Tímarit Máls og menningar - 01.09.2003, Síða 61

Völuspá og Hringadróttinssaga tmm bls. 59
Tilvísanir
1 The Lord of the R'tngs (1954-55), á íslensku:
Hringadróttinssaga, Þorsteinn Thorarensen ís-
lenskaði (1993); The Silmarillion (1977), á íslensku:
Silmerillinn, Þorsteinn Thorarensen íslenskaði
(1999); The Hobbit (1937), á íslensku Hobbitinn,
Þorsteinn Thorarensen íslenskaði (1997); Farmer
Giles of Ham (1949), á íslensku Gvendur bóndi á
Svínafelli, Ingibjörg Jónsdóttir þýddi (1979).
2 Ljóðið Mythopoeia er útgefið t.d. í: The Monsters
and the Critics: The Essays of J.R.H. Totkien,
London, 1991.
3 Sjá athygliverða umræðu um það í fyrirlestri
Matthews Whelptons „Tale-teller, truth-teller;
myth-maker, God", http://www.nordals.hi.is/matt-
hew.html.
4 Sbr. sérstaklega fyrirlestur Tolkiens: The Monsters
and the Critics. Hann þýddi líka og kynnti Beowulf,
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl og Sir
Orfeo.
5 [ sambandi við þessa hugmynd segir Terry Gunnell
í fyrirlestri sínum „Tívar in a Timeless Land:
Tolkien's Elves": „While attempting to recreate a
lost mythology for England in the Silmarillion, he
was simultaneously proposing a form of ur-myt-
hology - in Tom Shippey's words, we might call it
an „asterisk mythology" - that might help explain
the range of fragmented jigsaw pieces that form
the mythologies of the western world, and join
them into one. In other words, he might have
argued that it was they rather than he that was the
borrower: that all the western mythologies went
back to the mythology that he was positing. Of
course this was all a game that he was playing"
(http://www.nordals.hi.is/terry.html).
6 í fyrirlestrinum „Tolkien and lceland: The Philology of
Envy" segirTom Shippey: „Tolkien wanted English
myths, and English legends, and English fairy-stor-
ies, and these did not exist. He refused to borrow
from Celtic tradition, which he regarded as alien.
What was he going to do? The answer is, of
course, that he was going to borrow from Old Nor-
se, which, for philological reasons, he did NOT
regard as alien" (http://www.nordals.hi.is/shipp-
ey.html).
7 Tom Shippey: The Road to Middle-Earth, London,
1992, bls. 211.
8 Tom Shippey: „Tolkien and lceland: The Philology
of Envy".
9 Einar Ól. Sveinsson segir ástæðu sömu úrfellingar
(eyðu) geta verið þá að skáld Völuspár hafi treyst á
þekkingu áheyrenda á goðafræðinni: „Þegar kvæð-
ið var ort, hefur margt verið áheyranda Ijósara en
nú. Á goðafræði kann skáldið mikil skil, og krefst
hann hiklaust fullrar þekkingar áheyranda t.d. um
nöfn goða og vætta, ættatengsl þeirra, kunnáttu í
goðsögum" (Einar Ól. Sveinsson: íslenzkar bók-
menntir i fornöld, Reykjavík 1962).
10 Það er kannski athyglisvert að fyrsti titill
Silmarillions var The Lost Tales.
11 Sbr. Tom Shippey: „Tolkien and lceland: The
Philology of Envy".
12 Sjá líka Skírnismál (vísur 7, 17), Alvíssmál (vísur 10,
12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 28, 30, 32), Grímnismál
(5. vísa) og Völundarkviða (10. vísa, 31. vísa).
13 Terry Gunnell bendir á hugsanlegt samband milli
álfa og vana í „Tívar in a Timeless Land: Tolkien's
Elves".
14 Flutningur álfa er ítrekað minni og kemur líka upp í
t.d. keltneskum goðsögum og í íslenskum þjóð-
sögum. Sbr. líka Katherine Briggs: The Fairies in
Tradition and Literature, London, 2002, bls. 264.
15 Sjá Tom Shippey: „Tolkien and lceland: The
Philology of Envy".
16 Sbr. Tolkien, J.R.R.: Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed.
Humphrey Carpenter & Ch. Tolkien, London, 1995,
bls. 21, 31, 175.
