A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee.© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Celtic: “Celtic Things” and “Things Celtic” – Identity, Language, and Mythology

J. S. Lyman-Thomas

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In a 1937 letter to his publisher Stanley Unwin, just after The Hobbit was released, Tolkien expressed “a certain distaste” for “Celtic things” (Letters 26). Eighteen years later, after the third volume of The Lord of the Rings had appeared, he referred in his O’Donnell Trust Lecture “English and Welsh” to his “large work . . . which contains .  .  . much of what I personally have received from the study of things Celtic” (MC 162). In light of the earlier remark, it is not surprising that very little attention had been devoted to Tolkien’s use of “things Celtic” until relatively recently. But these two comments do not, in fact, bookend a period during which Tolkien’s views evolved from despising “Celtic things” to respecting “things Celtic.” Over the span of his life, his letters and works reflect a consistent interest in and affection for “things Celtic,” particularly Welsh. Scholarship in this area has grown considerably in the past few years, shedding new light on Tolkien’s relationship with Celtic literatures and lan-guages;1 in the process, there has also been necessary reconsideration of just what he meant in that 1937 letter. The same visionary who was arguably able to fulfill his dream “to restore to the English an epic tradition” (Letters 231) also loved Wales (Letters 289). In a time when the British Empire was waning and England itself was going through an identity crisis, Tolkien demonstrated a complex understanding of the interplay of personal, regional, and national identity and was profoundly influ-enced by Celtic languages and literature.

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Identity

Tolkien’s relationship with “things Celtic” was intimately bound up in his own pro-fessional and ethnic identity. Rather than offering a definitive view of his attitude toward them, the comment in the 1937 letter to Unwin was actually more the rebuke of a layman by a professional scholar. Tolkien identified himself again and again as a philologist, which was reflected in how he referred to himself, in points he chose to respond to, and in the quality of his explanations. In 1955, for Harvey Breit’s weekly “In and Out of Books” in The New York Times Book Review, Tolkien was quoted as saying:

My work did not “evolve” into a serious work. It started like that. . . . I am a philolo-gist, and all my work is philological. I avoid hobbies because I am a very serious person and cannot distinguish between private amusement and duty. (Letters 218)

His identification as a philologist was complete: he saw it reflected in everything he did, whether it was “private amusement” or “duty,” scholarship or fiction.

He subsequently felt it necessary to elaborate on his answers to Breit in a letter to Houghton Mifflin, his American publisher, explaining that “the remark about ‘philol-ogy’ was intended to allude to what is I think a primary ‘fact’ about my work, that it is all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration” (Letters 219; emphasis Tolkien’s). In 1964, in a letter to Christopher Bretherton, he wrote, “I began the construction of languages in early boyhood: I am primarily a scientific philologist. My interests were, and remain, largely scientific” (Letters 345). The emphasis on the scientific quality of his approach is crucial to understanding his remarks in that 1937 letter. He was reacting to a reader for his publisher who had complained about the “eye splitting Celtic names” in the “Quenta Silmarillion” and had said that the work had “something of that mad, bright-eyed beauty that perplexes all Anglo-Saxons in the face of Celtic art” (Letters 25). Tolkien responded as a professional philologist:

I am sorry the names split his eyes – personally I believe (and here believe I am a good judge) they are good, and a large part of the effect. They are coherent and consistent and made upon two related linguistic formulae, so that they achieve a reality not fully achieved to my feeling by other name-inventors . . . Needless to say they are not Celtic! Neither are the tales. I do know Celtic things (many in their original languages Irish and Welsh), and feel for them a certain distaste: largely for their fundamental unreason. They have bright colour, but are like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design. They are in fact “mad” as your reader says – but I don’t believe I am. (Letters 26)

He first explains the rationale for the names – they are based on “two related linguistic formulae” – then addresses the use of the word “Celtic,” which the reader was clearly applying in its general, popular sense, based on stereotypes that were the legacy of Matthew Arnold. But “Tolkien’s sense of what is Celtic derived from first-hand

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knowledge of Celtic material in the original languages” (Phelpstead 2011, 11): he rejects popular misconception in favor of academic accuracy, both in the indiscrimi-nate use of the word “Celtic” (his invented words are not semantically derived from any of the Celtic languages, of which he specifies first-hand knowledge by mentioning Irish and Welsh) and in its application in the Arnoldian sense (his tales are not of the fanciful, romantic ilk that had come to be widely accepted as “Celtic” because of Arnold’s lectures on Celtic literature in 1865 and 1866).2 The “Celtic things” that are “mad” are those of Arnold’s legacy – not things genuine – notions to which Tolkien does not subscribe. His letters abound with his insistence on linguistic specificity.3 There seems no reason to assume he would not demand the same specificity in use of the word “Celtic.”

