The Stones and the Book: Tolkien, Mesopotamia, and Biblical

Mythopoeia

Nicholas Birns

I. The Book: Middle-earth, the Bible, and Mythopoeia

This article will discuss the influence of ‘Biblical

mythopoeia’ on Tolkien’s work. What is meant by “Biblical

mythopoeia’ is those parts of what Christians call the Old

Testament that are consciously mythic rather than historical

or theological in genre—the first nine or so chapters of

Genesis. Mythopoeia as a mode is also of course present in

the New Testament, and Tolkien’s close colleague C. S. Lewis

was famous for describing the Christ story as a ‘true

myth”1. This essay will at times take into account this

connection between the New Testament and myth, but it will

largely concentrate on the earliest portions of the Old

Testament./Hebrew Bible, and leave for another day or

another hand the entire question of explicit New Testament

influences. This may seem a very small portion of the Bible

to concentrate on, but it is the best-known portion of the

Bible, and the most controversial, and also the most crucial

for an understanding of the order and composition of the

world and of the Bible’s theory of human nature, both very

key issues form Tolkien in the shaping of Middle-earth. This

article will also take account, though, of the transition

that occurred in “Biblical mythopoeia” that had begun in the

mid-nineteenth century and was arguably completed in

Tolkien’s lifetime—the taking into account of neighboring

and predecessor civilizations, such as the Sumerian, Assyro-

Babylonian and Hittite, in influencing the stock of words

and concepts from which Tolkien could draw.

Randal Helms pioneered the significant study of

Tolkien’s relation to the Bible in Tolkien and the Silmarils

(1981), and many of the basic set of understandings of the

way in which the Silmarillion parallels the Bible’s account of

origins were first established by helms. As Christina Ganono

Walton says in her article on Tolkien and the Bible in The

Tolkien Encyclopedia, “Tolkien was familiar with the Bible in

all its aspects because of his religious devotion and his

work as a philologist.” Tolkien contributed, briefly, to

the Jerusalem Bible, the Roman Catholic English translation

first published in 1966; he worked on the Book of Jonah, not

Job as is sometimes erroneously said2. There have been many

theological analyses of Tolkien, such as those by Fleming

Rutledge and Ralph Wood, but these tend to concentrate more

on the New Testament than the Old and are as interested in

thematic and moral commonalities as they are in direct

source-study. Verlyn Flieger has looked at Bible connections

in a more literary and mythic way and provides a needed

corrective to theological overenthusiasms. Mariko Hulme,

importantly, has noted divergence from as well as emulation

of the Bible in Tolkien’s mythopoeic conceptions. As for

Tolkien’s interest in Mesopotamian legend, the subject of

the second half of this paper, as early as Tyler’s New Tolkien

Companion of 1979, the second of the general reference works

to be published on Tolkien, the parallels between the Valar

and the Mesopotamian pantheon as described in the creation

epic Enuma elish are noted. Robert Giddings, rather far-

fetchedly, sees Mordor as equivalent to Babylon, although he

means Babylon in Biblical allegory as much as he means the

historical Babylon. Timothy R. O’Neill’s early Jungian

analysis gets the core issues right, but in its eagerness to

find an archetypal correlate for everything in Tolkien is,

as Treebeard might put it, hastier in identifying Tolkienian

and Mesopotamian usage without due reflection. In several

essays, J. S. Ryan, the noted Australian Tolkien scholar and

polymath, has noted Mesopotamian sources for instance his

notice of a “Suruman” in the records of the Acadian king

Sargon (“Sargon of Agade”) , who, like Saruman, was

associated with metalwork. The Saruman/Sauron,

Suruman/Sargon pairing also opened the door to consideration

of a general Mesopotamian influence on Tolkienian

nomenclature. Ryan has also projected the influence of

Gilgamesh and various Mesopotamian customs on Tolkien. More

subtly, Jared Lobdell saw Babylon as an example of the

city’s potential to both express human aspirations and the 1 . See Lewis’s 1931 letter to Arthur Greeves, “Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth working on us the same way as the others, but with the tremendous difference that it really happened”. See Lyle W. Dorsett, ed. The Essential C. S. Lewisˆ. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996, p. 56.

temptations of will and appetite in Middle-earth. Michael

Martinez has noted the parallel between “Mesopotamia” and

“Minhiriath” as names, which will also be explored below;

Martinez has also noted the Erech/Uruk doubling-in other

words, not just that “Erech” is the Hebrew form of the

Sumerian Uruk, but that Uruk also exists as the Orcish name

for ‘orc’ in the same universe where there is a place called

Erech--that is the major conundrum of the Tolkien

Mesopotamian connection. L. J. Swain’s article on Gimli in

the Tolkien Encyclopedia notes parallels between his martial

prowess and that of Gilgamesh.

Tolkien, as his letter to Milton Waldman indicates,

sought to play down Biblical parallels and sources (both for

fear of being accused of impiety and out of eagerness to

establish the conceptual and philological autonomy of 2 . ˆTolkien’s translation of Jonah was published independently as The Book of Jonah, ed. Brendan Wolfe, London: Dartin, Longman, and Todd, 2009. For those who have wondered, Tolkien transited from a French version, though hewas philologically competent enough in Hebrew to consult lexicons and dictionaries to help him in his task. Hebrew ofcourse would be most philologists’ key to Semitic languages,excluding those specifically concerned with Arabic. Tolkien did not, however ’know’ Hebrew in the sense in which we usually speak of ‘knowing’ a language.

Middle-earth as a world, with an innate linguistic logic,

not one stemming from anterior historical lore). Yet the

Biblical parallels evinced by the creation account at the

beginning of the Ainulindalë part of the Silmarillion are

inescapable. Like that in Genesis (and, as we shall see, in

Enuma elish) Tolkien’s account presents a series of stages

in the shaping of the created cosmos, including but not

limited to the world. The general order parallels what is

given in the Bible; for instance, Ulmo being the first of

the Ainur (excepting Melkor) named in the text (Silmarillion 8)

is compatible with the first image of the universe in the

Bible being the deep, or tehom, which ‘darkness moved upon’

in Genesis 1.2. In both, water precedes earth, the creation

emerges into and is refined towards greater shape, order,

and definition, and transmogrified from a primordial,

inchoate whirl into the world we know. A key from the Bible

account is that the angels, there only sketchily on the Old

Testament and fleshed out in the New and in later tradition,

are, as the Valar, there from the beginning in Tolkien’s

account. Also like Greek and, as we shall see, Mesopotamian

gods, the Valar have areas of specialty and are in their

various spheres vice-gerents of God. Elmo is very like

Poseidon in Greek lore or Ea in Mesopotamian; they have, as

it were, the same portfolio, the spirit in charge of the

sea. Manwë’s relationship to Melkor is structurally much

like the Archangel Michael to Lucifer/Satan in Biblically

based systems, but Michael does not have a locatable seat of

governance as Manwë does on Taniquetil. In this way,

Tolkien’s account is more like Greek creation myths, with

the idea of a “Mount Olympus” and Hesiod surely must have

influenced him at several points. Tolkien was indeed, as C.

S. Lewis noted, adept at “Spenserian harmonizing” of various

traditions, and in doing so he was only following the model

of Christianity in general, in whose cosmic conception Greek

legend inevitably informs much of what is also Biblical.

