England in Middle-earth

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England and Englishness are represented in multiple forms within J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth writings; it appears, more or less thinly disguised, in the form of the Shire and the lands close to it; in kindly characters such as Treebeard, Faramir, and Théoden; in its industrialised state as Isengard and Mordor; and as Anglo-Saxon England in Rohan. Lastly, and most pervasively, Englishness appears in the words and behaviour of the hobbits, both in The Hobbit and in The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien has often been supposed to have spoken of wishing to create "a mythology for England"; though it seems he never used the actual phrase, various commentators have found it appropriate as a description of much of his approach in creating Middle-earth, and the legendarium that lies behind The Silmarillion. His desire to create a national mythology echoed similar attempts in countries across Europe, especially Elias Lönnrot's creation of the Kalevala in Finland.

England[edit]

An English Shire[edit]

Further information: The Shire and The Scouring of the Shire
Sketch map of the Shire

England and Englishness appear in Middle-earth, more or less thinly disguised, in the form of the Shire and the lands close to it, including Bree and Tom Bombadil's domain of the Old Forest and the Barrow-downs.[1] In England, a shire is a rural administrative region, a county. Brian Rosebury likens the Shire to Tolkien's childhood home in Worcestershire in England's West Midlands in the 1890s:[2]

Sarehole, with its nearby farms, its mill by the riverside, its willow-trees, its pool with swans, its dell with blackberries, was a serene quasi-rural enclave, an obvious model-to-be for ... Hobbiton and the Shire.[2]

The Shire is described by Tom Shippey as a calque upon England, a systematic construction mapping the origin of the people, its three original tribes, its two legendary founders, its organisation, its surnames, and its placenames.[3] Others have noted easily perceived aspects such as the homely names of public houses like The Green Dragon.[4][5][6] Tolkien stated that he grew up "in 'the Shire' in a pre-mechanical age".[7]

Tom Shippey's analysis of Tolkien's calque of the Shire upon England[3]
Element The Shire England
Origin of people The Angle between the Rivers Hoarwell (Mitheithel) and the Loudwater (Bruinen) from the East (across Eriador)
The Angle between Flensburg Fjord and the Schlei, from the East (across the North Sea), hence the name "England"
Original three tribes Stoors, Harfoots, Fallohides Angles, Saxons, Jutes[a]
Legendary founders
named "horse"[b]		 Marcho and Blanco Hengest and Horsa
Length of civil peace 272 years from Battle of Greenfields
to Battle of Bywater		 270 years from Battle of Sedgemoor
to publication of Lord of the Rings
Organisation Mayors, moots, Shirriffs[c] like "an old-fashioned and idealised England"
Surnames e.g. Banks, Boffin, Bolger, Bracegirdle, Brandybuck, Brockhouse, Chubb, Cotton, Fairbairns, Grubb, Hayward, Hornblower, Noakes, Proudfoot, Took, Underhill, Whitfoot All are real English surnames. Tolkien comments e.g. that "Bracegirdle" is "used in the text, of course, with reference to the hobbit tendency to be fat and so to strain their belts".[T 1]
Placenames e.g. "Nobottle"
e.g. "Buckland"		 Nobottle, Northamptonshire
Buckland, Oxfordshire

The vanishing "Little Kingdom"[edit]

Both the Shire and Bree have comfortable English-style public houses that serve beer. The medieval Cott Inn, Devon, is pictured.

Bree and Bombadil are still, in Shippey's words, in "The Little Kingdom", if not quite in the Shire. Bree is similar to the Shire, with its hobbit residents and the welcoming Prancing Pony inn. Bombadil represents the spirit of place of the Oxfordshire and Berkshire countryside, which Tolkien felt was vanishing.[10][1][T 2]

Shippey analyses how Tolkien's careful account in The Lord of the Rings of the land in the angle between two rivers, the Hoarwell and the Loudwater, matches the Angle between the Flensburg Fjord and the River Schlei, the legendary origin of the Angles, one of the three tribes who founded England.[11]

Lothlórien, too, carries overtones of a perfect, timeless England; Shippey notes how the hobbits feel they have stepped "over a bridge in time" as they cross yet another pair of rivers to enter Lothlórien.[11]