Carl Phelpstead’s analysis of the 1929 lecture “Celts and Teutons in the Early World” demonstrates that Tolkien clearly understood the tension between the Arnol-dian stereotypes and historical reality, and actually anticipated later scholarly conclu-sions. Tolkien argues “against the idea of the ‘two races and their perennial incompatibility and unceasing conflict’ . . . later he claims that although there is no evidence of racial differences between Celt and Teuton there is much contrary evidence that ‘they were indistinguishably alike’ ” (Phelpstead 2011, 15).

There is no doubt that Tolkien’s thinking probably evolved over his career, like any committed scholar’s. However, given that his fascination with Welsh began early (MC 192), his personal “Celtic” library turned out to be quite extensive,4 and he refers to himself as a “Celtophile” as early as 1929 (Phelpstead 2011, 15), it seems the disparagement of “Celtic things” that for so long discouraged scholars from investigat-ing his use of Irish, Welsh, and other so-called Celtic material was based on a funda-mental misinterpretation. In fact, the recently published “Essays on Kalevala” contains references to the Mabinogion that seem on the surface to directly contradict his remarks in the 1937 letter but which actually reinforce his distinction between the “Celtic” of Arnoldian stereotype and “Celtic” as applied in the science of philology. In both the manuscript and typescript versions, Tolkien compares the Kalevala to the Mab-inogion (Tolkien 2010b, 248–249 and 266–267); in the manuscript version, he observes:

The Mabinogion has such a background [of literary tradition]: a feeling of a great amount of development which has resulted in a field of the most excellently harmonized and subtly varied colours against which the figures of the actors of the stories stand out. (Tolkien 2010b, 249; emphasis added)

This is consistent with the 1937 letter not contradictory: here Tolkien is clearly not discussing one of the “Celtic things” of “bright colour . . . like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design” (Letters 26) but rather genuine Celtic material of a particular culture. He presented this version of the essay in November, 1914, 13 years before the letter to Unwin (Flieger in Tolkien 2010a, 213). Tolkien’s fondness

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for and interest in “things Celtic” – particularly things Welsh – actually remained fairly consistent throughout his career and life.

Two other identity factors clearly important to Tolkien were his nationality and, of course, language, and these are both inextricably linked to each other and to “things Celtic.” He identified strongly as English and vehemently rejected identification as part of the larger empire, writing in a 1943 letter to his son Christopher, “I love England (not Great Britain and certainly not the British Commonwealth (grr!))” (Letters 65). His insistence on specificity remains consistent: he narrows his ethnicity to a particular region in England, calling his family “Mercian” (Letters 108), meaning someone who hails from the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia, which is “the Latin adaptation of (West Saxon) Old English Mierce, the equivalent of Marc in the dialect of Mercia itself, and means ‘border or boundary people’ (as in the Welsh Marches)” (Phelpstead 2011, 110–111). In the 1955 letter to Houghton Mifflin referred to above, he wrote, “I am indeed in English terms a West-midlander at home only in the counties upon the Welsh Marches” (Letters 218) and called himself a “Saxon in Welsh terms, or in our own one of the English of Mercia” in his “English and Welsh” lecture (MC 162).

That he himself would include a reference to the Welsh border in his definition of “home” is clearly significant and relates directly to his life-long fascination with the language. In “English and Welsh” he tells of the “call” of the Welsh language:

I heard it coming out of the west. It struck at me in the names on coal-trucks; and drawing nearer, it flickered past on station-signs, a flash of strange spelling and a hint of a language old and yet alive; even in an adeiladwyd 1887, ill-cut on a stone-slab, it pierced my linguistic heart. (MC 192)

