Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Perspectives on the Sea
A major motif in The Lord of the Rings is the presence of large bodies of water, especially rivers and the Sea. In the Prologue “1 Concerning Hobbits”, the narrator explains that Hobbits had developed an antagonistic view of this type of water, along with the exploration and cultures associated with it. Hobbits of the Shire and the neighboring settlement Westfarthing lived not far from three Elf-towers located in the appropriately named Tower Hills and believed “one could see the Sea from the top of that [tallest] tower… no Hobbit had ever been known to climb it… the Sea became a word of fear among them, and a token of death”. (8) This passage also describes their dualistic relationship with Elves because of that Race’s association with the Sea. Although Hobbits admired, even envied, Elf culture by appropriating their crafts and a variant of their writing system, along with being ruled by the Elf-like or Elf-descended Fallohide Hobbits, as discussed in my post last week, at the time of the main story, “they spoke less and less with the Elves, and grew afraid of them, and distrustful of those who had dealings with them” (8).
Fear of the Sea and of other societies was not unique to fictional Hobbit culture. Many ancient people in the real world had a similar fear of large bodies of water and the people who navigated them, which was bolstered by their mythologies. The Sea existed as a duality with two vastly different positions in the ancient mind. Water was a source of life and a mode of transportation, but it often brought death and destruction. Across the globe, myths concerning water are likewise divided into two main categories: creation at the beginning of time, and floods followed by the rebirth of life on earth. Both categories had a similar theme: the universe was in chaos, and a god or gods created order, even if causing an interim period of further chaos.
The best known creation myth in the Christianized world appears in the first chapter of Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible. In the first ten verses, God hovers over the “formless and empty” waters, creates light, separates the sky from the water, and separates dry ground from the sea over the course of three days. A similar verse exists in the Quran 21:30, “Do the disbelievers not realize that the heavens and earth were once one mass then We split them apart? And We created from water every living thing. Will they not then believe?” In fact, most Mesopotamian religions have an analogous creation story, which I learned about extensively last year while reading the book Old Testament Parallels. Ancient Egyptians believed in Nu or Nun, the personification of the watery chaos before creation and the father of the sun god Ra. Sumerians and Akkadian groups like the Babylonians, Assyrians, and Chaldeans believed in Apsu and Tiamat, the separated fresh water and salt water made by the creator god Ea.
Across the water in the Americas, Mixtec of modern Mexico had their own creation myth with primeval waters. Their stories were recorded in Spanish by Fray Gregorio García, a Dominican monk who published Origen de los indios de el nuevo mundo e indias occidentales [Origin of the Indians of the New World and West Indies] in 1607. A partial English translation of this work was made by Lewis Spence, a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (RAI). (Readers might remember the origins of that organization from LOTRAM “Prologue, 1 Concerning Hobbits”.) Spence’s translation appeared in his book The Myths of Mexico and Peru published in 1913 : “before ever were years or days, the world lay in darkness. All things were orderless, and a water covered the slime and ooze that the earth then was”. After this period of water and darkness, all life was made by Ōmeteōtl, literally meaning “Dual God”, who might be a single god appearing in male and female forms or a pair of gods. While the similarity between these myths are striking, the religion of the Mixtec likely had already undergone significant Christianization in the one hundred and fifteen years between the arrival of Columbus and the publication of Origen de los indios.
Similarly, when American anthropologist Roland Burrage Dixon (who happened to be born in Worcester, MA) collected myths from Polynesia, Melanesia, Indonesia, Micronesia, and Australia for his 1916 publication The Mythology of all Races: Volume IX Oceanic, he did so with a Western, Christian lens. Dixon transcribed a translated verse from New Zealand, “The Universe was in darkness, with water everywhere / There was no glibber of dawn, no clearness, no light / And he began by saying these words…” (Dixon, 13). He may have recorded an original myth, but this song was likely influenced by the missionaries who had been arriving in New Zealand for over a hundred years since 1814.
