How Much Was J.R.R. Tolkien Influenced by Wagner’s Ring Cycle?

Q: How Much Was J.R.R. Tolkien Influenced by Wagner’s Ring Cycle?

ANSWER: To date no one has been able to publish any credible evidence showing that J.R.R. Tolkien deliberately or intentionally adapted any of the motifs from Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (“The Ring of the Nibelung”). All of the similarities between Wagner’s story and Tolkien’s (and there are not really that many) can be arbitrarily associated — in both cases — with older stories and traditions. Hence, proving a cause-and-effect relationship between Wagner and Tolkien (without some sort of concession from Tolkien himself) is completely impossible.

I addressed some of these issues in “Where Did Tolkien Get the Idea for a Ring of Invisibility?” but there are a few points that have been overlooked by many of the articles published over the past few years.

For example, Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” grew not only out of his lifelong fascination with old Norse and Germanic myths and folklore but also from a call for a “national opera” based on a 12th century poem discovered in the 1700s, the “Nibelungenlied”. Tolkien responded to no such call, but he did confess in one of his letters to a similar aspiration:

Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story-the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our ‘air’ (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be ‘high’, purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry. I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.

Of course, such an overweening purpose did not develop all at once. The mere stories were the thing. They arose in my mind as ‘given’ things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew. An absorbing, though continually interrupted labour (especially since, even apart from the necessities of life, the mind would wing to the other pole and spend itself on the linguistics): yet always I had the sense of recording what was already ‘there’, somewhere: not of ‘inventing’.

In this passage (lifted from Letter No. 131, which Tolkien wrote to Collins publisher Milton Waldman in 1951) J.R.R. Tolkien is describing (without naming) what we know as The Book of Lost Tales, his so-called “mythology for England”. Christopher Tolkien explained this point in the first volume of The History of Middle-earth, Part One of The Book of Lost Tales:

The story of Eriol the mariner was central to my father’s original conception of the mythology. In those days, as he recounted long after in a letter to his friend Milton Waldman,* the primary intention of his work was to satisfy his desire for a specifically and recognizably English literature of ‘faerie’.

It was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff.

In his earliest writings the mythology was anchored in the ancient legendary history of England; and more than that, it was peculiarly associated with certain places in England.

In the earliest conception (the “Eriol phase”) Tol Eressëa was ultimately to become the island of Britain and Men (the Anglo-Saxons) were to invade the island, driving the Elves into hiding (so that they would eventually fade). This emphasis on things English precluded any unnecessary borrowings from things German (or Scandinavian, Finnish, etc.). Which is not to say you won’t find those influences in The Book of Lost Tales for of course Tolkien lifted various archetypes from extant mythological and folklore sources scattered across northern Europe.

But he wanted to create an English mythology, not some paean to Germany’s “Nibelungenlied”. Even though Tolkien might borrow some characterizations and symbology from every source available, he was doing so as a philologist might borrow words in an attempt to reconstruct an “asterisk-word”, as Tom Shippey describes such things in The Road to Middle-earth. The “mythology for England” was intended to be an “asterisk-mythology”, constructed upon the sound basis of using analogous sources from related mythologies but incorporating such words and images from the shreds of English mythology and folklore where Tolkien felt confident those shreds had survived from the Old English period.

That identification was central to Tolkien’s themes. It is plainly evident in Letter No. 95, which he wrote to his son Christopher in 1945:

I read till 11.50, browsing through the packed and to me enthralling pages of Stenton’s Anglo-Saxon England. A period mostly filled with most intriguing Question Marks. I’d give a bit for a time-machine. But of course my mind being what it is (and wholly different from Stenton’s) it is the things of racial and linguistic significance that attract me and stick in my memory. Still, I hope one day you’ll be able (if you wish) to delve into this intriguing story of the origins of our peculiar people. And indeed of us in particular. For barring the Tolkien (which must long ago have become a pretty thin strand) you are a Mercian or Hwiccian (of Wychwood) on both sides.

However, despite his innate nationalism, Tolkien gave up on the entire enterprise, as Christopher explains in The Book of Lost Tales, Part One:

My father abandoned the writing of the Lost Tales before he reached their end, and when he abandoned them he had also abandoned his original ideas for their conclusion.

All of the great stories that preceded The Lord of the Rings, which evolved through phase after phase into what we know now as “the early Silmarillion” of the 1930s, really had nothing to do with German nationalistic pride; any concepts Tolkien might have borrowed from Norse or Germanic sources at the beginning were to assist him in constructing an essentially pagan, pre-Christian mythology that looked and felt Germanic while remaining English. That’s hardly what Wagner had in mind.

