Home » Reading & Literature » J.R.R. Tolkien » Tolkien's Time Machine: When Literary Worlds Collide - Page 2

Tolkien's Time Machine: When Literary Worlds Collide - Page 2

© Michael Martinez

What stands between civilization and barbarism is the power of choice. Those who choose to improve their lives, to study the world and its ways, and to learn from their mistakes, raise up the new civilizations. These civilizations are always born of a sense of wonder, a newness which evokes the symbology of a young world, freshly awakened from a long sleep. Those who have freedom of choice stripped from them live in darkness, and at best roam the world as wild folk (Men or Elves, or Dwarves), outcasts and outlaws, or simply untamed barbarians. The rest become slaves or willing servants and allies of personified evil, the Dark Lords who oppose civilization. But when Tolkien set out to write his stories, he did not necessarily choose the theme of civilization versus barbarism. Rather, the theme he constantly pursued, and never fully realized, was the collision between ideals from two different worlds. Civilization and barbarism are the past and present (or future) aspect of the same world. All civilizations arise from barbarism. All civilizations eventually meet new barbarians. But Tolkien's theme was a more wistful look at a past we never had. His quest began with the attempt to create a mythology for England, to devise an Anglo-Saxon mythos which explained (from his point of view), many curious elements left behind in the wake of the Norman invasion of 1066. There must once have been who knew (or thought they knew) what a wood-wose was, for example. Well, that is the official version of the story, as propounded by Tom Shippey and others. The problem is that the mythology for England, The Book of Lost Tales, lacks any such references. Instead, it tosses around terms like "gnomes" (from French), "pixies" (admittedly from Old English "Puck"), "fays" (from French by way of Old English), and "sprites" (also from French). The Anglo-Saxon angle is not so much in the fairies as in the lost wanderer (Eriol, Aelfwine) who discovers that they really exist and that once they were a part of the world of men. The fairies once lived in what has now become England, and there they fought a long and harsh war with men, eventually losing it or fleeing as more and more men arrived. In a sense, Tolkien's English mythology was really a Celtic mythology, because the men who drove the fairies from England were Anglo-Saxons, although Eriol's descendants remained in rapport with them for an unspecified number of generations. But those descendants became the Kings of Kent, which was traditionally a Jutish kingdom, and quickly became overshadowed by the Anglo and Saxon kings in Mercia, Wessex, and Northummbria. The name "Kent" is believed to derive from the earlier name of a Celtic tribe anyway.

The copyright of the article Tolkien's Time Machine: When Literary Worlds Collide - Page 2 in J.R.R. Tolkien is owned by Michael Martinez. Permission to republish Tolkien's Time Machine: When Literary Worlds Collide - Page 2 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.