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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   30842 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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To be fair most visual adaptations I've seen of LotR go pretty hard on Anglo-Saxon Rohirrim, and all the white horse imagery makes it tempting. Nonetheless I think it would be just as reasonable to present them as something more Scythian, which would fit well if you're inclined to a more Byzantine vision of Gondor - the eastern/southern half of the great empire of antiquity, its western/northern cousin long since fallen, but still holding out and serving as a bulwark against the east. I have seen people draw comparisons between the Black Speech and Turkic languages before. I could also see maybe a comparison between the Rohirrim and the Cumans?

At any rate, the Rohirrim are clearly fair of skin and fair of hair, so that would definitely constrain my casting of them.

I should also say, to be fair, you are correct that one of Tolkien's motives was to create a kind of mythology for England. Here's Letter #131:

Also – and here I hope I shall not sound absurd – I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing. For one thing its 'faerie' is too lavish, and fantastical, incoherent and repetitive. For another and more important thing: it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion.

For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary 'real' world. (I am speaking, of course, of our present situation, not of ancient pagan, pre-Christian days. And I will not repeat what I tried to say in my essay, which you read.)

Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story-the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our 'air' (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be 'high', purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry. I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.

Of course, such an overweening purpose did not develop all at once. The mere stories were the thing. They arose in my mind as 'given' things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew. An absorbing, though continually interrupted labour (especially since, even apart from the necessities of life, the mind would wing to the other pole and spend itself on the linguistics): yet always I had the sense of recording what was already 'there', somewhere: not of 'inventing'.

So my nitpick does not pertain to this motive in any way. It's only that I don't think this motive constrained Tolkien to depicting places geographically analogous to England. I suppose this is inevitable; any fair reflection of the historical or mythic consciousness of England qua England must surely also include a sense of Europe, or of the lands to the south that have, for better or worse, shaped England's history and identity.

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