The Influence of Ossian on J.R.R.Tolkien

Ossian was the invention of a Scottish poet, and was claimed to be an ancient bard who had composed a cycle of epics based on events in Scotland and Scandanavia in the dark ages. In fact it was possible to date the events on which the cycle was supposed to be based to around 200 AD, thanks to the helpful inclusion of the name of a Roman emperor.

Ossian

Ossian was the name given to the fictional bard created by James Macpherson. He published a cycle of supposed epic Gallic poems in 1760. The date is significant.

When you think about it - we all have a tribal past which still exerts some influence on us. Personally I am from the county of Sussex in southern England. Sussex is a contraction of South Saxons. I could just about claim therefore that I was descended in some way from the Saxon warriors who invaded Britain in the fifth century sweeping away the Roman Empire. It is a nice thought, but 15 centuries separate me from this heritage so it isn't really that great a legacy. Other people in the world are closer to their tribal origins but there aren't many people in Western Europe or America who really have strong links to whatever tribe they come from, except native Americans of course.

But there is one part of the British Isles where the tribal past is a lot closer. In the Highlands of Scotland society was effectively tribal well into the era for which we have good records. The Scottish lowlands developed socially and economically pretty much in line with England. In the seventeenth century the lowland Scots were protestant, spoke English and traded via the medium of money. If you were to turn up in Edinburgh in 1650, although you would miss motor cars and broadband, you wouldn't feel that out of place. You could make yourself understood and you would have a pretty good idea of what was going on and how to fit in. With some cash in your pocket you would get by just fine.

If you were to find yourself in the Highlands at the same period you would be in a world that was totally alien. The language would be gallic and you would walk miles before you found an English speaker. You would also find that society was organised into tribes, or as the locals would call them, clans. These were the basis of all social transactions and as an outsider to the clan system your reception would be completely arbitary. You might be welcomed as an honoured guest. But you would be more likely to be robbed. Robbery would be regarded not as a crime but as a respectable way to earn a living. The clan chief would have powers over and above that of any elected official you have ever come across.

The breakdown of the clan system in the Highlands is well documented. The clans got caught up in in the internal politics of England. The Stuart dynasty had been deposed from the throne of England as a result of political, religious and economic upheavals. Their support was very thin in England itself, but it was just conceivable that with support in catholic Ireland and the catholic Highlands, and a bit of help from the then global superpower France the Stuart dynasty could just about hope to make a comeback. Matters came to a head in 1745. Bonnie Prince Charlie, the heir to the Stuart inheritance, raised his standard in the Highlands and the clans flocked to support him. He was nowhere near as welcome in the lowlands, where despite their Scottish roots the Stuarts were even less popular than in England.

At first the clansmen, who individually were superb fighters, seemed to have it their way. They beat all the forces sent against them and got as far south as Derby, only 130 miles from London. But after this giddy initial success the advantages of an organised society with greater resources began to tell. The British army started to advance and before long the clansmen had been pushed back to their home country. Their bravery was no match for the well supplied and equipped regular army equipped with canons and plenty of bullets. The final showdown came at Culloden. It was an heroic fight. The British general, the Duke of Cumberland, at one point had to take off his wig and shake out the bullets. But at the end of the day the power of the clans was broken forever. The British moved in and imposed order on the wild territory that was so different to the rest of the kingdom. Gallic was surpressed. The tartan was outlawed. The rule of law arrived for the first time. Many of the people went. They have never come back. In some parts of the highlands population density is lower now than it would have been in 1745. The last tribes had gone from the British Isles.

But then a strange thing happened. Once the clansmen were gone and no longer a threat to the settled society of the Scottish lowlands a strange transformation took place. They became romanticised and the subject of a fascination they never exerted in their heyday. One of the first examples of this was Macpherson's amazing claim to have translated a cycle of epic poems from the Gallic. Twenty years before the clans were ignored at best, and most likely treated as potential cut-throats. By 1860 there was a market for their poetry. It still seems to me a great shame that they are a scam. I would love to have some genuine folk tales from Scotland. It seems that Macpherson was trying to give Scotland a set of myths to replace the ones that he thought had been lost. This really does sound like Tolkien, who explicitly said that he had set out to create a "mythology for England". Like Tolkien's, Macpherson was incredibly popular all around the World with such notable fans as Goethe and Napoleon. Given the parallels it is well worth having a closer look at Ossian. Was this one of Tolkien's sources for his ideas?

