Thursday, July 23, 2020

Tolkien’s Mythic Plan for England

From Unherd:
This trick of Tolkien’s, of taking the familiar and making it into the stuff of high fantasy, is one of the subjects explored in considerable depth in John Garth’s The Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien. Given the bewildering array of influences that fed into Tolkien’s work — personal, geographical, historical, linguistic and poetic — it is no mean task to gather up the threads and create a coherent narrative of how different parts of Tolkien’s life and work fed into the creation of what Tolkien eventually called his “legendarium”.

By this he meant not just The Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit, but the entire fictional universe he created which forms the background for those stories. The sheer scale of Tolkien’s creative endeavour is indicated by the fact that after his death, his son and literary executor Christopher published not just The Silmarillion — a sprawling blend of creation story and epic history — but also 12 volumes in a series known as The History Of Middle Earth, based on his father’s notes and unpublished manuscripts, as well as a stand-alone novel, The Children of Hurin.

Garth makes clear that Tolkien’s approach was that of the magpie. Rather than drawing on one particular place or one particular tradition, he drew on all sorts of landscapes and legends. For example, the existence in Middle Earth of a quasi-heavenly enchanted land far across the Western sea – Valinor, the Undying Lands – echoes the beliefs in such places found all across Europe. (Read more.)
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