1 00:00:06,010 --> 00:00:09,910 So what I'm going to do today is to talk about Tolkien's interest in Old Norse, 2 00:00:10,240 --> 00:00:15,310 his history with his subjects and his approach to it, both as a scholar and as a creative writer. 3 00:00:16,030 --> 00:00:21,160 And then I'll look at a few places where we can see a bit of Old Norse influence finding its way into his works. 4 00:00:22,270 --> 00:00:25,989 And since then, since we're here at the end of this lecture series, and sadly, 5 00:00:25,990 --> 00:00:29,560 near the end of the Polygons wonderful Tolkien exhibition, and so fantastic. 6 00:00:30,130 --> 00:00:33,490 I'm going to finish by talking about the apocalypse and the end of the world. 7 00:00:33,640 --> 00:00:42,490 That seemed appropriate just to warn you in advance. So first, I should just briefly explain what we mean when we talk about Old Norse. 8 00:00:43,540 --> 00:00:51,100 So Old Norse was the language spoken across Scandinavia and Iceland during the Viking age and throughout the medieval period. 9 00:00:51,460 --> 00:00:56,500 It's the ancestor of the modern Scandinavian languages, so Norwegian, Icelandic, Danish and so on. 10 00:00:57,640 --> 00:01:03,340 It's a dramatic language and it's therefore quite closely related to English in that they share a common ancestor. 11 00:01:03,910 --> 00:01:08,980 And in the Viking age, old English and Old Norse were very closely, very close indeed. 12 00:01:09,820 --> 00:01:14,620 Probably so close that a speaker of one language would be able to understand the speaker of the other. 13 00:01:15,370 --> 00:01:20,980 Maybe not perfectly, but well enough to communicate. And of course, if you know your Viking history, 14 00:01:21,010 --> 00:01:24,729 you will know that there were many occasions during the Viking age when speakers 15 00:01:24,730 --> 00:01:28,870 of Old Norse and speakers of Old English were in contact for good or ill. 16 00:01:29,800 --> 00:01:34,630 So the cultures as well as the languages, have a very close and very long standing relationship. 17 00:01:36,190 --> 00:01:43,660 So that's the language. But when we talk about literature, we're mostly talking about texts which were written down in medieval Iceland, 18 00:01:44,350 --> 00:01:46,600 largely from the 12th century onwards. 19 00:01:47,080 --> 00:01:54,130 That's where the majority of surviving Old Norse literature was preserved and recorded, but not necessarily composed. 20 00:01:55,090 --> 00:01:56,470 Much of it was composed in Iceland. 21 00:01:56,650 --> 00:02:03,850 But there are also many texts which were preserved in medieval Iceland that had been originally composed in other parts of the Norse speaking world. 22 00:02:05,470 --> 00:02:08,530 And the corpus of Old Norse literature encompasses a very, 23 00:02:08,530 --> 00:02:15,910 very wide range of texts and diverse in form and in subject matter and in really any other way that you can think of. 24 00:02:16,750 --> 00:02:22,510 So we have poetry and prose on all kinds of subjects. We have praise poetry written for Viking kings. 25 00:02:22,840 --> 00:02:25,870 We have learned historical and Christian works. 26 00:02:27,100 --> 00:02:32,079 We have the long prose narratives of the Icelandic sagas, and probably most importantly, 27 00:02:32,080 --> 00:02:37,690 for our purposes today we have since this work the poet together and the poetry. 28 00:02:37,690 --> 00:02:46,750 It is a compilation of poems which were originally composed by different authors, different times and places across the Scandinavian world. 29 00:02:46,930 --> 00:02:53,020 But they were written down and recorded in this manuscript, written in Iceland in the late 13th century. 30 00:02:54,490 --> 00:03:01,390 And the poetic Edda is a very important source for our understanding of pre-Christian pagan Norse mythology, 31 00:03:01,840 --> 00:03:08,740 because it contains poems on a wide range of mythological and heroic subjects, including the creation of the world. 32 00:03:09,040 --> 00:03:13,780 The interaction between the gods and the Giants, the end of the world at Ragnarok. 33 00:03:14,710 --> 00:03:21,880 And also poems about legendary heroes and especially the legend of the volumes, which I'm going to talk about quite a bit later. 34 00:03:23,660 --> 00:03:27,950 So audience literature includes this very, very wide and varied corpus of texts. 35 00:03:28,850 --> 00:03:32,270 And I don't think it will surprise you to learn that Tolkien knew this corpus. 36 00:03:32,450 --> 00:03:37,370 He knew Old Norse, both language and literature extremely well, as we would expect. 37 00:03:38,030 --> 00:03:41,330 So he began to teach himself Old Norse while he was still at school. 38 00:03:42,230 --> 00:03:46,340 He continued to study as a student at Oxford. Along with his other linguistic interests. 39 00:03:47,600 --> 00:03:53,840 In the early 1920s, when he was teaching English at the University of Leeds, he also started to teach Old Norse. 40 00:03:55,040 --> 00:03:58,730 And he enthusiastically encouraged the study of the language among his students. 41 00:03:59,060 --> 00:04:03,709 He set up a Viking club at which he and his colleagues and students would read the 42 00:04:03,710 --> 00:04:08,600 sagas and drink beer and compose drinking songs in various ancient languages. 43 00:04:09,080 --> 00:04:16,430 This is what Tolkien did for fun. And at Leeds, he also became close friends with the old Norse scholar Eddie Gordon, 44 00:04:17,360 --> 00:04:24,140 whose 1927 Introduction to Old Norse published just after Tolkien's time at Leeds, is still one of the standard guys to the subject. 45 00:04:24,150 --> 00:04:25,550 So if you've studied any Old Norse, 46 00:04:25,730 --> 00:04:33,620 you have probably come across this book and in the acknowledgements that Gordon thanks Tolkien for his help in the preparation of the book, 47 00:04:34,220 --> 00:04:38,750 and they actually collaborated on several scholarly projects together at that period of Tolkien's career. 48 00:04:40,850 --> 00:04:49,310 After moving back to Oxford in 1925 as professor of Anglo-Saxon, Tolkien continued to teach and lecture on Old Norse in the English faculty here. 49 00:04:50,150 --> 00:04:54,620 And perhaps unsurprisingly, he founded another group for the recreation reading of the Sagas. 50 00:04:55,520 --> 00:04:59,570 This time the group was called the Cold Beta, and that's an old Norse term. 51 00:04:59,690 --> 00:05:00,980 It means coal biters. 52 00:05:01,190 --> 00:05:07,790 And in the sagas it refers to people who sit around next to the fire keeping warm so close that it's like they're biting the coal. 53 00:05:08,210 --> 00:05:14,810 And so everybody thinks they're really lazy and stupid. But then it usually turns out they have hidden talents and go on to perform great deeds. 54 00:05:15,200 --> 00:05:18,680 So I'll leave you to decide whether that applies to Tolkien, whether he thought it might. 55 00:05:20,600 --> 00:05:23,930 And the copy to included C.S. Lewis and a number of Tolkien's other friends. 56 00:05:24,170 --> 00:05:27,440 And it actually formed a kind of precursor to the Inklings. 