Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth by Marjorie Burns (review)

REVIEWS 223 the authors have selected specific personages, written works, cities, institutions, and works of art to discuss and employ as tools in a more in-depth understanding of the black African experience. The editors have successfully divided the chapters, not into customary geographical regions, but instead into categories useful to historians of Europe in search of more conceptual material. Because of the nature of this research, the reader may feel on occasion that the text becomes a list of horrible stereotypes or deplorable tales. Perhaps this is why scholars have avoided the important but sensitive topic. Many historians of early modern Europe have, in effect, written black Africans out of history texts, ignoring their small but significant presence in European populations, their frequent mention in historical documents, and their depictions in works of art. This text will serve as a useful tool in rectifying this omission. One hopes that these essays will encourage research into additional sources and more European regions. LISA BOUTIN, Art History, UCLA Marjorie Burns, Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middleearth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2005) xii + 225 pp. Riding the tide of the films’ popularity and the continuing wave of interest in “Celtic” music and other matters, Marjorie Burns writes for a broad audience of fantasy fans in her recent work, Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth. At a time when controversial questions of Celticity generate nuanced discussions of cultural, ethnic, and linguistic identity among scholars, Burns instead reinstates nineteenth-century stereotypes codified by Matthew Arnold, which pitted the rational, mature, and masculine Saxon (or Norseman) against the sentimental, childish, and feminine Celt. Although her opening argument intimates that she will provide a poststructural blurring of binaries in an effort to foreground the multivalent nature of Tolkien’s “double-sided” characters and works, she ultimately reinscribes and upholds the typological oppositions between “Celtic enchantment and Norse vitality” that the reader initially thought she would transcend (10). In fact, Burns’s citation of Tolkien’s claim that there is “no value at all” in the image of the “wild incalculable poetic Celt, full of vague and misty imaginations,” nor any value in the image of the Teuton as “solid and practical when not under the influence of beer” (15), lends little credence to her subsequent claim that Tolkien nonetheless relied upon and employed romantic stereotypes about the Celts, as popularized by Matthew Arnold and Ernest Renan—though Burns seems unaware of the work of the latter. Because Burns does not define “Celtic” and “Norse” in full detail, nor does she provide an extensive overview of the historical complexities within and between these ethnic groups, the reader leaves the first chapter with an overly simplified picture of what is in fact the complicated and shifting nexus of “Celtic” and “Norse” identity—indebted more deeply to linguistic than cultural factors for definition. And even if Burns has geared her work towards a general audience, this certainly does not excuse her use of unreliable sources on Celtic matters, nor does it excuse such careless statements as the following: “most of us would agree that Tolkien’s Elves feel far more Celtic than Norse” (24); “the feeling given by these woods is entirely druidic” (36); “there is as well something in the English character that responds with discomfort when REVIEWS 224 faced with excess, irrationality, or emotional display” (16). Nevertheless, Burns’s exploration of “Norse” elements in Tolkien’s work proves far more compelling than her discussion of Celtic motifs, primarily due to a solid grounding established by the work of T. A. Shippey. In her fourth chapter, Burns’s scrutiny of the correlations between William Morris’s Icelandic Journals and certain scenes in The Hobbit render rare insights into the two texts, even though a direct causal connection may be lacking. Likewise, her examination in chapter 5 of the intersections between Gandalf and his Norse mythological counterpart, Odin, proves similarly credible and perceptive, while her analysis of the shadow sides of Gandalf and Galdriel, as represented in Saruman and Shelob, sheds further light on the two characters’ depth of characterization. The sixth chapter elucidates intriguing aspects of the multifaceted representation of...