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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2042214" data-attributes="member: 7240">But look at why we're having this argument. Underneath this argument is fact that I am reading the text more literally than you are.Given that European saints' lives started being written in 397CE, I don't know how you can make a purely chronological argument against what I am saying. The production of medieval saints' lives in Germanic Europe proceeded contemporaneously with the Eddic tradition for hundreds of years. Furthermore, saints' lives are where he got the names of a whole bunch of characters -- Frodo, Drogo, etc.This is like saying "Tolkien couldn't have been talking about the Somme because he told us repeatedly the books were not an allegory of any twentieth century event." That's all fine and good until you find Tolkien's own letter telling someone he drew inspiration for some of his battle scenes from his experience in the Somme. What you do throughout this response is argue that because the focus of Tolkien's interest was on the age and culture that produced the Eddas, it is therefore impossible that his text is pointedly referencing things outside of this age and culture. What you are doing here is privileging secondary scholarship about Tolkien's words over the words themselves.Tolkien used the period between about 500 and 1100 for inspiration; right? I think you're engaging in some sloppy reasoning here. Can we agree that the bursting horn references Roland? Or would you also argue that because Tolkien was not interested in the time period in which the Song was written that we cannot view the sundering of Theoden's horn in this way? We also know that Tolkien drew some of his inspiration for key passages from his experiences in the Somme, even though he was adamant that the book was not an allegory of any twentieth century event.</blockquote>I see what's going on here. I am using the term "medieval" to refer to the period to which it now refers; whereas you are using it to refer to the period to which it referred when Tolkien wrote.There are a number of continuities in worldview between the early medieval and high medieval periods as well as, as you note, a number of discontinuities. But because scholars tend to view the number of continuities as greater than the number of discontinuities, they renamed the Dark Ages the Early Middle Ages.I think this is a reasonable argument. However, I think that you are again using this as a way of excluding things it does not exclude. If Tolkien was willing to tell us he was gaining inspiration from the Carolingians, I think it is really dubious to discount arguments I am making on this basis. Also, remember that Bede predates our Beowulf; there is no straight developmental narrative here. I agree with the above paragraph. However, I think you are using it to argue that Tolkien did not use or care about other aspects of the medieval world. I think this is a mistake. I don't know if he was "interested" in the use of these tropes (and thanks but there are enough definition of "trope" for all of us); what I will say is that the books are full of conscious references to archetypal episodes in medieval history and literature. For someone who wasn't interested in such things, he sure used them a lot.Scholars of medieval language and rhetoric would not disentangle these things. The whole purpose of medieval etymology was to prove rhetorical points on a symbolic level. One of the things that Tolkien tries to do is adopt medieval conventions of storytelling; so if he puts a phony etymology in the story, that means that he is speaking symbolically to the reader. I think that what you know about Tolkien's statements about his project are one of the biggest obstacles in Tolkien scholarship. Tolkien was not writing a narrative allegory; but this does not mean that he did not fill his book with direct references to the past he studied.I think that there is a big problem in Tolkien scholarship in that because Tolkien had to deny that LOTR was a direct allegory of a bunch of things it clearly was not an allegory of, these statements are used to discount very obvious and textually grounded references in his works. For instance, there is a document from approximately 870 AD called the Vision of Charlemagne that writes about the four ages of the Franks. The third age is called "Nazg" -- it is the time in which the realm splits and everyone starts pursuing their own self interest. At the end of this age, there will either be a renewal or total defeat. Given that Nazg wasn't even a real word in Frankish at the time, it seems pretty clear to me that the document is being directly referenced. But the way people employ Tolkien's statements about allegory, even a clear reference like this would be discounted. I don't know what you mean by "no other analogs anywhere in the work" -- the book is full of references to things. But these references are not allegorical narrative references. There are lots of ways that Tolkien references real world things but he consistently does so in such a way as to break any attempt to make his book into a narrative allegory. There is not way, for instance, that Denethor's explanation to Boromir of why the house of Mardil are stewards and not kings is not making a pointed and negative reference to Charles Martell decision to transform his family from the ruling stewards of France into the kings of France by crowning his son Peppin as king.What do you mean? That was his job. That was where his paycheque came from. He was a professional medievalist -- as in, he was a professor of Anglo Saxon (ie. early medieval English) at Oxford university. And we know that in order to get this job, in order to get his doctorate, he studied both the early medieval and high medieval periods.[/QUOTE]

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