Tolkien as the Father of True Fantasy

What Tolkien’s Nomenclature & Legendarium Teach Us About Language & History

The Linguist Asks, the Author Answers

“What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.”

Shakespeare, perhaps, did not write this line with historical linguistics in mind, but it bears all the questions that linguistics tries to answer nonetheless. In traditional linguistic theory, the word marker of ‘rose’ as signifying a certain kind of flower in the English language is purely accidental; indeed, any other word marker could be used—and is used by every other language in existence—and it would not affect the flower existing, appearing, or smelling as such, (at least, as far as that can be proved with subjective accounts of different language speakers experiencing the same flower).

But the word rose does have an explanation, at least etymologically (from Old English rōse, from Latin rosa, though from there it gets murky as to where it descends, but if you agree it comes from Ancient Greek ῥόδον, you can find yourself at Proto-Iranian *wardah, which has been speculated to come from the Proto-Indo-European root **h₁lewdʰ-*, ‘to grow’), and if that is sufficient answer enough for Shakespeare’s question, we might leave it at that. But there are others who take a slightly different view, such as Tolkien, who believed in the rather controversial theory of “phonetic fitness” of a word and how it sounds, which accompanies meaning, and should not be ignored. Yes, the name for something can be accidental, for it is a combination of sounds, syllables, and other morphological aspects passed down from one generation to the next without any widely held council to determine how the sound will change, but that does not mean the word form is entirely arbitrary. Here I might quote T.A. Shippey’s article “History in Words: Tolkien’s Ruling Passion”, in which he claims that “the first rule of etymology, you might say, is that words which look like each other cannot possibly be related in reality, while words which are so related certainly will not look like each other. But this does tell you something about the unexpected nature of reality, as it does about otherwise unrecorded history.” In other words, can one really call anything in Nature truly arbitrary when they follow laws and patterns, even when those laws and patterns surprise us, or remain in the dark?

Moreover, Tolkien, a writer, philologist, and poet, who studied the great epics of Homer and the Norse Eddas—poems that were more like songs passed down from that clouded, half-mythological land of prehistory, when the sounds of words perhaps mattered much more—understood the power of the spoken, or sung, word, the sounds and syllables whose internal rhythmic qualities are reflected in various meters and melodies. But his interest in words, and thus the naming of things, has far greater consequences when applied to his fictional work, and has shaped the true genre of Fantasy as a legacy of these ancient languages and their prehistory, not as legends and myths, but as the real past, whether modern fantasy authors realize it or not.

Though the genre of fantasy owes much of its standard tropes to Tolkien—elves, orcs, dwarves, and dragons, for example—there seem to be few, if any, fantasy authors since who have understood Fantasy as a mode of storytelling in the way Tolkien conceived of it. The main difference is vital and intrinsic to Tolkien’s writing: Middle-earth is set on our very Earth, not another planet or alternate universe, and occurs in a time before known history. In fact, his history of Middle-earth was intended as a mythology of England, like Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad were for Greece, Virgil’s Aeneid for Italy, Beowulf for Wales, and the Norse Eddas for Scandinavia. In the words of Tolkien in a letter to Houghton Mifflin Co., “’Middle-earth’, by the way, is not a name of a never-never land without relation to the world we live in…It is just a use of Middle English middel-erde (or erthe), altered from Old English Middangeard: the name for the inhabited lands of Men ‘between the seas’…imaginatively this ‘history’ is supposed to take place in a period of the actual Old World of this planet.”

Thus, Middle-earth is not a second-world fantasy, as most modern fantasy novels are, but very much tied to our own, as prehistory, woven with the legends of the Old World, when most things were not written down but sung orally, and those that were written down might feasibly have been lost in the flames of a fire-breathing dragon, or else later copies were destroyed by a much less impressive fire in a monastery or library of some sort, so that oftentimes only mere fragments of summaries made from even more dubious copies of long forgotten songs like Beowulf are all that remain today. We are reminded that “as a medieval scholar and above all as a philologist, Tolkien was keenly aware of just how much we have lost of our cultural heritage,” and deeply lamented “the disastrous 1731 fire at Ashburnham House that destroyed or damaged roughly a quarter of the Cotton Collection to which [Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight] belonged.”¹ He also mourned for the author of the so-called Gawain-poet: “Of this author, nothing is now known. But he was a major poet of his day; and it is a solemn thought that his name is now forgotten, a reminder of the great gaps of ignorance over which we now weave the thin webs of our literary history.”

