So what I'm going to do today is to talk about Tolkien's interest in Old Norse,
his history with his subjects and his approach to it, both as a scholar and as a creative writer.
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.
And since then, since we're here at the end of this lecture series, and sadly,
near the end of the Polygons wonderful Tolkien exhibition, and so fantastic.
I'm going to finish by talking about the apocalypse and the end of the world.
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.
So Old Norse was the language spoken across Scandinavia and Iceland during the Viking age and throughout the medieval period.
It's the ancestor of the modern Scandinavian languages, so Norwegian, Icelandic, Danish and so on.
It's a dramatic language and it's therefore quite closely related to English in that they share a common ancestor.
And in the Viking age, old English and Old Norse were very closely, very close indeed.
Probably so close that a speaker of one language would be able to understand the speaker of the other.
Maybe not perfectly, but well enough to communicate. And of course, if you know your Viking history,
you will know that there were many occasions during the Viking age when speakers
of Old Norse and speakers of Old English were in contact for good or ill.
So the cultures as well as the languages, have a very close and very long standing relationship.
So that's the language. But when we talk about literature, we're mostly talking about texts which were written down in medieval Iceland,
largely from the 12th century onwards.
That's where the majority of surviving Old Norse literature was preserved and recorded, but not necessarily composed.
Much of it was composed in Iceland.
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.
And the corpus of Old Norse literature encompasses a very,
very wide range of texts and diverse in form and in subject matter and in really any other way that you can think of.
So we have poetry and prose on all kinds of subjects. We have praise poetry written for Viking kings.
We have learned historical and Christian works.
We have the long prose narratives of the Icelandic sagas, and probably most importantly,
for our purposes today we have since this work the poet together and the poetry.
It is a compilation of poems which were originally composed by different authors, different times and places across the Scandinavian world.
But they were written down and recorded in this manuscript, written in Iceland in the late 13th century.
And the poetic Edda is a very important source for our understanding of pre-Christian pagan Norse mythology,
because it contains poems on a wide range of mythological and heroic subjects, including the creation of the world.
The interaction between the gods and the Giants, the end of the world at Ragnarok.
And also poems about legendary heroes and especially the legend of the volumes, which I'm going to talk about quite a bit later.
So audience literature includes this very, very wide and varied corpus of texts.
And I don't think it will surprise you to learn that Tolkien knew this corpus.
He knew Old Norse, both language and literature extremely well, as we would expect.
So he began to teach himself Old Norse while he was still at school.
He continued to study as a student at Oxford. Along with his other linguistic interests.
In the early 1920s, when he was teaching English at the University of Leeds, he also started to teach Old Norse.
And he enthusiastically encouraged the study of the language among his students.
He set up a Viking club at which he and his colleagues and students would read the
sagas and drink beer and compose drinking songs in various ancient languages.
This is what Tolkien did for fun. And at Leeds, he also became close friends with the old Norse scholar Eddie Gordon,
whose 1927 Introduction to Old Norse published just after Tolkien's time at Leeds, is still one of the standard guys to the subject.
So if you've studied any Old Norse,
you have probably come across this book and in the acknowledgements that Gordon thanks Tolkien for his help in the preparation of the book,
and they actually collaborated on several scholarly projects together at that period of Tolkien's career.
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.
And perhaps unsurprisingly, he founded another group for the recreation reading of the Sagas.
This time the group was called the Cold Beta, and that's an old Norse term.
It means coal biters.
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.
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.
So I'll leave you to decide whether that applies to Tolkien, whether he thought it might.
And the copy to included C.S. Lewis and a number of Tolkien's other friends.
And it actually formed a kind of precursor to the Inklings.
They stopped meeting about 1933 when they'd run out of sagas to read, apparently,
and then meetings of the Inklings kind of took over that place in Tolkien's life.
So I think it's important to realise that Tolkien's interest in Old Norse was very much.
Definitely a scholarly one. But it was also quite a big part of his social life and his friendships and and especially in
this period when he was a young academic at Leeds and Oxford in the twenties and thirties.
So for him, a shared love of Old Norse literature was very much the foundation of some really formative and important friendships.
