{"id":1622,"date":"2016-04-06T12:44:05","date_gmt":"2016-04-06T12:44:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greydogtales.com\/blog\/?p=1622"},"modified":"2016-04-06T19:37:53","modified_gmt":"2016-04-06T19:37:53","slug":"tolkien-at-easter-a-warning-from-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/greydogtales.com\/blog\/tolkien-at-easter-a-warning-from-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Tolkien at Easter: A Warning from History"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today on greydogtales<\/em> \u2013 why hobbits suck, Wayland’s Smithy, some proper Anglo-Saxon folklore and how to aethelfrith<\/em> without losing your appetite. Fantasy for those who like mythology and history; mythology and history for those who like fantasy. Or something like that. Hang in there.<\/p>\n

People ask me if I write fantasy. They do this with a vague sense of hope, trying to deflect me from another fascinating lecture on either lurchers or Edwardian psychiatry. It’s interesting, I reply, that Freud<\/strong> began corresponding with Jung<\/strong> concerning his patients’ fantasies in 1906\u2026<\/p>\n

\"not<\/a>
not a ring-wraith, honestly<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cNo, we meant magic swords, elves, dragons, that sort of thing! Fun stuff!\u201d they shriek. And as it happens, today we celebrate an exciting anniversary, Aethelfrith Day<\/strong><\/em>. So this is a good time to talk about fantasy.<\/p>\n

As everyone knows, it is one thousand four hundred years ago to the day since King Aethelfrith<\/strong> died*. He was slain, in fact, fighting King Raedwald<\/strong> of East Anglia in 616CE. But he had already managed to lay the foundations of the Kingdom of Northumbria by uniting the kingdoms of Bernicia and Deira. Hurray!<\/p>\n

\"Kingdom_of_Northumbria_in_AD_802\"<\/a>
northumbria in 802ce<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A lot of my family come from around York in old Deira, the city from which Edwin<\/strong>, Aethelfrith’s successor, ruled Northumbria for a while. Edwin converted to Roman Christianity at York. Regarding this event, the church historian Bede<\/strong> (672 \u2013 735) quotes a famous simile about a sparrow flying in and out of a hall, which ends with:<\/p>\n

\u201c…This life of man appears for a short space but of what went before or what is to follow we are ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

OK, said Edwin. I’ll buy that. I’m not fond of birdwatching, but I would like to know what happens when I finally put down the binoculars. It’s politically-motivated, deeply-suspect Roman Christianity for me!<\/p>\n

We’ll stick with Bede for a moment, because it’s also Easter Month, or Eosturmonath<\/em>, as they called it in the Kingdom of Northumbria. Bede was an Anglo-Saxon monk based in County Durham, and wrote On the Reckoning of Time<\/em>, in which he says that during Eosturmonath<\/em>, which is effectively our April, the pagan English celebrated Eostre<\/strong> the Goddess and held feasts in her honour. At the time Bede was writing this (about 723), the custom was dying out and being replaced by a Christian celebration, the Paschal Month, which focussed on Jesus.<\/p>\n

\"oestre,<\/a>
eostre\/ostara, johannes gehrts, 1884<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I’ve mentioned before that I grew up on a coast with a lot of this sort of history (see whale-road, widow-maker<\/a>). As a teenager I took Bede’s An Ecclesiastical History of the English People<\/em> out of the library – that and Tom Swift and His Giant Robot<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Bede’s plot is weak, but the names in there are great, and not long after that I read J R R Tolkien’s<\/strong> Lord of the Rings<\/em>. I still say that hobbits are best considered in relation to pie-filling (see later)<\/em>, but when I got to the Riders of Rohan, and the genealogy of Theoden King, I was deeply hooked.<\/p>\n

\"LOTR<\/a><\/p>\n

The names, the names\u2026 I wanted to write this sort of thing. There were villages around us which might have come straight out of Bede and\/or Tolkien. There’s even an Eastrington in the East Riding of Yorkshire, a village which was around when the Domesday Book was assembled, and which may get its name from Eostre. I was getting an Anglo-Saxon rush.<\/p>\n

In The Two Towers<\/em>, there is a song with the line “Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?\u201d<\/em> Tolkien sourced this from the Old English poem The Wanderer<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Hw\u00e6r cwom mearg? Hw\u00e6r cwom mago?<\/em>
\nWhere is the horse gone? Where the rider?<\/p>\n

The Wanderer<\/em> is a great read for fantasy fans, by the way. Check out the Exeter Book online, the largest collection of Old English literature still in existence, given to the library of Exeter Cathedral in 1072.<\/p>\n

\"the<\/a>
the exeter book<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

You can listen to The Wanderer<\/em> in Old English here, just to get the rhythm and sound of the original words:<\/p>\n