57 00:05:28,370 --> 00:05:32,870 They stopped meeting about 1933 when they'd run out of sagas to read, apparently, 58 00:05:33,530 --> 00:05:37,550 and then meetings of the Inklings kind of took over that place in Tolkien's life. 59 00:05:38,910 --> 00:05:42,450 So I think it's important to realise that Tolkien's interest in Old Norse was very much. 60 00:05:42,480 --> 00:05:48,570 Definitely a scholarly one. But it was also quite a big part of his social life and his friendships and and especially in 61 00:05:48,570 --> 00:05:52,830 this period when he was a young academic at Leeds and Oxford in the twenties and thirties. 62 00:05:53,790 --> 00:06:00,720 So for him, a shared love of Old Norse literature was very much the foundation of some really formative and important friendships. 63 00:06:02,070 --> 00:06:08,640 So it's kind of interesting and a bit surprising that actually, although Tolkien taught and lectured on Old Norse extensively, 64 00:06:09,150 --> 00:06:14,040 he published no scholarship, which focussed really in any way at all on Old Norse. 65 00:06:15,390 --> 00:06:18,810 Occasionally in his scholarly publications, [INAUDIBLE] make reference to Old Norse, 66 00:06:19,620 --> 00:06:24,390 but usually as a comparison for English material, which is always the primary focus of interest. 67 00:06:25,860 --> 00:06:30,630 And to understand that kind of apparent anomaly and Tolkien's approach to Old Norse more generally, 68 00:06:30,930 --> 00:06:34,650 it's useful to see it within the context of the scholarly environment of his day. 69 00:06:35,550 --> 00:06:39,600 So at Oxford, Old Norse has a kind of special place we like to think, 70 00:06:39,840 --> 00:06:45,030 and because it's historically been studied and taught within the English faculty as Tolkien taught it, 71 00:06:45,270 --> 00:06:50,070 and that's not the case, all universities, it's not the case with most non English medieval languages, 72 00:06:50,310 --> 00:06:52,410 so medieval Welsh or medieval French or whatever. 73 00:06:53,550 --> 00:07:00,180 And that's really indicative of an approach to Old Norse, which was very prevalent in the first half of the 20th century. 74 00:07:00,900 --> 00:07:04,140 So Tolkien's, you know, period of academic his academic career, 75 00:07:04,530 --> 00:07:11,370 which really tended to focus a lot on similarities and common features between Old Norse and medieval English literature, 76 00:07:11,520 --> 00:07:18,530 and especially Old English, and using to use each corpus of literature to inform the study of the other. 77 00:07:18,540 --> 00:07:20,190 So very much a comparative approach. 78 00:07:21,730 --> 00:07:29,110 And they're very good reasons for that, especially as I mentioned earlier, the very close linguistic relationship between Old Norse and Old English. 79 00:07:29,600 --> 00:07:36,129 And so not only do they share a common ancestor, but there was also significant influence from the Old Norse language on the 80 00:07:36,130 --> 00:07:40,660 English language at a later date as the result of Viking settlement in England. 81 00:07:41,710 --> 00:07:44,470 And that linguistic evidence, that linguistic influence is very, 82 00:07:44,470 --> 00:07:49,270 very evident in the dialect of some of the middle English texts that Tolkien was most interested in. 83 00:07:49,720 --> 00:07:57,460 So so going in the Green Knight and Poe, which he edited and translated both have a very noticeable Old Norse influence on their language. 84 00:07:59,280 --> 00:08:03,120 And it was very characteristic of the scholarly climate of Tolkien's day. 85 00:08:03,420 --> 00:08:10,410 That philological study of the languages, the relationship between the languages should go hand in hand with a comparative approach to the literature. 86 00:08:11,640 --> 00:08:16,320 And that tells us quite a lot about Tolkien's approach to Old Norse and what he like to kind of do with it, really. 87 00:08:17,100 --> 00:08:23,580 And that approach operates on the understanding that just as the Old Norse and the old English languages have a common ancestor, 88 00:08:23,730 --> 00:08:25,110 so too their literatures, 89 00:08:25,950 --> 00:08:35,520 especially that poetry ultimately had a common root in a shared body of stories of myths and legends dating back to at least the fifth century. 90 00:08:35,670 --> 00:08:41,520 So that's before the settlement of Anglo-Saxon England, before the Viking age, before the two cultures had diverged. 91 00:08:42,630 --> 00:08:49,530 And this quotation from one of Tolkien's lectures on the poetic adder is very typical of this view. 92 00:08:52,980 --> 00:08:59,190 So he sees he describes the party together as a descendant of a common Germanic verse and tradition of verse, 93 00:08:59,190 --> 00:09:06,060 which now escapes us of neither the themes of this old Baltic verse nor its style have we anything left. 94 00:09:06,300 --> 00:09:09,780 Save the suggestions afforded by the comparison of Norse and English. 95 00:09:11,610 --> 00:09:18,600 So his point here is that by comparing Old Norse and Old English, you can kind of get closer to understanding this common Germanic verse. 96 00:09:19,770 --> 00:09:25,020 So even if you're comparing texts which were written centuries apart in a very different contexts, 97 00:09:25,260 --> 00:09:28,320 so maybe eighth century England, 14th century Iceland, 98 00:09:28,860 --> 00:09:35,190 if you read them together, you can hope to sort of trace back something about their common tradition, which was the ancestor of both. 99 00:09:36,030 --> 00:09:42,810 And that's that's a hypothetical common tradition which predates any surviving texts by several centuries. 100 00:09:43,470 --> 00:09:47,610 And its origins lie not in the places where the surviving texts are written down. 101 00:09:47,730 --> 00:09:51,300 So England or Iceland mostly, but in Northern Europe. 102 00:09:51,840 --> 00:09:54,480 So Sweden and Denmark and northern Germany. 103 00:09:55,320 --> 00:10:04,559 And that sense of long ago and lost and sort of almost not quite recoverable, but almost within reach is really important. 104 00:10:04,560 --> 00:10:09,150 And that's the kind of thing that really fired Tolkien's imagination as a scholar and a writer. 105 00:10:10,760 --> 00:10:13,850 So here talking calls that tradition Germanic literature. 106 00:10:14,120 --> 00:10:20,090 But actually the word he tends to use for it is northern. Northern ness for him was a very powerful word. 107 00:10:20,990 --> 00:10:25,010 It's also one which is usefully kind of vague and comprehensive because it 108 00:10:25,010 --> 00:10:28,910 can potentially include Anglo-Saxon England and Scandinavia and Iceland and, 109 00:10:29,420 --> 00:10:31,820 you know, basically the whole of Northwest Europe, if you want it to. 110 00:10:33,780 --> 00:10:38,310 So when it comes to the relationship between Old Norse literature and Tolkien's own creative work, 111 00:10:38,760 --> 00:10:42,750 there were definitely certain aspects of Old Norse which interested him more than others. 112 00:10:43,560 --> 00:10:49,860 And it's usually the ones which come closest to this idea of northern ness or could give a provide a glimpse of it. 113 00:10:51,440 --> 00:10:56,420 So as I said earlier, audience literature includes a very diverse range of genres and forms, 114 00:10:56,840 --> 00:11:01,100 but not all of them really have much to do with this idea of Northern ness as Tolkien saw it, 115 00:11:01,760 --> 00:11:05,120 and so they don't really find their way into Tolkien's imaginative world. 