Moreover, in the Ainulindalë Eru Iluvátar is spoken of as

creating through music, or through music manifested by his

subcreations, the Ainur (the group from which the Valar are

taken, the subcreative, angelic agents). Music is not at all

mentioned in the Biblical Creation account, and perhaps the

main reason why Tolkien employs music as a metaphor for

creation—his source most likely being Lonnröt’s compilation

of the Kalevala--is precisely this. It is different from the

Bible without rivaling or contradicting it; it is a modal

discrepancy, not an ontological or value-laden difference.

Indeed, music is not mentioned in the Bible until Genesis 4,

when Cain’s descendant Jubal is mentioned as the primordial

inventor of the harp and flute. Music is associated with

both degeneracy and technology in the Bible; the emphasis of

the Bible’s creation account is overwhelmingly visual. The

Ainulindalë’s emphasis on music keeps the same message, but

switches the medium. As Jason Fisher points out, music also

provides a very fitting metaphor for the disharmony

introduced into the cosmos by Melkor’s evil, as concord

becomes discord. This arguably rings more true than a visual

metaphor based on the opposition of light and dark—though

Tolkien also uses this more generally in his cosmic

conception.

So Tolkien substitutes for, or, to use the linguistic

term T. A. Shippey has widely popularized within Tolkien

studies, ‘calques’ (takes the shape of and adapts it to a

different, substitutive context) the biblical creation story

in the Ainulindalë. What is important to note is that there

is a Silmarillion-equivalent of Genesis 1, a story that is

fully detailed and enumerated. This is not at all true of

Genesis 2-3, the story of Adam and Eve and the Fall of Man.

Tolkien’s presentation of Hildórien and the primal origin of

the Atani indicates that there was a Fall in their past,

that they were fleeing Westward from some darkness that had

troubled them, and that man was at first left alone to

contend with whatever peril Morgoth could bring upon them:

no Vala was there to guide and counsel them as had occurred

in the case of the Quendi. The Akallabêth can be seen as a

kind of fall—the very name means ‘downfall’—but it is so

tied up with the Greek Atlantis story as to not be purely

Biblical., and is more the ‘fall’ of a nation and its king

than of a species, a living kind; Elendil and his followers

are exempt from Númenor’s fall, but not unregretful of it.

In any event, Númenor was not Eden; it was not a primal

place of innocence, but a restorative land of gift that went

awry. To find the presence of Genesis 2-3 in the legendarium

we need to go back to the First Age.

A difference between Tolkien’s world and that of the

Bible, and for that matter of Mesopotamian legend, is that

the latter two had gods (or a God), angels (or demigods),

human beings, and demons or evil spirits, but they did not

feature other sentient mortal

races. Tolkien certainly does, and this is the backdrop for

how he will handle the Genesis 2-3 material. We are told the

Eldar woke in Cuiviénen, saw the stars there and then were

led to the West; there is the threat of Melkor all around,

but there is no sense of a Fall or a Temptation. In turn,

although there is no returning to Cuiviénen, which is lost

forever, Tolkien, in the History of Middle-Earth and even in

the published Silmarillion itself, makes pretty clear where it

is: “far off in the east of Middle-earth, and northward”

(Silmarillion 45) east and north of Rhûn, on perhaps the far

northeast corner of any conceivable map of Middle-earth. As

the map of Middle-earth does and does not (despite the

opposite demurrals of both Tolkien himself and overeager

critics) correspond to the map of Europe, the location of

Cuiviénen does and does not correspond to, say, the Aral Sea

or perhaps a bay in the Arctic coast of Siberia.

Like the Eldar, men—the Edain, the Atani, the second-

born—come westward, drawn by the refracted lights of the Two

Trees. But Tolkien’s account of them is very different. They

awake in Hildórien, land of the followers, but no physical

details about Hildórien’s geographical location are given.

Moreover, as noted above, the first Atani to manifest

themselves in Eldarin lands speak cryptically of a past

traumatic experience, by which they are clearly, in Jane

Chance’s words, “already corrupted”. (Chance 219). But there

is no alternate version of the Fall of Man equivalent to the

alternate version of the Creation presented in the

Ainulindalë. Even in the Athrabeth Finrod ar Andreth, the place

where Tolkien speaks most explicitly of a Fall, there are

philosophical reactions to the aftermath of an assumed Fall,

and an explanation of Melkor’s capacity to sow the seeds of,

yet not totally to cause, sin that is consistent with

Christian orthodoxy, but there is no story, not even an

implied narrative. What Tolkien unmistakably wants the

reader to do is to themselves ‘supply’ the Biblical account,

plug it in to what happened in Hildórien that made the Atani

flee westward, and go on from there. In other words, the

actual narrative is bracketed in such a way as that the

Genesis 2-3 story would fit in neatly as something that

happened in the world of The Silmarillion, but for reasons of

decorum and subcreative autonomy is left unarticulated3.

This is also why Hildórien, as opposed to Cuiviénen, is not

referred to as ‘lost’, and not given a detailed location;

the Bible gives a lengthy, if nebulous, geographical

description of where Eden was or is. The Bible describes

Eden as largely being in Mesopotamia, or being at the primal

source of all the great rivers of the region, two of which

were those of Mesopotamia. But, with regard to our argument,

this is incidental; it is that the Bible gives the detailed 3 . The Two Trees in Valinor, as has been noted, are reminiscent of the trees in Eden; yet there are a sufficientamount of other mythic trees that this is not an exclusive source. Furthermore, in Tolkien’s world the Two Trees do notgrant eternal life; the figure of incarnate evil goes at them directly, not through human proxies; and his aim is notto gain any secret or to violate any taboo, but to ruin Valinor for the Valar.

location that matters. For Tolkien to introduce any

geographical specificity into his description of Hildórien

would be to rival the Bible.

So far we are one out of two. In his Creation story,

Tolkien freely provides an alternate if not antagonistic,

version, of what the Bible says. In the Fall of Man story he

carefully does nothing to dislodge the possibility of the

Biblical fall, as such, happening in his subcreated world.

There is no Silmarillion equivalent to the Cain-Abel story;

though there are stories of sibling rivalry in the

legendairum (Fëanor and his brothers, especially in Fëanor

being a craftsman as Cain’s offspring were, one could even

see a trace of Cain in Boromir) and, as Lobdell notes

(Lobdell 128), the ambiguity involved Cain as a founder of

cities does most likely inform the conception of a city in

Middle-earth—beacons of light in a dark world, but also (as

with Gondolin) embodiments of their founders’ pride4. But it

is only when we get to the Noah and the Flood story that we

find another parallel

And this parallel is the most remarkable one of all, as

Tolkien actually admits it. He terms Elendil, in his epic

letter to Milton Waldman of 1951, a ‘Noachian figure”,

explicitly bringing in a Biblical trope that, even though he

first wrote it in a private communication he surely knew

the general reader would encounter, and indeed now serves as

a sort of preface to the paperback edition of the published

Silmarillion. Why this rupture of the carefully maintained wall

between the world of Middle-earth and Númenor and that of

the Bible? This allusion speaks very loudly in the writings

of Tolkien simply because he elsewhere takes such pains to

mute parallels, such as his reluctance to make Galadriel a

full ‘type’ to the Virgin Mary. In that same letter to

Waldman, Tolkien speaks of wanting mythic and religious

elements ‘in solution’ (in the chemical sense, in other

words not as ‘the solution’ to’ a problem, Tolkien meant 4 . One must note, though, that Tolkien’s legendarium is on the whole far more positive about cities than is the Old Testament; Minas Tirith, the most visible and functioning city in Middle-earth, is not presented as inherently evil orcorrupt. Tolkien is famed as a defender of trees and the countryside, but he did not have the structural bias againstcities the Biblical writers did; in this way, he may be closer to the author of the Gilgamesh story, for whom Uruk was, for better or for worse, an arena fit for Gilgamesh’s strength and valor.

that these elements were inextricably dissolved into the

narrative). He cautioned against their “explicit” presence

in his work. Yet no sooner has he given this warning than he

compares Elendil, a figure hugely importance as a mover in

the history of Middle-earth, though never having a vivid

onstage role in any of the various tellings of the Downfall

story, to Noah, one of the most iconic figures in the Bible!

