Sallyport - The Magazine of Rice University - Winter 2002

One Ring to Rule them All
my work.”
Chance may minimize her Tolkien scholarship, but his work has
sufficiently intrigued her that, in addition to publishing books on the
subject, she organized two sessions on Tolkien at last year’s International
Congress on Medieval Studies—the first time that Tolkien has been
formally discussed at the ICMS in its more than 30 years. The sessions
have lead to yet another book, Tolkien the Medievalist, which is a collection
of theoretically driven essays by Tolkien scholars that will be published
soon in the Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture series by
Routledge LTD.
Besides, there’s no mistaking the glow in her eyes as she discusses
Tolkien’s epic, its cultural context, and its internal meanings.
Chance was in her first teaching
job, at the University of
Saskatchewan, when a medievalist
colleague recommended LotR. “I
took a weekend out and started
reading very skeptically,” Chance
says. “I got immersed in the magic
of it and just devoured all three
volumes. I don’t know if I became a
convert—that almost sounds like
something religious. I certainly
became convinced that it was a text
you could teach and that it was
worthy of scholarly study.”
Tolkien, a professor of Old and
Middle English literature at Leeds
and Oxford, was unhappy, Chance
explains, with the lack of an
English mythology. “He wanted to
create a mythic world that could do justice to the richness of English
culture,” she says. “Other cultures—Mediterranean, Greek, Roman,
Scandinavian, and even Irish and Welsh—have native mythologies, but
England has no mythic gods, no identifiable corpus of heroes like the ones
in Ovid’s Metamorphosis or Homer. You could point to King Arthur, but
those legends are affected by French Norman influence, which Tolkien
didn’t like. What he did have was a corpus of work in Old and Middle
English, such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and
Scandinavian sagas, such as the Norse Eddas. But most of those, even
Beowulf, are about Scandinavian, not English, heroes.”
Even so, Tolkien’s knowledge of northern European myth and languages
profoundly influenced his work, particularly with regard to the themes,
images, and structures he uses and the names he gives to people and places.
Frodo, for example, is from the Old English word fr?d, which means wise,
and mordor is the Anglo–Saxon word for death.
Certainly, though, the reality of two world wars affected Tolkien as
profoundly as any myth. “Many of his good friends whom he had gone to
school with died in World War I,” Chance says. “He never got over that.
http://www.rice.edu/sallyport/2002/winter/features/lordoftherings/index.html (2 of 4) [10/30/2009 11:00:10 AM]