So it's kind of interesting and a bit surprising that actually, although Tolkien taught and lectured on Old Norse extensively,
he published no scholarship, which focussed really in any way at all on Old Norse.
Occasionally in his scholarly publications, [INAUDIBLE] make reference to Old Norse,
but usually as a comparison for English material, which is always the primary focus of interest.
And to understand that kind of apparent anomaly and Tolkien's approach to Old Norse more generally,
it's useful to see it within the context of the scholarly environment of his day.
So at Oxford, Old Norse has a kind of special place we like to think,
and because it's historically been studied and taught within the English faculty as Tolkien taught it,
and that's not the case, all universities, it's not the case with most non English medieval languages,
so medieval Welsh or medieval French or whatever.
And that's really indicative of an approach to Old Norse, which was very prevalent in the first half of the 20th century.
So Tolkien's, you know, period of academic his academic career,
which really tended to focus a lot on similarities and common features between Old Norse and medieval English literature,
and especially Old English, and using to use each corpus of literature to inform the study of the other.
So very much a comparative approach.
And they're very good reasons for that, especially as I mentioned earlier, the very close linguistic relationship between Old Norse and Old English.
And so not only do they share a common ancestor, but there was also significant influence from the Old Norse language on the
English language at a later date as the result of Viking settlement in England.
And that linguistic evidence, that linguistic influence is very,
very evident in the dialect of some of the middle English texts that Tolkien was most interested in.
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.
And it was very characteristic of the scholarly climate of Tolkien's day.
That philological study of the languages, the relationship between the languages should go hand in hand with a comparative approach to the literature.
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.
And that approach operates on the understanding that just as the Old Norse and the old English languages have a common ancestor,
so too their literatures,
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.
So that's before the settlement of Anglo-Saxon England, before the Viking age, before the two cultures had diverged.
And this quotation from one of Tolkien's lectures on the poetic adder is very typical of this view.
So he sees he describes the party together as a descendant of a common Germanic verse and tradition of verse,
which now escapes us of neither the themes of this old Baltic verse nor its style have we anything left.
Save the suggestions afforded by the comparison of Norse and English.
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.
So even if you're comparing texts which were written centuries apart in a very different contexts,
so maybe eighth century England, 14th century Iceland,
if you read them together, you can hope to sort of trace back something about their common tradition, which was the ancestor of both.
And that's that's a hypothetical common tradition which predates any surviving texts by several centuries.
And its origins lie not in the places where the surviving texts are written down.
So England or Iceland mostly, but in Northern Europe.
So Sweden and Denmark and northern Germany.
And that sense of long ago and lost and sort of almost not quite recoverable, but almost within reach is really important.
And that's the kind of thing that really fired Tolkien's imagination as a scholar and a writer.
So here talking calls that tradition Germanic literature.
But actually the word he tends to use for it is northern. Northern ness for him was a very powerful word.
It's also one which is usefully kind of vague and comprehensive because it
can potentially include Anglo-Saxon England and Scandinavia and Iceland and,
you know, basically the whole of Northwest Europe, if you want it to.
So when it comes to the relationship between Old Norse literature and Tolkien's own creative work,
there were definitely certain aspects of Old Norse which interested him more than others.
And it's usually the ones which come closest to this idea of northern ness or could give a provide a glimpse of it.
So as I said earlier, audience literature includes a very diverse range of genres and forms,
but not all of them really have much to do with this idea of Northern ness as Tolkien saw it,
and so they don't really find their way into Tolkien's imaginative world.
What does feature heavily is the mythological and the heroic material, the poetic Edda and the Sagas,
which deal with the legendary past what we call the for now the saga,
which are quite often quite late medieval texts, but they're set in this past northern world.
And it's not a coincidence that this is the kind of material which bears most
significantly on the way Tolkien read Anglo-Saxon literature and especially Beowulf.
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.
I'll give you three brief examples of many, though that could be different. Really.
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.
You can see they come straight from a list of dwarf names in full spell, which is the first time in the Edda.
I've highlighted them for you in bold. You may be able to see and they're all there.
Or in Turin and Philly. And Kilian is an Ocean Shield, which is I can see Goudy in Ordnance.
