What's the original source for tolkien-esque lore. Is it Tolkien or did he draw from something else?
Specifically I was wondering if elves and dwarves have genders and sexual dimorphism.
>>44018149
if you read the appendices in the back of his books he explains it himself you lazy turd.
>>44018149
>What's the original source for tolkien-esque lore. Is it Tolkien or did he draw from something else?
Seeing that the tale of a war for a magical ring which gives power to control a world filled with magic was a favourite of the Nazis, and The Lord of the Rings was published in the 50s, yes, I would say it has some influences.
And that same story has it's roots on another tale about a cursed ring, a broken sword which has to be rebuilt to recover a lineage and a grey wandering wizard and god with many names.
Now go take a look at some basic mythology books.
Norse myth, Saxon myth, and Catholicism.
Siegfried, which is in turn about Nordic/Saxon mythology.
>>44018149
His worldbuilding was partly inspired by norse mythology, specifically the Prose Edda and Poetic Edda.
In Tolkien's middle earth, elves and dwarves have both males and females, with female dwarves being rarer and difficult to identify due to their likeness to male dwarves.
I've read a folklore book that stated that dwarves and elves are actually one species, with dwarves being the males and elves being the females, but that was likely an isolated idea.
Whenever I hear about Tolkien fiction, I can't help but think about the screencap of that one guy on a forum saying, first, that One Piece, DBZ, Naruto, etc, are older than Lord of the Rings, and then, when he's proven wrong, saying that the books weren't popular and they're only popular now because they made movies of them recently, in relation to the post.
>>44024274
oh yea. You didn't know the books were based on the movies? Tolkien just added a bunch of random noncanon fluff to Jackson's original film trilogy.
Tolkien was a linguist foremost, and his main competences and interests lay in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian literature. For instance then, things like the Prose Edda, the Völsung Saga and Beowulf. He was also interested in Finnish mythology, such as the Kalevala (essentially the Finnish national epic assembled from Finnish and Karelian folk tales). Lastly, the cosmology of Middle-Earth and Ea is based around his own personal Christian faith and literary philosophy of "sub-creation", which made him interpret his own self-made cosmology as an extension of the Abrahamic creation story and metaphysics. Sometimes the dwarves are interpreted to have been influenced by him assigning a "older covenant" to one race, thus modelling them on Jews. That theory isn't entirely without controversy, though.
>>44018149
Beowulf.
>>44024215
>I've read a folklore book that stated that dwarves and elves are actually one species
Elf, just like goblin, groups together various creatures. A dwarf is an elf, just like the creatures who helped the norns, and if I recall correctly the spirits of small kids also were elves.
It's just that nowadays pop culture relates elves, just as goblin, to a concrete kind of creature. But that is a modern meaning of the word.
>>44024472
>which made him interpret his own self-made cosmology as an extension of the Abrahamic creation story and metaphysics
Wasn't that actually an influence from a Christian or jewish sect? If I recall correctly, there is an interpretation of the holy book which says that inventing another world is like saying you don't like ours, and so insulting god. And Tolkien was influenced by that idea.
>>44024842
I AGREE.
>>44024842
Elf, Fey, Spirit, Goblin, Vila. They were all umbrella terms that came to mean a specific type of being. In the original stories a faerie could be anything from a household brownie to a malevolent black dog, with the description of the same creature often changing from village to village.
>>44024909
I think it's more a case of how he believes the real world to have come into being influencing how he makes his fictional world come into being. Worldview and shit
>>44018149
Drew inspiration from nordic mythology and The Worm Ouroboros from what I heard.
>>44018149
Hey.
That's a cute pig.
>>44018149
Tolkien based a lot of his work on Norse and Finnish Mythology.
Gandalf was apparently inspired by Väinämöinen from Kalevala.
