[Child of the 7th Age]

I may have a severe attack of the "fuzzies', since I am leaving several posters whom I respect scratching their heads! Please forgive any confusion. Let me try and explain.

Bethberry-- Regarding the origins of this thread: My original question did arise from reading "It Seems Different Near the Shire". In that excellent discussion, several explanations were put forward as to why the Shire and the surrounding area seemed to evince a distinct sense of faery. Yet no one mentioned the simple but obvious point that the region was the one which most clearly showed the influence of Tolkien's English roots. I felt those roots had some bearing on that special aura.

From there, I created a new thread that concerned the extent of "English influence" on the Legendarium and the degree to which this influence was recognized by today's readers. I bemoaned the fact that we seemed to be losing this sense of connection for a variety of reasons. My introductory discussion was very broad, too broad, as it touched on many different aspects of these themes. Because I was uncertain whether the topic held general interest, I purposely phrased my post and questions in the widest sense. I hoped to generate some broad discussion and then narrow the focus. (Bad idea!) The personal details I included were intended to show that, even before the Letters or Shippey's book, I sensed an underlying English influence, often subtle, that went beyond the Victorian image of the Shire and perhaps rested on older roots.

Sorry this wasn't clear, but I still hold stubbornly to my central proposition: the Legendarium (from Silm to Hobbit to LotR) is rich with English placenames, words, and associations of all types, not just in terms of the Victorian Shire but an older and, to me, more intriguing connection with Old English language and lore. And where JRRT was unable to draw on specifically Anglo-Saxon sources, he turned instead to Norse, Finnish, and Germanic ones and proceeded to "Anglicize" them. This was familiar to me since historians are forced to resort to these very same borrowing and guessing games for this period.

This was all part of Tolkien's openly stated effort to create a series of tales for England to make up for those that had been sadly lost. This was his first and primary motive in creating the Legendarium, i.e. the very first layer of the complex onion which was later to emerge.

We may also be getting "bogged down" in terminology. When I speak of the Silm, I am not merely referring to the truncated version edited by CT but the evolving Legendarium as it developed from its earliest days down through the material which appears, for example, in Morgoth's Ring.

Littlemanpoet raised the issue of Celtic versus Old English origins:

I confess to being one of those people who sees no Anglo-Saxon, but plenty of Celtic, in The Silmarillion.

But take a look at what the author himself says. Tolkien clearly felt the Celtic tales were not a genuine expression of the English soul:

I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek and Celtic and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me) but nothing English....Letters, p 144

Or this:

...that rare allusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things).

In 1937 Tolkien makes an even stronger statement to this effect. Allen & Unwin had just rejected his first edition of the Silm, the reviewer stating that the "Silm has some of that bright-eyed beauty that perplexes all Anglo-Saxons in the face of Celtic art." Tolkien's frustration is evident in his response:

Needless to say, they (i.e. the names in the writings) are not Celtic. Neither are the tales. I do know Celtic things (many in their original languages Irish and Welsh) and feel for them a certain distaste. largely for their fundamental unreason. They have bright colour, but are like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design. They are in fact 'mad' as your reader says -- but I don't believe I am.

No one could deny that there are concepts (e.g. Tuatha de danaan Elves) and words in the Legendarium drawn from the Welsh and Irish (and the Cornish!) tradition, but Tolkien evidently felt they were not central to his heart or to the story itself.

Littlemanpoet Within the confines of this thread, it would be hard for me to show point-by-point that, at the base of the Silm, lies a whole variety of Old English lore (plus the related Germanic, Finnish and Norse stories that have been Anglicized). It would have been easier to show this influence if Tolkien had used a major work like Beowulf or the Icelandic sagas as his chief inspiration, but no works such as these even exist for Old English. So instead he used bits and pieces of hundreds of different things.

Once again, I refer you back to Shippey. As a philologist, he went in word-by-word and point-by-point (just like Tolkien did) drawing upon a hundred different scraps of evidence to reconstruct these ancient "sources". His work was appropriately titled: The Road to Middle-earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology. Given that Shippey's original publication date was 1982, before much of HoMe came out, his attention was naturally focused more closely on the Hobbit and the Rings. But he does devote a chapter to Silm and another to the early HoMe (BoLt 1 & 2, and The Lost Road) where he shows many of these same influences. Shippey was one of the very few critics of whom JRRT approved. When he saw the first draft of his book, he said:

I am in agreement with nearly all that you say , and I only regret that I have not the time to talk more about your paper.

Given JRRT's opinion of critics, this was high praise indeed!

Without getting into details, here are a brief list of topics/persons which Shippey mentions go back to Anglo-Saxon or other related sources as I've explained above:

1.Fall of the Noldor (actually quotes a line verbatim from an Old English poem Maxims I--saw the origin of evil in the forging of a sword and what happened to it just as Tolkien saw it in the creation of the Silmarils and the subsequent struggle)

2. The whole question whether Elves have souls"--draws on the Early South English Legends

3.Figures of Turin and his sister, Aelf-wine, Alb-oin, Ing, Earendil, Eriol, Audoin (Edwin), Aldorion and Erendis,

4. Origin and place names of Tol Eressea

5. Certain concepts of time and fate which can be traced back to Deor, an O.E. poem

6. An association between those mariners who tried to find the Lost Road and the ancient custom of ship burials which physically repesented this same desire to sail away and avoid death.

7. The concept of Elf-friend, at least as a name.

My favorite is Earendil. He's in the Exeter Book which is based on earlier Anglo and Germanic sources: Oh, Earendil, brightest of angels, sent to men above Middle-earth..." How appropriate!

Hope this helps a little.

Rimbaud: I always like your posts. They make me think and this time is no exception. But I fear we'll have to agree to disagree. The critical point for me is not the disparity in wealth, which certainly existed. I feel that class implies a certain consciousness on the part of the members of that group. And I do not believe medieval man ever reached such a consciousness. He simply did not picture himself in this way. The earliest hints of this are in the 14th and 15th century when certain small uprisings occur among the peasants. But many medievalists would dispute even this.

sharon, the 7th age hobbit

[ October 02, 2002: Message edited by: Child of the 7th Age ]