17 „Gand, however, must mean „staff," and a staff
or magic wand is what magicians carry; and a
magician might be called an álfr by people who
associated the elves with magic. So Gandalf is a
wizard, but the first thing that Bilbo sees is „an old
man with a staff". The name creates the staff, and
the staff creates the idea of a wizard" (Tom Shipp-
ey: „Tolkien and lceland: The Philology of Envy").
Það er kannski athyglisverð að í þýðingu Völuspár
t.d. eftir Larrington er nafnið þýtt bókstaflega og
„Gandálfr" er kallaður „Staff-elf". (Sjá The Poetic
Edda, Carolyne Larrington þýddi, Oxford, 1996.)
18 Tom Shippey: „Tolkien and lceland: The Philology
of Envy".
19 Fyrirmynd dreka ( Hobbitanum virðist vera Fáfnir í
Fáfnismálum þótt drekinn sem Beowulf barðist við
hafi einnig verið mikilvægur.
20 Forveri Shelob, Ungoliant (Úngolíant fornkónguló),
tengist „Unlight" - gegnir hræðilegu hlutverki í
sögu Silmarillions þar sem hún sýgur m.a. Ijós
trjánna í Valalandi, sbr. Fenri í Vafþrúðnismálum (v.
46).
21 J.R.R. Tolkien: Silmarillion, New York, 1982, bls.
34.
22 Tré var mikilvægt tákn hjá Tolkien að öllu leyti og
kemur líka upp í öðrum verkum hans: smásögunni
„Leaf by Niggle", og fyrirlestrinum „On Fairy-Stor-
ies" (Tree and Leaf, 1964).
23 Sbr. Sigurður Nordal: Völuspá, 1952.
24 Einar Ól. Sveinsson: (slenzkar bókmenntir í
fornöld, bls. 336.
25 Dronke, Ursula: Myth and Fiction in Early Norse
Lands, 1996, bls. 13.
26 Shippey segir meðal annars að norræna goðafræð-
in hafi verið Tolkien fyrirmynd hvað hina „göfugu
heiðni" varðaði: „In answer to my question, WHY
did Tolkien want to invent a new mythology, then,
I would say that, like Grimm or Grundtvig, he very
much wanted a mythology which seemed native,
which was not identifiably Judaeo-Classical. He
also felt that Old Norse mythology provided a
model for what one might call „virtuous pagan-
ism," which was heathen; conscious of its own
inadequacy, and so ripe for conversion; but not yet
sunk into despair and disillusionment like so much
of 20th century post-Christian literature; a mytho-
logy which was in its way light-hearted. [...] But
this was also, for Tolkien, the state of mind of
many of his countrymen in the 1940s. Christianity
was no longer the universally-accepted belief it
had been. Evil seemd to be unconquerable, to rise
again from every defeat. There was a strong
impulse to give up, to make terms, to do the kind
of deal with Sauron, or with Saruman, which is
suggested several times in The Lord of the Rings.
But they must not do it. They must learn to go on
without assurance of victory, without trust in God,
if necessary to go on fighting a long defeat. If the
spirit of the godless Viking could be revived in
modern times, as it had been in the Nazi ideology
of heathenism and Oðinn-worship, then the spirit
of the virtuous pagan could also be revived:
another aspect of saga-tradition, men like Njáll or
Gunnarr, wise, brave, doing the best they could
under difficult circumstances, going down in the
end to defeat, but not allowing this to change their
hearts. (Tom Shippey: „Tolkien and lceland: The
Philology of Envy", http://www.nordals.hi.is/shipp-
ey.html).
27 Einar Ól. Sveinsson: íslenzkar bókmenntir í
fornöld, bls. 329.
28 Sigurður Nordal: Völuspá, 1952.
29 Einar Ól. Sveinsson: íslenzkar bókmenntir í
fornöld, bls. 328.
30 Tom Shippey: „Tolkien and lceland: The Philology
of Envy".
31 Terry Gunnell: „Tívar in a Timeless Land: Tolkien’s
Elves".
Olga Holownia (f. 1977) er MA (enskum búkmenntum frá
Háskólanum (Varsjá og stundar nú nám í íslensku fyrir erlenda
stúdenta við Háskóla fslands.
Dagný Kristjánsdóttir, Brynhildur Þórarinsdóttir, Þorbjörg Jóns-
dóttir og Terry Gunnell fá þökk höfundar fyrir hvatningu og
aðstoð við greinina.