Tolkien encyclopedia pdf

While highly creative, the fiction of J. Tolkien drew on a number of sources. Tolkien was inspired by the academic fields of philology and early Germanic Tolkien was heavily influenced by Norse mythology.

Tolkien, is the story of the love. On Tolkien's grave, J. Tolkien is referred to as Beren and Edith is be inspired by the god Tyr and the wolf Fenrir, characters in Norse mythology.

Tolkien also got inspiration from the great love story of Romeo and Juliet. Languages constructed by J. He gave them a rich family of languages and a vast cultural inheritance that, for all that it was rooted in real traditions, required all his genius and imagination to truly flourish. Elves Listening to a Minstrel. Music plays an important role in the culture of the Elves, especially the Teleri. While by birth she is Halfelven, she ultimately chooses the fate of the Elves.

The heroine, Senta, the daughter of a sea captain, falls instantly in love with the Dutchman when her father brings him home after a voyage under the terms of his curse he is allowed to set foot on land once in every seven years. When the Dutchman sets sail again, Senta leaps into the sea, and so lifts the curse on his soul. They owe their name to the eald enta geweorc of Anglo-Saxon. Out of such simple philological origins, Tolkien created beings of great and beguiling complexity—generally slow and gentle in their thoughts, words, and deeds but capable of swift and elemental violence when roused, as in their overthrow of Isengard.

To find beings of myth and legend that correspond directly to the Ents, Tolkien had only to look back into English folklore, in which the Green Man plays a such a key and distinctive part.

The Green Man was in origin a Celtic nature spirit and tree god who represented the victory of the powers of growth over the powers of ice and frost. Essentially benevolent, he could also be powerful and destructive, just like the Ents and the even more belligerent Huorn tree spirits.

The March of the Ents—one of the most powerfully imagined events in The Lord of the Rings—also has a more personal inspiration. Tolkien believed that Shakespeare had trivialized and misinterpreted an ancient and authentic myth, providing a cheap, simplistic interpretation of the prophecy of this march of a wood against a hill.

Thus, in The Lord of the Rings he devised a situation in which the Ents, the spirits of the forest and personifications of growth and renewal, march against their foes, the Orcs, the spirits of the mountain and personifications of winter and death. Marching Ents A group of Northmen who settle in the Vales of the Anduin in the twentieth century of the Third Age and who are the ancestors of the Rohirrim.

A strong and fair-haired race of horsemen and men-at-arms, in TA they unexpectedly come to the aid of the Men of Gondor. In The Lord of the Rings she disguises herself as a young cavalryman, rides to Gondor, and takes part in the Battle of Pelennor Fields, slaying the Witch-king of Morgul. Whether shield-maidens existed in reality is much debated. Like Sleeping Beauty, she is awakened from sleep by Sigurd the Dragon-slayer, with whom she falls in love.

It is also somewhat romanticized, since her donning of a male disguise to assert her personality and achieve her goals in a male world makes us think of any number of Shakespearean heroines, such as Rosalind in As You Like It One of the seven queens of the Valar, who has the power to heal all hurts and relieve weariness.

EVIL EYE A widespread superstition throughout human history, recorded in ancient Greek and Roman texts as well as many religious scriptures, from the Koran to the Bible, by which an individual, often a sorcerer, has the power to injure or harm by means of a simple, but baleful, glance.

Attempts to ward off the power of the evil eye have resulted in the creation of talismans featuring a staring eye, which is supposed to reflect back the malicious gaze on the evildoer. Such talismans are found painted on the prows of boats and ships, on houses and vehicles, and are worn as beads and jewels in a multitude of cultures from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean.

In all cultures, eyes are believed to have special powers and are said to be windows onto the soul. It is difficult to determine whether the spirit of Sauron, after his defeat at the end of the Second Age, was ever able to regain an actual material form—a disembodiment, perhaps, that makes his malign power seem all the greater.

More generally, Odin in his guise as necromancer was the mythological figure who most obviously informed the identity of Sauron the Necromancer and, not coincidentally, was also known as the One-Eyed God.

The greatest of the Eldar whose pride brings disaster on his kinsmen. Tolkien required a creature that was brutal, murderous, and filled with low cunning.

