Well. I doubt I'll be able to work up that kind of dedication!

I read somewhere that Tolkien created his mythology because Britain didn't have one, and he felt it needed one. The earliest mythic tales of the British Isles were imports, from the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes (Beowulf), and later the Norman French. Even the Arthurian Legend, although set in Britain, was based on the French Troubador/Chivalric literature, the same one that fell into disrepute when Cervantes skewered it in Don Quixote. The Medieval tales of Arthur were from Christian Britain, Geoffrey of Monmouth was a monk, and he wrote in Latin in the 12th century. They were just that, Medieval, they did not go back to pagan Britain.

Tolkien was an expert in the misty beginnings that dominated the mythic origins of Finnish, Icelandic, and Germanic/Scandinavian literature, all the way back to bardic, oral times. He felt England lacked that tradition. Some early literature survived from the Celts in Ireland and Scotland, but they were not English, were they? That may seem like just a technicality to us, but it is a big deal if you're English.

My own experience with this type of ancient writing is limited to Homer and the Old Testament, and I confess I too am fascinated by it. It is a wonder to view from afar the earliest expressions of our parent cultures, perhaps transcribed long after they were orally compiled in pre-literate times. I read them not as history, but as a cultural and psychological glimpse into the thought of our most distant ancestors, and the communities and societies they lived in. In the Bible and Homer we get eyewitness testimony from our dimmest and most ancient tribal and Bronze Age memories. It may be highly edited, distorted, and difficult to interpret from the viewpoint of modernity, but it is the only eyewitness testimony we have. Other than the meager fragments archaeology can give us, it is the only knowledge of our past we have direct access to. That makes it precious.

But that's the whole point, isn't it? We read these works to get a sense of our beginnings. But Tolkien's mythology is not that of the early Britons, it comes solely from his own mind and personality and his academic pursuits. The wanderings of the ancient Jews and Odysseus, the Mycenaean Mediterranean and the creation myths of the Hebrews may not be actual history, but they were the legitimate memory of that history for our ancestors. It affected them, and they affect us. We are connected. These memories may be culturally distorted and, from a modern perspective, difficult to interpret, but they are at least authentic. They are all we have from that ancient time, and they must be studied, and treasured even if we choose not to accept them as some ultimate and definitive truth.

There is nothing wrong with creating an alternate reality and setting our stories in it, science fiction writers do it all the time. We are all familiar with the idealized (and often totally unrealistic) universes of modern authors; the Frontier of Western Fiction, the mean streets of our noir detectives, even the sterile suburban landscapes or Machiavellian executive suites of contemporary novels. But we create these alternate universes as a model to contrast and compare with our own, to examine our own times and thought, as Tolkien did himself so effectively in the LOTR trilogy. But I find his obsession with his created universe a bit disorienting.

I have much more to say about this, I may write about it later, and I am very interested in your views on it. If you read the Silmarillion three times, then there may be a good reason why I should too.