I’ve read that Tolkein was inspired by/ripped off the ideas for his books from various medieval tales and myths, but I’ve never heard what ones they were. Can anyone enlighten me? I’m that one of them is Sir Gwain and the Green Knight, as I’ve read a Tolkein translation of that, but as for the others, I’ve no ideas. (Though, now that I think about it, Mallory’s Le Mort d’Arthur was probably one as well.)
um…all of them?
Seriously, he drew from so many sources one could hardly call it “ripping off”. The eddas of the vikings, ancient finnish legends, the stories of Sigurd Ring, the bible, even Gilgamesh.
Read Tolkien’s Ring by Day, and you’ll see some of his inspirations.
You forgot Beowulf, Qadgop. Heck, the first time I read Beowulf, I thought it was ripping off of Tolkien! Yes, I did know better, but the influence is definitely there.
Of course, his biggest influence was a very old and very rare copy of the Book of the Thains ;).
If you are interested in the literary background of Tolkien’s story you might try tracking down “Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord Of The Rings” By Lin Carter. The only source I recall him mentioning specifically was “The Elder Edda” which actually lists several of the dwarf names he used. I’ve also read that he got many of his ideas for Hobbits/Hobbiton/Shire from a children’s book. “The Land Of The Smergs”. Unfortunately the current edition of this book is quite expensive so I never read it. This claim could merely be a marketing ploy.
Tolkien was actually part of a budding fantasy genre that had been building for some time. A couple of my favorite pre-Tolkien authors are James Branch Cabell and, of course, Lord Dunsany.
Like any book, The Lord of the Rings wasn’t written in a vaccuum, it was influenced by its times; the politics, the culture, and the other literature out there all had some impact on the structure of the story. That doesn’t mean that it was “ripped off”, by any means.
Well, Mr. Visible, I wouldn’t exactly call it “a budding fantasy genre” – the writing of adult fantasy was a very fringe-y sort of activity, done continually since the 1700s but only by a few writers. (Juvenile fantasy was much more common, hence The Hobbit originally being written and marketed as a children’s book.)
Tolkien was a professor of English language and literature at Oxford for most of his adult life. He was a scholar in the field; the “Pearl poet” (the anonymous person who wrote four long poems including “The Pearl” and “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”) was of special interest to him and he was the acknowledged expert on him, bringing out the standard edition of his works. He was strongly moved, according to his biographer Humphrey Carpenter, by Germanic mythology, and his early work (cf. The Book of Lost Tales) was an effort to create, out of whole cloth, a peculiarly English mythology cycle. This evolved into the world depicted in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.
A lot of fine detail in the books was derived from his scholarship. For example, every name and place in Rohan was coined from Old English names and toponymy (the system a given ethnic group uses for giving places names). I found out just last night that even this has an interesting twist – the Northmen of Rhovanion, far-back-in-Tolkien’s-history ancestors of the Rohirrim, were named in Latinized forms of Gothic, the earliest known Germanic language and hence collateral ancestor of Old English.
Tolkien emphatically refuted (in a letter to his publisher regarding the pseudo-erudite introduction written by his Swedish translator) that the One Ring “was” the Ring of the Nibelungs, but the idea of the fate of the world being embodied in a particular ring certainly came from the origins of this.
There’s an interesting twist also, and involving Cabell as well, in Earendel, who is a kenning for John the Baptist or Christ in Old English religious prose, but who is associated with the Evening Star, and whose name is cognate with the Horvendile of the legends from which Shakespeare extracted Hamlet (and Cabell the Horvendile who appears in some of his interrelated stories). The line “Is that the Horvendile whose great toe is the Evening Star?” (Cabell) is a perfectly legitimate question that never fails to reduce me to a laughing jag. For him to be the ancestor of both Elrond and Aragorn is truly the cream of the jest! 
And don’t forget the informal club in Oxford, The Inklings . A group that included CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Warren Lewis. I guess it doesn’t qualify as source material per se, but it does qualify as a source of ideas.
I have to agree with furryman about Lin Carter’s underappreciated book Tolkien: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings I find its examination of sources far better and more convincing than a lot of “scholarly” books on the topic, many of which are damned near unreadable. Sadly, I think it’s long out of print.
I also suggest The Annotated Hobbit, which has a lot about sources for that book. It also mentions The Land of Snergs, giving excerpts and illustrations.
Tolkien also got stuff from German artists (there’s a picture in Annotated from which Tolkien may have gotten the image of Gandalf).
One incident recounted in “Beowulf” is about a thief stealing a two-handled cup from the dragon’s hoard, which pretty obviously inspired the similar scene in The Hobbit (although, curiously, Tolkien denies any such explicit borrowing).
One weird influence: I’d swear that Tolkien’s description of the city of Minas Tirith was cribbed from Herodotus’ description of the city of Ecbatana in his Histories.
The description of the fall of some of the Ainur in the “Ainulindale” in The Silmarillion certainly seems borrowed from Jewish and Christian stories about the Fall of Lucifer.
