Metareferences and Intertextuality.

[davem]

Not sure it belongs here, but something Tolkien wrote about Ents did strike me. I'll need to quote a bit from one of my recent CbC posts:

So, Tolkien has invented the Ents, but hasn’t come up with an account of them. It seems like he knew they were there, but had no idea where they had come from. In fact, in letter 157 he says:

'I always felt something ought to be done about the peculair Anglo-Saxon word ent'. Note, not 'something could be done' but ought to be done.

To me this says that Tolkien was not only using some old ideas/themes because he was struck by them in some way, he was doing it deliberately, because it ought to be done. This clearly goes back to his original intent of recreating England's lost mythology. 'ents' were a part of A-S mythology, even if little or nothing about them had survived beyond the name. But Tolkien felt they were important to our ancestors, whatever they had been, so he had to find some way to incorporate them into the mythology for England he was writing.

Shippey has also shown how other things in the Legendarium were incorporated for the same reason - like the Eddaic Dwarves already mentioned, or the unexplained account in the same work of the different kinds of Elves - Light Elves, Dark Elves, etc. In ancient Northerm myth there were these different kinds of Elves, but if there ever was any explanation of why some were 'Light' & some were 'Dark' it has been lost. As Shippey shows - specifically regarding the Elves issue - was to try & explain this difference. The difference was there in the myths, Tolkien was attempting to create (or perhaps 're-create' as he was always trying to find 'what really happened') a story which would acount for this difference is Elvish types. (See Shippey's essay 'Light-Elves, Dark-Elves & Others: Tolkien's Elvish Problem' in Tolkien Studies vol1)

In short, I think Tolkien did take things from earlier myths, legends & stories, both consciously & unconsciously, but he also took somethings because he felt he should - because something ought to be done with those things.