Reconstructed Artifacts

For Tolkien, the link between the Old World’s lost history and our modern world lay in language. Words held the key to understanding that which had been burnt or buried in the sands of time. If he could trace back a word to its ancestor and understand its meaning, and hear how it might have been sung, he would be closer to the people who spoke it, and thus the legends they told. After all, “What good was a language without a history? It would be like a day without sunshine.”² For Tolkien, reconstructing dead languages was more than just a linguistic feat governed by sound laws; “Not only did he belong to an elder school of philologists, well documented in Shippey’s Road to MiddleEarth, who thought that by understanding and correctly applying Grimm’s Law and similar rules of sound-change they could re-create lost languages from their latter-day descendants (if any);” but “he was able to go beyond that and speculate on means whereby truly dead languages, with no living speakers and which have left behind no physical trace, could be recovered.”³

Tolkien’s Fantasy writing did what linguistics could not; he gave meaning to the names of things through a reconstructed language and therefore a reconstructed history, to “‘…restore to antiquity its meaning and identities’”⁴ and breathe life into the Old World, especially that of England, which could not be known through scientific or literary means alone. Therefore, I would not be surprised if Tolkien would agree with the claim by Mary Haas, a renowned American linguist, that a reconstructed language is “a glorious artifact, one which is far more precious than anything an archeologist can ever hope to unearth.” And Tolkien himself, through the character of Galathir, the Herb-master of the Houses of Healing, and his ignorance of the plant athelas and its healing properties, “shows, in a rather prophetic way, how genuine knowledge can dwindle down to ancient lore, which is remembered but no longer felt to have any practical value. That is what happened, in the end, to etymology and to Tolkien’s own speciality, no longer taught anywhere within the English-speaking world of learning.”⁵

Reconstructed languages as the link between the Old World and the New, as a tool and methodology of recovering a lost history, inevitably reveals itself in Tolkien’s nomenclature. Since he was writing in English—in fact, The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion were supposedly from a manuscript called The Red Book of Westmarch, which Tolkien claimed to have translated himself from the original (invented) language of Westron—the only words which could have remained and often did remain in their “original” language were nouns, especially place names, and names of people, which often employ words that describe the world, thus the name Rohirrim for the people of Rohan is Sindarin for "Horse-lords," and Rohan itself "Land of the Horse-lords."

These names were, of course, part of Tolkien’s larger store of invented languages and root words, which were not only connected to later dead languages such as Old English, Old Norse, and Old High German, but could be etymologically traced according to sound laws from Quenya and Sindarin all the way through his mythic prehistory, through the linguist-approved Indo-European language tree, and on down to Old English, as Rateliff notes about the name for England: “Tolkien added “Ingolondë” as one of the names for Beleriand, a name retained in the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion. In Christopher Tolkien’s words, “it seems plain . . . that England was one of the great isles that remained after the destruction of Beleriand.” He also gives it as his opinion that “England still had a place in the actual mythological geography” in 1937. The implicit linkage of Ingolonde “Land of the Noldor” (or Angoloð, the Sindarin equivalent of “Noldor” or “Gnome”) with England, the land of the Angles, is a very characteristic Tolkienian linguistic doubling. cf. the Old English word orthanc (orthanc enta weorc “the cunning work of giants”) being given an Elvish etymology as well.”

Another example, also centered around the Rohirrim, was the word used by Éowyn “when she faces the Nazgûl.” She “shouts at it: “Begone, foul dwimmerlaik, lord of carrion!” Now what in the world is a dwimmerlaik? The last element offers no problem. It is Old English lac, which means ‘sport’ or ‘play,’ and is used in names like Guthlac and Hygelac. The pronunciation, though, shows the influence of the cognate Old Norse term leikr, with the same meaning, which survives in northern England as the usual word for “to play,” and is found both in the fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and in Haigh’s twentieth-century Huddersfield Glossary.”

