[Rumil]

Hi all,

I think Tolkien used different aspects of some familiar dark age and ancient cultures (and legends of those cultures) and rather mixed them up, in a fascinating way of course!
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For example the Rohirrim resemble the Goths in their largely unsettled horse-raising lifestyle (and have more Goth-y names during their early history), the Normans in their military tactics and hardware, but the Anglo-Saxons in their later names (eg. Eomer who was a Saxon assassin).

The elves have languages based on Finnish (Quenya) and Welsh (Sindarin) and are distantly related to the Sidhe of Irish legend. However, they are also great city builders (at least the Noldor) like the Romans etc.

The Numenoreans resemble Egyptians with their whole tomb-obsession thing, the Romans again in their empire-building episodes, the legend of Atlantis in Numenor itself and perhaps the Byzantines by the end of the 3rd age, being the remenants of a once-great empire, though bizarrely Faramir and Boromir's names appear to be Polish in form.

The Dwarves have Viking names (and so, of course, does Gandalf), though these were apparently based on mannish names from the Dale area, as Dwarves keep their real names secret.

The hobbits remind one of rural England, but have some quite advanced technology (clocks, umbrellas, etc.) so seem to belong to the 16th to 18th century perhaps.

So I think Tolkien looked far and wide for his cultural inspirations (Taniquetil sounds Mayan or Aztec or something similar surely?), and they don't necessarily relate to his philological inspirations in every case.

[ September 17, 2003: Message edited by: Rumil ]