Losing sight of the basics......

[Child of the 7th Age]

Are we losing something which Tolkien considered central to his works?

This is going to be long, so bear with me!

Long ago, when I first explored Tolkien (and also T.H. White), I had an overwhelming sense of coming home to an idealised England, a country with a mythic past richer than my own. As a foot-loose American wanderer and student in the UK, I visited the West Midlands and other haunts that shaped Tolkien's vision. I could list a hundred different examples: spying on hobbit domestic arrangements in the Victoria & Albert Museum, visiting the villages of Oxfordshire and Berkshire which were said to embody Bombadil's spirit, staying with Englsh farm families whose hearts lay deep in the soil, hearing the ancient placenames, and learning of the Anglo-Saxons whose values and language stood close to those of The Mark.

Nowhere in the books did the term "England" appear, yet everywhere I sensed how Tolkien's roots lay deep within the English countryside, and within the language itself. Years later, I read the Silm, HoMe, JRRT's Letters, and Shippey's Road to Middle-earth, and was pleased to learn that my inchoate sense of English identity was not mistaken. Most striking perhaps was Tolkien's early insistence (later dropped) that Elvenhome itself survived as England.

I could cite example after example, but this noted quote from Tolkien best summarizes it:

Also--and here I hope I shall not sound absurd--I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romnce, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff.

.... Do not laugh! But once upon upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to mke a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story--the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths--which I should dedicate simply to England; to my country.

In my mind, this was the single most important motive in JRRT's mind when he began his Legendarium: to restore the lost history of England, traditions first torn away by 1066, surviving only as folk remnent and then sadly obliterated by England's early industrialization. And in Tolkien's mind, this was to be an ancient past freed from the overlay of French, Celtic, and Roman influences.

We talk about a thousand different subjects on the Downs--religious undertones, the movie, European sources, characterization, etc., but rarely has there been much attention paid to the English underpinnings of the Legendarium. There may be several reasons for this. Shippey points out that the English themselves were so divorced from their distant past that the London publishers couldn't even see the parlance and structure of the Silm. owed heavy debts to Anglo-Saxon. Plus, as Tolkien's fan base grows and grows, we bring in so many different cultures and countries. The sense of intimacy with England fades. Finally, we now have people trekking off to New Zealand in order to see and explore the Shire and the rest of Middle-earth!

Am I the only one who's bothered by this?

Do you ever feel the presence of England in the Legendarium? Can you identify specific examples of this in the tales?

Why was England, of all the countries of northern Europe, the one to lose most from its ancient past?

Does Tolkien's supposed motive for composing the Legendarium merit some specal attention and study, or should we simply think of it as so many empty words?

And is anyone out there in the UK peeved to see fans trekking off to gorgeous New Zeeland to visit "Middle-earth"?

P.S. Anyone from New Zeeland, please don't take this personally. The country looks beautiful, and I'd love to visit there, but is this what Tolkien was writing about? Or doesn't it matter?

[ September 30, 2002: Message edited by: Child of the 7th Age ]