Tolkien and Wales

The University of Wales Press had a big sale over the summer. Tolkien and Wales was on the list. How could I resist a title like that? Of course I then discovered that the book won a Mythopoeic Award back in 2012, so clearly I should have read it before now. Oh well, better late than never.

Carl Phelpstead is a professor of English Literature at the University of Cardiff. At least I hope he still is. That institution has been taken over by a bunch of idiots with MBAs who are busy asset stripping, which means firing anyone whose specialism they deem too woke. I don’t think I have encountered him at conferences before, which is odd because he cites Dmitra Fimi, Tom Shippey and David Bratman quite a bit. We will doubtless meet at some point.

And now the book. How much of Wales is there in the work of Tolkien? You might think that, given his devotion to the ancient people of England, he would take a dim view of their ancient enemies. This book, however, proves that assumption wrong.

You are probably aware that Tolkien’s Elvish languages, Sindarin and Quenya, were based on Welsh and Finnish. Though in Tolkien’s case, because he was a philologist, ‘based’ means having a similar grammar, not borrowing words. Of course that means that the poor elves have mutations, but apparently only two whereas Welsh has three, and for some goddess-forsaken reason the Cornish have five.

Tolkien was very much enamoured of Welsh as a language, though his attempts to explain what he means when he says that one language is more beautiful than another don’t make much sense to anyone who is not a philologist, and maybe don’t make sense to them either.

Weirdly Tolkien strongly disliked Gaelic, which is not that far removed on the language family tree. Sorry, Irish pals.

So where did this love of Wales come from? We hear stories about the young Tolkien seeing the names of Welsh towns on the side of coal wagons as they rolled through Birmingham. But in 1920 he and his family holidayed in Wales in the small seaside town of Llanbedrog on the Llŷn Peninsula. In those days the town would have been very Welsh-speaking, and it quite possibly still is.

As an academic, Tolkien spent his time studying ancient works of literature from the British Isles. While he is well known for his work on Beowulf, he also worked on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and was very conversant with The Mabinogion, Geoffrey of Monmouth and Gerald of Wales. Phelpstead traces the influences of Welsh mythology on The Lord of the Rings.

Along the way he gave me the answer to something that I’d been wondering about. Why the heck is the Red Book of Hergest, one of the primary sources of ancient Welsh literature, named after a famous Saxon king? It turns out that, before being sequestered by Oxford University, the book had been kept in a place called Hergest Court in Herefordshire. Hence the name. Herefordshire, as Phelpstead notes, is in the Welsh Marches, which are to the south and east of Wales, but if you are English and live in Birmingham they are fairly obviously Westermarch.

Although this is an academic tome, the language is quite approachable and Phelpstead is not above sneaking in the odd joke. I was particularly amused by this passage:

There was once a writer living in Oxford, though he had been born outside England. His most famous work was an enormously popular piece of fantasy fiction that presented itself as a true history, claiming to be based on an ancient manuscript source. The book dealt with kings, heroes and a wizard. It became a best seller not only in England, but internationally; it was translated into many languages, was widely illustrated and was adapted in other media. That writer was, of course, Geoffrey of Monmouth…

More seriously Phelpstead has interesting things to say on Tolkien’s view of Celticness, and on Welsh, English and British identity. I could write a lot more on that, but I think I’d need to be a Tolkien scholar to do so. I will therefore stop here and give this book a warm recommendation to anyone interested in Tolkien and his work.

Title: Tolkien and Wales
By: Carl Phelpstead
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Purchase links:
Bookshop.org UK
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