116 00:11:05,690 --> 00:11:12,709 What does feature heavily is the mythological and the heroic material, the poetic Edda and the Sagas, 117 00:11:12,710 --> 00:11:16,670 which deal with the legendary past what we call the for now the saga, 118 00:11:16,940 --> 00:11:22,640 which are quite often quite late medieval texts, but they're set in this past northern world. 119 00:11:24,110 --> 00:11:27,259 And it's not a coincidence that this is the kind of material which bears most 120 00:11:27,260 --> 00:11:32,000 significantly on the way Tolkien read Anglo-Saxon literature and especially Beowulf. 121 00:11:36,510 --> 00:11:42,030 So if we take a look at some examples of how all those features in tokens work, those are the kind of texts we will find. 122 00:11:42,570 --> 00:11:45,630 I'll give you three brief examples of many, though that could be different. Really. 123 00:11:47,070 --> 00:11:54,960 One of the most famous and really very obvious and transparent examples of borrowing from the poetic Edda is the names of the dwarves in The Hobbit. 124 00:11:56,040 --> 00:12:01,110 You can see they come straight from a list of dwarf names in full spell, which is the first time in the Edda. 125 00:12:04,210 --> 00:12:07,630 I've highlighted them for you in bold. You may be able to see and they're all there. 126 00:12:07,720 --> 00:12:13,300 Or in Turin and Philly. And Kilian is an Ocean Shield, which is I can see Goudy in Ordnance. 127 00:12:13,990 --> 00:12:17,500 And Tolkien basically took his favourite names from this list and put them into The Hobbit, 128 00:12:18,700 --> 00:12:25,360 and he actually slightly came to regret that a bit later because it's not really very typical of the way he chose names. 129 00:12:26,500 --> 00:12:34,030 You know, he usually chose names in his world with immense care to fit his invented languages and the mythology that he had created. 130 00:12:34,900 --> 00:12:38,590 But he chose these names quite early on in the process of writing The Hobbit, 131 00:12:39,430 --> 00:12:45,610 and he didn't yet know or he hadn't yet decided how or whether that was going to link up with his his own mythology, 132 00:12:45,610 --> 00:12:50,260 his invented world, though his mythology was already in existence, had been for a long time. 133 00:12:50,440 --> 00:12:56,340 But he hadn't kind of decided whether The Hobbit was part of it yet. So when he wanted some names for dwarves, he just went to the editor. 134 00:12:57,320 --> 00:13:01,809 And, and although the dwarves have Old Norse names, actually, 135 00:13:01,810 --> 00:13:07,630 when Tolkien then later came to invent a language for the dwarves during the watch and the writing of the Lord of the Rings, 136 00:13:07,870 --> 00:13:11,350 he decided that their language wasn't actually related to Old Norse. 137 00:13:11,650 --> 00:13:14,830 It was closer to Hebrew, so not related to Old Norse in any way. 138 00:13:15,310 --> 00:13:21,520 And he came up with a fictional explanation for this, which involves the dwarves having a private language they use among themselves, 139 00:13:21,670 --> 00:13:26,560 and then names, Old Norse names, which they use publicly with, you know, outsiders. 140 00:13:26,920 --> 00:13:29,110 But I think the real reason is it's pretty clear to say, 141 00:13:29,470 --> 00:13:36,670 and he later referred to this this use a little bit disparagingly as a rabble of name dwarves out of his mouth. 142 00:13:38,020 --> 00:13:43,300 So it's very nice. It is is quite fun, but it's not really typical of how Old Norse tends to find its way into his world. 143 00:13:44,710 --> 00:13:49,450 And more often he kind of takes ideas and then reinvents them and create something new. 144 00:13:50,200 --> 00:13:56,650 And a good example of this is with another name, which you can see in this list, Gandalf, whose name also comes from this list of dwarves. 145 00:13:58,090 --> 00:13:59,680 And when talking was writing The Hobbit, 146 00:13:59,920 --> 00:14:04,270 he seems originally to have planned for Gandalf to be the name of the head dwarf, which is why he's got a dwarf name. 147 00:14:04,930 --> 00:14:12,700 But the name Gandalf actually means something like Wand Elf Gander is a kind of maybe a kind of magic staff and Alpha is Elf. 148 00:14:13,510 --> 00:14:21,190 So you can kind of see how from the name itself, with those suggestions of magic and elves and maybe even a wizard staff, 149 00:14:21,430 --> 00:14:25,750 that the character of Gandalf began to grow out of his name into something more powerful. 150 00:14:27,370 --> 00:14:30,490 And Gandalf those quite a lot more than his name to Norse literature, 151 00:14:30,760 --> 00:14:36,070 because he also shares some important characteristics with the Norse god, Odin, the father of the gods. 152 00:14:37,430 --> 00:14:40,940 Odin is the God of poetry and the God of battle and the dead. 153 00:14:41,660 --> 00:14:48,500 And he has many names and many guises, and he is known in Norse literature for wandering the world in the form of an old man, 154 00:14:48,770 --> 00:14:51,110 hooded and cloaked to disguise his identity, 155 00:14:51,260 --> 00:14:59,090 often with his hat pulled down over one of his one eye, and he suddenly appears intervening in the lives of his favourite heroes. 156 00:14:59,180 --> 00:15:04,850 And then just as suddenly disappears again and gandalf's physical appearance and also his kind of 157 00:15:04,850 --> 00:15:11,090 unexpected eruptions into the lives of the Hobbits and his inscrutable and enigmatic nature at times, 158 00:15:11,210 --> 00:15:13,730 I think, all owe a debt to this conception of Odin. That's quite clear. 159 00:15:14,240 --> 00:15:19,190 And Tolkien himself says in one of his letters that he pictured Gandalf as an Odin wanderer. 160 00:15:19,880 --> 00:15:24,200 And he was probably thinking of images like this 19th century painting Odin in the guise of a wonder. 161 00:15:25,850 --> 00:15:32,750 But then, of course, while reminiscent of Odin, Gandalf is also in many ways unlike the terrifying God of North Smith. 162 00:15:33,650 --> 00:15:38,240 Odin favours warriors and kings. He would have had no time at all for hobbits. 163 00:15:39,500 --> 00:15:43,700 So talk has taken something from the figure of Odin. But he's very much made something new of his own. 164 00:15:45,620 --> 00:15:46,790 And we can see a similar process. 165 00:15:46,790 --> 00:15:53,600 In my last example from The Hobbit, this is my, my personal favourite based on the shape shifter you can turn into a bear. 166 00:15:55,220 --> 00:15:59,540 So the story of a warrior who can turn into a bear or is descended from a bear comes 167 00:15:59,540 --> 00:16:04,549 up in a number of Old Norse legendary sagas and also in some medieval English texts, 168 00:16:04,550 --> 00:16:08,270 too. And such characters are often named Bjorn. 169 00:16:08,780 --> 00:16:13,250 So it's the perfect name for Tolkien's character. In Old Norse, it means bear. 170 00:16:13,820 --> 00:16:20,060 But Tolkien gives his character the old English form an old English in old English, the word by all means, man or warrior. 171 00:16:20,210 --> 00:16:24,140 So it's kind of got that double meaning of bear and a man in the name itself. 