Taum Santoski VII

'Aphorisms Towards a Poetics of Fantasy'

[page 2]

7. Tolkien's mythology is the result of four processes, each having a dependency upon the other, the multiplicity in a unity. The Ainulindale is the mythological process; The bulk of The Silmarillion is the mythologizing of history; The Lord of the Rings is the historicized myth and Unfinished Tales is the scholastic/academic media.

--Taum Santoski, circa 1984