Why does he do this?

To answer ‘why is Elendil called a Noachian figure?” we

should first answer the implied predecessor question “How is

Elendil a Noachian figure?” Elendil comes much later in

comparative time than Noah. Noah is the tenth generation

from Adam, whereas Elendil, although the exact number and

succession of the lords of Andúnië are not enumerated, must

even with the long lifespan of the Númenoreans been the

fifteenth or so generation of Silmariën whom in turn had

many generations of Edain ancestors stretching back the

House of Bëor. Noah is primordial, whereas Elendil is in the

middle of history, a historical actor, someone who people in

Frodo’s time (Elrond, Celeborn, Galadriel) had met and

remembered. Furthermore, Elendil comes after four millennia

of recorded history—names, dates, battles, events,

accumulated lore. In Noah’s time the world had its first

full experience with its own sin; in Elendil’s time, the

world had seen many, and Númenor itself was an attempt to

restore man to a quasi-ideal existence, not to protect

mankind from temptation and willpower. Ar-Pharazôn and

Sauron are the named sources of evil, rather than the

Bible's vague suggestion of evil men possibly corrupted by

inappropriately spawned demigods. Furthermore, Noah was a

refugee—he washed up on Ararat as a kind of sanctuary, not

unlike the Númenorean Meneltarma (to be discussed later on

in this essay) —whereas Elendil, although the most benign

kind of imperialist—far more humane than the Black

Númenoreans who had earlier came to Middle-earth—was

nonetheless an imperialist, a founder of realms, a “builder

of cities” (as Tolkien’s great admirer, W. H. Auden, might

put it) a statesman, an establisher of order, a King5. Noah

was none of these. Noah alighted on a peak as a refuge;

Elendil fled from a land whose last possible remnant is the

peak of the Meneltarma6. And we must mention what Noah is

most famous for, the taking of every type of animal on his

ship.. There were no animals recorded in the flight of the

Faithful; they must have made do with whatever they found in

Middle-earth, although a sprig of the Numenoran White Tree,

Nimoth, was, crucially, rescued. (Of course, eventually one

animal, Shadowfax, takes the reverse voyage, indeed going

all the way to the Blessed Lands, but his extramural

ancestry goes further back, to the First Age). Moreover,

Noah's sons, aside from Ham with his strange sexual

trespass, are ciphers, only there to be ancestors of sets of

peoples; Elendil's sons are important characters, and

Isildur arguably is just as fleshed-out a character—as

vouchsafed by his importance in the history of the Ring—as

his father.

Elendil is a much more historicized figure than Noah.

Furthermore, most of the Akallabêth story is modeled on the

Atlantis story, and this is made very obvious by the naming

of Atalantë in the published Silmarillion. Even more

strikingly, Tolkien in the Lost Road, his initial telling of

the Downfall of Númenor, concocts a historical frame in the

pairs of father-son, Amandil-Elendil, Audoin-Alboin, figures

that bypass any need whatever for a Biblical armature. A

similar frame occurs in the Notion Club Papers where the

erudite obsession of Arundel Lowdham needs no Biblical

analogue for its linguistic intuitings.

Why then “Noachian?” Let us look at the word ‘Noachian’

itself; it is the adjectival form of Noah, with the ‘ch”

added to make it sound better in English and also faithfully

mirror the original Hebrew in which the name is Noach. But

“Noachian” implies a kind of figure, a class—it implies a

sort of comparative mythology. And Christianity had always

been aware of “Noachian figures”. Indeed, throughout the

entire history of Western Christianity; the Greek story of

Pyrrha and Deucalion, attested in Hesiod and much alter in

Ovid, had been known as a comparable and analogous Deluge

story. These analogies made possible a sort of implicit

comparative mythology, although most often the existence of

a Greek flood story was used to confirm the historicity and

truth of the Biblical one. But the very word “Noachian,” as

indicative of a kind of archetype, mooted the possibility of

more than one diluvian scenario.

Thus Tolkien has a kind of warrant for Elendil being a

sort of Noah, but not literally Noah, not bracketing Noah in

as in the Hildórien story, but providing a different sort of

narrative that yields an alternate, though not converse,

account, much like the Ainulindalë. And with this Tolkien’s

borrowings from the mythic material in Genesis pretty much

close. With the story of Abraham, the Bible begins a

consciously historical narrative, historical not in the

sense of being able to be proven as an actual event—we have

no more trace of Abraham’s existence than of Noah’s—but of 5 . The Auden ‘builder of cities’ line is from “In memory ofSigmund Freud,” in Auden, Collected Poems, ed, Edward Mendelson,New York: Vintage, 1991, p. 276. 6 . The Meneltarma, though, has much greater internal theological significance in the body of its legendary framework, not only having the Semitic theophoric elements “-el”—although Tolkien would insist this is an accident, theSindarin and Quenya “Menel—“ for heaven being all the name connoted—but being the place where the Numerorean kings were‘closest to God’, more in a way like Mount Sinai than the mountains (note plural) of Ararat, which are a one-time occurrence in the Bible, and an allusion to a civilization, that of Urartu, who the Israelite relation with was almost totally mediated through their common Assyrian assailants, and it itself only mentioned one time in the Bible, in the book of Jeremiah.

being written in the genre of history, of being put in a

setting that is plausibly historical. Abraham is put in such

a context, whereas Noah is not. This does not, furthermore,

mean the Noah story is not true, as Tolkien would have

certainly wanted us not to concede; it merely means that its

genre is that of myth or legend. There can be no Tolkienian

equivalent of Abraham because of the radical literary

historicality of Abraham’s call. All of the legendarium, if

one can ‘set’ it in the Biblical universe, is set before,

and well before, Abraham. Between the Noah and Abraham

stories, there is only the genealogies in Genesis 10 and 11—

for which of course there are Tolkienian analogues—and the

Tower of Babel story, which, as Lobdell suggests, may well

have informed the Akallabêth and other points in the

legendarium when divine force rebukes incondign human

aspirations. One aspect of Tolkien’s world that seems very

early-Genesis in tenor, even though it lacks an exact

parallel, is the Meneltarma. Part of this is that it

contains the Biblical theophoric ‘el” in it (even though in

the internal world of the legendarium “menel’ means

’heavens” in Quenya. Part of it is the unadorned,

unarticulated, but deeply pious monotheism is very much what

might have been practiced by pious men and women in the

world of the Bible before the Abrahamic call. Perhaps

something like the Meneltarma was meant when the Bible says,

in Genesis 4, of the time of Enos, Adam’s grandson, that “In

those days men began to call upon the name of the Lord.”

Yet we are still left with three major episodes of

Biblical mythopoeia: Creation, fall, Flood. Of these, two

are calqued in Tolkien, one bracketed. Why the variety of

treatment? What do the Creation and Flood have in common

that the Fall story lacks? The Creation and Flood story

involve nature and natural cosmogonic forces, the Fall story

about human vulnerability. Perhaps Tolkien felt more

comfortable, or felt it was more apposite, improvising and

riffing on the former while leaving the latter as the Bible

provided it. But Tolkien was somebody above all interested

in the shape and history of words, of language, and it is

most likely in literary history that the source of this

difference is to be found..

