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Originally Posted by davem
What both groups share, however, is mistrust of the 'outsider' - even, in the case of the Hobbits, of some of their fellow 'insiders' ('They're queer folk in Buckland.')
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Yes, you are right. I think we went into the insularity of the Hobbits in some detail when we discussed the early Hobbit chapters here on the CxC forum.
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Originally Posted by davem
Now, it will be argued that the period of Anglo-Saxon England which Tolkien was basing his Rohirric culture on was earlier than that just prior to the Norman Conquest, but the point is, he did not know much about the day to day life of the A-S peoples. His knowledge would have been drawn from the poems (Beowulf, Finnsburg, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Maldon, etc. in conjuntion with the limited knowledge gained from graves So, in effect, he used the 'idealised' A-S world of heroic myth ('confirmed' by the swords, daggers, etc found in the graves), to create the Rohirrim.
The Rohirrim are his 'fantasy' Anglo-Saxons, 'idealised' in one sense into a warrior elite, but certainly not 'idealised' in the moral sense
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Well, I'm not sure his depiction of the Rohirrim is limited simply to the Anglo-Saxons, nor to their literature alone. The dating of, say,
Beowulf is a notoriously debatable point among OE scholars--ranging over at least two hundred years, if not five hundred--so I'm not sure how closely we can pin down Tolkien's view to a historical sense of the period.
Nor would Tolkien have been limited merely to the battle poems, as the OE corpus includes a fair number of religious poems, poems of exile and longing, riddles, legal papers, to say nothing of Alfred's Doomsday entries. I think the warrior aspect of the Rohirrim owes as much to other warrior epics as to the Old English poems alone. And I wouldn't want to ignore the influence of WWI, as you so ably argued in your thread about that recent bio on Tolkien.
But I think your earlier post hit something important. There are aspects to the Rohirrim which don't derive from the Anglo Saxon period per se or the warrior epics of other nations, however much the militarism of the period shows in LotR. And that is the Woses and Ghân-buri-Ghân. I cannot recall anything like it in the OE literature I have read, although there is much about foreigners, foes, enemies and fearful monsters.
It is a remarkably complex depiction. It seemingly begins with the derisive attitude towards those who don't speak well a foreign language--the 'uncouth' remark--and extensive descriptions of the ugliness of the man--ugliness meaning largely 'not like the tall, fair-haired Rohirrim and Gondorians'. But Ghân-buri-Ghân shows himself a very apt diplomat, very astute at handling this kind of conversation. The reference to hunting his people is particularly telling I think in terms of Tolkien's inclusion not of an Anglo-Saxon feeling towards others but a modern interpretation.
I guess what I am trying to say is that, at the beginning of the interview I think the narrator's voice implies a Rohirrim attitude towards the Wild People, one of thinly veiled disgust or dislike, as if they aren't truly 'people'. But by the end of the passage I think the perspective has shifted to create a more sympathetic attitude towards Ghân. Of course, I could be all wet and wrong, but I sense that Tolkien was including here his thoughts about European attitudes towards 'the dark continent'. Or the Australian attitude towards the Aboriginal tribes there. Or the Native peoples--First Nations--in North America.
So, I wouldn't say the depiction of the Rohirrim is 'idealised' even by epic proportions. I think it represents in part a logical extension of some of the qualities in the earlier heroic literatures. It is a heavily nuanced depiction.