into a great bear in the Battle of Five Armies, appears to owe much to the berserk warriors of Northern tradition who fought with frenzied fury and whose name, according to the most accepted interpretation, described them as wearing bearskins. And in The Lord of the Rings, Aragorn’s broken sword recalls that of Sigurd in the Volsungasaga; the seat of Amon Hen is akin to Hliðskjf, the all-seeing seat of Odin; and the meeting of the forces of Sauron and the Army of the West on Dagorlad, the Battle Plain, at the feet of the Ered Lithui or Ash Mountains, recalls the battle between the Goths and the Huns on the Danube-heath below the Hills of Ash.
After discussing the fragmentary remains of early Germanic writings, especially in Old English and Gothic, Paul Bibire observes in ‘Sægde se þe cuþe: Tolkien as Anglo-Saxonist’, Scholarship and Fantasy (1993), that
Tolkien manifestly felt the imaginative pull of these lost literatures, of what must have been. His scholarly caution … warned him against confusing what is with what might have been …. He is also remarkably careful to dissociate his recreative from his scholarly activities, and the legends of the Rohirrim and their ancestors and cousins of Mirkwood are not those of the early English, or of their continental Gothic or Norse cousins: rather, he creates an analogue of such a body of legends, as it might have developed in the different cultural and geographical circumstances of Rohan and Gondor. [pp. 124–5]
Tolkien himself commented on this separation of his re-creative and scholarly activities in an unpublished essay concerning his thoughts on translating poetry:
I must protest that I have never attempted to ‘re-create’ anything. My aim has been the basically more modest, and certainly the more laborious one of trying to make something new. No one would learn anything valid about the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ from any of my lore, not even that concerning the Rohirrim; I never intended that they should. Even the lines beginning ‘Where now the horse and the rider’ [The Lord of the Rings, bk. III, ch. 6], though they echo a line in [the Old English poem] *‘The Wanderer’ … are certainly not a translation, re-creative or other wise. They are integrated (I hope) in something wholly different … they are particular in reference, to a great hero and his renowned horse, and they are supposed to be part of the song of a minstrel of a proud and undefeated people in a hall still populous with men. Even the sentiment is different: it laments the ineluctable ending and passing back into oblivion of the fortunate, the full-lived, the unblemished and beautiful. To me that is more poignant than any particular disaster, from the cruelty of men or the hostility of the world. But if I were to venture to translate ‘The Wanderer’ – the lament of the lonely man withering away in regret, and the poet’s reflexions upon it – I would not dare to intrude any sentiment of my own, nor to disarrange the order of word and thought in the old poem, in an impertinent attempt to make it more pleasing to myself, and perhaps to others. That is not ‘re-creation’ but destruction. At best a foolish misuse of a talent for personal poetic expression; at worst the unwarranted impudence of a parasite. [Tolkien Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford]
Tolkien did, however, give a version of part of the Old English poem *The Seafarer a significant place in *The Lost Road and *The Notion Club Papers, though in an entirely different context: a sea-longing to seek the land of the Elves. He also wrote, probably in the early 1930s, Völsungakviða en nýja (‘The New Lay of the Völsungs’), a poem of 339 eight-line stanzas. On 29 March 1967 he wrote to *W.H. Auden, who had sent him part of the Elder Edda that he and Paul B. Taylor had translated into Modern English: ‘In return again I hope to send you … a thing I did many years ago when trying to learn the art of writing alliterative poetry: an attempt to unify the lays about the Völsungs from the Elder Edda, written in the old eight-line fornyrðislag stanza’ (Letters, p. 379). A companion poem, Guðrúnarkviða en nýja (‘The New Lay of Gudrún’), of 166 eight-line stanzas, dates to the same time. (For the ‘New Lays’ see The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún.)
In the Old English poem *The Battle of Maldon the old retainer Beorhtwold, prepared to die in a last desperate stand, proclaims: ‘Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessens’. These words, Tolkien comments, ‘have been held to be the finest expression of the northern heroic spirit, Norse or English; the clearest statement of uttermost endurance in the service of indomitable will’ (*The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, in Essays and Studies (1953), p. 13). They exemplify as well an ideal which Tolkien applied frequently in *‘The Silmarillion’ and The Lord of the Rings. To name only one instance in the former, in the Nirnaeth Arnoediad the Men of the House of Hador stand firm against the forces of Morgoth until only Húrin remains:
Then he cast aside his shield, and wielded an axe two-handed; and it is sung that the axe smoked in the black blood of the troll-guard of Gothmog until it withered, and each time he slew Húrin cried: ‘Aurë entuluva! Day shall come again!’ Seventy times he uttered that cry; but they took him at last alive … for the Orcs grappled him with their hands, which clung to him still though he hewed off their arms; and ever their numbers were renewed, until at last he fell buried beneath them. [*The Silmarillion, p. 195]
Likewise, in The Lord of the Rings, Book V, Chapter 6, Éomer lets ‘blow the horns to rally all men to his banner that could come thither; for he thought to make a great shield-wall at the last, and stand, and fight there on foot till all fell, and do deeds of song on the fields of Pelennor, though no man should be left in the West to remember the last King of the Mark’. On a differfent level, the same spirit is expressed by Frodo, and especially Sam, as they struggle across the desolation of Mordor to Mount Doom, and Frodo realizes that
at best their provision would take them to their goal; and when the task was done, there they would come to an end, alone, houseless, foodless in the midst of a terrible desert. There could be no return.
‘So that was the job I felt I had to do when I started,’ thought Sam: ‘to help Mr. Frodo to the last step and then die with him? Well, if that is the job then I must do it ….’
But even as hope died in Sam, or seemed to die, it was turned to a new strength. Sam’s plain hobbit-face grew stern, almost grim, as the will hardened in him …. [bk. VI, ch. 3]
*Priscilla Tolkien once said of her father and his works of fiction:
When thinking of his imagination I feel that like his scholarship it was overwhelmingly Northern European in every detail of his deepest loves and fears. The ideas aroused by the sufferings of long, hard, cruel winters, the dazzling beauty of the short flowering of Spring and Summer, and the sadness of seeing this once more pass back into the darkness; the symbolism of darkness and light is continual in [*The Silmarillion] for good and evil, despair and hope. Such a climate also nourished the virtues which he held in such high regard: heroism and endurance, loyalty, and fidelity, both in love and in war. [‘Talk Given at Church House, Westminster on 16.9.77 by Priscilla Tolkien’, Amon Hen 29 [?November 1977], p. 4]
See also ‘Norse Mythological Elements in The Hobbit’ by Mitzi M. Brunsdale, Mythlore 9, no. 4, whole no. 34 (Winter 1983); Fredrik J. Heinemann, ‘Tolkien and Old Icelandic Literature’, Scholarship and Fantasy (1993); Gloria St. Clair, ‘An Overview of the Northern Influences on Tolkien’s Works’ and ‘Volsunga Saga and Narn: Some Analogies’, both in Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference 1992, ed. Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. GoodKnight (1995); Tom Shippey, ‘Tolkien and Iceland: The Philology of Envy’ (2002), revised in Roots and Branches: Selected Papers on Tolkien (2007); Marjorie Burns, Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth (2005) and ‘Old Norse Literature’ in J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, ed. Michael D.C. Drout (2006); Dimitra Fimi, ‘Tolkien and Old Norse Antiquity’ in Old Norse Made New: Essays on the Post Medieval Reception of Old Norse Literature and Culture, ed. David Clark and Carl Phelpstead (2007); J.S. Ryan, ‘Trolls and Other