172 00:16:25,700 --> 00:16:33,679 And it's been noted that Tolkien's drawing of Bale's Hole in The Hobbit is indebted to this drawing in Phoebe Gordon's introduction to Old Norse, 173 00:16:33,680 --> 00:16:42,170 which I mentioned earlier. And there it illustrates one of the most famous sagas to feature a bear shapeshifter, Bothwell Blackie Infrastructure. 174 00:16:42,740 --> 00:16:47,209 And in the introduction to that saga just before this picture, Gordon comments on parallels, 175 00:16:47,210 --> 00:16:54,440 possible parallels between this text and Beowulf and Beowulf so name may well derive from accounting for bear the wolf. 176 00:16:54,680 --> 00:16:56,900 So like a lover of honey is a bear. 177 00:16:57,890 --> 00:17:03,980 And Tolkien certainly thought that they belonged to the same kind of in its ultimate origins, to the same bear hero story. 178 00:17:04,580 --> 00:17:10,670 And so, again, the story he's drawing on with Bay One is, you know, it belongs to a world of shared northern legend. 179 00:17:11,540 --> 00:17:17,149 But again and again, this is why I really like this example. You know, this is Tolkien's description of bone, actually. 180 00:17:17,150 --> 00:17:20,510 But, you know, Tolkien's character is clearly indebted to this archetype. 181 00:17:20,510 --> 00:17:24,140 But most of what we get here is actually Tolkien's own imagination. 182 00:17:24,320 --> 00:17:27,860 The hives of honeybees, the animal servants, their charming details. 183 00:17:27,860 --> 00:17:34,760 They are certainly not found in the north. Sources in the sagas, these man bear characters all very much warriors. 184 00:17:35,360 --> 00:17:38,790 And beyond does fight. He is kind of terrifying as well. He does fight to the end of The Hobbit. 185 00:17:38,930 --> 00:17:44,990 But Tolkien also kind of imagines his domestic life. What would it actually be like if you were a shapeshifting bear? 186 00:17:45,230 --> 00:17:50,720 What would you live on? What would you plant in your garden? And these are the kind of details that sagas don't really give us. 187 00:17:54,930 --> 00:18:00,480 So I give you three brief examples of how talking was drawing at times on audience literature in The Hobbit. 188 00:18:01,110 --> 00:18:02,639 And I think of all Tolkien's works, 189 00:18:02,640 --> 00:18:08,820 The Hobbit actually is the one where Norse influence is most easy to discern where it kind of lies closest to the surface of the text. 190 00:18:09,600 --> 00:18:16,799 And there probably a number of reasons for that. One is that, as I mentioned earlier, The Hobbit is a bit less kind of firmly anchored in in origins, 191 00:18:16,800 --> 00:18:19,140 at least in the invented world of Tolkien's mythology. 192 00:18:19,560 --> 00:18:25,260 It began life as a children's story, and Tolkien was clearly he felt free to sort of pull in elements from miscellaneous sources. 193 00:18:26,010 --> 00:18:28,440 And there's something very playful about it, especially. 194 00:18:28,770 --> 00:18:35,240 And I think, you know, we should remember the first readers of The Hobbit after his own children were some of the former members of the Cold Beta, 195 00:18:35,250 --> 00:18:40,920 like C.S. Lewis, who would have immediately got these kind of references to Old Norse literature and probably appreciated the joke. 196 00:18:41,990 --> 00:18:46,920 And so that approach is obviously a bit less appropriate in Tolkien's later works. 197 00:18:48,300 --> 00:18:54,570 But another reason, I think, for the kind of looseness of The Hobbit is probably the period when it was written in the early 1930s, 198 00:18:55,350 --> 00:19:01,200 and that was a time when Tolkien was working very closely with Old Norse literature, pretty much on a daily basis, I would imagine. 199 00:19:01,610 --> 00:19:08,340 And I was describing earlier how Old Norse was a regular part of his teaching and his socialising in the twenties and thirties, 200 00:19:08,730 --> 00:19:11,820 and by the late 1930s and then into the 1940s, 201 00:19:11,820 --> 00:19:18,780 when he was in the long process of writing The Lord of the Rings, the place of Old Norse in his professional life and in his friendships had changed. 202 00:19:19,080 --> 00:19:26,550 The cold water had given way to the Inklings, and he was no longer lecturing on Old Norse at Oxford because in 1941, 203 00:19:26,700 --> 00:19:35,430 Oxford appointed a dedicated person to do that. But certainly in the early 1930s, Old Norse would have been very much uppermost in his mind. 204 00:19:36,660 --> 00:19:41,910 And it seems to have been a period when he was thinking about one old Norse legend, in particular the story of the Vulcans. 205 00:19:45,280 --> 00:19:52,720 Because it was probably in the early and early 1930s. Christopher Tolkien suggested that Tolkien was working on his own version of the Vulcan story, 206 00:19:52,840 --> 00:19:57,280 The Legend of Sigurd in Britain, which is which I'll talk about in a bit later. 207 00:19:58,930 --> 00:20:05,710 The legend of the volumes held a very special place in Tolkien's imagination and his relationship with the literature of the medieval north. 208 00:20:06,580 --> 00:20:13,030 So that's what I'll talk about for the time I have left. I will first give you a very, very, very simple outline of the story. 209 00:20:13,630 --> 00:20:18,310 The Voice of Legend centres on the hero of Sigurd, the most famous dragonslayer of Northern literature, 210 00:20:18,580 --> 00:20:23,800 and talking points out maybe the only famous one really more famous than Beowulf, certainly in his day. 211 00:20:24,880 --> 00:20:29,350 And the story tells of his father, Sigmund, also a great hero and the story of his own. 212 00:20:29,530 --> 00:20:39,129 Then, secrets, education by the Smith Regan, who urges him to kill a dragon fast near and when his treasure hoard of gold and after secrets done this, 213 00:20:39,130 --> 00:20:43,630 we then get to hear about Sigurd very tangled relationships with two women the Valkyrie, 214 00:20:43,630 --> 00:20:47,980 Brienne, Hilde and the woman who marries good friend and also good friends. 215 00:20:47,980 --> 00:20:52,690 Brothers who are at first his friends, but then eventually incited to to murder him. 216 00:20:53,410 --> 00:20:56,530 And then the story goes on to follow their lives and eventual deaths. 217 00:20:57,490 --> 00:21:01,420 So that's a very, very simplified summary because there are many, many more strands to it than that. 218 00:21:01,810 --> 00:21:10,540 It's a story made up of multiple texts and poems and legends which have been been linked up over time and have passed through many hands. 219 00:21:12,250 --> 00:21:17,590 And there's also a legend survives in many sources, and that testifies to its complexity and its popularity. 220 00:21:17,800 --> 00:21:22,870 But it also means there are quite a lot of inconsistencies and mysteries at some key moments in the story. 221 00:21:23,680 --> 00:21:26,950 So it's a very powerful legend in the drama of the dragon slaying. 222 00:21:27,190 --> 00:21:31,390 The intensity of the characters relationships, their violent love and jealousy. 223 00:21:32,710 --> 00:21:35,140 So it's very powerful, but it's also a kind of scholarly puzzle. 