And Tolkien basically took his favourite names from this list and put them into The Hobbit,
and he actually slightly came to regret that a bit later because it's not really very typical of the way he chose names.
You know, he usually chose names in his world with immense care to fit his invented languages and the mythology that he had created.
But he chose these names quite early on in the process of writing The Hobbit,
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,
his invented world, though his mythology was already in existence, had been for a long time.
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.
And, and although the dwarves have Old Norse names, actually,
when Tolkien then later came to invent a language for the dwarves during the watch and the writing of the Lord of the Rings,
he decided that their language wasn't actually related to Old Norse.
It was closer to Hebrew, so not related to Old Norse in any way.
And he came up with a fictional explanation for this, which involves the dwarves having a private language they use among themselves,
and then names, Old Norse names, which they use publicly with, you know, outsiders.
But I think the real reason is it's pretty clear to say,
and he later referred to this this use a little bit disparagingly as a rabble of name dwarves out of his mouth.
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.
And more often he kind of takes ideas and then reinvents them and create something new.
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.
And when talking was writing The Hobbit,
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.
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.
So you can kind of see how from the name itself, with those suggestions of magic and elves and maybe even a wizard staff,
that the character of Gandalf began to grow out of his name into something more powerful.
And Gandalf those quite a lot more than his name to Norse literature,
because he also shares some important characteristics with the Norse god, Odin, the father of the gods.
Odin is the God of poetry and the God of battle and the dead.
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,
hooded and cloaked to disguise his identity,
often with his hat pulled down over one of his one eye, and he suddenly appears intervening in the lives of his favourite heroes.
And then just as suddenly disappears again and gandalf's physical appearance and also his kind of
unexpected eruptions into the lives of the Hobbits and his inscrutable and enigmatic nature at times,
I think, all owe a debt to this conception of Odin. That's quite clear.
And Tolkien himself says in one of his letters that he pictured Gandalf as an Odin wanderer.
And he was probably thinking of images like this 19th century painting Odin in the guise of a wonder.
But then, of course, while reminiscent of Odin, Gandalf is also in many ways unlike the terrifying God of North Smith.
Odin favours warriors and kings. He would have had no time at all for hobbits.
So talk has taken something from the figure of Odin. But he's very much made something new of his own.
And we can see a similar process.
In my last example from The Hobbit, this is my, my personal favourite based on the shape shifter you can turn into a bear.
So the story of a warrior who can turn into a bear or is descended from a bear comes
up in a number of Old Norse legendary sagas and also in some medieval English texts,
too. And such characters are often named Bjorn.
So it's the perfect name for Tolkien's character. In Old Norse, it means bear.
But Tolkien gives his character the old English form an old English in old English, the word by all means, man or warrior.
So it's kind of got that double meaning of bear and a man in the name itself.
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,
which I mentioned earlier. And there it illustrates one of the most famous sagas to feature a bear shapeshifter, Bothwell Blackie Infrastructure.
And in the introduction to that saga just before this picture, Gordon comments on parallels,
possible parallels between this text and Beowulf and Beowulf so name may well derive from accounting for bear the wolf.
So like a lover of honey is a bear.
And Tolkien certainly thought that they belonged to the same kind of in its ultimate origins, to the same bear hero story.
And so, again, the story he's drawing on with Bay One is, you know, it belongs to a world of shared northern legend.
But again and again, this is why I really like this example. You know, this is Tolkien's description of bone, actually.
But, you know, Tolkien's character is clearly indebted to this archetype.
But most of what we get here is actually Tolkien's own imagination.
The hives of honeybees, the animal servants, their charming details.
They are certainly not found in the north. Sources in the sagas, these man bear characters all very much warriors.
And beyond does fight. He is kind of terrifying as well. He does fight to the end of The Hobbit.
But Tolkien also kind of imagines his domestic life. What would it actually be like if you were a shapeshifting bear?
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.
So I give you three brief examples of how talking was drawing at times on audience literature in The Hobbit.
And I think of all Tolkien's works,
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.
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,
at least in the invented world of Tolkien's mythology.
