Speculative Mythology: Tolkien's Adaptation of Winter and the Devil in Old English Poetry

Not only do J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth writings include fairy tales, mythological adventures, linguistic exercises, and theological reflections; they also provided their author with a place for scholarly play. Tolkien's fictional work often serves as a philological sandbox, free from the demands and criticisms of a scholarly audience. For example, as several scholars have noted, the Gothic names of the Rohirrim's distant ancestors (Vidugavia, Vidumavi, etc.) suggest that the Rohirrim's real-world counterparts, the Anglo-Saxons, might have had Gothic ancestry.¹ This conjecture is much safer hidden in fictional genealogies than it would be in a scholarly publication. In this essay, I explore another example of such scholarly play: Tolkien's treatment of the relationship between the devil and winter in Old English poetry. The Old English Genesis, elegies like The Wanderer and the Seafarer, and hagiographies like Andreas all suggest an implicit connection between Satan's desire to hold a throne in the north, Satan's role as a spiritual opponent to the saints, and winter weather's parallel roles as both northerly menace and spiritual threat. Tolkien borrows these themes in his invented mythology and adds an explicit, causal connection between them. His Satan figure, Melkor (later named Morgoth),² is "a dark lord upon a dark throne in the North" who created temperature extremes and who brings spiritual and physical danger as well as a Fell Winter upon his realm (S 205). The Old English poems considered below might compel an imaginative reader to wonder what a mythological connection between the north-dwelling devil and northerly weather might look like. Melkor is Tolkien's answer to that question, an answer that he also incorporates into the theology and aesthetics of his mythology as a whole.

Winter and the Old English Devil: A Shadowy Link

Before turning to Tolkien, I will discuss his raw material: the characteristic and overlapping ways in which the devil and winter are described in Old English poetry. The devil appears in the Old English Genesis, especially Genesis B, as a rebellious vassal of God who wishes to set up him strenglicran stol… / heahran on heofonum "a stronger throne for himself, higher in the heavens" (ll. 273–74).³ According to Genesis A, he wants this throne to be on norð-dæle / ham and heah-setl heofena rices "a home and a high throne in the northern regions of the kingdom of heaven" (ll. 32–33). Genesis B adds further details: he will build a trymede getimbro "fortified building" in the west and norð (l. 275). His plan is frustrated; he is thrown down to hell before he has a chance to build this northern fortress. But these two texts—one of English origin, one translated from Old Saxon—suggest at least a shadowy connection in the poetic tradition between Satan and the north.

On its own, this idea is not uniquely English or even Germanic. It has roots in the Vulgate's story of Lucifer's fall, in which Lucifer declares, sedebo in monte testamenti, in lateribus aquilonis "I will sit on the mount of the testament, on the walls of the North" (Isaiah 14:13). Augustine clarifies this theme, quoting from Isaiah 14 in his commentary on Psalm 47:

contrarius solet esse aquilo sion: sion quippe in meridie, aquilo contra meridiem. quis es iste aquilo , nisi qui dixit: ponam sedem meam ad aquilonem, et ero similis altissimo?

(Augustine 47.3.24)

Zion is accustomed to opposing the north: Zion, indeed, is in the south, and the north is opposed to the south. Who is that "north," other than the one who says, "I will put my seat in the north, and I will be like the Most High"?

Here, Satan not only aspires to live in the north; he is the north. Alfred L. Kellogg points also to Augustine's Liber de Gratia Novi Testamenti, in which "the deprivation of grace… is symbolized by the north wind," and suggests that this association became a kind of received wisdom...