224 00:21:35,140 --> 00:21:41,620 And I think Tolkien, the power and the puzzle both appeal to Tolkien in the Middle Ages. 225 00:21:41,620 --> 00:21:48,100 The volume legend seems to have been known across Northern Europe. So these images, disparate images, are from Norway and Sweden and England. 226 00:21:49,000 --> 00:21:53,410 So it survives in a very full form in Old Norse, in a cycle of poems, in the poetic Edda, 227 00:21:54,160 --> 00:21:59,710 in summary form, in the prose at a and also in a long prose version, the 13th century, also Masada. 228 00:22:01,000 --> 00:22:05,290 And we know that a kind of related version of the story was also known in Anglo-Saxon England 229 00:22:05,500 --> 00:22:10,270 because it's referenced in Beowulf and appears on carvings in Viking age sculptures from England. 230 00:22:11,470 --> 00:22:18,130 And then the story again, a related version of the story is also the subject of the Nibelungen Beat, the great epic of medieval German literature. 231 00:22:19,180 --> 00:22:22,329 So it was popular in the Middle Ages, and then in the second half of the 19th century, 232 00:22:22,330 --> 00:22:29,020 it had a great revival of popularity when the medieval texts, which translated into English Fulsome Saga, 233 00:22:29,290 --> 00:22:36,190 was first published in English in 1870 as a collaboration between the Icelandic scholar Erich Magnusson and William Morris, 234 00:22:36,400 --> 00:22:42,970 who was a big influence on Tolkien, especially in talking to youth. And Morris in his introduction called it the great story of the North, 235 00:22:43,240 --> 00:22:47,860 which should be to all our race, what the tale of Troy was to the Greeks and never became that. 236 00:22:48,550 --> 00:22:53,440 But Morris did do a lot to popularise it because he did not just this version, but also a poetic version. 237 00:22:53,890 --> 00:22:59,560 In 1876, in his own, his characteristically lush, archaic, alliterative style of poetry. 238 00:23:01,060 --> 00:23:04,180 And Morris has two versions of the story very lasting popularity. 239 00:23:05,260 --> 00:23:07,540 And at the same time, in the second half of the 19th century, 240 00:23:07,540 --> 00:23:14,230 the legend was also being brought to public attention because Faulkner made a very altered version of it, the basis of the ring cycle. 241 00:23:15,820 --> 00:23:19,120 So it's not really surprising that for Tolkien, born at the end of the 19th century, 242 00:23:19,360 --> 00:23:25,630 the volume legend was the very first story from Northern Literature that he encountered before Beowulf or anything like that. 243 00:23:26,230 --> 00:23:29,950 And he first came across it as a young child, maybe as young as six or seven, 244 00:23:30,190 --> 00:23:36,130 when he read Andrew Landes version in the Red Fairy Book, which is a retelling of Morris's translation. 245 00:23:37,390 --> 00:23:44,440 This is the Dragon Fascination accompanying story, and Lang Lang said The introduction says This is a very old story and, 246 00:23:44,440 --> 00:23:48,130 you know, very old things always had an attraction for Tolkien and it has a sad ending. 247 00:23:48,250 --> 00:23:52,270 Indeed, it's all sad and all about fighting and killing, as might be expected from the Danes. 248 00:23:55,750 --> 00:24:00,250 And Lang's version seems to have inspired young Tolkien to write his own very first Dragon story, 249 00:24:00,460 --> 00:24:03,550 which was, as he later recalled about a green great dragon. 250 00:24:05,440 --> 00:24:09,339 As a teenager, he moved on to reading the Old Norse for himself via William Morris. 251 00:24:09,340 --> 00:24:09,999 Interestingly, 252 00:24:10,000 --> 00:24:16,659 he bought a copy of Marx's translation of Ultima Saga with some school prize money and began to teach himself Old Norse in order to read it. 253 00:24:16,660 --> 00:24:21,810 And the original. It is 1939 lecture on fairy stories. 254 00:24:22,050 --> 00:24:24,150 Tolkien looks back at his own childhood reading, 255 00:24:24,630 --> 00:24:30,780 and he singles out this story as one which above all others awoke in him a profound sense of literary desire. 256 00:24:32,220 --> 00:24:38,310 So Alice was not that great. And Treasure Island, he was not keen on Arthurian legends, had some appeal, he says, 257 00:24:38,580 --> 00:24:43,560 but best of all, was the nameless north of Sigurd, of the Vulcans and the Prince of All Dragons. 258 00:24:44,100 --> 00:24:49,440 Such lands were pre-eminently desirable. That phrase, the name is North. 259 00:24:49,440 --> 00:24:54,090 He's identifying. This is the beginning of his interest in Northern ness before he really even knew what that was. 260 00:24:55,230 --> 00:24:59,580 And it was the Dragon, of course, which particularly spoke to him, though he didn't really want to meet a dragon. 261 00:24:59,580 --> 00:25:06,090 He says the world that contained even the imagination of Bosnia was richer and more beautiful at whatever cost of peril. 262 00:25:07,930 --> 00:25:09,129 And the language that he uses here. 263 00:25:09,130 --> 00:25:17,140 The Principal Duncan's echoes some very similar comments he makes in passing about the Sega legend in Beowulf, the monsters and the critics from 1936. 264 00:25:18,070 --> 00:25:23,470 As far as we know anything about these old poets, we know this the prince of the heroes of the Norse supremely memorable. 265 00:25:23,710 --> 00:25:28,270 And then he quotes fulsome Tsonga, you know, what's his name will endure while the world lasts. 266 00:25:28,540 --> 00:25:32,769 That means was a dragon slayer and his most renowned deed from which in Norse he derived 267 00:25:32,770 --> 00:25:37,390 his title Daphnis Bonnie as Bane was the slaying of the Prince of Legendary Worms. 268 00:25:38,080 --> 00:25:42,970 Although there is plainly considerable difference between the letter Norse and ancient English form of the story alluded to in Beowulf. 269 00:25:43,270 --> 00:25:49,480 Already there it had these two primary features the dragon and the slaying of him as the chief deed of the greatest of heroes. 270 00:25:51,040 --> 00:25:53,650 So the Prince of Dragons and the Prince of the Heroes of the North. 271 00:25:54,580 --> 00:26:01,150 His language in both lectures suggest that there's something for him kind of superlative and pre-eminent about the Sigurd legend. 272 00:26:01,720 --> 00:26:07,420 Among the other stories of Northern literature. And both those lectures date to the 1930s. 273 00:26:07,780 --> 00:26:13,020 And as I said, it was probably in the early part of that decade that he was working on The Legend of Silkwood and Glycerine and also The Hobbit. 274 00:26:13,030 --> 00:26:16,660 So we can think of the Thirties as kind of Tolkien's wholesome period, I think. 275 00:26:17,470 --> 00:26:21,610 And there are several important elements of The Hobbit which are clearly inspired not just by Norse literature generally, 276 00:26:21,760 --> 00:26:26,230 but by the Sigurd legend in particular. So first, of course, there's the Dragon. 277 00:26:27,400 --> 00:26:29,770 As talking points out in Beowulf, the monsters and the critics. 278 00:26:30,010 --> 00:26:36,220 There actually aren't that many dragons in medieval Germanic legend, and there aren't really only two, he says, by Dragon and Fascinator. 