[Man-of-the-Wold]

Well, first I would clarify that I was trying to take a stab at where JRRT looked for historical/legendary inspiration. I think he, and certainly I, would not suggest that anything ever existed that exhibited the social and moral civilization of the Dunedain, much less the Eldar, even if classical and ancient civilizations offer something of a model in terms of relative urban and artistic achievements.

The back-to-nature perspective about the Quendi is not without justification, but they are not "Noble Savages" or denizens of Walden Pond, but rather people operating in a spiritual context unfathomable to Men.

However much one might wish to romanticize about Native Americans, to compare Tolkien's Elves to any Western or non-Western society is ludicrous.

I would also differentiate what I said about Tolkien's idealized England and environs of circa 630 to 830 A.D., with respect to ancient/classical Celts, Tuetons or pre-Indo-Europeans. Despite the sometimes "Iron-Age" feel of Tolkien's world, these earlier groups were often characteristically Pagan Europeans, engaging in blood sacrifice, obsessed with death, and bent on brutality, sometimes even on a par with their so-called more civilized comtemporaries, such as the Egyptians, Pheonicans and Romans. Yet Pagan societies were not at all times bloodlusting heathens. Their natural spirituality could hit on true divinity and more humane ways of life.

The world of the British Isles and Anglo-Saxon England that JRRT seems to have idlycized really began after the Angles and Saxons (their absorbed Jute and Frisian cousins) had more or less stabilized rule of Eastern and Central Britain from Edinburgh to Dorchester, and had been Christianized by Continental Missionaries, as well as the Irish.

The seven or so kingdoms (Wessex, Essex, Sussex, Kent, Angles, Mercia and Northumbria) that spoke dialects of Old English, which is most closely found today in "Scots" and "Plattdeutsch", co-existed at times with the various P-Celtic, Q-Celtic and Pictish kingdoms in Cornwall, Wales, Cumbria, Dalydd, Strathclyde, Alba, Ireland and Brittany. Besides warfare, the Anglo-Saxon hold on most of the best lands in Britain, seems to have been facilitated by conflict among British-Roman entities, as well as the common peoples' oppression by those entities, notwithstanding a golden if brief Arthurian respite. Disease emanating from Mediterrainian contacts, as was likely maintained by the British, may also have contributed to the Anglo-Saxon's gradual, and sometimes effortless expansion over the 200 years following the exit of effective Roman authority from Britain by the early Fifth Century.

Whatever the cruel reality of warfare and politics, then and there, as well as across the channel in Charlemagne's Frankish Empire, a pious nobility and a decent type of proto-feudal civilization flourished that was culturally approximate to Tolkien's Third Age --- Dark Ages indeed! The legends and myths of these (re)christianized Anglo-Brits were not unlike his First Age.

(The Shire, of course, best compares to an out-of-the-way English village with a long-absentee Lord, of c. 1700)

As for the Vikings, I do not wish to overly emphasize revisionism. Yet to compare them to Orcs is outrageous, especially when one recognizes the Icelandic Edda as Tolkien's single greatest source of inspiration.

Clearly, heroes from Hurin to Beorn are unmistakably patterned on Viking-like personages. The "Northmen" are very much land-based Vikings in a cultural sense.

Still, the Viking stereotype is not without basis, and it does come to us from monastaries beset by early, and likely unorganized Norwegian raiders, and from the usually unfavorable military experiences of the Vikings' enemies in Ireland, Scotland and England, but it is passed to us through a Norman filter, which is not to say from the reign of William the Conqueror per se, but rather from most writers of English History from then and until nearly the present day.

It was the French-speaking, Danish-derived, Norman who wanted to portray their Saxon and Scandinavian rivals as savages, and to darken memories of the time before 1066. It was to somehow correct this distortion of the past that orignally inspired Tolkien's "Lost Tales," which in time led to Middle-Earth.

[ April 29, 2003: Message edited by: Man-of-the-Wold ]