The Other Way 'Round - Page 11
© Michael Martinez
In his letter (No. 131) to Milton Waldman, Tolkien notes: "The sequel [to The Hobbit], The Lord of the Rings, much the largest, and I hope also in proportion the best, of the entire cycle, concludes the whole business -- an attempt is made to include in it, and wind up, all the elements and motives of what has preceded: elves, dwarves, the Kings of Men, heroic 'Homeric' horsemen, orcs and demons, the terrors of the Ring-servants and Necromancy, and the vast horror of the Dark Throne, even in style it is to include the colloquialism and vulgarity of Hobbits, poetry and the highest style of prose." "The cycle", as he calls it, extends from The Silmarillion (then still unpublished) through The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien would eventually add The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and The Road Goes Ever On. It would fall to his son Christopher to add a Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales.
Unlike the Beowulf poet, Tolkien wasn't simply telling a rollicking good story. He was creating a mythology. The Beowulf poet was codifying a popular tale, perhaps Christianizing it along the way, and quite possibly was introducing a few classical elements of his own. But the Danes and Geats of "Beowulf" bear little resemblance to the Rohirrim in style. The Rohirrim do not boast about their own deeds, whereas Beowulf proudly corrects the conniving Unferth by telling how he engaged in a contest of strength and endurance with Breca years before. The heroes of Beowulf live in a Germanic world which looks and feels like the Northman culture of Rohan: kings sit in halls, noble women serve drinking cups, warriors stand beside their lords, men value courage and trust in their convictions. The boasting is, in fact, a trait which "Beowulf" shares with the "Iliad". Both Achaeans and Trojans often break into long-winded accounts of their genealogies and deeds. Poetically, the story-tellers must remind their audiences of who was whom, and how they were all related to each other.
It is the poetic form where Tolkien borrows extensively from Anglo-Saxons for the Rohirrim, though. He uses the Anglo-Saxon (Old English) language as a model for the Rohirrim's mode of speech. He depicts the Rohirrim as a more primitive, less sophisticated people in comparison to the rural Hobbits and Cosmopolitan Dunedain and Elves, who speak colloquial modern English or an affected archaic modern English. The Rohirrim play the role that an Anglo-Saxon tribe, living beside modern Englishmen, might be allotted. But whereas the Anglo-Saxons learned to write, and bequeathed to their descendants documents such as "Beowulf", Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Rohirrim did not write down their legends and laws. So, song and poetry are the hallmark of Rohirric culture.
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