It began life as a children's story, and Tolkien was clearly he felt free to sort of pull in elements from miscellaneous sources.
And there's something very playful about it, especially.
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,
like C.S. Lewis, who would have immediately got these kind of references to Old Norse literature and probably appreciated the joke.
And so that approach is obviously a bit less appropriate in Tolkien's later works.
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,
and that was a time when Tolkien was working very closely with Old Norse literature, pretty much on a daily basis, I would imagine.
And I was describing earlier how Old Norse was a regular part of his teaching and his socialising in the twenties and thirties,
and by the late 1930s and then into the 1940s,
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.
The cold water had given way to the Inklings, and he was no longer lecturing on Old Norse at Oxford because in 1941,
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.
And it seems to have been a period when he was thinking about one old Norse legend, in particular the story of the Vulcans.
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,
The Legend of Sigurd in Britain, which is which I'll talk about in a bit later.
The legend of the volumes held a very special place in Tolkien's imagination and his relationship with the literature of the medieval north.
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.
The Voice of Legend centres on the hero of Sigurd, the most famous dragonslayer of Northern literature,
and talking points out maybe the only famous one really more famous than Beowulf, certainly in his day.
And the story tells of his father, Sigmund, also a great hero and the story of his own.
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,
we then get to hear about Sigurd very tangled relationships with two women the Valkyrie,
Brienne, Hilde and the woman who marries good friend and also good friends.
Brothers who are at first his friends, but then eventually incited to to murder him.
And then the story goes on to follow their lives and eventual deaths.
So that's a very, very simplified summary because there are many, many more strands to it than that.
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.
And there's also a legend survives in many sources, and that testifies to its complexity and its popularity.
But it also means there are quite a lot of inconsistencies and mysteries at some key moments in the story.
So it's a very powerful legend in the drama of the dragon slaying.
The intensity of the characters relationships, their violent love and jealousy.
So it's very powerful, but it's also a kind of scholarly puzzle.
And I think Tolkien, the power and the puzzle both appeal to Tolkien in the Middle Ages.
The volume legend seems to have been known across Northern Europe. So these images, disparate images, are from Norway and Sweden and England.
So it survives in a very full form in Old Norse, in a cycle of poems, in the poetic Edda,
in summary form, in the prose at a and also in a long prose version, the 13th century, also Masada.
And we know that a kind of related version of the story was also known in Anglo-Saxon England
because it's referenced in Beowulf and appears on carvings in Viking age sculptures from England.
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.
So it was popular in the Middle Ages, and then in the second half of the 19th century,
it had a great revival of popularity when the medieval texts, which translated into English Fulsome Saga,
was first published in English in 1870 as a collaboration between the Icelandic scholar Erich Magnusson and William Morris,
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,
which should be to all our race, what the tale of Troy was to the Greeks and never became that.
But Morris did do a lot to popularise it because he did not just this version, but also a poetic version.
In 1876, in his own, his characteristically lush, archaic, alliterative style of poetry.
And Morris has two versions of the story very lasting popularity.
And at the same time, in the second half of the 19th century,
the legend was also being brought to public attention because Faulkner made a very altered version of it, the basis of the ring cycle.
So it's not really surprising that for Tolkien, born at the end of the 19th century,
the volume legend was the very first story from Northern Literature that he encountered before Beowulf or anything like that.
And he first came across it as a young child, maybe as young as six or seven,
when he read Andrew Landes version in the Red Fairy Book, which is a retelling of Morris's translation.
This is the Dragon Fascination accompanying story, and Lang Lang said The introduction says This is a very old story and,
you know, very old things always had an attraction for Tolkien and it has a sad ending.
Indeed, it's all sad and all about fighting and killing, as might be expected from the Danes.
And Lang's version seems to have inspired young Tolkien to write his own very first Dragon story,
which was, as he later recalled about a green great dragon.
As a teenager, he moved on to reading the Old Norse for himself via William Morris.
Interestingly,
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.
And the original. It is 1939 lecture on fairy stories.
Tolkien looks back at his own childhood reading,
and he singles out this story as one which above all others awoke in him a profound sense of literary desire.