Constantinople and Minas Tirith

There have been surprisingly few really epic sieges in history. Rome was sacked by the Goths in 410 and the Vandals in 455 but neither siege was long or particularly glorious to either attackers or defenders. Carthage was besieged by the Romans and was heroically defended, but the Carthaginians were traders more than soldiers. The destruction of Nineveh was a major event but hasn't really resonated through history so I don't think that J.R.R.Tolkien had it in mind when he came to draft his account of the siege of Minas Tirith. I think that there is one, and only one, siege that really compares with that of Minas Tirith. In 1453, after over a thousand years as the major city of Christianity Constantinople was besieged by the Ottoman Turks. Constantinople had taken over from Rome as the centre of the Empire and had changed so much that it is now referred to as the Byzantine Empire. It was by the standards of the time a huge city and maintained history and culture from a previous age that had been lost and forgotten in the world outside. Its huge walls and defensive ditches had never before been taken. Only once in its history had it been attacked successfully. That had been by the 5th Crusade where there had been a large element of deception involved in the attack. The Byzantine Eastern Roman Empire had been under attack by the Turks for centuries and had almost always come off worst. The conflict was so ingrained that it had become almost ritualistic. In fact often, cities would not be contested militarily. The Byzantines The Turks attacked the walls by land and maintained a fleet outside. The defenders were hopelessly outnumbered and cut off from all help. The Turks had a large cannon fired - one of the first times that artillery was used against a city. The huge chain across the harbour entrance prevented the Turkish fleet from attacking directly. This was a key defence and when some Christian ships managed to break the blockade and reach the city, it became clear that the Turks could still be resisted. To counter this they transported ships overland on greased logs to get round the boom and block the port itself. Once they had achieved this all hope for relief vanished. The canon continued to pound the walls during the day, but the defenders repaired the breeches during the night. Turkish attempts to build tunnels to undermine the walls were beaten by counter tunnels. (The chief of sappers on the Byzantine side was a Scot called John Grant.) The walls, first built by the Emperor Theodosius, continued to stand between the Turks and their prize. But they had overwhelming superiority in numbers and could hope to simply outfight the defenders. On May 22 the city experienced an eclipse of the moon. This was an evil omen for the superstitious Byzantines. When I first read about that I was instantly put in mind of Minas Tirith in its unnatural gloom during the siege by Sauron. And a few days later there was another omen. The whole city was covered with a dense fog. This is almost unknown in that part of the world. As the fog cleared people noticed that the church of Hagia Sofia was wreathed in a strange light. Hagia Sofia had been founded some 900 years before by the Emperor Justinian and was the religious and symbolic heart of the city. Some said it was the Holy Sprit leaving the city. It recalls the lights seen in the tower of Denethor as Minas Tirith was under attack. But unlike Minas Tirith, Constantinople was not to be saved by a rescue from the North. Some defenders believed that they saw the campfires of a Christian army come to rescue them in the distance, but it was in vain. By the end of May it was obvious that the Turks were preparing for an all out assault. A last service was held in the Hagia Sofia - the last Christian service to take place there attended by the last emperor, Constantine XI. A last call to surrender was rejected. Hopeless as it might be, Constantine could not give up the last stronghold of the Christian Empire without a fight. At midnight the assault began. The defenders were overwhelmed . Constantine himself was killed defending his city. His courage at this last hour and willingness to fight to the end have justly made him a hero to the Greeks ever since. The fall of Constntinople sent a shock through Western Europe. It was the largest and the oldest Christian city. It was the last link with the empire of the Romans. The Moslems now controlled all but one of the great patriarchies of the early church. A messenger walked into the council at Venice without following and without waiting to be announced or acknowledged interrupted whatever business was being conducted and said simply " I bring the worst news that there could be, the worst news that there will ever be. Constantinople has fallen."

Gondor and Ancient Rome

The parallel between Gondor and Rome is hardly worth bringing up - it is just so obvious. But there is one feature of them that is particularly striking and on which a key plot feature of the Lord of the Rings hinges. Gondor was the southern branch of the much larger realm of the exiled Numenoreans. This split of an empire into two related ones which nonetheless maintain a connection is one that sounds like a piece of pure fiction. Emperors don't often split their empires up, not willingly at any rate. Any half decent ruler wants to ruler a bigger area not a smaller one. So you will have to look hard into history to find a precedent. But there is one. And it is in that most Gondor-like of empires, Rome. The emperor Theodosius was the last to rule both halves of the empire. He had many qualities that Tolkien would have approved of. He sorted out religious dissent firmly and established the Church with a set of standards based on the Nicene creed. He made Christianity the official religion of the empire. I can imagine that the catholic JRR would have been quite happy under Theodosius. On his death he split it between his two sons Arcadius and Honorius. From then on the split become permanent until the final extinction of the Western Empire at the hands of the Goths. The Eastern Roman Empire continued for another thousand years in Constantinople. Greek became the language of the empire and the culture drifted away from its latin roots. But right up until the end the emporers continued to think of themselves as and call themselves Romans. I imagine that a descendant of Julius Ceaser who turned up in the fifteenth century when the empire was basically just the city of Constinople, might well have been welcomed as a saviour in the same way as Aragorn at Minas Tirith.

