The Lord of the Rings as [Greenlandian] Fantasy in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien [edited title]

[Parmandur]

And tobacco, probably other New World stuff if we looked closely.

Yeah, because Tolkien clearly didn't give a rip about that sort of thing.

 

[Dausuul]

It’s also possible he stumbled across something by REH and realised it was cliche!

Although I feel Tolkien was more the sort of person who would read Wodehouse for pleasure.

Tolkien was familiar with Howard's works and "rather enjoyed" them (in contrast to his sharply critical attitude toward much other fantastical fiction of his day).

 

[Paul Farquhar]

And tobacco, probably other New World stuff if we looked closely.

Tomatoes are also mentioned.

 

[Mannahnin]

Welsh and Irish myth and legend are really quite surreal, which I find delightful, but was not Tolkien's jam. The Mabinogion is a wild fever dream.

See @Reynard, JRR Tolkien would not agree about the Celtic vibe.

Celtic is a broad cultural group encapsulating several cultures and languages, including two major linguistic divisions, Gaelic and Brythonic.

Tolkien didn't much care for Irish (a Gaelic language) and found it aesthetically unappealing, but did quite enjoy and honor Welsh (a Brythonic language), and drew on it for inspiration.

As J. S. Ryan has observed, “the ‘Welsh’/Celtic strand to [Tolkien’s] writing . . .must be given the serious attention hitherto accorded only to his Old English and Old Norse analogues”.3 As we shall see, this strand extends to the inspirational influence of tales and legends from the Welsh cultural heritage, a heritage with which Tolkien was very familiar. For example,the inscription on the Ring (One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them) which Gandalf reveals written in letters of fire to a quavering Frodo, hearkens back to the inscription on the ring given as a token of love by the famed mediaeval Welsh ruler Llewellyn the Great to his betrothed Joan in 1206: Un Fodrwy i ddangosein cariad, Un Fodrwy I’n clymu—“OneRing to show our love, One Ring to bind us”. This is still inscribed on many Welsh wedding rings to this day.

Another property of the Ring, that of making its wearer invisible, was shared by the ring given by Luned to Owain in the old Welsh tale Iarlles y Ffynnon, “The Lady of the Fountain”, which was included in the collection of ancient stories and myths to which its nineteenth century translator Lady Charlotte Guest, gave the name The Mabinogion, a book with which Tolkien is known to have been very well acquainted. The stories in The Mabinogion were taken from the “The Red Book of Hergest”. It is intriguing, therefore, that Tolkien presented The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as “translations from the Red Book of Westmarch”, especially as Hergest Court, from which “The Red Book of Hergest” gets its name is in Herefordshire, a part of England bordering Wales known as the Marches. From the viewpoint of Tolkien’s native Warwickshire it is the West March.

But why should Tolkien’s intended “mythology for England” thus extend its roots beyond the soil of England? The good Professor himself suggests the answer in his 1955 O’Donnell Lecture: “Welsh is of this soil, this island, the senior language of the Men of Britain, and Welsh is beautiful.”

Tolkien loved the sound of Welsh from childhood. “I heard it coming out of the West. It struck at me in the names on coal trucks; and drawing nearer it flickered past on station signs, a flash of strange spelling and a hint of a language old yet alive; even in an adeiladwyd 1887, ill-cut on a stone slab, it pierced my linguistic heart.”

https://staustinreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/StAR-May-June-2021_BRADY.pdf

The Mythopoeic Society Reviews: Tolkien and Wales

 

[Parmandur]

Celtic is a broad cultural group encapsulating several cultures and languages, including two major linguistic divisions, Gaelic and Brythonic.

Tolkien didn't much care for Irish (a Gaelic language) and found it aesthetically unappealing, but did quite enjoy and honor Welsh (a Brythonic language), and drew on it for inspiration.

https://staustinreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/StAR-May-June-2021_BRADY.pdf

The Mythopoeic Society Reviews: Tolkien and Wales

But he didn't care much for the Welsh legendarium.

 

[Mannahnin]

But he didn't care much for the Welsh legendarium.

See edit (expanded quote from linked article). He evidently liked it enough to be inspired by at least bits of it, unlike the Irish tales.

 

[briggart]

I never read LotR as anything other than second world fantasy.

So, communist fantasy?

IIRC, in the Hobbit, JRRT presents himself as simply the editor of Bilbo's journal, and since Bilbo's journal then gets expanded by Frodo and Sam into the Red Book of the Westmarch to include the events in LotR, this would formally set LotR on Earth. But I think this is as far as it gets.

Personally, I never gave it a lot of weight until I read the Lost/Unfinished/Recovered Tales with the early drafts of some of the Silmarillion stories, where Tolkien made the connection with Earth's past more explicit. But again, that connection was toned down significantly in later works.

 

[Mannahnin]

So, communist fantasy?

Pretty sure he meant in this sense:

https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Secondary_world

 

[briggart]

Pretty sure he meant in this sense:

https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Secondary_world

Thanks! I assumed something like that, but never actually heard the term used like that before.

 

[Reynard]

Pretty sure he meant in this sense:

https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Secondary_world

Thanks! I assumed something like that, but never actually heard the term used like that before.

I actually meant it in its more modern sense of "a different universe" rather than the pseudo-religious connotation.