He discusses the “seniority” of the “British” (Brythonic) language in Britain, which would become Welsh – “It had become already virtually ‘indigenous’ when the English first came to disturb its possession” (MC 177) – and he suggests that “there is a difference between the first-learned language, the language of custom, and an individual’s native language, his inherent linguistic predilections” (190). He identifies in his own – and others’ – predilection for Welsh, “the native language to which in unexplored desire we would still go home” (194; emphasis added). According to Yoko Hemmi, Tolkien “is arguing that many of the inhabitants of Britain, including himself . . . are, metaphorically speaking, still British or ancient Britons deep down” (2010, 155), “British” in the ancient sense, not the modern. Tolkien’s English identity originated in the geography of Mercia5 and was cultivated by his passion for, and training in, philology (specifically Old English and things Anglo-Saxon and Ger-manic, see ch. 15), but it was also profoundly influenced by the notion of a shared heritage and ancestral language with his “Briton” (Celtic) neighbors, the Welsh. This identification with “things Celtic” had deep roots for Tolkien and had major implica-tions for his language invention and for his fiction in general.

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Language

The main Celtic language that influenced Tolkien was clearly Welsh, not surprisingly, considering that he enjoyed Arthurian literature as a boy. He was fascinated by the language from an early age, and spent the money from the only prize he ever won on Welsh books (MC 192). He loved Wales itself (Letters 289), he owned many books in Welsh and pertaining to Welsh, including “the so-called ‘Mabinogion’ from both the Red Book of Hergest and the White Book of Rhydderch in four editions” (Fimi 2007, 51), and he engaged in serious study of the Welsh language.6 It is impossible to sepa-rate discussions of Tolkien’s invented languages from discussions of his fiction, and the modeling of the Elvish language Sindarin on Welsh undoubtedly constitutes “the most profound impact made by Tolkien’s love of Wales and Welsh on his creative writing” (Phelpstead 2011, 50). As Tolkien said of his invented languages in general, “The stories were made . . . to provide a world for the languages” (Letters 219, see also ch. 14). He also understood that languages were inextricably linked to the cultures that used them, noting “that ‘legends’ depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the ‘legends’ which it conveys by tradition” (Letters 231). He described Sindarin as having a “linguistic character very like .  .  . British-Welsh” and believed it appropriate to “the rather ‘Celtic’ type of legends and stories told of its speakers” (Letters 176), such as the Grey-elves. Tolkien understood language as a dimension of identity, integral to the way stories are told and inextri-cable from the culture the stories are about. While Sindarin is not Welsh, and the Grey-elves are not analogues to the Welsh people, there are resonances that cannot be overlooked.

Sindarin sounds like Welsh and often looks like Welsh, an effect achieved through similar consonant and vowel sounds and combinations and similarities in grammar but not in lexical content. Drawing on Jim Allan’s 1978 An Introduction to Elvish, Carl Phelpstead offers a useful summary of the similarities between Welsh and Sindarin, among which are a similar phonology, including certain sound changes in Sindarin that “resemble the initial mutations so characteristic of Welsh” (Phelpstead 2011, 46–47); similar creation of plurals (47); and similar placement of adjectives and geni-tive nouns after nouns being modified (48). But while Sindarin may seem like a variant of Welsh, it does not share vocabulary, and words that might look the same are totally different in meaning. “Amon hen” in Sindarin means “hill of the eye” (48) or “the eye’s hill,” adhering to the pattern of showing possession by putting the genitive noun after the noun it modifies. But “amon” is not a Welsh word, and while “hen” means “old” in Welsh, it is actually one of the few Welsh adjectives that are placed before the noun they modify (unless “hen” itself is modified, when it reverts to the usual order, as in “ci hen iawn,” “very old dog”). Sindarin may look Welsh to an English speaker, but to a Welsh speaker, it is a foreign language.

Tolkien not only modeled Sindarin on Welsh but he created a comprehensive lan-guage history, in which languages evolved in precisely the way he knew happened in

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the real world. Sindarin and Quenya, which is modeled on Finnish (another of Tolk-ien’s language loves, see ch. 18), both evolved from the parent language Eldarin. Tolkien explained his rationale in a letter to Naomi Mitchison:

. . . I have composed them in some completeness, as well as their history and account of their relationship. They are intended (a) to be definitely of a European kind in style and structure (not in detail); and (b) to be specially pleasant. The former is not difficult to achieve; but the latter is more difficult, since individuals’ personal predilections, especially in the phonetic structure of languages, varies widely, even when modified by the imposed languages (including their so-called “native” tongue). (Letters 175)

He goes on to describe Quenya as “[t]he archaic language of lore” meant to be a kind of “Elven-latin” and Sindarin as the “living language of the Western Elves” (176). In other words, Quenya and Sindarin have roughly the same relationship to Eldarin that Latin and Welsh do, respectively, to Indo-European. As Phelpstead notes, this is par-ticularly interesting because Finnish (upon which Quenya is based) “is one of the few European languages not part of that family, belonging with Hungarian and Estonian to the Finno-Ugric language family” (2011, 43).