As David Damrosch has shown in The Buried Book, the

nineteenth century, with its large-scale European colonial

and economic interest in what we now call the Middle East,

saw, for the first time in Western history, large-scale

contact with the archaeological remains of that region.

Soon, considerable excavations were made, papyri and, in

Mesopotamia, stone tablets were found, and languages that

had long been mysterious, such as ancient Egyptian, and

languages that had been virtually unknown, such as Akkadian

or Sumerian, were deciphered and texts in them could be

read. Thus a trove of writing that had been absent from any

received cultural tradition for over two millennia suddenly

re-emerged and became newly part of the world’s heritage—old

books that were as thrillingly new as the latest serialized

Victorian tale.

One of the most exciting discoveries, made by George

Smith in 1872, was what was termed ‘the Epic of Gilgamesh’,

which had in it a Flood story with striking similarities to

the Bible. Four years later Smith also deciphered Enuma

elish, a Creation story with similarly striking resemblance

to what we have in Genesis. It immediately became clear that

the most likely scenario for the presence of comparable

materials in the Bible and in Mesopotamian remains was that

the Jewish exiles in Babylonia, in the sixth century BC, had

heard these stories and adapted them to their repository of

early satires of man and God.

There is no Mesopotamian analogue to the Adam and Eve

story; that seems to be a purely Hebrew story, with the

distinctly Hebrew pun of ‘Adam” meaning red clay, the very

substance out of which he was made. Thus it can be plausibly

argued that Tolkien felt free to calque the Creation and

Deluge stories because they had already been revealed as

comparative literature, as stories on which the Biblical

account itself was probably a variation,. Upon beginning

Milton’s Paradise Lost, the seventeenth-century poet’s

contemporary, Andrew Marvell, worried that Milton would

“ruin/for I saw him strong. the sacred truths to chaos and

old song7.” Marvell feared that Milton would use his

imagination to rival the Creation account, and even, in a 7 . Andrew Marvell, The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno, Harmnodsworth: Penguin, 1975, p. 192.

literary sense, throw it back into chaos! Yet Milton, as

Marvell observed did not do this: his epic is an expanded

but in essence orthodox account of the action of the Bible’s

first three chapters seen in a Protestant Christian

perspective. As compared to Milton, Tolkien, the pious and

observant Catholic, ruined the sacred truths far more—a

seventeenth-century poet mingling the music of the Ainur and

Elendil with Adam and Eve would at worst have been labelled

a heretic, at best an even more peculiar fellow than the

highly peculiar Arundel Lowdham of The Notion Club Papers. But

Tolkien could, in his own mind and in that of many Christian

readers get away with this in the twentieth century, and

could do this partially because many intelligent Christian

readers had understood that the Creation and Flood stories

were intertextual borrowings taken up by the writer so the

Bible for their own theological and moral purposes. The

Biblical mythopoeia used by Tolkien as source may well be

coextensive with that which is reflected in Mesopotamian

texts.

II. The Stones: Mesopotamia and Middle-earth

In his letter to Naomi Mitchison, Tolkien states “naturally,

as one interested in antiquity and notably in the history of

languages and 'writing', I knew and had read a good deal about

Mesopotamia, “ This association between Mesopotamia, and the

history of writing and languages, though, would only have been

possible in the preceding century. Substantive historical

knowledge about ancient Mesopotamia was only two generations

old when Tolkien began his academic and literary career. But

of course the indirect influence of Sumerian, Akkadian,

Assyrian, and Babylonian culture on the West is much older

due to the way it permeates the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.

Often, the archaeological discoveries of Mesopotamian

remains were used either to bolster or undermine Biblical

claims. But Tolkien’s published record seems to have

remained aloof from the polemical aspects of this contest as

he did with respect to "the fascinating semi-scientific"

area of 'the prehistoric" (Letters 128-9) in using the

pterodactyl deployed so dramatically in Book V of The Lord Of

The Rings.

Tolkien would have had ample opportunity to encounter

the study of this field at Oxford, both as a student and as

a professor. Archibald Sayce, who made the pivotal

discovery of the ancient Hittite language, was Professor of

Assyriology at Oxford, holding the Shillito Readership in

Assyriology, until 1918. That Tolkien knew the name “Sayce”

as that of a philologist is borne out by his comments in

“English and Welsh” on “Sayce” and “Waugh” as names—“Sayce’

is the Welsh word for English, “Waugh” an English word for

Welsh—and says “Sayce” is a name “particularly well known in

philology,” presumably referring to both A. H. Sayce,

Archibald Sayce, as well as O. L. Sayce who worked with

Joseph Wright on his grammar of the Gothic language.

Sayce was succeeded in the Shillito readership by the

American-born Stephen Langdon succeeded him, in the 1920s

and 1930s. Langdon in turn was succeeded as Shillito Reader,

after the short interim of Reginald Campbell Thompson and a

wartime vacancy, by Oliver Gurney starting in the 1940s8.

All four of these men were well-known scholars who Tolkien,

as somebody similar involved in obscure languages often seen

as quaint and arcane by the dominant Greco-Latin ethos of

the university, would have seen in some way as fellow

laborers in the vineyard. Like Tolkien himself they were all

lore-masters of faraway worlds, although Tolkien added to

this lore-mastery that of his own invented universe. They

also may well have felt a similar tension between language,

literature, and religion in their work as Tolkien did in

his. Part of their work was purely technical, and yet one of

the reasons the university maintained professorships in both

fields is that both areas were important to an understanding

of the distant sources of the modern civilization of the

West. Oxford’s maintenance of a professorship in Assyriology

was indeed, part of its acidic distinction, one of the

accoutrements that made Oxford one of the world’s premier

universities. For all these reasons, Tolkien would have been

clearly aware of the academic students of Mesopotamia who

were his colleagues.

Just as twentieth-century England valued the insight into

Anglo-Saxon assumptions the language and story of ˆBeowulfˆ

may have revealed, but saw its own life as far more

developed, less barbarous, so did it at once find itself

intriguing by the light Mesopotamian sources could shed on

the Bible stories, but also were slightly threatened by the

alien light they cast upon narratives so foundational even

for Western secular, much less religious, culture. In turn,

the study of Mesopotamian cultures went beyond that of the

Bible, but it could never be free from the Biblical mesh;

witness the title of the most widely used collection of

Mesopotamian and other source-texts used in the university

classroom, Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old

Testament. The inevitable doubleness--Biblical and non-

Biblical--of any Mesopotamian allusions in modernity is seen

in the way Tolkien uses the name of the same city twice in

The Lord of The Rings. One, Erech, the name used in the Bible,

is used for the place where Aragorn picks up the Stone that

commands the fealty of the Dead which he will use to defeat

his adversaries and recover his Kingdom; the other, Uruk, 8 . Gurney was in turn succeeded, in 1978, by the well-knownscholar Stephanie Dalley, but by then Tolkien was in no position to take immediate note of academic developments in Oxford.

is the name used by the Orcs of themselves, even the

experimental, ''mixed-race' Orcs that Saruman devises for

increased efficiency and menace. Both can be explained in

internal terms; in other words. Tolkien can plausibly say,

as he did with Erech in letter 297, that the reference was

not consciously intended. Erech has the Er- element for

"one" which, when one knows any Elvish, seems so natural as

to have the name arguably seem coincidental. Whereas if one

starts out with ‘Orc’ and wants to have the same word in a

more guttural and exotic variant, Uruk would seem a natural.

