The White Council

Re: Middle-earth is not medieval?

Tolkien and Inklings Discussion

: : : : Please explain, Michael.

: : That takes a lot of explaining. Maybe the easiest explanation begins with the fact that Middle-earth is an amalgamation of ideas from many different cultures and times. But there are also many generic aspects to Middle-earth which I feel people look at an identify with only Europe's medieval period, even though Tolkien himself denied direct medieval assocations.

: : There is a popular assumption that Tolkien was drawing on medieval sources for Middle-earth. He drew on many sources and he acknowledged some of them. But use of ideas (such as the cup-theft in THE HOBBIT) from medieval poems does not mean Tolkien was describing a world like medieval Europe. He was describing a world very different from Anglo-Saxon England, France of the Merovechs, Carolingians, and Capetians, the Holy Roman Empire, Byzantium, and so forth.

: : And because Tolkien used Anglo-Saxon to represent true Rohirric many people assume the Rohirrim must have been like the Anglo-Saxons. Not only did he deny this, the two peoples are demonstrably different in many significant ways in terms of culture, politics, religion, and history.

: : In essence, when I say Middle-earth is not medieval, I am debunking popular misconceptions about Middle-earth, rather than trying to deny the obvious connection between Tolkien's love for ancient Germanic poetry and sme of his own literary devices.

: : There are exremely few elements in Middle-earth which can be attributed to the Middle Ages of Europe. Far fewer than most people suppose. All the weapons, armor, and cultural ideas found in THE LORD OF THE RINGS are pre- or post-Medievalisms.

: : I often find it ironic that people will argue strenuously that Middle-earth must have been medieval because Tolkien was a medievalist. He viewed himself as a classicist, and had a great fondness for the classics. His professional life focused on Anglo-Saxon, but his intellectual life and interests encompassed far more than that and people don't seem to give enough credit to these other strong influences in Tolkien.

: : Virtually every time someone has said, "But look! THIS aspect of Middle-earth is medieval!" I have shown that is not so. That a person sees something in Tolkien and thinks of the Middle Ages does not mean Tolkien intended to convey that idea. Look at how many people believe he was a racist simply because he wrote his books 50 years ago, "way back when everyone was a racist". People weren't all racists back then, and racism seems just as prevalent today as it ever was. But people develop perceptions and ideas which they cling to, and they view all the past through those perceptions and ideas.

: In my opinion, the idea that Middle Earth is medieval was spawned, and is reinforced by the numerous calendars that have depicted Middle Earth settings and characters as medieval. : Northern European Medieval, to be exact. Tolkien's drawings and illustrations have an other-worldly appearence, not medieval. His drawing of a Numenorean helmet is definitly not medieval. If anything, it has a somewhat Polynesian appearence.

The strongest argument for Middle-earth not being medieval is that it is a sub-creation from Tolkien's own mind which draws from numerous sources and cannot be simple defined as medieval or anything else corresponding to human history.