I was just wondering if anyone knew the name of the myth where we got our Sleeping Beauty from and J.R.R Tolken's The Hobbit from. I remember the Norse myth and it had something to do with a Valkyrie falling in love with a warrior she was suppose to bring to Valhalla but couldn't and she gave up her immortality and goddess like power and had to wait in a tower with a thorn on her finger that made her sleep for him (sound familiar yet?) and there was some references that linked The Hobbit to it that I don't remember the specifics from it because I haven't read the myth since Freshman High School when I took mythology/short stories. Anyway, dose anyone reconise this myth and can tell me it's name so I can look it up. Cause apparently anytime you type in Norse Myth and The Hobbit together, they just keep referring to the fact that dwarves are norse or whatever else that should be freaking obvious if you know any myth what so ever.
J.R.R Tolken And Norse Myth
(9 posts) (7 voices)-
Sun Jul 26 2009 6:11 pm #
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Max
MemberTry searching Sigrdrífumál at Wikipedia.
The link is:
SigrdrífumálSun Jul 26 2009 6:35 pm # -
Interesting but no cigar, maybe ti's one of the other ones listed there.
Sun Jul 26 2009 7:58 pm # -
JohnA1nut
MemberI don't know about those, but I've read that the story of Snow White was based on a true story. The "dwarves" were children forced to work in mines. Because of the backbreaking labor and the intense hours, the children aged prematurely, were hunched over, and didn't live very long. (In other words, children looked a lot like the dwarves in the movie.) "Snow White" was a nickname given to a woman who worked to change these types of labor practices and who helped to get the children out of the mines.
Strange how modern fairlytales almost always have a really evil backstory, isn't it?
Sun Jul 26 2009 9:35 pm # -
As long as we're bringing up tangentially related stories, one of my favorite parts of reading Beowulf (in translation, of course) was realizing that the story of the thief who drove the fire-breathing dragon to a weeks-long destructive rampage by stealing its golden cup bore much to close a resemblance to certain parts of The Hobbit to be entirely coincidental.
Sun Jul 26 2009 10:33 pm # -
JohnA1nut
Memberbore much to close a resemblance to certain parts of The Hobbit to be entirely coincidental.
I don't know Scott. I wrote a story about three divergent versers who jumped in between each other's lives long before I had ever heard of Multiverser. I didn't call them versers or even use the word Multiverse, but it bore a striking resemblance to this. I had never even heard of MJ at the time of the writing.
Mon Jul 27 2009 2:05 pm # -
Ephemeral Dreamer
MemberBringing up really evil back stories, I really like the Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella. I liked how dark it was. Evil step mothers getting their eyes pecked out by your friendly forest animals. Horrid step sisters cutting pieces of their feet off to fit into a glass shoe 3 sizes too small. Ah, the atmosphere was wondrous.
Mon Jul 27 2009 8:04 pm # -
Tadeusz
MemberI'm going to take John's and Wodium's side on this:
1. Before Multiverser, I made a minmax character for Champions that made his way into Northgate City (the Multiverser setting)----Soliton: The Multiversal Man.
2. OTOH, I think I've read that Tolkien wanted to create for England what the Norse had in the way of mythology.Mon Jul 27 2009 9:19 pm # -
That latter is true. Tolkien grieved the fact that pretty much all ancient British Isles mythology had been lost, and wanted to give the British a sort of mythology peculiarly their own, for the cultural enrichment value.
As to what happened to the island mythologies--
- When Christianity came to the isles, the Druid priests themselves came to hear the message, and decided that Christianity was true and the old religion not so, so they shut down their own faith and embraced the new religion. No one then had any reason to preserve what the priests themselves and disavowed. (This, incidentally, was not due to military pressure; the Roman armies were not at that time Christian even in name.)
- Despite their seeming natural protections, the islands were invaded multiple times--by the Saxons, by the Celts, by the Norsemen, by the Normans, each new people bringing their own ideas and beliefs with them. Even Arthurian legend owes more to the French sense of chivalry and Le Morte d'Artur than it does to Welsh influence.
- Even apart from this, what we call Great Britain was divided into warring factions--the Welsh, English, and Scots fought against each other, but (particularly the Scots) also fought between themselves when they did not have an outside enemy to unite them. Nearly any mythologies that did exist were extremely regionalized and even localized.
- It doesn't help that in the nineteenth century a few "scholars" who wanted to be famous wrote treatises about ancient Celtic and other beliefs that were largely speculative and invented, which were taken for fact because of their supposed scholarly origins. This blurred the lines between identifiable original and inventive accretion.
- Even the earliest English written stories, such as Beowulf and Gawain and the Green Knight already show the marks of Christian influence; there just doesn't seem to be any written accounts of earlier beliefs.
Tolkien felt that this loss made it more difficult for the English to self-identify as a united people. The Germans and the Scandinavians had rich mythologies, and their modern identities were in some ways built on the sense of who they once were. For the British, who they once were was not much more than a history of invading armies replacing earlier regimes, a hodgepodge of ethnic backgrounds.
It's difficult to grasp why this is a problem for those of us in America, because to some degree that is our identity: we embrace that we are a hodgepodge of ethnic backgrounds, and draw our identity from that. But Tolkien thought that the European nations that had that sort of mythological identity for themselves built from it great cultural achievements that England somehow lacked.
I suppose that makes it an extremely ambitious undertaking, but that seems to be what he was hoping. He certainly did not achieve that, but he did give fantasy a huge boost in the English-speaking world, which may be something of the same thing.
Forgive me for rambling.
--M. J. Young
Mon Jul 27 2009 10:12 pm #
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