Tolkien and Wagner?
 

Can anyone tell me if Tolkien had an interest in Germanic mythology? I ask because I recently bought Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen and I found lots of similarities:

1) A Ring of power. (cunningly enough)
2) The dwarf in Seigfried is called Mime, isn't there a dwarf called Mim somewhere in the Silm?
3) Seigfried's sword is forged from the shards of his father's.
4) Brunnhilde's father decrees that no man should marry her unless he be great enough to pass the obstacles guarding her (that's sort of the same)
5) Brunnhilde falls in love with Seigfried and renounces her immortality
6) Aforementioned father is of the race of gods on earth. Whose power is waning and they are departing from the earth.

I thought that was all a bit much for coincidence, unfortunately i don't know any of the background mythology. Are these all common elements or am i seeing things? [img]smilies/cool.gif[/img]

Germanic mythology: yes; Wagner: no. These two things are quite different, anyway.

In his Letter #229, on someone who claimed that "The Ring is in a certain way 'der Nibelungen Ring'....", Tolkien wrote: "Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases. [...] It has nothing whatsoever to do with The Lord of the Rings."

And from TA Shippey's Road to Middle-Earth, p. 296:

"Tolkien was irritated all his life by modern attempts to rewrite or interpret old material, almost all of which he thought led to failures of tone and spirit. Wagner is the most obvious example. People were always connecting The Lord of the Rings with Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Tolkien did not like it. 'Both rings were round', he snarled, 'and there the resemblance ceases' (Letters, p. 306). This is not entirely true. The motifs of the riddle-contest, the cleansing fire, the broken weapon preserved for an heir, all occur in both works, as of course does the theme of 'the lord of the Ring as the slave of the Ring', des Ringes Herr als des Ringes Knecht. But what upset Tolkien was the fact that Wagner was working, at second-hand, from material which he knew at first hand, primarily the heroic poems of the Elder Edda and the later Middle High German Nibelungenlied. Once again he saw difference where other people saw similarity. Wagner was one of the several authors with whom Tolkien had a relationship of intimate dislike: Shakespeare, Spenser, George MacDonald, Hans Christian Andersen. All, he thought, had got something very important not quite right. It is especially necessary, then, for followers of Tolkien to pick out the true from the hertical, and to avoid snatching at surface similarities."

[ March 18, 2002: Message edited by: Sharku ]

Thanks for that Sharku. I knew Wagner always took his libretti from previous sources (most operatic composers do that) but I didn't know how Tolkien viewed it.

Cheers [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]

from walhall.com....
Thank goodness for Tolkien. I wouldn't want to sit through sixteen hours of Wagnerian opera.

[ July 24, 2002: Message edited by: Sweatpea Knotwise ]

True, I couldn't stand that either.

~Burzdol~

Aside from some familiarity with Goethe, and the German romantic philosophical tradition, my knowledge of German romantic literature, Wagner and the Sturm und Drang movement is cursory at best. However, one thing in Sharkû’s post raises a question for me.

In reference to Wagner, I wonder what exactly is it that he didn’t get quite right. I understand that Tolkien knew the source material first-hand, but that does not necessarily mean that those who know the source material second-hand can not come to an accurate understanding of said source material. For example, I was able to study, and I think with a good amount of accuracy, Heidegger with only a vague ability to read German (actually with no practical ability at all). I don’t think Tolkien would be so immodest as to base his judgement on linguistic ability alone.

Can it be that his judgement of Wagner is based on the Teutonic nationalism that Wagner inserts into the Elder Edda? If this is so, isn’t Tolkien, himself, guilty of a similar misstep when he inserts his own English nationalism into the Elder Edda?

If someone with more knowledge than I of both the Elder Edda and the German romantic movement could clarify this, it would be greatly appreciated.

Tolkien was a professor at Oxford. Let's not forget he would have known the Norse Eddas inside and out. This is the man who formed a book club where they read Icelandic literature in Icelandic.

That probably is the case - and the follow-up you suggesta as well. His reluctance to admit any similarities later would then arise from the legacy of Nazism so blatantly using those mythologies to their own horrible ends (let's not talk about Wagner here even if he was a role-model for Hitler; an artist and a politician at the same time with the quest of making great the nation).

But we should also see, that that kind of national-romantic world-view was not that uncommon back then (before WWII) among the intelligentsia. On the contrary it was more or less the mainstream cultural view in Scandinavia, the Great Britain and Germany. And it wasn't always just nationalistic in the way of referring to nation states only, but oftentimes took the form of Nordischen erbe, the Northern heritage - or like Hitler popularised it; as aryanism (which of course means Persian / Indian roots, but little did he understand the history of ideas and people).

So it's easy to see the prof. taking part in that general mood and like everyone else taking part in that feeling, feeling a need to distance himself from it after the Nazi-regime so mishandled that line of thought.

You're quite right here. He even studied Finnish to be able to read the Kalevala in the original language.... :)