The Afterlife, Reincarnation, and Courtly Love

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by Idril

My actual question which I failed to communicate: Is the love between female Eldar and male Edain an example of courtly love? Tolkien incorporated several customs of the Medieval Ages and literary devices of Epic poetry into his work (weregild is actually name-dropped by Boromir in FotR). I am curious if anyone else saw the correlation.

Courtly love, in the medieval literary sense, is guilty love: Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and Guinevere, the Breton Bisclavret, Le Roman du Châtelain de Coucy et de la Dame de Fayel, and even Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio's Decameron, all deal with adulterous or illicit love. Tolkien does not condone such unions and the Eldar/Edain courtships are not at all in the style of medieval courtly love.

You will find more detail from epics of the early Middle Ages present in Tolkien's work, as opposed to the high Middle Ages when courtly love was in fashion. Weregild, for instance, is mentioned in Beowulf, and Isildur refers to the One Ring as "weregild" in payment for the death of his father, Elendil. So too, the naming conventions for many of the Dwarves (and Gandalf) come from the Völuspá, and many of the plot points in the story of Turin Turambar were derived from the Kalevela, both drawn, like Beowulf, from oral tradition that came from the early Middle Ages, or perhaps predates it altogether.

One might as well throw in other literary works such as the Old Testament, the Welsh Mabinogion, Plato's Dialogues, and the Icelandic Eddas and the Volsunga Saga, as far as veins of literature that Tolkien mined.