He wanted a creature that wallowed in the pleasures of torture of mind, body, and spirit. Tolkien knew exactly what he wanted and where to find it: the embodiment of something akin to the most evil of all monsters created by the collective imagination of the Germanic and Norse peoples. It was a tale that would fuel his imagination for the rest of his life.

This early enthusiasm not only led to his study of Norse and Germanic literature and language—the focus of his life as a scholar—but also inspired his first serious attempt, at 22 years of age, as the creator of his own original stories. For, beyond dragon-fire and serpent-strength, Glaurung has more subtle powers: the keenest eyesight, the greatest sense of hearing and smell.

He is a serpent of great cunning and cleverness, but his intelligence—like that of his entire race in Norse and Germanic legend—has the flaws of vanity, gluttony, greed, and deceit. The life and death of Glaurung the Deceiver is the tale of a powerful and original character that is central to The Silmarillion. Usually the tallest and slimmest of their race, they are commonly fair-skinned, fair-haired, and most likely to go on adventures.

Almost any display of individuality or ambition exhibited by a normally conventional Hobbit is usually attributed to a distant Fallohide bloodline. The name Fallohide provides some of the inspiration for the character Tolkien gives to this kindred. This second derivation suggests the characteristics shared by all Hobbits: a love of newly tilled land and an uncanny ability to hide away in the landscape, so as to appear almost invisible to Men.

Typically fair-haired Fallohide family names are Fairbairn, Goold, and Goldworthy, while their unconventional, independent nature and their intelligence are suggested by such names as Headstrong and Boffin. Consequently, his own Fall of Arthur is an alliterative poem of nearly a thousand verses in the style and meter of the Old English Beowulf in which Arthur is a British military leader fighting a dark shadowy army of invaders out of the east led by the evil, dark knight Mordred.

Men build their camps on its back, but when they light their fires, the beast dives beneath the sea drowning all and sundry. Somewhat overshadowed by Boromir, his bold and ambitious brother, Faramir is depicted as humbler but more thoughtful, and just as steadfast in his defense of his homeland. I love only for that which they defend. The destruction of the Elven city of Gondolin in FA recalls the fall of Troy in Greek mythology—a city likewise famous for its massive walls.

In that tale Ilmarinen forges the artifact known as the Sampo that could bring great wealth and good fortune to its possessor. Both artifacts excite greed and envy. See the entries on the Sampo and Silmarils for more on the connections between these magical artifacts. Ultimately, all such stories are warnings about the dangers of human—or indeed Elven—hubris.

In one of the best-known Norse myths concerning Fenrir, the gods, knowing the trouble he is destined to cause, attempt to bind him. Sired by Draugluin, the Father of Werewolves, Carcharoth is the unsleeping guardian at the gates of the dark, subterranean kingdom of Angband. The site of one of the most critical battles in the history of Gondor.

In TA in the Battle of the Field of Celebrant, the forces of Gondor were about to be overrun by barbarian Easterling invaders known as the Balchoth. This proved to be one of the most critical battles in European history, as the invader was Attila the Hun c. AD —53 , leader of the most formidable barbarian force the Romans had ever faced.

After the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields and the retreat of the invading Huns, as reward for their military service, the Visigoths became the main inheritors of the lands devastated by the barbarian wars and plagues.

AD — It quite intoxicated me. It revealed a mythology that would be hugely influential on the composition of The Silmarillion. Many years later, in a letter to the poet W. Sightings of this phantom ship, glowing with a spectral light, were made starting in the eighteenth century.

However, he entirely inverts the story by making his mariner not cursed and aimless but blessed and purposeful. The comparison tightens, however, in the motif of the leaping lover.

However, unlike Senta, Elwing is transformed into a seabird. Flies of Mordor. These gray, black, and brown blood-sucking insects are marked, as Orcs are marked, with a red eye-shape upon their backs.

She may be in origin identical with another goddess, Frigg, wife of Odin, and queen of both the Aer and Vanir gods.

Like his sister Freya, the goddess of love and war, Freyr is one of the Vanir, a tribe of fertility gods who united with the Aesir gods of war to form a single pantheon under Odin. Surt and Freya are entirely destroyed in their last battle, while the Balrog and Wizard continue their struggle until the Balrog is slain, but at the cost of life of Gandalf in his bodily form as the Grey Wizard. She is commonly identified with Freya, and there is a certain overlap in the stories told about the two goddesses.

