A new master narrative

The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England has entered into both scholarlyand popular consciousness: Anglo-Saxonism is both a focused scholarly enterprise and a broad cultural phenomenon. These two aspects of Anglo-Saxonism exert mutual influences on one another in a single spectrum of perception and belief. The adjective ‘Anglo-Saxon’ reverberates with overtones of a healthy agrarian and village-based life, or of the poetry of nature, or of a native system of representative governmentthought worthy of emulation, or of men and women of a robust mental and physical constitution. Anglo-Saxonism also included an appreciation for the vibrant aesthetic qualities of old English, seen as an artful expression of the values, ideals and sentiments of the people of early medieval England.

Anglo-Saxonism, professional history, archaeology & philology

It was precisely during that period that history was gradually transformed from an amateur occupation to an academic, specialised ‘profession’. The achievement of British history of the mid-19th century is the historiography of the early Middle Ages. Translated chronicles and poetry, as well as legal documents, poured from the presses of the antiquarian and ecclesiological societies, and later, the Rolls Series [i.e. a government program which ran from 1858 to 1911 and published scholarly editions of medieval chronicles and records]. In 1842, the Philological Society was established to promote the study of language and languages in all their aspects, including historical and comparative linguistics. It became more nearly feasible at this time to reconstruct the tenor of Anglo-Saxon social life through advances in the relatively new science of archaeology.
Between 1799 and 1805, Sharon Turner first published his History of the Anglo-Saxons, who displayed a very positive attitude towards the Anglo-Saxon past. In 1833, John-Mitchell Kemble (1807-1857) brought out his translation of Beowulf; from 1839 to 1848, he published the six volumes of his Codex diplomaticus aevi Saxonici, the first comprehensive edition of Anglo-Saxon charters; in 1849, his historical study The Saxons in England, a comprehensive social and constitutional history of Anglo-Saxon England. Kemble stood out in his time for bringing to the study of grave-finds an extensive knowledge of early medieval history, as well as a command of comparative Germanic philology. In 1834, Benjamin Thorpe (1782-1870) brought out his Analecta Anglo-Saxonica: A selection in prose and verse from Anglo-Saxon authors of various ages: with a glossary, and it remained a viable textbook for much of the rest of the century. In 1840, he published a two-volume edition of legal texts titled Ancient Laws and Institutes of English; in 1861, a new two-volume edition of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle published in the Rolls Series; in 1865, an edition of a miscellaneous set of unpublished Anglo-Saxon legal documents, Diplomatarium Anglicum aevi Saxonici, including not just charters but also wills, manumissions, and documents relating to guilds, along with a glossary of key terms and an index of place names.

Anglo-Saxonism & popular history

This was a time, as well, when civic museums were being built where artefacts pertaining to the early medieval period could safely be stored and set on display. It was also the moment of explosion of popular, illustrated print. In 1852, Alfred’s life was described as ‘the favourite story in English nurseries’, and between 1800 and 1901, a cult of the Saxon king developed in Britain, with over a hundred popular ‘Alfredian’ texts published – including poems, plays, novels and histories, as well as children’s books. The authors of these works ranged from canonical figures such as William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hughes, to devoted amateurs like John Fitchett (who spent forty years writing a 1,500-page epic about the Saxon king, a work which is possibly the longest poem in the English language). Rewriting Alfred’s life was not a purely male preserve: Victorian women writers also celebrated the king, commonly in ‘improving’ texts for juvenile readers.
In illustrated histories, members of the Norman ruling class were often characterised as ruthless, rapacious, cruel, perfidious, and sexually licentious, as opposed to their ethnic Saxon counterparts, who were likely to be characterised as forthright and manly even if downtrodden.

Reconstructing the village community: an early social history?

As the methods of archaeological research were gradually refined, they naturally led to sharper insights into social history. The Saxon village community was reconstructed and celebrated. Kemble laboured to promote knowledge of the folklore and customs that the Saxons shared with other Germanic-speaking groups.

