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Set a star bar friends otherwise you will not receive the wonderful push of Wenjing
I'm afraid you're right: the study of the prototype and origin of The Lord of the Rings may occupy the energy of a generation or two of scholars. I hope this doesn't have to happen. For me, the concrete application of specific plots is the most interesting and worth thinking about, whatever their motives, whether they are complete inventions, deliberate borrowings, or unconscious coincidences.
— The Collected Letters, No. 337, to "Mr. Rigley", 25 May 1972
When you saw Gandalf walk out of the sacred and fearsome Van Gun Forest, and the white horse Jie Shadow galloped along the whistle, were you also amazed by this fabulous beauty? In addition to the blood boiling for the bravery of the Rohan cavalry, do you also wonder where the inspiration for the human races in the north came from? Good colts, forests, suns and moons, this time, we start with Tolkien's origins with Germanic culture, and talk about the Germanic marks in the Middle-earth style.
It is worth mentioning that the original intention of this article is not to simply list the contrasts, so as to completely pull the mythological story into reality, because literature is not mechanical; we are not in favor of moving history to one by one and claiming that "this is the metaphor of the Lord of the Rings", because it is not so. Nevertheless, when walking through the Middle-earth world, we can still see the traces of the cultures and spirits that Tolkien loved, and the understanding of these cultural imprints is both the anchor point of our immersion in the Middle-earth world and the tacit tacit understanding between the reader and the author.
"Tolkien"
Or "Tollkühn"?
"In this war, I developed a strong personal grudge against the ignorant Adolf Hitler... The spirit of the North, which I loved dearly and which had made a great contribution to Europe, would be destroyed, depraved and misused, and would forever be nailed to the pillar of shame of history. ”
— Collected Letters, No. 45
Tolkien's patrilineal family was originally from Lower Saxony, Germany, and moved to England after the 18th century. In a lecture, Tolkien mentioned that the surname Tolkien may be derived from the German word Tollkühn, which means "foolishness".
Tolkien's mother taught Tolkien German as a child. Long before Tolkien studied English language and literature at Oxford University, he had a lasting passion and considerable degree of research on the language and culture of early Germans. After World War I, Tolkien participated in the compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary, where he was primarily responsible for the history and etymology of Germanic words beginning with W. In 1943, Tolkien, then a professor at Pembroke College in Oxford, opened an overview course in Germanic linguistics for prisoners of war.
As a profession of his choice and passion, the literature, poetry and mythology of early Germanic culture inspired Tolkien's creations. Sources of inspiration include Old English literature such as Beowulf, Nordic Sakya such as The Legend of Vulson, The Legend of Hayval and Heydrick, Old Edda, Prose Edda, and old German Such as Eurendel and Song of the Nibelungen. However, Tolkien objected to critics making a direct comparison of his work with The Ring of the Nibelungen.
We can glimpse Tolkien's attitude toward his German ancestry in his 1938 reply to the German publisher Rütten & Loening. At the time of World War II and the publication of The Hobbit, Rütten & Loening expressed to Tolkien that he would be willing to launch a German version, but first to prove his Aryan ancestry. Tolkien wrote back that he had no Jewish ancestry and had always proudly looked at his German name, but he believed that the Jewish people were undoubtedly extremely gifted, and that if insignificant inquiries about ancestry were to become the rules of literature, he would soon not be proud of his German ancestry.
It's not the prince who rides the white horse, it's the wizard!
The Lokhan people in The Lord of the Rings are generally considered to be similar to the ancient Germanic peoples, because of the old English characteristics of their national language, but also because of their integrity and brave character. Like the Tencteri who crossed the Rhine in the Germania Chronicles, the Rohan people also flourished horse culture and were also known for their brave cavalry. In the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, the Design of the Rohan Cavalry Helmet, which resembles a Germanic helmet, is also used.
As one of the most characteristic and fascinating aspects of the Rohan culture, the setting of the good colt Meyalas (most famous for Gandalf's mount in The Lord of the Rings) worshipped by the Lokhan people has a lot in common with the Germanic worship of the white horse in The Chronicles of Germania.
The Germans raised white horses in the jungle dedicated to the gods, and they were regarded as messengers of the gods. These white horses were not for ordinary work, but were accompanied by priests, kings, or chiefs who listened to the hiss and sniffles of the white horses as a form of divination.