This example comes from Shippey’s article already mentioned, where he accounts for this word as such: “The word comes from Old English gedwimer, etc., and if it had survived into modern English it would appear as dwimmer; …“Magic art” is, however, only one aspect of its meaning. It is in fact a word rather like shimmer or glimmer, with a root meaning of ‘being hard to make out, being on the edge of sight.’ People then associate this with ghosts, as in Dwimorberg, with deceit, as in Dwimordene, with shape-shifting, as in dwimmer-crafty, all of which have something to do with blurred or warped vision; and with dreams, in which people see things that are not there. The word implies a belief that the magic arts themselves depend on casting spells of illusion, which was famously the native belief of the North, as in the well-known account of Thor’s visit to Útgartha-Loki’s hall of deceptions in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda. What does Éowyn then mean, finally, by calling the Nazgûl dwimmerlaik? She may mean ‘creature of sorcery,’ which is true. Remembering the force of -laik, she may mean ‘sport of nightmare.’ The word hints also at the Nazgûl’s doubtful reality, seeming non-existence, as if he too is a creature of deceit and altered vision. It is in fact a dwimmery sort of a word, defined only, within The Lord of the Rings, by triangulation from a number of quite different perspectives, Gríma’s, Gandalf ’s, Éomer’s, Éowyn’s, and outside it by a similar process of guessing from a number of themselves doubtful or poorly-recorded uses. Tolkien’s various uses and compound terms do, however, several times remind us that the Riders as a whole inhabit an intellectual world quite different from ours, though at the same time, Tolkien would have insisted, quite literally cognate with it.”

And so in just these few examples we can see the connection between very real reconstructed languages, very real reconstructed myths, and their prehistoric, Middle-earth counterpart, or more aptly, their cognate, which at once involves their words, myths, and legends, but spins them into a new web of story, filled with all the subtleties and nuances that are so often found in these ancient, dead words, whose shifting meanings can never be fully defined with one word of any modern language. It can hardly surprise us, then, as both a linguist and storyteller, that so intertwined were Tolkien’s invented languages with the Old World, so immersed academically, intellectually, and creatively in the very real attempt of creating a mythology of England, that Tolkien wrote in a letter to Stanley Unwin that “though shelved…the Silmarillion and all that has refused to be supressed. It has bubbled up, infiltrated, and probably spoiled everything (that even remotely approached “Faery”) which I have tried to write since. It was kept out of Farmer Giles with an effort, but stopped the continuation. Its shadow was deep on the later parts of The Hobbit…”

Mourning the Old World

The shadow of his legendarium on all his work, the fact that he could not write anything without those mythologies and legends creeping into the story, points more than anything else to the true heart of Fantasy, at least as Tolkien believed it, and the divine functions of such a misunderstood genre. He wished to bring the Old World to life because he “mourn[ed] the passing of the old world,” and therefore “strikes the elegiac note,” which Rateliff claims is essential to Tolkien’s unique genre of Fantasy and which is missing in other fantasy novels.

But Tolkien did not just mourn the people, the cultures, the history of the Old World, but the very world itself, its mountains, forests, valleys, and rivers, the shape of the seas, the beauty of nature and natural creation before Man and his Machine cut down forests and bulldozed through mountains and reshaped rivers, and changed lush valleys into cement jungles. In the 1920 epilogue of The Book of Lost Tales, Tolkien wrote: “And now is the end of the fair times come very near . . . all the beauty that yet was on earth—fragments of the unimagined loveliness of Valinor whence came the folk of the Elves long long ago—now goeth it all up in smoke. . . . So fade the Elves. . . . Memories faded dim, a wraith of vanishing loveliness in the trees . . . . Tavrobel shall not know its name, and all the land be changed, and even these written words of mine belike will all be lost. . . .”

As Rateliff rightly points out, the function of Tolkien’s Fantasy was the concept he posits in his essay “On Fairy Stories,” namely “Recovery: the restoration of a sense of wonder in everyday things—or, in this case, an appreciation of the wondrous history that might underlie what seem today very ordinary places.” Just like reconstructed languages breathe life into the cultures and history of the Old World, the landscape itself is recovered too, so that “Middle-earth is not a Neverland or a Narnia or even a Dunsanian Dreamland but the good green earth beneath our feet, when it was enchanted.”⁶ Not only is the landscape of the Old World recovered through this enchantment, but the spell must be cast through their names, or words. For Tolkien, the relationship between word and thing is stronger than mere accident, for the combination works its magic in the mind, specifically in memory, so that as Tolkien claims in the appendix of his masterful essay, “If a story says “he climbed a hill and saw a river in the valley below” . . . every hearer of the words will have his own picture [of the scene], and it will be made up of all the hills and rivers and dales he has ever seen, but specially out of The Hill, The River, The Valley which were for him the first embodiment of the word.”⁷