A critical use of the past

This case of the possession and reinvention of an Anglo-Saxon inheritance may illustrate the usages of the remote past in a society which was the first to be exposed to the related effects of industrialisation and modernisation. The national past is seen as including losses, not just gains. ‘Losers’, neglected by chronicles and modern historians alike, are rehabilitated and replace the Whig heroes.

References:
Billie Melman, “Claiming the Nation’s Past: The Invention of an Anglo-Saxon Tradition”, Journal of Contemporary History, 1991.
John D. Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066-1901, Wiley Blackwell, 2015.
Joanne Parker, England’s darling. The Victorian cult of Alfred the Great, Manchester University Press, 2007.

These historians perceive Englishness not in the constitution but in the people. The tradition they invent is potentially integrative and seeks to include in the nation groups hitherto excluded from it. Notions like ‘freedom’ and patriotic virtues may be extended to include in the nation groups hitherto excluded from it: the lower classes, as well as women, are offered liberties.

Billie Melman, “Claiming the Nation’s Past: The Invention of an Anglo-Saxon Tradition”, Journal of Contemporary History, 1991.

This Anglo-Saxonism of the middle and late 19th century was far different from the earlier adulation of the Anglo-Saxon period as a golden age of free institutions. A belief in Anglo-Saxon freedom, once used to defend popular liberties, had been transformed into a rationale for the domination of peoples throughout the world, a racist doctrine.

Anglo-Saxonism & Indo-European philology

“Of particular use to the Anglo-Saxonists were the philological researches into the Indo-European language family from which the German and English languages were descended.
The effort to determine the origin of the Indo-European language group assumed strong racial overtones. The fundamental error was the assumption that affinity of language proved affinity of race. This led to a search for an original homeland of the Indo-European or Aryan peoples – often located within the plateau of Central Asia. 19th century philologists not only described the ancient links between languages but also wrote historical descriptions of a tightly knit racial group that had spread out from its original homeland to encompass much of Europe and India. The Anglo-Saxons had already been firmly linked to their Germanic ancestors, they were now in process of being linked to the linguistic racial group form which they were descended.

Anglo-Saxonism, comparative ethnology… and phrenology

And finally, ethnologists were to place the Anglo-Saxons firmly within a superior Caucasian race. The work of the 19th century ethnologists was indeed decisive in giving a definite racial cast to Anglo-Saxonism. Rather than merely praising Anglo-Saxons or Germanic tribes, the ethnologists were able by comparative methods to establish reasons for superiority and inferiority; an essential shift in emphasis occurred when the arguments about the inferiority of other ‘races’ assumed an importance as great or even greater than arguments about the excellence of Anglo-Saxons. There was a sharp increase in the number of those who were prepared to defend inherent, unchangeable differences between races. The Anglo-Saxons were to become the final product of a long line of superior beings who stretched back through an Indo-Germanic cradle to the very creation of a superior race.
William Lawrence‘s (1783-1867) Lectures on… the Natural History of Man, first published in 1819, went through numerous editions by the 1840’s. Lawrence promoted a five-fold classification of the human species into five races – Caucasian, Mongolian, American, Ethiopian and Malay. He argued that the Caucasians were clearly a superior race; he also wrote of the inferiority common to the ‘dark-coloured people of the globe’.
The popularisation of racial ideas was helped by the phrenologists who enjoyed a great vogue from the 1820’s through the middle of the century. The Scotsman George Combe (1788-1858) praised the Caucasians above all other races, the Teutonic branch over all Caucasians, and the Anglo-Saxons over all Teutons. The phrenologists consistently maintained that Anglo-Saxon supremacy stemmed from the physical conformation of the brain, and that the improvability of non-Caucasian races was limited by the deficiencies of their original organization. By the 1840’s phrenology was deserted by the serious scientists, yet for many years it influenced popular opinion.

Reginald Horsman, “Origins of Racial Anglo-Saxonism in Great Britain before 1850”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1976.