"This is Jet Shadow. He was the head of the kings of horses, Meyalas, and even Theodon, the king of Thehan, had never seen a better horse than him. Isn't he shining as silver and galloping like a rapids? He came for me—he was the white knight's horse, and we'll go to the battlefield together. ”
- "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers"
Jet Shadow
The Lohans believed that Meyalas was equally divine. Legend has it that the ancestors of Meyalas came to Lokhan from the land of the Western gods on the other side of the sea with the hunting god Bema (called Oromi by the elves). Among the known Meyalas, Ferrarov and The Snow Mane are both white horses, and The Shadow is a gray horse, but its coat color is "shining like silver in the day and like a shadow in the night".
Meyalasto was the mount of the heroic royals, and one of the most legendary of them, the Shadow of the King, was tamed by no one before Gandalf appeared, so it was never ridden by anyone. When the gates of Minastilis were breached, Gandalf rode The Shadow against Nazgur, the only free horse in Middle-earth who could stand in front of the Witch King without fleeing, the Shadow had extraordinary courage, and Meyalas also represented the classical spirit of heroism and sacredness.
White Knight
"I'm not a tree, I'm Ent"
The forests and trees that often appear as sacred places in the Middle-earth world may also glimpse the shadow of the relationship between the Germanic people and the forest. In the Chronicles of Germania, the Germans offered the forest to the gods; in the religion of the Seminones, the reason for the dedication of the jungle to the gods is also indicated: on the one hand, due to the signs of the ancestors, and on the other hand, due to the primitive horror caused by the jungle. James Obertino believes that the sacred forest here corresponds to Rose Royne in The Lord of the Rings, but perhaps the Vangun Forest where Ent lives has more ancestral signs and primitive horror characteristics than rose Roth Royn's elven ethereal divine divinity. As a tall, tree-like intelligent creature created by Yavana after the earth, one of arda's oldest races, the Ente in The Lord of the Rings is the embodiment of primitive terror and the spirit of the ancient forest for the little hobbits who walk into the forest.
VanGun Forest
Ente
"The Black Forest (Mirkwood) is not my invention, it is an ancient place name, full of legend... I think that this word is not just a word used to describe color ('black'), but has the meaning of 'dark and gloomy' from the source. ”
— Collected Letters, No. 289
At the same time, Tolkien also mentioned in his letter to his grandson that the Black Forest (Mirkwood) also had Germanic origins: it was used to refer to the vast forest that once sat in the south of the land where the Germans lived, like a natural barrier.
Alan Lee's Black Forest
The "descendants of the sun" turned out to be myself
"Just as the moon rose from the west and came out of the darkness, the Finnese men blew the silver trumpet and led the crowd to set foot on Middle-earth, and the shadows of the group were cast in front of them, deep and long."
- "The Sprite Diamond"
The moon is seen as a distinctive feature of Germanic culture that distinguishes it from Greco-Roman culture, a feature that is still preserved in the masculine part of speech of the modern standard German word "moon" (der Mond). For example, in ancient Scandinavian mythology, which belonged to the Germanic mythological system, the moon god Máni was male and the sun god Sól was female. The moon goddess is often seen as a woman in Greco-Roman mythology, such as Selene, the moon goddess in Greek mythology.
In Tolkien's Middle-earth world, the moon was also uniformly set as male. Meyartrian, who drives the moonship, is a hunter, while Myyar Aren, who drives the Sunship, is a woman. Among the Numenore people, the sun and the moon are personified as the old man of the moon and the lady of the sun.
In the Chronicles of Germania, the Germans believed that the night was before the day. When the sun rises in the Middle Continent world, the moon also rises into the sky seven days before the sun. The first lunar month or full moon was considered by the Germans to be the most auspicious time to deal with affairs, and in Tolkien's pen, the elves generally preferred the moon, because the rising of the sun marked the awakening of humans and the decline of the elves, and the moon treasured the memories of the elves. The elves also called humans the "second people" or "children of the sun" because they awoke as the sun first rose.
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The Lord of the Rings: Hardcover Illustrated Book
J.R.R. Tolkien
[English] Alan Lee Figure
Deng Jiawan Shi Zhongge Du Yunci translated
● The original novel of the Oscar-laurel film "The Lord of the Rings" series.
● George W. R.R. Martin, J.K. Rowling, Peter Jackson; Asimov, Arthur Clarke, Terry Pratchett, Ursula Le guinn, Neil Gaiman, the masters admired by all geniuses.
● Tolkien Foundation designated translation, new revision of the hardcover edition; fifty illustrations by Oscar winner Alan Lee are newly calibrated.
●A large number of "attachments" with the value of the book: poster-style full map of the western part of Middle-earth, pull-page shire map, Gondor detailed map, including "fragments of the Book of Mazapur" images, a set of six Alan Lee illustration postcards.