So Alice was not that great. And Treasure Island, he was not keen on Arthurian legends, had some appeal, he says,
but best of all, was the nameless north of Sigurd, of the Vulcans and the Prince of All Dragons.
Such lands were pre-eminently desirable. That phrase, the name is North.
He's identifying. This is the beginning of his interest in Northern ness before he really even knew what that was.
And it was the Dragon, of course, which particularly spoke to him, though he didn't really want to meet a dragon.
He says the world that contained even the imagination of Bosnia was richer and more beautiful at whatever cost of peril.
And the language that he uses here.
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.
As far as we know anything about these old poets, we know this the prince of the heroes of the Norse supremely memorable.
And then he quotes fulsome Tsonga, you know, what's his name will endure while the world lasts.
That means was a dragon slayer and his most renowned deed from which in Norse he derived
his title Daphnis Bonnie as Bane was the slaying of the Prince of Legendary Worms.
Although there is plainly considerable difference between the letter Norse and ancient English form of the story alluded to in Beowulf.
Already there it had these two primary features the dragon and the slaying of him as the chief deed of the greatest of heroes.
So the Prince of Dragons and the Prince of the Heroes of the North.
His language in both lectures suggest that there's something for him kind of superlative and pre-eminent about the Sigurd legend.
Among the other stories of Northern literature. And both those lectures date to the 1930s.
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.
So we can think of the Thirties as kind of Tolkien's wholesome period, I think.
And there are several important elements of The Hobbit which are clearly inspired not just by Norse literature generally,
but by the Sigurd legend in particular. So first, of course, there's the Dragon.
As talking points out in Beowulf, the monsters and the critics.
There actually aren't that many dragons in medieval Germanic legend, and there aren't really only two, he says, by Dragon and Fascinator.
And he said he preferred fascinate. He didn't think there was Dragon was very good.
And he pointed out that he pointed out for us that Bilbo's meeting the small was
kind of indebted to fastness because by all strong it doesn't talk but funnier.
Secrets Dragon is a clever and cunning dragon like Smaug who has to be outwitted not just by force, but by clever words.
So the epic poem Funny Smile begins with Vanya realising Sigurd has just stabbed him
and then demanding to know God's name and secret doesn't give his name straight away.
He kind of refers to himself with the sort of riddle he says, Noble beast, am I called?
And I have wandered as a motherless boy father. Have I known as other sons of men?
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,
and he's very proud of himself for doing it so as not to have to give Small his name.
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.
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,
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.
So that's clearly something he had learned and passes on to us from softened his mouth.
Another key detail in the secret story might rings and bells with The Hobbit and occurs after Sigurd kills Virginia.
He's resting the dragon's heart on a spit and he accidentally touches his thumb to his lip.
He tastes the dragon's blood and becomes able to understand the language of birds.
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.
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.
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.
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,
but a bit less directly.
Like Aragorn, for instance, Sigurd has a famous Reforged sword, his father's sword broken in battle, which is remade for his son.
And there is also a ring in the fossil legend,
although it actually plays quite a bit less of a role in the North sources than the ring does in Tolkien, or indeed, Varner.
But altogether, I think the fulsome legend, and perhaps more than any other story from Old Norse literature,
permeated Tolkien's imagination from a very early age,
gave him the kind of images and ideas from this very first encounter with the literature of the North.
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,
because it's the most direct and extensive engagement with Old Norse literature among Tolkien's works.
But it's also perhaps not very well known. I don't know how many people here have read it.
It was actually hardly known at all until it was published by Christopher Tolkien in 2009.
Tolkien himself only referred to it once in his published letters. He seems to have kind of written it.
Christopher Tolkien suggests in the 1930s and then just sort of put it away and not really done anything with it.
But it's actually a really interesting text and a kind of a remarkable achievement,
actually, a very complex re-imagining of some very complex source material.
And it's also an experimental work in a number of ways, as I'll explore.
So the work is made up of two long poems written in English,
but in Old Norse alliterative metre fullness log, which is the metre of the most, depends on the idea.
So the poems are not translations, although in places they follow the EDDA and some other sources closely.
They're a retelling of the story in a completely new way, really, with Tolkien's own interventions and innovations.
