Quote:
Originally Posted by combatmedic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-earth
If this article is correct, he sometimes he described more or less the way you describe it and sometimes he described more as I see it.
Like the moral nature of the Orcs, or even their origins, this may be something he saw differently at different stages in his writing and afterward.
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When JRRT talks about 'secondary or sub-creational reality', he's talking about 'fiction'. It's his particular trope of speaking, he believed that fictional creations had a reality to them because they are created by people who are themselves creations of God, thus the fiction itself has a certain validity or 'reality' at second-hand from God. This applied both to explicit fiction like LOTR and pagan mythology and heroic legends. It did not mean that the ficitional world of Middle-earth is not set in the physical world of reality, it's an 'imaginary past' in the same sense that James T. Kirk lives in an 'imaginary future' of the real world.
It's a complicated concept, he seemed to have some trouble finding the words for what he meant, but ME is 'subcreational secondary reality' in the same sense that most fiction is.
He also used the subcreational concept to refer to any case where any being 'creates' something. Morgoth, for ex, was acting 'subcreatively' when he invented evil, and Feanor was acting subcreatively when he made the Silmarils.