The influence of philological Anglo-Saxonism on Tolkien

The influence of philological Anglo-Saxonism on Tolkien is clearly visible in his depiction of the Riders of Rohan who “resemble the ancient English down to minute detail.”42 Tolkien had access to the culture of the Anglo-Saxons through his professional work, and drew on their literature extensively. Yet that access was not direct, a jump from the twentieth century to the first millennium, rather, his medievalism was coloured by that of earlier philologists who conceived of them in racial terms, marked out from the rest of humanity by their physical, cultural, and linguistic character. The Rohirrim, as Faramir tells Frodo, are one of the “proud peoples of the North,” once the enemies of Gondor, but now their allies; they are “tall men and fair women, valiant both alike, golden-haired, bright-eyed, and strong,” said to be descended from “the same Three Houses of Men as were the Númenoreans in their beginning.” The key role language plays in differentiating peoples in Tolkien’s world is also displayed in his description of them: “their lords speak our speech at need; yet for the most part they hold by the ways of their own fathers and to their own memories, and they speak among themselves their own North tongue.”43 Race in Middle-earth is defined by interlinked moral, physical, and linguistic factors, demonstrating clear links to philological constructs of race which had arisen during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Tolkien’s human protagonists – including Hobbits – are unmistakably influenced by historical and literary constructs of European culture. Where the Rohirrim resemble the pre-Conquest English, Hobbit life and the Shire are redolent of nineteenth-century England. If the Rohirrim as a people most closely resemble the Anglo-Saxons,44 the Gondorrians also have some Germanic values, many of which are best illustrated in the life of Aragorn. His right to the throne of Gondor and Arnor is not solely conferred by his descent from the legendary kings of former ages, rather, he must prove himself worthy by strength of will, through battle, and through leadership. He does not enter the city of Minas Tirith as king until he has been acclaimed by its people those of the surrounding lands. This model is strongly reminiscent of Tacitus’s Germani who chose their leaders by battle prowess and consent, not descent. Aragorn, moreover, is from the North – as compared to Gondor’s South; his character has been shaped by that land and by his pure descent. The Gondorrians, like Tacitus’s southern Romans, have fallen from the peak of their power, as Pippin sees when he first enters Minas Tirith with Gandalf: [The city] “was in truth falling year by year into decay; and already it lacked half the men that could have dwelt at ease there.”45Judy Ford convincingly reads the renewal of Gondor and its empire under Aragorn’s kingship as “an expression of a late-ancient, early-medieval, northern European hope that the Roman Empire could be reborn, and that its reincarnated form would embrace the Germanic peoples and provide them with glory and peace.”46 The fulfilment of that wish is arguably found in the nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism of the British Empire as much as it is in The Lord of the Rings.