In the Old English epic of Beowulf there is Froda, the powerful king of the Heathobards, who attempts to make peace between the Danes and Bards. Likewise, the medieval Icelandic poet and historian Snorri Sturluson — recorded that another King Froda was a contemporary of the Roman Emperor Augustus and that his reign was conspicuous for peacefulness. After the carnage of the war, Frodo the Wise becomes a respected counselor and peacemaker throughout Middle-earth.

The war-ravaged Shire is transformed and filled with Elvish enchantment. In that year, many children born to Hobbits are golden-haired and beautiful, and everything prospers in the Shire. In Old English literature and Scandinavian mythology, the name Frodo or Froda, Frothi, Frotha is often connected with figures associated with peace.

Perhaps the best-known myth associated with the Furies—or the Erinyes—concerns the Greek hero Orestes who, after murdering his mother, Clytemnestra, is ruthlessly pursued by the goddesses. These spirits upon Middle-earth took the form of man-shaped giants shrouded in darkness with manes of fire, eyes that glowed like burning coals, and nostrils that breathed flame.

Balrogs wielded many-thonged whips of fire in combination with a mace or flaming sword. Falls of Rauros. In ancient Welsh mythology we find forest and water nymphs who closely resemble Galadriel, the guardians of sacred fountains, wells, and grottoes hidden in deep forest vales. In Arthurian tradition, Vivien, the Lady of the Lake and perhaps in origin a Celtic White Lady herself, rises dressed in white from her palace beneath the lake to present the sword and scabbard of Excalibur to the rightful king.

Vivien also raises Lancelot du Lac before sending him into the world with the arms of war. We might see a similar figure in Greek mythology, the sea nymph Thetis, mother of Achilles, the greatest hero of the Trojan War, who gifts her son with his armor. Galadriel, too, belongs to this tradition, presiding over a realm of dreams and desires, visions and illusions, and gifts and blessings. In Samwise Gamgee we have the perfect foil to his master, Frodo Baggins.

Gandalf has multiple sources of inspiration in the mythologies of many nations. All are linked with magic, sorcery, arcane knowledge, and secret doctrine. Most obviously, in appearance, Gandalf, like Merlin, Odin, and Wotan, takes on the form of a wandering old man in a gray cloak carrying a staff. Gandalf is comparable to these figures in his powers and deeds, like Merlin or Hermes, for example, serving as a guide to the hero and helping him to win against impossible odds by using his supernatural powers.

In The Hobbit, however, Gandalf appears largely as a standard fairy-tale character: a rather comic, eccentric magician in the company of a band of Dwarves. He even has something of the character of an absent-minded history professor about him, of which Tolkien would have had firsthand experience. Like his fairy-tale counterparts, Gandalf also fulfills the traditional role of mentor, adviser, and tour guide for the hero and in so doing moves the plot rapidly forward.

Wizards usually provide a narrative that comprises a reluctant hero, secret maps, translations of ancient documents, supernatural weapons and how to use them , some monsters and how to kill them , location of treasure and how to steal it , and an escape plan negotiable. Gandalf the Grey certainly fits into this tradition. It is Gandalf who brings the Dwarves and the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins together at the start of the story and sets them on their quest.

It is just this combination of the everyday and the epic that makes The Hobbit so compelling. Grand adventures with Dragons, Trolls, Elves, and treasure are combined with the afternoon teas, toasted English muffins, pints of ale, and smoke-ring-blowing contests. In The Hobbit, then, Gandalf is an amusing and reassuring presence, something like a fairy godfather. In the opening chapter of The Lord of the Rings, he seems to reprise the role, appearing much like an odd but much-loved uncle who always amuses everyone with his amateur magic tricks.

As the book continues, the force of his personality and ethical purpose increases tenfold as he is revealed as a powerful archetypal wizard. His later transformation into Gandalf the White is even more shocking. In this, Tolkien seems to be making the point that behind all fairytale magicians are the powerful archetypes from myth and epic. In this startling transformation, Gandalf fully reveals his status as one of Istari, the order of Wizards who in origin are among the immortal angelic powers known as the Maiar.

