So clicking on the middle-earth tag or this link Topics tagged middle-earth will now lead to 62 threads on Middle Earth. I reread a very good one last night.
Has everyone heard the 39-minute interview Denys Geroult did with him (from 1964)? Clips have been floating around, but this seems to be as complete as we’ll ever get.
FYI, a local weatherman has been broadcasting from home – a Middle Earth map is visible on a side wall 
Brian
I don’t see it, maybe the picture was pulled down already?
It isn’t in that picture. I just wanted to link to the guy in question.
It is shown during live broadcasts (you could try at the 6 o’clock report)
https://wxow.com/news/wxow-live-stream/
Brian
Bumped.
For some strange reason, I woke up this morning with the song Linden Lea playing in my head.
I haven’t thought about it for years, but I feel sure it was part of the inspiration for Tolkien’s Ents. I thought I’d ask if this has ever been suggested before.
@Wendell_Wagner is a serious Tolkien expert, and a member of the Mythopoeic Society and Tolkien Society, and may know.
It’s notable that the song uses the unusual word ‘moot’ in connection with oak trees. Treebeard may be an oak tree, and the apple tree mentioned in the same verse reminds me of the Entwives.
It’s likely that Tolkien knew the song, and it seems to me that it was a conscious or unconscious inspiration.
First verse:
Within the woodlands, flow’ry gladed,
By the oak trees’ mossy moot,
The shining grass blades, timber shaded,
Now do quiver underfoot;
And birds do whistle overhead,
And water’s bubbling in its bed;
And there for me, the apple tree
Do lean down low in Linden Lea.
Poem by William Barnes, 1859.
Setting by Ralph Vaughan Williams, 1901.
It’s hard to tell. Some searching came up with the website https://
m.face
book.
com/
permalink.php?id=225978247416220&
story_fbid=5457094790971180. (Sorry, but if I didn’t split up the link into pieces, it wouldn’t show it.)
The person who wrote that webpage also thinks there are similarities between Tolkien and Barnes. I think Tolkien and Barnes just read the same books.
I’m not really a Tolkien expert. I just go to Tolkien meetings (and, more generally, Inklings meetings). I’m a little bit of a C. S. Lewis expert.
Well, Barnes wrote the books.
He was a philologist and linguist who lived in Dorset a few generations before Tolkien, and died before Tolkien was born. He was particularly interested in recording and writing about the Dorset dialect and its Anglo-Saxon roots. His first published work was a Lapland narrative poem.
So his interests were similar in many ways to those of Tolkien.
I’d be surprised if Tolkien wasn’t familiar with his linguistic work and his poems in the Dorset dialect, and wasn’t influenced by them. Barnes’ poems have a similar style and feel to Tolkien’s.
As far as I know, Barnes’ idea of ‘a moot of trees’ is found nowhere else outside Tolkien.
Perhaps a better version of this beautiful song, along with the music.
You can see how similar it is in tone and feeling to Tolkien’s ‘songs’.
I can’t answer the question but Tolkien did say in a letter that he was inspired by the line in Macbeth about Birnam Wood Marching.
He thought what if the woods could march.
Why did i not see this thread when it was new?! Oh, because it starts from before i joined the forum. And it hasn’t been very active since then.
This is close to my experience. My father read “the Hobbit” to me after my grandmother took me to a play. Yes, there was a live “Hobbit” play. It was only okay. I loved it, so he gave me his copy of “the Lord of the Rings”. I was in second grade, and i learned reading fluency from that book. I also learned what a paragraph is. (I tried to send a night of reading at the end of a sentence, but some sentences aren’t good ending points.)
I read it every year from then until I went to college. But i don’t know the details nearly as well as some of the other posters here, so i mostly lurk in the Tolkien threads.
Ditto on the sourcebook love. I’m attempting the daunting task of creating. D&D campaign but it’s the reference books I’m rally salivating over reading.
As for Tolkien-I could talk about the books all day, but I’m a in no way an authority.
Except that the word “moot” in Dorset dialect doesn’t mean a meeting-place, but rather the stump and roots of a felled tree. That’s not Treebeard, that’s Treebeard’s mutilated corpse.
I think Tolkien was probably far too linguistically savvy to get this meaning/etymology of the term “moot” confused with the Middle English word “moot” and its Old English root “gemot”, meaning “meeting” or “assembly”.
So I definitely don’t think Tolkien was trying to evoke imagery from Barnes’ poem or Vaughan Williams’ song in the minds of his readers by using the term “Entmoot”. Whether Tolkien himself knew “Linden Lea” and whether it influenced his terminology unconsciously seems impossible to say. Probably his use of “moot” in the sense of “meeting” or “assembly” simply came from his study of archaic English.
Tolkien was influenced by a huge number of things:
If that doesn’t work for you, just look for the entry J. R. R. Tolkien’s influences in Wikipedia.
Thanks for that!
I hadn’t realised that ‘moot’ had a different meaning in the Dorset dialect. (The OED also agrees.)
So if there is a connection, it would be more complicated. Tolkien was no doubt aware of both meanings, but the song may still have suggested to him the Entmoot, by a play on words. There’s no way of knowing Tolkien’s mind on this.
I have always thought that the Hobbits’ hairy feet were suggested by the name Harold Harefoot (King of England 1035-1040), again by a play on words. Again it’s impossible to say, but there’s certainly no question that Tolkien was familiar with Harold Harefoot.
It’s very likely that Tolkien knew the song, as it was one of the most popular pieces that Vaughan Williams ever wrote, and widely known in the early 20th century, especially in ‘refined circles’.
If the tree moot (in the two meanings of the word) and Hare-foot / hair-foot were the origins of the concepts, they would have been conscious little linguistic jokes, which inspired something completely different from the originals.
“No one ever influenced Tolkien—you might as well try to influence a bandersnatch.” -C. S. Lewis
(Actually, Lewis was talking about a different kind of influence. He went on to say: “We listened to his work, but could affect it only by encouragement. He has only two reactions to criticism: either he begins the whole work over again from the beginning or else takes no notice at all.”)
I’ve been rereading LOTR and came upon the fact that Glorfindel was sent back to Middle-earth as himself after death, which apparently was pretty rare. Was this planned by Tolkien from the start? Or was he clearing up something from the Simarillion (which I have not yet read)?
Tolkien didn’t tend to listen closely to criticism by people who listened when he read his unpublished works to them (except in a few cases where he quit and started over). That’s not what is meant in the Wikipedia article that I linked to by influences. He had read an enormous number of things. Many of them were conscious or unconscious influences on his works. The friends who listened to his works often influenced him consciously or unconsciously in their general conversations, not in their specific criticisms.
The story I heard is that Tolkien was addressing a group of fans, and stated that each Elf name is unique. One of the fans pointed out that an Elf named Glorfindel had died fighting a Balrog in the sack of Gondolin, yet here, thousands of years later, an Elf named Glorfindel saved Frodo’s bacon. Tolkien hemmed and hawed, and fretted, and thought about it, and finally said that it might be a case of reincarnation.
That story pleases me more than I should.