Tolkien in General

It's just surface-level discussion so far: just general things about The Silmarillion.

{{ In connection to the piece I did while ago on this thread (few pages back I think) on Tolkien, faery and British history, this is a nice little short vid looking at a faery mound in Ireland. }}

{{ If you've ever wondered what the Glittering Caves behind Helms Deep looked like, probably pretty much exactly like this, Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, England, which according to Letters was Tolkien's inspiration for the description given by Gimli to Legolas of the caves. }}

{{ Well I've been down a Tolkien rabbit hole!
So it all started when I got a text from a friend that just read, “Have you heard about the Tolkien Doggerland theory?”
I had not, so I did some digging about, it's a theory from several years ago that seems to be doing the rounds again and for some reason has got some traction this time, and on the surface it's a lot of obvious nonsense.
Basically it says that Tolkien really was translating lost tales and myths recorded in the Red Book, the truth about which he and Christopher (and presumably now the Tolkien Estate)have been keeping secret all these years and that this Red Book is all that remains of the history of Doggerland.

You can get an idea of the sort of stuff it proposes here-

https://twitter.com/Robkearney1981/status/1294807323542720515

There are so many obvious reasons as to why this is nonsense that I won't insult you with going through them, but some further digging produced some interesting thoughts.

There is a remarkable correlation between Tolkien's lost ages of ME and pre-ice age Europe. And I don't just mean in general shape, I mean in placements of things, like forests, mountains and such.
Now to a degree this is to be expected, it is supposed to be Northern Europe in a lost age.

This is turns out was the premise of what I think is the article that started all this stuff, penned several years ago, it goes into the similarities between the landscape of Ice Europe and ME but its conclusion is not that Tolkien had access to some secret trove of lost history for which there is no other evidence, but something quite different; the idea that Tolkien effectively recreated the mythic landscape of pre-ice age Europe by inference.

When Tolkien was writing LotR's there were no maps of pre-ice age Europe, no idea about the extent of the landmass or that Doggerland was settled land for generations.
But he did have the myths and legends he loved and knew so much, so when Norse myths and Germanic myths concur that, for example, there was a grim dark forest east of the mountains, Tolkien naturally instinctively followed the myths, he put his dark forest of Mirkwood east of the mountains.
Extrapolate that sort of knowledge out as Tolkien, by design of placing his tale in a lost Europe, and by instinct based on the information in the sagas and tales he loved, and Tolkien recreated the general landscape of pre-ice age Europe out of the myths, and bizarrely in this way he has commemorated things that once existed and are genuinely lost to the world with the changing of the ages.
And I find that fascinating, that Tolkien may have in his own way incorporated myths that included glimpses of our real lost history into his recreation of that lost history. }}

Fits in with the Jungian idea that myths are universal.

{{ In this case it's more the specifics or possibilities of them that fascinate me. For example, there really was a Mirkwood, in the sense that roughly where Tolkien places it (southern Poland into Ukraine) there really was a legendary forest at the end of the last ice age remembered in tales with the same sort of ominousness as Tolkien's version.
Maybe more interesting is hobbits- where did they sneak into Tolkien's brain - the first thing he ever wrote about the was that they lived in holes. Why that? And where does he place them? The NW of ME. Why there? What little nudges of lore and learning in the subconscious of his mind was indicating this information?
And is it possible contained in the earliest European myths were memories of a little people who lived in houses underground in the far NW of Doggerland?

'Skara Brae, located in the Scottish Orkney Archipelago is a settlement consists of a cluster of 8 prehistoric dwellings that have had people scratching their heads on account of its dimensions as this excerpt explains: "These eight little dwellings came complete with stone beds, a central hearth, shell midden insulation, and indoor toilets draining outwards from the structures, but most interesting of all, are the dimensions of the doors and beds. The doorways and beds barely reach four feet, and so, the only logical conclusion to make from these dimensions is that the inhabitants were indeed diminutive in stature."
What is even stranger is that these Neolithic homes were located underground.
A manuscript written by the Bishop of Orkney in 1493 suggests that when the King of Norway, Harald Haarfagre, conquered Orkney in the 9th century, it was inhabited by the short-statured Papae...'

You can see here how small the doors are in comparison to modern people-



Originally these would have been roofed over and turfed-





Then you'd have to imagine it with a fire going in the central hearth for throwing magic rings into to test, furs and decorations painted on walls, the stone 'dressing tables' seem to have been for keeping personal items on, so Gandalf even had a mantelpiece to leave his letter on!

And Skara Brae wasn't one underground house, it was several all connected with passageways, more a Smial in fact, maybe the Brandybucks lived there!



And of course we can't dismiss all the Celtic mythology of the Little People hinting towards the same thing.

Are hobbits drawn from snippets of lore that in actuality remember the small stature inhabitants of the north of Doggerland who lived in underground houses? Is the fall of the north kingdom ancient echoes of the mysterious vanishing of the Picts? Or the people of Doggerland itself? It's fascinating to consider the possibilities. And to try to reverse engineer Tolkien as it were and see what glimpses of reality he may have accidentally unearthed.

If you read this Amarie I'd be interested if you have any insights into the word 'papae', as interestingly the area of Orkney where most of these buildings are located is called Papa Westary, known locally as Papay.}}

Quick googling tells me this is mentioned in Historia Norvegiæ.

Papae were Irish and Orkney munks, the Pict were called Peti.

----

The term ‘papar’ was the name given by the Norse to the clerics of the pre-Norse church.

“These islands were at first inhabited by the Picts and Papae. Of these, the one race, the Picts, little exceeded pigmies in stature; they did marvels, in the morning and in the evening, in building walled towns, but at mid-day they entirely lost all their strength, and lurked, through fear, in little underground houses.

" . . . And the Papae have been named from their white robes, which they wore like priests; whence priests are all called papae in the Teutonic tongue. An island is still called, after them, Papey

https://www.orkneyjar.com/history/vikingorkney/takeover.htm

{{ Thanks Amarie, interesting. We don't know exactly who lived in these dwellings, only that they seem to have been 'special' in some fashion.
The landscape was somewhat different back then, they were not right next to the sea but among fields leading to a salt water river estuary from which they got one of their main sources of food, oysters. These days extensive farming down the ages has rendered the land treeless, but even by about 3000bc woodland was sparse, but the land was super fertile (it's been farmed now constantly for 5000 years), this is why the household furniture, like dressers are made of stone instead of wood. But they did have some wood for some things (it's hard to imagine how they built some of the stone circles and burial mounds without the aid of wood frames, rollers, pivots and such), and it had to be brought from elsewhere, but more telling they also had meat. What's unusual here is that the only bones ever found are from cuts of meat, not a scrap of any other part of the animals. This would seem to indicate someone was precutting and packaging the food elsewhere to be brought there for them. This has led some to think they must have been an elite class perhaps priests or druid equivalent. So it's interesting the Norse records them as having this priestly association too.

But in terms of landscape we have a green rolling farmland, it's flat looking now but what's there now are just the tops of those rolling gentle hills, the rest, along with whatever other underground dwellings there were, have been claimed by the sea, it had small woods, little rivers and gentle streams, and a people of claimed diminutive stature living in houses built into the ground. In the NW of Europe. Does seem like a bit more than coincidence!
I can imagine Tolkien's English bias reading of such a beautiful, fertile, green land in the NW with its hole dwellers and immediately assuming it must be in England somewhere! }}}