Influences of the germanic and scandinavian mythology in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien

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J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy world depicted in his three major works "The Hobbit", "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Silmarillion" could be called "new" because it is an imaginary one, it is not historical and neither is it of collective origin like the case is with the overwhelming majority of legends and myths all over the world. But, Tolkien's world is certainly not groundless. It is traditional, "borrowing from the power and import of his sources - the "middangeard" of "Beowulf", the grim and brutal cosmos of "The Volsunga Saga", the cold and bitter realm of the "Eddas", all of which left their traces and worked their sway over his own imagination" (Helms, R., 1974). With "The Hobbit" and his early lectures ("Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" in 1936 and "On Fairy-Stories" in 1938) he had rediscovered the value and relevance to our own time of mythic literature and set out to convince his audience of this value because people had in his view "lost the keys to mythic response" (Helms, R., 1974). And as his opinion was one of distress that the English had so few myths of their own and had to live on foreign borrowings, so "he thought he'd make one himself" (Cater,В., 1972).

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