Tolkien’s Ring is a kind of literary detective’s casebook that amounts to an investigation of the imagination of J. R. R. Tolkien. In Tolkien’s Ring we will look into Tolkien’s sources of inspiration for his epic fantasy novel, The Lord of the Rings. In this investigation, the symbol of the Ring is of primary importance. Through understanding its meaning and significance, we can begin to understand how Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is the result of an ancient story-telling tradition that dates back to the dawn of Western culture.
Tolkien once described how the discovery of the Ring in an Orc cavern by Bilbo Baggins was as much a surprise to the author as it was to his Hobbit hero. Tolkien knew as little of its history as Bilbo Baggins did at that time. He also explained how it grew from a simple vehicle of plot in The Hobbit into the central image of his epic tale The Lord of the Rings. Just as Tolkien’s Wizard Gandalf set out to discover the history of the Hobbit’s Ring, so in this book we will search out the history and descent of Tolkien’s Ring.
Just how did this Ring come to be so casually discarded in the caverns of Tolkien’s mind? The truth is Tolkien’s Ring had its origin in a tradition of ring quest tales that came into being before the pyramids of Egypt were built, or the walls of Babylon were raised. While the glorious civilization of Greece and the mighty empire of Rome rose and fell, that tradition lived on. It survived the fall of the pagan gods; and the rise of Buddha, Mohammed and Christ.
Although the ring quest tradition first came into being among tribal peoples long before written records were kept, this does not mean we have no idea of what early forms it took. Remarkably, in the twentieth century, the symbolic rituals of the ring quest remain intact in one of its most elemental forms among the nomadic tribes of Lappland and Siberia. Anthropologists living among the shamanic Lapplanders this century have frequently recorded the ritual enactment of the ring quest.
In this ceremony the shaman or wizard of the tribe places a brass ring on the head of a sacred drum. The designs and markings on the skin of the drum are essentially a cosmic map of human and spirit worlds. The shaman begins to chant and gently tap the rim of the drumhead with his drum hammer, making the ring move and dance. The ring’s progress is the journey of the human soul. As the ring moves around the cosmic map, the shaman sings the tale of the soul’s perilous journey through the human and spirit worlds.
Tolkien’s Ring attempts to link the bookish Oxford don who was J. R. R. Tolkien and that wild tribal shaman to a single tradition spanning more than five thousand years. Tolkien tapping away on his typewriter keys as the wandering soul of his Hobbit hero moves and dances to its pulse is not unlike the shaman tapping his drum. Nor is the journey of Tolkien’s Ring across the map of Middle-earth essentially unlike the journey of the shaman’s ring across the drum map of his human and spirit worlds.
In his The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien awoke something deep in human consciousness through the universal language of mythic images drawn from the early history of mankind. His epic tale made him the heir of an ancient storytelling tradition that used the common symbolic language of myth to create the largest body of invented mythology in the history of literature.
In tracing the sources of Tolkien’s Ring, we open to an audience an appreciation of the world of myth and legend from which Tolkien drew his inspiration. The richness of this heritage is evident in his tales and his vast mythological structures. Tolkien was deeply committed to the study of the ancient wisdom of the human soul as preserved in myth and legend.
‘I am interested in mythological invention, and the mystery of literary creation,’ Tolkien once wrote in a letter to a reader. ‘I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own, not of the quality that I sought, and found in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish; but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff.’
This was Tolkien’s life ambition. So great was this obsession that it could be argued that the undoubted literary merits of Tolkien’s epic tale of The Lord of the Rings were almost a secondary concern. Important as the novel is, any analsis of Tolkien’s life and work makes one aware that his greatest passion and grandest ambition were focused on the creation of an entire mythological system for the English people.
‘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 … which I could dedicate simply: to England; to my country.’
The enormity of this undertaking is staggering. It would be as if Homer, before writing the Iliad and the Odyssey, had first to invent the whole of Greek mythology and history. The degree to which he has actually succeeded is remarkable. In large part Tolkien’s invented mythology in the popular imagination has definitely become that of England. Furthermore, it is certainly the most complex and detailed invented world in all literature.
The key to Tolkien’s world is not so much where it is to be found, but when. ‘The theatre of my tale is this earth, the one in which we now live, but the historical period is imaginary,’ he wrote. ‘The action of the story takes place in North-west of Middle-earth, equivalent in latitude to the coastline of Europe and the north shore of the Mediterranean.’
That imaginary time is a mythical one just before the first human histories, and the rise of any recorded civilization. It begins with the creation of the world known as Arda (Middle-earth and the Undying Lands) within vast spheres of air and light. This world is inhabited by pagan Gods, Elves, Dwarves, Ents, Orcs, Trolls, Dragons – and eventually mortal Men.
