Mordor inspired by Nazi Germany?

[Gwathagor]

Originally Posted by rorschach

I think that the whole ethos and historical sensibility of the book does point to one period in particular - the lowest point of Saxon fortunes during the Viking invasions in the late 9th century, specifically after the battle of Chippenham (878) where Alfred of Wessex was defeated and his army scattered.

Tolkien WAS a huge Saxon fan, so I find this theory plausible. I doubt there was any direct connection in his imagination, but he was certainly drawing on what he was most familiar with - i.e. Anglo-Saxon history, among other things.

[rorschach]

Thank you both for replying, and I fully agree with 'so far as it goes' Burrahobbit. A work as wide-ranging and complicated as LOTR badly needed a coherent geo-political framework, and it's not surprising that, consciously or unconsciously, JRRT settled on one that so closely matches a historical situation from a period he happened to be a world authority on - so far, so obvious.

A good reason to set out these historical parallels is a continuing sadness (which JRRT surely shared) about how little people know of this history. If you don't know the events of Alfred the Great's reign, please, please do read up on them. This was a key turning point in not just English but world history, and it's also a great STORY. From the despair of defeat to the eventual recovery and victory is an emotional rollercoaster on a par with LOTR itself, and these things actually happened...

A related issue of great interest is the creative process which led to LOTR. Say you decided to write an epic fantasy saga. You want the prevailing mood to be one of a titanic clash of civilisations, with one side apparently doomed to inevitable destruction, and the annihilation of not just the people but their whole history and culture. How would you research the mindset of the outnumbered and threatened side?

From a European perspective you might start with writers from the end of the Western Roman Empire facing barbarian invasion, or perhaps the fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 (which incidently has strong parallels to the mood inside Minas Tirith during the siege). More recently, the impact of european colonial expansion on native cultures was just as catastrophic, but apart from Native American accounts there are few written sources (US readers might be somewhat surprised, not to say offended, to hear the rush to the Pacific Coast so described, but in world-historical terms that's exactly what it was). Finally, and in a category all of it's own (and not available to JRRT) is Holocaust Literature.

JRRT probably didn't do any overt research in this way, but then he didn't have to. Want to know what the end of the World feels like? Try reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles for the 860's and 870's. A lifetime of reading these accounts both professionally and for his own pleasure meant that they could hardly fail to permeate into JRRT's world view. This is the main reason for my view that LOTR could have been written at almost any time after the Victorian Era (when concerns about the effects of industrialisation and the mechanisation of the coutryside were already widely expressed) and the advent of WWII is irrelevant. At any time doesn't mean by anyone however - the perculiar nature of JRRT's genius is what keeps us all reading his astonishing books.

Finally, and in a Loki-like spirit of mischief, I can't resist pointing out the ultimate parallel between Alfredian history and LOTR.

The Ring: something taken into the heart of the enemy's camp, which effectively neutralises the threat from that enemy.
= Christianity itself. The conversion of the Danish commanders after Ashdown as a condition of the Peace Treaty removes the immediate threat to Wessex, allowing time for consolidation and recovery, whilst simultaneously undermining morale and coherence among the Danes.

No wonder Frodo is seen by so many commentators as a Christ-like figure. It's not the Ring he's taking into Mordor, but the Gospel itself, which he delivers to spectacular effect in his own Sermon on the Mount (Doom).

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Gwathagor

Tolkien WAS a huge Saxon fan, so I find this theory plausible. I doubt there was any direct connection in his imagination, but he was certainly drawing on what he was most familiar with - i.e. Anglo-Saxon history, among other things.

Gwath, you've given me a chuckle there. I've got this image now of Tolkien donning a leather biker jacket and headbanging to Wheels Of Steel by Barnsley's finest metal band.