Freeman saw himself in the vanguard of professional historiography. He wanted respect his professional authority.
At the same time, Freeman was a Whig. He was, by temperament, kindred to ancient traditions. Freeman was an ardent democrat. He assumed that democratic governments were more moral, more characteristic of a politically ‘mature’ society, than other political systems. In his eyes the record of despotic government hardly constituted ‘the history of a people at all’.
Freeman thus sought to give his moral convictions the sanction of ‘scientific’ order. The study of coins, weapons, tools, and inscriptions became historical – and of moral value – only insofar as they contributed to the understanding of ‘man as a member of a political community’. And Freeman also sought popular acclaim. The History of the Norman Conquest was to be a major scholarly work, but one he also hoped would attract that ‘strangest of beings, the general reader’.

Rosemary Jann, The Art and Science of Victorian History, 1985.

It is easy to dismiss Freeman as the impassioned, idiosyncratic personality that he was. The result, however, is often to write him off as a colourful eccentric who can tell us little about the characteristic attitudes of men of his generation and class. Of course, Freeman was a unique and often eccentric character. Yet we may be able to see a set of beliefs that were widespread among liberals of his class and generation.

Theodore Koditschek, “A liberal descent? Freeman’s invention of racial traditions”, in Bremner & Conlin (eds.), Making History. Edward Augustus Freeman and Victorian Cultural Politics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015.

Preface to the Third Edition

I found, in revising what I wrote twelve years back, that I could improve a good deal in point of mere style. I have often put a good English word where I had at first allowed a stranger to creep in.

E. A. Freeman, History of the Norman Conquest (3rd ed.), vol. I, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1877.

It has been a hard task to make Englishmen feel as they ought towards the heroes of their own blood. It has been a hard task to make Englishmen understand that they are Englishmen, that their tongue is English, that they have a rightful share in a speech and a literature which have lived on for more than fourteen hundred years.

E. A. Freeman, History of the Norman Conquest, vol. V, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1876.

Freeman is a nostalgic cultural radical, determined to do what he can to reverse the verdict of history. He consciously sets out to establish a national pride in early English history and to promote Teutonic heroes to parity with those of classical history and epic.
Freeman also set himself to write as ‘pure’ an English as possible, untainted by words of Latin or French origin. His restricted diction and syntactic austerity represent an attempt to use archaism as a means of cleansing [i.e., cleaning, purification] and renewal. Freeman’s diction was deliberately archaic: he freely employed ‘strove’, ‘deem’, ‘tarry’, ‘of a truth’, ‘recked little’. He was also predictably fond of inversions: ‘came not’, ‘failed him not’. It is a prose of short, grammatically simple sentences, with few conjunctions, participles or adjectives, constituting a style which seems best described as neo-barbaric: ‘but’, ‘because’ and ‘although’ are rare. Freeman’s preferred ways of expressing consequence – ‘And so it was’, ‘And so it proved’, and above all ‘It was ruled’ – imply not so much scientific connection or causal inevitability as doom or destiny, and the heroic fatalism of the Sagas.
He was irritated by complaints of his repetitiousness and clearly disappointed by the reception of his works. There was more than vanity in this; there is something of the bitterness of a baffled [i.e., discomfited] messianism.

John Burrow, A Liberal Descent. Victorian historians and the English past, 1981.

Freeman was diffident about [i.e., wary of] applying racial types used by contemporary craniometry and ethnography to his own subject. Rather, Freeman’s understanding of race was concerned more with what might loosely be termed culture. Here the markers of language and institutional development, instead of skull size or skin colour, were the key determinants. Like his contemporary Max Müller, Freeman could focus on language and its development as not only the principal factor in categorising race but also as a presumptive indicator of cultural and therefore national identity. However, Freeman was unable to suppress his enthusiasm for the cultural if not biological idea of race as a ‘real’ historical determinant, concluding that, although a fiction, ‘we may speak of families and races, of the great Aryan family and of the races into which it parted, as groups which have a real, practical, existence, as groups founded on the ruling primeval [i.e., primitive] idea of kindred, even though in many cases the kindred may not be by natural descent, but only by law of adoption.’
This forms the basis of Freeman’s earlier and most trenchant enunciation of his liberal racialism, Comparative Politics (1873). Despite making no claim to physiological superiority, the Teutonic race emerges as the star of the show.
As the Teutonic race was the custodian of [i.e., the person responsible for] modern history, it was therefore naturally superior to other branches of the original Aryan family, such as some ‘Asiatics’, which had either lost pace, for whatever reason, or simply fallen into a condition of stasis.
What’s more, excluded from the Teutonic and broader Aryan brotherhood, principally on account of their supposedly innate incapacity for assimilation of any kind, were races such as the ‘Turanian’ Turk. Corollary to this was Freeman’s growing distaste for Jews, as one part of the Semite family, which also reached a head around this time in relation to Benjamin Disraeli’s foreign policy towards Russia and the Ottoman Empire.
The older he got the more overtly racist his outlook seemed to become.

