Heren Istarion

Tolkien's Heroic and Mythic Sources
By Anthony S Burdge

In Tracing the Epic I looked to show some of the literary influences that helped guide Tolkien to writing his epic The Lord of the Rings. Here I would like to provide some more thoughts concerning what he has done for modern day and the sources of his epic.

As Tolkien's critical essay and lecture The Monster's and the Critics renewed and emphasized the importance of Beowulf, he also brought to us a renewed sense of the hero, and how we have lost that ideal. Our unconscious connection to myth, and the relation to our primordial living universe is what we have lost, is one of Tolkien's messages in his works. The hero motif is another such motif that is lost. It is believed that in modern day we do not possess in literature nor society heroic or mythic ideals, that their has been a "death of mythology"

According to author and Professor Randel Helms in his 1974 book entitled Tolkien's World:

"A hero is the expression of a culture's ideals about itself, and our ideals about ourselves have all been puntured. Cultural ideals are formulated and understood most efficiently in myths, and we have lost the ability to participate wholeheartedly in mythic belief, lost in fact the key to response to our cultures's central mythic system. And that loss, tragic as it is in it own right, opened the door to one that seems to me even greater: a bone-deep cynicism about, a frostbotten insensitivity toward, the capacities of myth for discovery, for transmission of awe, and for molding a worthwhile self"(Tolkien's World pg.150)

It is in response to this loss that Tolkien drew heavily upon ancient sources, like Beowulf. The author of the Beowulf looks back to an age of his ancestors, at a time of the great migrations of the 4t hand 5th centuries. These great folk migrations into Europe are also the time of another of his sources The Saga of the Volsungs.This is the time of upheaval and the collapse of the northern frontier defenses of the Roman Empire. Germanic tribes and Hunnish horsemen invade what is now France and Germany, and the heroic historical feats of this saga are the center of the Volsungasaga. These tales were carried to Viking Scandinavia and by Norsemen to Iceland. One of these great tales, the tale og Sigurd the Volsung has been utilized by William Morris and Tolkien, and is part of the Codex Regius, the most important manuscript of the poetic Edda's.

It is through such sources that Tolkien renewed this lost literary form and ideal for modern day society and provides a vision of hope and man's potential nobility in his epic.

This will be an ongoing study to be featured in Heren Istarion's journal Parma Nölé available via membership.