--- "Dan D." <onco111@...> skrev:

> Dear Yong Peng and Rett,
> Your speculations sound like a variation on "I like
> Eastern
> mythology. Good stuff. I like Tolkien. Good stuff.
> Therefore,
> Tolkien's ideas must be Eastern."

If we want to project upon a writer an idea most
certainly alien to him, C. S. Lewis gives us a good
opportunity:

In his novel "Out of the Silent Planet", he says that
the real name of the planet Mars is "Malacandra".

As anyone can see :-), this must be the Sanskrit form
of Pali "Mala-canda", i. e. "Spot-moon"...

Or perhaps "Maala-canda" - "Rosary-moon".

When he calls Venus and Earth "Perelandra" and
"Thulcandra" respectively, he makes it a little more
difficult for us, however.

--- rett <rett@...> skrev:

> Reading that explanation, I believe there is no way
> that an early twentieth century Oxford philologist
> would have devised that system without having been
> directly and consciously influenced by Sanskrit
> grammar.

I agree. Where he took the ideas of his stories,
however, is a different matter. One of his main
sources was ancient Iceland; and there are some
parallells between Old Norse and Old Indian mythology,
perhaps because of a common Indo-European background
(e. g. Thor and the giants versus Indra and the asuras
- Thor and Indra is the same name, by the way, and the
same word as English "thunder").

And stories tend to be cross-cultural, anyway. I don't
think the main themes of the Jataka stories were
invented by the Jataka authors; many may have a
pre-buddhist, oral, background. And about the Arabian
Nights, at least one theme there - the spirit in the
bottle - may also be found, in a much simpler version,
in the German Days, i. e. the tales of the Grimm
brothers.

> It's an inside joke that any philologist would
> immediately grok.

Oh, so you've read Heinlein too? Definitely not a
Buddhist writer, at least not in his attitude to war
and Pacifism.

Is the word "grok" a part of the common English
vocabulary nowadays, by the way? I wouldn't have
understood it if I didn't happen to be responsible for
the Swedish translation of "Stranger in a Strange
Land" (not a very good translation, unfortunately,
partly because the publisher forced me to shorten the
text, and partly because I didn't and don't like
Heinlein's ideology - in that case, too, I needed the
money...)

And back to Tolkien: one thing he *was* aware of was
the Nazi misuse of linguistic concepts. In 1938, a
German Publisher wrote to Allen & Unwin in London to
discuss a possible German translation of "The Hobbit",
but they had to know one thing: the author of the book
was an Arian, wasn't he? (By which they meant, of
course, Non-Jewish.)

A&U forwarded the letter to Tolkien himself who
answered that he had checked his ancestors and no,
unfortunately - he was not of Indian decent, nor
Persian, nor Gipsy, so he most definitely wasn't
Arian...

(His own name, by the way, was probably derived from
the German adjective "tollkühn"; at least that's what
was told in his family - his ancestors were Saxons who
came to England long *after* the Normans, only in the
18th century.)

Gunnar