Time in Tolkien's fiction

Elvish time, in The Lord of the Rings as in the medieval Thomas the Rhymer and the Danish Elvehøj (Elf Hill), presents apparent contradictions.

Both the story itself and scholarly interpretations offer varying attempts to resolve these; time may be flowing faster or more slowly, or perceptions may differ.

Tolkien was writing in a period when notions of time and space were being radically revised, from the science fiction time travel of H. G. Wells, to the inner world of dreams and the unconscious mind explored by Sigmund Freud, and the transformation of physics with the counter-intuitive notions of quantum mechanics and general relativity proposed by Max Planck and Albert Einstein.

The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger suggests that these illustrate a Christian message, that one must not attempt to cling to anything as worldly things will change and decay; instead, one must let go, trust in the unknown future, and in God.

The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger wrote that at the end of the nineteenth century, thinkers in several fields were turning away from present time and exploring other ways to view the world.

[4] The theory did not gain scientific acceptance, not least because it led to an infinite regress of dimensions, but attracted the interest of contemporary writers including H. G. Wells, J.

B. Priestley, Jorge Luis Borges, John Buchan, James Hilton, Graham Greene, Rumer Godden, and two members of the Inklings literary group, C. S. Lewis and Tolkien.

Tolkien began The Lost Road, abandoning the draft after four chapters in 1937; he tried the theme again in The Notion Club Papers, written between 1944 and 1946, which he also dropped; and finally made use of some of these ideas in The Lord of the Rings, published in 1954–1955.

[10] The Inklings scholar John D. Rateliff describes Tolkien's two time travel novels and Lewis's The Dark Tower, all incomplete, as a "triad".

Lewis's work, written sometime between 1939 and 1946, and published posthumously in 1977, is a possible sequel to Out of the Silent Planet; its protagonists use a "chronoscope" to view an alien world in "Othertime".

[14][15] Flieger comments that had either The Lost Road or The Notion Club Papers been finished,[15] we would have had a dream of time-travel through actual history and recorded myth which would have functioned as both introduction and epilogue to Tolkien's own invented mythology.

[15]Tolkien built a process of decline and fall in Middle-earth, implying that if one could go back in time, one would find a far more perfect world than the present one, into both The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings.

[23] The Dark Lord Sauron may be defeated, but that will entail the fading and departure of the Elves, leaving the world to Men, to industrialise and to pollute, however much Tolkien regretted the fact.

Evil had been seen and heard there, sorrow had been known; the Elves feared and distrusted the world outside: wolves were howling on the wood's borders: but on the land of Lórien no shadow lay.

[T 10] Virginia Luling, writing in Mallorn, identifies E. Nesbit as the source of the device of a pair of characters who travel back in time from Edwardian England.

This is the central plot device in her 1908 The House of Arden; Luling comments that this seems to be the only work before Tolkien's The Lost Road that functions in this way.

[27] Flieger identifies a network of influences, starting from H. G. Wells and including Dunne; collectively, they provided what she calls "a template" for Tolkien's ideas of time travel.

That poem has an exceptionally complex metrical structure, and narrates in a "veiled and riddling" way how a father bereaved of his daughter falls asleep and finds himself in a land without grief; he sees her standing on the far side of a river that he cannot cross.

If that was Tolkien's meaning, Shippey writes, Frodo's feeling that he has "stepped over a bridge of time into a corner of the Elder Days, and was now walking in a world that was no more" might be exactly correct.

[34] The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger writes that the Fellowship debated how much time had passed while they were there, Sam Gamgee recalling that the moon was waning just before they arrived, and was new when they left, though they all felt they had only been there for a few days.

[34] Flieger however writes that there is a definite contradiction between Frodo's position, that there is an actual difference in time between Lothlórien and everywhere else, and Legolas's, that it is a matter of perception.

That is not, writes Flieger, the end of the matter, as she feels that Aragorn reintroduces the dilemma when he says that the moon carried on changing "in the world outside": this suggests once again that Lothlórien had its own laws of nature, as in a fairy tale.

[36] Flieger notes that in On Fairy-stories, which she calls "the clearest statement of his artistic credo",[37] Tolkien writes of what it is about fairy tales that brought him enchantment.

He cites Rudolf Otto's 1919 The Idea of the Holy, which argues that while the numinous, "the common core of all religious experiences",[38] cannot be sharply defined, it can be felt through things such as art and literature: "a deep joy may fill our minds without any clear realization upon our part of its source and the object to which it refers".

Miller suggests that one hint to the purpose of the Bombadil episode is in the names: the "Old Forest, Old Man Willow, Tom as Eldest" (his emphasis) all stand outside time, "left over from the First Age".

"[41] Here, the time visited is the Third Age, c. 1300,[T 13] at the moment when the Witch-King of Angmar (the leader of the Nazgûl) attacks from his fortress of Carn Dûm and defeats the people who lived around what became the Barrow-downs.

Frodo "moves through a doorway in time" when he steps past the ancient standing stone, and cries out "The men of Carn Dûm came on us at night, and we were worsted.

In this state of preservation, she writes, they illustrate a Christian message: "the danger to faith in a fallen world of clinging to the present, which inevitably becomes living in the past".

[42] She contrasts this, a mistaken attempted escape from change and death, with the actions of mortal Men and Hobbits who boldly face the loss of all they hold dear, "the absolute necessity of letting go, of trusting in the unknown future, of having faith in God".