G.A. Bremner, Jonathan Conlin, “Freeman and the importance of being memorable”, in Bremner & Conlin (eds.), Making History. Edward Augustus Freeman and Victorian Cultural Politics, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015.

Letter to Milton Waldam, probably late 1951. Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. I have been at it since I could write. But I have never stopped, though of course, as a professional philologist (especially interested in linguistic aesthetics), I have changed in taste, improved in theory, and probably in craft.

Letter to the Houghton Mifflin Co., June 1955. A primary ‘fact’ about my work is that it is all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration. The authorities of the university might well consider it an aberration of an elderly professor of philology to write and publish fairy stories and romances, and call it a ‘hobby’, pardonable because it has been (surprisingly to me as much as to anyone) successful. But it is not a ‘hobby’. The invention of languages is the foundation. The ‘stones’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters, 1981

I have read enough, I think, to venture the opinion that Beowulfiana is, while rich in many departments, specially poor in one.

• It is as an historical document that Beowulf has mainly been examined and dissected. In 1921, Professor Archibald Strong had declared: ‘Beowulf is the picture of a whole civilization, of the Germania which Tacitus describes. The main interest which the poem has for us is thus not a purely literary interest. Beowulf is an important historical document’. The historian’s search is, of course, perfectly legitimate.

• But it does not assist criticism – the understanding of a poem as a poem (for that is not its object). But Beowulf is in fact so interesting as poetry, in places poetry so powerful, that this quite overshadows the historical content, and is largely independent even of the most important facts that research has discovered. Beowulf is indeed the most successful Old English poem because in it the elements, language, metre, theme, structure, are all most nearly in harmony.

J.R.R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”, 1936.

Too many people are willing to form opinions of Beowulf, this greatest of the surviving works of ancient English poetic art, after reading only such a translation.
No literary translation can be expected to provide a complete index to the language of Old English verse, and of Beowulf in particular. For many Old English poetical words there are (naturally) no precise modern equivalents of the same scope and tone: they come down to us bearing echoes of ancient days beyond the shadowy borders of Northern history. Yet the compactness of the original idiom, inevitably weakened even in prose by transference to our looser modern language, does not tolerate long explanatory phrases. The primary poetic object of the use of compound words was compression, the force of brevity, the packing of the pictorial and emotional colourtight within a slow sonorous metre made of short balanced word-groups.
The poet who in those days said and who heard flæschama (‘flesh-raiment’), ban-hus (‘bone-house’), hreðer-loca (‘heart-prison’), thought of the soul shut in the body, as the frail body itself is trammelled in armour, or as a bird in a narrow cage, or steam pent in a cauldron. But he did not say all this fully or explicitly. And therein lies the unrecapturable magic of ancient English verse for those who have ears to hear: profound feeling, and poignant vision, filled with the beauty and mortality of the world, are aroused by brief phrases, light touches, short words resounding like harp-strings sharply plucked.

J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Translating Beowulf”, 1940.

It is the mood of the author, the essential cast of his imaginative apprehension of the world, that is my concern, not history for its own sake. The special virtue of Beowulf resides in the theme, and the spirit this has infused into the whole. Northern courage, the creed of unyielding will, is the great contribution of early Northern literature.
Beowulf certainly carries the illusion of historical truth and perspective. This is because the author has used an instinctive historical sense – a part indeed of the ancient English temper (and not unconnected with its reputed melancholy), of which Beowulf is a supreme expression. The author of Beowulf showed forth the permanent value of that pietas (piety) which treasures the memory of man’s struggles in the dark past, man fallen and not yet saved, disgraced but not dethroned. It would seem to have been part of the English temper in its strong sense of tradition, dependent doubtless on dynasties, noble houses, and their code of honour, that it should preserve much from the northern past to blend with southern learning, and new faith.

