Quote:
Originally Posted by Idril
My actual question which I failed to communicate: Is the love between female Eldar and male Edain an example of courtly love? Tolkien incorporated several customs of the Medieval Ages and literary devices of Epic poetry into his work (weregild is actually name-dropped by Boromir in FotR). I am curious if anyone else saw the correlation.
|
Courtly love, in the medieval literary sense, is guilty love:
Tristan and Isolde,
Lancelot and Guinevere, the Breton
Bisclavret,
Le Roman du Châtelain de Coucy et de la Dame de Fayel, and even Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio's
Decameron, all deal with adulterous or illicit love. Tolkien does not condone such unions and the Eldar/Edain courtships are not at all in the style of medieval courtly love.
You will find more detail from epics of the early Middle Ages present in Tolkien's work, as opposed to the high Middle Ages when courtly love was in fashion. Weregild, for instance, is mentioned in
Beowulf, and Isildur refers to the One Ring as "weregild" in payment for the death of his father, Elendil. So too, the naming conventions for many of the Dwarves (and Gandalf) come from the
Völuspá, and many of the plot points in the story of Turin Turambar were derived from the
Kalevela, both drawn, like
Beowulf, from oral tradition that came from the early Middle Ages, or perhaps predates it altogether.
One might as well throw in other literary works such as the
Old Testament, the Welsh
Mabinogion, Plato's
Dialogues, and the Icelandic
Eddas and the
Volsunga Saga, as far as veins of literature that Tolkien mined.