This belief finds a similar expression in Ursula Le Guin’s The Wizard of Earthsea, where each thing in the world has a True Name, which if spoken, gives the speaker power over it, though much of this knowledge of the Old Speech had been lost, and most things have since been named with a language that does not have this power. Thus the young mage and protagonist, Ged, learns that “magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing…Many a mage of great power…has spent his whole life to find out the name of one single thing—one single lost or hidden name. And still the lists are not finished. Nor will they be, till the world’s end…But magic, true magic, is worked only by those beings who speak the Hardic tongue of Earthsea, or the Old Speech from which it grew.” Yet there is a danger to harnessing this power, as Ged discovers early on, and even more danger in trying to change it, so that “a wizard’s power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world.”⁸

We might find a curious echo of this belief in the power of True Names in real etymologies for words, such as in the descendants of the Indo-European word for ‘bear.’ In Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, the word for bear shares a presumed common ancestor *arktos, but in Old Church Slavic and English, we find medvedi and bear respectively, which cannot be traced back to *arktos. To solve this riddle, linguists realized that the latter “two branches of Indo-European are spoken in northern regions by people who were, at some point, hunters. So it appears likely that the name for the bear was tabued for fear of offending the beast or so that he might not hear his name and know he was being hunted. In its place another name was substituted which presumably the bear would not recognize. Germanic substitutes a word which originally meant simply “the brown one” (Common Germanic *ber- ‘brown’; also Dutch beer, German Bär). In Slavic, a more descriptive title is provided, and a bear is spoken of as the “honey-eater” from the roots of medv- (←Indo-European *madhu) ‘honey’ and ed- (←Indo-European *ed-) ‘to eat’.”⁹

Given this ancient relationship between language and environment, it should come as no surprise that Tolkien was as preoccupied with his lexicon of invented languages as he was with the precise mapping of his invented landscapes. In fact, he had such a love of trees and plants and their names that it encumbered his pace on walks, to the frustration of C.S. Lewis and his brother, Warren, the latter who wrote in his diary that Tolkien’s “one fault was that he wouldn't trot at our pace in harness; he will keep going all day on a walk, but to him, with his botanical and entomological interests, a walk, no matter what its length, is what we would call an extended stroll, while he calls us 'ruthless walkers.'” Many readers of Tolkien’s work have complained about the long, seemingly useless descriptions of scenery, claiming that he spent too much time describing the kinds of trees and plants found on the journeys across Middle-earth, or used too many words on greenery and mountains and rivers that were merely passed by.

But to Tolkien, the Earth and the names of things went hand in hand, for he believed that language, like any living, breathing being, changed over time as did the very face of the Earth, and held its memory. So when he reconstructed the languages of this Old World, he also recovered the Old World and all that was in it, from every nut and acorn, and so Middle-earth is as much remembered as it is invented, not arbitrarily, neither so accidentally either, but from a deeper impulse, tied to the very makings of the world, so that a rose and its sweet smell are bound together as Man is bound to the Earth.

Evoking Earth’s Memory

The power of language as memory, however, has greater consequences than might meet the eye, which Tolkien alludes to in The Notion Club Papers, and which Rateliff summarizes as a belief “that a change could come, so drastic that it changed not only the present and of course the future from that point on but even the past as well, so that the present now derived from a different past and the original past had no longer ever happened, being transformed from history—the things that actually happened—into myth; the things we remember that exist now only in legend and memory. Or, to put it a different way, after Númenor’s destruction the only way to reach the lost isle would be through memory: the old shape of the world existed henceforth only as a memory of earth.”¹⁰

But as Rateliff warns, and rightly so, “evoking the Earth’s memory is a risky business.”¹¹ Not only is the past a powerful tool, wielded carelessly and often cruelly in the present (as can be seen with the racist Aryan theory and its immoral and false attempt to map modern beliefs on an already conjectured history), but the past also has a potency of its own, working its power on the present without our knowledge, and shaping the world today, even if it is only through a collective memory, or we might say because it is through a collective memory it is all the more powerful. For Tolkien, “Nothing worth preserving is ever really lost. Just as a lost past may linger on in the Memory of the World, so too lost art still exists where it really counts, in the Mind of God.”¹² Perhaps it is no coincidence that the Silmarillion reads much like the beginning of the Bible, and yet the creation of the world—which was already held in the Mind of a greater collective—was given expression only through song, in other words, through art and sub-creation (very importantly of this world), which we can call true Fantasy.

