"in the Hilt Is Fame": Resonances of Medieval Swords and Sword-Lore in J.R.R. Tolkien's the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings (Critical Essay‪)‬

As part of the powerful and evocative scene in which the Company of the Nine embarks from Rivendell on the quest to return the One Ring to Mount Doom, J. R. R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings provides a detailed description of the war gear borne by each member of the Fellowship: (1) Gimli's axe and Legolas's bow notwithstanding, the place of honor among the weapons carried by the Company is reserved for swords: swords with names, swords with lineages, swords with magical properties, and swords that herald (as Aragorn's does) the closing of the Third Age. Clearly, then, in Middle-earth as in medieval Europe, the sword possesses what its most distinguished modern commentator, Ewart Oakeshott, describes as "a potent mystique which sets it above any other man-made object" (1). Considering that Tolkien's professional life was spent immersed in Germanic, Norse, Celtic, and English medieval literature and mythology, including texts rich in swords and sword-lore, it is scarcely surprising that the characters in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are provided with weapons whose names, descriptions, acquisition, characteristics and lore echo those of what Tolkien called the "northern mythological imagination" ("Monsters" 268), or as one recent critic has put it, the "real Middle-earth" (Bates): Northwestern Europe in the early and central middle ages. This paper seeks to illuminate resonances of medieval swords and sword-lore in Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, where swords and the lore associated with them play important, if largely neglected, roles. (2) It will be argued that the blades of Middle-earth as presented in these works display the influence of famous literary, mythological, and historical weapons from northern Europe in the middle ages, highlighting Middle-earth's well-established inheritance of Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Norse and later medieval literature and mythology. Moreover, because of the association of specific weapons with particular heroes in this literature, such a study also bears on the nature of heroism in Tolkien's work.