Iceland in Tolkien's Work?

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

I've always felt as though Tolkien's greatest 'debt' to the Sagas was more their "feel" than any specific event or reference. Time and again in the Sagas you have somebody who does something that sets off a feud and no matter how hard everyone tries to avert disaster and tragedy it's hopeless and everyone involved suffers mightily. The Sagas do not participate in the Modernist idea of history as advance/improvement...quite the reverse. And that's pretty much the story of Middle Earth in a nutshell. Things generally go from light to dark, from high to low, vengeance and blood feuds wipe out whole peoples and cause misery without justice... Which is not to say that the Sagas or Middle-earth are depressing places--there is fellowship, honour, heroism but mostly there is convivialty, hospitality and, most importantly, gatherings of friends and family. The world is dark, but life need not be so.

There may be elements of particular reference between the Sagas and Middle-earth (the portrayal of the trolls in TH is clearly inspired by Icelandic trolls; the 'governmental' structure of the Shire is pretty much precisely the kind of loose 'democracy' practised in Old Iceland) but on the whole I think the real comparison is to be made betwen the views of heroism--what Tolkien called "naked will and courage in the face of inevitable defeat". That's what got Frodo and Sam to Mount Doom, and that's what inspired Aragorn to lead his armies to the Black Gate.

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by Fordim Hedgethistle

....but on the whole I think the real comparison is to be made betwen the views of heroism--what Tolkien called "naked will and courage in the face of inevitable defeat". That's what got Frodo and Sam to Mount Doom, and that's what inspired Aragorn to lead his armies to the Black Gate.

Yes, but such valor is not specifically Icelandic in nature; one could just as easily infer the same from Tolkien's Anglo-Saxon studies. One only has to read The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son to get that same sense of valor and heroic chivalry (however misguided in this case in point). That sense of selflessness in the face of defeat and death is evident in nearly every literary piece of that time (even the coeval Frankish 'Song of Roland' echoes that bravado).

[davem]

Originally Posted by Morthoron

Yes, but such valor is not specifically Icelandic in nature; one could just as easily infer the same from Tolkien's Anglo-Saxon studies. One only has to read The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son to get that same sense of valor and heroic chivalry (however misguided in this case in point). That sense of selflessness in the face of defeat and death is evident in nearly every literary piece of that time (even the coeval Frankish 'Song of Roland' echoes that bravado).

Well, no, its not unique to the Icelandic concept of valour. One would not expect it to be, given that both the Anglo-Saxons & the Icelanders were Germanic peoples, & their attitudes reflect a cultural norm. However, being that this thread is discussing (possible) Icelandic influences on Tolkien, I don't see that pointing out that another society held the same view adds to the discussion. The fact that the Anglo-Saxons held to the 'Northern theory of courage' doesn't negate the fact that the Icelanders also did. Both Icelanders & Anglo-Saxons held to the concept of weregild. Men in both societies wore tunics.

The real point is that we have nothing like the Sagas from Anglo-Saxon England, no extensive literature which depicts everyday life in Dark Age/Medieval England. The Children of Hurin is the closest thing we have in style & structure to an Icelandic Saga from Tolkien, & there is nothing in the whole of Anglo-Saxon literature that is anything like it - as far as I'm aware. The work seems almost purely Icelandic is style, mood & structure - getting away from the Shire or Numenor options admittedly. Surely we have to look to Icelandic Saga literature as a major influence on Tolkien's creation - something which is usually ignored in favour of seeking Biblical or Northern mythological influences.

[Lalaith]

Actually I think the "feel" of CoH is closer to the Eddic poems (the various Lays of Gudrun, the Lay of Atli, etc) than to the sagas. The date of the poems is disputed, as they are older than the date they were fixed to paper, but they are certainly at least three centuries older.

[davem]

Originally Posted by Lalaith

Actually I think the "feel" of CoH is closer to the Eddic poems (the various Lays of Gudrun, the Lay of Atli, etc) than to the sagas. The date of the poems is disputed, as they are older than the date they were fixed to paper, but they are certainly at least three centuries older.

I suppose it depends on whether we're talking 'feel' or structure & style. Of course, as Hookbill points out, Tolkien drew on many sources, but if one is familiar with the Sagas, one can't help noting the basic structure of the story reflects the typical structure of a saga.

CoH starts with Turin's ancestry, grandfather & father, setting out the place of his family in the wider society. Then we have the hero's birth, his childhood, early deeds, his outlawry (again a popular topic for saga writers), his heroic feats, the suffering & destruction he brings on friends & kin, & ending with his death. Even his mother is typical of Saga mothers. Its a 'classic' saga in its structure. Of course, Kullervo was a major influence, as were the Eddas, Beowulf, the Volsungasaga et al.

The real point, I think, is that the influence of Saga literature on Tolkien's work has not been sufficiently explored. Tolkien was a member of a group, The Coalbiters, who gathered together to read the Sagas in the original Icelandic, & his love of Saga literature & the way it influenced his work should be taken seriously. Pointing out other influences is to sidetrack the thread. Of course those influences are there, but in order to discover the specific influence of the Sagas on Tolkien's work we have to put them on one side.