Originally Posted by rorscach

The Baddies: Dark destructive power based in the south and east, determined to destroy the power of Gondor and apparently invincible. = the Danish Vikings who've already destroyed Northumbria and look set to complete the job against Wessex. Utterly evil (i.e. pagan, non-Christian). Centre of power is Mordor =London (note the similarity of the words). Nothing changes, I'm from Yorkshire and I still think of London as the root of all evil. Colour is black = Vikings are commonly associated with this colour, from the black raven standard to the normal dress of Guthrum, the Viking commander at Chippenham.

Well the Vikings were not 'evil' for one, they were a highly advanced culture, and Tolkien was very fond of them, as shown by his love of the Icelandic sagas and all the rest of the mythology and history of that people. I think rather his ire would be against the French to be honest, and if any parallel could be drawn I think he'd pinpoint the destruction of English culture at 1066.

Plus Tolkien's work is packed full of Scandinavian imagery.

I agree about London though. Nice one.

[rorschach]

Actually I think the Mordor/London analogy holds up well in any case. JRRT was unashamedly provincial in outlook, and there's evidence for his distrust of the centralising tendencies of Whitehall bureaucracy, with all that that implied for loss of cultural identity in other regions of England. This fear of being taken over, of being 'swamped' may strike a chord with, for example, the average American or French view of Washington or Paris respectively - part of the reason for LOTR's continuing popularity perhaps?

Were the Danes 'evil'? I don't think so either (and nor did JRRT as you say), but nor were they the cuddly bunnies of modern revisionism. They undoubtedly had a nice line in 'shock and awe' tactics, but then as the old proverb says 'You can't make an omelette without killing several million Russians' .. Their contemporary Christian opponents certainly depicted them as evil - 'The Scourge of God' no less - but then they would, wouldn't they?

It doesn't make any difference to my identification of the historical situation in Alfred's time with the basic geopolitical structure of LOTR. There is no allegory here. LOTR is a fantasy: Gondor is NOT Wessex, Aragorn's story is NOT the same as Alfred the Great's, and as has been forcefully pointed out on other threads Orcs are NOT Vikings.

It seems absurd to accuse JRRT of a lack of imagination, but it's rather unfortunate that he ended up with this particular geography for Middle Earth. He could have placed his 'evil force of destruction' at any point of the compass he chose, but by putting it in the east and south he appears to put LOTR firmly into the whole history of threats to Western European civilisation from that quarter - from the Goths and Huns, Arabs, Mongols, Turks et al right down to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. This has been a gift to allegory-hunters ever since the book was written.

Note that the Silmarillion never seems to get plagued by these kinds of historical analogies, for the good reason that the forces of evil are stuck up in the far north. A Chinese or Indian reader might feel the cultural resonance of a northern invasion (after the Mongol and Mughal invasions respectively), but it's not easy to come up with a european parallel. The clearest ones I can think of - a northern force bringing physical destruction and cultural annihilation to an artistically advanced, culturally, racially and politically diverse south - would be the Albigensian Crusade against southern France in the mid13th century, or it's Iberian contemporary the Reconquista of Christian Spain against the Moors. JRRT would have hated both these comparisons, of course, since they cast Catholic Christianity in the role of Morgoth.

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

As I so often do, I think that some passages from the letters might be helpful here, especially since they support several of the points made above.

Originally Posted by JRRT

The Lord of the Rings was actually begun, as a separate thing, about 1937, and had reached the inn at Bree, before the shadow of the second war. Personally I do not think that either war (and of course not the atomic bomb) had any influence upon either the plot or the manner of its unfolding. Perhaps in landscape. The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme. They owe more to William Morris in his Huns and Romans, as in 'The House of the Wolfings' or 'The Roots of the Mountains'.

