Mt. Doom and Stromboli, & Other Correlates of Middle-earth

[Extollager]

In a separate thread

http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/546846-mt-doom-and-mt-elburz-in-the-caucasus.html#post1781648

I said that it seems that somewhere Tolkien said, or is reported to have said, that Mt. Doom (Orodruin) correlates with Mt. Elbrus or Elbruz in the Caucasus Mountains. As of this writing I have not been able to track down where I read this.

However, I have found some interesting nuggets related to the topic of real-world correlates of Third Age Middle-earth locales.

I thought it would be good to have a thread that could explore various angles on such topics. One reason for doing so is as a push-back against what's getting fixed in some fans' minds, namely the locations used in recent movies based on Tolkien. So far as I know, Tolkien had no interest in New Zealand and no images therefrom in his mind. If, then, we want to relate our reading of his books to real-world locales, we do well to ponder the nuggets we have relevant to that matter.

I will share some things I have seen and invite others to do so, to comment on what we come up with here, etc.

 

[Extollager]

Here are a few things from my collection that I came across when I was looking for verification of the Mt. Doom - Mt. Elbrus connection.

1.Henry Resnik/Resnick interviewed Tolkien for a Saturday Evening Post profile. The transcript of their conversation is reprinted in the 18th issue of the fanzine Niekas, which is available here:

eFanzines.com - Niekas

This interview really is of exceptional interest. Here, Resnik asks if Middle-earth is Europe, and Tolkien replies (page 41): "Yes, of course -- Northwestern Europe where I was born -- well, I wasn't born there, actually; but where my imagination comes from."

2.In Clyde Kilby's Tolkien and the Silmarillion (Harold Shaw, 1976), the author, who became a friend of Tolkien, says that he mentioned the interview to Tolkien. He says that Tolkien "denied ever having said these things" (p. 51)!

3.But Kilby says also that, later on, he asked Tolkien where Numenor was, and Tolkien said "In the middle of the Atlantic" (p. 52).

4.Kilby says that a profile of Tolkien by Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, published in the 22 March 1968 London Daily Telegraph Magazine, reports Tolkien said that Mordor "would be roughly in the Balkans."

I might have a copy of the Plimmer profile somewhere and if I discover it, I should be able to verify Kilby's reference. I would give much credence to Kilby. He was a scholar and a trusted friend of Tolkien late in Tolkien's life.

5.In the fanzine Tolkien Journal 3:4 (Whole Number 10, Nov. 1969), a letter from Chris Jones with an editorial comment reports that Dick Plotz, president of the Tolkien Society, reported that "Tolkien says Stromboli is Mount Doom" (p. 22).

 

[Extollager]

In my previous messages above, I'm dealing with "correlates," i.e. statements by Tolkien that suggest a Middle-earth (secondary-world, in Tolkien's terminology -- an imagined realm) locale is a real-world (primary world) one.

Related to this is the topic of "associations," i.e. real-world locales that Tolkien saw as being "like," or as having "inspired," Middle-earth ones.

A good example is the association of Rivendell and/or Dunharrow with the Lauterbrunnental in the Swiss Alps. (See Scull and Hammond, The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Chronology volume, pp. 27-28). See here:

Rivendell in Switzerland

Neat, isn't it? But I would urge that everyone be careful to distinguish clearly between true correlates and these associations or inspirations. There is no authorization, so far as I know, for anyone to say that the Lauterbrunnental "is" Rivendell.

 

[Extollager]

We should soon have a book that makes interesting connections between The Hobbit and a map of Wales:

The Hobbit - Professor J.R.R. Tolkien's magic mirror maps of Wales - Matador Non-Fiction - Stephen Ponty

But this is not a matter of a "correlate" in the sense I am using the term.

 

[Extollager]

Tolkien on Tom Bombadil as the "spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside):

http://www.csun.edu/~dar04956/literature/lordoftherings/tolkien_tom_bombadil.pdf

See excerpt from Letter 19 above. I take this to be more an "association" or "inspiration" than a correlation, i.e. one should be a bit cautious about inferring from it that the Old Forest-Barrow Downs area is the Oxford-Berkshire countryside back in the Third Age.

 

[Extollager]

See "Personal Experience" here:

J. R. R. Tolkien's influences - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Extollager]

In #321 in Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, JRRT wrote (4 Feb 71) that the Helm's Deep passage was written just after he revisited the Cheddar Gorge caves in 1940 and "coloured by my memory of them much earlier before they became so commercialized. I had been there during my honeymoon nearly thirty years before."

An association, not a correlate.