J.R.R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”, 1936

Perhaps because of his childhood fascination with surviving forms of pre-Conquest languages, Tolkien from his earliest days subscribed to the Norman Yoke view – while a schooldchild in Birmingham, he once argued in debate for the negative impact of the Conquest upon English society.
As his medieval studies progressed, Tolkien’s fascination with Old and Middle English languages, coupled with a growing dislike of all things Gallic (intensified, no doubt, by a disastrous trip while a student tutor at Oxford to Brittany in 1913 and then World War I service on the French front lines), only increased his disdain for the effects of the Conquest.
Moreover, as Tolkien began to perceive what he saw as the devastating effects of industrialization and modernity upon English landscape and culture, the Conquest came to represent the first step in the globalizing, centralizing, and bureaucratically minded ‘progress’ that threatened the social fabric of his beloved England.
For Tolkien, the Norman Conquest prevented the survival of a distinctively English language and corrupted the ideal of English life.

Martin Foys, “Norman Conquest”, Tolkien Encyclopedia, 2007

To Deborah Wester, 25 October 1958. I do not like giving ‘facts’ about myself other than ‘dry’ ones. But of course, there is a scale of significance in some ‘facts’. There are significant facts, which have some relation to an author’s work. For instance, I dislike French. I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food, but detest French cooking.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters, 1981

‘Many long lives of men it is since the golden hall was built’, said Aragorn.
‘Five hundred times have the red leaves fallen in Mirkwood in my home since then’, said Legolas, ‘and but a little while does that seem to us.’
‘But to the Riders of the Mark it seems so long ago’, said Aragorn, ‘that the raising of this house is but a memory of song, and the years before are lost in the mist of time. Now they call this land their home, their own, and their speech is sundered from their northern kin.’ Then he began to chant softly in a slow tongue unknown to the Elf and Dwarf; yet they listened, for there was strong music in it.
‘That, I guess, is the language of the Rohirrim’, said Legolas; ‘for it is like to this land itself; rich and rolling in part, and else hard and stern as the mountains. But I cannot guess what it means, save that it is laden with the sadness of Mortal Men.’
‘It runs thus in the Common Speech’, said Aragorn, ‘as near as I can make it.

Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers, “Chapter 6. The King of the Golden Hall”, 1954

Language of Shire = modern English
Language of Dale = Norse (used by Dwarves of that region)
Language of Rohan = Old English
‘Modern English’ is lingua fraca spoken by all people (except a few secluded folk like Lórien) – but little and ill by orcs.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Peoples of Middle-earth, 1996 (12th and final volume of The History of Middle-earth, edited by Christopher Tolkien from the unpublished manuscripts of his father)

Letter to the Houghton Mifflin Co., June 1955. ‘Middle-earth’, by the way, is not a name of a never-never land without relation to the world we live in (like the Mercury of Eddison). It is just a use of Middle English middel-erde (or erthe), altered from Old English Middangeard: the name for the inhabited lands of Men ‘between the seas’. And though I have not attempted to relate the shape of the mountains and land-masses to what geologists may say or surmise about the nearer past, imaginatively this ‘history’ is supposed to take place in a period of the actual Old World of this planet.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters, 1981