Tom Shippey's analysis of Tolkien's river angles[11]
Rivers Place Peoples Time
Flensburg Fjord, Schlei Germany The forefathers of the English Long ago, before England was founded
Hoarwell, Loudwater Eriador The forefathers of the Hobbits Long ago, before the Shire was founded
Nimrodel, Silverlode Lothlórien The Elves, as they used to be Long ago, in "the Elder Days ... in a world that was no more"
Mines, ironworks, smoke, and spoil heaps: the Black Country, near Tolkien's childhood home, has been suggested as an influence on his vision of Mordor.[12]

Industrialised England[edit]

Further information: Mordor

England appears in its industrialised state as Isengard and Mordor.[1] In particular, it has been suggested that the industrialized area called "the Black Country" near J. R. R. Tolkien's childhood home inspired his vision of Mordor;[12][13] the name "Mordor" meant "Black Land" in Tolkien's invented language of Sindarin, and "Land of Shadow" in Quenya.[T 3] Shippey further links the fallen wizard Saruman and his industrial Isengard to "Tolkien's own childhood image of industrial ugliness ... Sarehole Mill, with its literally bone-grinding owner".[14]

Anglo-Saxon England[edit]

A reconstructed Viking Age longhouse similar to Beowulf's Heorot
Further information: Rohan (Middle-earth) and Beowulf in Middle-earth

Anglo-Saxon England appears, modified by the people's extensive use of horses in battle, in the land of Rohan. The names of the Rohirrim, the Riders of Rohan, are straightforwardly Old English, as are the terms they use and their placenames: Théoden means "king" in Old English; Éored means "troop of cavalry" and Éomer is "horse-famous", both related to Éoh, "horse"; Eorlingas means "sons of Eorl"; the name of his throne-hall is Meduseld, which means "mead-hall". The chapter "The King of the Golden Hall" is constructed to match the passage in the Old English poem Beowulf where the hero approaches the court of Heorot and is challenged by different guards along the way, and many of the names used come directly from there.[15][16][17][T 4] The name of the Riders' land, the Mark, is Tolkien's reconstruction of the Germanic word from which the Latinised name "Mercia", applied to the central kingdom of Anglo-Saxon England and the region where Tolkien grew up, derives.[18]

Englishness[edit]

Hobbits[edit]

Englishness appears in the words and behaviour of the hobbits, throughout both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.[19] Shippey writes that from the first page of The Hobbit, "the Bagginses at least were English by temperament and turn of phrase".[20] Burns states that[19]

it too lies within the English, in the best of English-kind. It lies in the courage and tenacity Tolkien admired in his fellow countrymen during the First World War; it lies in the English ability to recognize duty and carry resolutely through...

It is the same with the hobbits, who return and rebuild the Shire. Though it is their complacent and comfort-seeking qualities that stand out most consistently, a warrior's courage or an Elf's sensitivity can arise in hobbits as well.[19]

Burns writes that Bilbo Baggins, the eponymous hero of The Hobbit, has acquired or rediscovered "an Englishman's northern roots. He has gained an Anglo-Saxon self-reliance and a Norseman's sense of will, and all of this is kept from excess by a Celtic sensitivity, by a love of earth, of poetry, and of simple song and cheer."[19] She finds a similar balance in the hobbits of The Lord of the Rings, Pippin, Merry, and Sam. Frodo's balance, though, has been destroyed by a quest beyond his strength; he still embodies some of the elements of Englishness, but lacking the simple cheerfulness of the other hobbits because of his other character traits, his Celtic sorrow and Nordic doom.[19]

'English' characters[edit]