Sent to Middle-earth at the end of the first millennia of the Third Age, the Istari, as emissaries of the Valar, serve as advisers to the rulers of the mortal lands.

The two Old Norse elements of Gandalfr are either gand, or gandr, and alf r. However, Tolkien would likely argue that each translated aspect of this particular Wizard has other definitions hidden within, and we can see how the implications of both layers of meaning played a considerable part in shaping the fate of the character. However, this conflict in meaning appears to be a foreshadowing of a twist in plot in which Gandalf the Grey is transformed into Gandalf the White.

As an astral traveler, Gandalf is comparable to the Norse god Odin who, in his shamanic wizard form, traveled between the world of men and the worlds of spirits, and even into the land of the dead. Garm will attack Tyr the One-handed, god of war, and engage in a battle that will end in their mutual destruction. In the Quest for the Silmaril, Carcharoth bites off hand of the hero, Beren henceforth, like Tyr, known as the One-handed.

Both Garm and Carcharoth are comparable to the ancient Greek Cerberus, the unsleeping three-headed hellhound that guards the underworld gates of Hades. Although there is no definitive version, it is reputed to be the longest oral epic in existence with well over a million recorded verses in multiple languages and dialects. Geser is a warrior-king who is both a smith and a magician. To such a hero, all things are possible. He assumes many forms, creates invulnerable weapons, conjures up phantom armies, and creates wealth and prosperity for his people.

Tradition insists, for instance, that the great historic Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan was descended from a family of smiths, as was the legendary Tartar hero Kok Chan. The multiskilled hero Geser becomes king of his lands by virtue of many feats of heroism and magic. His confirmation as king comes when the supernatural guardians of the kingdom allow him entry into a crystal mountain where the treasures of the kingdom are kept.

The most important of these is the emblematic throne of the realm. His archenemy, the evil Kurkar, has a similar ring or talisman that must be kept safe and by whose power he rules his kingdom. There is no indication that Tolkien knew or was inspired by the tales of Geser and Kurkar, but both The Lord of the Rings and the stories of Geser share an ancient and widespread archetypal theme of kings as magician-smiths and ring lords.

Sauron the Ring Lord shares many characteristics with both Geser and Kurkar. Like Geser, Sauron is both a supernaturally gifted smith capable of creating unmatched wonders in his forge, and a magician capable of terrifying acts of sorcery. Both have mountain strongholds, and both must keep safe the golden rings by whose powers they rule their kingdoms. At this point, the comparison between Geser and Sauron largely ceases. Sauron the Dark Lord is much more closely akin to the malevolent Kurkar.

Normal fires do not even cause the metal to redden, and both require supernatural fires of volcanic intensity to melt them down. There is an ancient and widespread archetypal theme of warrior kings as magician-smiths and ring lords.

They have the power to paralyze with terror or enthrall with a glance of the eye or the sound of their voice. Elven nobleman, son of Fingon, and high king of the Noldor—and indeed the Eldar—through the Second Age.

However, in both realms, this victory of the righteous and good comes at the cost of the lives of their kings and the loss of alliances that can never be recovered. King Arthur slays and is slain by the forever-damned Mordred, while Sauron slays both Gil-galad and Elendil, but is finally overthrown when the One Ring is cut from his hand.

These, he believes, are the greatest interlocking network of caverns and grottos in all of Middle-earth, a discovery that could make it a potential paradise for Dwarves. However, Gimli in this instance is not the name of a dwarf or man but rather a place. This mighty serpent is depicted as being of massive size and strength, and protected by scales of impenetrable iron.

His fangs and claws are rapier-sharp, and his great tail can crush the shield-wall of any army. From him they learn all the secrets of the treasures to be found in the deep earth, and become the greatest craftsmen of the Elves in the shaping of jewels and forging of metals. It occurs in one or two places [in The Hobbit] but is usually translated goblin or hobgoblin for the larger kinds. However, the publishing history of Tolkien novels ensured that readers would first encounter them under the Goblin name.