The horsemen were drawing near the downs. They were riding like the wind. Now the cries of clear strong voices came ringing over the fields. Suddenly they swept up with a noise like thunder, and the foremost horseman swerved, passing by the foot of the hill, and leading the host back southward along the western skirts of the downs. After him they rode: a long line of mail-clad men, swift, shining, fell and fair to look upon. Their horses were of great stature, strong and clean-limbed; their grey coasts glistened, their long tails flowed in the wind, their manes were braided on their proud necks. The Men that rode them matched them well: tall and long-limbed; their hair, flaxen-pale, flowed under their light helms, and streamed in long braids behind them; their faces were stern and keen. In their hands were spears of ash, painted shields were slung at their backs, long swords were at their belts, their burnished shirts of mail hung down upon their knees.
Gimli was uneasy. ‘What do you know of these horsemen, Aragorn?’ he said. ‘Do we sit here waiting for sudden death?’
‘I have been among them’, answered Aragorn. ‘They are proud and wilful, but they are true-hearted, generous in thought and deed; bold but not cruel; wise but unlearned, writing no books but singing many songs, after the manner of the children of Men before the Dark Years. They have long been the friends of the people of Gondor, though they are not akin to them. It was in forgotten years long ago that Eorl the Young brought them out of the North, and their kinship is rather with the Bardings of Dale, and with the Beornings of the Wood, among whom may still be seen many men tall and fair.”

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers, “Chapter 2. The Riders of Rohan”, 1954

It was night. On either side of the road the host of Rohan was moving silently. Now the road passing about the skirts of Mindolluin turned southward. Far away and almost straight ahead there was a red glow under the black sky and the sides of the great mountain loomed dark against it. They were drawing near the Rammas of the Pelennor; but the day was not yet come.
The king rode in the midst of the leading company, his household-men about him. He turned to the men of his household who were near, and he spoke now in a clear voice so that many also of the riders of the first éored [Old English for a ‘band’ or ‘troop’ or cavalry] heard him:
‘Now is the hour come, Riders of the Mark, sons of Eorl! Foes and fire are before you, and your homes far behind. Yet, though you fight upon an alien field, the glory that you reap there shall be your own for ever. Oaths ye have taken: now fulfil them all, to lord and land and league of friendship!’

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers, “Chapter 5. The Ride of the Rohirrim”, 1954

Tolkien read a paper on the Kalevala [the Finnish epic poem] to a college society, and in it began to talk about the importance of the type of mythology found in the Finnish poems. ‘These mythological ballads‘, he said, ‘are full of that very primitive undergrowth that the literature of Europe has on the whole been steadily cutting and reducing for many centuries with different and earlier completeness among different people’. And he added: ‘I would that we had more of it left – something of the same sort that belonged to the English‘. An exciting notion; and perhaps he was already thinking of creating that mythology for England himself.

Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien. A biography, 1977

In no small part, the nostalgic, mythic contours of Tolkien’s writings derive from his historical bias against the Norman Conquest.
The very lexicon Tolkien uses in his own fiction seeks to moderate the linguistic impact of the Conquest; throughout his work, he employs primarily words of Germanic (i.e., Old English) derivation over ones of more recent French of Latin origins.
Furthermore, Tolkien saw the Conquest as ultimately suppressing the essence of English myth, and his works of Middle-earth may be viewed as a response to this perceived deficiency, drawing as they do upon Old English vocabulary and texts to fashion a mythic surrogate.
In sum, the pre-Conquest linguistic and literary elements of Tolkien’s fiction contribute heavily to their central nature, a nature in no small part inspired by imagining what English myth could have been were it not for the reality of the Norman Conquest and the changes it wrought.

Martin Foys, “Norman Conquest”, Tolkien Encyclopedia, 2007

Tolkien attempted to assemble an integrated collection of legends with a distinctly national identity. He was preceded in such an attempt by the German Jacob Grimm and the Norwegian Dane Nikolai Grundtvig. The Kalevala and the mythology of Middle-earth were both compiled and invented by their authors, each of whom created a fictional framework upon which to hang their tales. Tolkien wanted English myths, and these did not exist. He refused to borrow from Celtic tradition, which he regarded as alien. What was he going to do? The answer is, of course, that he was going to borrow from Old Norse, which from philological reason he did not regard as alien. Tolkien set out to create his own body of more or less connected legend, through which to fill in the myths and legends he supposed had genuinely been lost following the Norman Conquest.
Thus, Tolkien’s earliest tales, aptly called ‘the Lost Tales‘, establish a mythic framework in which England itself, physically, is the center – although Tolkien later abandoned these early attempts to center the mythology, literally, on the real island of England.

