The Scourge of The Dark Side...Tolkien and Modernism

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

One wonders whether, when Tolkien wrote phrases like "his fate drove him" and the like, he was thinking of 'fate' not as Latin fatum or Fata, but as a translation of OE wyrd, which doesn't carry that same implication of intention, but comes closer to "that which happens"- T certainly knew that fatum originally meant the ruling or pronouncement of a god, and in that sense was much closer to OE dom, modern doom.

Ne mæg werigmod wyrde wiðstondan,
ne se hreo hyge helpe gefremman.
For ðon domgeorne dreorigne oft
in hyra breostcofan bindað fæste;

A weary mood won't withstand wyrd,
nor may the troubled mind find help.
Often, therefore, the fame-yearners
bind dreariness fast in their breast-coffins.

That's a stanza from the OE poem The Wanderer. It basically relates that one can try to hide from troubles, or bravely fight on and win in the face of adversity. Interesting concept (sort of an Anglo-Saxon Self-Help manual).

At first blush, one would think that the OE definition of wyrd (which has a prominent place in Beowulf as well) would be Tolkien's primary linguistic focus. He seems to use the words doom and fate interchangeably, and wyrd is a closer approximation of Catholic Predestination dogma in that one has a personal wyrd which is subject to one's free will; where it variates slighty from Catholicism is that one's personal wyrd is inhibited or affected by another person's wyrd, and I can see many cases in the books where this is the case.