Silmarillion like and Hyborean Age like scenarios as a loose model for how things in Genesis 5 to 11 could have played out.
That said, Conan the Barbarian is probably, like Rahan, a decent approximation of Nimrod as a young man ...
9:04 His make-believe about Gothic words that weren't recorded and about Quenya / Sindarin being partly preserved in Pre-Indo-European words that came into some Indo-European languages (like alqua / alph -> álft in Icelandic) is a great reminder that Grimm and Pokorny and Brugmann were essentially conlangers.
10:04 Just a quibble.
Even if the Lone Isle ends up being Britain, Tolkien would not have agreed to call his Legendarium "a British mythology" since that already exists. He was very well aware that Britons essentially are the same things as Welsh. And Welsh mythology certainly exists, it's called the Mabinogion.
13:47 "on the nose"
Maybe. But, also, it would have made him take on a collective fall of man (more compatible with Anglicans like "Bishop" Gore and C. S. Lewis than with the Catholicisms he professed, see the dogmas of Trent Session V) in an on the nose way when he was thinking about the theology.
I think anyone who tries to meld Deep Time and various scenarios borrowed from Evolutionism with Catholicism runs into problems and feels far smoother if details are left out.
14:13 As a Catholic, I basically agree with Atlantis really being there.
A 17th C. Spanish theologian in Latin America (Perú, I think) asked the question of how Americas were peopled after the Flood by Atlantis before it sank. He didn't know about Behring's, of course, but it would make sense in the Clovis scenario, and of course explain how the map we have fit in with a one continent map of the pre-Flood world. After the Flood, there was a rift between Europe / North Africa and Atlantis, and another one between Atlantis and North America, and it united into one big rift when Atlantis sank.
15:02 Now, the idea that we are revolving around the Sun is certainly not a thing he had from Catholic theology (except the diluted version promoted by the Assumptionist Father Olivieri .... the defender of Settele in 1820).
I'm a Catholic Geocentric, and as such thankful for the fantasy I read that left me free to imagine what I now hold to be true, to many the obstacle for accepting it is, they haven't really a good imaginary grasp of what Geocentric cosmology can look like. I've run in with people who asked me "how do you explain the seasons" ... as if the seasons were a total mystery to St. Thomas Aquinas!
15:07 "that's not hard, right?"
Exactly. There is no one who with wild horses will persuade me to think that God couldn't have told Joshua about Heliocentrism if it were true, "because they wouldn't have understood" ...
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