279 00:26:36,370 --> 00:26:39,160 And he said he preferred fascinate. He didn't think there was Dragon was very good. 280 00:26:40,210 --> 00:26:45,160 And he pointed out that he pointed out for us that Bilbo's meeting the small was 281 00:26:45,160 --> 00:26:50,230 kind of indebted to fastness because by all strong it doesn't talk but funnier. 282 00:26:50,260 --> 00:26:57,490 Secrets Dragon is a clever and cunning dragon like Smaug who has to be outwitted not just by force, but by clever words. 283 00:26:58,810 --> 00:27:03,610 So the epic poem Funny Smile begins with Vanya realising Sigurd has just stabbed him 284 00:27:03,910 --> 00:27:07,930 and then demanding to know God's name and secret doesn't give his name straight away. 285 00:27:07,930 --> 00:27:12,639 He kind of refers to himself with the sort of riddle he says, Noble beast, am I called? 286 00:27:12,640 --> 00:27:16,570 And I have wandered as a motherless boy father. Have I known as other sons of men? 287 00:27:16,570 --> 00:27:24,010 Do I always walk alone? And you may remember that in The Hobbit, Bilbo similarly comes up with lots and lots of wriggling names for himself, 288 00:27:24,010 --> 00:27:27,580 and he's very proud of himself for doing it so as not to have to give Small his name. 289 00:27:27,730 --> 00:27:33,970 I am he that walks on scene. I'm the friend of bears and the guest of Eagle's ring winner luck wear a barrel rider. 290 00:27:34,420 --> 00:27:39,760 And Tolkien tells us this, of course, is the way to talk to dragons. In case you didn't know, if you don't want to reveal your proper name, 291 00:27:40,030 --> 00:27:46,960 which is wise and don't want to infuriate them with a flat refusal which is also wise, no dragon can resist the fascination of riddling talk. 292 00:27:47,860 --> 00:27:51,790 So that's clearly something he had learned and passes on to us from softened his mouth. 293 00:27:53,740 --> 00:27:59,440 Another key detail in the secret story might rings and bells with The Hobbit and occurs after Sigurd kills Virginia. 294 00:27:59,740 --> 00:28:04,180 He's resting the dragon's heart on a spit and he accidentally touches his thumb to his lip. 295 00:28:04,480 --> 00:28:08,230 He tastes the dragon's blood and becomes able to understand the language of birds. 296 00:28:09,310 --> 00:28:14,440 And the birds kind of warn him that the threat to his life and then direct him almost to the next stage of his journey. 297 00:28:15,280 --> 00:28:22,509 And and in the last chapters of The Hobbit, you might remember that birds start speaking and helping our heroes and ravens start carrying messages. 298 00:28:22,510 --> 00:28:28,690 But most importantly, it's a thrush speaking in Bard's ear, which tells him where to shoot at the weak point in Smiley's body. 299 00:28:28,960 --> 00:28:37,030 So I think a clear inference from the second story certain elements from the voice of legend can be identified in The Lord of the Rings as well, 300 00:28:37,030 --> 00:28:38,230 but a bit less directly. 301 00:28:39,190 --> 00:28:46,840 Like Aragorn, for instance, Sigurd has a famous Reforged sword, his father's sword broken in battle, which is remade for his son. 302 00:28:47,890 --> 00:28:50,080 And there is also a ring in the fossil legend, 303 00:28:50,500 --> 00:28:55,950 although it actually plays quite a bit less of a role in the North sources than the ring does in Tolkien, or indeed, Varner. 304 00:28:56,710 --> 00:29:01,240 But altogether, I think the fulsome legend, and perhaps more than any other story from Old Norse literature, 305 00:29:01,510 --> 00:29:05,200 permeated Tolkien's imagination from a very early age, 306 00:29:05,290 --> 00:29:10,600 gave him the kind of images and ideas from this very first encounter with the literature of the North. 307 00:29:12,820 --> 00:29:18,310 So the last thing I want to do is talk a bit about Tolkien's own version of the Volsung story, The Legend of Sigurd and Catherine, 308 00:29:18,550 --> 00:29:23,560 because it's the most direct and extensive engagement with Old Norse literature among Tolkien's works. 309 00:29:23,560 --> 00:29:26,530 But it's also perhaps not very well known. I don't know how many people here have read it. 310 00:29:27,760 --> 00:29:31,780 It was actually hardly known at all until it was published by Christopher Tolkien in 2009. 311 00:29:32,290 --> 00:29:36,670 Tolkien himself only referred to it once in his published letters. He seems to have kind of written it. 312 00:29:37,330 --> 00:29:41,710 Christopher Tolkien suggests in the 1930s and then just sort of put it away and not really done anything with it. 313 00:29:42,220 --> 00:29:45,310 But it's actually a really interesting text and a kind of a remarkable achievement, 314 00:29:45,310 --> 00:29:50,140 actually, a very complex re-imagining of some very complex source material. 315 00:29:51,220 --> 00:29:55,060 And it's also an experimental work in a number of ways, as I'll explore. 316 00:29:56,440 --> 00:29:59,530 So the work is made up of two long poems written in English, 317 00:29:59,770 --> 00:30:04,750 but in Old Norse alliterative metre fullness log, which is the metre of the most, depends on the idea. 318 00:30:05,440 --> 00:30:11,590 So the poems are not translations, although in places they follow the EDDA and some other sources closely. 319 00:30:11,860 --> 00:30:17,560 They're a retelling of the story in a completely new way, really, with Tolkien's own interventions and innovations. 320 00:30:18,070 --> 00:30:24,070 He gives the poems, these Old Norse titles, which are his own invention, but kind of allude to real poems in the Edda. 321 00:30:24,490 --> 00:30:29,920 And and as well as following the metre of the poems, he also imitates and features the manuscript presentation. 322 00:30:29,930 --> 00:30:33,790 So they have little brief prose summary headings of the kind that you get in the Edda. 323 00:30:35,410 --> 00:30:41,710 So I said it's an experimental work. So firstly, it's a kind of scholarly experiment, a hypothesis about the voice of also legend, 324 00:30:42,700 --> 00:30:49,300 which attempts to solve some of the textual puzzles which arise from gaps in sources to reconcile some of their inconsistencies. 325 00:30:49,930 --> 00:30:53,890 All of the medieval texts we have for this story are composite to some extent. 326 00:30:54,280 --> 00:31:01,419 So they don't agree in many details. And Tolkien kind of chooses which details he likes or which ones he thinks are probably most original, 327 00:31:01,420 --> 00:31:04,330 which belong to a more kind of authentic, older form of the legend. 328 00:31:04,570 --> 00:31:09,820 So there's a sort of an argument about the history of the legend which underlies the poetic choices he's making. 329 00:31:11,640 --> 00:31:15,960 At the same time, it's an experiment in writing alliterative verse in the music of the Edda. 330 00:31:16,320 --> 00:31:22,590 Here's one reference to these poems much later is in a letter to W.H. Auden, a fellow lover of the poet together. 331 00:31:22,920 --> 00:31:26,010 And there he describes it as an experiment in trying to learn alliterative poetry. 332 00:31:26,040 --> 00:31:29,549 So I'll just give you a little example of what that looks like. This is fast. 333 00:31:29,550 --> 00:31:33,900 Miller Coming forth from the mountain, cigarettes crouched, waiting in a hollow to stop him from beneath. 