However, readers who progress from The Hobbit to the high romance of The Lord of the Rings and the heroic age of The Silmarillion soon discover that Tolkien no longer portrays Goblins simply as comic grotesques, but as the seriously irredeemably evil race of Middle-earth in thrall to the Dark Lord. His Goblins share many aspects with Germanic, Nordic, and British traditions, with kobolds, bogies, knockers, bugbears, red caps, demons, imps, sprites, and gremlins, as well as with beings from the folk traditions of Asia, such as the Malayan Toyol or Cambodian Cohen Kroh, evil, twisted spirits animating the bodies of murdered children or fetuses.

He plays a key role in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, where he appears as a foil and even alter ego of the main protagonists, Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, respectively. There is some inconsistency in his portrayal across the two books: in The Hobbit he is shown as some sort of murderous, cannibalistic Goblin feared even by other Goblins, while in The Lord of the Rings Tolkien reveals Gollum to be an ancestral Stoorish Hobbit long banished from his people and corrupted by the One Ring.

In The Hobbit, the foul race of Orcs are most often called by the more familar name of Goblins. Sote steals a cursed ring, but he so fears it may be taken from him, he has himself buried alive with it, and sleeplessly guards it with his weapons drawn. Jekyll and Mr. Increasingly during the Third Age the realms—first under its kings and later under the Ruling Stewarts—provide a bulwark against the growing power of Sauron and Mordor and Easterling and Southron hordes.

Its capital lies first at Osgiliath and later Minas Tirith. In elaborating the history of his fictional kingdom, Tolkien drew extensively on his knowledge of ancient history. Like Umbar, Carthage in North Africa commanded mighty fleets of warships, and allied itself with mercenary armies supported by war elephants and cavalries. The Western Roman Empire, too, had to endure centuries of warfare with invading barbarians on its eastern borders.

The ascension of King Elessar at the end of the War of the Ring marks the restoration of the kingdom of Gondor and a new, more prosperous age in its history. Both historically and linguistically, the Goths fascinated Tolkien from an early age. In Gothic, Tolkien observed the first recorded language of the Germanic people and the first recorded language spoken by the progenitors of the English people.

Tolkien believed that through his study of the language, and the surviving fragments of Gothic texts, he would gain new insights into this elusive people. Both peoples were migrants from the north of their respective continents, and both had legendary dragon- slaying forebears.

From time to time, too, the Goths allied themselves with the Roman Empire, most notably at the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields AD where Gothic cavalry staged a dramatic rescue of the beleaguered Roman troops. The sword is wielded by King Sigmund until the blade is broken in a duel with Odin, the Lord of Battles. Gram and its history are comparable to Narsil, the dynastic sword of the kings of Arnor and Gondor, and its history.

The shards of Narsil are saved, and three millennia later the sword is reforged by the Elves of Rivendell for Aragorn, the rightful heir to the kings of Arnor and Gondor. Its blade is distinguished by the blue flames that play along its razor edges. In the Nibelungenlied, Sigurd is transformed into the German hero Siegfried and the Dwarf-reforged sword used in the slaying of the dragon is called Balmung. While the Valar and Elves are ultimately victorious, the near-cosmic violence of the battle results in the shattering of the Iron Mountains and the sinking of almost all of the land of Beleriand.

And in both battles, all the legions of good and evil—all creatures, spirits, demons, and dragons—meet in one final terrible conflict.

It is noteworthy that while there were twelve Olympian gods and goddesses, the Valar number fourteen. For as Tolkien acknowledged, the plot of The Hobbit was largely inspired by Beowulf, and quite clearly Gollum was a miniature version of the monster Grendel.

By some evil power, the ogre Grendel was granted supernatural strength and protection from attack by the weapons of his enemies. The monster came by night and murdered scores of warriors as they slept. Both monsters are subhuman grotesques in appearance and habit. Gollum lived in the dank pools of dark caverns, where he became thin and hairless, a murderer and a cannibal.

His eyes became bulbous, his feet webbed, and his teeth grew long and sharp through living off raw, unclean meat. The monster Grendel had a similar damned existence. He seems to have had little or no human speech and his nocturnal life was largely occupied with stalking prey, murder, and cannibalism. Surrounded by his treasure and trophy weapons stolen from murdered men, the creature lived only to feed on human flesh. Mortally wounded Grendel crawls off to die in the grotto at the bottom of his haunted pool.

