Month: June 2018

arda-marred:

“ For Tolkien,
the distant past was a frame of reference, a daily currency. So, too, for
Robert Graves; but Graves liked to cash in ancient for modern, ‘translating’
Anglo-Saxon poetry into trench imagery, with ‘Beowulf lying wrapped in a
blanket among his platoon of drunken thanes in the Gothland billet; Judith
going for a promenade to Holofernes’s staff tent; and Brunaburgh with its
bayonet-and-cosh fight’. Tolkien’s tendency was the opposite; he might see
German Flammenwerfer and think of
Greek fire, exchanging new coin for old. A glance at some of the parallels
between his creations and his immediate circumstances suggests that such double
vision helped him construct his myth of a fictional ancient past; so that in
war-emptied Oxford he devised the deserted Elven capital Kôr, in troop-crowded
Whittington Heath the migrant encampments of Aryador, and after the Somme, the ‘dragon’
attack on Gondolin. ”  

—John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth