Dear, J. R. R. Tolkien

Dear,
J. R. R. Tolkien

Did you successfully create an English mythology? I'd say the answer is unequivocally yes. Reading the Poetic Edda---you sly one---I see the inspiration to your mythology. Even where you got the term "Middle Earth."

It used to be a strange thought to me, how Middle Earth could exist. Where is Middle Earth? It never occurred to me that our Earth was Middle Earth. My scheme of the cosmos, taught to me from a young age, was always what science taught. I hadn't begun to think that you were operating off of a new cosmology. One which I had tasted in my dreams, where the Earth is Flat and the Ettins live in Jotunheim beneath the Earth in cosmology. The fact that the Poetic Edda seems to imply it, is fascinating to me.

However, is Middle Earth flat? Or, is it like our world, a sphere? Because what I know of Middle Earth is that it's not really the Earth, but a continent like Asia. And that Arda lies to the outer bounds, as another continent. And in Arda, that is where the Valar live. How your Valar, like Othin or Thor, live on the Earth. Kind of like as if Asgard were simply another continent. I find influences of Columbus's discovery, a whole new world over to the West, resonating in your writing.

I must say, the greats borrow. I borrowed from Hieronymus Bosch and Beowulf, though I didn't intend to. As they were driven into my subconscious by dreams. I know you suffered from the same illness. I'm aware of that. The "Elves" might as well be my "Satan Kings", although yours were benevolent and mine weren't. I wonder if you linked the Elves with the Ettins. That is what my mind would linke them with. 

In the cosmology I dreamt---independently---there was something like Jotunheim underneath the Earth, and I see reflections of it in literature. The Gethens, created by Ursela K. Le Guin, are something like what I saw in Jotunheim, in my dream. That dream haunts me. So does my Beowulf story. So I understand the cosmology of the Viking's universe. I've been primed to understand it, and I hadn't begun o think that maybe Middle Earth were one of these kinds of things, that the very cosmology was different than our planet. To which, when did Middle Earth's events happen? There is a question. If Eurasia is Middle Earth, and North and South America are Arda, what exactly is the time when The Lord of the Rings took place? Perhaps it exists in the gaps of our time. Perhaps it is another time, existing simultaneously with our own? For in my cosmology---the one built in my mythologies---we exist in blocks of time called "Worlds", and they're separated by Kings---those very Thirteen Kings---who keep everyone within their appropriate block. And when the world ends, they destroy it, yet other worlds exist sideways to that other world. And that is the cosmology of Fairyland. There is Mars, Elysium, Jotunheim, Earth, Hell, Heaven, nd twenty-four planes beneath Jotunheim, that each resembles more like hell the further down you go. It's a compulsory creation, worked out in my imagination from looking at Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights. Obviously it must have had an impact on me. But, I suffered from the same disease you did. I understand the disease intimately. The subconscious creations of these "Mythologies" overshadows the real world, and we must fight to overcome it. Yet, for you it was World War I, and for me it was my Notorious Youth.