But while Welsh and Finnish have very different roots, Tolkien may have seen connections between them besides his aesthetic pleasure in both. They did share a common historical crisis, which Tolkien surely would have known about;7 both lan-guages were under threat and underwent significant turning points in the sixteenth century, thanks to the printing press. S. H. Steinberg credits the survival of the Welsh language specifically “to the fact that from 1546 books were printed in Cymric” (1959, 85), a view later endorsed by Elizabeth Eisenstein (2005, 91–92). Steinberg and many other historians have noted the decline of Irish, Cornish, and Scots Gaelic (and other minor and/or non-state European languages): the dearth of early printed material (sixteenth century specifically) clearly seems to have handicapped the chances of the languages’ survival. Welsh was in danger of marginalization as a result of various pieces of legislation: the so-called Act of Union of 1536,8 which made English the official language of administration and law in Wales and barred monoglot Welsh speakers from holding public office (Jenkins, Suggett, and White 1997, 62); and the Act of Uniformity under Edward VI in 1549, “which decreed public worship was to be conducted only in English” (Roberts 1997, 139). The Act for the Translation of the Scriptures of 1563 that authorized the translation into Welsh of both the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer paved the way for the printing of William Salesbury’s New Testament in Welsh in 1567 (Roberts 1997, 142).9 William Morgan then both revised Salesbury’s translation and finished the work for publication in September 1588 (Williams 1997, 217). The Bible provided both a sense of legitimacy and a model of literary style for the language, and thus helped ensure the survival of the language.

Finnish was at risk for different reasons: it actually had no written form at all before Bishop Mikael Agricola composed a primer in the language, which was printed in

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Stockholm in 1542 (Steinberg 1959, 87). Subsequent works by Bishop Agricola fol-lowed, including a New Testament in 1548 (though the Finnish did not get a full Bible until 1642; Steinberg 1959, 88).

That Welsh and Finnish were special to Tolkien is obvious, and while he referred most often to their aesthetic attractions,10 he had to have been aware of their relative political and sociological situations on the world stage. The Welsh language had suf-fered greatly in the nineteenth century: the so-called Blue Books11 questioned the legitimacy of the language; Welsh-Not campaigns abounded (Roberts 1998, 33); and there was “a lamentable erosion of confidence [in the Welsh language] among the Welsh cultural élite” (Jenkins 1998, 12). While the number of Welsh speakers rose “to a maximum of 977,366 in 1911,” over the century “the percentage of Welsh speakers declined from around 95 per cent to 44.6 per cent,” and “the number of monoglot Welsh speakers declined sharply between 1891 and 1911” (Jenkins 1998, 3) – the same year Tolkien entered Oxford (Phelpstead 2011, xix).

While twenty-first-century ideas about sociolinguistics and postcolonial concerns about language extinction cannot be ascribed to Tolkien, he did apparently value multiplicity. Even though his main professional interest was in forms of English, and he identified strongly as English, he objected to the hegemony of the English lan-guage. In 1943, he reacted to being told that one eighth of the population of the world spoke English and that it was the biggest language group:

If true, damn shame – say I. May the curse of Babel strike all their tongues till they can only say “baa baa.” It would mean much the same. I think I shall have to refuse to speak anything but Old Mercian. (Letters 65)

And while he wasn’t fond of Irish, as an academic he still valued it: “I have no liking at all for Gaelic from Old Irish downwards, as a language, but it is of course of great historical and philological interest, and I have at various times studied it” (Letters 385). Tolkien established a connection between the languages he created from Welsh and Finnish that was different from what their models had in reality but which was appropriate and even prophetic in its own way: the once endangered Finnish, the basis for Quenya – the “Elven-latin” – went on to become a state language when Finland declared independence in 1917. Welsh, on the other hand, took longer to come into its own. Tolkien did not live to see the political equality of Welsh in Wales, estab-lished by the Welsh Language Act of 1993, but there is no doubt that Welsh, and everything he knew about it, influenced various aspects of his work. Yoko Hemmi (2010) contends that, “[using] ‘English and Welsh’ as a main ‘epitext,’ we can deter-mine how [Tolkien’s] original theory of native language expounded in the essay is reflected in his imagined linguistic landscape of The Lord of the Rings” (148).

