[Gothmog]

Probably there's a lot of stories which are almost the same through out the scandinavian countries. We must remember that the boundaries of today was settled relative late. Finland belonged to Sweden until 1800- something, right Thin? And Denmark and Sweden has swapped parts of south Sweden(Skåne to me) a long time. And Norway has belonged to both Sweden and Denmark and so on... And even earlier there were no kingdoms. The separate areas were governed by some local chief.

But this does not stay in the nordic countries. The vikings raids through Europe left traces. For example are the scottish clans half irish, half vikings roughly expressed. When traveling in Scotland you recognize a lot of the old place names (for example I heard of a place called Kallwik or something like that and Kallvik=Cold Bay). Of course the myths, stories and language spread with the people.

What's interesting is the extent of the similarities between old English and for example old Swedish. If a swede reads a text in old english nowadays, he would understand a lot of words and probably the context. This is at least according to my father who has studied English and always been fond of both Celtic languages and Old English.

Unfortunately I don't know enough about the old legends and stories to comment on them separatly. But I do know that Mr T found much inspiration in these. As mentioned earlier: Gandalf, Shadowfax, maybe Turin. Probably the dwarfes as they're not unusual to find in the stories, and Middle Earth. And there's sure to be more of these things if we dig a little.

I just noticed that I made a slight mistake in my previous post here. Midgård is actually translated Middle Yard/Court but can be equaled with Middle Earth. That's the meaning of it.

But for more discussions about the Tolkien-Nordic connection we might nead an other thread. It would be really interesting to hear more about Kullervo-Turin-Sigmund Fafnersbane. But for now, that's all...