Tolkien's modern sources

• 1. Introduction

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  Tolkien's modern sources have long been hidden in plain sight. When asked in 1966 to name a favourite book, Tolkien named H. Rider Haggard's 1887 adventure novel She. He pointed to the Greek shard of Amenartas as 'the kind of machine by which everything got moving.' Thomas Kullmann and Dirk Siepmann concluded that 'the tradition Tolkien owes most to is nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel-writing.' Holly Ordway, in Tolkien's Modern Reading, catalogues over 200 books by 149 authors that Tolkien demonstrably knew. Dale Nelson, in the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, identifies 25 authors whose works carry direct parallels to Tolkien's fiction. What were those books, and what traces did they leave in the world of Middle-earth?

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• 2. The Adventure Inheritance

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  Tolkien stated he 'preferred the lighter contemporary novels,' naming John Buchan as his example. Critics have identified many resonances between Buchan's storytelling and Tolkien's. H. Rider Haggard's novels offered what one scholar calls 'mythopoeic and straightforward adventure romance,' a quality Tolkien responded to directly. Scholars have compared Tolkien's Gollum to the evil and ancient hag Gagool in Haggard's 1885 novel King Solomon's Mines. Tolkien wrote of being impressed as a boy by Samuel Rutherford Crockett's 1899 historical fantasy The Black Douglas. He stated that Crockett's fight with werewolves gave him the battle with the wargs in The Fellowship of the Ring. Scholar Jared Lobdell builds on such parallels to argue that The Lord of the Rings is 'an adventure story in the Edwardian mode.'

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• 3. The Morris Imprint

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  In Iceland in the early 1870s, William Morris met a boisterous man called 'Biorn the boaster' who lived in a hall beside Eyja-fell. Biorn tapped Morris on the belly and told him: 'besides, you know you are so fat.' The medievalist Marjorie Burns argues that this encounter, and Morris's entire Icelandic journey, shaped key details of Tolkien's Bilbo Baggins. Burns notes that Beorn in The Hobbit pokes Bilbo 'most disrespectfully' and compares him to a plump rabbit. Morris's companion, the painter Edward Burne-Jones, depicted Morris as very fat in Iceland cartoons. Burns suggests those images 'make excellent models' for the Bilbo who runs puffing to the Green Dragon inn. Morris was 'relatively short, a little rotund, and affectionately called "Topsy"' for his curly hair.

  Tolkien wanted to imitate Morris's medievalising prose and poetry romances, including the 1889 The House of the Wolfings. Place names from Morris's world fed directly into Middle-earth: the Dead Marshes and Mirkwood both trace back to Morris. As a student, Tolkien read Morris's 1870 translation of the Volsunga saga, which introduced him to Norse mythology. Morris enjoyed a pipe, a bath, and 'regular, well-cooked meals.' He looked as out of place in Iceland as Bilbo did over the Edge of the Wild. Both were afraid of dark caves. Burns notes that Tolkien's Bilbo 'jogs along behind Gandalf and the dwarves,' a comic posture Morris himself adopted in Iceland.

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• 4. Science Fiction and Fantasy

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  Edward Wyke-Smith's Marvellous Land of Snergs, with its 'table-high' title characters, influenced the incidents, themes, and depiction of hobbits. H. G. Wells's subterranean Morlocks, in the 1895 The Time Machine, have been seen as suggestive of Gollum. Jules Verne's 1864 Journey to the Center of the Earth shares striking plot devices with The Hobbit. Both feature a hidden runic message and a celestial alignment that directs the adventurers to their goal. Tolkien made use of George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin. He acknowledged the 1858 Phantastes in a letter as a source. He wrote that MacDonald's sentient trees had 'perhaps some remote influence' on his tree-giant Ents. Owen Barfield's 1928 Poetic Diction, by Tolkien's fellow Inkling, contributed to his world-view of decline and fall.

  Tolkien read Lord Dunsany's fantasy novels and short stories without agreeing with his use of irony, skepticism, or dream explanations. He found Dunsany's invented names unconvincing. Middle-earth names in Quenya and Sindarin were 'coherent and consistent,' he said, unlike the names of 'Swift or Dunsany.' The fantasy author E. R. Eddison, influenced by Dunsany, published the 1922 The Worm Ouroboros. Tolkien met Eddison and praised the book in print; a private letter records his dislike of Eddison's philosophy, cruelty, and choice of names. Tolkien stated that the phrase 'crack of doom' came from an unnamed Algernon Blackwood story. Holly Ordway identifies this as Blackwood's 1909 novel The Education of Uncle Paul. In that novel, children describe 'the crack between Yesterday and To-morrow,' through which anything may happen. David Lindsay's 1920 A Voyage to Arcturus reached Tolkien through C. S. Lewis. Tolkien read it 'with avidity,' finding it 'more powerful and more mythical' than Lewis's own 1938 Out of the Silent Planet. He objected to Lindsay's anti-gravity rays and crystal torpedo ship. In The Notion Club Papers, Tolkien's protagonist Guildford criticizes exactly those kinds of 'contraptions.'

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• 5. English Literary Currents

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  Michael Martinez, writing for The Tolkien Society, found 'similar dialogue styles and character qualities' in Dickens and Tolkien. He compared the nine members of the Fellowship to Pickwick's circle of friends in Dickens's 1837 novel The Pickwick Papers. He also saw Bilbo's birthday speech as closely echoing Pickwick's first address to his group. The scholar Anna Vaninskaya places Tolkien in the romantic tradition of writers like W. B. Yeats and William Morris. In political terms, she compares his mature writings to the Little Englandism and anti-statism of G. K. Chesterton and George Orwell. After the Second World War, critics including Anthony Burgess, Edwin Muir, and Philip Toynbee heavily criticized The Lord of the Rings. Others defended it: Naomi Mitchison and Iris Murdoch respected the work, and the poet W. H. Auden championed it. Later critics have placed Tolkien closer to the modernist tradition, noting his emphasis on language and temporality. His pastoral emphasis connects him with the First World War poets and the Georgian movement. The Tolkien scholar Claire Buck suggests that creating a mythology for England would fit the tradition of English post-colonial literature.

  Holly Ordway has noted Tolkien's lasting interest in Joseph Henry Shorthouse's 'strange, long-forgotten' 1881 novel John Inglesant. Ordway finds John Inglesant's 'moral conflict and competing loyalties' mirrored in Tolkien's fiction. A 'providentially freeing climax consequent upon the exercise of pity,' Ordway argues, forms 'perhaps the key theme' of The Lord of the Rings. Thomas Kullmann and Dirk Siepmann find Tolkien's prose drawing on a wide range of novelists. They compare his limited point of view with Jane Austen, his landscape descriptions with the Bronte sisters and Thomas Hardy. For characterisation through non-standard speech, they cite Emily Bronte and Charles Dickens; for the use of ancient mythology, they invoke James Joyce's Ulysses. Kullmann and Siepmann find that Tolkien and Joyce both 'create intense dialogue with myths,' Joyce through allusion, Tolkien by emulating style and content.

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