Kindly characters such as Treebeard, Faramir, and Théoden exemplify Englishness with their actions and mannerisms. Treebeard's distinctive booming bass voice with his "hrum, hroom" mannerism is indeed said by Tolkien's biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, to be based directly on that of Tolkien's close friend, fellow Oxford University professor and Inkling, C. S. Lewis.[21] Marjorie Burns sees "a Robin Hood touch" in the green-clad Faramir and his men hunting the enemy in Ithilien, while in Fangorn forest, she feels that Treebeard's speech "has a comfortable English ring".[1] Théoden's name is a direct transliteration of Old English þēoden, meaning "king, prince";[22][23] he welcomes Merry, a Hobbit from the Shire, with warmth and friendship.[24] Garry O'Connor adds that there is a striking resemblance between the wizard Gandalf, the English actor Ian McKellen who plays Gandalf in Peter Jackson's Middle-earth films, and, based on Humphrey Carpenter's biographical account, of another Englishman, Tolkien himself:[25][26]

He has a strange voice, deep but without resonance, entirely English but with some quality in it that I cannot define, as if he had come from another age or civilization. Yet for much of the time he does not speak clearly. Words come out in eager rushes ... He speaks in complex sentences ...[27]

Shakespearean plot elements[edit]

Further information: Shakespeare's influence on Tolkien

Shippey suggests that Tolkien cautiously respected the English playwright William Shakespeare, and that he appears to have felt some kind of fellow-feeling with him, given that they were both from the county of Warwickshire in the English midlands, where Tolkien had passed his happiest childhood years.[28] Some of the plot elements in The Lord of the Rings resemble Shakespeare's, notably in Macbeth. Tolkien's use of walking trees, the Huorns, to destroy the Orc-horde at the Battle of Helm's Deep carries a definite echo of the coming of Birnam Wood to Dunsinane Hill, though Tolkien admits the mythic nature of the event where Shakespeare denies it.[28] Glorfindel's prophecy that the Lord of the Nazgûl would not die at the hand of any man directly reflects the Macbeth prophecy; commentators have found Tolkien's solution – he is killed by a woman and a hobbit in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields – more satisfying than Shakespeare's (a man brought into the world by Caesarean section, so not exactly "born").[28]

Tom Shippey's analysis of Shakespearean prophecy in The Lord of the Rings and Macbeth[28]
Plot element Work Prophecy Events Explanation
A forest seems to move The Lord of the Rings (unexpected) Walking trees (Huorns) destroy Orc-horde at Battle of Helm's Deep Mythic
Macbeth Birnam Wood shall come to Dunsinane Hill Macduff's men cut branches, carry them to Dunsinane Ordinary
A villain seems to be protected The Lord of the Rings Not by the hand of Man will he fall A woman, Éowyn, and a Hobbit, Merry, kill the Lord of the Nazgûl; Merry's sword was made exactly for this purpose[T 5] Mythic
Macbeth None of woman born shall harm Macbeth Macduff, delivered by Caesarean section so not strictly "born", kills Macbeth Ordinary

A mythology for England[edit]

Dedicated "to my country"[edit]

Tolkien would have liked to emulate Elias Lönnrot, who travelled Finland recording oral folklore.[29] 1912 sketch for a mural, Lönnrot and the Rune Singers, by Akseli Gallen-Kallela

Jane Chance's 1979 book Tolkien's Art: 'A Mythology for England' [30] introduced the idea that Tolkien's Middle-earth writings were intended to form "a mythology for England". The concept was reinforced in Tolkien scholarship by Shippey's The Road to Middle-earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology (1982, revised 2005).[31][32] In his 2004 chapter "A Mythology for Anglo-Saxon England", Michael Drout demonstrates that Tolkien never used the actual phrase, even though commentators nonetheless have found it appropriate as a description of much of his approach in creating Middle-earth.[33] Tolkien wrote in a letter:[T 6][34]

I had a mind to make 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 could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. ... I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.

— Letter #131 to Milton Waldman (at Collins), late 1951

Drout comments that scholars broadly agree that Tolkien "succeeded in this project".[33] Carl F. Hostetter and Arden R. Smith state that Tolkien created the mythology initially as a home for his invented languages, discovering as he did so that he wanted to make a properly English epic, spanning England's geography, language, and mythology.[35]

Dimitra Fimi writes that the desire to create a national mythology was not unique to Tolkien. Attempts, sometimes fraudulent, with varying degrees of success, had been made in Denmark, Finland, Germany, Scotland, and Wales in the 18th and 19th centuries.[36]