If one has—as Tolkien seems to have done---successfully

escaped a pining of ‘Orc’ down to aosurce in the visionary

poems of William Blake, surely an ‘Uruk’ that is but a

variant form of ‘orc’ (cf. the Sindarin word, for the plural

of orcs, Yrch, the word seems to be the same in all

languages, repugnance not inspiring terminological

variety!). It would going to far as to say, as both Giddings

and Timothy O’Neill have done, that Tolkien’s Erech IS the

ancient one; J.S. Ryan’s suggestion of a possible awareness

seems more in the spirit of Tolkien's fairly strict

determination not to infringe upon the autonomy of his

subcreation by devising obvious linkages to our own world,

although he well knew some seepage was unavoidable, and

concedes as such in many circumstances in his letters.

Rather than leaping on every possible convergence, the

source-hunting critic should explore gingerly, with the

burden of proof being on identity, not independence. Erech,

though, as a referent is pretty hard to resist. This is

especially so since the way Erech is used in The Lord of the

Rings is the same way Erech is used in the Bible (Genesis

10:10)--as a reminder of a deliberately archaic time. The

Biblical reference is itself archaeological, itself

referring to a time three thousand years in the past. The

Uruk reference is one contemporary with the action of The

Lord Of The Rings, just as Uruk was the name that became known

in modernity after the archaeological excavations had been

conducted and the newly unearthed ancient languages mastered

by scholars. It supplies a discernible exoticism that is yet

not outside the ken of the reader, in much the same way that

the use of the name of another Mesopotamian city, Lagash,

does in the original version of Isaac Asimov’s 1941 novella

Nightfall (a story Tolkien might possibly have read; he went on

record [Letters 377] as admiring Asimov‘s science-fiction)9.

Let us look further at what is suggested by “Erech” and

“Uruk” in terms of Tolkien’s overall frame of borrowing from

Mesopotamian and Biblical-mythopoeic sources. Just as names

that, however exotic-seeming to twentieth-century readers

they might have been, are in fact Anglo-Saxon (Isengard,

Rivendell, Orthanc), and are associated with ‘modern

Westron’ culture, the culture of the vernacular West at the

end of the Third Age. Names like Erech are intended to

represent a remote strand of that culture, before it was

leavened and sophisticated by the return of the Edain across

the Sea. (Remember, even when the Edain had been in Middle-

earth in the First Age they had been in Beleriand, not in

the rump Middle-earth of the post-First Age map. Using a

name from the Bible for referring to a mysterious other

culture might have seemed ideal for Tolkien. A similar, far

less tangible, instance is “Esgaroth”. Of the two cities on

the lake near Erebor, the object of the quest of The Hobbit,

Esgsroth is clearly the more mannish, the more vernacular;

Dale is associated with the at least crypto-Elvish name of

Girion, whereas the masters of Esgaroth do not have such

elevated nomenclature. Furthermore, Esgaroth has a quasi-

democratic, merchant-prince-ruled polity, as opposed to the

old-fashioned monarchy of Dale, Esgaroth is, though, both

more modern and more archaic; it does not have a King

because it has been less influenced than Dale by the impact

of Numenóran civilization. Thus it is notable that the

Sumerian word for reed sounded something like “gi” (as we

know Sumerian totally through cuneiform writing, we cannot

be totally sure how it sounded), especially as reeds, given

the environmental setting of the Sumerian language, were so

crucial to daily life, and, of course, the role that reeds

play in the Bible, in Joseph’s dreams and in the saving of

the baby Moses renders the entire idea of reeds with a

viscerally Biblical tug10. Tolkien tended to use names with

Biblical-mythopoeic associations more when they were linked 9 , Two of the few given name for Orcs in LOTR are Lagduf and Muzgash. If one combines the constituent elements, "Lagash" could come up,; a; though this association seems more phonic than philological.

with Adûnaic or proto-Adûnaic uses uninfluenced by Westron,

and it is interesting in this light to note that the

triconsonentsl roots of most Adûnaic words are like those in

most Semitic words (though Adûnaic otherwise seems more

Ural-Altaic or even Indo-European than Semitic in its

linguistic aesthetic).

And now for ‘Uruk’. The Uruk-hai, when we first hear

the name, are the entities who kidnapped and cruelly

mistreat our Hobbit heroes Merry and Pippin. They are

menacing, harsh, alien. What better a name for them than one

containing ‘Uruk”? This name, in the late nineteenth and

twentieth centuries, came from outside the world to which

Europeans were used. threatening it with otherness and

savage, dimly comprehensible phonemic and spiritual values.

And yet…. The Orcs, though evil, are created beings, born

out of the corruption of, in various accounts, elves and/or

men. Their abjection is not their own faults, but Morgoth’s

and, latterly, Sauron’s. Although they are most likely not

redeemable, they show moments of compassion and charity,

even though those are brief and dim. Also, they—as a class,

not necessarily the individual Orcs are old, first conceived

of one or tow ages past, although Saruman’s cross-breeding

of orcs and men is a ‘modernization’. The name ‘Uruk’, old

but recently rediscovered, at once archaic and contemporary,

fits the situation perfectly. Tolkien may not have intended

this borrowing, but, as applied, it is superbly apt. The

word is resonant and scary, yet its very presence, its

readiness-at-hand, is the result of painstaking

archaeological and philological scholarship.

Of course Tolkien himself knew a good deal about this

sort of scholarship. As a philologist specialization in

Germanic languages, he knew well the thrill of discovering

buried manuscripts, puzzling out half-forgotten languages,

and unconcealing moving stories and beautiful phrasings from

the deep past. He knew what it meant for names of kings and

gods that would not bestir the common man to have a deep

resonance to the scholar because of what that scholar knew

concerning the meaning of these names in the past. He

shared with his Assyriological colleagues a championship of

10 . I am grateful to Jason Fisher on this point.

the shards, the vestiges, of a lost world, not only against

modern languages but against the far more established

philological apparatus of classical studies, of the study of

Latin and Greek which always remained at the core of

twentieth-century academic philology in Britain. The

incompleteness of the Anglo-Saxon, Gothic, and Scandinavian

worlds Tolkien studied is analogous to the incompleteness of

the Mesopotamian world: there is so much we shall never

know, that will perpetually remain, in the words of R. M.

Wilson’s famous book title, lost11.

There are great differences as well. Germanic culture

was oral; we have what even the least romantic or

primitivism analyst must conclude is traces of a poetic and

narrative tradition written down just as the tradition was

enduing, and with the dominant mode of literacy in that era—

Christianity—against it Mesopotamian literature, on the

other hand, was consummately literate; indeed, our literacy

is descended directly from Mesopotamian practices. Far from

being the product of a mutually dependent warrior caste,

Mesopotamian literature came from a highly organized,

hierarchical, and above all urbanized society. And whereas

the Germanic legends were written down on parchment or

vellum, Mesopotamian stories were carved out in cuneiform

wedge marks on large tablets of clay. Tolkien’s own work was

written and not oral, a product of print culture, and even

in Middle-earth manuscript culture reigns alongside and even

above oral tradition. The ‘clay tablet culture’ of

Mesopotamian writing is a step further back from modernity,

but it still is in the site of literature and not orality.