We are thirty-seven thousand years into the history of this world before the events related in The Lord of the Rings even begin. After the War of the Ring, many millennia pass before leading on ‘eventually and inevitably to ordinary history.’
In a footnote to one of his letters, Tolkien estimates our own historic time was some six thousand years after the Third Age, which he suggested put the twentieth century in the Fifth or Sixth Age by Middle-earth’s system of reckoning. So, like those who attempt to date the creation of the world back through the texts of the Bible, we may now reckon the time of Tolkien’s War of the Ring at something between 4000 and 5000 bc; while the creation of his world of Arda must be placed at 41,000 bc.
Naturally, Tolkien’s world of Arda did not come out of nowhere. It was a composite of all Tolkien was: creative author, philologist, historian, folklorist, mythographer, geographer, philosopher, artist. It was once written of Dante: ‘Well nigh all the encyclopedic erudition of the Middle Ages was forged and welded, in the white heat of an indomitable will, into the steel-knit structure of the Divine Comedy.’ Similarly, of Tolkien it can be said that a compression of everything he read, knew, dreamed and believed of Western history and culture went into the creation of his world of Middle-earth and the Undying Lands.
To understand the creative process of Tolkien’s mind, it is interesting to look into his essay ‘On Fairy-Tales’. Tolkien suggested the process by which fairy tales were traditionally created was well encompassed in the homely metaphor of soup-making: ‘Speaking of the history of stories and especially of fairy-stories we may say that the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling, and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty.’
Tolkien rather warns us off the task of examining the bones in an attempt to determine the nature of the ox from which the soup is made. ‘The history of fairy-stories is probably more complex than the physical history of the human race, and as complex as the history of human language.’
He warns us that ‘the intricate web of Story is now beyond all the skill but that of the elves to unravel it.’ Certainly, the recipe for Tolkien’s Cauldron of Story was very, very complex. Its bones and bits, dainty and undainty, were drawn from a vast range of histories, myths, tales, folklore, sagas. To this was added the magical ingredient of pure invention.
Tolkien’s Ring is not an attempt to examine The Lord of the Rings page by page, image by image. It will more broadly attempt an investigation into that rich body of literature, myth and history which inspired Tolkien in the creation of his epic novel. These are myths and legends with which Professor Tolkien was intimately acquainted, and about which he often despaired because so few readers in the twentieth century were even vaguely familiar with them.
One of Tolkien’s chief vehicles of inspiration for literary invention was philological. He considered himself a philologist above all things. ‘I began with language, I found myself involved in inventing legends of the same taste,’ he once wrote. It was language itself that suggested a world rather than the other way round.
One of Tolkien’s most famous statements came by way of an answer to the question of where Hobbits came from. ‘All I remember about the start of The Hobbit is sitting correcting School Certificate papers in the everlasting weariness of that annual task forced on impecunious academics with children. On a blank leaf I scrawled, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” I did not and do not know why.’
After that, it became his task to explain to himself just what a Hobbit was and what it was doing in that hole in the ground. Besides Hobbits, Tolkien created other races and creatures from names he invented himself, like Balrogs, Uruks, and Nazgûl. More typically, however, Tolkien took words from fragments of ancient mythologies and legends. Often he chose Old English words that suggested little or nothing to the average reader. Obscure words like Orc, Ent, Wose were expanded by his inventive mind, and made into striking and original creations. On other occasions, Tolkien took clichés of myth and fairy tale like Elf, Dwarf, Wizard which he vigorously reinvented. To all he gave vibrant life and a vast, newly created world where they might live and breathe.
Central to Tolkien’s creative effort was the attempted illusion that Middle-earth was a world of archetypes which survived in the racial unconscious of the English people. All that the English are and know comes from this world. All great events of English history are prefigured in archetypal form in this ancient mythic world.
Throughout his fictional writing, Tolkien employs a favourite literary device of inventing a kind of ‘prototype story’, which we are encouraged to accept as the ‘true event’ that would plausibly explain later well-known legends and tales of many nations.
Tolkien’s creation and sinking of his mighty island kingdom of Númenor was a deliberate attempt to write the ‘true story’ behind the myth of Atlantis. In The Lord of the Rings, in Prince Aragorn’s kiss which awakens the sleeping Princess Éowyn, we are meant to see the ‘origin’ of the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty. We are often given prototypes of a species: Glaurung the Golden is the ‘Father of Dragons’; Durin the Deathless is one of the ‘Seven Fathers of the Dwarves’. Tolkien even gives us a ‘true story’ behind that well-worn cliché ‘Crack of Doom’ by turning it into a ‘real’ and frightening place.
Ultimately Tolkien’s Ring itself is intended to be the archetypal Ring on which all other ring quest cycles were based. The truth, of course, is quite the opposite, although Tolkien’s Ring makes its unique contribution to that ancient tradition.
