Lord of the Rings Research Papers (original) (raw)

Tolkien is not always given due credit for his deep familiarity with Arthurian romances. Yet, in the 1920s, he co-edited and translated the Middle English romantic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Tolkien and Gordon 1925). Around 1930, he tried his own hand at romantic poetry in the incomplete and only recently-published The Fall of Arthur (2013). And of course he taught the genre for many years at Oxford. More than this, however, Tolkien’s epic romance The Lord of the Rings is replete with Arthurian allusions, including (as Veryln Flieger has noted), ‘the withdrawal of a sword, a tutelary wizard, the emergence of a hidden king, [and] a ship departure to a myth-enshrined destination’. Such allusions make it clear that—even as he sought to supplant what he saw as the imperfectly- naturalized myth of Arthur with his own evolving ‘body of more or less connected legend’ dedicated ‘to England’— Tolkien’s great novel also carried on a deft dialogue between modern and premodern views of friendship, love, and romance. Thus, in the sad tale of the Ents and Entwives, Tolkien explored the tragedy of lost love: the ‘old trouble’ of ‘hearts [that] did not go on growing in the same way’. The rich medieval theme of frustrated love comes into his epic in the form of the ‘love triangle’ between Aragorn, Arwen, and Éowyn. Love in the form of mutual respect and sympathy are the focus of several key turning points in the narrative, as we see in the love between Frodo and Sam, Gimli and Galadriel, and Aragorn and Éomer. And the theme of love’s perversion, of ironic, cynical, and sarcastic references to love and to the birth of hate, emerge in several scenes where ‘love’ appears in the mouths of the orcs, and of Gollum. Throughout, Tolkien’s keen philological ear is much in evidence, not only in his careful usage of ‘love’ and its many derivations and inflections—e.g., loved, beloved, lovely, loveliness, lover, etc.— but also in his deliberate development of several nuanced Elvish roots for ‘love’, such as ban-, mel-, and -(n)dil.