 

[Extollager]

This is a placeholder: there's an authentic remark somewhere from Tolkien about how a real world locale reminded him of Ithilien, or something like that. My sense is that he saw the place after he described Ithilien.

 

[Extollager]

Another placeholder: Scull and Hammond, JRRT C & G: Reader's Guide (p. 1100) gather some information relating to Tolkien's relating of the Shire to a "Warwickshire village of about the time of the Diamond Jubilee [of Queen Victoria, 1897]," etc.

But this too is an "association" or "inspiration." I think the topic of actual "correlates" has not been quite squeezed dry.

 

[Extollager]

In the earliest phase of his mythologizing, Tolkien did intend real-world correlates of imagined scenes.

Kortirion among the Trees: the Influence of Warwick on JRR Tolkien's vision of Middle-earth, an essay - The Tolkien Society

 

[Extollager]

Back to correlates. In reporting on the Niekas interview in message #2 above, I neglected to mention that, asked what is east of Rhun and south of Harad, Tolkien says:

"Rhun is the Elvish word for 'east.' Asia, China, Japan, and all the things which people in the west regard as far away. And south of Harad is Africa, the hot countries."

Resnick then asked:"That makes Middle-earth Europe, doesn't it?" and Tolkien replied, "Yes, of course."

 

[Extollager]

I found an interlibrary loan copy of the Plimmer article that I mentioned above, by the way, and can verify that Kilby quoted it correctly, the Plimmers reporting that Mordor "would be roughly in the Balkans" (p. 32 of their article).

That put me up to checking The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, which contains his 8 Feb 1967 letter to the Plimmers. Page 376 is quite a rift of ore for the topic of this thread. Here Tolkien says that LOTR "takes place in the North-west of 'Middle-earth', equivalent in latitude to the coastlands of Europe and the north shores of the Mediterranean. .... If Hobbiton and Rivendell are taken (as intended) to be at about the latitude of Oxford, then Minas Tirith, 600 miles south, is at about the latitude of Florence. The Mouths of Anduin and the ancient city of Pelargir are at about the latitude of ancient Troy," i.e. Hisarlik, Turkey.

 

[JoanDrake]

You mean WE'RE the Blessed Realms?


I knew we were ok, but...


My understanding is that Tolkien was not exactly a world traveler, though he was certainly not uneducated in geography. Still there wasn't any Internet back then or to be honest, even a whole lot of picture books or magazines, compared to what we have now. Even though Tolkien would undoubtedly have access to almost all of what existed it would still take considerable time and research for him to get all the places he mentions from real cognates.


I can't help but think it would be a whole lot easier for a brilliant man with a vivid imagination to just make it all up, and then say. "Oh, yes, you're certainly right about that," whenever he was asked if such and such was actually so and so. It wouldn't be like he was lying. It was just the polite thing for an Oxford don to do.


I remember reading somewhere that the Barrows was based on Tolkien's WWI experience of No Man's Land. It does have a certain verisimilitude that doesn't seem as strong in most of his other places

 

[Pyan]

A direct correlation, though of person, not place is between Sam Gamgee and the ordinary soldier of the 1914-18 war:

"My 'Sam Gamgee' is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself"

JRR Tolkien, The Authorised Biography, Ch. 8, Humphrey Carpenter.

I remember reading somewhere that the Barrows was based on Tolkien's WWI experience of No Man's Land.

I hadn't heard that association - the only one I was aware of is in the Letters:

"The Dead marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme."

Letters 226: to Professor L.W. Forster, 31 December 1960

 

[Extollager]

By the way, just as a sidebar, here are a couple of things I ran across:

--"The Elder Ages and the Later Glaciations of the Pleistocene Epoch" by Margaret M. Howes, in Tolkien Journal III:2 (1967). Pseudo-scientific paper. "[W]hat remains of the sunken land of Numenor is now that portion of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge south of Latitude 45, and centered on the mountain peaks now called the Azores." "The Gottweig Interstadial, in which we place the Second, Third, and beginning of the Fourth Ages of Middle-earth, lasted from 95,000 to 11,000 years before the present time." A disaster in the Fourth Age resulted in the present contours of the Eurasian landmass. After Sauron's downfall at the end of the Third Age, vast caverns under Mordor were discovered. The first immigrants into Mordor rightly shunned them and concerned themselves with the rehabilitation and cultivation of that land. In time, cattle thrived on the "grassy plains of Gorgoroth." But, in time, some men began to explore the caverns, finding "mighty machines of the Dark Lord." The then-king and his counselors urged that these caverns be sealed. A faction, however, insisted that knowledge as such was not harmful and the king yielded to them and granted permission for further exploration. In time, the fascination of the relics of Mordor became obviously something more sinister than a disinterested quest for knowledge. "n their arrogance, they let loose forces they could not control"...

