Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

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Funnily enough, this is also a myth. You are quoting Letter #131. But you are likely quoting secondary or tertiary sources and forgot the rest.

Here's what you quote:

> Also – and here I hope I shall not sound absurd – I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its 'faerie' is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion

And here's what you missed:

> Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story – the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. (…) I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.

Indeed it was long ago when that attempt was aborted: it was the Book Of Lost Tales which would have been the missing Anglo-Saxon mythology but that has been abandoned around 1920. Christopher Tolkien clearly stated most elements defining and peculiar to BOLT are not present in later works. There are many versions of the Silmarillion but there's only one version of BOLT.

Tolkien's work is a solution in search of a problem though. It's unsurprising to conclude that English has so few stories if he discards all its Germanic and Skandinavian heritage!

But clearly thats not strictly “English” or “British”. The mythos of Nationalism was strong in Tolkiens time (which sorta continue to this day). Every “Nation” needed a homogeneous population with a shared culture and strong bonds that bind them together; one way of doing this was to appeal to an origin myth.

He did not. He reached for those Scandinavian and Germanic stories, to fashion his own, and England's. But to say that the stories of the English would have been the same as the stories of other Germanic and Scandinavian people's assumes much less diversity among all those peoples than had actually existed.

I was quoting directly from my copy of the Silmarillion. But I don't agree that that later paragraph invalidates the premise that the lore of LoTR has its roots in an attempt to create English mythology. This letter was written after LoTR was written (but not yet published), and it was inspired and written under the very effort that he later give up. That he didn't end up publishing the entire mythos doesn't mean that it's not a valid lens under which to interpret his work. Indeed, it's a necessary lens.

Could you expand on that? To me the second quote seems to support the reading of LOTR etc. as part of an attempt to create/ codify an English myth cycle

The last sentence is Tolkien admitting he aborted the project. He wrote The Hobbit as something of a children's tale in a bout of inspiration, and the LoTR when his publisher was weirded out by the alien nature of the silmarillion, asking instead for "more fun stuff with hobbits."

This can best be seen in the history of middle earth, his son's chronicle of the writing process for his father's work; volume VI covers the fellowship of the ring, and it is a doozy in first drafts compared to the mainstream published version. He basically tried to reboot Bilbo, and in later drafts his son, going on another quest for dragon gold. It was only after the thing was in full swing that those old impulses and sources found their way into the fabric of the story, sort of figuring out where it was going based on how far he'd wandered in the draft phase.

Anyway he wasn't trying to build english myths when he wrote the books he is famous for, that was more a young & ambitious college student's feverdream.

> Anyway he wasn't trying to build english myths when he wrote the books he is famous for, that was more a young & ambitious college student's feverdream.

If that feverish worldbuilding formed the ultimate setting of LoTR, would it not be relevant in evaluating that world?

It didn't. A few ideas from BOLT survive in the Silmarillion but it is certainly not a setting of LotR. Remember that neither Hobbit nor LotR originally was even in the Silmarillion universe it just sorta grew to be there. Fitting the Hobbit in actually is quite difficult.

> Remember that neither Hobbit nor LotR originally was even in the Silmarillion universe it just sorta grew to be there. Fitting the Hobbit in actually is quite difficult.

We're not talking about some abandoned setting of LotR, we're talking about the world of the book that was actually published. Which is absolutely the world of the Silmarillion (also as published).

Well, yes, but what I am saying is that the few ideas that survived from BOLT into Silmarillion didn't form LotR -- they are too distant relatives so to speak.

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