The Boy stood on the Burning Deck

The Boy stood on the Burning Deck is a Victorian poem by Elizabeth Bishop. To modern ears it is cheesy and melodramatic but was incredibly popular for at least 100 years after it was written in 1950. It commemorates the destruction of the french flagship L'Orient in the battle of the Nile. L'Orient was a huge ship by the standards of the day and was much bigger and better armed than anything in Nelson's fleet. It could only be tackled by two warships from either side with any chance of success. The French sailors were skillful and experienced and there is no reason to doubt that they were the equal of the English so this duel was both deadly and key to the outcome of the battle. In the event, the English succeeded in setting alight to it. Hence the burning deck from which all had to flee. But despite the flames the French gunners heroically stayed at their posts to continue firing. Amongst the officers in charge below decks at this moment was a Captain Casabianca, whose 9 year old son was also part of the crew. But despite the bravery of the crew, a magazine deep in the ship was ignited causing a huge explosion. The noise was so loud it was heard in Alexandria 25 miles away. The shock was so great the battle paused for 30 minutes while the very few survivors were rescued. The hardened sailors of the two fleets were hardly mild mannered men so this shows just how huge a calamity it was. The story grew up that the English sailors had seen a small boy on the burning deck of the doomed vessel shortly before it blew up. From these facts the story of a boy refusing to abandon his post without the permission of his father grew up. From this story the poem was written. Tolkien would certainly have known the poem well when he was growing up. The interesting thing is just how Tolkienesque the theme of this poem is. The boy prefers death in the flames to disobeying his father. Think of Beregond and his cruel dilemma when Denethor wanted to be burnt along with Faramir. There is the conflict between obeying orders and common sense. And there is the fire playing a prominent part. It doesn't seem too far fetched to think that Tolkien had this poem somewhere in the back of his mind when he was writing this bit of the Lord of the Rings?

The Scouring of the Shire

In many ways 1688 was the most remarkable years of English history. In 1684 James II had unexpectedly become king following the death of his brother Charles II. Charles was known as the merry monarch and was a sort of royal dandy. It wasn't known during his reign that he had all along been a closet Catholic and his deathbed conversion to Rome had been a huge shock to his subjects, with whom he had generally been popular. His brother was an out Catholic. This was both unpopular and constitutionally tricky. The King of England is also the head of the Church of England. Luckily James was already in his fifties and had no heir. The next in line to the throne was a Protestant. The problem was therefore going to sort itself out in time so it seemed bearable. But Jame's promotion of Catholics and persecution of the official Church, which was loved by the majority of the population of England, must have seemed an attack on the very fabric of society. Everything changed in 1688 when James' Catholic wife gave birth to a son. Now there was the prospect of not just a few more years of agony, but the real possibility of another Catholic monarch reigning for a long time. This was not to be borne. But it left the loyal subjects with the ultimate divided loyalty. Did they support their Church or their King? England at this time did not have a standing army so James was vulnerable to a popular uprising. Basically his position depended to a large extent on consent from his subjects - and he was well award of this. His solution to this was to bring across Catholic Irishmen to form a loyal army. He calculated that he could rely on troops that shared his religion and had a natural dislike of the English as well. This incendary situation could easily have led to bloodshed. Only forty years before the country had suffered years of civil war, and no doubt there were enough old soldiers still alive to have provided the know-how for a new conflict. But in the event, although there was drama aplenty there was almost no fighting. Some leading English citizens sent a suggestion to William of Orange, the Stadtholder of the Netherlands, that he should land with an army whereupon the population would welcome him and offer him the throne. At this time William was fighting a war of survival against France. He had to make the decision - should he risk taking his army to England? If he did so and got entangled in a civil war he could leave his country unprotected from his enemy. But the prize of winning over England to his side was great. He took the risk and set sail for England, knowing that he risked losing everything including his own country's independence. The English Channel is very narrow near Dover and it was impossible to pass it unobserved by day but as the chance of time and tide had it the flotilla happened to go by during the long winter hours of darkness. William chose to light the lamps on all his ships to clearly signal to onlookers on shore that he was on his way. He landed in Dorset on the 5th of November. As it happened this was the day devoted by the Church of England to celebrate the unsuccessful attempt by Catholics to blow up the Houses of Parliament. As the news of the landing spread huge bonfires were lit and fireworks let off. This was the first time that the event had been celebrated in this way and the tradition of bonfires and fireworks on the fifth of November which continues to this day in England dates back to 1688. Landing unopposed by the powerful English fleet was lucky, but William was now in the position of invading a large kingdom which on paper had considerable resources available to defend itself. William was in a position to give battle if need be, but if he did he would be possibly harming his legitimacy as a saviour, and also weakening the kingdom he was hoping to take over. What he did therefore was to move very slowly and to avoid battle while waiting for the population to come over to his side. This happened more slowly than he wanted but he did begin to pull over both the ordinary people of the west of England and increasing numbers of the upper classes and the establishment. For James it must have been agonising watching his authority slip away as more and more people went over to William. The last straw seems to have been when his top general, John Churchill, defected. Churchill, an ancestor of Winston, was both an important military expert and also a personal fried of the king. Now that his army had started to disintegrate James fled, stopping to throw the Great Seal in the Thames. Having got right to the point of a potentially murderous civil war, England succeeded in changing its government with hardly any bloodshed. The potential harm that could have come from a conflict is easy to imagine by looking at Ireland where the same process was far from peaceful and where the bitterness arising from it was still causing problems even a couple of years ago. It is not hard to see why the men at the time called it the Glorious Revolution. It has been forgotten to some extent today when compared to the Civil War and the two World Wars which have more action to them. but when Tolkien was growing up it a more prominent bit of history. As someone who was interested in folklore he can hardly have been unaware of the rhymes that date from the period like The Grand Old Duke of York. For this reason I think that it was this period in English history he was thinking of when he wrote the Scouring of the Shire. The re-establisment of the legitimate church and the banishing of a tyrant all sound like very Lord of the Rings themes. And the atmosphere in the Shire has great parallels. The English put up with the privations at first, but when things got too much it only needed a small prod to stir them up. Much the same as the hobbits in the Shire. The other strong parallel is the determination to avoid violence as far as possible. And some of the details have parallels as well. The central role of bonfires for instance. Tolkien may not have been consciously modelling the Scouring of the Shire on the Glorious Revolution of 1688. But I can't believe that what he had heard about it didn't have some influence on him.

