The Old Artificer

Though this blog has not been visited by a large number of people, I was surprised to learn that somehow people are finding some of my posts. I never intended this: I set up the blog to post articles by others that had interested me and might prove valuable for some later research project (I did this so that I could have the articles readily available in one place). But, since clearly many are interested in the popular culture, mythology, and fandom that fascinates me, perhaps I will try to comment more on what I post.

So here is some Tolkien blogging:

I was recently working on a project related to fairy tales and anthropology in the 19th century, and I became very interested in Andrew Lang. He was a Scottish anthropologist, classicist, folklorist, author, and journalist who seems to have involved himself in nearly every argument going on in Victorian England. He argued vocally with Max Müller over Müller’s theories of solar mythology (Müller contended that most ancient myths are really allegorical representations of nature), and he argued with Edward Tylor over the origins of religious thought. In the 1890s, he began collecting and compiling world folklore and mythology and published many volumes of color-coded “Fairy Books.” For children growing up at this time, Lang’s Fairy Books would have been much like the Grimms’ collection.

J.R.R. Tolkien, who was born in 1892, grew up as Lang’s books were published, and they had an enormous impact on him. In The Red Fairy Book, Lang included “The Story of Sigurd” from The Volsung Saga. The story, which featured Fafnir the dragon, excited Tolkien’s imagination and is particularly important to his later. As Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien’s biographer, notes (from J.R.R. Tolkien: A biography, page 30) :

[Tolkien] found delight in the Fairy Books of Andrew Lang, especially the Red Fairy Book, for tucked away in its closing pages was the best story he had ever read. This was the tale of Sigurd who slew the dragon Fafnir: a strange and powerful tale set in the nameless North. Whenever he read it Ronald found it absorbing: “I desired dragons with a profound desire,” he said long afterwards. “Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighborhood. But the world that contained even the imagination of Fafnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril.”

I am bringing this up because during my research on Lang, I found an excellent website on the Fairy Books. At that site, you can access every single one of the 13 books. Of course, they probably influenced many of Tolkien’s colleagues in the world of literary fantasy as well (Lewis would have been familiar with him too). So you can browse that website and read some myths and tales you may never have read before, or see how the myths you already know were presented to young Tolkien. Doing so, you’ll find all sorts of gems, like these from “The Story of Sigurd”:

“When Sigurd heard the story he said to Regin:

`Make me a good sword that I may kill this Dragon.’

So Regin made a sword, and Sigurd tried it with a blow on a lump of iron, and the sword broke.

Another sword he made, and Sigurd broke that too.

Then Sigurd went to his mother, and asked for the broken pieces of his father’s blade, and gave them to Regin. And he hammered and wrought them into a new sword, so sharp that fire seemed to burn along its edges.”

It is important to note that these were not collected by Lang in the same way that we think of the Grimms literally transcribing tales from “the folk.” Lang re-presented texts that he collected, and as such, anyone interested in the influence of these stories should see how they were presented to Tolkien–how Lang edited them and changed them from other sources to make them suitable for Victorian children.

Other connections between Tolkien and Lang: Tolken quoted Lang a few times in his famous essay “On Fairy Stories,” and while at Oxford, he actually supervised Roger Lancellyn Green’s dissertation on Lang (Green has written many books on modern fantasy writers).