Mmmhm. And in a specific example, the difference that severed WoA from the Silmarillion completely back when I was still thinking one sprang from the other and would never amount to anything else, was the weird, repeating sense that Feanor was right.
Now, within the structure of the Silm, Feanor is not right. He's sympathetic, sure, but he's a dipshit and he starts ugly, messy wars and turns on his kin and sets in motion events that would fuck his people up for milennia to come. Yet what I kept getting what . . .well, he was right.
Which lead to, okay - what's required for him to have been in the right, here? Short answer was "take away the gods." Ditch the Valar, and the system built on their arbitration. Take away concrete rules of right and wrong, and take away an all-encompassing moral world-system. Having done that, I took what I already knew about my elves and proceeded to try and figure out why that was - such as why, despite the fact that they're immortal, their base-line societal impulses seem to be traceable to some of the same impulses as ours. Answer being that they didn't EVOLVE as immortal, and so on.
The almighty "why". ::grin:: Tolkien could legitimately, within the world he built, fall back on "God said so." I can't, and evolution is much more pragmatic than God. The only place the birth-point is visible any more is in Sorae and his two wives and their respective sons, and the fact that his remarrying was a Bad Idea.
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Date: 2005-10-31 06:09 pm (UTC)From:Now, within the structure of the Silm, Feanor is not right. He's sympathetic, sure, but he's a dipshit and he starts ugly, messy wars and turns on his kin and sets in motion events that would fuck his people up for milennia to come. Yet what I kept getting what . . .well, he was right.
Which lead to, okay - what's required for him to have been in the right, here? Short answer was "take away the gods." Ditch the Valar, and the system built on their arbitration. Take away concrete rules of right and wrong, and take away an all-encompassing moral world-system. Having done that, I took what I already knew about my elves and proceeded to try and figure out why that was - such as why, despite the fact that they're immortal, their base-line societal impulses seem to be traceable to some of the same impulses as ours. Answer being that they didn't EVOLVE as immortal, and so on.
The almighty "why". ::grin:: Tolkien could legitimately, within the world he built, fall back on "God said so." I can't, and evolution is much more pragmatic than God. The only place the birth-point is visible any more is in Sorae and his two wives and their respective sons, and the fact that his remarrying was a Bad Idea.
/babble