Reply-To: The GREYtalk Discussion List
From: Mick Scannell
Subject: [GREYTALK] Re: [GREYTALK] Tenh & Religions
To: GREYTALK@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
I scrawled :
>Tolkein was apparently heavily
>influenced by the Kalevala and drew heavily on it when writing Lord of t
>Rings.
Rob replys :
Less so than Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, and Teutonic sources, however. A good read on this is: “Tolkein: A Look Behind the Lord of the Rings,” by Lin Carter. Also check out “The Letters of JRR TOLKEIN” as selected and edited by Humphrey Carpenter, which supplies the master's insights on this.
... freakily enough, that very night on a book review programme there was an American author who had just completed his latest meisterwerk 'The Hobbit's Companion', which, so he stated, went deep into Tolkein's linguistics background to explain why he named the characters and places in his Middle Earth stuff the way that he did. Bilbo was apparently a 17th century dagger.... Baggins was a mideaval thief .... lots of words like 'tautologies' and 'metaphors' getting bandied about (you get the idea).
Rob then answered an earlier Q of mine :
Nope. I supplied those both in the original supplement “Gods Demi-Gods and Heroes,” and later, as re-written, in “Deities and Demigods.” My main concentration were Norse, Finnish and Central American. Gary loved the write-up I did of the Finns; but he had before that created Mordenkainen to be played in my world of Kalibruhn campaign, which was, at the time, an extension, of sorts, of GH; but far from being an integral part, except in our idea sharing of the time. We freely swapped adventures therein, allowing our PCs (especially Gary's) to traverse back and forth between the two, which was common in those early days of play. Gary, BTW, is quite the historian and had recommended (many years earlier in our association) that I read the *Kalevala*, which I later found time to do in full. A great book and I highly recommend its perusal.
.... aiee! Quelle misspell on my behalf! BTW, there was a Finnish artist called Gallen-Kallela who earlier on this century did a striking series of paintings based on THAT book; if you really enjoyed it then the pictures are a must to see (there are art folios available), with tryptichs of Sampo and his Gold Machine and Vainomoinen (?) Cursing.
This mail is very GH-light; better stick summat in to justify it's bandwidth:
Disclaimer : my observation has probably been talked about and beaten to death more times than E-wing in Johannesburg Prison, but have you ever noticed that :
Olidammara
It's a bit like armadillo spelt backwards, isn't it?
Regards,
Mick
PS : he can create a shell, you know.
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