The Real Middle-Earth

by Brian Bates

In The Real Middle-Earth, explore the magically enchanting early-English civilization on which Tolkien based his world of The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien readily admitted that the concept of Middle-earth was not his own invention. An Old English term for the Dark Age world, it was always assumed that the importance of magic in this world existed only in Tolkien’s works; now Professor Brian Bates reveals the vivid truth about this historical culture. Behind the stories we know of Dark Age kings and queens, warriors and battles, lies the hidden history of Middle-earth, a world of magic, mystery and destiny. Fiery dragons were seen to fly across the sky, monsters haunted the marshes, and elves fired poisoned arrows. Wizards cast healing spells, wise trees gave blessings, and omens foretold the deaths of kings. The very landscape itself was enchanted and the world imbued with a life force.

Repressed by a millennium of Christianity, this belief system all but disappeared, leaving only faint traces in folk memory and fairy tales. In this remarkable book Professor Brian Bates has drawn on the latest archaeological findings to reconstruct the imaginative world of our past, revealing a culture with insights that may yet help us understand our own place in the world.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

298 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 1, 2022

Reviews

[Felix · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book does do what it promises: it talks about anglo-saxon, celtic and norse mythology and culture and links this to Tolkiens work. If this sounds interesting to you, do read this book.

But the connections drawn are not always that deep. One can certainly see how this world has influenced Tolkien, and that is interesting, but sometimes you can go pages without Tolkiens work being mentioned. Some of the connections are also very superficial, while others are quite interesting.

Sometimes the book does a good job mentioning the source materials that it draws on but sometimes it also throws out statements and ideas and it is left unclear if they are the authors thoughts or established historical research, which detracts from the reading experience since it puts one in a scrutinising frame of mind.

Some sections are written with too rambling and repeat explanations of basic things from previous sections. The book could use a little editing.

All in all an interesting book to read that does deliver on its premise but there are many improvements that could be made to it.

[Michel · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you are looking for a book that explains the sources of Tolkien's work, don't read this. This is a book about pre-conquest society, filled with conjecture, suppositions and a failed attempt at melodramatic story-telling. Constantly referring to society before 1066 as 'the real Middle-earth' is a pathetic attempt at invoking a relationship to Tolkien's writing that doesn't materialise. Only very occasionally - once in 30 pages or so - is there any mention of an event in LOTR or The Hobbit that may be explained by Celtic or Anglo-Saxon traditions or religious beliefs. In itself the book is an enumeration of historical facts and surmises, that might definitely be the result of actual study on the part of the author, but connecting it to the works of Tolkien is pertinently only done to draw the wrong kind of attention to it. As someone who expected the works of Tolkien to be explained to me in a true historical context, I feel cheated out of 17 hard earned euros.

[Cian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Truly a bizarre title. The book has next to nothing to do with Tolkien or his influences. It would pass for an okay short-piece on Dark Age England with a splattering of Norse mythology, but its really all-over the place and achieves nothing. Its like a three piece attempt at an archaeological travel book, a history and comparative mythology but it really does fail on all these fronts. The idea of approaching the subject matter in relation to Tolkien's own academic pursuits, interests and creative writings would be an amazing book concept.

But its not attempted here. Despite the packaging. Its an idle scatter-shot attempt at converging topics that are related, and could be compelling as an analysis, but are not presented as such here. Not at all.

The book is just an uncoordinated wandering mash of Dark Age facts, some loose analysis which barely (cannot be overstated how rarely and barely it is!) ever refers to Tolkien, and the same old stories from Norse mythology we've all read about a million times; told in the same way and order again and again without any of the poetry or potency of something like the original Prose Edda or Snorri's works from which all these hack writers repackage the material. I am actually sick of writers like Neil Gaiman or this text here just blandly retelling the stories of famous mythologies... all the Asgards, Fenirs, Lokis etc etc with nothing interesting added. And then making money off the 'new' published texts. At least Stephen Fry put some character into his creative thief of the Classical texts.

But more's to the point, I don't think the author really knows anything about Tolkien. The references he makes are really points that someone who read The Lord of the Rings trilogy a long time ago and who sometimes watches the movies would make. He literally, LITERALLY doesn't even mention Tolkien's own academic pursuits, studies, professorship or any of his correspondances or notes. He just seems to infer that Tolkien was from England and so liked Dark-Age Anglo Saxon lore but then proceeds to just talk about Norse mythology. Explaining or connecting none of it. It's like he takes the connections all for granted but then also adds nothing more to the comparisons.

Tolkien has book loads of correspondences where he talks about his historical, mythological and linguist influences. The author here seems to nothing about that. I don't believe he has read The Silmarillion or anything that Tolkien said or wrote bar the Trilogy and The Hobbit. And even then it is suspect.

