Happiest of Hobbit Days! Tomorrow, September 22, marks the birthday of both Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, beloved protagonists of J.R.R. Tolkien’s published novels set in Middle Earth. In this latest installment of our annual series examining the Professor’s historical influences, Bryan explores how two of the most famous structures of the Legendarium stem from longstanding human traditions concerning the works of ages past.
“Men said that in the far-off days of the glory of Gondor the sea-kings had built here this fastness with the hands of giants.”
So does J.R.R. Tolkien begin his description of the Hornburg, the great fortress that guards the vale of Helm’s Deep. One of the reasons most commonly offered for the enduring power and authenticity of Tolkien’s Middle Earth is that it is a fictional world that feels thoroughly lived-in, populated with cultures that bear the weight of millennia of tradition and filled with the ruins and remnants of bygone kingdoms. For a story that is so informed by the slow decline and collapse of prior civilizations, it makes sense that these ruins are nigh-omnipresent throughout the three books of The Lord of the Rings, from the ruined watchtower of Amon Sul to the abandoned seats of Amon Hen and Amon Lhaw and desolate mansions and estates of Ithilien. Yet the two great fortresses of the story which serve as focal points for pivotal battles are described differently than all the others. As the wizard Gandalf and his halfling charge Pippin approach Minas Tirith, the great city and citadel of what remains of the realm of Gondor, Tolkien employs language remarkably similar to his description of Helm’s Deep:
And upon [Mount Mindolluin’s] out-thrust knees was the Guarded City, with its seven walls of stone so strong and old that it seemed to have been not builded but but carven by giants out of the bones of the earth.
These fortresses strike the characters, and thus the reader, as something more than simply ruins. They are ancient, awe-inspiring, standing defiantly amongst the mists of time out of some dim-remembered past and constructed with such perfect skill as to seem hardly the work of mortal beings.
While these mythical descriptions of age-old architecture sound right at home in a fantasy setting, they actually come from a long historical tradition of attributing enduring, titanic architecture to the efforts of “giants.” The most salient parallel, given Tolkien’s background as a scholar of Anglo-Saxon, is that of early medieval Britain. The modern historian Max Adams has called it the “Land of Giants,” and one can understand why. As Romano-British and then Anglo-Saxon farmers and war leaders scratched out a living among thatched huts in the shadow of abandoned Roman cities and the great Wall, it’s eminently understandable they might wonder at these monumental works of the past. The problem here, though, is that the medieval world never really lost track of the the Romans, nor were their building techniques unapproachably advanced. The real “giants” of Dark Age Britain were more figures of Celtic and Germannic mythology, with suitably older references: it was the crude yet massive Iron Age hill forts and megalithic sacred stones of the far distant past that were the gigantic works here.
Tolkien’s great fortifications, however, are described like they are as much on account of the skill of the ancients as their imposing size and age, and as I completed my most recent re-read of the Trilogy, I was put in mind of a different topic, one that I’d studied rather extensively in undergrad. Early medieval Europe was not the first society to live in the aftermath of societal collapse. Around 1200 BC, the eastern Mediterranean world underwent what scholars currently agree appears to be some kind of catastrophic, cascading system failure in what is known as the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Centuries later, the Greek city states would rise again amongst the ruins of their prior glory, with such legendary locations as Mycenae and Pylos not only preserved in their mythological traditions but visible on the landscape in the form of tumbled, half-buried ruins. Many of these structures would be known by a term we still use today: Cyclopean. Not only were the Cyclopes of Greek myth giant in size, they were as a group more technically skilled than their most famous example, Polyphemus of Homer’s Odyssey, would suggest. They were children of Poseidon, god of the sea, the personal assistants of Hephaastus, god of the forge, and those responsible for forging the mightiest weapon in existence: the thunderbolts of Zeus. Indeed, the size and complexity of the ancient ruins that surrounded the Classical Greeks led them to wonder at their construction just as we still wonder at the grandeur of the Great Pyramids at Giza. In modern academic parlance, “Cyclopean masonry” still refers to this style of architecture used in Mycenaean citadels, most famously those at Tiryns, Gla, and Mycenae itself. It is characterized by walls made from massive boulders, either apparently unfinished or only partly carved, and fitted together tightly with a minimum of clay mortar—and often no mortar at all. Combined with the polished, tightly-fitted ashlar masonry which Bronze Age Greeks also employed in building, it’s little wonder that their descendants attributed their works to a race of semi-divine giants.
While neither the hill forts of Britain nor the grand citadels of Bronze Age warlords quite approach the quality and strength of the walls constructed by Tolkien’s long lived, enlightened men from across the sea, therein lies the prerogative of the fantasy author’s pen. Minas Tirith and Helm’s Deep may be heightened versions of our own historical traditions, but their connection to more realistic forebears is one of those things that has made Middle Earth feel so much more authentic than a simple fantasy world to generations of fans.