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Them Dwarves, Them Dwarves! - Page 2

© Michael Martinez

The casual borrowings of elements from the mythology was never the product of intent, but rather the good fortune of necessary story-telling. Story-tellers often reuse the same ideas, names, themes, and even descriptions to keep their stories moving. The repetition of whole passages is common in oral traditions where poets and story-tellers memorize great sagas in pieces and retell the old tales with familiar phrases and descriptions that may or may not always be used in the same fashion for each retelling. In December 1937, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to E.G. Selby: "I don't much approve of The Hobbit myself, preferring my own mythology (which is just touched on) with its consistent nomenclature -- Elrond, Gondolin, and Esgaroth have escaped out of it -- and organized history, to this rabble of Eddaic-named dwarves out of Voluspa, newfangled hobbits and gollums (invented in an idle hour) and Anglo-Saxon runes." (Christopher Tolkien, "The Return of the Shadow", p. 7) Clearly when Tolkien first published The Hobbit he viewed it as a separate work, a tale which stood on its own and which merely borrowed some things for convenience' sake from the older, larger mythology which until that time had been shared only with family, C.S. Lewis, and one other close acquaintance. Christopher Tolkien discusses the issue at some length in The Peoples of Middle-earth: "In this, 'language of Dale = Norse (used by Dwarves of that region)' shows plainly that a major obstacle, perhaps the chief obstacle, to a coherent 'authentication' had by this time been resolved. When my father wrote The Hobbit he had of course no notion that the Old Norse names of the Dwarves required any explanation, within the terms of the story: those were their names and that was all there was to it....But now this inescapable Norse element had to be accounted for; and from that 'rabble of Eddaic-named dwarves out of Voluspa' the conception emerged that the Dwarves had 'outer names' derived from the tongues of Men with whom they had dealings...." (Christopher Tolkien, "Peoples of Middle-earth", pp. 70-1) This apparent difficulty, so easily resolved by a quickly scrawled note which defined the linguistic fiction Tolkien utilized to explain the relationships of the languages he employed in The Lord of the Rings, eventually led Tolkien to devise a complex and (to me, at least) interesting history for the Dwarves which he had originally never foreseen. Of course, everything which occurred in the Second and Third Ages was contrived directly as a result of Tolkien's agreeing to write a sequel to The Hobbit, with the exception of the story of Numenor. Its downfall, at least, had been written in story form by Tolkien for several years before he wrote The Lord of the Rings.

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