介绍： Gueroult: Professor Tolkien The Lord of the Rings is one of the most remarkable works of fiction of the century and i'm going to start with one or two questions, about possible source material.
For example um i thought that, conceivably Midgard might be Middle-earth or have some connection?
Tolkien: Oh yes th...

介绍： Gueroult: Professor Tolkien The Lord of the Rings is one of the most remarkable works of fiction of the century and i'm going to start with one or two questions, about possible source material.
For example um i thought that, conceivably Midgard might be Middle-earth or have some connection?
Tolkien: Oh yes they're the same word. Most people have made this mistake thinking Middle-earth is a particular kind of earth or is another planet and you know in the science fiction sort. But it's simply an old-fashioned word for this world we live in, as imagined surrounded by the ocean.

Gueroult: It seemed to me that Middle-earth was in a sense, as you say, ''this world we live in'' but um this world we live in at a different era.
Tolkien: No … at a different stage of imagination … yes.

Gueroult: Because this is interesting, because in The Lord of the Rings um particularly in appendices, you go to great trouble to get your chronology exactly correct, with respect to the four ages that you write about, but you make no attempt at all to tie this up with time as we know it today, why is this?
Tolkien: Because it had been impossible. Because you would completely interfered with and trammelled one in a free invention of history and an incident of one story.

Gueroult: Nevertheless, despite what you've just said, it seems to me that one could place most of the action if not all of the action within a fairly definite sort of time.
Tolkien: It won't really work out, you know, either paleontologically or archaeologically at all, actually, I mean... and you can't really relate the landmasses as I described them satisfactorily to the landmasses we know now, nor of course can you uh really have such a sort of mixed culture as I described which includes tobacco, umbrellas and other things to what little is known of the archaeological history. I wanted people simply to get inside this story and take it in a sense of actual history. It seemed to me that to be cut off by a big abyss of ages you had exactly the same effect you get in a scientific story when you go into some remote part of the galaxy. They don't really explain how but you get the sense of being far away that's all, in a possible world but far away. This is the same sort of thing in time isn't it?

Gueroult: Oh yes but in uh what one might call science fiction the authors seldom go to the trouble anything like the trouble you've done in tying this imagined world so closely to the world as we know it. Because so much of this is very close to what we know i won't say today but in the recent historical past.
Tolkien: Oh yes it really resembles some of the history of Greece and Rome as against the perpetual infiltration people out of the east isn't it?
Gueroult: Yes.
Tolkien: Yes, it certainly does that but, then of course a poor man, who building a story, has to build it out of some of the things he himself knows. He doesn't rush around doing Roman history and go and see what that happened. But that mean if he's been brought up as I was on ordinary history and on reading, that would be the material out of which he constructs.