If creation myths have melded into a similar format, what about flood myths? I first explored this topic as an undergraduate at Wheaton College in Massachusetts when I created Deluge: An Art Book of Flood Myths. The story most familiar to readers once again appeared in Genesis, this time in chapters 6 through 8, as Noah brings animals into his ark. The Sumerian and Akkadian flood myth appeared in the Epic of Gilgamesh, as the titular hero visits flood survivor Utnapishtim, who is presumably his ancestor, to learn the secret of immortality. In Greek and Roman mythology, excellently illustrated in the classic D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, Deucalion and Pyrrha build their boat, collect animals, and wait out the storm.
Flood myths existed outside of the Mediterranean and Mesopotamian region. The Indian continent has its own myriad of religions with their own flood myths. From Hinduism came the story of Manu and Matsu. The faithful mortal Matsu built his boat during the flood, while the fish Manu, an avatar or incarnation of the god Vishnu, pulled the boat to safety. On the central plains of North America, modern Lakota Sioux people have a syncretic religion, combining aspects of traditional beliefs with Christianity. In their flood myth, the Creating Power, also called Wakan Tanka, sang the flood into being, saying, “I will sing three songs, which will bring a heavy rain. Then I’ll sing a fourth song… Water will come out of the cracks and cover the land”.
Not all flood myths used water as their liquid of choice. In the Finnish national epic Kalevala, a major inspiration for The Lord of the Rings, blood from the knee of the bardic sage Väinämöinen covered the entire earth. Väinämöinen used the magic of song to defeat his enemies but ultimately left the land of Kaleva, singing a magical boat into being and sailing away from the mortal lands. Neighboring Scandinavian countries have similarly bloody floods. The Old Norse texts Poetic Edda and Prose Edda both featured the death of the giant Ymir at the hands of the brother gods Odin, Villi, and Ve, with the giant’s blood covering the earth.
Besides creation and flood myths, people of Ancient and Medieval Europe developed tales about what lived in the sea. Pliny the Elder, who appeared on the blog earlier this week in my review on Greek and Roman Technology with a quote complaining about capitalism, wrote in his thirty-seven book series Naturalis Historia [Natural History] that each animal found on land must also have a watery counterpart. This type of logic was common in Greco-Roman society, similar to how Aristotle believed women have fewer teeth than men, although he could have easily counted a few teeth to refute this. By the Middle Ages, cartographers illustrated maps with fantastical creatures — including the human-horse-fish hybrid ichthyocentaur, massive lobsters, and sirens — and believed these were scientific realities.
Besides fearsome animals on the sea, terrifying people lived on the water. The Sea Peoples of the Mediterranean attacked ancient Egypt during the Late Bronze Age collapse around the 12th century BC, but little is recorded about their culture except from an antagonistic point of view. The sophisticated Vikings of Scandinavia, whose flood myths were filled with blood instead of water, attacked coastal Europe from around 800 AD to 1100 AD until defeats in battle paired with missionaries spreading Christianity gradually ended the raids. More recently, the British Royal Navy was considered the best fleet in the world from the mid-17th century to the end of World War Two and used its power to colonize a considerable portion of the world. Its only rival was the combined forces of the Koninklijke Marine [Royal Netherlands Navy] and Verenigde Oostindische Compangie (VOC) [Dutch East India Company], which led the Netherlands to dominance in maritime trade during the 17th through 19th centuries.
Fear of the Sea, whether rational or irrational, was found not only in fantasy but also throughout history, and for good reason. Even today, nearly eighty percent of the Earth’s oceans have not been studied by humans. As for the stories of creations and floods, there is no conclusive agreement on how the universe came into being, how to control the devastation of natural disasters, or what might live in deep water. Just like Hobbits, modern humans may distrust people from other cultures while enjoying their inventions and using their words. Through these ongoing cultural comparisons on seemingly unrelatable topics, I will continue to reveal similarities between people across time and place, including the fictional world.
Read past installments of Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical