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A few months ago, a newsgroup conversation inspired one of the biggest shifts in my perspective on Middle-earth since I first started reading Tolkien. I figure at least a few people here might be interested, so I'm finally taking the time to share.
As a reader of Tolkien's stories, it's obvious that Middle-earth is a very different world than our own: it's deeply infused with "Faerie" on every level, from magic spells to enchanted items to fantastical beings. Fundamentally, that difference is absolutely true. But the essence of my epiphany was that our view is tremendously atypical: to the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants (at least in the era of The Lord of the Rings), Middle-earth would have appeared no more magical than our own world.
Perhaps the clearest illustration of this is Sam Gamgee, whose longing for a glimpse of magic was a key personality point from his first introduction. He was eager to believe his cousin Hal's report of a walking tree, and he was entranced by Bilbo's stories of the Elves. You've got to figure that Sam had as much experience with Elves and magic as almost anyone in the Shire. But what did it amount to? Glimpses and legends, nothing more: at the start of the story, Sam "believed he had once seen an Elf in the woods." And while he did meet quite a few Elves once his journey with Frodo began, even as late as his last days in Lothlorien Sam was still wishing for his first clear taste of "Elf-magic". But as readers, we can't sympathize at all: we get to skip straight to the scene where he finally sees some, and in any case we've been treated all along to excerpts from the Elves' magical history.
As readers, we're "spoiled" in a way that Sam would envy: practically our entire experience of Middle-earth is touched by Faerie. We see Elves all over the place, so much so that I've often unthinkingly assumed you'd be likely to run into a few on the road if you were in the right general region. But that's wildly inaccurate, as Sam's example shows. Similarly, our experience with Dwarves touches on their more "magical" side quite often (Ring-resistance, secret doors, reincarnation, smoke-ring remote control), but to almost every hobbit and human they were simply bearded guys eager to trade craft work for food. We meet trolls, giants, walking trees, wraiths, talking birds, a dude who transforms into a bear, dragons, a Balrog, corpse candles, conscious statues, and an honest to goodness army of ghosts. The fraction of inhabitants of Third Age Middle-earth who have ever seen even one of those things is probably minute (and practically nil if we add "and lived to tell about it"!).
We're also constantly running into magical things. I'd guess that fully half of the swords or even knives mentioned in the story have some obvious enchantment, while even the very special characters we're following probably still see them as remarkably rare and unique (they certainly never treat them as commonplace). We see five(?) magic rings "on screen" and we're assured that there are a bunch of others out there that nobody kept track of, but it's easy for us to forget that most of them were last seen three thousand years ago and by this point could be scattered literally anywhere on the continent or sunk to the bottom of the sea.
And the history! We as readers "know" the full history of Middle-earth, and we even know where to go to learn about it: just wander over to Rivendell (or maybe Lorien) and you'll meet folks who can tell you pretty much all of it from firsthand experience. Or failing that, we've got books of lore either at Rivendell or translated by Bilbo and available to study. But again, our experience as readers is immensely distorted compared to everyday life in Middle-earth: even in the Citadel of Gondor, where lore and knowledge are probably preserved better than in any other human community, "Imladris" was just a rumor from the distant past (and it took months of effort for one of Gondor's greatest heroes to find it at all). And Bilbo's texts weren't just the hobby of an aging hobbit, they were a tremendous work of scholarship, highly prized in Gondor itself. (In fact, there are good arguments to be made that nobody in the Shire had ever heard any of Middle-earth's history from before the Last Alliance before Bilbo went to Rivendell.)
It's tempting to suggest that stories of magic in Middle-earth would be more widely believed than similar stories in our world, simply because they really do have a factual basis behind them. But how much of a difference does that make when the examples are so rare? If there are five degrees of separation between you and your great-great-grandfather or cousin's friend's roommate's brother who once saw a dragon in the sky, how different is that true history from the myths and legends of the primary world that we know to be false? Even if there is potentially evidence of old dragon scales to be found on the Withered Heath, does that make a real difference to people who have never seen that evidence or even imagined that they might meet someone who had? In the beginning, Sam's belief in Faerie seemed to be based more on hope or faith than on evidence, and he was clearly teased for it. Even the men of Lake-Town had by and large stopped believing in Smaug until the moment he attacked.
I could go on and on along similar lines (I haven't even commented on the folk beliefs of Rohan and Gondor as compared to those in the real world). The point of all that is that my next reading of the books will probably feel rather different now that I've thought of all this. To realize that practically every human being in the story who wasn't raised by Elves would react to elements of Faerie pretty much the same way that you or I would, and that they haven't read The Silmarillion or even heard (or heard of!) most of the stories there... that's a big shift from the way I've approached the book. I'm quite looking forward to what I'll find.
As a reader of Tolkien's stories, it's obvious that Middle-earth is a very different world than our own: it's deeply infused with "Faerie" on every level, from magic spells to enchanted items to fantastical beings. Fundamentally, that difference is absolutely true. But the essence of my epiphany was that our view is tremendously atypical: to the overwhelming majority of its inhabitants (at least in the era of The Lord of the Rings), Middle-earth would have appeared no more magical than our own world.
