History and Nationalist Myth-Making in The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien was a philologist, not a scholar of myth. He admitted as much in “On Fairy-Stories,” an essay originally given as a lecture in 1939. Nonetheless, “On Fairy-Stories” shows Tolkien was knowledgeable about myth scholarship of his and preceding generations and had drawn his own conclusions on the origins and functions of myth. For Tolkien, myth was the process by which human beings comprehend and describe the world around them: “The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval.”
Tolkien had begun writing The Lord of the Rings at about the time he delivered “On Fairy-Stories.” His ideas about the cognitive role of myth play out in the novel. When characters look up at the constellation readers identify as Ursa Major, the Big Dipper, or the Plow, they know it as the Sickle of the godlike Valar. Whether dealing with difficulties or meeting the love of their life, they think of themselves as participants in a chain of events begun long ago by heroes such as the clever Elvish princess Lúthien and her hapless mortal lover Beren. Through these blended mythic-historic narratives, characters imagine their collective pasts and create identity and meaning, as real people do.
In particular, the histories Tolkien created for the fictional kingdoms of Gondor and Rohan, presented in the main text and appendices of The Lord of the Rings, resemble mythopoeic narratives created by ancient, medieval, and modern states. Tolkien did not create these histories for the purpose of indulging himself, generating trivia for fans, or providing a rulebook for his setting. These narratives not only provide insights into the beliefs, motivations, and self-conceptions of Tolkien’s characters but also comment on the role of myth in real-world societies.
Gondor: A Myth of a Golden Age
A myth is a story that members of a community tell themselves about who they are and where they come from. Myths may create shared meanings that bring people together, although they may also create scapegoats, outcasts, and enemies. Most modern scholarship stresses that myths are not necessarily false, although they are often selective or distorted tellings of the truth. More importantly, myths are believed to be true by their audiences.
As such, myth is easily entangled in history, and a community’s origins are a common target for mythopoeia. Greeks and Romans in the ancient Mediterranean credited the founding of their cities to mythic survivors of the Trojan War. The collection of annals known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle include Woden in the genealogies of historic kings because the once-god’s role as an ancestor figure persisted after the people had become Christian. Modern nation-states also mythologize their founders. As an American, I was raised on myths about figures such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton. These foundation myths create models of what communities “should” be like and provide (ostensibly) virtuous examples for members to emulate.
According to the “official history” in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings, the people of Gondor trace their origins to Númenor, an island civilization that was once the heart of a world-spanning empire. When the last Númenorean king invaded the land of the Valar themselves, more than three thousand years before the events of The Lord of the Rings, Númenor and most of its people were destroyed. A few survivors, led by Elendil and Isildur, escaped to the Númenorean colonies on the mainland of Middle-earth, where they founded the realm of Gondor. Elendil and Isildur were then instrumental in defeating the Dark Lord Sauron when he first rose to power. In time, Gondor also became a vast empire, powerful on land and sea. So great was its wealth, “precious stones are pebbles in Gondor for children to play with.”
This narrative recalls a type of myth common since antiquity—the myth of the “golden age.” For Anglophones, golden age myths may include narratives relating to Arthurian Britain, Republican Rome, and Classical Athens. These narratives imagine a past in which the community supposedly attained a pure, authentic state. They may focus on the community’s past economic, political, religious, and intellectual achievements.
The myth of Gondor’s golden age is important to how Gondorian characters understand themselves and present themselves to others. “Believe not that in the land of Gondor the blood of Númenor is spent, nor all its pride and dignity forgotten,” Boromir declares when he introduces himself to Elrond’s council.
By our valour the wild folk of the East are still restrained, and the terror of Morgul kept at bay; and thus alone are peace and freedom maintained in the lands behind us, bulwark of the West.
He invokes several elements of Gondor’s national myth: its Númenorean inheritance, military might, and defiance of Sauron.
However, other characters do not accept this version of history. Aragorn challenges Boromir’s claim that Gondor is responsible for the defense of Middle-earth and reminds him that other Númenorean descendants dwell outside the kingdom’s borders. “You know little of the lands beyond your bounds,” Aragorn says.
What roads would any dare to tread, what safety would there be in quiet lands, or in the homes of simple men at night, if the Dúnedain were asleep, or were all gone into the grave?
Then, Gandalf informs the council that Sauron survived through the actions of Isildur—an event conveniently forgotten in Gondor. This is the first significant indication in the novel that Tolkien’s characters narrate the past as they understand it and that readers cannot always take them at face value.