To jump to the bottom line of a rather complicated argument, using textual evi-dence, including the repeated instances when the Hobbits are moved by or spontane-ously speak Sindarin (a language they presumably don’t know), Hemmi demonstrates that “[t]he relationship between Sindarin and the Hobbits could be considered as

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analogous to British and the people ‘who today live in Lloegr and speak Saesneg’ ” (2010, 168); in other words that Sindarin is to the Hobbits what Tolkien feels Welsh is to many English: a native language that they don’t necessarily speak but of which they seem to have an “inherited memory” (159) that represents “home” (168).

When Tolkien suggests that there are many others who share his predilection for Welsh as an inherited “native language” (MC 194), he is perhaps being optimistic. He himself referred to English discomfort with the Welsh language when he acknowl-edged that the predilection for Welsh among English may lie “dormant .  .  . shown only in uneasy jokes about Welsh spelling and place-names” (ibid.). It has always been viewed by many English at best with suspicion, at worst with outright ridicule and hostility.12 It was somewhat unusual for an Englishman in the early twentieth century to be as fond of Welsh as Tolkien was. He was, as so often happened, ahead of his time.

Mythology

As many critics have discussed, Tolkien, staunchly English, lamented the lack of a singularly English mythology, comparable to the accomplishments of the nineteenth-century folklorists with their collections and recreations of national mythologies, like the Grimm brothers or Lönnrot, whose Kalevala Tolkien so admired. The seeming void in English literature may have been more keenly felt because of the political and social situation in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The England in which Tolkien was a child and young adult experienced the weakening of the British Empire (to which English identity, in particular, was inextricably bound) and increased immigration that played on xenophobic fears of disease and contamina-tion. But also, much more local and often overlooked, was the rising nationalism uncomfortably close in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, all “Celtic” regions with their own long, unique mythological traditions. The Welsh Nonconformist majority managed to disestablish the Anglican Church in Wales in 1920; the Scottish Home Rule Association introduced a Scottish Home Rule Bill in 1919, 1920, 1921, 1924, and 1927 (Welsh 2002, 370); and the Republic of Ireland gained independence in 1922 (Welsh 2002, 352). The proximity of the growing nationalism of the so-called “Celtic fringe” placed those cultures in pages of The Times over tea tables.

As has been demonstrated above, though Tolkien had no use for the Celtic stere-otypes of the nineteenth century, he clearly felt lifelong fondness for genuine “Things Celtic” (particularly Welsh) that the English in general, and the British government in particular, did not share. The English attitude expressed in the Blue Books of 1847, in which highly prejudicial language associated Welsh Methodism with “moral, as well as sanitary, failure” and indicted the Welsh language as a major factor in Welsh backwardness and educational failings (Roberts 1998, 172), prevailed into the twen-tieth century. But at the same time as the English were vilifying the Welsh, they were also rehabilitating King Arthur as English. As Marjorie Burns puts it:

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By focusing on King Arthur and Arthur’s Round Table knights (and on Teutonic ele-ments within these tales), the nineteenth-century English found a means of conferring respectability on Camelot and making it their own. What had once been Celtic was now Arthurian and therefore English – so fully and fittingly so (in the minds of some) that Arthur’s Celtic roots were as good as lost to view. (2005, 17)

Tolkien, however, was much more subtle and respectful of his source material: in “English and Welsh” he says:

There is, of course, no doubt that the view of the process which established the English language in Britain as a simple case of “Teutons” driving out and dispossessing “Celts” is altogether too simple. There was fusion and confusion. (MC 169)

