A Tradition and an Invented World

Tolkien shows that fiction can contain extensive genealogies, languages, histories, and internal coherence. The size of a story-world cannot prove that its events occurred. A comparison with Greece must therefore rest on something more than complexity.

Greek tradition differs in how it developed. It was carried across communities, performances, rituals, local claims, and literary works. No single surviving author designed the whole inheritance and controlled every version.

That difference makes its transmission worth studying. The material records interactions among people with different memories and interests. Its inconsistencies can belong to that distributed history.

Yet distributed development does not make supernatural events self-verifying. A community can inherit an invention as readily as a memory. The distinction from Tolkien helps identify the kind of evidence we have: a long communal tradition whose possible historical content needs examination, rather than a complexity that itself establishes truth.