He gives the poems, these Old Norse titles, which are his own invention, but kind of allude to real poems in the Edda.
And and as well as following the metre of the poems, he also imitates and features the manuscript presentation.
So they have little brief prose summary headings of the kind that you get in the Edda.
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,
which attempts to solve some of the textual puzzles which arise from gaps in sources to reconcile some of their inconsistencies.
All of the medieval texts we have for this story are composite to some extent.
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,
which belong to a more kind of authentic, older form of the legend.
So there's a sort of an argument about the history of the legend which underlies the poetic choices he's making.
At the same time, it's an experiment in writing alliterative verse in the music of the Edda.
Here's one reference to these poems much later is in a letter to W.H. Auden, a fellow lover of the poet together.
And there he describes it as an experiment in trying to learn alliterative poetry.
So I'll just give you a little example of what that looks like. This is fast.
Miller Coming forth from the mountain, cigarettes crouched, waiting in a hollow to stop him from beneath.
In deep hollow on the dark hillside. Long there lurked. The land trembled.
Force came fast near fire. His breathing down the mountain rushed Mr. Poison.
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.
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,
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.
It tends to concision, weighty packing of the language in sense and form.
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.
I love that and that's great. And that's what Tolkien's going for.
And it's quite unlike a lot of his other poetry in that way.
And then on top of all that, he does something really interesting by introducing into the poem his own interpretation of the volume legend,
which isn't found in any of the Norse sources. His Sigurd is not just a great hero,
but a unique figure with a divinely appointed destiny chosen for him and brought to fruition by the planning of Odin.
So Tolkien begins his version of the story, not as the Norse sources do with Sigurd ancestors,
but way back in mythological deep time before the creation of the world with a version of the Norse creation myth
which is drawing on but not directly translating villains battle from the Edda and like the poem tells of creation.
And it then tells of the future destruction of the gods at Ragnarök the last battle.
But Tolkien introduces a completely new element,
a prophecy that the world can be saved at Ragnarok if a particular type of hero can be found to fight for the gods.
If in day of doom, one deathless stands who death hath tasted and dies no more.
The serpent slayer seed of Odin. Then all shall not end nor earth perish.
So the conditions are specific and threefold. The hero must be descended from Odin, but also a mortal who has tasted death.
And also Dragonslayer. And Tolkien.
As Tolkien tells it,
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.
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.
That's why Odin brings dead warriors to live in Valhalla, so they can fight with the gods at the end of the world.
But not this prophecy. And Tolkien's quite clear about this. In some explanatory notes he wrote to accompany the poem.
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,
and then begets in the world many mighty men whom he gathers invaluable to be his companions in the last battle.
One family in a special, he singles out the victims, all of whom are his chosen warriors.
And one sacred son of Sigmund is to be the chief of all their leader on the last day,
for Odin hopes that by his hand the serpent shall in the end be slain and a new world made possible.
Now, if the gods can accomplish this, but only one who has lived on Earth first as a mortal and died,
this motif of the special function of Sigurd is an invention of the present poet,
i.e. talking to himself or an interpretation of the Norse sources in which is not explicit.
And by not explicit he means just not there at all.
And characteristically, for Tolkien, this is building on a implicitly on a point of philological interpretation.
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,
and he often calls Sick of the World, chosen in his poem.
So this prophecy, which is told his own invention, casts a good quite plainly as a kind of Christ figure,
a figure both divine and mortal, whose died and conquered death and will return on the last day as the saviour of the world.
And there are overt Christian resonances not just in the idea, but actually in Tolkien's choice of language.
So one who death has tasted and dies no more is quite close to some poor cross being raised from the dead,
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.
So this is cigarettes. Birth wind was wailing, waves were crying.
Seagull in sorrowful when a song she bore Sigrid golden as a sun shining force came.
He sat in a far country, and that phrase, a man from a far country, is echoing the prophecy of Isaiah.
And that image of Sigurd as a son, a golden son, bright figure that comes up a lot in the poem.
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,
but also to the idea of secret as a kind of solar deity, a sun God who dies but is resurrected.