334 00:31:34,590 --> 00:31:38,550 In deep hollow on the dark hillside. Long there lurked. The land trembled. 335 00:31:38,700 --> 00:31:42,720 Force came fast near fire. His breathing down the mountain rushed Mr. Poison. 336 00:31:44,040 --> 00:31:51,180 So notice how short the lines are, how much you have to kind of pack into those pairs of the lines of pairs of lines connected by alliteration. 337 00:31:52,530 --> 00:31:59,430 And the effect the talking is aiming at is one that he describes in a comment he made in a lecture contrasting Old Norse and Old English poetry, 338 00:31:59,760 --> 00:32:07,410 where he says Old Norse poetry aims at seizing a situation, striking a blow that will be remembered, illuminating a moment with a flash of lightning. 339 00:32:07,980 --> 00:32:11,790 It tends to concision, weighty packing of the language in sense and form. 340 00:32:12,420 --> 00:32:17,790 Old English verse does not attempt to hit you in the eye. To hit you in the eye was the deliberate intention of the Norse poet. 341 00:32:18,470 --> 00:32:21,630 I love that and that's great. And that's what Tolkien's going for. 342 00:32:22,350 --> 00:32:24,630 And it's quite unlike a lot of his other poetry in that way. 343 00:32:26,100 --> 00:32:32,310 And then on top of all that, he does something really interesting by introducing into the poem his own interpretation of the volume legend, 344 00:32:32,490 --> 00:32:37,710 which isn't found in any of the Norse sources. His Sigurd is not just a great hero, 345 00:32:37,890 --> 00:32:44,610 but a unique figure with a divinely appointed destiny chosen for him and brought to fruition by the planning of Odin. 346 00:32:45,960 --> 00:32:51,030 So Tolkien begins his version of the story, not as the Norse sources do with Sigurd ancestors, 347 00:32:51,330 --> 00:32:57,660 but way back in mythological deep time before the creation of the world with a version of the Norse creation myth 348 00:32:57,840 --> 00:33:04,800 which is drawing on but not directly translating villains battle from the Edda and like the poem tells of creation. 349 00:33:04,980 --> 00:33:09,090 And it then tells of the future destruction of the gods at Ragnarök the last battle. 350 00:33:10,020 --> 00:33:12,150 But Tolkien introduces a completely new element, 351 00:33:12,210 --> 00:33:18,840 a prophecy that the world can be saved at Ragnarok if a particular type of hero can be found to fight for the gods. 352 00:33:19,770 --> 00:33:24,720 If in day of doom, one deathless stands who death hath tasted and dies no more. 353 00:33:25,110 --> 00:33:29,520 The serpent slayer seed of Odin. Then all shall not end nor earth perish. 354 00:33:31,640 --> 00:33:37,910 So the conditions are specific and threefold. The hero must be descended from Odin, but also a mortal who has tasted death. 355 00:33:38,150 --> 00:33:41,270 And also Dragonslayer. And Tolkien. 356 00:33:41,600 --> 00:33:42,350 As Tolkien tells it, 357 00:33:42,350 --> 00:33:50,270 Sega is created specifically to fulfil these conditions and he's guided from birth to death by Odin's intervention so this prophecy can be fulfilled. 358 00:33:50,360 --> 00:33:56,930 And none of this is in the north sources. And the idea that human heroes will fight at Ragnarok, that is found in Norse tradition. 359 00:33:57,050 --> 00:34:03,290 That's why Odin brings dead warriors to live in Valhalla, so they can fight with the gods at the end of the world. 360 00:34:03,290 --> 00:34:08,990 But not this prophecy. And Tolkien's quite clear about this. In some explanatory notes he wrote to accompany the poem. 361 00:34:10,370 --> 00:34:18,019 So he describes that the dominion of the gods was from the first threatened with destruction, i.e. they knew Ragnarok would come Odin Lord of Gods, 362 00:34:18,020 --> 00:34:23,180 and then begets in the world many mighty men whom he gathers invaluable to be his companions in the last battle. 363 00:34:23,870 --> 00:34:28,700 One family in a special, he singles out the victims, all of whom are his chosen warriors. 364 00:34:29,270 --> 00:34:33,410 And one sacred son of Sigmund is to be the chief of all their leader on the last day, 365 00:34:33,740 --> 00:34:38,990 for Odin hopes that by his hand the serpent shall in the end be slain and a new world made possible. 366 00:34:39,560 --> 00:34:44,600 Now, if the gods can accomplish this, but only one who has lived on Earth first as a mortal and died, 367 00:34:45,500 --> 00:34:48,950 this motif of the special function of Sigurd is an invention of the present poet, 368 00:34:49,130 --> 00:34:54,230 i.e. talking to himself or an interpretation of the Norse sources in which is not explicit. 369 00:34:54,350 --> 00:34:56,960 And by not explicit he means just not there at all. 370 00:34:59,060 --> 00:35:04,730 And characteristically, for Tolkien, this is building on a implicitly on a point of philological interpretation. 371 00:35:04,730 --> 00:35:10,790 He doesn't explain it, but you are kind of meant to get it that he thinks the name Volsung means the chosen or is connected to the word for choice, 372 00:35:11,300 --> 00:35:14,120 and he often calls Sick of the World, chosen in his poem. 373 00:35:15,200 --> 00:35:20,570 So this prophecy, which is told his own invention, casts a good quite plainly as a kind of Christ figure, 374 00:35:21,080 --> 00:35:27,560 a figure both divine and mortal, whose died and conquered death and will return on the last day as the saviour of the world. 375 00:35:28,310 --> 00:35:33,830 And there are overt Christian resonances not just in the idea, but actually in Tolkien's choice of language. 376 00:35:34,580 --> 00:35:40,280 So one who death has tasted and dies no more is quite close to some poor cross being raised from the dead, 377 00:35:40,670 --> 00:35:47,570 dies no more death, has no more dominion over him. And there are a number of places in the poem where we get sort of little biblical echoes. 378 00:35:47,840 --> 00:35:51,379 So this is cigarettes. Birth wind was wailing, waves were crying. 379 00:35:51,380 --> 00:35:56,360 Seagull in sorrowful when a song she bore Sigrid golden as a sun shining force came. 380 00:35:56,360 --> 00:36:02,780 He sat in a far country, and that phrase, a man from a far country, is echoing the prophecy of Isaiah. 381 00:36:04,810 --> 00:36:09,600 And that image of Sigurd as a son, a golden son, bright figure that comes up a lot in the poem. 382 00:36:09,610 --> 00:36:16,030 Again, it's not really in the North sources. It owes a bit to William Morris's version of the story, which has quite a lot of that kind of imagery, 383 00:36:16,570 --> 00:36:22,430 but also to the idea of secret as a kind of solar deity, a sun God who dies but is resurrected. 384 00:36:23,500 --> 00:36:25,780 And for comparative mythologies of Tolkien's day, 385 00:36:25,990 --> 00:36:33,250 this was a very common way of interpreting the figure of Christ and also some of the gods of many mythologies, including Norse mythology. 