To: Tom Clarke who wrote (7759 ) 6/19/2025 8:01:59 AM From: Maple MAGA 1 RecommendationRecommended By
Read Replies (1) | Respond to "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.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."