Even so, everything seems to have gone wrong. The Hobbit is doubly defeated: morally by the power of the Ring and physically by the power of Gollum. Yet upon Middle-earth, the victory of evil often leads to its own defeat. Gollum ends up a reluctant martyr whose evil intent resulted in the greatest good.

In his creation of races and realms of the Elves, Tolkien was to some degree guided by the Norse cosmology of the light elves of Alfheim and the dark elves of Swartalfheim. In European folklore the association of elves with forests and woodlands, as well as with the mysterious, gray hours around twilight, is an old one. There, in Oberon and Titania the king and queen of the fairies , we may see a buried inspiration for King Thingol and Queen Melian. In the Kalevala, Kullervo requests of his sentient sword that it drink his blood and take his life.

The legend of his rise to power from shepherd to king was recorded by both Plato in The Republic and Herodotus in The Histories. According to these accounts, after an earthquake opened a hidden cave, the young shepherd entered it and discovered a tomb and a magic ring that could make the wearer invisible.

Armed with this ring of invisibility, Gyges managed to enter the Lydian royal palace, seduce the queen and, with her aid, slay the king, and become king in his place. He was known to the Romans as Pluto. Both were stern and dreaded rulers of the dead, and enforcers of fate. According to one Greek myth, the three sons of Cronos divided the realms of the Earth between them: Hades was ruler of the dead; Zeus the Roman Jupiter ruler of the living who breathed the air; while Poseidon the Roman Neptune was ruler of all the life of the seas.

The vast territories to the south of Gondor. A land of desert, grasslands, and jungles and of blistering heat, it has strong associations with the real- world Africa. Its peoples are the Haradrim.

The smallest in stature and most typical of the three strains of Hobbits: the standard-issue diminutive, brown-skinned, curly-haired, hairy-footed, hole-dwelling Hobbit.

The other two Hobbit breeds are the Fallohide and Stoor. Together, these three races were meant to link the history of the Hobbits with that of the Germanic settlers of Britain: the Saxons, the Angles, and the Jutes. The Harfoots were most likely to trade with Dwarves, while the Fallohides were most likely to consort with Elves, and the Stoors with Men. The association of Hobbits with hares not only implies nimbleness, but also keen sight and hearing, as well as oversized feet. Together all these allusions provide a succinct description of this Hobbit kind: a small, nimble creature with large, hairy feet.

The tall, dark-haired people of Dunland who made a pact with the Wizard Saruman and joined his Orc legions. The dike is named after Helm Hammerhand, ninth king of Rohan. Rohirric legends told of the night-stalking Helm descending from the dike like a mighty Snow Troll and slaying his foes with his bare hands. Thus, we discover, the centuries-long wars between the fair-haired Anglo-Saxons of Mercia and the dark-haired Celts of Wales are mirrored in the centuries- long wars between the fair-haired Rohirrim of the Mark and the darkhaired Dunlendings of Dunland.

As he often stated, Hobbits were meant to be quintessentially English, so logic dictated that the history of Hobbits and the Anglo-Saxons should have much in common. Eventually, both races make mountain crossings and settle for centuries in wedge-shaped delta regions called the Angle. Wars and invasions force both peoples to make water crossings and establish new homelands: the English Shires for the Anglo-Saxons and the Shire for the Hobbits. Helm Hammerhand.

Helm froze to death in a night raid against the Dunlendings. He was known to the Romans as Mercury. Hermes is a psychopomp—the conveyer of souls to the underworld—and is also the god of commerce, roads, merchants, travelers, thieves, magicians, and alchemists. Indeed, in some of these aspects Hermes has more in common with Odin, the king of the gods in Norse mythology, and, in his association with traveling and magic, with the Istari or Wizards of Middle-earth.

Hobbit village and ancestral home of the Baggins family of Bag End, located almost at the center or midland of the Shire, not too far away from the Three- Farthing Stone. With his mother and his brother, from the age of four to eight between and he lived at 5 Gracewell Road in the village.

On a warm summer afternoon in , Tolkien was sitting at his desk in his study at 20 Northmoor Road in the suburbs of Oxford. He had worked as a scholar on the Oxford English Dictionary and knew the English language and a multitude of other languages to its very roots. Words—the look and feel of them as well as their origins—inspired him. But that was only a beginning. In the many stories surrounding it, the Grail becomes an elusive and enigmatic symbol whose exact meaning scholars have much debated.