But there are nonetheless definite similarities both of

circumstance and of ethos between the Mesopotamian milieu

and the Germanic milieu Tolkien professionally studied. One

of these emerged during the decades most formative to

Tolkien in his training in and early practice of the

discipline of philology, which necessarily involves a deep

study of comparative Indo-European linguistics. The Hittite

people had been known of as a minor people in the Bible, the

most notable example being the unfortunate husband of 11. R. M. Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England, New York: Cooper Square, 1969. Tolkien scholars may be familiar with this book through Shippey’s citation of it in The Road to Middle-earth.

Bathsheba, Uriah the Hittite, who is sent off to his death

in battle when King David conceives an erotic desire for his

wife. As scholars began to decipher Egyptian and

Mesopotamian records, though, they found the Hittites being

referred to as a great people a significant diplomatic and

military player in the ancient Near East of the latter half

of the second millennium BC. In 1886, Sayce, the first

holder of the chair in Assyriology at oxford, announced his

belief that there had been a large Hittite empire in this

period.  This was confirmed by archaeological excavations

led by the German archaeologist Hugo Winckler, who in 1907

was able to decipher some Hittite texts, leading  to the

Czech scholar Bedřich Hrozný's 1915 conclusion that  that

Hittite, though written in cuneiform like the Sumerian and

Semitic Mesopotamian languages, was an Indo-European

language. This was thrilling to many scholars who delighted

in this indication of the antiquity of the dominant

language-group of the present12. But it was particularly

seismic for linguists. Ferdinand de Saussure, the great

linguist of the turn of the twentieth century, had

hypothesized that in proto-indo-European languages there had

to be “laryngeals”, sounds made with the larynx  that

existed in no recorded language but which Saussure’s sense

of the processes of linguistic change said must have existed

in the past. In Hittite, these laryngeals are used with two

sounds represented in English by “h”. The discovery of

Hittite, or more exactly the realization, in 1927, that

laryngeals were present in Hittite proved Saussure right,

and proved, more generally, that a systematic sense of the

workings of language can inform and motivate the

interpretation of individual words13.

          The Hittite discovery was the most newsworthy

development in Indo-European linguistics in Tolkien’s time.

It was arguably the final achievement in the evolution of

the field—i. e. before later methodological innovstions in

comparative linguistics and Chomskyan general grammar made

this discipline more a historical and less a methodological

arena. Tolkien himself asserted the importance of the

Hittite discovery. In his 1924 review essay on general

philological topics for The Year’s Work In English Studies, he states:

 

The general view of the article is that we have in Hittite

at once the earliest Indo-European language recorded, and

yet one as altered as the most changed of modern Indo-

European dialects (e.g. Albanian); a language in structure

Indo-European, but possessing hardly any certain Indo-

European vocabulary at all — and what it does possess does

not reveal any regular phonological relations such as we

would expect. This is sufficiently astonishing; hardly less

astonishing than is the story of the discovery and digging

up in 1907 of this language that had apparently simply

vanished from human memory at the destruction of the Hittite

power about 1200 B.C., to remain in oblivion for over 3,000

years.

12 . In Germany this inevitably took on complicated racial and ethnic overtones, see Claudia Breger, “Imperialist Fantasies and Dispalced Memory: Twentieth Century German Egyptologies.” In New German Critique, number 96, 2005, pp. 135-159.13 . See Oswald J. L. Szemerényi, Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics, Oxford and London: Oxford University Press, 1999.

 

        There are several aspects of this quotation

particularly valuable to the present argument, over and

above the evidence it provides of Tolkien’s knowledge of

Hittite and the bridge this knowledge provided between the

Mesopotamian and Germanic worlds. Tolkien is notably

cautious about just how Indo-European the Hittite language

is. He notes that it is mainly the structure, not the

lexicon (though the few cognate words that were found, such

as the Hittite word for water being ‘vadar’, were made much

of, for obvious reasons). This is both anthropologically

sagacious in that he did not use the discovery of the

Hittites to claim antiquity and primacy of Indo-European

peoples the way German scholars tended to do. But it has

also been borne out by subsequent research which has

concluded that the people who spoke it were not properly

Hittites, or Hattians—inhabitants of the land of Hatti—but

an Indo-European-speaking elite who conquered that and

fairly well on in its development, provided it vigorous rule

and called themselves “Nesili”. Tolkien’s prudence turned

out to be clairvoyant. There is a methodological point as

well: Tolkien did not jump to conclusions, he did not plump

for the most sensational scrap of evidence, he noted a

connection of potential interest and suggested scholars

carefully consider it. Tolkien’s own philological technique

is a good example for students of Tolkien's imaginative

work, who need to take as much account of stringent proof as

possible. Most immediately relevant is Tolkien's registering

of not just the discovery of Hittite but its re-discovery,

that Hittite as a language had been buried for millennia and

was now known again. This provides a connection to a

postulated general recognition by Tolkien that bodies of

knowledge about the anterior past—whether it be the

relatively near Mesopotamian or the far deeper prehistoric—

had re-arisen and had made a difference as to how a deep

past might be re-imagined in modern times

To get closer to Tolkien’s professional specialties, the

most famous early Germanic work is Beowulf, much as the most

famous Mesopotamian work is Gilgamesh (to give it its proper

title, since all Mesopotamian texts were called by their

opening words, sa naqba imaru, he who saw everything). But in

neither case are we sure that these works had this premier

status in their original milieu, they have it now because we

have happened to find them, and in both cases, developed,

belatedly, the philological tools to find them valuable and

hone their understanding, Presumably the fact that we have

these works attests to their being copied and recopied, and

thus products of an original canonical decision by the

milieus that produced them. But we have no way of knowing

this, and with both texts their preservation and recovery

verges on the accidental. We can never know how their

original audience read or understood them. Interestingly,

neither Beowulf nor Gilgamesh was the most ‘nationalistic’

or ‘imperial’ figure of their milieu, and it is precisely

Tolkien’s point in “The Monsters and the Critics; that this

does not matter.

Beowulf and Gilgamesh are similar in other ways as well.

They are both not really 'epics', being far too short to be

compared to Homer or the ancient Sanskrit epics in length or

ambition. Their heroes are epic, but not their machinery or

construction. Also, both are about strong men, not without

elements of savagery, who nonetheless dwell in and are the

defenders of civilized societies, They are both tragic

because their military achievement and physical strength

clearly do not satisfy them psychologically or spiritually,

as is revealed in Beowulf’s final disquisition to Wiglaf

after being wounded, in which he indicates he has lived by a

set of ethical standards higher than the exercise of brute

military strength or valor solely intended to maintain rule.

Gilgamesh, though more impetuous, less mature, than even the

young Beowulf, has his rough temper partially motivated by

his anger at the gods and the limits they impose on the

world and on human life and aspirations. As characters,

Beowulf and Gilgamesh magnificently exemplify a world and

an ethos that at the same time they fundamentally challenge

with a dissatisfaction that sees beyond a milieu in which

they had been so successful. They seem at once to accept and

to challenge the core assumptions of their own cultures14.

(And Beowulf, even though presumably based on oral stories,

was a written text, and Tolkien, especially as a Catholic,

would have valued the literacy involved in its

transcription, which even if the poem is not explicitly an

exposition of Christian dogma was by definition done under

Christian auspices, and thus literate ones).