Letters no. 226 (31 December 1960)

My problem with allegory, even such a diverting allegory as the Wessex connection, is that it trammels L.R., obscuring its meaning behind false real-world analogies. Allegory has been the great literary disease of the last century, probably because it allows the reader to feel that he has been allowed into a cosy little secret. The vulgar and untutored might see, for example, a simple beast fable about animals running a farm, but of course the educated and superior critic knows that Orwell is talking about the Russian revolution. It allows the reader who possesses a modicum of sense to feel that he has cracked a code and revealed secrets hidden to lesser minds.

This, of course, has presented a lot of problems to authors of fantasy. It's no coincidence that E.R. Eddison's foreword to The Worm Ouroboros begins "It is neither allegory nor fable but a Story to be read for its own sake," while Tolkien's preface to the 1966 second edition of L.R. contains a long rebuttal of its status as an allegory on recent events that already accounts for every fifth word ever posted in this forum. There is, however, a good reason for the determination of their denials: to find allegory in either author's work is to misunderstand fundamentally the nature of the work, and - in Tolkien's case at least - his entire outlook on life, fiction and his country's enemies.

Tolkien made a number of comments on the Second World War in his letters, many of them directly relating to Germany, and his attitude is a telling one. Perhaps, though, it is best to begin with his famous letter to the German publishing house Rütten and Loening Verlag, of 1938.

Originally Posted by JRRT

My great, great grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject - which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort [i.e. whether Tolkien had any Jewish ancestry] are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.

Letters no. 30, 25th July 1938

Tolkien, then, was well-disposed towards Germany as a country, and like any reasonably intelligent person he was able to distinguish between a country and the party that happens to be leading it. It is difficult to imagine someone actually liking Mordor as a place or an idea, at least the parts of it through which Frodo and Sam pass in L.R., because Mordor is almost a physical manifestation of Sauron's will to corrupt and destroy: a land utterly blasted and ruined. On the other hand, some parts of 1940s Germany were really quite nice and remain so.

After five years of destructive warfare, Tolkien's opinion remained basically unchanged. While deploring the excesses and methods of the axis powers, he continued to detest the individuals responsible for them, not the entire nation.

Originally Posted by JRRT

Urukhai is only a figure of speech. There are no genuine Uruks, that is folk made bad by the intention of their maker; and not many who are so corrupted as to be irredeemable (though I fear it must be admitted that there are human creatures that seem irredeemable short of a special miracle, and that there are probably abnormally many of such creatures in Deutschland and Nippon - but certainly these unhappy countries have no monopoly: I have met them, or thought so, in England's green and pleasant land).

Letters no. 78 (12 August 1944)

Tolkien's distaste for jingoism is again apparent in a letter of 1944.

Originally Posted by JRRT

We knew Hitler was a vulgar and ignorant little cad, in addition to any other defects (or the source of them); but there seem to be many v. and i. l. cads who don't speak German, and who given the same chance would show most of the other Hitlerian characteristics. There was a solemn article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don't know the difference between good and evil! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done. Of course there is still a difference here. The article was answered and the answer printed. The Vulgar and Ignorant Cad is not yet a boss with power; but he is a very great deal closer to becoming one in this green and pleasant isle than he was.

Letters no. 81 (23-25th September 1944)

As the fall of Berlin neared, with Russian tanks sixty miles from the city, Tolkien was again disgusted with the bloodthirsty popular opinion in his own country.

Originally Posted by JRRT

Yet people gloat to hear of the endless lines, 40 miles long, of miserable refugees, women and children pouring West, dying on the way. There seem no bowels of mercy or compassion, no imagination left in this dark diabolic hour. By which I do not mean that it may not all, in the present situation, mainly (not solely) created by Germany, be necessary and inevitable. But why gloat! We were supposed to have reached a stage of civilisation in which it might still be necessary to execute a criminal, but not to gloat, or to hang his wife and child by him while the orc-crowd hooted. The destruction of Germany, be it 100 times merited, is one of the most appalling world-catastrophes.