Dimitra Fimi's analysis of attempts to create national mythologies across Europe[36]
Nation Date Author Method, materials used Goal, work created Notes
Denmark 1808 on Nikolai & Sven Gruntvig Heroic poetry, ballads Northern Mythology Some success, useful for national identity
England 1914 on J. R. R. Tolkien Gather scraps of evidence, write layered documents Tolkien's legendarium Successfully re-released
"Elves, Orcs, Ents, ... Woses ...
into the popular imagination"
alongside Trolls; added Hobbits[37]
Finland 1835 Elias Lönnrot Tour country, gather mass of folk poems Kalevala Success, new national tradition;
Influential on Tolkien
Germany 1812 on Brothers Grimm Collect mass of fairy tales Mythology, legends Inconclusive
Scotland 1760 James Macpherson Publish poem "translated" from Gaelic manuscripts Cycle of poems by "Ossian" Considered fraudulent;
manuscripts never shown to exist
Wales 1789 on Iolo Morganwg Try to recreate ancient bardic tradition
Publish poems claimed to be from medieval manuscripts;
Claim national Eisteddfod derived from ancient Gorsedd		 Welsh Triads Considered fraudulent

A reconstructed prehistory[edit]

Further information: Ælfwine (Tolkien)

Tolkien recognised that any actual English mythology, which he presumed, by analogy with Norse mythology and the clues that remain, to have existed until Anglo-Saxon times, had been extinguished. Tolkien decided to reconstruct such a mythology, accompanied to some extent by an imagined prehistory or pseudohistory of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes before they migrated to England.[33][38] Drout analyses in detail and then summarises the imagined prehistory:

The brothers Hengest and Horsa are the legendary founders of England. Illustration from Edward Parrott's 1909 Pageant of British History

The original settlers of Anglo-Saxon England were the sons and descendants of Ælfwine, the Elf-friend who had sailed across the sea to the Holy Isle of the Elves. The prehistory of the descendants of Ælfwine was Tolkien's invented mythology of Arda, but it also included the story of Beowulf, a depiction of the exploits of some others of their ancestors. The early history of Anglo-Saxon England was generated when the half-brothers of Heorrenda, Hengest and Horsa, led the migration of the Jutes from the continent to England. Heorrenda himself composed Beowulf and compiled the legends of Arda in the Golden Book of Heorrenda. Hengest is a character in Beowulf and in Finnsburg. The hero of Beowulf is a Geat, which equals a Goth, one of the continental ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons... It all fits nicely together even though it is probably not true (and Tolkien knew this).[33]

Nicholas Birns argues that Tolkien's work on the Finn and Hengest story combines aspects of his conjectural research into English origins and mythological arguments made in his legendarium. He chose to take the key word eotenas to mean "Jutes", not "monsters", allowing him to explore making Hengest into a kind of national hero of England.[39]

Old English heroes, races, and monsters[edit]

Further information: Philology and Middle-earth § Inventing a mythology
The Old English poem Beowulf's eotenas [ond] ylfe [ond] orcneas, "ogres [and] elves [and] devil-corpses", inspired Tolkien to create ents, elves, orcs, and other races for his mythology for England.[37]

Tolkien saw that hardly anything was left of English mythology, so he looked to Norse and other mythologies for guidance.[37] Tolkien found hints in Beowulf, which he much admired,[35] and other Old English sources. Old English texts gave him his ettens (as in the Ettenmoors) and ents, his elves, and his orcs; his "warg" is a cross between Old Norse vargr and Old English wearh.[40] He took his woses or wood-woses (the Drúedain) from the seeming plural wodwos in the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, line 721; that comes in turn from Old English wudu-wasa, a singular noun.[41] Shippey comments that

As for creating a "Mythology for England", one certain fact is that the Old English notions of Elves, Orcs, Ents, Ettens and Woses have through Tolkien been re-released into the popular imagination to join the much more familiar Dwarves ..., Trolls, ... and the wholly-invented Hobbits."[37]

Carl Hostetter comments that all the same,

even Beowulf fails to meet Tolkien's criteria for a truly English epic, for though it was composed in Old English, and makes a new and characteristically English use of Germanic mythological elements, nevertheless no part of it is set in England; and so though the poem moves beneath northern skies, those skies are nevertheless not English."[35]