For not once does he mention Rohan even when going into depth about the Anglo-Saxons and their spiritual affinity to white horses, and how they venerated the animal at times. He compares abandoned Roman villas and towns to 'Towers of Doom' but does not mention the Númenóreans and talks about spiritual pollutions and taboos and yet doesnt connect that to the Ring... and saying that he rambles on for fifteen, twenty pages about something in Norse mythology that has no parallel at all with either Dark Age Angland or Tolkien, and doesn't even to attempt to connect it thus, and further he doesnt even tell the mythological story of the rings of power in Norse legend.

Also, he says the HobbitS went through Mirkwood. A real place blah blah. Only Bilbo went through Mirkwood. The hobbits, multiple, went nowhere near Mirkwood. Even someone who just watched the movies would know that.

Its all just very weird and scattered. Especially the last third of the book is just endless narrative retellings of mythology. And there's some really weird conflated takes. There is this grand connection to a collective spiritual imagination, but he doesn't ground that idea its presented too whimsically to be of worth.

Really, if this was a:
Book on Norse mythology - 2/5 i.e. redundant, unnecessary.
Book on Dark Age Angland - 3/5 short, scattered, episodic. But with some interesting ideas.
Book on Tolkien's influences - 0/5 literally scant trivia.

Geniunely its like it was a college essay and the guy didn't read or research anything on Tolkien, so wrote this whole answer in response without mentioning him - and then at the end clumsily added in mini paragraphs referring to the Lord of the Rings once every thirty-five pages. I have no patience for endlessly referring to post-Roman Dark Age Angland as 'the Real Middle Earth' four hundred and fifty times. Its dumb. It's like a cheat code added in to justify the misleading title of the book.

The analysis from the Anglo-Saxon's imaginative mind is interesting sometimes, but the connection to the LOTR is literally like - there's a horse in Asgard, just like how Gandalf has a horse. Or that the belief in 'elf-shot' as a causer of disease once upon a time correlates to elves in Tolkien's world. The author really needs to read more Joseph Campbell. Comparative mythology isnt about going "Ohh here it says elf, here it says troll, like in that other book series or series of legends', it has to be more comprehensive and intriguing than that. Though the etymology in this book in find, no where does he talk about Tolkien's genius ability at language, or his extensive study of Dark Age and Middle Age languages,

Overall I find the advertising of Tolkien's Inspiration extremely misleading. If he wanted to write that kind of book he should have done alot more work before putting out this fleeting thing. Its a cobbling together of a bunch of rambling topics that I really was racing through to finish because it bored and frustrated me so much.

I would give it 1/5 stars but there's a few things I underlined as like a series of facts on the Anglo-Saxons, everything else is tripe, unoriginal or really vague.

[Harry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an adequate survey of the pre-Christian culture which extended, for some not-quite-clear period of time across some indeterminate area in Northern Europe, including the British Isles.

"Adequate" perhaps precisely because someone being uncertain what time period and area you're talking about after reading a history book is not a very good sign.

Bates leads hard on his extremely tenuous Tolkienian connection (by far the least interesting thing about his subject): every chapter finishes with a line or two about an episode in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings which loosely connects with whatever Bates has just explored. This has three effects:

1. It's mildly annoying. Pre-Christian cultures are interesting in their own right; I don't need Professor Bates to tell me about how later writers have used the interestingness of these peoples in order to convince me they're interesting.

2. It's inaccurate. As much as I don't especially care about the Tolkienian connections, it's jarring when Bates cites some exemplar from Tolkien and gets it wrong. His connective "and Tolkien used that fact like this..." largely seem to be drawn from Wikipedia summaries of Tolkien's works, further underscoring the pointlessness of the exercise.

3. It reflects a serious lack of confidence. An author in firm command of their material and with a subject worth writing about (I can hear Barbara Tuchman's admonishments in the back of my mind) doesn't need to dither about, scraping together tenuous connections with the work of other writers of greater stature and gravity in order to convince people their own work is worth reading. They just write it because it is worth reading.

By the end, The Real Middle-Earth's lack of self-confidence is extraordinarily grating. Like all the worst history books it is organised by vague themes rather than chronologically (another symptom of the chronically unsure historian: unable to surface themes from narrative themself, they throw coherence out the window and ask the reader to make the story themselves); it insists on a wheedling and obsequious language referring to the civilisation under discussion as "the real middle-earth" about twice per page, which feels more like branding and an appeal to the Tolkien connection than a useful terminology (distinguishing the cultural elements of the subject might have been quite enlightening). Worst of all, it digresses constantly into suggestively-worded but thinly-cited asides about how modern psychology is starting to think a bit differently about this or that element of the unconscious, and if you squint a bit you can make that change look a bit like this "real middle-earth" thing Bates is talking about, so maybe these ancient people knew more than we credit for — but don't ask what he means in too much detail, we're back to oblique references to poorly-remembered Tolkien scenes.

[Jake Lukshmana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read at the suggestion of a book keep. After I went back and thanked him.

It is for those who want to learn about, and reconnect with a pre-christian world view, rather than Tolkien buffs.

Become one with the magic of nature.