Английская Википедия: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
An English 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.Шаблон:Sfn 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:Шаблон:Sfn
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.Шаблон:Sfn Others have noted easily perceived aspects such as the homely names of public houses like The Green Dragon.Шаблон:SfnШаблон:SfnШаблон:Sfn Tolkien stated that he grew up "in "the Shire" in a pre-mechanical age".[1]
| 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, JutesШаблон:Efn |
| Legendary founders named "horse"Шаблон:Efn |
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, ShirriffsШаблон:Efn | 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"
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.Шаблон:SfnШаблон:Sfn[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.Шаблон:Sfn
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.Шаблон:Sfn
| 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" |
Industrialised England
England appears in its industrialised state as Isengard and Mordor.Шаблон:Sfn 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;[2]Шаблон:Sfn 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".Шаблон:Sfn
Anglo-Saxon England
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.Шаблон:SfnШаблон:SfnШаблон:Sfn[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.Шаблон:Sfn
Englishness
Hobbits
Englishness appears in the words and behaviour of the hobbits, throughout both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.Шаблон:Sfn Shippey writes that from the first page of The Hobbit, "the Bagginses at least were English by temperament and turn of phrase".Шаблон:Sfn Burns states thatШаблон:Sfn
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."Шаблон:Sfn 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.Шаблон:Sfn
'English' characters
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.Шаблон:Sfn 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".Шаблон:Sfn Théoden's name is a direct transliteration of Old English þēoden, meaning "king, prince";[3][4] he welcomes Merry, a Hobbit from the Shire, with warmth and friendship.Шаблон:Sfn 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:Шаблон:Sfn[5]
Shakespearean plot elements
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.Шаблон:Sfn 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.Шаблон:Sfn 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").Шаблон:Sfn
| 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
Dedicated "to my country"
Jane Chance's 1979 book Tolkien's Art: 'A Mythology for England' Шаблон:Sfn 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).Шаблон:SfnШаблон:Sfn 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.Шаблон:Sfn Tolkien wrote in a letter:[T 6]Шаблон:Sfn
Drout comments that scholars broadly agree that Tolkien "succeeded in this project".Шаблон:Sfn 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.Шаблон:Sfn
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.Шаблон:Sfn
| 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 HobbitsШаблон:Sfn |
| 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
Tolkien recognised that any actual English mythology, which he presumed existed by analogy with Norse mythology, and given 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.Шаблон:Sfn[6] Drout analyses in detail and then summarises the imagined prehistory:
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.[7]
Old English heroes, races, and monsters
Tolkien saw that hardly anything was left of English mythology, so he looked to Norse and other mythologies for guidance.Шаблон:Sfn Tolkien found hints in Beowulf, which he much admired,Шаблон:Sfn 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.Шаблон:Sfn 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.Шаблон:Sfn Shippey comments that
Carl Hostetter comments that all the same,
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".Шаблон:Sfn Tolkien expended considerable effort on his Old English character Ælfwine, whom he employed as a framing device in his The Book of Lost Tales;Шаблон:Sfn he used a character of the same name in his abandoned time travel novel The Lost Road.[8]
A reflection of 20th century England
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".Шаблон:Sfn 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".Шаблон:Sfn[T 7] He was speaking about Beowulf; she applies his words to his own writings, that his mythology was meant to provideШаблон:Sfn
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:Шаблон:Sfn
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".Шаблон:Sfn She states that the main function of a mythology is "to mirror a culture to itself".Шаблон:Sfn 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".Шаблон:Sfn 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.Шаблон:Sfn
A mythology for Britain, or Europe
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.Шаблон:Sfn
Notes
References
Primary
Secondary
Sources
- Шаблон:Cite book
- Шаблон:Cite book
- Шаблон:ME-ref
- Шаблон:ME-ref
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- Шаблон:Cite web Also published in A Tolkien Compass (1975) and The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion (2005).
- Шаблон:Cite book
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Шаблон:Middle-earth Шаблон:Lord of the Rings
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