Oh, hi there, everyone, and greetings from the freakishly warm late-autumn day we're having here in Chicago. Yesterday I was getting people updated on what's been going on with me in the two weeks since I last wrote a journal entry, which wasn't that hard to do - the only thing of note, in fact, as pathetic as it is, is that for the first time I did a comprehensive viewing of the entire Peter Jackson production of Lord of the Rings. And this is no mean feat, actually, as I was mentioning yesterday - I ended up watching the 12-hour movie a total of five times during the process (once with the original soundtrack, another four times with the various audio commentaries from cast and crew), not to mention the 18-hour making-of documentary, the interactive maps, the 10,000 production photos, the dozens of storyboard-to-film comparisons, etc etc.

You don't go through something like that, of course, without developing at least a curiosity about the rest of Tolkien's mythology - the ten thousand years of history that happen before the events of LOTR, the comprehensive "nonfiction" reference guides to races and geography, all of which Tolkien dutifully recorded for decades in his notes and correspondence, all of it published by his son posthumously in what can only be called a ridiculously hefty twelve-volume set. And as I was mentioning yesterday, I've never wanted to sit down and wade through Tolkien's atrocious Elven poetry and 55 pages of Dwarf mating habits, just to get a good overall understanding of the mythology's general structure. So thank God I had the idea of checking Wikipedia a couple of weeks ago, where I discovered that dozens of obsessive Tolkien fans there (and are there really any other kind?) have collaborated over the years to create this exhaustive reference guide to Tolkien's mythology, with hundreds of individual entries and all of them hyperlinked when mentioned in other entries.

So, like the unemployed slacker I am, I ended up reading a whole bunch of these entries as I was going through the movie-watching process at the same time, and for the first time really getting a good sense of the overall Tolkien mythology - of what events marked each Age and how they progressed, of what the story is behind each of the ancient ruins we see in the movie version. And I discovered something early into this process, as I'm sure many of you already have by tackling the books yourselves, which is that there's a reason so many people get so obsessed with Tolkien's mythology - because it's infinitely complex, the result of a decades-long obsession the author himself had, which just perfectly tailors it for further obsessive behavior.

I mean, this is probably the one single thing about the Tolkien mythology that makes it so different than any other fantasy series out there - the thing that convinces certain colleges, for example, to let people actually major in Tolkien studies, while laughing at the idea of getting a Masters in Star Wars - because the mythology Tolkien created really is complex and layered enough to warrant that kind of academic study. This was a guy, after all, who was a lifelong academe himself - someone who invented a workable new language as a teenager for fun, who was considered by many while alive to be the planet's greatest authority on the medieval epic poem "Beowulf." Tolkien understood the complicated way history works - how certain cultures flair up in importance for several hundred years, for example, then eventually die, leaving only these impossibly large monuments and a plethora of tales that are half-truth and half-legend.

And that I guess is the genius of Tolkien, is that he first envisioned this universe of his in his twenties, and so had a good sixty-odd years to work on it and to weave it into this impossibly rich tapestry, to the point that it is as complex and multi-threaded as such "real" documents like the Bible. Which then of course brings up this intriguing question - what's "real," anyway, when it comes to the subject of mythology and legend? If you're an atheist like me, then you of course believe that no "holy" book currently existing is actually holy, but rather is a product of mortal humans trying to create a mythology and history around a certain set of metaphysical beliefs to which they adhere. And in this light, Tolkien's mythology is really no different from the Bible itself, other than that it was deliberately created by a sole person over the course of a few decades, and that it was published as a fictional tale instead of a religious belief.

I mean, we definitely know the dual inspirations behind Tolkien's mythology in the first place, because he was very clear about them when he was alive: because he thought it would be a fun way to add relevancy to the study of ancient civilizations; and because he held this lifelong grudge about all the other European countries having a creation mythology and England not, and felt like his home country deserved one. And this is true, as I discovered two years ago when doing my first research into European history, in preparation for my first trip there; why, even the well-known King Arthur myth originally comes from the conquering Normans, and is actually a part of French history instead of English.

And the irony, of course, is that European mythology (as we know it, anyway) didn't even exist until the 1800s, and was largely the deliberate political creation of the power-hungry monarchs who were running things at the time. See, we tend to think of European nationalities as "unchanging" now, but this is not how those societies originally came into being; the "English," for example, and all the traits we associate with that term (the accent, the skin type, the personality, etc) are in fact an amalgam of Scandinavian Vikings, French Normans, German Goths, local pagans and more. As the centuries progressed, then, less of these tribes were nomadic in nature, more settled down permanently, and the people who did settle in each of these areas eventually developed the traits and languages we now think of as nationalities.

What had happened by the 1800s, then, was that these royal lines ruling each of these areas had intermarried so much for political reasons, that the entire aristrocracy in Europe became one giant family tree. And with this giant dysfunctional family tree came a bunch of dysfunctional soap-opera family dramas, hurt feelings and jockeyings for power, only with entire national populaces being used as pawns instead of one rich Texas family or whatever. It was during this period that the idea of "nationalism" was first coined - this theory that if you can establish a common history and ancestry to your country's people, they'll be unusually proud of their country and go fight more wars for you without complaining. Really, it was the world's largest and most profound conspiracy theory, when you read about it in hindsight - royals working with government officials, working with poets and novelists, working with historians and scientists, all to create this unifying made-up mythology about their own country, so that the citizens of that country would be proud of their king and go kill more often for him.

