R: Nur-ellen universes (was Re: Barukh "Susa'i" ben-Yohhanan?)

Jörg wrote:

> [1] A brief description of the two Nur-ellen universes:
>
> The first of these two universes is one where Tolkien's books contain
> actual history.  In that world, Sindarin was indeed a natlang quite a
> long time ago, and there are still a few Elves left over whose language
> has evolved into Nur-ellen from Sindarin.
>
> The second is more realistic.  It assumes that there have been "Elves"
> in the past, but they were mere mortal humans, nevertheless with a
> fascinating civilization that was advanced for their time.  There never
> was a race of immortal beings, and the geography of the _Silmarillion_
> and the _Lord of the Rings_ is entirely fictional.  These "Elves" lived
> in Britain (and earlier, in large parts of continental western Europe,
> being the same people known to archaeology as the bell-beaker folk)
> before the Celtic invasion and are in fact the historic nucleus of those
> Celtic and Germanic mythological tradition Tolkien re-created his Elves
> from.
My impression has always been that the map included in LOTR looked like
Western Scandinavia. Tol Erassea (sp) is westernwards, and stands for the
British Isles. Mordor is placed where Finland is: we know Finnish were
considered wizards by Norse men and how much was Tolkien a devotee of Old
English and norse literature (the names of Gandalf, Oin usw. all come from
Snorri's Edda). Numenor even looks like Atlantis! Tolkien himeself once
stated that we shouldn't consider the Middle Earth another world, but Europe
in another era. Elves look like the bell-beaker folk, mannish people's
speech is many times rendered as OE (thus IE).

Luca