The Finnish Epic Behind Tolkien's Lord of the Rings

Generations of readers have cherished Middle Earth, the fantasy universe sprung from the mind of storyteller J.R.R. Tolkien. Now, his magical world has been brought to life with the premiere of the first film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring. While the author's imagination was vast, Tolkien's world and its cast of characters do have roots in real-world history and geography, from the world wars that dominated Tolkien's lifetime to the ancient language and legends of Finland.

Anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis recently traveled to a remote area in eastern Finland to uncover Tolkien influences that stretch back thousands of years into the misty past of northern Europe.

Davis, a National Geographic Society Explorer in Residence, journeyed to the Viena Karella region, along the Russian border, to study Finnish. By the 19th century this area was a last refuge for the unique Finnish language.

Nearly all Finns at that time were speaking Swedish or even Russian, the region's established written languages. But their own language still existed in this isolated region as it always had—in oral form, passed down through the ages from one generation to the next as an epic song, the saga of the Finnish people.

The epic (comparable to India's Ramayana, or the Greek Odyssey) is called the Kalevala, and those who sing its lyrical verses from memory are known as "rune-singers." These elders long carried in their minds the entire record of the Finnish language.

"In an oral tradition, the total richness of the language is no more than the vocabulary of the best storyteller," Davis explains. "In other words, at any one point in time the boundaries of the language are being stretched according to the memory of the best storyteller."

In the Viena Karella region, the oral tradition of the Finnish language is still alive, but now contained in the memory of just a single storyteller. His name is Jussi Houvinen, and he's Finland's last great rune-singer. This elderly man is a living link to myths and languages from pre-Christian, pre-Neolithic times, that have passed mouth-to-ear over the ages in an unbroken chain.

"It's an amazing thing to be in the presence of a man singing even a snippet of the poem," says Davis of his meeting with Jussi, "because it's so powerful that even if you don't speak Finnish it's profoundly moving just to listen to it, just the cadence of the sounds.

"Being in his presence, and knowing how few people can today recite the poem, you felt you were in the presence of 15,000 years of history that was about to be snuffed out." When Jussi dies the ancient succession of rune-singers will end. No one from a younger generation has been able to learn the vast breadth of the saga.

However, the Finnish language itself will not die with Jussi, due to the efforts of a country doctor named Elias Lönnrot.

In the early 19th century, Lönnrot became enamored of the Finnish epic he found in Viena Karella. He devoted himself to traveling the district, listening to the rune-singers and committing the Kalevala to the written word. This was the genesis not only of the modern Finnish language, but of the Finnish nation as an entity, creating what Davis calls "this wonderful idea of a pre-Christian bardic poem inspiring a modern nation."

The language inspired not only Finnish nationalism, but also a young English scholar and writer named J.R.R. Tolkien, in whose mind was already taking shape a magical universe which was about to be transformed by Finnish language and legend.

In a letter to W.H. Auden, on June 7, 1955, he remembered his excitement upon discovering a Finnish Grammar in Exeter College Library. "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; and I gave up the attempt to invent an 'unrecorded' Germanic language, and my 'own language'—or series of invented languages—became heavily Finnicized [sic] in phonetic pattern and structure."

The Finnish language that so delighted the young student became the inspiration for the lyrical tongue of Middle Earth's elves. Tolkien taught himself the ancient and newly codified Finnish to develop his elfin language, and so that he could read the Kalevala in its original Finnish. This extraordinary achievement opened the door to many further influences from Finnish mythology. Parallels abound between the Kalevala and Tolkien's own saga, in terms of both the characters themselves and the idea of the hero's journey.

The Kalevala features "all the themes of pre-Christian traditions, shape-shifting, mythical demons, magical plants, animals becoming human beings," says Davis, while the story itself "is fundamentally a story of a sacred object which has power, and the pursuit of the mythic heroes who seek that power, to seek a way of understanding what that power means." Davis describes the Kalevala as "a journey of the soul and a journey of the spirit—and that's obviously what drew Tolkien to it."

Tolkien readers have long seen Tolkien's bucolic vision of rural England represented in Middle Earth's The Shire, and recognized English farmers in characters such as the hobbit Sam. But those who explore the Kalevala a may discover much of the land of the elves, and their language, in the vast snowy spruce forests of Finnish legend.

The Kalevala and other influences on Tolkien are the subject of a one-hour documentary National Geographic Beyond the Movie: The Lord of the Rings, which premieres in the United States on December 23 on MSNBC.

Great find blam!

Oh great and might ring ping king, wanna ping the ring list?

To: jrherreid; HairOfTheDog; RosieCotton; billbears; ObfusGate; austinTparty; Texas2step; jrherreid...

Shhh... don't tell the anti-Harry Potter people.

as a Finnish America I love this story....

Terve!

I agree great find, however I'm a little confused by the intent of the author of the article. It seems as if he is trying to put down the Christian aspect of LOTR. It is amazing though to the extent that Tolkien went to develop the Elvish language

On a different note, to hear Tyler speak it was a pleasure in itself. And this is coming from someone that didn't even want to see her in the movie

The first fifteen minutes I really tried to look at it from the book POV but quickly was overwhelmed. Tyler did quite a bit of growing up for that role. She was perfect!! The only thing I did find distrubing was when Bilbo attacked Frodo at Rivendell over the ring. Understanding why it was done that way, I still think they could have done that without the special effects.

My understanding is that the main source was the collection of Icelandic sagas known as "The Elder Edda" written around 1000 A.D. Richard Wagner also drew on these for his 4-opera cycle, "The Ring of the Nibelung. I remember Eddic verses such as,

"Gunnar, no joy will the gold give thee, the rings shall soon thy slayers be."
and
"In swirling waters, Gaulish rings will gleam; rather than gold shine in Hunnish hands."

Tolkien drew on a large number of sources for his stories. The mythology involving the Sauron, the Ring and the Men of Numenor, and Gondor is mostly Germanic, as you point out.

The Rohirrim are essentially Anglo-Saxon, a related but different Teutonic group.

The Elves and their languages, OTOH, seem to be largely based on the Finnish epics and language.

The Elves and their languages, OTOH, seem to be largely based on the Finnish epics and language.

Actually, the Elvish languages Tolkien invented came from two sources: Finnish for Quenya and Celtic Welsh for Sindarin. Why? Because Finnish and Welsh were the two foreign languages he liked the most.

Cool, I didn't know that. Although I had observed the similarity to Welsh in Sindarin. I don't know enough about Finnish to recognize it.

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