Mordor inspired by Nazi Germany?

[William Cloud Hicklin]

steeped in the history of Dark Age England

I take exception to the phrase, 'history' and "Dark Ages' being a contradiction in terms. The Dark Ages are "dark" precisely because there are no surviving histories of them.


If you mean the Middle Ages, please don't call them the Dark Ages. The span of the Dark Ages varies from author to author and place to place, but the usual convention runs from the sack of Rome and the Rescript of Honorius in 410 until the coronation of Charlemagne in 800.

[Bêthberry]

Perhaps it's time to note an interesting comment about Tolkien's method from one of his major critics, Tom Shippey. The comment is, I think, important, for it speaks to Tolkien's motivation not in his personal history or experience but in the subject so near to his heart, language.

Originally Posted by The Road to Middle-earth

It is not too much to say that this language and this people [Gothic and the Goths] haunted Tolkien all his life. As is noted by Christopher Tolkien (UT, p. 311), the names of the leaders of the Rohirrim before the dynasty of Eorl are not Old English, like everything else in the Riders' culture, but Gothic, e.g. Vidugavia, Vidumavi, Marhwini, etc. (see LOTR, PP. 1021-22). They function there to suggest language behind language and age behind age, a phenomenon philologists so often detected. On a larger scale, the Battle of the Pelennor Fields closely follows the account in Jordane's Gothic History, of the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, in which also the civilisation of the West was preserved from the 'Easterlings', and in which the Gothic king Theodorid was trampled by his own victorious cavalry with much the same mixture of grief and glory as Tolkien's Theodon. (p. 15-16)

Shippey then provides a quotation from one of Tolkien's letters about this interest in words. The letter is written to Christopher Tolkien.

Originally Posted by Letters

All the same, I suddenly realised that I am a pure philologist. I like history, and am moved by it, but its finest moments for me are those in which it throws light on words and names! Several people (and I agree) spoke to me of the art with which you made the beady-eyed Attila on his couch almost vividly present. Yet oddly, I find the thing that thrills my nerves is the one you mentioned casually: atta, attila. Without those syllables the whole great drama both of history and legend loses savour for me.

The point of atta, attila is that Attila's name comes from Gothic, not from the Hun's language and so one has to ponder how this ferocious barbarian came by the name "little father" in the language of a different tribe. There's a rewriting of history there, as philologists were wont to do.

So Shippey suggests:

Originally Posted by The Road to Middle-earth

. . . the word tells the story. Tolkien went on in his letter to say that in his mind that was exactly how The Lord of the Rings grew and worked. He had not constructed a design. Instead he had tried 'to create a situation in which a common greeting would be elen sila lumenn omentielmo. Literary critics might not believe him, but philologists (if any were left) ought to know better. (p. 16).

So there's a battle similarity from a very different age.

[Sarumian]

Thanks for taking this into the thread and making clear what sort of inspirations led Tolkien through his "quest".

However there is one other point I'd like to mention in connection with World War II. The great tyrants of the 20th c. were some sort of social sorcerers who bewitched nations and ruled with the combined use of lust, excitement and terror. This was how Evil's face looked in Tolkien's day.

All this is in correspondence with what I see as his central idea - that there is something like magic in the world; that we need to put up with this fact and be ready to face consequences.