Tolkien’s use of source material is decidedly not simple: he weaves it into his mythol-ogy in a way that seems totally organic while at the same time creating complex reso-nances that make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Because Tolkien attests that he began with the languages and created the mytho-logical world as a vehicle for them, a logical place to start a discussion of his Celtic sources is with Sindarin (the language indebted to Welsh) and its speakers, the Elves. The Elves and their world are representative of Tolkien’s nuanced use of the source material. Before they were the Elves of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, they were the “fairies”/Elves of The Book of Lost Tales, written early on but published posthu-mously. Dimitra Fimi traces the development of Tolkien’s fairies from their begin-nings as Victorian “fluttering sprites” into the Elves of The Lord of the Rings, who are “taller than an average Man and not winged” (2009, 14) and demonstrates that he was particularly concerned with creating an English fairy tradition separate from the Celtic, especially from the Irish (57). Between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the Elves “have lost their frivolous side and are now capitalized” (Burns 2005, 48). But while the Elves’ fully realized culture in The Lord of the Rings has more connection with Celtic traditions than English, and it is deliberately contrasted with the Men of Gondor and the Rohirrim of The Mark, both with clear English associations (“The Mark” is from the Old English “mierce,” meaning Mercian – see above, also ch. 15, and Phelpstead 2011, 110–111), the formula is more complicated than The Elves = The Welsh simply because Sindarin shares ties with Welsh.

Burns’s insightful analysis from her chapter “Bridges, Gates, and Doors” is repre-sentative: “In Tolkien’s stories the closest parallels to the Celtic Otherworld are Riv-endell and Lothlórien” (2005, 54). She points out that “[e]ntrances into Tolkien’s Celtic settings are indicated by water crossings . . . or by archways of bending branches and trees or by shadowy descents into sequestered valleys” (52). To enter Lothlórien, the Fellowship must cross the Silverlode and Nimrodel, as well as be led blindfolded over water and other unknown perils in a “series of initiatory steps” (65). As tempting as it is to accept the Welsh analogue, the resonances here are of Irish origin, and Burns goes on to describe the role of the Tuatha Dé Danann in the Celtic Otherworld that Tolkien references in his descriptions of thresholds into Elven territories (66). Several

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scholars have noted the similarities between Tolkien’s Elves in “The Flight of Noldor” (in The Silmarillion) and stories of the Tuatha Dé Danann from Ireland. Fimi offers a particularly useful summary of basic parallels: “the Tuatha Dé Danann are not clearly defined as ‘demons’ or men, but appear as semi-divine beings” (like the Elves, who aren’t gods but who are “superior to men”); the Tuatha Dé Danann’s skills and roles echo those of the “High-Elves, who learn arts and crafts from the Valar”; and the Tuatha Dé Danann and Elves have similar reasons for making their respective journeys to Ireland and Middle-earth (Fimi 2006, 162–163). Tolkien appears to draw on source material appropriate for his characters in the same way he creates the languages that are appropriate for their speakers’ stories.

The isolated, forested, other-worldly Lothlórien (as well as other Elven habitats) seems to play directly to the Victorian stereotype of the sensitive, mystical Celt in tune with nature that Tolkien disdained; however, the picture of Lothlórien is not so simple (and is, therefore, typically Tolkien): it is a place with a bad reputation. Boromir says, “of that perilous land we have heard in Gondor, and it is said that few come out who once go in; and of that few none have escaped unscathed,” but Aragorn counters, “Say not unscathed, but if you say unchanged, then maybe you will speak the truth. . . . But lore wanes in Gondor, Boromir, if in the city of those who once were wise they now speak evil of Lothlórien” (FR, II, vi, 440). He is chiding Boromir that belief in fanciful tales or rumor says more about Gondor than it does about Lothlórien, which echoed prevalent English tendencies toward the Welsh. Through Aragorn, Tolkien is making clear that Lothlórien isn’t a reflection of the nineteenth-century Celtic stereotype.

The interplay of Welsh and Irish elements (genuine things Celtic) associated with the Elves in their various settings in his mythology suggests the “subtly varied colours” Tolkien found so appealing in the Mabinogion (Tolkien 2010b, 249). Phelp-stead provides a Welsh connection for the Elves, linking them to “the tylwyth teg, the ‘fair folk’ or fairies, and from them back to the god Nodens, or at least to Gwynn vab Nudd (Gwyn ap Nudd), son of Nudd/Nodens and abductor of Creiddylad in Culhwch and Olwen” (2011, 65). In the same discussion, Phelpstead recalls Tolkien quoting from Pwyll (also in the Mabinogion) “in order to demonstrate that ‘Celtic’ narrative is seldom stereotypically Celtic: rather than a dreamy visionary, Pwyll emerges from this episode as a ‘very practical man,’ as is conventionally expected of the English or other Germanic peoples” (Phelpstead 2011, 65). This addresses the same stereotype that Tolkien had also challenged in his “Celts and Teutons” lecture in 1929 (ibid.).13

