Home » Reading & Literature » J.R.R. Tolkien » Tolkien's Time Machine: When Literary Worlds Collide - Page 6

Tolkien's Time Machine: When Literary Worlds Collide - Page 6

© Michael Martinez

Homer doesn't just put a staff into Agamemnon's hand; he glorifies the staff, bestowed upon the king from the hands of the gods (through his family). When Agamemnon raised his staff, the Achaean kings listened to him in such as way as they would not listen to any other person. The speeches that Agamemnon and others make in "The Iliad" provide a template for the speeches in "The Wanderings of Hurin". Agamemnon orders his heralds to sound their trumpets, and thousands of Achaeans come to a vast assembly to hear him speak. Hardang, Halad of Brethil, is forced to call an assembly of the Folk of Brethil (a Folkmoot), in which the chieftains of the people come by the hundreds. A trumpet is sounded there, too. In both stories, men get up and address the assemblies, and they win the support of the assemblies by appealing to the peoples' strong sense of morality and law. In the tradition of Rohan, two early leaders stand out from the rest: Eorl and Helm Hammerhand. When Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings, only a handful of people knew about the "Silmarillion", so he may have borrowed lightly from himself by modelling Helm on Hurin and Eorl on Hador Lorindol. Helm was a man of great strength and temper, and because of his ingracious handling of Freca, Helm launched a war which nearly destroyed Rohan. Helm's son Haleth fell defending Meduseld against the army led by Freca's son Wulf. Helm himself died later on, somewhere out in the miserable cold, alone. Turin killed himself after defeating the dragon Glaurung in defense of Brethil, and Hurin eventually wandered off to die somewhere in the south, perhaps alone. Eorl, like Hador, was already the leader of his people when he became their king (Hador became the first Lord of Dor-lomin). Both men were tall and golden-haired, and they were celebrated in song. Both men also fell in battle with their traditional enemies and were avenged by their sons. Both men led their people to new lands within the borders of great kingdoms. Tolkien's protagonists, for large stories and small, seem to fit the mold that Glenn proposes: they are either Adventurers (such as Turin, Beren, and Aragorn) or Leaders (such as Hador, Hurin, Eorl, Helm, Theoden, and Aragorn), or both (such as Aragorn and Isildur). The traditional northern hero, brave and arrogant, or tragic and foolhardy, a bit dim-witted, doesn't really serve Tolkien's purpose. He looks beyond the northern tradition for a more suitable hero archetype, and associated symbology. The merging of mythical worlds thus results in the most unique of mythical worlds, and one which reasonably echoes traces of all classical western literature.

The copyright of the article Tolkien's Time Machine: When Literary Worlds Collide - Page 6 in J.R.R. Tolkien is owned by Michael Martinez. Permission to republish Tolkien's Time Machine: When Literary Worlds Collide - Page 6 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.