Letters no. 96 (30th Jan. 1945)

This is scarcely the sort of language that one would expect Tolkien to use about the fall of Mordor, particularly since he doesn't. This is because although in his books the antagonist is virtually a personification of evil, Tolkien lived in the real world, and people are not like that. Hitler, for example, as well as inspiring and ordering the deaths of millions, plunging the world into a brutally destructive war and utterly wrecking Germany, was a dog-loving, vegetarian teetotaller and decorated war hero, who might have led quite an unremarkable life had he not entered politics. Tolkien appears to have regarded him with contempt; not the awe that Sauron inspires.

Basically, then, not only was Tolkien too subtle a writer to hammer home points about contemporary politics in the form of a rather clumsy allegory, but the very points which he is often supposed to have been making do not support his own expressed opinions. This is why he devoted so many words to refuting the World War II allegory: because it presented to the world an utterly false view of his views and (more importantly in his eyes) the character of his work.

Now for some fun.

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

I think the only aspect of LotR that you could argue was influenced directly by WWII was the creation of the Fell Beasts (good call, Rumil). I believe there is something in one of the letters about this, about how Tolkien was horrified by airborne warfare - and I understand he was not wholly happy about Christopher being an RAF man, either.

I found that one too.

Originally Posted by JRRT

It would not be easy for me to express to you my loathing for the Third Service - which can be nonetheless, and is for me, combined with admiration, gratitude and above all pity for the young men caught in it. But it is the aeroplane of war that is the real villain. And nothing can really amend my grief that you, my best beloved, have any connexion with it. My sentiments are more or less those that Frodo would have had if he discovered some Hobbits learning to ride Nazgûl-birds, 'for the liberation of the Shire'. Though in this case, as I know nothing about British or American imperialism in the Far East that does not fill me with regret and disgust, I am afraid I am not even supported by a glimmer of patriotism in this remaining war. [The war in the Far East, which continued until August 1945]

Letters no. 100 (29th May 1945)

I was also interested in rorschach's points about the geographical location of Mordor. There is actually a parallel that is both medieval and Christian, and which supports Tolkien's assertion that the south-eastern siting of the Black Land was a geographical necessity. As John F. Vickrey points out in 'The Vision of Eve in Genesis B' (Speculum 44 (1969)), in the Anglo-Saxon poem Christ III, the appearance of Christ on judgement day is to be from the south-east (ll. 899-904), and the poem follows numerous literary parallels that associate God with the south-east and the devil with the north-west (this could be the reason for Tolkien's placement of Morgoth's great fastnesses in northern regions). In Lactantius's Divinae Institutiones, II, 9, God is also associated with the east and south, in this case at the creation. Vickrey follows Thomas Hill in tracing these associations to St. Jerome's commentary on Zacharias xiv 4-5.

Tolkien would have been familiar at the very least with the advent of Christ in Christ III and may have read any number of works by St. Jerome, so it may be that he was aware of this, which supports his contention that if one sets one's action in the north-west of the known world (the region occupied by Anglo-Saxon England), one cannot avoid having one's main antagonists attack from south and east. If I were given to the seeking of allegory, I might suggest that it was, in fact, deliberate, and that Tolkien was upset with God during the entire writing of L.R., but of course that would be ridiculous.

[Nogrod]

Originally Posted by The Squatter of Amon Rûdh

I was also interested in rorschach's points about the geographical location of Mordor. There is actually a parallel that is both medieval and Christian, and which supports Tolkien's assertion that the south-eastern siting of the Black Land was a geographical necessity.

Looking at the European civilisations it's pretty easy to see that the threats came (come!!!) from east and south whether they were (are) persians, carthagenians, huns, slavs, ottomans, arabs...

It's the basic story of the West. And wasn't Tolkien writing a mythology eg. the "basic story"?

[Morthoron]

I don't think Tolkien's story is at all analogous with specific eras of real history. For every comparative point to real events and his chronology, there are wholly divergent themes occurring simultaneously with those that many commentators claim as allegorical.