386 00:36:33,670 --> 00:36:35,920 Usually not Sigurd, who is not, of course, God. 387 00:36:38,080 --> 00:36:43,000 So the effect of all this is to give a new kind of unity to the whole story with all its disparate parts, 388 00:36:43,720 --> 00:36:49,060 its what talking calls the hope of Odin, a kind of foreknowledge which is controlling the good life. 389 00:36:50,380 --> 00:36:55,600 And this mythological framework, and particularly these parallels between Sigurd and Christ suggests, 390 00:36:55,600 --> 00:37:00,130 I think that as well as being an experiment in alliterative verse and a scholarly hypothesis and all of those things, 391 00:37:00,340 --> 00:37:06,700 it's also a kind of experiment in reconciling Tolkien's own deep Catholic faith with the pre-Christian stories, 392 00:37:06,700 --> 00:37:12,040 which held so much fascination for him. And again, if we situate this poem in the 1930s, 393 00:37:12,670 --> 00:37:16,810 this question of the relationship between Christianity and myth and myth be true 394 00:37:17,080 --> 00:37:20,470 was one that Tolkien was famously at this time discussing with C.S. Lewis, 395 00:37:21,100 --> 00:37:27,820 who was then not yet a Christian, but was interested in the idea of a sacrificial God and its relationship to the Christian story. 396 00:37:29,170 --> 00:37:34,570 And in the 1930, they had the famous conversation in which which was instrumental in Lewis's conversion to Christianity, 397 00:37:34,720 --> 00:37:38,800 in which Tolkien convinced him that Christianity could be a myth but could also be true, 398 00:37:39,370 --> 00:37:46,509 that it could be a mythic story of a God who dies but is resurrected like a builder in the Norse sources or in Tolkien's version. 399 00:37:46,510 --> 00:37:53,200 SIGURD But also a true myth. So we might see this is one way in which Tolkien was kind of exploring that idea for himself. 400 00:37:54,710 --> 00:38:01,690 And finally, it also casts an interesting light on Torquay's discussion of the relationship between Christian and Pagan mindsets in Beowulf, 401 00:38:01,690 --> 00:38:05,170 the monsters and the critics. So another product of his thinking in the 1930s. 402 00:38:06,280 --> 00:38:08,649 In that lecture, though, its primary focus is Beowulf. 403 00:38:08,650 --> 00:38:17,140 Tolkien uses Norse mythology and especially the idea of Ragnarok to explore why the poet of Beowulf chose to put monsters at the centre of his story. 404 00:38:18,400 --> 00:38:22,690 So a very typical example of what I was saying earlier about using Old Norse to inform a reading of Anglo-Saxon texts. 405 00:38:24,100 --> 00:38:28,330 So the dragonflies of Beowulf, Tolkien argues, is a significant and serious battle, 406 00:38:28,660 --> 00:38:32,650 in part because it's an echo of a cosmic battle between the gods and the monsters. 407 00:38:33,160 --> 00:38:36,460 Although in the world of Beowulf, the pagan gods are no longer part of the story. 408 00:38:37,750 --> 00:38:44,320 So the poet of Beowulf is a Christian. But Tolkien argues that he still sees the world is essentially a battle against monsters. 409 00:38:44,560 --> 00:38:49,780 Whatever monsters might mean or signify evil or death or chaos or whatever. 410 00:38:50,290 --> 00:38:56,440 It's a story of man alien in a hostile world, engaged in a struggle which he cannot win while the world lasts. 411 00:38:57,520 --> 00:39:03,250 In the view of the poet of Beowulf, Tolkien says. The monsters had been the foes of the gods, the captains of men. 412 00:39:03,430 --> 00:39:07,780 And within time, the monsters would win in the heroic siege and lost defeat. 413 00:39:07,840 --> 00:39:11,290 So at Ragnarok, men and gods alike have been imagined in the same post. 414 00:39:11,890 --> 00:39:18,250 Now the heroic figures, the men of old tales on the hafnium heroes under the heavens remained and still fought on until defeat. 415 00:39:18,550 --> 00:39:21,760 For the monsters do not depart. Whether the gods got will come. 416 00:39:22,540 --> 00:39:27,640 A Christian was and is still like his forefathers, a mortal hemmed in a hostile world. 417 00:39:29,570 --> 00:39:34,760 So the battle against the monsters, Tolkien suggests, cannot finally be won within the mortal world. 418 00:39:34,760 --> 00:39:42,620 It's an inevitable defeat, even if heroes win temporary victories over a dragon or over a Dark Lord of the Rings, and yet, 419 00:39:42,620 --> 00:39:50,480 within a Christian understanding, the tragedy of the great temporal defeat remains for a while poignant, but ceases to be finally important. 420 00:39:50,750 --> 00:39:54,650 It is no defeat for the end of the world is part of the design of method. 421 00:39:55,190 --> 00:39:59,810 That's the old English name for fatal God. The arbiter who is above the mortal world. 422 00:40:01,080 --> 00:40:05,460 And it's precisely this idea which Tolkien is bringing to bear on his retelling of the good story. 423 00:40:05,730 --> 00:40:10,650 The defeat and death and failure can actually be part of a kind of a surprising divine plan. 424 00:40:11,340 --> 00:40:15,059 In the no sources speak, a story is very definitely a tragedy. 425 00:40:15,060 --> 00:40:20,220 It's a tale of grief and betrayal and failure. And that does colour the tone of Tolkien story. 426 00:40:20,460 --> 00:40:25,470 But Tolkien, like the poet of Beowulf, brings to his pagan material a Christian perspective. 427 00:40:26,220 --> 00:40:29,790 And so his poem kind of looks beyond the world to a second coming. 428 00:40:32,140 --> 00:40:39,420 And I think even in The Hobbit, we can see an echo of this. A final echo from the Sega Legend children's book, though it is, 429 00:40:39,430 --> 00:40:43,239 it ends with the death of one of the major characters and Sauron's words as he 430 00:40:43,240 --> 00:40:47,319 lies dying are very close to the words with which Tolkien describes secrets. 431 00:40:47,320 --> 00:40:54,770 Death. Sorry, Intel's bill, but I go now to the halls of waiting to sit beside my fathers until the world is renewed. 432 00:40:55,610 --> 00:41:00,710 And if Sigurd in Valhalla, we're told that we see long at his father's side for war waiting. 433 00:41:00,860 --> 00:41:09,650 The world's chosen. But unlike in the North sources, that final war will not be a defeat, but a final victory, and the world will be renewed. 434 00:41:11,300 --> 00:41:15,950 So this is one attempt to work through this idea. It perhaps wouldn't have been Tolkien's kind of conclusive word on the subject. 435 00:41:16,400 --> 00:41:19,220 We should bear in mind he never actually chose to publish this this work. 436 00:41:19,400 --> 00:41:23,750 But I think you could see it as laying the ground for some of the distinctive tone of the Lord of the Rings, 437 00:41:23,930 --> 00:41:29,210 particularly that kind of melancholic, autumnal tone. The invocation of a world which is waning. 438 00:41:29,510 --> 00:41:33,110 Darkness is spreading. But there are shafts of light and hope. 439 00:41:33,500 --> 00:41:36,500 Perceived, though not clearly understood by mortal eyes. 440 00:41:37,670 --> 00:41:41,750 What Tolkien, for the long defeat, is the inevitable fate of elves and of mortals in this world. 441 00:41:42,050 --> 00:41:44,210 And even great victories can only be temporary. 442 00:41:44,540 --> 00:41:51,230 But there may yet be a purpose above the mortal world, which sees and governs all and is working towards ultimate victory. 443 00:41:51,650 --> 00:41:52,010 Thank you.