Hostetter notes that Eärendil, the mariner who ends up steering his ship across the heavens, shining as a star, was the first element of English mythology that Tolkien took into his own mythology. He was inspired by the Earendel passage in the Old English poem Crist I lines 104–108 which begins "Eala Earendel, engla beorhtast", "O rising light, brightest of angels".[35] Tolkien expended considerable effort on his Old English character Ælfwine, whom he employed as a framing device in his The Book of Lost Tales;[35] he used a character of the same name in his abandoned time travel novel The Lost Road.[42]

A reflection of 20th century England[edit]

Verlyn Flieger writes that "the Silmarillion legendarium" is both a monument to his imagination and as close as anyone has come "to a mythology that might be called English".[43] She cites Tolkien's words in The Monsters and the Critics that it is "by a learned man writing of old times, who looking back on the heroism and sorrow feels in them something permanent and something symbolical".[43][T 7] He was speaking about Beowulf; she applies his words to his own writings, that his mythology was meant to provide[43]

the illusion of surveying a past, pagan but noble and fraught with deep significance—a past that itself had depth and reached backward into a dark antiquity of sorrow".[T 8]

Flieger comments that "Tolkien's great mythological song" was conceived as the First World War was changing England for ever; that it grew and took shape in a second era between the wars; and that in the form of The Lord of the Rings found an audience in yet a third era, the Cold War. She writes:[43]

If Tolkien's legendarium as we have it now is a mythology for England, it is a song about great power and promise in the throes of decline, racked by dissensions, split by factions, perpetually threatened by war, and perpetually at war with itself.[43]

In her view, this is nearer to the vision of George Orwell's 1984 than to the "furry-footed escapist fantasy that detractors of The Lord of the Rings have characterized that work as being".[43] She states that the main function of a mythology is "to mirror a culture to itself".[43] She follows this up by asking what the worldview encapsulated in this mythology might be. She notes that Middle-earth is influenced by existing mythologies; and that Tolkien stated that The Lord of the Rings was fundamentally Catholic. All the same, she writes, his mythos is fundamentally unlike Christianity, being "far darker"; the world is saved not by a god's sacrifice but by Eärendil and by Frodo, in a world where "enterprise and creativity [have] gone disastrously wrong".[43] If this is a mythology for England, she concludes, it is a caution not to try to hold on to anything, as it cannot offer salvation; Frodo was unable to let go of the One Ring, and Fëanor could not with the Silmarils. A shell-shocked England, like a battle-traumatised Frodo, did not know how to let go of empire in a changed world; the advice is, she writes, sound, but as hard for nations to take as for individuals.[43]

A mythology for Britain, or Europe[edit]

Further information: Tolkien's frame stories and Time in J. R. R. Tolkien's fiction

Scholars including Dimitra Fimi have questioned the applicability of the phrase "a mythology for England" to Tolkien's work. She notes that while some of Tolkien's legendarium writings envisaged a frame story about travel backwards in time from modern England, as in the unfinished The Notion Club Papers, The Silmarillion became the ancient history of a region in the north of Europe, far less precisely located. In Fimi's view, Tolkien's enthusiasm for English nationalism had faded by the 1950s. She notes, among other things, that he ended up incorporating the "Celtic" into the legendarium, rather than opposing Englishness with Welshness or Irishness, so he constructed more of a "mythology for Britain" than a purely English one. Further, in her view, Tolkien became increasingly interested in the spiritual aspect of his mythology, such as what happened to the souls of Elves after their deaths: and this "competed for precedence in Tolkien's mind" with the mythology's nationalistic aspect.[36]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ Shippey comments that both nations have forgotten their origins.[8]
  2. ^ Old English: hengest, stallion; hors, horse; *marh, horse, cf "mare"; blanca, white horse in Beowulf[3]
  3. ^ Sheriff, Shirriff is derived from Old English scir-gerefa "Shire-reeve", an officer of the shire.[9]

References[edit]

Primary[edit]

