Quote:
Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin
It's an interesting idea- except Tolkien hated everything French.
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I know, right? So why did he use the name of a forest in France for his subcreated land?
One thought that springs to mind is that he may not have viewed Brittany as 'really' French. I'm not sure how widely known it is that Brittany was at least nominally independent down to the 1500s, and is one of the old Celtic realms (along with the likes of Wales and Cornwall). Given his liking for at least one Celtic language, he might well have wanted to reclaim a Breton myth from the French.
... except that myth is part of the Arthurian tales, and he hated them too. So
why did he do it?
This is why I'm thinking he wanted to link his stories to a real ('real') location: the other option is that he was grounding it in a mythic cycle that he's known to dislike intensely.
(Also, of course: if he wanted to claim Britain as Tol Eressea, pretty much his only choices for Beleriand are a) France, b) Scandinavia, or c) sunk in coincidentally the same place Eressea wound up.)
hS