In The Road to Middle Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology Tom Shippey includes as an appendix “a brief guide to the works which nourished Tolkien’s imagination.” These include Old Norse sagas, German fairy tales, Scottish ballads, Middle English poetry, a Finnish epic, and of course Old English literature.

The Old English works that Shippey mentions in particular are:

• Beowulf
• The Ruin
• The Wanderer
• The Battle of Maldon
• Maxims I and Maxims II
• Solomon and Saturn II
• Exodus

Today I’m going to take a brief look at The Wanderer. It’s an elegiac poem of 115 lines found in the Exeter Book, an Old English manuscript created circa AD 975. The bulk of the poem consists of the protagonist’s musings as he wanders, an exile from society after the loss of his lord and kinsmen. You can find a translation on Anglo-Saxons.net and others by Karl E.H. Seigfried and Tim Romano online.

Based on my brief research, I’ll lay out three aspects of The Lord of the Rings that are undoubtedly influenced by The Wanderer: the names of people and places, the creation of the Ents, and the “Lament for the Rohirrim.”

In his extensively annotated translation of The Wanderer Karl E.H. Seigfried explains several proper nouns that Tolkien based on words in The Wanderer.

• “”Middle-earth” (middangeard, “middle-yard”) is the Old English equivalent of the Old Norse miðgarðr (also meaning “middle-yard”). The former is the source for Tolkien’s “Middle-earth,” the latter for “Midgard” in Modern English translations, retellings, and reimaginings of Norse mythology.”
• “Beorn (here translated as “warrior”) is a word that only appears in Old English poetry (i.e., not in prose works) and is used to mean man, warrior, prince, nobleman, or chief. Both beorn and bera (“bear”) are cognate with the Old Norse björn (“bear”), but the meaning of björn seems to have evolved from the animal to the human. Tolkien tapped into the transformation of the word when he created The Hobbit‘s Beorn, a mysterious character who shifts between bear and human form.”
• “The Wanderer speaks of the “nobleman” using the word eorl (here in the dative as eorle), which is related to the Old Norse jarl and the Modern English earl. A character named Eorl is mentioned several times in The Lord of the Rings as the first king of Rohan and ancestor of the Rohirrim.”
• “Edoras (translated here as “buildings”) is the plural form of the noun edor (“place enclosed by a fence,” “dwelling,” “house”). Again connecting the Rohirrim to the Anglo-Saxons, Tolkien gives the name Edoras to their hilltop fortress in The Lord of the Rings.”
• “The character name Théoden is from the Old English þēoden (“prince, lord”) which appears in this passage of The Wanderer as the genitive þēodnes in the phrase Ēala þēodnes þrym(“Alas, glory of the prince”).”
• “The Wanderer uses the word frōd (“wise”) in the phrase frōd in ferðe (“wise in spirit”). In J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Tom Shippey points out that Frodo is “the one name out of all the prominent hobbit characters in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings which Tolkien does not mention or discuss.” Given that “wise in spirit” seems such an apt description of the Ring-bearer, perhaps this half-line from the poem Tolkien knew so well played some part in his naming of Frodo.”

Seigfried also states that Tolkien’s Ents (beings resembling talking trees) are derived from the Old English word for giants, which appears in the phrase eald enta geweorc (“The ancient works of giants”). In fact “Tolkien credits the creation of the Ents in his own mythology to this line of The Wanderer, writing to W. H. Auden (letter 163) that his giant figures of the forest “are composed of philology, literature, and life.”

The passage of The Wanderer which is echoed most directly in The Lord of the Rings is the “ubi sunt” passage, which Tolkien read at a valedictory address in 1959 (as stated by Stuart D. Lee).

Hwǽr cwóm mearh, hwær cwóm mago? Hwǽr cwóm máþþumgyfa?Hwǽr cwóm symbla gesetu? Hwǽr sindon seledréamas?Éalá , beorht bune! Éalá, byrnwiga!Éalá, þéodnes þrym! Hú seo þrág gewát,genáp under niht-helm, swá heo nó wǽre!

Where is the horse gone, where the young rider? Where now the giver of gifts? Where are the seats at the feasting gone? Where are the merry sounds in the hall? Alas, the bright goblet! Alas, the knight and his hauberk! Alas, the glory of the king! How that hour has departed, dark under the shadow of night, as had it never been!

And here is the lament from The Lord of the Rings, recited by Aragorn while looking at the graves of former lords of Rohan:

Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?

Blogger Juli Witte explains it well: “With this repetition Tolkien is not just trying to grab the reader’s attention, he is also playing into a very strong tradition of medieval poetry: the ubi sunt-motif. The name for this motif comes from the Latin phrase ‘Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?‘ which means ‘Where are those who were before us?‘.This is called an erotema, a rhetorical question, and forms the beginning of many Latin poems which ponder upon the concepts of mortality and the transience of life, while also calling strongly upon a sense of nostalgia.”

Time permitting I’ll be looking into more of Tolkien’s inspirations. For now, take a listen to The Wanderer read in Old English.

Sources

• “The Wanderer: An Old English Poem” by Karl E.H. Seigfried via The Norse Mythology Blog
• Excerpt from “J.R.R. Tolkien and The Wanderer: From Edition to Application” by Staurt D. Lee via Tolkien Studies (Vol. 6, 2009, pp. 189-211)
• “The Wanderer: Edition and Translation” by Tim Romano
• “Exile, Wyrd and the Anglo-Saxon Warrior Ideal in The Wanderer and Tolkien’s Quenta Silmarillion“ by Esteliel
• “Tolkien, ‘The Wanderer’ and the Ubi Sunt-tradition” by Juli Witte via A Universe of Words
• “The Wanderer” by L.A. Smith via The Traveller’s Path