Ah, thanks for the info. I had been led to believe that Tolkien had done little more than file the serial numbers off some legends/stories for his works. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, really. I’ve just been listening to Stravinski’s Rite of Spring, and its pretty obvious where John Williams got a lot of his ideas for film scores from.
Great line. But I think Tolkien was a lot more creative with what he did with his borrowings that that. You want to see plagiarism? Read The Sword of Shannara.
There is, as other posters maintain, a wide difference between imitation and allusion. Tolkien created a lyric patchwork of western mythology and gave it a unique and indisputably English character. He borrows names and languages for very specific reasons: he believed (heretically, in linguistic circles), that we have an innate ability to intuit meaning from words themselves, even if we do not know their histories. His theory is rather more complicated than this, of course. All of his borrowing served a precise, thoughtful purpose.
The same simply cannot be said for authors like Brooks. Their works do not stand up to the same critical scrutiny.
For two excellent books about Tolkien, you need look no farther than to Tom Shippey, one of his students. I don’t think anyone understands Tolkien’s intellectual roots so well as Shippey. He is also a fine writer, with a rather refined wit.
To be honest, I would pass on Lin Carter, if for the only reason that he wrote it before the Silmarillion.
One has to remember, too, that virtually every fantasy published since about 1965 is more or less a blatant ripoff of Tolkien. It was the popularity of The Lord of the Rings that created the market.
While elves as a mythic element existed before him, the particular gimmick of a long-lived proud-to-the-point-of-stiff-neckedness race with peculiar powers over the land they lived in harmony with is his styling on the elf concept – and I’ve never seen an elf in anybody else’s writing that didn’t have a hint of Feanor and Galadriel in his/her characterization.
Similar statements could be made for virtually every major plot-and-character element.
Granted that some people have used what they borrowed creatively and intelligently, the fantasy writers of the late 20th Century knew where their opportunity to spin their stories for money came from. The more courteous among them acknowledged it.
This is partly due to the fact that Tolkien drew on a vast array of plot and character elements from all of western myth. It is difficult not to be duplicitive of someone with such a command of vernacular culture.
Poly: could you repeat this more slowly for me, identifying who is referred to by the "who"s and "him"s? This sounds interesting, but I’m only an amateur here–throw me a line, please.
I haven’t read (or even heard of) Shippey, but now I’m going to have to look him up. When I was castigating “scholarly” authors, I was thing of folks like William Ready, whose The Tolkien Relation is, as far as I can tell, useless. Its alternate titleis even worse: Understanding Tolkien.
Despite the rest of Maeglin’s post, I have to take issue with this. Just because it was written before the Silmarillion is no reason to ignore a work that gleans what it can from the available material.
Hear, hear.
(A kenning for John the Baptist? Your erudition is getting a bit rich for my blood, and while I appreciate the compliment implied by your assuming my ability to comprehend it, I really do need a road map this time.)
Hear, hear.
(A kenning for John the Baptist? Your erudition is getting a bit rich for my blood, and while I appreciate the compliment implied by your assuming my ability to comprehend it, I really do need a road map this time.)
Durn it. Please forgive the doublet.
Well, OK. And it sounded so erudite and impress-Ike-ish, too! 
[quote]
There’s an interesting twist also, and involving Cabell as well, in Earendel, who is a kenning for John the Baptist or Christ in Old English religious prose, but who is associated with the Evening Star, and whose name is cognate with the Horvendile of the legends from which Shakespeare extracted Hamlet (and Cabell the Horvendile who appears in some of his interrelated stories). The line “Is that the Horvendile whose great toe is the Evening Star?” (Cabell) is a perfectly legitimate question that never fails to reduce me to a laughing jag. For him to be the ancestor of both Elrond and Aragorn is truly the cream of the jest! [/qote]
Okay. Tolkien originally took the name Earendil from an Old English phrase that was basically a salutation to the Evening Star under the epithet Earendel (note the different vowel) – and this was poetically tied in with either Christ or John the Baptist in a metaphorical sort of way.
A different line of descent of that epithet led to the name Horvendile, who is a character in the Hamlet stories that Shakespeare drew on. That same Horvendile was appropriated by James Branch Cabell as a character in his Poictesme stories, and IIRC he used that quotation as an abstruse Nabokov-like wordplay – exactly what Horvendile’s great toe has to do with the Evening Star escapes my memory at the moment, but it was one of those follow-this-train-of-thought things that tickle my fancy.
And the last sentence was a pun of my own, which has got those few people who have read Cabell ROFLing, but which does make sense as a statement without that pun.
A kenning, BTW, was an old Anglo-Saxon literary gimmick – a stock epithet that described the word implied but not said in a playful way. Walrad – whale road – was often used to imply the Sea. (Which reminds me that occasionally the kenning became the accepted word, as with the big seal-like critter with the tusks and moustache known by the kenning “whale-horse” or in Anglo-Saxon “wal-hross” > “walrus”.)