Perhaps the clearest illustration of this is Sam Gamgee, whose longing for a glimpse of magic was a key personality point from his first introduction. He was eager to believe his cousin Hal's report of a walking tree, and he was entranced by Bilbo's stories of the Elves. You've got to figure that Sam had as much experience with Elves and magic as almost anyone in the Shire. But what did it amount to? Glimpses and legends, nothing more: at the start of the story, Sam "believed he had once seen an Elf in the woods." And while he did meet quite a few Elves once his journey with Frodo began, even as late as his last days in Lothlorien Sam was still wishing for his first clear taste of "Elf-magic". But as readers, we can't sympathize at all: we get to skip straight to the scene where he finally sees some, and in any case we've been treated all along to excerpts from the Elves' magical history.
As readers, we're "spoiled" in a way that Sam would envy: practically our entire experience of Middle-earth is touched by Faerie. We see Elves all over the place, so much so that I've often unthinkingly assumed you'd be likely to run into a few on the road if you were in the right general region. But that's wildly inaccurate, as Sam's example shows. Similarly, our experience with Dwarves touches on their more "magical" side quite often (Ring-resistance, secret doors, reincarnation, smoke-ring remote control), but to almost every hobbit and human they were simply bearded guys eager to trade craft work for food. We meet trolls, giants, walking trees, wraiths, talking birds, a dude who transforms into a bear, dragons, a Balrog, corpse candles, conscious statues, and an honest to goodness army of ghosts. The fraction of inhabitants of Third Age Middle-earth who have ever seen even one of those things is probably minute (and practically nil if we add "and lived to tell about it"!).
We're also constantly running into magical things. I'd guess that fully half of the swords or even knives mentioned in the story have some obvious enchantment, while even the very special characters we're following probably still see them as remarkably rare and unique (they certainly never treat them as commonplace). We see five(?) magic rings "on screen" and we're assured that there are a bunch of others out there that nobody kept track of, but it's easy for us to forget that most of them were last seen three thousand years ago and by this point could be scattered literally anywhere on the continent or sunk to the bottom of the sea.
And the history! We as readers "know" the full history of Middle-earth, and we even know where to go to learn about it: just wander over to Rivendell (or maybe Lorien) and you'll meet folks who can tell you pretty much all of it from firsthand experience. Or failing that, we've got books of lore either at Rivendell or translated by Bilbo and available to study. But again, our experience as readers is immensely distorted compared to everyday life in Middle-earth: even in the Citadel of Gondor, where lore and knowledge are probably preserved better than in any other human community, "Imladris" was just a rumor from the distant past (and it took months of effort for one of Gondor's greatest heroes to find it at all). And Bilbo's texts weren't just the hobby of an aging hobbit, they were a tremendous work of scholarship, highly prized in Gondor itself. (In fact, there are good arguments to be made that nobody in the Shire had ever heard any of Middle-earth's history from before the Last Alliance before Bilbo went to Rivendell.)
It's tempting to suggest that stories of magic in Middle-earth would be more widely believed than similar stories in our world, simply because they really do have a factual basis behind them. But how much of a difference does that make when the examples are so rare? If there are five degrees of separation between you and your great-great-grandfather or cousin's friend's roommate's brother who once saw a dragon in the sky, how different is that true history from the myths and legends of the primary world that we know to be false? Even if there is potentially evidence of old dragon scales to be found on the Withered Heath, does that make a real difference to people who have never seen that evidence or even imagined that they might meet someone who had? In the beginning, Sam's belief in Faerie seemed to be based more on hope or faith than on evidence, and he was clearly teased for it. Even the men of Lake-Town had by and large stopped believing in Smaug until the moment he attacked.
I could go on and on along similar lines (I haven't even commented on the folk beliefs of Rohan and Gondor as compared to those in the real world). The point of all that is that my next reading of the books will probably feel rather different now that I've thought of all this. To realize that practically every human being in the story who wasn't raised by Elves would react to elements of Faerie pretty much the same way that you or I would, and that they haven't read The Silmarillion or even heard (or heard of!) most of the stories there... that's a big shift from the way I've approached the book. I'm quite looking forward to what I'll find.
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As for Gandalf's wizardry in the Shire, another aspect of all this that I didn't get into at length here was the notion of what I've sometimes called "technological magic". Gandalf's fireworks don't sound that far beyond what we might be able to produce today. Dwarf doors that are concealed until the right words are spoken could easily be built today. A substantial fraction of the magic that we do see in Middle-earth is of that sort, and I'd guess that for everyday folks, those examples would be the vast majority of their rare encounters with magic. (I'm thinking of the Dwarf-made toys at Bilbo's birthday party that were "obviously magical," as one example.) But I'm not sure that those rare encounters with "magical technology" would do much to change peoples' basic perceptions about the world they lived in.