Gilgamesh’s ultimate instance of this is the Flood

scene, in which Gilgamesh’s search for immortality is

quashed when he loses the plant given him by Utnapishtim, a

‘Noachian figure’! (Conversely, Elendil saves a sprig of

Nimloth, and thus ultimately of Galathilion, the primal

‘White Tree’ of the subcreated order, from Númenor and

replants it in Minas Tirith). Tolkien doubtless go, most 14 . In the Babylonian version of Gilgamesh, this sense of challenge may have to do with a similar issue, but the ‘changing of the pantheons’ in Mesopotamian culture, ca. 1900 BC, which is presumably when it was written. In other words, Gilgamesh may have been was written in Sumerian but atabout the time Sumerian was losing ground to Semitic languages and peoples, and the names given to the gods changed accordingly. The translation or adaptation into Babylonian provided a further overlay and sense of transition and memorial adaptation Could be a postulated equivalent to the pagan-Christian changeover evoked in Beowulf.

immediately, those aspects of the destruction of Númenor he

did not get from the Plato’s account of Atlantis in the

Timaeus and Critias from Hesiod or directly from the Bible

itself. But there is something interesting in the

conjunction of Gilgamesh, the strongman seeking immortality,

and Utnapaishtim, the Noachian figure, with Ar-Pharazôn and

Elendil, even though in the latter case the moral

differentiation is far greater, and the two never meet 'on

stage', i. e. in any narrative portion, although one may

presume that, as kinsmen and members of the royal family,

they knew, though assuredly did not like, each other .

Another place where the Bible clearly borrowed from

ancient Mesopotamian legends is the Creation story. The

second verse of the Bible ’and darkness moved upon the face

of the deep" is, in Hebrew hoshek al-penei tehom. 'Tehom' here

is, as e.g., John Day has argued, a cognate word to Tiamat,

the villainous serpent-goddess who stands, like chaos, in

the way of good divine governance in Enuma elish15. Tolkien

15 . See John Day, God’s Conflict With The Dragon and the Sea; echoes of a Canaanite Myth in the Old Testament. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1985.

clearly knew or knew of Enuma elish. Ea, the sea god in that

story, fairly obviously inspired the word 'Eä' for the world

that is. If asked Tolkien might well have said that the word

drew on Greek or Latin vocabulary for words having to do

with Being and the ontological, or was intended as a calque

of them, but the context into which the idea of Eä is put,

that of an unfolding creation story moving across time and

involving different conjunctions of divine powers, is

clearly that of Enuma elish. (Ursula Le Guin’s use of a poem

within her Earthsea fictional world called “the Creation of

Eä’ is clearly aware of the Sumerian context, and when the

first Earthsea book was published The Silmarillion with its

mention of Ea had not been published, nonetheless her use of

the Sumerian term is done in the wake of her influence by

of Tolkien’s languages and nomenclature). Enuma elish

parallels and is different from the Ainulindalë in much the

same way Hesiod is: the biggest difference in both cases is

that the Valar in Tolkien do not reproduce, whereas the gods

in both Greek and Mesopotamian works do; they are

generational gods and generational rivalries. In the Enuma

elish, the young god Marduk, emerges, king Arthur-like, or

indeed Beowulf-like in the court of Hrothgar, to seize the

day and defeat the great monster. The emergence of Tulkas

the Strong from outside may be an echo of this. The idea of

the Ainulindalë could have been inspired by Hesiod alone, or

for that matter Paradise Lost, but the idea of the multi-track,

creation epic filled with hosts and hordes of divine power

is made to seem a genre emulable by a teller of tales, not

just terrain that inevitably, as in Milton's case, requires

declaring oneself as a Christian or a pagan, he 'comparative

literature; or the comparative mythology' aspect of the

Ainulindalë, may well come from the Enuma elish . Gilgamesh

himself as a character, as a human being, does not have many

Tolkienian analogues; perhaps Finrod's sacrifice of himself

for Beren is analogous to Gilgamesh’s altruism with respect

to Enkidu, but a different sort of male bond is involved,

and Finrod is more of an intellectual, far more thoughtful

than the impulsive Gilgamesh who so often resembles an

overgrown boy; whereas Fin rod is one of the most mature

characters in the Silmarillion material. . Or perhaps it is

better to say that in Tolkien’s world a Gilgamesh figure

would not be heroic-tragic but impetuous-tragic; witness the

Gilgamesh like nature of King Eärnur, the foolhardy last

King of Third Age Gondor, who challenges the Witch-king to

single combat in a way that puts his own glory over the care

of the state and who also seemed to have difficulties with

women reminiscent of Gilgamesh; Eärnur (whose name of course

has the telltale crypto-Sumerian “Eä—“ in it) never marries

or settles down, and Gilgamesh’s lack of domestication

remains a major issue for his city throughout the epic. As

with many of Tolkien’s borrowings, it is the names and

patterns that matter the most; the emotional core, the tone

of relationships and values, remains distinctly Tolkienian

no matter what source he consults, excavates, plunders.

Mesopotamian history and civilization also may have had

some influence on Tolkien. The name Minhiriath—‘between the

rivers; means just what Mesopotamia—‘between the rivers’—

means in Greek, though the debatable land of Minhiriath is

hardly the cradle of civilization. But Tolkien surely knew

some of his readers would think of the Greek name for the

Tigris-Euphrates valley upon decoding the verbal

constituents of 'Minhiriath'. In other words, on seeing a

name that, in Sindarin meant ‘between the rivers’, Tolkien

knew that the word most common in English that meant, in

another language, ‘between the rivers as ‘Mesopotamia’.  The

most common architectural image of Mesopotamian culture, the

ziggurat, has a possible echo in Tolkien's world, even

though the linguistic history of Middle-earth precludes the

Tower of Babel story with which the ziggurat image is now

most associated. (Nothing in the Bible says explicitly the

Tower of Babel is meant to  be a ziggurat, though, has been

plausibly argued,). ‘Zigûr' was the Adûnaic name for Sauron,

and it is in his Adúnaic capacity, as it were, his role as

an advisor to the Ar-pharazôn who has foregrounded Adunaic

and definitively repudiated Sindarin as the official state

language of Numenór, that he does what the Bible judged the

ziggurats did, affront the ordained powers with creaturely

pride. Mordor, as an aggressive, cruel force threatening at

the gates of the beleaguered champions of justice and truth,

highly resembles the Assyrian Empire, in its siege of

Samaria, and the Babylonian, in its siege of Jerusalem. Of

course, these are from the Bible’s point of view , but the

look inside Mordorian, Orcish culture Tolkien gives us in

Book IV reflects the fact that in modernity we could see the

other side, see how the Assyrians thought, how they

justified themselves or attempted to. The Bible has

addresses by adversaries to the Israelites; such as the

Assyrian Rabshakeh’s taunting in 2 Kings 18; but it does

not give us Orc-talk within the ranks of the adversaries;

we never hear idolaters in internal dialogue.

So Mesopotamia can figure as a kind of ‘other’ for

Tolkien. But Mesopotamian elements are also on the ‘good’

side of Tolkien’s moral universe.  On the other hand, Minas

Tirith, as a city has echoes of Babylon, which in many ways

was the ultimate stone city, and which, like Minas Tirith,

excelled in both warfare and in the more civilized arts.

Again, Tolkien could have gotten this from any other places.