  1. ^ Tolkien 1967
  2. ^ Carpenter 2023, #19 to Stanley Unwin, 16 December 1937
  3. ^ Carpenter 2023, #297 to Mr. Rang, draft, August 1967
  4. ^ Tolkien 1954, book 3 ch. 6 "The King of the Golden Hall"
  5. ^ Tolkien 1955, book 5, ch. 6 "The Battle of the Pelennor Fields": "No other blade, not though mightier hands had wielded it, would have dealt that foe a wound so bitter, cleaving the undead flesh, breaking the spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will."
  6. ^ Carpenter 2023, #131 to Milton Waldman (at Collins), late 1951
  7. ^ Tolkien 1997, p. 26
  8. ^ Tolkien 1997, p. 27

Secondary[edit]

  1. ^ a b c d Burns 2005, pp. 26–29.
  2. ^ a b Rosebury 2003, p. 134.
  3. ^ a b c Shippey 2005, pp. 115–118.
  4. ^ Duriez 1992, pp. 121ff.
  5. ^ Tyler 1976, p. 201.
  6. ^ Rateliff 2009, pp. 11ff.
  7. ^ Carpenter 2023, #213 to Deborah Webster, 25 October 1958
  8. ^ Shippey 2005, p. 116.
  9. ^ "sheriff (n.)". Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 19 May 2021.
  10. ^ Shippey 2005, pp. 111–112, 123.
  11. ^ a b c Shippey 2001, pp. 196–199.
  12. ^ a b Jeffries, Stuart (19 September 2014). "Mordor, he wrote: how the Black Country inspired Tolkien's badlands". The Guardian. Retrieved 19 August 2020.
  13. ^ Baratta 2011, pp. 31–45.
  14. ^ Shippey 2005, p. 194.
  15. ^ Shippey 2005, pp. 139–145.
  16. ^ Burns 2005, p. 143.
  17. ^ Solopova 2009, p. 21.
  18. ^ Shippey 2001, pp. 91–92.
  19. ^ a b c d e Burns 2005, pp. 28–29.
  20. ^ Shippey 2005, p. 132.
  21. ^ Carpenter 1977, p. 198.
  22. ^ Wynne, Patrick H. (2006). "Theoden". In Drout, Michael D. C. (ed.). The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia (first ed.). Routledge. p. 643. ISBN 978-0-415-96942-0.
  23. ^ Bosworth, Joseph; Toller, T. Northcote. "þeóden". An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Prague: Charles University.
  24. ^ Chance 1980, pp. 119–122.
  25. ^ O'Connor 2019.
  26. ^ O'Connor, Garry (26 November 2019). "How Ian McKellen Almost Didn't Play Gandalf". LitHub. Retrieved 1 May 2021.
  27. ^ Carpenter 1977, Part One: A visit. page 13.
  28. ^ a b c d Shippey 2005, pp. 205–209.
  29. ^ Kuusela 2014, pp. 25–36.
  30. ^ Chance 1980, Title page and passim.
  31. ^ Jackson 2015, pp. 22–23.
  32. ^ Shippey 2005, p. 112.
  33. ^ a b c d Drout 2004, pp. 229–247.
  34. ^ Shippey 2005, pp. 345–351.
  35. ^ a b c d e Hostetter & Smith 1996, Article 42.
  36. ^ a b c Fimi 2010, pp. 50–62 "Fairies, folklore, and the 'mythology for England'".
  37. ^ a b c d Shippey 2005, pp. 350–351.
  38. ^ Cook, Simon J. (2014). "J.R.R. Tolkien's Lost English Mythology". RoundedGlobe. Retrieved 2 September 2020.
  39. ^ Birns, Nicholas (2022). "Eotenas and Hobbits: Finn and Hengest, and Tolkien's Speculation About Origins". Journal of Tolkien Research. 14 (1). Article 8.
  40. ^ Shippey 2005, p. 74 footnote.
  41. ^ Shippey 2005, pp. 74 footnote, 149.
  42. ^ Luling, Virginia (2012). "Going back: time travel in Tolkien and E. Nesbit". Mallorn (53 (Spring 2012)): 30–31.
  43. ^ a b c d e f g h i Flieger 2005, pp. 138–142.

Sources[edit]

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