How J.R.R. Tolkien's novels were inspired by Medieval poems of 'northern bravery'
Tolkien flipped to a blank page on a student essay and scribbled, “in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”.
- Tolkien flipped to a blank page on a student essay and scribbled, “in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”.
- From this doodle Tolkien went on to write one of the world’s most popular fantasy adventure series, The Lord of the Rings (1954).
- His main work, however, was not as the writer of fantasies that made him so famous.
- This can be seen in his love of fairy tales and in his drawings, which are almost all natural landscapes, with little architecture.
A mythology for England
- Tolkien’s biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, argues that he was attempting to create “a mythology for England” through his fantasy fiction, by creating an imaginary world with its own languages, history, cultures and people.
- He wanted to dedicate it “simply: to England: to my country”.
‘Northern courage’
- Tolkien termed this kind of response to challenge “northern courage” in his 1936 essay, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.
- It was “northern” because this type of courage is highly prevalent in the Old Norse sagas that Tolkien was so familiar with and which grew out of the northern Scandinavian countries between the 9th and 13th centuries.
Northern courage in Lord of the Rings
- Northern courage is at work in The Lord of the Rings, when Gandalf confronts the Balrog on the bridge of Khazad-Dûm.
- In a different way, the protagonists Bilbo and Frodo Baggins exhibit courage as they leave the comforts of the Shire to fulfil a greater heroic duty.
- All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” The wizard’s words here are steeped in northern courage.
- What makes Tolkien’s fantastical world so appealing is the recurrent suggestion that the courage manifested to defeat the big monsters in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is the very same courage that can be found in hopeless situations of a more ordinary sort.