JRR Tolkien and writing on Estonia

An English writer’s fantasy epic of a ring of evil power and of a wizard, hobbits, men, a dwarf and an elf who seek to destroy it has captured the imagination of millions of readers around the world. It also unleashed an army of scholars to unravel how JRR Tolkien developed his ideas.

The map of Middle Earth on the inside front cover of The Lord of the Rings is an invented geography that echoes western Eurasia. You can see the Baltic sea to the west, the north-south track of the Ural mountains, the mighty Volga running alongside, although it’s a different river in Tolkien’s world that runs into a remote inland lake, like the Caspian or Aral seas.

Tolkien’s descriptions of nature, cultivated and wild, call to mind the forests and fields of northern Europe, and heading south reminds one of the herbal fragrance of Tuscany, or the golden light of the Balkans. The grasslands of the horse riders of Rohan recall the plains of Hungary, and the desert lands of Mordor, parts of Iran or Iraq.

“Influences on Tolkien” is the title of a Wikipedia page, which shows a map explaining the Misty Mountains took their shape from the Alps - but this says nothing about their arrangement in space. The same goes for a comparison between the Great River, Anduin, and the Danube.

Did the Finno-Ugric world inspire Tolkien in his creation of Middle Earth? His elves – imagined as a tall and slender, highly skilled people - speak a language that looks Finnic in its sounds. Indeed, Tolkien said of Finnish: “It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me.”

An Oxford University linguist, Tolkien invented more than a dozen dialects of Elvish, having a fascination in how languages evolve. The relationships between the Indo-European languages he certainly knew – similarly, for the connections between the Sámi (Lapland) languages, Finnish, Estonian, the more distantly related Hungarian, and their dialects and regional accents.

But a search for a specific Estonian influence on Tolkien is more difficult. The Númenóreans – men of the west - came from an island that scholars have linked to the Greek myth of Atlantis because of its name in Elvish, Atalantë. Tolkien wrote of this as “curious chance”. Yet Astalanda was the name given to Estonia by the 12th Century cartographer, al-Idrisi, when he drew his world map. Coincidence, or not?

Kalevipoeg playing the zither, by Joan Llopis Doménech from València, Spain    

Valdur Mikita agrees that Tolkien’s love of Finnish mythology greatly influenced his works but cannot resist speculating: “In any case, the wizard Gandalf, embodied by Ian McKellen in the cult films The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit strikingly resembles the image of Kalevipoeg when playing the zither by the Kääpa river. We are left to enjoy the elegant thought that in this way South Estonia has become the absolute epicentre in Europe of magical thinking.”

By this, Mikita means a deeper and pre-industrial appreciation of, and connection with nature and place.

Reading The Linguistic Forest (2013) suggests to me that Tolkien has inspired a way of looking at Estonia, rather than the other way around – there’s more to enjoying nature in this flat land by appreciating its cultural overlay than for its own sake.

The boglands, the boulder-fringed Baltic coast, blueberry-floored pine forests, reed-lined streams, ancient oak trees, and glacier-carved lakes come alive in the mind’s eye when overlain with the area’s long history of human contact.

Robert Macfarlane performs the same magic for the British isles in The Old Ways (2013), a beautifully written journal of his wanderings on ancient paths, recalling times and deeds long vanished from human consciousness, or largely so.

To take a leaf from Tolkien’s ranger, Strider, speaking to the hobbits he befriended on arriving at a desolate place in their quest far from home:

“But long before, in the first days of the Northern Kingdom, they built a watchtower on Weathertop. It was burned and broken and nothing remains of it now but a tumbled ring, like a crown on the old hill’s head. Yet once it was tall and fair. It is told that Elendil stood there watching for the coming of Gil-Galad out of the West, in the days of the Last Alliance.”

Tolkien and Macfarlane offer a clue on how to write about Estonia.

The bogs in Soomaa recall the Forest Brothers who held out there in hiding against Soviet invaders for long and bitter years during and after WWII, for instance, and for another: it was in the holy lake near Otepää where Tartu university students dipped the newly made Estonian national flag, in secrecy from Tsarist scrutiny, on 4 June 1884.

Entering the world of art, Ilon Wikland, Konrad Mägi and Richard Uutmaa stamped their impressions, respectively, on Haapsalu, the lake-and-drumlin county NE of Tartu, and the sheds at Altja in Lahemaa National Park, for all time, for admirers of their works.

Moving to books, Valdur Mikita cannot fail to inspire a nature, language and culture-based sense of Estonia, and the same goes for Estonia’s most popular novelist, Andrus Kivirähk. An academic seminar we attended at Puhtu taught us to appreciate archaeological landscapes, and more besides.   

To conclude: belonging to place seems to be important, psychologically, for human wellbeing. It is no accident that maarahvas in Estonian, and tangata whenua in Māori mean the same thing – “the people of the land”, which is how these people called, or still call themselves.