What did he not imagine that still must have occurred?
this is one of my favorite phenomena that occurs when you have really really good world building! the world is so comprehensively fleshed-out that the reader really can feel that they are reading a history, which means they are only reading about a selection of events and facts and happenings out of a whole world’s worth of events and facts and happenings. the reader feels as if any question about the history of that world really has a true answer, whether or not that answer is revealed anywhere in the work, even independent of whether the author has any internal conceptualization of what the answer may be!
in mathematical logic, one of the main things considered is a “theory,” which is a collection of facts expressed in some specific (formal) language (in first-order logic). a theory is incomplete if there are (first-order expressible) facts in the same language of the theory that can’t be determined to be true or false based on the facts in the theory. on the other hand, if you can deduce the truth or falsity of any fact from the stuff in the theory, it’s complete. here is a colloquial example:
let’s say my language lets me identify someone’s hair color (red, blond, brown, black, other) and whether one person is taller than another, and let’s say my theory has the following facts in it:
there is a person with red hair
there is a person with red hair who is shorter than every other person
this is not a complete theory, because it doesn’t tell me if “there is a person whose hair is not red” is true or false. I could get two redheads of different heights in a room and both facts in my theory would be true, but I could also put a short redhead and 20 tall people with blue hair in the room and my facts would still be true.
okay so why did I bring this up?
all of the canon facts of a work of fiction is like a theory, and the theory of lotr feels complete to me. and this is so wacky!!! like, yes, of course there are things that we can’t prove to be true or false about the lotr universe from what we know of it, but it feels like that’s not because there is no true answer, it’s just that we can’t access it or something. the math analogy is breaking a little here but yeah, idk I think about this a lot and it’s one of my favorite things about lotr and it’s something I haven’t really felt about other works
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