Boromir, a man of action, is not prone to reflecting on history, but his brother, Faramir, has a more complicated relationship with Gondor’s mythologized past. That he values his country’s intellectual achievements is clear in his best-known quotation about loving not the weapons of war but what they defend: “the city of the Men of Númenor,” as he calls Gondor’s capital of Minas Tirith. “I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom.” Faramir reveres Gondor’s Númenorean inheritance, but he notes that many Númenoreans have served Sauron and reflects on the hubris that led to the civilization’s downfall.
Aragorn, the Ranger who becomes king, is not Gondorian, but he cannily invokes Gondor’s national myth before ascending the throne. He sets out from Rivendell with Elendil’s sword reforged and renamed as Andúril, “Flame of the West,” to recall the memory of Númenor, the westernmost land inhabited by mortal beings in Tolkien’s created geography. In Gondor, Aragorn locates a descendent of a sacred tree that grew in the capital of Númenor and replants it in Minas Tirith. At his coronation, he recites the words spoken by Elendil upon his arrival in Middle-earth. One of Aragorn’s regnal names is Envinyatar, “the Renewer” in Tolkien’s constructed language of Quenya. Renewal is another significant component of golden age myths—leaders often proclaim their intent to restore to a community the glory it enjoyed in the past.
One result of Aragorn’s invocation of Gondor’s mythologized past is that he proves his claim to the throne despite his outsider status. Another is that he is able to rally the soldiers of Gondor and their allies to march on the gates of Mordor, offering a battle that he hopes will allow Frodo to destroy the One Ring and save Middle-earth, but which Aragorn himself cannot expect to survive. One of the functions of myth is to motivate members of a community to act collectively, especially in times of hardship. But not all uses of myth are so constructive.
Rohan: A Myth of Territory
While the Gondorians discover their origins in written accounts of Númenor’s downfall, the people of Rohan look to songs of their heroic ancestors. About five hundred years before the events of The Lord of the Rings, Appendix A relates, a people known as the Éothéod lived in the north of Middle-earth. Their leaders included the dragon-slaying Fram and horse-taming Eorl. When the Éothéod assisted the Gondorian army in battle, the ruling Gondorian steward awarded a northern province to the people. They became known as Rohirrim, and the country, Rohan. There they lived idyllically as “free men under their own kings and laws.”
This “official history” asserts the region had been depopulated before the Rohirirm arrived, but—as is often the case with myths like this—this is not true. In fact, the region was already (and is still) inhabited by a people referred to as “Dunlendings,” since the Rohirrim then drove many of them into the adjacent territory of Dunland. Tolkien clearly did not forget about the Dunlendings when he wrote Appendix A—he mentions them again only a few pages later. The most logical assumption is that readers are intended to notice the discrepancy.
The Dunlendings get little time on page, but through the character of Gamling, Tolkien indicates in The Two Towers that the Dunlendings’ collective memory of expulsion was used by Saruman to recruit them for his invasion of Rohan:
[The Dunlendings] hate us, and they are glad; for our doom seems certain to them. ‘The king, the king!’ they cry. ‘We will take the king. Death to the Forgoil! Death to the Strawheads! Death to the robbers of the North!’ Such names they have for us. Not in half a thousand years have they forgotten their grievance that the lords of Gondor gave the Mark to Eorl the Young and made alliance with him. That old hatred Saruman has inflamed.
Although Gamling is Rohirric, he claims knowledge of the Dunlending language and views on history. This hints at Gamling having interacted closely with Dunlendings, despite the enmity between the groups.
Appendix A likewise hints at cohabitation between Dunlendings and Rohirrim in an episode that occurred about two hundred and fifty years after the latter’s arrival in Rohan. Freca, a nobleman of both Rohirric and Dunlending descent, approaches Helm, king of Rohan, to propose a marriage between Helm’s daughter and Freca’s son. Helm takes affront at the offer. The exchange decays into petty insults relating to weight and age and Freca’s Dunlending ancestry before a fight breaks out, in which Helm kills Freca. Helm then declares Freca’s son, Wulf, an outlaw. Wulf flees Rohan but returns four years later with a Dunlending army.
The Dunlendings, and Rohirrim of Dunlending descent such as Freca and Wulf, contest the Rohirrim’s “myth of territory.” This type of myth sacralizes a given territory as the place where a community attained its ideal state. Often, this land must be safeguarded from anyone the community deems an outsider. Freca considers himself Rohirric enough to propose the union of his family to Helm’s, but Helm names Freca a Dunlending, enforcing Freca and Wulf’s outsider status before killing one and exiling the other.