Tolkien had an early interest in Arthurian material, discovering Sir Gawain and the Green Knight while at King Edward’s school (Carpenter 1977, 38; see also chs. 1, 2, 3, and 16), but when he began developing his mythology, though he considered the Arthurian world “powerful,” he dismissed it as “imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English” and, further, it was “involved in . . . the Christian religion” (Letters 144). As a philologist, he knew well the origins of the material and, of course, had not subscribed to the nineteenth-century Anglicization of it, and while he ultimately considered his work “fundamentally religious and

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Catholic,” he had consciously avoided overt references in favor of working the “reli-gious element .  .  . into the story and the symbolism” (Letters 172). But despite his rationale against borrowing from the Arthurian world, he was influenced by it, and he adapted and used things Arthurian in his characteristically nuanced way.

Tolkien’s relationship with Arthurian material was, of course, grounded in scholar-ship. He turned his early interest in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight into an edition of the poem for University students with collaborator E. V. Gordon in 1925 (Carpenter 1977, 118).14 He did begin one creative Arthurian piece, a non-rhyming alliterative poem, “The Fall of Arthur,” which is notable because “it is one of the few pieces of writing in which Tolkien deals explicitly with sexual passion” (Carpenter 1977, 188; see also ch. 27). While it was never finished and is the only work in which he bor-rowed directly from Arthurian material, many scholars have observed his use of Arthurian motifs in his fiction (the text though was eventually published; see Tolkien 2013). Verlyn Flieger points out that Tolkien’s own work mirrors the body of Arthu-rian literature itself: his stories have been reworked and exist in multiple versions, and an integral part of his fictional world is predicated on the idea that it is being conveyed by multiple storytellers (2005, 41). A useful example of Tolkien’s use of things Arthurian concerns parallels between Arthur, Frodo, and Aragorn, and subse-quent resolutions. While some similarities might seem quite straightforward – the sudden revelation of Aragorn’s identity as heir (FR, II, ii, 321; see Phelpstead 2011, 85); his “possession of (named) sword” (ibid.); his “return” to claim a throne (referred to in the volume title; Phelpstead 2011, 84) – there is really something much more complicated going on. Mirroring the Arthurian inflections of the Aragorn story is the saga of the other hero, Frodo, who also has a named sword, which he pulls out of a wooden box (as opposed to a stone, FR, II, iii, 361; and Flieger 2005, 42), and who is on a sort of reverse quest to dispose of the Ring. As with the resonances of multiple genuine Celtic influences on the Elves and the entrances to Elven territories, and those on Lothlórien, where Celtic stereotype is created and denied simultaneously, Tolkien establishes tension between a heroic epic (Aragorn, the hero who will be king) and a fairy-tale (Frodo, the ordinary hero). As Phelpstead puts it, “Rather than retell the Arthurian legend, Tolkien’s fiction gains resonance from echoing the characters and motifs of that tradition in a new imaginative setting” (2011, 86).

But Tolkien may be going further than merely referencing old material to enrich his new world: Aragorn accomplishes what Arthur has not yet managed; he has ful-filled the “return” promised in “The Return of the King.” But while Phelpstead sees Frodo as being “unable to complete his anti-quest” (86), it can be argued that he does, in fact, succeed in a roundabout sort of way: it is true that he claims the Ring himself instead of casting it into the fire (RK, VI, iii, 1237), but not long before that, when Gollum tries to take the Ring, Frodo promises, “If you touch me ever again, you shall be cast yourself into the Fire of Doom” (1235), which is exactly what happens when he does, in fact, bite Frodo’s finger off at the climactic moment, and he takes the Ring with him. So Frodo’s curse is Gollum’s – and the Ring’s – undoing (which Gandalf apparently suspected would happen),15 but it is unclear whether it was the Ring’s

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influence or his own will which caused Frodo to make the curse, thereby unwittingly fulfilling the anti-quest. But it is certain that the destruction of the Ring makes pos-sible Aragorn’s victory and ascension to the throne. The ambiguity of the ending is further enhanced by the characterization of the Hobbits in general as anachronistic “well-to-do” representatives of Edwardian England (Shippey 2000, 6–7) combined with Frodo’s departure by ship, “a deliberate echo of the departure of the wounded Arthur” (Flieger 2005, 42). Tolkien doesn’t simply suggest the Celtic Arthurian mate-rial in the intertwining adventures of his two heroes but rather he transcends it through Aragorn’s success in the “return,” Frodo’s Arthurian exit, not dead but “to be healed, if he can be” (Flieger 2005, 42), as if to suggest that he might return as well, and by having both of his heroes echo Englishness.

