Fanworks Tagged with A Sense of History

Simon reads 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics' to conclude his account of the Anglo-Saxon tower of its allegory.

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The Anglo-Saxon poet looks on the sea from the highest point of the tower and then, without saying all that was seen, begins a descent. The way of the poem traces a spiral staircase. Ultimately, the plan of this staircase follows an Elvish design. The staircase is a picture of the descent of mortal generations in history, drawn from the perspective of those who do not die.

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The Fall of Númenor offers the evidence used to arrive at Tolkien's reading of the exordium to Beowulf.

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The arrival and departure of ships across the Great Sea carries mythic significance for the peoples of Middle-earth. The image of ships crossing out of and back into a mysterious West appears as well in Beowulf and is alluded to in Tolkien's tower analogy in his lecture "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," where the tower allows those who climb it to observe the passage of the ships.

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While he never climbs the stairs of this Elf-tower, in Lothlórien Frodo Baggins descends a flight of steps to look into Galadriel’s Mirror, wherein he first sees the sea. This post examines the view.

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With Gildor Inglorion we finally climb the stairs of Elostirion and look on the view, and what we see appears to reveal a hidden thread in the story of Frodo Baggins. This post reads two annotated translations of two Elvish songs to step through a crossroads in the narrative to arrive at the tower on the margin of the story, wherein is a stone that is a window onto Valinor.

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As inscribed above the western doors of the Mines of Moria, that magical illustration of Elf-Dwarf collaboration, the name of the game is treachery. From Frodo’s far-seeing dream of Orthanc in his first night in the house of Tom Bombadil, the post draws in the person of Frodo Baggins the image of the Stone by which the will of the Necromancer enters a Tower.

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The first of some posts on the Elf-tower on the western margin of The Lord of the Rings attempts to frame the relationship between the narrative and the appendices of The Lord of the Rings and an analysis of Frodo's dream-visions. 

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In 1946, two towers appeared in Tolkien's writings. The tower found in The Fall of Númenor may shed light on the meaning of the tower analogy of "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics."

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This story was penned some years back as a way of marking the Peregrin Boffin of the 1939 drafts of The Lord of the Rings. Boffin was a Hobbit who walked to Moria but vanished from the story in summer 1940, when his character, Trotter, the Ranger met in Bree, became Aragorn, heir of Elendil.

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Jane Chance's interpretation of the tower analogy in Tolkien's lecture-turned-essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" dismisses historical inquiry as a valid reading of the poem.

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The tower analogy in "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" wasn't simply a poignant extended metaphor about the poem but addressed specific scholars about academic debates around Beowulf. The lack of addressing this historical context has led to misreadings of Tolkien's meaning.

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An early draft of Tolkien's essay on "Beowulf" used a rock garden analogy to show how the critics—who were actual people whom Tolkien knew—were responding incorrectly to the poem.

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In 1936, a shadow had fallen over Europe. Tolkien's lecture on Beowulf looked to the past to draw for the present moment a theory of courage in the face of an uncertain future. 

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Beowulf offers an Anglo-Saxon view upon the world of the old homeland, before migration to the British Isles and conversion to Christianity. The poet takes history as a process of forgetting. In the world of the poem, knowledge of heaven above was forgotten a long age before, while what is beyond the western ocean is in the process of being forgotten.

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The Fall of Gondolin has historical antecedents in sacks of cities in the ancient and medieval world, all featuring military destruction and a grievous impact on innocent civilian survivors.

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Tolkien may have taken inspiration for Galadriel's character—an outspoken queen figure—from literary and historical figures like Circe, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Joan of Arc.

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From ancient times to the present, siege warfare has been used to wear down an enemy through time and deprivation. Siege tactics, defense against a siege, and humanitarian concerns from real-world sieges have analogues in sieges in Middle-earth.

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Midway through the Third Age, a plague devastated Gondor before spreading northward. This element of the legendarium connects to the history of real-world plagues, namely the Black Death.

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Oaths were a part of the history of many cultures across time and feature heavily in the legendarium as well.

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The use of hostages as a political strategy in Third Age Gondor has historical parallels in medieval Welsh history, and the bloody outcome of the real history may explain some of the tensions between the Easterlings and Gondorians as Sauron's power grew.

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History of dragons in world myth.

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History of the Atlantis myth that inspired Tolkien's Númenor.

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Basic historical background on the Anglo-Saxon people that Tolkien studied.

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