But the discovery of Mesopotamian remains made possible in

many ways a comparative, anthropological look at these

cultural phenomena. Notably, Mesopotamia in these prismatic

reflections appears as both good and bad, informing both

Sauron and Minas Tirith This is not far from how the Bible

saw Mesopotamian civilization. Mesopotamia was the home of

the idolatry from which (according to Joshua) Abraham fled,

the home of the impious builders of Babel, of the brute

vigor of Nimrod, of the oppressive Assyrian and Babylonian

armies,. Mesopotamia was a realm controlled by elites, with

little place for the humble and lowly; as compared to the

world of the Babble it is much like the aristocratic,

dilettanishly epic world of E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros

as opposed to Tolkien’s fictions with their humble heroes

stretching from Berne in the First Age to Sam Gamgee in the

late Third. This, sense of humility and the lowly is the

Bible's big advantage over Mesopotamia literature. But it

would be good for us not to brag about it-! Mesopotamian

civilization should receive its due, and Tolkien would have,

as his comment in the Mitchison letter suggests, recognized

that Mesopotamian civilization But it provided  the source

for many of the Bible's legends, with languages closely akin

to the Bible’s own, and whose understanding of human and

cosmic nature was closer to the Bible’s than that of any

other culture, even the Egyptian with which the Bible is

also significantly enmeshed. 

Twentieth-century use of Mesopotamian materials

partially depended on admitting that Mesopotamian tales

informed the Bible, in other words, conceding that the Bible

was not the oldest work ever written, and that it seems to

be influenced by material we would inevitably understand as

legend or story. Tolkien had two advantages here coming out

of his own distinctive worldview. As somebody who, with

Lewis, believed in the idea of true myth, he would not have

been deterred by the legendary traits in both corpuses as

little as he was by the monsters in Beowulf. And as a Roman

Catholic, Tolkien was necessarily not a Biblical

fundamentalist, seeing the text of the Bible as only one

part of a fabric also woven by tradition, the Holy Spirit,

and the teaching authority of the Church. In practice, Roman

Catholicism was highly resistant to archaeological discovery

until relatively late in Tolkien’s life. But that was the

particular political conjunction of Catholicism in his day;

it was nothing in the doctrines of the religion itself. By

definition, a ‘catholic’ idea of Christianity, one stressing

historical continuity and a regard for the totality of the

church, will be less insistent on historical minutiae as a

bedrock of faith than will evangelical or fundamentalist

approaches.

Ancient Mesopotamia is still a place and time very

strange to us, even after nearly two centuries of

understanding it with some level of historical accuracy.

Tolkien himself spoke, in his letter to Milton Waldman, of

'”the vast backcloths" and T. A. Shippey famously said of

the Silmarillion material that it was best glimpsed as a

horizon in the past, the source of legend, not paraded out

in full detail. “How could depth be created when there was

nothing further to reach back to?” Shippey probingly asked

(Shippey 171). Readers of the Silmarillion might disagree in

aesthetic terms. But, if they would also read the Bible,

they would note that Shippey's and Tolkien's

characterization actually describe the relationship of the

Old Testament to the Mesopotamian texts that came before it

than that of the New to the Old. In other words, we always

knew that part of the aesthetic, as well as the theological

richness, of the New Testament was how much the Old was

implicated in it. But now we can know that there were other

texts behind the Old as well, that give the Hebrew stories

what Shippey calls “the impression of depth”. One might

claim that the entire idea of a legendary past as seen by

the Hobbits, of a world at once distant but familiar,

present in so many ways yet also fundamentally unbelievable,

was partially inspired by the role an ancient and, until

modern times, highly mysterious culture played in a book

that was read by everyone in the West. If The Lord of the Rings

today—familiar, full of well-known stories and easily

apprehensible meanings, though still full of depth and

mystery—is like the Old Testament in literary terms (it

compares to the Old much better than the New in terms of

genre, which is all we are talking about here), then the

Silmarillion material—incomplete, existing in multiple

versions, archaic, primal, mythic, obscure, sometimes

disturbing—resembles Mesopotamian legend. To understand how

the tradition of the Silmarillion material operates both in the

world of The Lord of the Rings and in the world of its readers,

one could do worse than look at the implied relationship of

the Bible to Mesopotamian tradition.

Indeed, Mesopotamia itself felt this sense of

tradition; waves of Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and

many others all participated in the same culture established

first by the Sumerians, just as many waves of peoples in

Middle-earth—Ents, dwarves, Hobbits, Wizards. The Hittites

were a potential conceptual and practical bridge between

Tolkien’s philological world and the world of the ancient

near East not just because of geographical proximity but

because the high culture of the Hittites was borrowed from

and calqued upon that of Mesopotamia. The Hittite realm was,

at least among the upper ranks of its rulers,  Indo-European

in language but it was Mesopotamian—and therefore, if one is

to extend language to other areas—‘Semitic’ in culture, at

least in substantial terms (all of the literate Mesopotamian

peoples other than the Sumerians speaking Semitic

languages). The archaeological and geological discoveries of

the nineteenth century that challenged traditional Biblical

accounts produced two different levels of deep past to—in

different hands and from different viewpoints--undergird and

subvert the time of the Bible; the nearer deep past of the

Mesopotamian and the further deep past of the prehistoric,

Mesopotamian history and the privileging of Mesopotamian

origins, presented a rival wellspring of “deep time” with

respect to the prehistoric. Whereas the prehistoric past

dwarfed the Biblical, the Mesopotamian past, even though its

anticipation of Biblical themes may provoke the ire and

disdain of some fundamentalists,  laterally privileges the

Bible’s importance. participated in the culture established

by the Eldar. And, in a Christian and even post-Christian

world, Mesopotamia, even when its texts are seen as sources

or rivals for the Bible, is almost a part now of Biblically

derived culture, as so much of the scholarly interesting it

is motivated by Mesopotamia’s proximity to the Bible. As

Daniel Lord Smail points out, Mesopotamia, as a reservoir

of ‘deep time’, rivals the prehistoric past. Whereas the

prehistoric past has the potential, in terms of sheer scale,

to dwarf the Bible , the Mesopotamian past, even though its

anticipation of Biblical literary motifs may provoke the ire

and disdain of some Biblical fundamentalists, has a

closeness to the Bible that residually, laterally, keeps on

privileging the Judaic scriptures. Indeed, to take an

interest in Mesopotamia is to an extent to be philo-Semitic,

as, other than the Sumerians, all the other peoples of the

area-Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians—spoke Semitic

languages akin at least to a degree to Hebrew, and only

those wishing to wall off the Sumerians as the supreme

originators of the culture and see the Semitic latecomers

are as initiative can avoid giving credit for Semitic-

speaking peoples; and it was the Semitic speakers who

produced the texts of Gilgamesh and Enuma elish in the form we

have them today. Because of all this closeness to the Bible

milieu, Smail argues that the twentieth century resorted to

Mesopotamia as a more comfortable deep past, shrinking from

the vaster and less classifiable terrain of the prehistoric.

But this can be turned around, to render Mesopotamia a deep

past whose virtue in that it is the furthest point in time

where we can look back and see some image of ourselves in

its cultural production. As is indicated, the specific

borrowings traced above, as well as the entire idea of

biblical mythopoeia plausibly enabled by rediscovered

Mesopotamian texts, Tolkien seemed to have looked back to

Mesopotamia and seen something distantly, abstractly

familiar, whereas the prehistoric exists only as archaic

protoplasm from which a frightening creature can be

extrapolated to epitomize the hour of greatest fear and

danger in Tolkienian narrative, to provide a one-time

shudder. By contrast, the engagement with Mesopotamian

referents is gradual, many-instanced, and subtle. In his

comment on the pterodactyl episode, Tolkien emanated only a

guarded enthusiasm for the prehistoric as a category of

redeemable human time16. Compared to that, Mesopotamia, for

all its remoteness from the core of his academic and

philological interests, may have even seemed a bit like

home.

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