The question is, were the Sagas a major influence on Tolkien's Legendarium or not, & if so, how & in what way? To respond to that question with 'Well, there were lots of influences.' misses the point of the question. So, I don't think it is germaine to point up similarities with other cultures/myths, because all that does is lead us to the dead end of 'Tolkien was influenced by lots of things'. This is about how 'X' may or may not have influenced Tolkien, not aboout pointing out that he was influenced by A, B, C, D, etc as well.

Also, I take Lalaith's point re the Eddas, but I'm not sure (personal feeling of course) that they were as great an influence on CoH as on some of his other works.

[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by davem

The real point, I think, is that the influence of Saga literature on Tolkien's work has not been sufficiently explored. Tolkien was a member of a group, The Coalbiters, who gathered together to read the Sagas in the original Icelandic, & his love of Saga literature & the way it influenced his work should be taken seriously. Pointing out other influences is to sidetrack the thread. Of course those influences are there, but in order to discover the specific influence of the Sagas on Tolkien's work we have to put them on one side.

The question is, were the Sagas a major influence on Tolkien's Legendarium or not, & if so, how & in what way? To respond to that question with 'Well, there were lots of influences.' misses the point of the question.

You're right here davem but I think also wrong. Your depiction of the story of Túrin in comparison to Egil's saga or parts of the fates of people in Njall's saga I feel compelled to accept and grant you - and Lal - a point here. There really is a similarity in the style and the structure of the narrative here. But whether it goes through all that Tolkien wrote, that I think is another question and brings back the things about other possible influences as well.

I mean it's hard to ask this kind of tightly defined question when any answers to it will so easily go off the limits. What would a comparison with the sagas actually give us if it's tightly defined to not jump outside the sagas themselves?

Were the sagas a major influence on Tolkien's legendarium? You can't answer that question without giving a somewhat grounded explanation what was the part of other mythologies in Tolkien's writing as well... Only then can you compare the relative weight of different mythologies...

Sorry to nit-pick on this.

[Bêthberry]

Much depends upon how the topic is defined and first presented and then how the posters develop and extrapolate the topic.

Myself, reading the first post here, thought that we were being asked to consider how Numenor ressembled the Old Icelanders. All well and good, except I happened at the time to be reading a compilation of old Welsh tales and legends and discovered that sunken cities are prominent in the old Welsh tales. Ah ha, says I, we have a common topic among many cultures of eld.

Now, we all know about Atlantis and we all know about Tolkien's recurrent dream of flooded civilization, and we all know about Tolkien's love of Welsh. So my initial reaction was to say, well, yes, but there's these Welsh possibilities too. So it isn't a question of ignoring the topic but of wondering just how it is to be defined. To say broadly that the Numenoreans could be like the Old Icelanders is to invite responses of 'well, how specific and definite is that similarity'.... It's a bit confusing moving between causation and correlation and simple similarities. It invites other similarities.

Besides, we have Tristram Shandy which starts not just with ancestry and the hero's birth, but with the actual ... well, ... little man as it were.

I would like to see Lalaith elaborate a bit on her post about how 'the feeling' of CoH is closer to the Eddic poems than the Sagas. What are those differences between the Eddas and the sagas? And, frankly, I would enjoy a bit more discussion of just CoH before we jump into the literary forebearers. After all, I want to explore the reading experience before I break it apart.

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by davem

Well, no, its not unique to the Icelandic concept of valour. One would not expect it to be, given that both the Anglo-Saxons & the Icelanders were Germanic peoples, & their attitudes reflect a cultural norm. However, being that this thread is discussing (possible) Icelandic influences on Tolkien, I don't see that pointing out that another society held the same view adds to the discussion. The fact that the Anglo-Saxons held to the 'Northern theory of courage' doesn't negate the fact that the Icelanders also did. Both Icelanders & Anglo-Saxons held to the concept of weregild. Men in both societies wore tunics.

Being that the 'thread is discussing (possible) Icelandic influences on Tolkien', isn't pointing out when something is not necessarily exclusive to Icelandic nature, but present in Anglo-Saxon literature as well, germane to the discussion, particularly in regards to an Anglo-Saxon scholar such as Tolkien?

Originally Posted by davem

The real point is that we have nothing like the Sagas from Anglo-Saxon England, no extensive literature which depicts everyday life in Dark Age/Medieval England. The Children of Hurin is the closest thing we have in style & structure to an Icelandic Saga from Tolkien, & there is nothing in the whole of Anglo-Saxon literature that is anything like it - as far as I'm aware.

Certainly, CoH bears a great debt to the Sagas, but more so the Eddas, as Lalaith pointed out. But then again, there are certain similarities to the Finnish Kalevala as well (Kullervo seducing a maiden, only to find out it is his sister, and then later killing himself, for instance). Kullervo is an anti-hero much in the mold of Turin.

