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Middle-earth: Myth, Legend or Tale?© Douglas Charles Rapier
"'Queer things you do hear these days, to be sure,' said Sam.
'Ah, said Ted, 'you do, if you listen. But I can hear fireside-tales and children's stories at home, if I want to.'
'No doubt you can,' retorted Sam, 'and I daresay there's more truth in some of them than you reckon. Who invented the stories anyway?'";
JRR Tolkien, 'Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring', 'The Shadow of the Past'
The Brothers Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm, understood the importance of fairy tales to society. They were distrustful, however, of earlier attempts to record folk tales by others who had poetically re-worked the tales to suit the literary tastes of their contemporaries. The Brothers dedicated their lives to recording the recitations given by simple farm-folk and villagers of such stories with scholarly attention to detail and devout respect for their sources. Their life-long efforts to preserve the integrity of the stories were not merely to provide ready crib-side entertainment. As philologists, historical linguists and de facto ethnographers who had been educated in the Law, they understood the intrinsic value of authentic folk-tales: to preserve folk-tales was to preserve cultural heritage. In 1806, with the armies of Napoleon marching through Western Europe, Wilhelm Grimm wrote, "Those days of the collapse of all hitherto existing establishments will remain forever before my eyes... the ardor with which the studies in Old German were pursued helped overcome the spiritual depression... Undoubtedly the world situation and the necessity to draw into the peacefulness of scholarship contributed to the reawakening of the long forgotten literature; but not only did we seek something of consolation in the past, our hope, naturally, was that this course of ours should contribute somewhat to the return of a better day." It is beyond doubt that Professor Tolkien also understood the importance of folk and fairy tales. Tolkien, as a philologist, was enamored of Gothic and Old German languages and had given courses in these languages at Leeds. It must therefore be assumed that the literature which served as source material for his studies included the Germanic and Northern European tales which the Brothers Grimm had themselves 're-awakened' in their own studies. Indeed, in a letter dated 16 December, 1937 to his publisher, Stanley Unwin, he refers to 'The Hobbit' as "a comic tale among conventional and inconsistent Grimm's' fairy-tale dwarves...".
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