It is better to say that the compendium is a masterful amalgam of Tolkien's studies and interest, a synthesis linguistic in intent, that covers a wide spectrum of biblical and mythological allusions (Antedeluvian, Atalantan, Miltonian, Finnish, Icelandic, Graeco-Roman, Anglo-Saxon, etc.), and is both anachronistic and archaic simultaneously. How else can one explain the advent of gunpowder in the West occurring simultaneously with an almost total reliance on chain mail (with only a single mention of a crossbow or arbelist-like weapon), and the mentions of clocks, newspapers, new world imports and trains in a 16th or 17th century squirearchy in the Shire alongside a pre-feudal kingship such as in Rohan?

Tolkien's vast conglomeration defies allegorical interpretation unless one wishes to parse out the prose into tiny bits. Reading Tolkien's letters, it is clear that even he was often mystified by his own work, saying one thing imperatively early on, then drastically changing his view decades later. He even plops in a character like Tom Bombadil, who any rational reader can plainly see does not fit neatly into any Middle-earth categorization whatsoever, but is placed there because Tolkien liked the character and felt his presence was important (cosmological questions be damned).

One can no more equate Alfredian Wessex with the story than one can try to compare the Ring with the atomic bomb, neither can one present Mordor as Nazi Germany in a cogent manner any more than you can imply that Gondor, or its precedent Numenor, was built on the foundations of Constantinople. People have tried, but in the end it never adds up to a completely consistent theory. There are resemblances, there are facsimiles, there are hints, but there are never one-to-one comparative ratios. That is the mark of true genius, and obviously the reason we will be arguing this same topic into the ground well after the dead horse has been beaten into bits so tiny that we will be sparring over equine molecules.

[Gwathagor]

Originally Posted by Nogrod

Looking at the European civilisations it's pretty easy to see that the threats came (come!!!) from east and south whether they were (are) persians, carthagenians, huns, slavs, ottomans, arabs...

It's the basic story of the West. And wasn't Tolkien writing a mythology eg. the "basic story"?

Some of the most significant, defining threats to the western world have come from the north, as seen by the invaded states. The Romans had the Goths, Vandals, and Huns, Charlemagne had his nemeses the Saxons, and everybody suffered under the ubiquitous Vikings.

I agree about those other invasions though, the Muslims in particular.

[davem]

Actually, Tolkien's inspiration for LotR was the Wars of the Roses - Aragorn was clearly modelled on Richard III - even down to the broken sword:

.

Elrond is therefore Warwick, the Kingmaker, whose daughter Aragorn goes on to wed....

[Juicy-Sweet]

Originally Posted by rorschach

Were the Danes 'evil'?

We aren't evil. It's just that our intentions at the time got misunderstood. We wanted to make friends, but it's sometimes difficult to communicate over cultural barriers.

Barring that Sauron is nothing like Hitler. Hitlers power was in INSPIRATION of people - he took over a non-evil people - Germany had not been especially evil in WWII - and turned them evil. Sauron does that a bit - but most of his followers are turned looong ago. Hitler would more be like a King of Rohan or Gondor that turned the whole country to the side of Sauron - which would have been an interesting episode. Hitler's armies followd him willingly: Sauron has to threaten many of them.

Hitler was a terrible military planner - the German generals refereed to him as "the madman in Nürnberg - while Sauron is more like Stalin, a master tactician and strategist. Hitler also sucked at the intelligence bit of the war, while this is maybe Sauron's strongest side.

The soldiers of Mordor and Nazi Germany are very different as well. Germany's were well disciplined, bordering to the robotic. Sauron's are undisciplined, often fighting among themselves. Sauron doesnt seem to have anything like the SS, a large completely loyal elite corps. He has a large unruly bunch and then some 20 large generals to keep them in check.

Hitler didnt fight for himself as a person - but for the aryan race. Sauron fights for himself alone.

Evil comes in many forms...