And for comparative mythologies of Tolkien's day,
this was a very common way of interpreting the figure of Christ and also some of the gods of many mythologies, including Norse mythology.
Usually not Sigurd, who is not, of course, God.
So the effect of all this is to give a new kind of unity to the whole story with all its disparate parts,
its what talking calls the hope of Odin, a kind of foreknowledge which is controlling the good life.
And this mythological framework, and particularly these parallels between Sigurd and Christ suggests,
I think that as well as being an experiment in alliterative verse and a scholarly hypothesis and all of those things,
it's also a kind of experiment in reconciling Tolkien's own deep Catholic faith with the pre-Christian stories,
which held so much fascination for him. And again, if we situate this poem in the 1930s,
this question of the relationship between Christianity and myth and myth be true
was one that Tolkien was famously at this time discussing with C.S. Lewis,
who was then not yet a Christian, but was interested in the idea of a sacrificial God and its relationship to the Christian story.
And in the 1930, they had the famous conversation in which which was instrumental in Lewis's conversion to Christianity,
in which Tolkien convinced him that Christianity could be a myth but could also be true,
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.
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.
And finally, it also casts an interesting light on Torquay's discussion of the relationship between Christian and Pagan mindsets in Beowulf,
the monsters and the critics. So another product of his thinking in the 1930s.
In that lecture, though, its primary focus is Beowulf.
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.
So a very typical example of what I was saying earlier about using Old Norse to inform a reading of Anglo-Saxon texts.
So the dragonflies of Beowulf, Tolkien argues, is a significant and serious battle,
in part because it's an echo of a cosmic battle between the gods and the monsters.
Although in the world of Beowulf, the pagan gods are no longer part of the story.
So the poet of Beowulf is a Christian. But Tolkien argues that he still sees the world is essentially a battle against monsters.
Whatever monsters might mean or signify evil or death or chaos or whatever.
It's a story of man alien in a hostile world, engaged in a struggle which he cannot win while the world lasts.
In the view of the poet of Beowulf, Tolkien says. The monsters had been the foes of the gods, the captains of men.
And within time, the monsters would win in the heroic siege and lost defeat.
So at Ragnarok, men and gods alike have been imagined in the same post.
Now the heroic figures, the men of old tales on the hafnium heroes under the heavens remained and still fought on until defeat.
For the monsters do not depart. Whether the gods got will come.
A Christian was and is still like his forefathers, a mortal hemmed in a hostile world.
So the battle against the monsters, Tolkien suggests, cannot finally be won within the mortal world.
It's an inevitable defeat, even if heroes win temporary victories over a dragon or over a Dark Lord of the Rings, and yet,
within a Christian understanding, the tragedy of the great temporal defeat remains for a while poignant, but ceases to be finally important.
It is no defeat for the end of the world is part of the design of method.
That's the old English name for fatal God. The arbiter who is above the mortal world.
And it's precisely this idea which Tolkien is bringing to bear on his retelling of the good story.
The defeat and death and failure can actually be part of a kind of a surprising divine plan.
In the no sources speak, a story is very definitely a tragedy.
It's a tale of grief and betrayal and failure. And that does colour the tone of Tolkien story.
But Tolkien, like the poet of Beowulf, brings to his pagan material a Christian perspective.
And so his poem kind of looks beyond the world to a second coming.
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,
it ends with the death of one of the major characters and Sauron's words as he
lies dying are very close to the words with which Tolkien describes secrets.
Death. Sorry, Intel's bill, but I go now to the halls of waiting to sit beside my fathers until the world is renewed.
And if Sigurd in Valhalla, we're told that we see long at his father's side for war waiting.
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.
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.
We should bear in mind he never actually chose to publish this this work.
But I think you could see it as laying the ground for some of the distinctive tone of the Lord of the Rings,
particularly that kind of melancholic, autumnal tone. The invocation of a world which is waning.
Darkness is spreading. But there are shafts of light and hope.
Perceived, though not clearly understood by mortal eyes.
What Tolkien, for the long defeat, is the inevitable fate of elves and of mortals in this world.
And even great victories can only be temporary.
But there may yet be a purpose above the mortal world, which sees and governs all and is working towards ultimate victory.
Thank you.