Myths may create categories, order them within hierarchies, and naturalize and legitimize discriminatory systems. Analysis of a myth may begin by identifying the categories of people and other beings set out in the narrative, how these categories are ranked, and how the narrative justifies this ranking. In the narrative of Helm and Freca, Tolkien establishes the categories of “person of Rohan” and “Dunlending” and makes clear the Rohirrim believe themselves superior to Dunlendings. Yet these categories are not inborn but enforced by people, such as Helm. Nor are they exclusionary, if Dunlendings and Rohirrim intermarry and learn each other’s languages.
Moreover, Tolkien’s narrative of the war between the Dunlendings led by Wulf and Rohirrim led by Helm does not portray the latter as a heroic figure. Helm kills Freca in a petty argument and is later revealed to be a cold-blooded murderer: leaving his winter refuge, Helm would “stalk like a snow-troll into the camps of his enemies, and slay many men with his hands,” Tolkien writes. “The Dunlendings said that if he could find no food he ate men.” The war is not presented as a glorious triumph over savage outsiders but a tragedy, sparked by Helm’s pride, that leads to the deaths of Helm, Wulf, Helm’s sons, and many others, weakening Rohan for years. Overall, this narrative complicates rather than reinforces the Rohirrim’s self-conception as a heroic people who are the rightful rulers of Rohan.
Complicating Created Histories
The incident between Helm and Freca is not the only point where Tolkien subtly undermines his characters’ myths of history. Faramir informs Sam and Frodo in The Two Towers that the Númenorean aristocracy did not expel the indigenous people of Gondor. However, Gondorian characters express a hostility comparable to Rohirric hatred of Dunlendings toward the peoples of southern realms, especially that of Umbar. The main text and appendices establish that Gondor and Umbar have a long, shared history: Umbar is another former Númenorean colony, it was once a Gondoriancolony as well, and the two realms have often been at war with each other.
According to Appendix A, the mutual animosity began about sixteen hundred years before the War of the Ring. Valacar, king of Gondor, marries Vidumavi, a foreign princess who Gondorians consider to be of a “lesser and alien race.” In Tolkien’s works, Númenoreans often express disdain for non-Númenorean peoples. Númenoreans also believe—wrongly, as Tolkien makes clear—that intermarriage with other peoples reduces the extended lifespans gifted to them by the Valar. When the son of Valacar and Vidumavi, Eldacar, succeeds the throne, rebellion ignites among Gondorian aristocrats who believe his mixed heritage illegitimizes his rule. Eldacar eventually prevails in a civil war that destroys Gondor’s former capital, Osgiliath. The rebels flee to Umbar, then under Gondorian rule, where they establish a base to launch further attacks. This conflict continues until the War of the Ring, when Aragorn must summon an army of ghosts to liberate Gondor’s southern fiefs from Umbarian occupation.
The relationship between Gondor and Umbar parallels that between the Rohirrim and Dunlendings. As the Dunlendings disrupt the Rohirric territorial myth, Umbar’s existence challenges Gondorian myths of Númenorean inheritance, military might, and defiance of Sauron. Umbarians have as much a claim to the lost empire’s legacy as Gondorians, and their military strength is great enough to challenge Gondor’s. That Umbar aligns with Sauron despite sharing much of its history and culture with Gondor implies the latter may just as easily fall under the Dark Lord’s sway. Umbar challenges Gondorian self-image just as the Dunlendings that of the Rohirrim.
For all the high fantasy trappings of Tolkien’s novel, he went to great lengths to establish that the primary historic enemies of Gondor and Rohan were not monstrous or supernatural entities but human societies made up of outcasts from both kingdoms. Moreover, with much less effort, he could have constructed narratives that confirmed rather than challenged Rohirric and Gondorian national myths and upheld both states as straightforwardly heroic. That he complicated his created histories as he did indicates he was making a thematic point.
Tolkien and Nationalist Myth
The significance of Tolkien’s created histories is not that they present “facts” about societies that never existed but that they speak to human behavior in the real world. In the two major state societies depicted in The Lord of the Rings, myth functions like it does in modern nation-states. Rohirrim and Gondorians tell myths founded in history that help them understand their places in the world, consolidate political power, and band together in times of difficulty. Revealingly, both kingdoms also wage self-destructive wars against outsiders whose difference is established not by inborn traits but by these same myths. Tolkien created a setting in which nationalist myth-making leads directly to violence. Through implication, he suggests the same is true in the readers’ world.
Admittedly, the extent to which Tolkien expects readers to agree or disagree with his characters’ beliefs and prejudices is often unclear. Characters’ descriptions of “wild men of the East” and “cruel Haradrim” go mostly unchallenged by the narrative, and readers should not explain the racism in Tolkien’s works as emanating solely from his characters’ subjective points of view. However, Tolkien’s novel supports multiple, even contradictory meanings. His created histories are too carefully developed for the implications about the dangers of nationalist myth to be accidents of runaway worldbuilding.