The seed that became the story of the Rings of Power also lay in the story of the Silmarils, for the Silmarils were talismans of great power which inspired both good and evil. The Silmarils were an experiment that made it possible for Tolkien to devise the Rings. When Bilbo picked up his magic ring in The Hobbit it was no more than that, a “magic ring”. Only after Tolkien’s publisher asked him to write a sequel to The Hobbit did he slowly begin to piece together a story around the “magic ring”, elevating it to the status of the One Ring, the Ruling Ring, which was made to enslave all the others. In the “Nibelungenlied” the ring that causes so much trouble is simply the ring of Brünhild, the Icelandic queen whom Siegfried deceives into marrying his friend Gunther; in The Lord of the Rings, the Rings of Power prove to be a self-made trap for the Elves. Tolkien says that the making of the Rings was a “second fall” for the Elves, implying that their obsession with “death and deathlessness” (delaying the effects of Time, which will inevitably bring on their fading process) led them into the folly of trying to circumvent the natural order of things.

Sauron used the Elves’ desire to remain in Middle-earth (as a superior “caste” over Dwarves and Men) to lay the trap. Once they had made the Great Rings he made the One Ring to enslave the Ring-makers and bind them to his will. Because all Elves would have benefitted from the Rings of Power all Elves would ultimately have been drawn into Sauron’s sphere of influence. The plan went awry when Sauron, in the act of “casting the final spell”, unwittingly betrayed his intentions to the Elves. They took off their Rings before he could seize control over their wills.

Everything from that point forward in the history (as well as the narrative for The Lord of the Rings) propels the Elves and their allies toward finding a way out of the trap. They first attempt to overthrow Sauron, but when the One Ring seduces Isildur that plan fails. They withdraw to their own lands, leaving Isildur in possession of the One Ring. Isildur is subsequently slain and the Ring lost for nearly 2500 years, and the Elves succumb to the allure of finally using their Rings to achieve as much as they possibly can in the absence of Sauron and the One Ring.

While Sauron remains separate from the One Ring the Elves enjoy a false safety, but after Sauron returns to life he begins to whittle away at his old enemies, dividing them against each other and draining their resources. Thanks to the Elves’ use of their three remaining Rings Men (and Dwarves) are unable to progress and achieve their full potential. So Middle-earth remains almost “hung in time”, awaiting the day of decision when either Sauron will recover the One Ring or someone will find a way to destroy it.

By the time Frodo reaches Rivendell the Keepers of the Elven Rings now fully realize that there is only one way out of the trap they have made for themselves: they must destroy the One Ring and with it the power of the other Rings, and ultimately accept their fate.

Wagner’s story follows a very different path. Alberich the dwarf steals gold from the Rhine Maidens and uses that to create a ring that grants him the power to rule the world. Wotan (Odin) steals the ring from Alberich, thus preventing Alberich from achieving his goal. But Alberich curses the ring, thus frustrating anyone else who obtains it. In the original ending for the cycle, Wagner had the ring returned to Alberich and his people, freeing them from slavery; but that ending was subsequently replaced.

Wotan is forced to give the ring to two giants, Fafnir and his brother, in payment for their services and to ransom Freya. But Wotan plots to recover the ring, which his mortal grandson Siegfried eventually does (by slaying Fafnir, who had slain his brother Fasolt for the ring). But Siegfried himself is eventually slain due to the plotting of Hagen, Alberich’s son. Wotan’s daughter Brünnhilde, Siegfried’s lover, destroys herself and the ring in a funeral pyre, and the gods and Valhalla are also destroyed.

People quickly point to the story of Fafnir killing his brother Fasolt for the ring and compare that to Sméagol’s murder of his cousin Déagol. However, most of these plot elements (including fratricide) are also found in “Völsunga Saga”, which is more readily acknowledged by scholars as a clear source for Tolkien’s fiction.

Given Tolkien’s stated intentions in devising an English mythology — and Christopher’s explanations of how that evolved toward creating first the world of “The Silmarillion” and then the Middle-earth of The Lord of the Rings — there is literally no room to justify any sense of borrowing from Wagner’s cycle because Tolkien reached farther back for his sources. Furthermore, the Rings of Power were not so much cursed as self-cursing in that they were the object of the Elves’ sin and the reason for their second fall.

The “Rings of Power Cycle”, as we might style it, is thus not about how an evil treasure is passed from hand to hand but rather about how the Elves must ultimately redeem themselves by aiding their fate-appointed saviour (Frodo) in destroying the power of the Rings once and for all. In other words, Frodo (or Gollum) ultimately had to undo what the Elven-smiths had done thousands of years before, freeing the Elves and their allies to resume their naturally appointed courses through Time and Space.

Wagner’s story is filled with greed and revenge themes, whereas Tolkien’s story is filled with fall and redemption themes.

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