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[arethinn]

From the Dept. of Thinking Too Closely About Things That are Meant Mythically, Subsection "It's Just a Story, One Put Together from Unpublished Fragments at That; I Should Really Just Relax":

So, during the Years of the Trees in Arda, there was nothing lighting the sky in Middle-earth other than the stars, yeah? So.... how did any life survive there? In perpetual near-darkness I would think nearly everything ought to have withered, frozen, and died (cf. nuclear or volcanic winter). What's up with that? The Sleep of Yavanna doesn't seem quite consistent chronologically, at least as it's described on that page, which makes it sound like it was the entire time from the destruction of the Lamps to the first rising of the Moon and Sun. That can't be right because we know the Elves awoke at Cuiviénen while still under only the stars, and that some portion of them eventually made it to Aman and laid eyes on the Trees. So it can't just be, handwave, they were all magically asleep all that time. I don't get it. Am I missing something?

(Maybe Quendi don't actually need to eat and aren't endotherms :P )

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I think what you're missing is the fact that Tolkien really did not feel bound to heed any of the laws of Science in his tales, and violated them on a very regular basis. That's why he can just casually abandon the Heliocentric Theory without a blink: "Galileo who?". That's why he's got a non-volcanic Lonely Mountain sticking up by itself in the middle of nowhere. That's why the dwarves of Khazad-dum bought all their food from humans. And that's why the Elves of Cuivienen did not wake up as lifeless corpsicles under a pousse cafe of frozen atmosphere.

No, they don't actually need to eat, and they aren't actually endotherms. This is how Maedhros managed to survive all that time, hanging from one wrist on a barren cliff, when any non-fictional hero would have succumbed to shock and exposure long before he starved to death. Fictional characters have the ability to survive whatever their creators want them to survive, however improbable their surviving it would be in the real world.

If that whole concept grates on you too much, consider the Silmarillion to be like the Christian Bible, or the Elder Edda, or the Ramayana: not a scientific record, or even an orderly account, but rather a mish-mash of tales "from the beginning", the story of a people, part history, part myth, part made-up hooey. The fact that the Elves believed something doesn't make it true; they were wrong about a lot of stuff - and Tolkien only claimed to be translating these quaint writings he'd run across, and thus took no responsibility for the accuracy of anything in them. ;~D

[arethinn]

Tolkien only claimed to be translating these quaint writings he'd run across, and thus took no responsibility for the accuracy of anything in them.

Haha, true. As I said, department of overanalyzing things meant to be taken mythically. This just occurred to me the other night while I was lying in bed and I was like "hey, waitaminnit..."

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

I hear ya; I do that very same thing, because Science, right? The 'mythology' angle doesn't hold up so well in light of the nigh-immortality of the Elves. Galadriel was the grand-daughter of Finwe, born in Valinor while the Trees still shone; she knew the Valar there, and she knew Melian and Olorin (Gandalf) in Middle-Earth. It's kind of hard to explain how 'myths' get generated when the people supposedly generating them can actually talk with the angelic beings who built Arda, and were eye-witnesses to events thousands of years ago.

Kinda doesn't matter, though, because unlike his modern imititators, I think Tolkien just honestly didn't believe in Science; didn't care what it said enough to even bother justifying his ignoring of it, and that's what gives his work its 'authentically archaic' flavor. So here we have Lord Elrond, a regular guy (for an Elf-lord) whose parents forever fly a boat across the sky, bearing a jewel made by his mother-in-law's uncle, and that's just how things are - there's no room for even hypothetical discussions of planets in that.

[arethinn]

You might be amused: picking up this to read from my bookmarks tonight, on the first page of the chapter (though in a different narrative context than the Silmarillion) the author notes: "...[Gildor &c's] appearance on the outskirts of the Shire once again raises an interesting practical problem that is unresolved by Tolkien here or elsewhere in The Lord of the Rings: where does their food come from?"

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

*high fives* YES! I've wondered since I was a girl, how Gildor and his folk had perfect apples and white bread. Where exactly are the Elven apple-orchards and wheat-fields supposed to be? Imladris? Lothlorien? Neither seems likely; the terrain's all wrong.

The Elves' cool golden beverage sounds like some kind of herbal tea to me. There's no mention made of it being alcoholic at all, let alone made from grapes - if it was, it could have been mead, or dandelion or elder-flower wine

I've never believed that lembas is made of grain. I think it's made of mallorn nut flour. The mallorn seed that Galadriel gives Same is a fine big nut, and trees that have nuts of that sort have a lot of nuts every year. Nut-meats are much high in protein and good fats than grains - I once found a recipe for almond-flour honeybiscotti, that sounded pretty lembas-like.

My daughter pointed out to me that Bilbo Baggins has both coffee and cinnamon. This indicates that trade-goods from Far Harad are somehow making it all the way to the Shire, at prices a not-yet-rich Hobbit can afford. What's the politics behind that? Are the men of Harad fighting for Sauron because Gondor's been treating Harad the way the British Empire treated India?

Really, it's all just that Tolkien was an Oxford don who didn't even buy or cook his own food, let alone raise or gather it himself, so he was far out of touch with where food comes from. Haha, yeah right, the dwarves of Khazad-dum have to buy all their food from humans...?