Turin's Origins?

[Ancalagon]

I have been wondering about the inspiration and origin of Turin Turambar as a character and considering who might have influenced Tolkien in his creation.

In my own interpretation, I have whittled it down to two mythological hero's of Germanic and Icelandic origin.

1. Beowulf - who fought a number of monstrous creatures, including a Dragon, who mortally wounded him in combat.

2. Sigurd - who slew Fafnir with an invincible sword. This one is particularly relevant as Sigurd hid in a hole along the Dragons daily track and thrust the sword into his soft underbelly.

It is important to note also, that Sigurd was cursed ever-after following the death of Fafnir, whereas Turin's curse was removed with the death throws of Glaurung!

What are your thoughts on this?

[Niniel]

Since Tolkien was much influenced by Scandinavian mythology, I would say that it is very well possible that some elements of Túrin's history were modelled after the sources you mention. It's too much of a coincidence to be just by chance.

[Ancalagon]

The more I have considered it and now having read The Children of Hurin again, I suspect it to be the latter.

*Mods, please move this thread to the relevant forum:)

[Ilmarin]

Tolkien answered that question


:Letter #131: There are other stories almost equally full in treatment, and equally independent and yet linked to the general history. There is the Children of Húrin, the tragic tale of Túrin Turambar and his sister Níniel – of which Turin is the hero: a figure that might be said (by people who like that sort of thing, though it is not very useful) to be derived from elements in Sigurd the Volsung, Oedipus, and the Finnish Kullervo.


The main inspiration was the story of Kullervo of Kalevala.

Take a look in the Wikipedia and you 'll know why.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KullervoLetter

#163:


never learned Finnish well enough to do more than plod through a bit of the original, like a schoolboy with Ovid; being mostly taken up with its effect on 'my language'. But the beginning of the legendarium, of which the Trilogy is pan (the conclusion), was in an attempt to reorganize some of the Kalevala, especially the tale of Kullervo the hapless, into a form of my own. That began, as I say, in the Honour Mods period; nearly disastrously as I came very near having my exhibition taken off me if not being sent down. Say 1912 to 1913. As the thing went on I actually wrote in verse.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Thorin]

Hey Anc! Good to see one of the fellow ancient ones!


I can't help but think that Tolkien was a bit influenced by Shakespeare as well. I see a bit of Hamlet and MacBeth elements in the tale of Turin and it definitely plays out like a Shakespeare tragedy

The battle episode between Eowyn and the Witch King has influences of MacBeth in it.

[Snaga]

I didn't think Tolkien was a big Shakespeare fan? Which doesn't mean he could not be influenced. A bit hard to entirely avoid influence from Shakespeare, if you're English, or English-speaking!

[baragund]

Sorry to veer off topic but how do you see MacBeth in the fight between Eowyn and the Witch King, Thorin?

[Thorin]

When the witch king says 'no man shall defeat me' and Eowyn whips off her helmet showing that she is indeed NOT a man but a woman,hence though no man could defeat him, a woman could!

I'm a little shaky on names with MacBeth as it has been so long but isn't the idea the same? Someone was told that 'no man born of a woman' would defeat the person but that person (was it MacBeth?) was in fact 'ripped untimely from his mother's womb' or was born in a C-section and didn't go through the birth canal, so technically the prophecy came true though it really came down to semantics and this person did defeat the other, just as Eowyn defeated the witch-king.

[Turgon]

Snaga is right about Tolkien's dislike of Shakespeare, but Tolkien was definitely familiar with MacBeth. In one of his letters Tolkien says he thinks the origins of the ents going to war may have been inspired by the coming of 'Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill' in Macbeth, which he saw as a schoolboy but thought Shakespeare made a hash of the idea. The idea of the moving forest stayed with him however.

[baragund]

Thanks Thorin. I can see the parellel there.



...Shakespeare made a hash of the idea.

Heh. It takes quite an ego to to describe Shakespeare's work that way.

[Turgon]

Hardly, Shakespeare is not without fault, nor does Tolkien strike me as being particularly egotistical.

[Aldanil]

I think that John Ronald's greatest source of discontent with the Bard was the prettified and diminutive pixy-ish images of fairies presented, especially in A Mid-summer Night's Dream, with such pernicious effect on the proper majesty of the Elves. His gripe with the business of "Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill" arose from what he considered the shameful squandering of a tremendous narrative opportunity, which resentful dissatisfaction must have stuck deep in his craw for decades, until the Oldest of the Onodrim (previously unknown to the author) walked into The Lord of the Rings to find Merry and Pippin on a sun-dappled hilllside in Fangorn Forest. The march of the Ents to Isengard must have given considerable pleasure to a man who had mourned so many fine old trees, lost to so many axes and chain-saws.

As for the primary thread of this thread, Ilmarin has it entirely right: the tale and character of Turin Turambar are derived, explicitly and extensively, from the rash and hapless hero Kullervo of the Kalevala. Having hunted up and read the original (in translation), I will here opine that Tolkien wrought most powerfully and well upon his source-material, enriching and substantiating the psychological (for want of a better word) depth and complexity of what is in Finnish the story of a violent hothead's reeeaallly bad luck.

The motif taken from the Volsunga Saga is one that Tolkien had already employed in The Hobbit (or rather, since our dearest don began his retelling while yet an undergraduate, one that he returned to in the Third Age): the grim great dragon vulnerable from beneath, slain as Fafnir is by Sigurd, pierced to the death by a Black Sword or Black Arrow.

As for the elements of Shakespearean tragedy mentioned in the earlier of Thorin's postings, I mun demur. Unlike such figures as Hamlet, Macbeth, or Othello, Turin is not destroyed in consequence of his own ruinous choices; the Doom that masters him at last (and from its beginning in the malice of Morgoth) is more than he can either comprehend or overcome. In Elizabethan drama, the catastrophe might have been otherwise, had the Thane of Cawdor listened to his conscience, had the Moor of Venice heeded not his "honest" friend, had the Prince of Denmark not dithered and dawdled. The fate that awaits Turambar was cruel and long-prepared.

One last circumstantial/tangential note on the matter of tragedy: perhaps my greatest regret, among very few, about the brilliant 50th anniversary conference at Aston University in Birmingham in 2005, was my inability ("sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler") to attend the stirring performance by the Greek Tolkien Society of the tale of Turin as a Sophoclean drama, because it was offered at the same time that evening as the Deutsche Quiz Championship, an internationally contested-for combat which produced the single funniest LOTR-anecdote in living memory, starring the Off On & Orc comic stylings of me companion Sting, a blade of "finest Elvish polyurethane" and not the former Police-man.