Jason Fisher, “Mythology for England”, Tolkien Encyclopedia, 2007

The author of Beowulf was telling of things already old and weighted with regret, and he expended his art in making keen that touch upon the heart which sorrows have that are both poignant and remote. There is not much poetry in the world like this; and Beowulf would still have power had it been written in some time or place unknown and without posterity, if it contained no name that could now be recognized or identified by research. Yet it is in fact written in a language that after many centuries has still essential kinship with our own, it was made in this land, and moves in our northern world beneath our northern sky, and for those who are native to that tongue and land, it must ever call with a profound appeal.

J.R.R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”, 1936.

Letter to Milton Waldam, probably late 1951.
My dear Milton,
You asked for a brief sketch of my stuff that is connected with my imaginary world. I do not remember a time when I was not building my imaginary world. Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages. But an equally basic passion of mine ab initio was for myth and for fairy-story, and above all for heroic legend on the brink of fairy-tale and history, of which there is far too little in the world (accessible to me) for my appetite. Also – and here I hope I shall not sound absurd – I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff.
Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) 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 England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our ‘air’, and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be ‘high’, purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry. I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.

Letter to Mr Thompson, 14 January 1956.
I have set myself a task, the arrogance of which I fully recognized and trembled at: being precisely to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters, 1981

If the Rohirrim at their onset were thrice outnumbered by the Haradrim alone, soon their case became worse; for new strength came now streaming to the field out of Osgiliath. There they had been mustered for the sack of the City and the rape of Gondor, waiting on the call of their Captain. He now was destroyed; but Gothmog the lieutenant of Morgul had flung them into the fray; Easterlings with axes, and Variags of Khand, Southrons in scarlet, and out of Far Harad black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King, “Chapter 6. The Battle of the Pelennor Fields”, 1955

To Stanley Unwin, 25 July 1938. (Allen & Unwin had negotiated the publication of a German translation of The Hobbit with Rütten and Loening, a German publisher. This firm wrote to Tolkien asking if he was of ‘arisch’ (aryan) origin.)
I must say the enclosed letter from Rütten and Loening is a bit stiff. Do I suffer this impertinence because of the possession of a German name, or do their lunatic laws require a certificate of ‘arisch’ origin from all persons of all countries? Personally I should be inclined to refuse to give any Bestätigung [confirmation], and let a German translation go hand. In any case I should object strongly to any such declaration appearing in print. I do not regard the (probable) absence of all Jewish blood as necessarily honourable; and I have many Jewish friends, and should regret giving any colour to the notion that I subscribed to the wholly pernicious and unscientific race-doctrine.

To Michael Tolkien (his son), 9 June 1941. People in this land seem not even yet to realize that in the Germans we have enemies whose virtues (and they are virtues) of obedience and patriotism are greater than ours in the mass. Whose brave men are just about as brave as ours. Whose industry is about 10 times greater. And who are – under the curse of God – now led by a man inspired by a mad, whirlwind, devil: a typoon, a passion: that makes the poor old Kaiser look like an old woman knitting.
I have spent most of my life, since I was your age, studying Germanic matters (in the general sense that includes England and Scandinavia). There is great deal more force (and truth) than ignorant people imagine in the ‘Germanic’ ideal. I was much attracted by it as an undergraduate (when Hitler was, I suppose, dabbling in paint, and had not heard of it), in reaction against the ‘Classics’.
But no one ever calls on me to ‘broadcast’, or do a postscript! Yet I suppose I know better than most what is the truth about this ‘Nordic’ nonsense. That ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler is ruining, 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.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters, 1981

In England, the Northern imagination was brought into touch with Christendom, and with the Scriptures.

J.R.R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”, 1936.

To Michael Tolkien (his son), 9 June 1941. That ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler is ruining, 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. Nowhere, incidentally, was it nobler than in England, nor more early sanctified and Christianized.

To Christopher Tolkien (his son), 18 January 1945. I read till 11.50, browsing through the packed and to me enthralling pages of Stenton’s Anglo-Saxon England. A period mostly filled with most intringuing Question Marks. I’d give a bit for a time-machine. But of course my mind being what it is (and wholly different from Stenton’s), it is the things of racial and linguistic significance that attract me and stick in my memory.

J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters, 1981