Interesting fun read. A couple of reactions. First, I recently reread LotR after decades and was impressed by it. At the same time, I also felt like LotR was s

Interesting fun read. A couple of reactions. First, I recently reread LotR after decades and was impressed by it. At the same time, I also felt like LotR was sort of a literary dollhouse for Tolkien: although there's a lot of complexity in certain things, other things seemed to be lacking in depth to the point of being comical at times. This is probably inevitable with a world that broad but the geospatial shallowness probably goes along with it. Second, to his credit, a lot of writing in general is sort of topologically simplified, and this probably reflects a certain cognitive mapping that goes on in reality. My sense of the world, for example, is vastly oversimplified, focused on my local environment and social network, and very blurry as you go outward. This is true of everybody. Maybe Tolkien made a mistake in reifying that a bit too much, in trying to fill in details of the world too much where other authors would have left it as "diagetically out of attentional scope" rather than "diagetically nonexistent". But psychologically people flow with it because it probably reflects human perception — probably especially when you are living through conflict and the world becomes even more focused. The article points out how unrealistic it is but it might not bother people because their internal maps probably aren't a lot different.