Notes From Around the Sundial
Created | Updated Sep 3, 2009
Tolkien and the Roman Empire
This week, I speculate on that most popular work of fiction, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and its setting in European history. This train of thought started a few years ago when I was reading up on Istanbul (which in former times was known as Byzantium or Constantinople) - the walled city surrounded by water, with the palace of the Sultan on a hill, and gardens leading down to the water. At the back of my mind I realised I knew this place from somewhere. Then it struck me - Tashbaan, the city of the Calormenes, in CS Lewis's The Horse and His Boy was just such a city. Lewis and Tolkien were great friends and compared notes on all their writings. I wondered could I find any similar parallels in the works of Tolkien. They turned out to be not hard to find.
Tolkien specifically stated that The Lord of the Rings was not an allegory. It grew out of his love for the mythology of Western Europe, but the events described in the story were just the ones that would make up a good story.
Nevertheless, there are many parallels between Europe's history and that of Middle Earth. All across southern Europe, there are remains of a previous civilisation, the Roman Empire, which once united all of southern Europe. In particular, England was once part of the Roman Empire, but the Romans withdrew from the country, and the old Roman roads and buildings gradually turned into ruins. The Shire, which is Middle Earth's equivalent of England, also remembers a time when it was part of a great Kingdom which encompassed the whole of the known world. But those days are long gone, thousands of years in the past. Some of the old roads still exist, but the military way-stations along them are in ruins.
The Two Kingdoms
The parallels go further. In ancient times, Elendil was the king of Middle Earth. But his kingdom was split between Arnor in the northwest and Gondor in the southeast. Arnor was considered the more important of the two, but it was the first to fall into ruin. Gondor survived, although its control of the world gradually shrank over time. Eventually it was a small kingdom fighting to hold back the power in the East.
The Roman Empire was also split into two, although they were east and west rather than southeast and northwest. The western empire was the first to fall, but the eastern empire, centred on Byzantium, continued for another thousand years as the Byzantine Empire. This brings the interesting conclusion that Gondor was like the Byzantine Empire, and Minas Tirith was the city of Constantinople - that is, the city of Istanbul before the Turks invaded it.
Does this comparison hold true? Minas Tirith was surrounded by the greatest set of walls in Middle Earth. Constantinople was also protected by the greatest walls ever built - although the Great Wall of China is huge and thousands of miles long, it was actually built after the threat of attack had gone away and was largely a political statement. The walls of Constantinople, on the other hand, successfully repelled invaders more than 80 times. There was an outer wall a number of miles from the main wall, which corresponds exactly with the outer wall of Minas Tirith, which was overrun at the first attack of the invading army.
Minas Tirith was separated from the enemy in the east by a river, rather than a channel of the sea, but this is a minor difference. The river Anduin was too wide to be bridged and required a fleet of boats to cross, so it was effectively the same as the Strait of the Bosphorus defending Constantinople.
The Forces of Evil
An odd parallel is between the forces of the Dark Lord and the Muslim Turks. No doubt, Tolkien had no particular bias against the Turks or Muslims, but the people of Constantinople at the time of its downfall would have hated them, and this is reflected in the attitudes of the Gondorians to the forces of Mordor, who are pure evil.
Certainly, the accounts of the soldiers of Gondor looking east towards Mordor in the last few days before the invasion mirror the attitude of the Byzantines on the eve of the Turkish invasion of their city.
And this explains one peculiarity of the Lord of the Rings map - why was Mordor such a peculiar shape? There's no doubt that Tolkien, while excelling in History, didn't score any great marks in Geography. His mountain ranges are all straight lines, and Mordor is the strangest of the lot with a rectangular shape marked out by mountain ranges. Well, get out your map of Europe and you'll see the reason. Mordor is Turkey!
Seek and Ye Shall Find
Of course, there are bound to be echoes of European history in Middle Earth. The people of Rohan are based on one of the many invasions of horse-riding nomads from central Asia - the Huns, the Mongols, the Tatars. But the match is not exact; these people came as invaders while the Rohirrim came to help the Gondorians.
The Elvish language that educated people still can speak in Middle Earth fills the same role as Latin (in the West) and Greek (in the East) did until the late Middle Ages.
But going beyond this, we are running the risk of stretching a point. It's easy to find anything you want if you look hard enough.
Of course, one of the main differences, between The Lord of the Rings and real life is that the Turks succeeded in conquering Constantinople, while Minas Tirith successfully resisted, and the Gondorian Empire never fell. Because the Byzantines had no magic rings. And whatever the people of Constantinople thought, the Muslim Turks were not genuinely evil. Their Ottoman Empire, although officially Muslim, was an egalitarian society and relatively benign in nature.
All these parallels seem to prove that for a good story, it is hard to beat real life!
