|
It seems that everything Tolkien wrote about came from some aspect of his professional life. He was unavoidably knowledgeable of the primitive peoples that had existed in the lands where the Germanic peoples lived that he spent most of his time studying. Whereas the Druedain do not directly resemble, say, Picts, or Basques, et cetera, there is a certain recognizability in them to such folk from our own past. There is the animistic element, though Tolkien has cleaned that up and removed from it any "witch doctor" connotations.
The Druedain seem to be depicted more or less after the fashion of primitive peoples with which we are familiar from our own studies of not so far distant history, such as the Aborigines of Australia, the Native Americans, and the natives of the Amazon as well. But their moral character seems a cut above. Which is interesting. I suppose Native Americans probably would have had an implacable hatred of Orcs; after all, they had an implacable hatred for what the European settlers did to their sacred lands....
|