Tolkien’s attitude toward Celtic things can no longer be summed up by that “certain distaste” expressed in the 1937 letter. His life’s work in philology, scholar-ship, and creative writing demonstrates the contrary, and his sense of a connection with the Celtic world, most pointedly through the Welsh language, underpins the respect with which he uses genuine Celtic elements and challenges rather than enforces the nineteenth-century stereotypes that he disliked. He set out to create a mythology for England, but his sense of identity in an ancient shared British heritage is reflected in the synthesis of “things Celtic” in his invented world. Scholars like Verlyn Flieger, Marjorie Burns, Dimitra Fimi, Carl Phelpstead, and others have laid a foundation in the exploration of this influence, but there is still much to be discov-ered, not only in terms of specific sources that influenced Tolkien but in how he used them. Postcolonial approaches to Tolkien are beginning to appear, and considering the history of the relationship between England and the British government, and its Celtic neighbors, this is important and necessary. But Tolkien was unusual for his time in his admitted fondness for the Welsh language and for Wales itself; as regards “things Celtic,” he did not appropriate source material wholesale but rather integrated it into his legendarium in a subtle and sophisticated way. Tom Shippey suggests “that Tolkien was the Chrétien de Troyes of the twentieth century” in that he didn’t invent material but rather “showed what could be done with it” (2000, xviii), a comparison with which Tolkien might have approved.

Notes

1 Verlyn Flieger, Dimitra Fimi, Marjorie Burns, and Carl Phelpstead have been at the forefront in exploring Tolkien’s Celtic influences.

2 Phelpstead refers to Matthew Arnold’s The Study of Celtic Literature, in Lectures and Essays in Criticism, vol. 3 of The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, edited by R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), 286–395.

3 Examples of Tolkien’s insistence on “scien-tific” accuracy in philological matters abound: see, e.g., his draft response to a 1938 inquiry from a German publisher (during negotia-tions to publish The Hobbit in German) about his origins. He says, “I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke

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Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people” (Letters 37).

4 See Fimi (2007, 51–53) for discussion of Tolkien’s use of Celtic materials as related to items in his “Celtic” library; Phelpstead (2011, appendix) also contains a list of Tolk-ien’s Welsh books.

5 Specifically the part that had been the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Hwicce, see Letters (108) and Phelpstead (2011, 112).

6 By 1925, he had already taught Medieval Welsh at Leeds (Letters 12).

7 As a philologist, he would have been well versed in language history, but obviously he was particularly interested in Welsh and Finnish and saw those histories as relevant to his work; he delves into the history of the Welsh Bible in “English and Welsh” and into the history of Finnish in “Essays on the Kalevala.”

8 While this is the name commonly given to 27 Henry VIII c. 26, the term “Act of Union” was not actually coined until 1901, by Owen M. Edwards.

9 Tolkien, in fact, owned an 1877 edition of Salesbury’s Dictionary, inscribed with the date “9 May 1907”(Phelpstead 2011, xix).

10 His aesthetic responses to Welsh have been discussed. He wrote of his first encounter

with a Finnish grammar, “It was like discov-ering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxi-cated me; and I gave up the attempt to invent an ‘unrecorded’ Germanic language, and my ‘own language’ – or series of invented lan-guages – became heavily Finnicized in pho-netic pattern and structure” (Letters 214).

11 The official title was Reports of the Commission-ers of Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales.

12 Mike Parker, in his amusing but thoughtful book Neighbours from Hell? English Attitudes to the Welsh (Talybont: Y Lolfa, 2007), discusses the many suspicions and prejudices the English have historically harbored, and often still seem to, about the Welsh, as evidenced in the media, political speech, legislation, etc. While the book is popular journalism rather than scholarship, under the surface lurk compelling issues that invite postcolonial investigation.

13 Phelpstead (2011, 142 n. 63) references Tolk-ien’s “English and Welsh” lecture (MC 172–173) and observes the connection with the “Celts and Teutons” lecture.

14 See also Phelpstead (2011, 48 n. 62) for a list of scholars who argue that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight had “influence on Tolkien’s crea-tive writing.”

15 Frodo remembers Gandalf’s words: “Even Gollum may have something yet to do” (RK, VI, iii, 1239).

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