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Abstract:

J.R.R. Tolkien owes much of his success as a writer to his scholarly expertise: the professional mastery of epic traditions of the past allowed the author to create an epic of his own. From the analysis of ancient texts and preparation of critical editions and translations (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Beowulf), via “sequelizing”
(The Homecoming of Beorhthnoth) and filling in the gaps in Germanic epics, the author comes to creating his own mythology deeply rooted in the authentic tradition. In this article we consider the three different traditions, or the three sources of the material that Tolkien uses: the Old Norse matter, the Anglo-Saxon matter and the British, i.e. Arthurian matter. In The Homecoming of Beorhthnoth as a continuation of the Anglo-Saxon Battle of Maldon Tolkien accurately reproduces both the form and the ideological context, thus becoming a co-author of an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet, together with him revising the historical and cultural stereotypes and recording their supersession. In the missing and “added” episodes of the Poetic Edda (The New Lay of the Völsungs and The New Lay of Gudrun) the story of Sigurd becomes yet another retelling or yet another version of the Tale of Turin Turambar: thus an elvish legend gets incorporated into the Northern European epics, while a fragment of the Scandinavian epic becomes part of the legendarium of Arda. In the retelling or reinterpretation of the Arthurian myth (the alliterative Fall of Arthur) the creative mythology converges with the authentic tradition: the legendary King Arthur sails into the creative myth of Tolkien, while the frontiers between the Tolkien’s world and the world of European epics get blurred. The non-Silmarillion texts mark an important milestone on the road from the scholarly approach towards the authentic sources to independent creative writing. By further developing the potential of the original texts, Tolkien becomes a co-author of anonymous poets and chroniclers in his own right as well as enhances
the credibility of his own creative legendarium while inscribing it into the existing time-honoured tradition by means of manifold references, allusions, subtle echoes and elaborate underlying associations.