On some level, it seems, Tolkien truly did believe in his story of the past, or he believed that this Memory of the World worked in mysterious ways, so that legend and myth are much closer to reality than they might seem, and that reality itself might be closer to Fantasy as sub-creation than we know. For even if the true prehistoric past is different from the tales Tolkien tells about it, yet still there is something in the essence of his stories that transcends time, ruin, and even death, keeping the Memory of the World—even if it is not what we would consider memory—alive through his words as a kind of universal Truth.

Indeed, Tolkien’s act of sub-creation, of true Fantasy, evokes the Earth’s memory as “a silent homage to those who have…gone before and vanished, leaving little or no trace.” And still here the connection between language and environment remains bound up, as can be seen from Arwen’s “green grave resting on Cerin Amroth until the end of time,” which writer Mathew Lyons claims is “part of the landscape long after she herself has been forgotten. In pre-literate societies . . . death and memory went hand in hand, since life could have no record but a burial site or a fistful of stories passed down from father to daughter, mother to son. . . . [S]uch grave-making is . . . a claim on eternity against the depredations of time, a plea for remembrance. . . . [T]he five hundred years and 16 generations of men that the mounds of Rohan mark . . . are as nothing to the elves. Yet elves and men such as these have been alike forgotten, have fallen out of memory: it is the central conceit of Middle Earth [sic]. . . . [T]he poignancy derives from . . . the simple absence of identity, as if such barrows, like the various national monuments to unknown warriors, stood for the sorrows of all the vanished peoples of the Earth.”¹³

Death and Memory are bound together, for only through memory are the dead remembered, so it is crucial that Tolkien’s story evokes Memory in order to recover the dead languages and prehistory of the world. In certain tribes, this connection between Death and Memory is almost reversed, but it elucidates the connection even more to the point. The language of the Abipones of Argentina, for example, had a custom where personal names were given from the names of animals and natural objects. But when the person died, the word that they were so named was abolished from the language entirely and never revived. To replace the word for the animal or object, the old women of the tribe would come together and create a new word, which would “spread like wildfire through every camp and settlement of the tribe.”¹⁴ It might appear as forgetfulness, but the taboo placed on the word previously used as a name for the dead acted much like the change of the name for bear in Indo-European, for it comes from a place of reverence and respect, paying homage to the dead in a silent remembrance.

Tolkien, then, might be said to have recalled the memory of the “real” prehistory through his sub-creation, in which his newly minted words, existing even before the earliest languages reconstructed by linguists, act as a replacement of the “real” languages, honoring them through different names. So the green grave of Cerin Amroth may still exist under another name, and perhaps had existed for a long time by yet another name, but in the Mind of God, the collective Memory of the World, all of these names merely describe the embodiment, the sub-creation of such a Hill, which exists in both myth and reality at the same time because it is itself a part of that greater Fantasy, the greater song of creation.

The Gift of Men

Tolkien’s legendarium and nomenclature act as a bridge between the Old World and the New, as language, culture, and history do all the time, so that “we read Tolkien to experience something new that nevertheless has the quality of something ancient and immemorial.”¹⁵ Yet there is something about his mourning of the past, this Old World prehistory, which strikes at the fundamental human quality of Fantasy—the creator’s creation who wishes to create—but whose Fate is ultimately mortality and Death. Even though Tolkien evokes the Earth’s memory to remember and honor the past, it is vital to his story that the Elves sail from the shores of Middle-earth, that even Valinor is lost forever, and dwarves, dragons, wizards, orcs, and hobbits hide or disappear, and the world of Men forgets its past, which turns to legend, then to myth, and then silence.

In the words of Rateliff, “however heartbreaking to our human sensibilities, we must accept loss and decay as essential parts of the world—in short, “the Gift of Men.” To do otherwise is to fall into the error of the Elves, whom Tolkien in this context called “embalmers,” so in love with the past that they want to prevent the future from ever arriving—at least the future conceived of as different from the present. Their ideal would be for the past to continue into present time and beyond, continually enriched but never passing away. Tolkien himself certainly understood the appeal of this—a seductive ideal of more time, if not infinite time, to go on making things and doing things that Tolkien called “an expression of certain not wholly legitimate desires the human race has about itself”—which makes his ultimate regretful rejection of it all the more moving.”

