"J.R.R. Tolkien had strong and clear views about the Norman Conquest—and they weren’t exactly warm toward the Normans. He viewed the Conquest of 1066 as a cultural catastrophe for England, particularly because it disrupted and diminished the Anglo-Saxon (Old English) linguistic and literary tradition he deeply admired.
Here’s a breakdown of Tolkien’s attitude:
Anglo-Saxon Loyalty - Tolkien consistently favored the Anglo-Saxon and Northern Germanic traditions over the Latinized, courtly, and bureaucratic culture that followed the Norman invasion.
- He admired the Anglo-Saxon heroic ethos, language, and mythology—this is evident in his scholarship on Beowulf and his affection for early English poetry and prose.
- He even described the Anglo-Saxon period as "nobler" in its literary and moral imagination.
View of the Normans - Tolkien saw the Normans as cultural interlopers, imposing a French-based legal and aristocratic system that severed England from its linguistic and mythological roots.
- That quote you cited—"English was a language that could move easily in abstract concepts when French was still a vulgar Norman patois"—perfectly reflects his disdain for what he saw as the coarseness and shallowness of early Norman French compared to the rich, expressive depth of Anglo-Saxon English.
- The post-Conquest French influence, in his view, Latinized and diluted the native English tongue and storytelling tradition.
His Student Speech - As a student at Oxford, Tolkien gave a speech (now lost) in which he allegedly lambasted the Norman Conquest, defending Anglo-Saxon England as a cultural high point and denouncing the Norman intrusion as an aristocratic and linguistic imposition.
- His lifelong resistance to Norman and French influence is echoed throughout his academic writings and fiction.
Influence on Middle-earth - The languages and cultures of Middle-earth reflect this bias. The Rohirrim are clearly modeled on Anglo-Saxons—noble, horse-lords, tied to a heroic oral tradition.
- The more “courtly” cultures like Gondor carry some Greco-Roman echoes, but even they are not portrayed with the haughty Norman-French overlay.
- There’s no clear Norman analogue in Tolkien’s mythology, and that absence is telling.
TL;DR: Tolkien viewed the Norman Conquest as a cultural downgrade, a moment when the heroic, poetic, and abstract depth of English was stifled by vulgar, bureaucratic, Latinized French influence. He saw Anglo-Saxon England as a golden age and was never shy about expressing his bias." |
