[jallanite]

Originally Posted by Mithalwen

… but it is necessary to remember that Tolkien was deliberately creating a mythology (for England).

In his letter to Milton Waldman, Tolkien writes:

But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story, – the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country.

That is not the same thing as “a mythology (for England)”. The phrase “a mythology for England” is repeated again and again by commentators on Tolkien as though it were an expression used by him, but it is never used by Tolkien. It is an invention by commentators, and distorts what Tolkien did say.

Tolkien is obviously referring here to his Book of Lost Tales in which the Lonely Isle was identified with Britain, but Tolkien soon rejected that identification. Quite rightly so. That Britain was the Lonely Isle drawn back to Middle-earth during the days of the Saxon Hengest is historically absurd, as though Roman Britain never existed, or pre-Roman Britain mentioned in Classical Greek texts. Tolkien quite rightly thought better of it. And nowhere in The Book of Lost Tales are the events outside of the Lonely Island made to take place in England.

A “mythology for England” surely should take place mostly in England. But the Eriol material was soon abandoned and the Ælfwine material that was to replace it was mostly never written. The stories of Beren, Túrin, Tuor, and Eärendil were never placed in England, save vaguely where in a few mentions Britain (part of which later became England) is identified as an island among the remains of sunken Beleriand.

The Hobbit takes place in previously unidentified territory. There is not sufficient detail given therein to identify the Hobbit homeland with England. Only in The Lord of the Rings is The Shire supposedly approximately in the area of later England, in days before the English Channel came to be. There indeed the Shire and Buckland and Bree are very English indeed, Edwardian English. But not the rest of Tolkien’s world.

In letter 294 Tolkien complains about the use of the word Nordic in connection to his writing but this rant would almost do as well for the word English:

Not Nordic, please! A word I personally dislike; it is associated, though of French origin, with racialist theories. Geographically Northern is usually better. But examination will show that even this is inapplicable (geographically or spiritually) to ‘Middle-earth’. This is an old word, not invented by me, as reference to a dictionary such as the Shorter Oxford will show. It meant the habitable lands of our world, set amid the surrounding Ocean. The action of the story takes place in the North-west of ‘Middle-earth’, equivalent in latitude to the coastlands of Europe and the north shores of the Mediterranean. But this is not a purely ‘Nordic’ area in any sense. If Hobbiton and Rivendell are taken (as intended) to be at about the latitude of Oxford, then Minas Tirith, 600 miles south, is at about the latitude of Florence. The Mouths of Anduin and the ancient city of Pelargir are at about the latitude of ancient Troy.

Auden has asserted that for me ‘the North is a sacred direction’. That is not true. The North-west of Europe, where I (and most of my ancestors) have lived, has my affection, as a man’s home should. I love its atmosphere, and know more of its histories and languages than I do of other parts; but it is not ‘sacred’, nor does it exhaust my affections. I have, for instance, a particular love for the Latin language, and among its descendants for Spanish. That it is untrue for my story, a mere reading of the synopses should show. The North was the seat of the fortresses of the Devil. The progress of the tale ends in what is far more like the re-establishment of an effective Holy Roman Empire with its seat in Rome than anything that would be devised by a ‘Nordic’.

In Tolkien’s finished conception the Shire is described by him as “more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee″. And the language of the Rohirrim is Old English. Esgaroth and Dale are Norse. The rest is more-or-less general medieval European. Neither The Silmarillion as published nor The Hobbit nor The Lord of the Rings as a whole is “a mythology for England”.