We might see the consequences of “embalming” drawn even more subtly in the character of Gollum and his love of “roots” (compared to the love of etymological roots of words), as T.A. Shippey so ingeniously writes about: “Gollum too, you will remember, back when he was still Sméagol, lived in a family “ruled by a grandmother of the folk, stern and wise in old lore, such as they had.” And he followed in her footsteps in a way, being “inquisitive and curious-minded . . . He was interested in roots and beginnings.” But this potentially admirable interest leads to him no longer looking upward, and in the end he goes underground, thinking: “The roots of those mountains must be roots indeed; there must be great secrets there which have not been discovered since the beginning.” But Gollum is mistaken. As Gandalf says, “there was nothing more to find out, nothing worth doing.” It is a hard thing to say of one’s own subject, but this reminds me strongly of the sense which Tolkien must often have felt of an intellectual revolution being forgotten, slipping away, turning into a low-grade series of tests you had to bully the students through, and which most of the students—alienated by poor teaching and poor teachers—could not give up fast enough. Throughout his professional life Tolkien “fought the long defeat,” in Galadriel’s phrase, sensed the danger of becoming a Gollum, too interested in roots, as we say, to stop and smell the roses.”

So Tolkien, despite his love of words, despite his love of etymologies and tracing them back to their ancient roots, must at some point give up the effort, leave the roots and the past be, in order to fully appreciate the rose and its sweet smell, lest he miss its short life and find it dead and buried, called by yet another name. Therefore even language and the environment, the very threads which weave together the tapestry of this world, must die and pass away, to be replaced by other words and roses. Even the Elves, and their near-immortal lifespans, all their beautiful creations, must fade and be forgotten. But it is crucial that Men, whose mortality and “acceptance of the inevitability of death” allow them to “pass beyond the world’s limitations,” are the ones to inherit the legacy of Middle-earth, while “the Elves cling to the past and so are swept away with it.” It seems then that “time and death are God’s method of providing us with space to create,” but nonetheless we ourselves are creation, and therefore must return to it, beyond the limits of the Earth.¹⁶

In this we might see “one way forward out of the Gollum-like obsession with roots and beginnings—which was, to see how those roots had flowered, to observe closely the connection between ancient words and entirely contemporary ones... Perhaps the real achievement would be, not only to work from root to flower, but also to work back again, from flower to root, and further, from dead leaf to living plant. And this would have particular force if one applied it not just to words and to philology, but to beliefs and to mythology.”¹⁷ Through this parallel of languages dying and being reborn, we might also see Nature dying and being reborn, a never-ending cycle of life and death which is at the heart of Creation, and can only find immortality in the collective Mind beyond the confines of this Earthly cycle, where it will be evergreen in Memory, neither living nor dying, but immortalized in song, the first and final act of Fantasy.

Tolkien, thus, rejects the role of “embalmer,” accepting that his creation will one day be buried, indeed has already been buried, under the sands of time and forgotten, just like Arwen’s green grave, and the New World will be built upon its ruins, until this world falls and another rises to take its place. Fantasy, true Fantasy at least, has this as its highest aim, not as an escape from the present or clinging to a bygone past, but as a silent homage to the Earth’s memory, which therefore shall never fade even after the unmaking of the World.

Bibliography

Arlotto, Anthony. Introduction to Historical Linguistics. Houghton Mifflin, 1972.

Rateliff, John D. “And All the Days of Her Life Are Forgotten: The Lord of the Rings as Mythic Prehistory.” The Lord of the Rings 1954-2004, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, Marquette University, 2006.

Rateliff, John D. and J.R.R. Tolkien. The History of the Hobbit. HarperCollins*,* 2011.

Shippey, T.A. “History in Words: Tolkien’s Ruling Passion.” The Lord of the Rings 1954-2004, edited by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull, Marquette University, 2006.

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Wizard of Earthsea. Parnassus Press, 1968.

1. Rateliff 2006

2. Shippey 2006

3. Rateliff 2006

4. Ibid.

5. Shippey 2006

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Le Guin 1968

9. Arlotto 1972

10. Rateliff 2006

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. As quoted in Rateliff 2006

14. Arlotto 1972

15. Rateliff 2006

16. Rateliff 2006

17. Shippey 2006