In Feanor's Footsteps - Page 3
© Michael Martinez
The early Earendel also walked through the streets of the empty Kor, collecting diamond dust on his clothes. But whereas the city was deserted because of Ingwe's departure, in The Silmarillion Tirion upon Tuna was deserted because the Noldor of Aman had gone off to a festival, and Ingwe had already moved into Valinor ages before. He now dwelt upon the slopes of Taniquetil, along with many of his people, the Vanyar.
The landscape of the early mythology is assumed to be England and Europe's landscape. Tasarinan is thus a region in Europe, as well as Hisilome. Tol Eressea, however, is England itself, dragged back to the Great Lands by Ulmo (over Osse's protests, and their struggle for control over the island results in the shearing off of Ireland from Britain). In The Silmarillion, Beleriand and the northern lands are assumed to lie somewhere in the northwest of the Old World, east of Belegaer, but there is no specific identification with northern Europe. That is, the English mythology is gone, and there is no connection between the Anglo-Saxons and Earendil (whose name Tolkien borrowed from an Anglo-Saxon poem called "Crist": eala! earendel engla beorhtast ofer middangeard monnum sended) and Eriol (the mariner Aelfwine, who recorded the Lost Tales, and whose sons were Hengest and Horsa, the first Saxon leaders to settle in Brittannia).
Have I lost you? The point I'm beating to death is that Tolkien reused elements of the earlier stories in new ways, but the old ideas are still quite identifiable. Even the Anglo-Saxons did not vanish completely from the tradition when Tolkien began to develop the Middle-earth we know and love. They were replaced by their generic ancestors, "the Northmen", tall and proud warriors from northern lands who give rise to heroes such as Beorn, Bard the Bowman, Fram, Eorl, Helm, Theoden, and Eomer. These are not Anglo-Saxon warriors, but rather are heroes from the northern world.
They or their successors, such as Sigurd and Offa of Angel (and Beowulf) would be celebrated in song and legend for centuries untold. The Northmen would eventually, as Middle-earth's storied Elder Days recede, differentiate in Scandinavians and Germans, and the Scandinavians became Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes (and Angles) while the Germans became divided into Goths, Vandals, Saxons, Frisians, Franks, and Suebi (to name just a few tribes and confederations). History (as passed on to us by the Romans) records that the Germans appeared on the landscape as mysterious wanderers, the Cimbri and Teutoni, who terrorized Gaul and Italy until their overconfidence led to their downfall and destruction at the hands of Roman soldiers.
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