The Other Way 'Round - Page 7
© Michael Martinez
That alphabet evolved into the Tengwar of The Lord of the Rings, and it represents the first in a series of departures from the pseudo Anglo-Saxon tradition which Tolkien eventually abandoned. Officially, he did not abandon the Book of Lost Tales until about 1925 or 1926. Tolkien continued to write stories and devise notes concerning his mythological lost age for England up until that time. As Homer and his contemporaries memorialized Amazons, gods, sirens, cyclopes, and other mythological creatures and peoples, so Tolkien memorialized imaginary prehistoric inhabitants of England. He did not neglect the Anglo-Saxon element, but his stories were really about fantastic creatures who retreated before the encroachment of the Anglo-Saxon peoples.
Anglo-Saxon, of course, continued to influence Tolkien's thought and fiction in many ways. In June, 1925, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. Tolkien dutifully noted that he had specialized in Greek philology for his Classical Moderations, but he added Old Icelandic, Gothic, Old and Middle English, and Medieval Welsh to the category of languages in which he was expert. And it has oft been noted that Old Icelandic provided Tolkien with several sources for the new mythologies he developed. For while he worked on the new Silmarillion mythology (which began to emerge in 1925), Tolkien also began writing the story which eventually became The Hobbit. It shimmered across his thought briefly in 1925, when he wrote, "In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit" on the back of a blank exam paper, and by 1930 Tolkien was entertaining his children with the adventures of Mr. Baggins. From The Hobbit there emerged the Norse/Icelandic names of Tolkien's Dwarves, and the tantalizing history of Dale, the first of his Northman kingdoms, as well as the dark and perilous Mirkwood Forest. In fact, much of The Hobbit reads like a light excursion into Norse mythology, with giants, shape-changers, wizards, dwarves, and dragons.
From 1918 (or 1921) through 1925, Tolkien worked on "Lay of the Children of Hurin" (Urin). This poem was composed in alliterative verse, following Old English styles. But when Tolkien began working on "Lay of Leithian" (the story of Beren and Luthien) in 1925, he changed modes, preferring instead the octosyllabic couplets (pairs of rhyming lines with eight syllables each) which originated in French Romance (around the 12th century and introduced into Middle English in the 13th century). The transition represented another departure for Tolkien from the Anglo-Saxon tradition. But Romance afforded him a much friendlier (if more difficult) mode in which to work.
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