Very interesting topic, as usual!
Well, I naturally tend to think of Tolkien's Middle-earth whenever I read anything with a medieval setting. I've been reading Bernard Cornwell's
The Last Kingdom, which definitely reminds me of Tolkien's works because it's English history: the invasion of the Danes. It's always striking to read nitty-gritty novels like this one and be thinking of Middle-earth because of the great contrast. In some ways, it's like entering in the same world, but then you hit a wall of...well, all the nasty stuff that made the Dark Ages the
Dark Ages.
In the thread "
LOTR - classist?"
Selmo mentioned how they thought Tolkien had a "romantic" view of such history (
here). My dad reminded me of this just earlier today, too. He was reading an excerpt from Grimmelshausen's
Simplicissimus, and remarked that "we've lost so much." Meanwhile he's reading about how soldiers brutally tortured and murdered peasants and ransacked towns during the Thirty Years' War. I think Tolkien was quite like this, in some ways. He harkened back to days that, now that they are long, long,
long passed, can be seen as glorious. But it takes drawing a line between good and evil, light and dark for it to be viewed that way, and that's just what Tolkien does in LotR (and many people who call themselves "historians" do in their interpretations of history).
The stories of Middle-earth are "romantic," and in some ways actually "romantic" in the sense of 18th century Romanticism. So when I read about the Danes and think of the Rohirrim, though it's such an obvious connection it still leaves me shocked. Practically all the Free Peoples are so pure in my mind because of Tolkien's presentation of the black and the white (in the big picture; there's plenty of grey if you look more closely).
The other thing I was considering while looking over parts of Ovid's
Metamorphoses for my Latin exam was the conflict between immortals and mortals found throughout myth. Relationships between mortals and immortals, and the constant difficulty of differentiating between gods, lesser gods, demi-gods, and other mystical creatures like nymphs and such. Elves are in conflict with Men and Dwarves (Hobbits they don't really notice, of course) constantly. Elves are seen and often even portrayed as superior. Simple Hobbits like Sam seem to look at them as practically "gods." And of course there's the issues surrounding immortal-mortal relationships. What is a child who is produced from such a union? In myths we have half-gods who can visit Olympus pretty much as much as any regular god, we have half-gods that are mostly portrayed as superhuman, and then there are more spirit-like creatures, more a part of nature...etc. In ME, mortal or immortal seems to be their choice, and they cannot escape the title "Half-Elven."
Tolkien's works are really like classic storytelling, like a myth that was spoken orally written down with more flowery language that looks better printed on a page, but without that first step, and without the passing down of generations. So, I think there are innumerable parallels to be drawn...and so this topic should have more replies.