Who was Sauron?

I read LOTR for the first time as a teenager in the Seventies, and back then there was no doubt in my mind who Sauron was. An evil tyrant who wanted to dominate the World, it could only be Adolf Hitler. For years I always thought of Sauron as being a manifestation in Middle Earth of the bogey man I had grown up with. It wasn't until years afterwards that I realised that the whole concept behind the book predated the Second World War by many decades. (I know it is there in the foreword, so I have no excuses but that is the way it was.) The fact that Tolkien himself was clear that the War of the Ring was not an allegory of the Second World War did really register at the time. But now I have had time to think about and to know more about how long it takes for an idea to form, I realise that I was certainly wrong. Sauron could not have been modelled on Hitler. So if it wasn't Hitler who inspired Sauron, who was it? There aren't a great many characters in history who really fit the bill as a Sauron prototype. Stalin is eliminated on the same chronological grounds as Hitler himself. And in any case Stalin never really fitted the bill. Hitler was a charasmatic evil wizard like figure who really seemed to have some kind of demonic power. Stalin always comes across more as a bureaucrat than an inspirational leader. No doubt he was just as eviil, but not really as interesting. Tolkien fought in the First World War, and there are many echoes of that conflict in LOTR. Could it be that Sauron was a personification of Kaiser Wilhelm. I don't think this really stacks up. The Kaiser's personality is pretty weak and it wasn't really his willpower that motivated the German armies in the First War. I don't think that anyone outside of propaganda departments would ever really think of him as the embodiment of evil. I think the only real choice is Napoleon. Tolkien was English and would not have been an admirer of Napoleon. Napoleon has never had a good press in England. He attempted to conquer the World and did it with huge elan but also with a depth of ruthlessness and agility that match Sauron pretty well. His victories are so amazing as to be almost magical and his very personal style of leadership really brings to mind the way Sauron could move his troops to do his will. Napoleon, like Sauron, was compelled to capitulate after a titanic struggle. The battle of Waterloo must have seemed to Tolkien very much the way the Last Battle before the Barad-Dur is portayed. And when the British got their hands on Napoleon they were still so scared of his wizard like powers that they had to imprison him on an island miles from anywhere to avoid him making a comeback. It is a shame that Ar-Pharazon (check name) didn't think of that instead of taking him back to Numenor at the end of the Second Age. Interestingly, when the British got Napoleon onto one of their warships they were careful to keep him away from London and the Prince Regent. They were scared that his huge charisma would be sufficient to charm the Prince Regent. And once he had him under his spell who knows what further evil he get up to. When I heard that I instantly thought of the way Sauron was able to bewitch the king of Numenor and all his councilors.