Tolkien drew a comparison between the Holy Grail and the Sampo, a similarly mysterious artifact that plays a key role in the Finnish national epic, the Kavalla. For Tolkien, both Grail and Sampo are at once artifacts and allegories—both real and abstract —and considered the quintessence of creative power, capable of provoking both good and evil, especially among the less than pure. Tolkien intended the Silmarils to be objects of similarly intense but obscure symbolism, focal points of the inexorable pattern of fate.

The Holy Grail, the Sampo, and the Silmarils all serve as a reminder that the mystery of ultimate destiny and purpose is something that cannot be penetrated. However, all three generate an ardent yearning to find, hold, and possess them, which leads to much shedding of blood. The paradox of the Silmarils specifically is that they, like the Grail, shine with a divine light, but to those who pursue them they bring about a descent into darkness and tragedy.

The empire lasted from the coronation of Charlemagne the usual starting point accepted by historians to its dissolution in Beren Holding a Silmaril. The elusive Silmarils have a Grail-like mystery and sacredness. The thousand-year-old silver-tipped hunting horn in the keeping of the Ruling Stewards of Gondor. The horn is that of one of the gigantic wild white oxen called the Kine of Araw which Tolkien modeled on the historic aurochs, the now-extinct wild white ox hunted by the ancient Germans, who also turned their horns into silver-tipped hunting horns.

The horn is modeled on a number of mythological or legendary horns, most notably the horn of the Norse god, Heimdall, known as Gjallarhorn, and the oliphant horn of the Frankish hero Roland in the medieval La Chanson de Roland. Each horseman was thought to symbolize a scourge: Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. One traditional Christian reading of the Four Horsemen saw in them a prophecy of the eventual decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

And in the nine Ringwraiths, too, we see a foreshadowing of the Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death that threaten to come down upon the inhabitants on the kingdom of Gondor and the other lands of Middle-earth. HORSES The horse plays a large part in the stories of Middle-earth—as steeds for warriors, as a means of transportation, and as beasts of burden.

The predominance of the horse reflects preindustrial societies generally, and Anglo-Saxon culture more specifically. These white and silver-gray horses are the strongest and fastest of the Third Age. With equal courage, Sigmund slaughters scores of his foes in acts of bloody revenge for the murder of his entire clan, including his eight brothers. She was the goddess of health and, although she was quite widely worshipped, she is close to being a personification.

In cult statues she was depicted as a young woman of tender expression. I J Isildur. Handmaid of Varda, the Valarian queen of the Stars, and numbered among the greatest of the Maiar.

It is comparable to the palace of the Greek gods Zeus the Roman Jupiter and Hera the Roman Juno , the king and queen of the gods on the summit of Mount Olympus, as well as to the hall or tower of Hlidskjalf, seat of the Norse king of the gods Odin. He seems originally to have been an ancient Finnish sky god who later took on the characteristics of other Indo-European smith-gods, such as Hephaestus and Vulcan. In the Kalevala, Ilmarinen is shown as capable of creating practically anything that can be worked from copper, brass, iron, silver, or gold.

The Sampo is variously described, but in the epic is depicted as a kind of magic mill that can perpetually produce salt, grain, and gold and thus is a source of phenomenal wealth and good fortune. Ilmarinen creates the Sampo in order to win the Maiden of Pohjola.

Ilmarinen, having created the Sampo, rushes to claim his promised bride, but she refuses him. Freyr was one of the Vanir, a race of fertility and corn gods, a name that seems to have also inspired the name of the Vanyar. There are many other hints and connections which, however, can only remain supposition. While many such motifs are part of a wider Celtic or even Indo-European body of myth and legend, it is impossible to imagine that Tolkien remained unaffected, let alone ignorant, of such a powerful, poetic tradition.

Tolkien tells us the names of the two others, Alatar and Pallando together known as the Blue Wizards for their sea-blue cloaks but that, since they wandered into the far east of Middle-earth, nothing is known of their doings. They are conjurers, tellers of tales, and repositories of wisdom, often appearing out of the blue, all characteristics that might equally apply to Gandalf, as he is depicted in The Hobbit and the early part of The Lord of the Rings, especially through the eyes of Hobbits.

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