Tolkein's Sources

Abstract

Although it is nearly forty years since the first issue of 'The Hobbit' by J. R. R. Tolkien then an Oxford professor and now a household name, it is perhaps only in 1976 - more than two years after his death - that there is likely to be any considerable public desire for accurate information as to the sources of that "children's book", or its vast sequel, 'The Lord of the Rings' (1954-55). Apart from the violently antipathetic critic, Edmund Wilson, most readers whether friendly or hostile, have been happy to accept that most of the names (Gandalf, Theoden, Shelob); the common nouns in Rohan, the territory of the horse-lords (edoras, Brego, Mark, Helm); and the obvious folkloristic elements, had their origin or analogues in scholarship of the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages in Germanic and Western European languages, literatures and beliefs. In a review of 1937, Richard Hughes was unsure as to the classification of 'The Hobbit', since it difficult to determine the age groups to which it would appeal, and he hat Tolkien was "so saturated in his life-study that it waters his imagination with living springs'. He also held that the book was 'Nordic mythology' rewritten by a man who 'contributes to it as first hand' (New Statesman and Nation, December 4, 1973). The truth of the matter is, of course, that Tolkien in all his writings about Middle-earth achieved a vast construct with a kind of echoeing depth, with elements of Welsh, Norse, Gaelic Scandinavian and Germanic folklore, wherein we hear echoes of Snorri Sturluson and 'Beowulf' of the sagas and of the 'Nibelungenlied', but all civilised by the gentler spirit of Modern (Christian and Edwardian) England. That many readers did not bother about identification of the source is less reprehensible since initially they had seized on the real situations and the important mythic or cosmic dimension to so many of the quests, encounters and final victories.