The Lord of the Rings is a Story of Good versus Evil, playing out in the setting of Tolkien’s Middle Earth.
Tolkien’s Myths are Largely Based on Old English and Old Norse Mythology.
- Beowulf
- King Arthur
- The Viking Sagas
In Norse Mythology, the World is Made up of 3 Levels.
The highest level of the world is the place of the gods, and the place level of the world is the underworld.
Elves, Dwarves, and Men Lie in Between.
The Norse word for this realm translates into the words “Middle Earth.”
There were 20 magical rings in Middle Earth, but one supersedes the rest.
King Arthur has a similar legend of the ring.
Sauron, an evil lord, had gotten hold of this all-powerful ring.
The Icelandic Völsunga saga influenced Tolkien.
In this story, a prince killed his father to gain access to his magical ring. After that, he ran and hid in a cave, where he was transformed into a snake.
The Hobbit is a similar tale of greed. Gollum
was also transformed into a monster by his greed.
In old Norse, the name “Frodo” means “wise.”
Frodo’s journey begins in the Shire. The Shire is the homeland of the Hobbits. The slow and pastoral life in the Shire echoes that of Tolkien’s childhood.
Frodo is not the typical hero. He is the “reluctant hero.”
Tolkien’s mythology is so very complex that he created a new word for it: “Mythopoeia.” By this, he meant that he had created an entirely new world based on his myth. The Hobbits and Dwarves did not live in England. They lived in Middle Earth.
“The Silmarillion (Quenya: [silmaˈrilliɔn]) is a short story collection in the mythopoeia of and by the English writer J. R. R. Tolkien, edited and published posthumously by his son Christopher Tolkien in 1977 with assistance from the fantasy author Guy Gavriel Kay.[T 1] The Silmarillion tells of Eä, a fictional universe that includes the Blessed Realm of Valinor, the once-great region of Beleriand, the sunken island of Númenor, and the continent of Middle-earth, where Tolkien’s most popular works—The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings—are set. After the success of The Hobbit, Tolkien’s publisher Stanley Unwin requested a sequel, and Tolkien offered a draft of the stories that would later become The Silmarillion.” Wikipedia
The Bible was of great influence on Tolkien.
One supreme god in Tolkien’s mythology.
The word “hobbit” may allude to the word “habit,” alluding to the fact that the Hobbits did not like a great of flux or change. Instead, they preferred the calmness of no change at all–no adventure at all.
The Elves are an almost perfect group of people. They are like people might have been had they never given into temptation and allowed evil to enter their lives. The elves have the most fully developed language of all the beings in Middle Earth. Some parts of the language represent Finnish.
“The Kalevala (Finnish: Kalevala, IPA: [ˈkɑleʋɑlɑ]) is a 19th-century work of epic poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Karelian and Finnish oral folklore and mythology,[1] telling an epic story about the Creation of the Earth, describing the controversies and retaliatory voyages between the peoples of the land of Kalevala called Väinölä and the land of Pohjola and their various protagonists and antagonists, as well as the construction and robbery of the epic mythical wealth-making machine Sampo.[2]”
The Dwarves are short, stout people who live underground. They have a different kind of language, too, The alphabet of the Dwarves is based on old Norse inscriptions.