michael_nielsen

One of the things I took from that Tolkien essay is some of the difference between story & myth. It's exaggerated and too blunt, but roughly: a culture has a plethora of stories; myths, by contrast, have cultures.

And much of the detailed difference between story and myth lies in this quality of subcreation. (Reading Tolkien on his beloved Christianity and Catholicism reinforces this point, I believe.)

You mean that every generation can add to a story - but every generation *reinterprets* myth as it is? This would make Hamlet a myth.

Something like that. I think the idea is sufficiently interesting & generative that I don't _want_ to reduce it to a tweet, or a single essay. But, yes, to a large extent our culture has been made by Hamlet (or by the Bible, or Star Wars, etc).

One of my favourite ways of seeing tLoTR movies actually - both Tolkien and Jackson were telling stories based on the same underlying myth :-). Not true, of course, but I like the idea!

What I like re your picking the Balrog part is that I think that's the deepest, core (pun) part of the whole thing. Ofc Tolkien uses archetypes etc etc but all other parts can be in a way interpreted as "cultural" a bit. Not that part -- that's just *human*.

A fact I've never really understood: the Balrog, Sauron, Saruman, and Gandalf are really all peers (of the Maia caste). It bugs me a bit that they seem so apart in form.

If I remember correctly the Maia rarely reveal or show their true form but instead take shapes or forms, and it is these shapes that can be destroyed.