And so this is when you saw the creation of "family tartans" and kilt patterns in Scotland, which in modern times we now think is real; and the creation of the "barbarians at the gate" mythos in Germany, which we also now think in modern times is real; and the popular rise of the King Arthur story in England, and the Joan of Arc story in France, etc. (And America wasn't immune, either - this was the same time you saw the first popular rise of the "Founding Fathers" mythos as well, with George Washington and the cherry tree and all the rest.) But for some reason the English were never as good as the Continental countries at establishing this fake national identity, and so a national mythology never really caught on; and this was what Tolkien was pissed about his whole life, 150 years after it first happened, and thought deserved a correction.

And so that's another really intriguing thing about the Tolkien mythology as you read through it, is that Tolkien meant for it to be a "real" mythology, in whatever murky way you want to define that - that Middle-earth actually is Europe and Russia, simply 6,000 years ago, that Elf DNA really is in a tiny part of our modern bloodstreams, that many of our modern cities actually have thousands of years of history behind them that we know nothing about. Tolkien made no secret, for example, that he considered the Shire (where the Hobbits live) to have eventually turned into what we now know as the pastoral middle section of England; and most Tolkien fans, for another example, agree that Minas Tirith was Tolkien's stand-in for Rome.

And so that becomes another fun part of Tolkien's mythology, of looking at his maps and reading his material, and imagining what his ancient locations have eventually morphed into in our modern world. Was Amsterdam actually Bree in an ancient time? Did Zurich used to be Isengard? Berlin, Riverdell? Budapest, the Black Gates? It's fun, I admit, to read through Tolkien's ten-thousand-year mythology and to imagine it as our own, one that's simply been lost to us over the centuries. It's fun to imagine that the gods used to actually live on Earth with us, in this holy land where America now sits, and that the noblest tribe of Men were given their own island as a reward for the last great battle; but then that the Men got greedy and tried to invade the gods' land, to gain immortality for themselves, that the island where they all lived was sunk by the gods as punishment, and that the tendrails of that "real" event still exist in our modern society as the Atlantis myth.

So I guess this all gets back to the question I had before, which is what a "real" mythology is in the first place. Certainly, almost no mythologies in our modern world are "real" in how we would define them; most are loosely based on real folk tales, sure, mostly from the pagans who used to run things before those damn Christians showed up, but what little was "real" history from those stories was again manipulated in the 19th century to serve modern political ends. And Tolkien's mythology certainly bears all the sophisticated marks of a real multigenerational shared cultural history - the way the story goes from more mystical to more realistic over time, the way that certain tribes are of central importance in one part of the history, and had completely died out by another part. In fact, the only thing I know of that prevents people from treating Tolkien's history and religion as real is simply the circumstances behind its publishing - that in our modern times, it is definitively presented to the public as a work of fiction, to be read as such.

So it all begs a question - 500 years from now, will society be treating Tolkien's mythology as a "real" one, to be studied historically alongside the Greeks and Romans? Will there be an actual religion one day centered on this delightfully bureaucratic afterlife Tolkien created for his universe? Is there a legitimate religion right now for worshipping Tolkien's theory of how the world began? That wouldn't surprise me at all - it wouldn't shock me one bit if one of you wrote in with a web address for an actual religion based on Tolkien's stories. (In fact, please do so if you actually know of such a group.)

In this respect, then, Tolkien actually achieved his goal - he actually did create a believable and infinitely rich mythology for his beloved England, although I would argue that Tolkien had an awful lot of reverence for something that ultimately was itself an artificial creation. And man, I'll tell you this - if you think Tolkienism is crazy now, just wait until 2048, which under current law is when the copyright will expire on Tolkien's writings, and the general public will be allowed to produce their own creative work within the LOTR mythology. In fact, in his letters Tolkien himself expressed a desire for this, a certain happiness in the idea of others picking up his mythology and creating their own work within it; the only thing stopping this from already happening of course is his son, who is infamously tightass when it comes to the Tolkien estate and how people are allowed to reference his father's universe. My prediction is that when the day for public domain comes, you might well see exactly what I've described today - such a flowering of creative work, all based on a consistent cultural storyline, that the boundary between "real" and "fake" in Tolkien's mythology becomes indistinguishable. I mean, there are certainly worse ways to live one's life than the way Tolkien advocated - to love nature, to do no harm to your fellow creatures, to enjoy life and to eschew technology that only exists for the sake of technology. If the world had a little less Fundamentalist Christians and a little more Tolkienists, I wouldn't consider that a bad thing at all.

Well, shiver me timbers, I'm actually making it out to a public event tonight. It's the one-year anniversary, in fact, of a literary show here in Chicago called the Dollar Store Show, hosted by Lit Guy Of The Moment Jonathan Messinger (who is also the Books Editor of Time Out Chicago). My second cousin, Nathan Keay, is actually one of the performers tonight; plus, of course, I've just been meaning to make it to the show sometime anyway, because I met Jonathan this summer and found him to be this really interesting and funny guy. Anyway, it's at the Hideout on Wabansia tonight, if any locals want to meet me out there; things start at 9:30, and the cover is either $1 or 2, I forget. Hmm, maybe I'll see you there!