---"The Mines of Mendip and of Moria" by J. S. Ryan (Mythlore #63, 1990) suggests that J. W. Gough's book The Mines of Mendip was a source for Tolkien's imagining of Moria. Mining in Somerset goes back to ancient times. I won't attempt to summarize Ryan's article.

 

[Extollager]

5.In the fanzine Tolkien Journal 3:4 (Whole Number 10, Nov. 1969), a letter from Chris Jones with an editorial comment reports that Dick Plotz, president of the Tolkien Society, reported that "Tolkien says Stromboli is Mount Doom" (p. 22).

Jones likely referred to something in the fanzine Niekas, page 40 of issue #19. Dick Plotz reports that he saw Tolkien on November 1 [1966]. Tolkien had recently returned from a Mediterranean cruise. Plotz says that Tolkien told him that he was (now I quote Plotz) "quite certain that Mordor corresponds more or less (and of course all this is more or less) to the Mediterranean volcanic basin, and he saw Mount Doom. At night the boat he was on went past Stromboli which was spewing fire."

On this, see Scull and Hammond, J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, the Chronology volume, page 801.

I'm not yet willing to surrender the impression that somewhere Tolkien has been reported as saying something about Mt. Elbrus/Elburz.

http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/546846-mt-doom-and-mt-elburz-in-the-caucasus.html#post1781648

I'd like to mention again that there's a thread on vintage Tolkien fanzines:

http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/547043-vintage-tolkien-fanzines.html#post1786194

 

[Boaz]

I posted recently in the Tolkien Trivia thread about the Roman legend of Horatius Cocles.

Horatius, nicknamed Cocles (One-eye), defended the Pons Sublicius (Sublician Bridge) with three friends against the army of Lars Porsena, King of Clusium, in the latter 6th century B.C. While the Romans hacked apart the wooden bridge Horatius and his friends bought them time. His friends turned and ran back before the bridge was destroyed, but Horatio stayed until he was cut off. With heaps of Etruscan dead protecting him, Horatius turned and dived into the Tiber. He swam home to a hero's welcome. During the Council of Elrond, Boromir claimed to have done the same thing at the last bridge to Osgiliath.

 

[Extollager]

Here's confirmation of Tolkien on Stromboli - Mordor:

• Dick Plotz states that Tolkien discovered Mordor while on a cruise in the Mediterranean. He sailed past Stromboli while it was erupting at night, and according to Plotz "he'd never seen anything that looked so much like Emyn Anar."

See on Niekas #19.

 

[Extollager]

An exciting piece of evidence has come to light!

http://www.theguardian.com/books/20...th-annotated-map-blackwells-lord-of-the-rings

 

[galanx]

While I don't know of any references, it would seem that Laketown is derived from the lake-villages first discovered in Switzerland in 1854, and later elsewhere in Northern Europe, including Glastonbury

In the winter of 1854, the commune of Meilen took advantage of exceptionally low water levels to start building a harbour on the shore of Lake Zurich.

Quite by chance, the excavations unearthed a number of odd-looking, superbly preserved ancient artefacts, and a series of wooden poles embedded in the mud. The diggers had found a prehistoric lake village.

Ferdinand Keller, a Zurich scholar, put forward a theory that the people here had lived in villages built on platforms above the water which were connected by bridges and walkways.

After the discovery of similar settlements on other Swiss lakes, the legend of the lake dwellers was born. Soon, it had fired Europe’s imagination. Articles in the press, exhibitions, historical paintings, novels, public events, calendars and schoolbooks fuelled the legend of the lake dwellers.

In subsequent decades, hundreds of lake villages were discovered – especially in the Alpine Arc from France to Slovenia, though similar settlements were also found in several other parts of Europe.

Alas, modern archaeology has revealed them as more prosaic.

In recent decades, modern scientific analysis and dating techniques have revealed that the villages were rather less exotic than our 19th-century ancestors had believed.

Today, specialists prefer to talk about “lake peoples” who built their settlements at different times from 4300 to 800 BC.

The settlements were actually built on land, usually in marshy areas. At the time, the water level in the lakes was much lower than it is today, and varied from year to year.

Nor were there any platforms. There were only individual, wooden houses standing apart from one another. And the hundreds of poles sunk into the ground date from different periods.

Rediscovering the legend of the lake dwellers - SWI swissinfo.ch

Glastonbury Lake Village - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Still, in Tolkien's day, and certainly up to mine, the reconstructed platforms of wood and wattle built on the lake for protection were prominently depicted in every schoolbook dealing with early European history.