This is not to suggest that Tolkien simply plucks figures out of myths and legends. The creative imagination is a complex thing. To demonstrate something of the creative process of Tolkien’s mind, we might look at a minor motif unrelated to the ring quest tradition, which demonstrates how the raw material is transformed into creative fiction.
Let us take an example of a single source with which most readers will already be familiar: William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. There can be little doubt that this play was a minor source for certain aspects of Tolkien’s novel. Curiously, it was a source of ‘negative inspiration’. This was because Tolkien profoundly disliked the play, although he was fascinated with the historic and mythic story of Macbeth.
Tolkien appears to have rather enjoyed voicing the ultimate Englishman’s heresy of hating Shakespeare altogether. In fact, he went even further and tended to voice his dismissal of drama as a form of literature at all. In his essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’, Tolkien concluded that drama is essentially hostile to much loved ‘fantasy’ because it is, in itself, a kind of counterfeit fantasy. Tolkien stated that more than any other form of literature, fantasy needs a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ to survive. In dramatized fantasy (like the Witches scene in Macbeth) Tolkien found ‘disbelief had not so much to be suspended as hanged, drawn and quartered.’
However peculiar Tolkien’s dislike of Shakespeare and Macbeth, it proved a very fruitful hatred, particularly in relation to the episodes of The Lord of the Rings concerning the Ents. Although typically the Ents themselves came from a philological source, the plot element of the mighty ‘March of the Ents’ was motivated by Shakespeare.
In explaining the origin of his Tree Herds, the Ents, Tolkien wrote: ‘I should say that Ents arc composed of philology, literature and life. They owe their name to the “eald enta geweorc” of Anglo-Saxon.’ However, beyond ‘Ent’ simply being an Anglo-Saxon name for ‘giant’, the real inspiration was Tolkien’s attempt to write the prototype myth behind what he considered a rather limp tale by Shakespeare.
‘Their part in the story is due, I think, to my bitter disappointment and disgust from schooldays with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of “Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill”: I longed to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war.’ And so he gives us the ‘true story’ behind the prophecy in Macbeth in the epic March of the Ents on the realm of Saruman of the White Hand.
Tolkien tells us, again in ‘On Fairy-Stories’: ‘Macbeth is indeed a work by a playwright who ought, at least on this occasion, to have written a story, if he had the skill or patience for that art.’ Since Shakespeare was no longer available to take the advice, Tolkien decided to take on the job himself.
In this effort, Tolkien extended himself beyond the marching wood motif.
He extended himself by challenging Shakespeare’s portrayal of Macbeth himself. Tolkien’s evil Lord of the Ringwraiths – the Witch-king of Morgul - who sold his mortal soul to Sauron for a ring of power and the illusion of earthly dominion is meant to suggest to us a grand and ancient archetype for Macbeth’s tale of a king possessed of a doomed and blasted soul.
So that none will mistake the comparison, or Tolkien’s challenge to Shakespeare, the life of the Witch-king is protected by a prophecy that is almost identical to the final one that safeguards Macbeth. Tolkien’s Witch-king ‘cannot be slain by the hand of man’; while the similarly deluded Macbeth ‘cannot be slain by man of woman born.’
Again, Tolkien’s challenge to Shakespeare is largely about what he considers a fairly limp fulfilment of the prophecy. In terms of convincing plot, one must acknowledge that the Witch-king’s death by a woman disguised as a warrior with a Hobbit as an accomplice is a much better answer to the fatal riddle than Shakespeare’s lawyer’s loophole that someone born by caesarean section is not strictly speaking ‘of woman born.’
The most important aspect of all this literary fencing is not really whether Tolkien actually succeeded in his challenge to Shakespeare, or anyone else. Nor does it particularly matter whether or not readers of The Lord of the Rings register the allusion. The result was that Tolkien’s mind was provoked into creating original characters and events that resonate with a depth and power which they inherit from their source.
This was one of the most profound aspects of Tolkien’s genius as an author. He combined a natural story-teller’s ability and inventiveness with a scholar’s capacity to draw from the deep well of myth, legend, literature and history. He breathed life into ancient traditions that, but for him, would have remained forever unknown to millions of modern readers.
In Tolkien’s Ring, we will survey a vast body of myth and legend in search of Tolkien’s sources. We will look at other rings and ring quests, and we will see where many elements of his epic tale were provoked into existence. However, we should never mistake Tolkien’s creative process as a mere cobbling together of ancient lore. Richer and more profound though Tolkien’s writing is for the ancient tradition it draws on, Tolkien’s art is by no means mere imitation. The Lord of the Rings is a highly realized and originally conceived novel that has renewed, invigorated and finally reinvented the ring quest for the twentieth century.
