Dan, your speculation sounds like a variation of "I'm going to naively believe what someone said was the absolute truth because they said so in a very long letter to a good friend of theirs."
What I've learned about humans is that they lie. A lot. All the time. They lie to their enemies, they lie to their casual friends, they lie to their closest friends, they lie to their family, they lie to themselves and often start believing their own lies. Virtuous and pious people are not excluded, although most of their lying tends to be of a white lie variety with underlying good intentions. When something of great importance is at stake, huge ego identity invested, religious agenda, epic storytelling adored by millions, even virtuous people willfully lie or deceive themselves into having distorted perceptions of reality and faulty memory of what inspired their highly acclaimed creation.
I'm more inclined to disregard what people say and examine the evidence to draw my own conclusions. This includes virtuous, honest people of great integrity. The probability of them telling the truth is far greater, but I find the evidence to be much more reliable most of the time.
I don't know Tolkien, never studied anything about him, and have no vested interest either way on what the actual truth is behind the origin of his mythology. I just wanted to point out that taking someone's word at face value is not sufficent evidence to establish truth.
-fk
-----Original Message-----
From:
Pali@yahoogroups.com [mailto:
Pali@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Dan D.
Sent: Wednesday, December 21, 2005 9:11 AM
To:
Pali@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Pali] Re: C.S.Lewis -- Chronicles of Narnia
Dear Yong Peng and Rett,
Your speculations sound like a variation on "I like Eastern
mythology. Good stuff. I like Tolkien. Good stuff. Therefore,
Tolkien's ideas must be Eastern."
Tolkien wrote a long letter to his friend Milton Waldman in 1951
explaining where his LoTR and related works sprang from. ....
frank@...
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