A mythology for England

Common card · No. 344111

The English author J. R. R. Tolkien has often been supposed to have spoken of wishing to create "a mythology for England". It seems he never used the actual phrase, but various commentators have found his biographer Humphrey Carpenter's phrase appropriate as a description of much of his approach in creating Middle-earth, and the legendarium behind The Silmarillion. His desire to create a national mythology echoed similar attempts in countries across Europe, especially Elias Lönnrot's creation of the Kalevala in Finland, which Tolkien read, mainly in English, and admired. That in turn inspired him to study the Finnish language, which he found beautiful. He imitated some of its features in one of his constructed languages, which became the Elvish language Quenya. He studied Welsh, too, and it led to another Elvish language, Sindarin. He realized that he needed some speakers of those languages, leading him to create tales of elves divided into different groups. Meanwhile, his study of Old...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Public domain