# Tolkien and Wagner....???



## 33Peregrin (Aug 8, 2004)

Well, this is the best place I know to ask this. Uhhhh... ok. Today I was at a little 'Piano Camp', which is just pretty much three days of learning little obscure things about the piano, and doing little piano-y things. It was just two Piano teachers (one of them mine) and maybe 7 kids, both of their students. So today we were learning about the music periods. I was half falling asleep, but then Dale (the other teacher) mentioned Wagner and the Ring Cycle or something. And he started talking about LOTR too (I was the one who answered it was written by Tolkien, of course)! But he said that the Ring Cycle was something Wagner worked on his whole life and was thousands of pages long. And that Tolkien did not think of his story, that it was Wagner, because his Ring Cycle was about one central evil ring... That Tolkien just used this idea. 
I couldn't really say anything, because I had no idea. I have never heard anything like this, nothing about it in the four Tolkien biographies I have read. Maybe I should have just believed him. But it just didn't seem that he knew very much about LOTR, maybe just the movies. He didn't seem that he knew Tolkien spent his whole life on the Sil and LOTR and anything. So I don't know. Has anyone heard anything like this? Can anyone tell me about this? Or do you think Dale just saw the movies and because he is so into music and everything, just says that it is based on Wagner's Ring Cycle? I just am lost, and I couldn't say anything because I wouldn't have known what I was talking about, having never even heard of the Ring Cylcle. But Dale even said that he had to argue with a lot of people at work about this too.
And please excuse my rambling.


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## joxy (Aug 9, 2004)

I'm surprised you've managed not to hear about Wagner's Ring, especially as it's so often spoken of in connection with Tolkien's books, though there is actually no real connection between them.
Wagner was mainly a musician - a composer and conductor - but he also wrote many prose books on the arts and music,
as well as four poems based on some areas of Germanic mythology. No doubt that exercise did take up a large amount of his time, but he had many other things to occupy him, and I think your teacher exaggerates on that point. Wagner used the poems as the basis for four operas, The Rhine-gold, The Valkyries, Siegfried, and The Twilight of the Gods. The four taken together are usually known as The Ring of the Niebelungen. The theme is gold taken from the bed of the Rhine, made into a ring by the creatures called niebelungs, and the various adventures of that ring in relation to standard figures of the mythology. It is a long, and in the opinion of many, a very tedious story, rendered into very tedious music, but it has aquired an enormous reputation, and there is an annual festival devoted to it. Wagner could occasionally write a tune, rather than portentous sounds like some of those that Shore offers us in the films, and you may know "The ride of the valkyries" from the opera about those creatures, the guardians of the ring. Tolkien was less interested in this specific mythology than in many others, and there is no relationship between his books and Wagner's operas, other than the coincidence of titles. Your teacher has definitely got that one wrong, and it would be interesting to know what aspects of it he argues about at work. I expect to see a sequence of contributions now expressing the opposite to my opinion of the operas, but I don't think there will be many defending the idea of a relationship with the books.


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## 33Peregrin (Aug 9, 2004)

Thanks Joxy. That really helped a lot. It is amazing how much you know about this! Perhaps I have come across something to do with Wagner, but have forgotten it. Oh well. Anyways, that really did help a lot. Anyways, I went on to read more about it last night and I found this: http://www.isi.org/lectures/text/pdf/birzer.pdf . I printed it off, and I plan to give it to the teacher. It might be difficult because he isn't my piano teacher, and I don't really see him very often. But thanks again!


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## joxy (Aug 11, 2004)

I'm glad to hear that 33P, and now it's my turn to offer you a big vote of thanks, for pointing me to that fascinating .pdf. I've learned a lot from it!

I mentioned the "Ride of the valkyries", which has often been used in films to raise some excitement, and which I'm sure you know even if you don't know what it is. There's another bit of Wagner that you almost certainly do know: the Wedding March, from the slightly less heavy opera Lohengrin. It's the one that people here tend to make fun of, setting words to it such as "here comes the bride, forty inches wide", which gives you an idea that Wagner really shouldn't be taken as seriously as many people insist he should be!
He shouldn't be completely ignored though, and, if you can take opera at all, you might make a start with The Master Singers of Nuremburg or The Flying Dutchman, which are both less weighty again than the Ring quartet. If you're not used to operat at all though, I definitely recommend Mozart as an introduction, definitely to be taken, along with Puccini, Rossini, Verdi, and Bizet, well before Wagner.


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## Inderjit S (Sep 2, 2004)

Question E21 in the following link deals with your question well.


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## Eledhwen (Jan 3, 2008)

I just found this archive in the New Yorker. It's three pages long, so I won't lift it, but it's very interesting and well written (in my occasionally humble opinion).


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## geordie (Oct 8, 2008)

Many people have drawn comparisons between Wagner's Ring Cycle and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings; but these comparisons don't stand up to much scrutiny. Tolkien was peeved by this sort of thing - 'Both rings are round' he once wrote 'and there the resemblance ceases'.

Of course, Tolkien knew the Niebelunglied in the original, and had no need for Wagner to teach him anything about that; but his real interest lay in the Norse version; of Sigurd and Fafnir, which he first encountered as a child in the Red Fairy Book, edited by Andrew Lang. (1890)


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