[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by Morthoron

Certainly, CoH bears a great debt to the Sagas, but more the the Eddas, as Lalaith pointed out. But then again, there are certain similarities to the Finnish Kalevala as well (Kullervo seducing a maiden, only to find out it is his sister, and then later killing himself, for instance). Kullervo is an anti-hero much in the mold of Turin.

The similarities with the stories of Kullervo from Kalevala and Turín surely go deeper than this but some people tend to overestimate the similarities as well.

We probably should not forget that Tolkien was an eclectic - or should we say an Eclectic - picking this and that thing from here and there to make a mythology of his liking. So there may be paths and motives from Icelandic sagas and others from Finnish epic - which kind of nicely is a 19th century production of a person who had the romantic ideas of Hölderlin in his backpack as well. And sharing things from other Germanic lore and even the old Greeks and Romas as well?

[Hookbill the Goomba]

I think that Tolkien, like most people, had many interests. The Icelandic sagas, Norse Mythology and good old fashioned Englishness were quite forefront in the many cultures of Middle Earth. The Culture of Numenor, while having Atlantian qualities, did, I think, have some allusions to the Icelandic sagas. Likewise, The Shire, while one of its main functions was, no doubt, to satisfy Tolkien's amusement with quintessential Englishness, had some of the Icelandic traits as well. One must always keep in mind that Tolkien had to create a new world and new cultures and all he had to work with was his imagination and cultures that already exsist, past or present. A completely new culture that is not base, even loosely, on another is an incredibly difficult thing to do, if not nigh on impossible. One must always be considering what has gone before, the good parts, the bad parts and all the parts in between.

The Shire, with its Icelandic housing and such Tolkein had studied in his time is mixed with the quirky English traits that he had observed his whole life. There are new things, of course, Hobbits themselves are not English people, nor are they Norsemen. They are, sorry to point out the obvious, Hobbits. Their creator may have had certain ideas about English folk and Icelandic houses as well as a whole host of other things, but they themselves are a peculiar race. I always imagined that the Hobbits (especially Bilbo in The Hobbit) were rather like Arthur Dent in The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Unexpected travelers in a far flung land of wonder and magnificence, and yet retaining those odd little personalities from their homeland that makes them stick out like a set of grossly disproportionate infected and possibly contagious sore thumbs.

As with any of Tolkien's cultures in Middle Earth, one must not always look too deeply at things. I do often wonder how many of the connections and similarities he was aware of. If I may speak from experience, it is only when another person reads something I have written that they say, "Ho-ho! This is inspired by X" or "Ah! A little like the thing that happened when so and so did the other thing..."

At least, that's how this struck me...

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Fordim Hedgethistle

I've always felt as though Tolkien's greatest 'debt' to the Sagas was more their "feel" than any specific event or reference. Time and again in the Sagas you have somebody who does something that sets off a feud and no matter how hard everyone tries to avert disaster and tragedy it's hopeless and everyone involved suffers mightily. The Sagas do not participate in the Modernist idea of history as advance/improvement...quite the reverse. And that's pretty much the story of Middle Earth in a nutshell. Things generally go from light to dark, from high to low, vengeance and blood feuds wipe out whole peoples and cause misery without justice... Which is not to say that the Sagas or Middle-earth are depressing places--there is fellowship, honour, heroism but mostly there is convivialty, hospitality and, most importantly, gatherings of friends and family. The world is dark, but life need not be so.

There may be elements of particular reference between the Sagas and Middle-earth (the portrayal of the trolls in TH is clearly inspired by Icelandic trolls; the 'governmental' structure of the Shire is pretty much precisely the kind of loose 'democracy' practised in Old Iceland) but on the whole I think the real comparison is to be made betwen the views of heroism--what Tolkien called "naked will and courage in the face of inevitable defeat". That's what got Frodo and Sam to Mount Doom, and that's what inspired Aragorn to lead his armies to the Black Gate.

Nice one Fordim. That's the greatest similarity of all - the style. A lot of people struggle with the Sil as the style is so at odds with the usual style you expect of a novel, yes even of Rings, but once you pick up an Icelandic Saga you have a moment of revelation and realise just what Tolkien was attempting to do in terms of style. Have to admit I was dumbfounded to realise this at long last! Far from being 'biblical', the Sil is just like one of the Sagas! Long lists of people, stark language and imagery, thinly but effectively drawn scenes of slaughter and of horror.

One of my mates once said he found The Sil 'glacial', and I told him that Tolkien was trying to achieve a 'cool Northern air' - and this is where, I think, he found it. I was rambling on not so long ago about how the Kinslaying made me feel odd, took me back to my ancestors almost - and then again when I picked up a Saga for the first time this feeling completely grabbed me by the guts.

It's a rich mine I think.

And that's what this thread is about - looking at Icelandic Sagas, Iceland and Tolkien's work.