3. Previous Considerations of the Influences

3. Previous Considerations of the Influences

By now, Tolkien's own writings and later studies from specialised scholars have offered three valid, 'official' sources from Universal Literature and one from History. Tolkien, his biographer Humphrey Carpenter and the specialists Tom Shippey and Joseph Pearce, all agree that the Norse Sagas (Eddas), Beowulf and the Holy Bible are the three main literary/mythologic sources for the composition and evolution of the story and events in Middle-earth. Specialist John Garth devoted an entire book to the influence of First World War into Tolkien, and though later sociologists and historians have demonstrated the actual impact of war on British people (for instance, two volumes compiled by the historian John Bourne) Garth traces a highly detailed diary about all the events and misfortunes Tolkien experienced while in the trenches.

3.1 Myth

The Norse Sagas (Nordic Eddas) provided Tolkien with a great list of names, and as a consequence with a great source for characters, mainly the Maiar and the Valar (gods and demi-gods), Dwarves and Elves. There was a strong 'Odinic', Norse viking feeling in both Maiar and Elves, for they were formidable sailors, but also because Norse gods wandered across the earth and the sky causing natural phenomena (daylight, night, stars, thunder and lightning...) and the children of Ymir, the giant who shaped the world from his body, were highly skilled in smithcraft and jewellery (in Norse myths Elves and Dwarves are sometimes mistakenly confused). And finally, from Beowulf he took the epic mood of the poem and the ugly evil creatures, being the text the most valuable source for him as long as it was sort of a filter of ancient legends into an early English language. There is a whole section in this study devoted entirely to the presence of myhtology in The Lord of the Rings.

3.2 Life, War and History

The Lord of the Rings as a portrait of Stalin's Russia just because Tolkien belonged to the Western side of the Iron Curtain is not quite an objective vision, unless we had the opinion of the author. In his Letters he displayed strongly ironical comments when dealing with Stalin and Russian Socialism:

Even the unlucky little Samoyedes, I suspect, have tinned food and the village loudspeaker telling Stalin's bed-time stories about Democracy and the wicked Fascists who eat babies and steal sledge-dogs.

Tolkien & Carpenter, The Letters of Tolkien, 64

[...] Though I must admit that I smiled a kind of sickly smile and "nearly curled up on the floor, and the subsequent proceedings interested me no more", when I heard of that bloodthirsty old murderer Josef Stalin inviting all nations to join a happy family of folks devoted to the abolition of tyranny & intolerance! But I must also admit that in the photograph our little cherub W. S. C. actually looked the biggest ruffian present.

Tolkien & Carpenter, The Letters of Tolkien, 65

In this last case, irony is quite ambiguous, because we don't know whether these are the words of Tolkien and the irony is his (as in the first quote) or he is quoting some other source, projecting the irony into the words of others to criticise them. With a very solemn sarcasm, Tolkien refers to his Prime Minister Churchill as a little cherub and as well as the biggest ruffian present in a photograph with that old murderer Josef Stalin, a scene probably belonging to the Potsdam Conference in 1945 attended also by American President Harry Truman. Whatever the case these words are not very kind to politics nor politicians and can give a very clear idea about Tolkien's viewpoints on social-political issues.

On the other hand, similar traces quickly prove to be found invalid, or contain a simply light resemblance which fades to nothing as it is deepened into. Tolkien was against the use of nuclear power, which was recognised as a great peril by Prime Minister Winston Churchill himself (as it will be later mentioned in Part IV section B of this essay). The One Ring could have been a metaphor of the uncontrolable power of atomic energy because of the fear provoked by its unleashed potency, and not because there was a passage in the book in which a Winged Nâzgul or an Eagle dropped the Ring over Gondor or Mordor and blew the whole city away. All those expecting visual or explicit analogies, allegories and metaphors in the Lord of the Rings may feel disappointed but not because Tolkien's masterpiece lacked of artistic qualities as a work of Literature. If anyone wanted to read lyrical metaphors about the glory as well as the nonsense of war, they could always turn to Rudyard Kipling's For All We Have and Are, W. B.Yeats' Meditations in Time of Civil War, Siegfried Sassoon's How To Die, Robert Graves' A Dead Boche or Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est.