Quote:
Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2
Yeah, but that's not what JRRT had in mind. For the purposes of his story, ME is the actual, physical past of the real world, in that world your time machine would take you back to Mordor and Gondor. Yes, it's fiction, but it's not fiction set in any sort of imaginary plane. It's as 'real' on its own terms as the starship Enterprise or the Morlocks/Eloi.
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It's worth noting that Tolkien did start to write two different time travel stories, both of which involved modern Men encountering, not so much Middle-Earth as Numenor:
The Lost Road and
The Notion Club Papers. In both, time travel is not achieved through a machine but through a form of psychic contact. In
The Notion Club Papers, that contact is not merely observation; there are suggestions that it reawakens ancient forces in the modern world and indeed threatens it was catastrophe.
Bill Stoddard