Although Tolkien never sought to create a “mythology for England,” as fans and critics sometimes claim, literary scholar Dimitra Fimi identifies nationalistic motivations in Tolkien’s early writings. In her book Tolkien, Race and Cultural History, Fimi tracks how these influences diminished over Tolkien’s lifetime, beginning at about the time of The Hobbit’s publication in 1937. When The Lord of the Rings was published in 1954–55, Tolkien “knew much more about nation formation and about how peoples, languages and traditions intermingle,” Fimi writes.
Courtesy of World War II he also had an acute awareness of the dangers of insisting on ‘racial’ or even just national purity; he knew how origin and cultural myths could be misused and appropriated.
Ultimately, in the last two decades of his life, Tolkien became increasingly critical of the mythopoeic elements in his work, which Fimi argues contributed to his failure to complete The Silmarillion. Tolkien’s self-reflection mirrors the general soul-searching that occurred among postwar myth scholars, as they reckoned with their discipline’s role in the Holocaust and World War II.
When Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings, he had not yet lost his taste for mythopoeia, but a clear invitation for readers to reflect on nationalist myth-making appears in The Two Towers, when Sam sees the body of a Haradian soldier killed by Gondorian Rangers. Although he has just heard two Rangers curse the Haradrim as allies of Sauron, his thoughts go out to the dead man:
It was Sam’s first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man’s name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace—all in a flash of thought which was quickly driven from his mind.
Sam ponders not only the man’s identity but the narratives—“lies or threats”—that had motivated him to kill strangers in a foreign land. This recalls the Dunlendings’ “old hatred” exploited by Saruman, which is not a lie in the sense of being a total fabrication but is a selective telling of the truth that ignores past coexistence with the Rohirrim. It also recalls Rohirric and Gondorian hatred for “wild hill-men” and “cursed Southrons” and the half-truths they tell themselves, erasing more complicated histories. In Middle-earth, violence against outsiders is not only a consequence of nationalist myth-making but directly encouraged by it, a theme that resonates with Tolkien’s life experience as a veteran of one world war and witness to another.
Because Tolkien’s worldbuilding speaks to historic realities, this passage also calls on readers to consider mythopoeic narratives in their own societies. Not all uses of myth are destructive, but the myths employed by modern nation-states easily enable violence against someone. As I write this, the people of the United States have reelected a presidential candidate who has promised violence against “outsiders”: immigrants, ethnic and racial minorities, women, and members of the queer and transgender communities. It has been more than a year since the beginning of genocide in Palestine, and more than two years since the invasion of Ukraine. These events did not occur out of spontaneous hatred. They are enabled not only by impersonal societal structures and the malice of individuals but also by narratives people create about the past and their relationships to it.
In this historical moment, we should consider what myths look like, how they are created and transmitted, who they include and exclude, and what other effects they bring about. It’s important we assess not only the myths we identify as harmful or that are believed by other people, but also the narratives we draw meaning from ourselves.
Further Reading:
Myth Scholarship:
Flood, Christopher G. Political Myth: A Theoretical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Lincoln, Bruce. Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Schöpflin, George. “The Functions of Myth and a Taxonomy of Myths.” In Myths and Nationhood, edited by Geoffrey Hocking and George Schöpflin, 19-35. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Smith, Anthony. “‘The Golden Age’ and National Renewal.” In Myths and Nationhood, edited by Geoffrey Hocking and George Schöpflin, 36-59. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Tolkien Scholarship:
Bowman, Mary R. “The Story Was Already Written: Narrative Theory in The Lord of the Rings.” Narrative 14, no. 3 (2006). Accessed October 19, 2024. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20107391.
Brown, Sara. “Remembering and Forgetting: National Identity Construction in Tolkien’s Middle-earth.” Journal of Tolkien Research 19, no. 3 (2024). Accessed October 19, 2024. https://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol19/iss3/8.
Emanuel, Tom. “By the Waters of Anduin We Lay Down and Wept: Tolkien’s Akallabêth and the Prophetic Imagination.” Mallorn no. 64 (2023).
Fimi, Dimitra. Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Works by J.R.R. Tolkien:
The Fellowship of the Ring, 2nd edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965.
The Return of the King, 2nd edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965.
The Two Towers, 2nd edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965.
“On Fairy-Stories.” In The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, 109-157. London: HarperCollins, 2006.
Abby Roberts is a writer of science fiction and fantasy who enjoys medieval history and indie rock. She lives in Virginia, United States, with her dog, Violet.