The Noble North

J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that he “ever loved that noble northern spirit,” rooted in the myths and culture of Scandinavia, Germany and England, “and tried to present in its true light.” Indeed, he raised the noble north to the level of Athens and Rome, creating, in  “The Lord of the Rings,” an epic that stands alongside “The Iliad,” “The Odyssey” and “The Aeneid.”

In a letter that Tolkien wrote to his son Michael in June 1941, he berated “that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler” for “[r]uining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light”. He had spent most of his life “studying Germanic matters (in the general sense that includes England and Scandinavia)” and regretted that people were ignorant of the “force” and “truth” of the “Germanic” ideal.

The supreme contribution of the noble northern spirit has its roots in the myths and culture, both Christian and pre-Christian, of Scandinavia, Germany and England but also, more broadly, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Among the ancient fruits of the noble north, which Tolkien knew and loved are the Kalevala, the Elder Edda, the Orkneyinga Saga, King Harald’s Saga, “The Dream of the Rood”, Beowulf, “The Seafarer”, “The Wanderer” and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Among its legendary and historic heroes are King Arthur, King Alfred the Great, and Cuchulain, and its holiest and most noble heroes are its saints: Brendan, Patrick, Aidan, Edmund, Magnus….

This living legacy of “northernness” inspired many modern authors, many of whose works were also read enthusiastically by Tolkien. As Holly Ordway shows in her book, Tolkien’s Modern Reading, Tolkien read numerous “neo-northern” works, including the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, Chesterton’s Ballad of the White Horse, Andrew Lang’s series of Fairy Books, the fairy stories of George MacDonald, the Norse inspired works of William Morris, and T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone.

Surprisingly, there’s no evidence of his ever reading the two great prose epics by Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter and The Master of Hestviken. The former had been published in an English translation in 1927 and, in the following year, Undset received the Nobel Prize for Literature. A convert to the Catholic faith who was received into the Church in 1924, Undset shared Tolkien’s faith as well as his love for the Norse sagas and medieval history. It is difficult to conceive how she escaped his attention. There’s little doubt, had he read Undset’s major works, that Tolkien would have admired them greatly.

The “noble northern spirit” is not restricted to literature, of course. It is also present in the great neo-gothic revival in architecture, which was lionized by Chesterton in his wonderful essay, “The Architect of Spears”: “The truth about Gothic is, first, that it is alive, and second, that it is on the march. It is the Church Militant; it is the only fighting architecture. All its spires are spears at rest; and all its stones are stones asleep in a catapult.”

Then there’s the way that the “noble northern spirit” inspired some of the greatest masterpieces of musical composition. The works of Wagner breathe this spirit, albeit in a pseudo pagan atmosphere, whereas the works of Sibelius imbibe the spirit of the folklore of the composer’s native Finland, bringing to tonic life the Kalevala, his homeland’s national epic. In art, the Pre-Raphaelites evoked the spirit of neo-medievalism, especially in their fascination with Arthurian subjects.

Returning to Tolkien’s letter, and his discussion of the “noble northern spirit”, he added that “[n]owhere … was it nobler than in England, nor more early sanctified and Christianized”. Apart from illustrating Tolkien’s patriotic predilection for his own nation’s culture, his words are nonetheless true objectively of Anglo-Saxon England in the late seventh and early eighth centuries. Caedmon, the earliest known of all English poets, was a monk at Whitby Abbey, and it is to this period that Beowulf, the great English epic, belongs. A profoundly Catholic work, irrespective of its woeful and willful misreading by modern critics, Beowulf was almost certainly written by a monk who was probably a contemporary of St. Bede. The last part of Beowulf, which tells of the hero’s defeat of the dragon, was a significant influence on Tolkien’s inspiration for The Hobbit. Other great poems written at this time or during the following century are “The Dream of the Rood”, “The Ruin”, “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer”, all profoundly Christian works which are so beautiful that they withstand the test of translation, belying Bede’s claim, when discussing his own translation of Caedmon’s English verse into Latin, that “verses, however masterly, cannot be translated literally from one language into another without losing much of their beauty and dignity”.

In late 1951, ten years after the wartime letter to his son, Tolkien was writing to his publisher about the connection between his own work and the noble northern spirit, and especially the “sanctified and Christianized” manifestation of it in Anglo-Saxon England: “I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story … which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country….”

There is little doubt that Tolkien more than succeeded in the task he set for himself. In doing so, he raised the noble north to the level of Athens and Rome, creating, in The Lord of the Rings, an epic that stands alongside The Iliad, The Odyssey and The Aeneid. Such is the magnitude of his success that he has truly “more than succeeded” because the epic and the wider legendarium contained in The Silmarillion and beyond, is larger than England. It transcends and supersedes England as the epics of Homer transcend and supersede Athens, and as Virgil’s epic transcends and supersedes Rome. Athens has fallen but Homer still stands strong and secure; Rome has fallen but Virgil still keeps vigil as a sentinel of civilization; England is falling, and perhaps has already fallen, but Tolkien has created a cornerstone of western civilization which is forever England.

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The featured image, uploaded by Ximonic (Simo Räsänen), is “A panoramic view from a ridge located between Segla and Hesten mountain summits in the island of Senja, Troms, Norway in 2014 August. The fjord to the left is Øyfjorden with its sounds Trælvika and Ørnfjorden. The fjord to the right is Mefjorden.” This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.