Old Norse

Tolkien’s scholarly interest in Old Norse is well attested, and the imprint on his fiction ranges from borrowed names to entire species of supernatural creature extracted from the mythology and reimagined in a heroic landscape of MyrkviÐr and NiÐafjöll. Old Norse was the language of Viking Age and medieval Scandinavia and the ancestor of modern Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Faroese. The Hobbit “was never intended to have a sequel”, and Tolkien now faced the difficulty of harmonizing a children’s tale that was predominantly Norse in character with an increasingly complex and variegated legendarium, itself influenced to some degree by the Norse pantheon. Within the framing narrative for The Hobbit, there are a series of episodes that together constitute a patchwork of Norse characters and themes, often placed in dialogue with the original literature.