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Tolkien's Middle-earth doesn't look like Medieval Europe - Page 7

© Michael Martinez

"In many ways they resembled 'Egyptians'," Tolkien continued, "the love of, and power to construct, the gigantic and massive. And in their great interest in ancestry and in tombs. (But not of course in 'theology': in which respect they were Hebraic and even more puritan ...)." He is at pains here to emphasize ancient models, not medieval European ones, for his Gondorians. Tolkien never once conceded a medieval influence. "I think the crown of Gondor (the S. Kingdom) was very tall, like that of Egypt, but with wings attached, not set straight back but at an angle....The N. Kingdom had only a diadem. Cf. the difference between the N. and S. kingdoms of Egypt." Hence, when Tolkien thought of Arnor and Gondor, he thought of Egypt's North and South Kingdoms. Culturally, these two kingdoms were much closer to Egypt than to anything else in Tolkien's imagination. On the medievalists' side there is Tolkien's use of the word "fief" to refer to the regions of Gondor, but "fief" has more than one meaning and Tolkien was not constrained to use it to imply feudalism. To explain how he was using familiar terms for his own purposes, Tolkien wrote a lengthy essay which was severely abridged at the time of publication to save on space. The full essay was published only in The Peoples of Middle-earth, volume 12 of The History of Middle-earth. The essay, published as "On Translation" in Appendix F, lays out the fiction of Tolkien's work as translator, and in the process explains how he intends the terms to be understood: "$41 The nomenclature of the Hobbits themselves and of the places they lived has, nonetheless, presented some obstacles to the satisfactory carrying of this process of translation. Their place-names, being (in the Shire especially) almost all originally of C.S. form, have proved least difficult. I have converted them into as nearly similar English terms as I could find, using the elements found in English place-names that seemed suitable both in sense and in period: that is in being still current (like hill), or slightly altered or reduced from current words (like ton from town), or no longer found outside placenames (like wich, bold, bottle)." At this point Tolkien commences to discuss shire at length, and the word he translated it from, suza-t (suza in the final texts), is used both in the north and in the south. "The Shire seems to me very adequately to translate the Hobbit Suza-t, since this word was now only used by them with reference to their country, though originally it had meant 'a sphere of occupation (as of the land claimed by a family or clan), of office, or business.' In Gondor the word suza was still applied to the divisions of the realm, such as Anorien, Ithilien, Lebennin, for which in Noldorin [Tolkien subsequently changed Noldorin to Sindarin] the word lhann was used...."

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