The Norse Mythology Hiding in The Lord of the Rings

Tolkien is one of my actual heroes, so I want to say this the right way. When The Lord of the Rings leans on Norse mythology, and it leans on it constantly, it isn't theft. He taught Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse literature at Oxford for decades before most of the world knew him as a novelist. He knew exactly what he was borrowing, and from whom, and he wanted careful readers to eventually find it.

A professor who knew exactly what he was doing

By the time The Hobbit came out in 1937, J.R.R. Tolkien had already spent more than a decade as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. He translated Beowulf. He translated Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He lectured on the Poetic Edda and the Völsunga saga to students, year after year, long before he wrote a word of fiction anyone outside his family would read. Middle-earth wasn't a side project built from nothing. It was the material he lived inside for his day job, poured into a story on nights and weekends.

The dwarf names came out of a thousand-year-old poem

Open The Hobbit and you meet Fili, Kili, Thorin, Balin, Dwalin, Oin, Gloin, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Dori, Nori, and Ori. Nearly every one of those names appears, almost unchanged, in a section of the Poetic Edda called the Dvergatal, the dwarf tally, a list of dwarf names tucked inside the Old Norse poem Völuspá. Balin is the odd one out, and scholars still argue about where Tolkien found him. The rest of the company was cast straight out of a thirteenth-century Icelandic manuscript.

The best detail is what else is sitting in that same list. Gandálfr. Roughly, wand-elf, or staff-elf. Tolkien's wizard was named by an anonymous Norse poet centuries before Tolkien ever picked up a pen.

Gandalf's whole look is borrowed from Odin

Odin had a folk disguise long before Gandalf did: a grey traveling cloak, a wide-brimmed hat pulled low, a staff, and the habit of turning up uninvited as an old man who knows more than he should. Norse and Germanic stories are full of this figure, the Wanderer, testing hosts, handing out advice nobody asked for, then vanishing before anyone gets a good look at his other eye. Tolkien knew the type intimately, and in one of his letters he described Gandalf outright as an Odinic wanderer. He wasn't hiding the resemblance. He was naming it.

Narsil is Gram wearing a different name

Aragorn's ancestral blade, Narsil, snaps in the battle against Sauron and gets kept broken for three thousand years, waiting for an heir who can carry it again. It's reforged as Andúril the moment Aragorn is finally ready to claim his birthright. That whole arc, a legendary sword shattered, held onto across generations, and reforged for the rightful son, is the plot of Gram, Sigurd's sword in the Völsunga saga. Sigurd's father fights with that sword until it breaks. The pieces get kept. Years later, a smith reforges them for Sigurd, and he goes on to do the thing the sword was always meant for. I made a reel about this exact parallel, because once you see it, you can't unsee it.

A cursed ring wrecked people long before Sauron's did

The idea of a ring of power that corrupts and destroys whoever holds it didn't start with Tolkien either. In the Völsunga saga, the dwarf Andvari owns a ring, Andvaranaut, that multiplies gold and carries a curse: it ruins every person who possesses it, and the curse runs through an entire family line, killing kings, brothers, and a dragon along the way. Tolkien read those older Norse sources directly, and the way the One Ring destroys its wearers, slowly, over decades, owes more to that patient dwarvish curse than to any one dramatic twist.

Mirkwood is a real place-name, not an invention

Even the setting is on loan. Myrkviðr, literally dark wood, shows up across Old Norse and Germanic literature as the forest you cross to leave the world you know behind. It's a mythological boundary line, not just a mood Tolkien invented. He translated the name and dropped it straight into Middle-earth.

The real borrowing is an attitude, not a prop

Names and props are the easy things to spot. What Tolkien actually pulled from the north runs deeper than any prop list. Norse myth builds toward Ragnarök, a battle the gods already know they're going to lose. They've been told the order they'll die in and by whose hand, and they ride out and fight anyway. Tolkien wrote directly about this in his essay on Beowulf, arguing that the real innovation of Northern mythology was courage with no reward promised on the other side of it. No guaranteed afterlife bribing anyone into bravery. Just the choice, made anyway.

That's the mood running under the last third of The Lord of the Rings. The Fellowship walks into Mordor with no real plan for getting back out. Théoden rides to the Pelennor Fields against odds nobody around him expects to survive. Nobody in that ending is promised a happy one. They go anyway. That's Ragnarök's ethic, wearing different armor.

This is just how myth works

None of this makes The Lord of the Rings less original. It makes it a good example of what myth has always done, which is get retold. Every generation takes the old gods and the old stories and dresses them in new clothes for the audience standing in front of it. Tolkien did it with the Eddas and Beowulf. Rick Riordan did it with the Greek Olympians for a generation of kids who'd never opened Homer. I'm doing my own version of it with Pantheon, putting the Norse, Greco-Roman, and Mesopotamian gods in one world, after a Ragnarök of their own already happened.

In Pantheon: The Elemental Artifact, the old gods survived the end of their world, and Ragnarök already happened before the story opens. Three young gods from rival houses, Norse, Greco-Roman, and Mesopotamian, get pulled together after a revered goddess is murdered, and none of them start out trusting each other. If the sword-and-wanderer patterns above are the kind of thing that get you, this is that same instinct, just built into a new story instead of an old one.

It's a signed first edition, 174 full-color pages, collecting issues #1 through #5, with art by Willi Roberts and letters by Lydon White. It funded at 147% on Kickstarter from 103 backers before a single copy was printed, and it carries a cover quote from the Executive Director of the Joseph Campbell Foundation.