"Do the Atlantis story and abandon Eriol-Saga"

“O upon a time,” wrote Tolkien to a publisher in 1951, “I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend . . . which I could dedicate . . . to England; to my country” (Letters 144). Much as he described (though perhaps not quite as he intended) his legendarium of Middle-earth, now published in entirety many years after his death, is indeed “a body of more or less connected legend.” It is also a body of overlapping, competing, endlessly revised, and often incomplete texts, the outcome of more than half a lifetime’s worth of invention. In such an assembly of material it is perhaps over-optimistic to expect total consistency, and with a few exceptions such as Ainulindalë, the stories of Beren and Lúthien, and those of Túrin Turambar, such consistency is not there. What is there, underlying all the intertangled, often unfinished texts, is a fixed purpose—Tolkien’s intent to create a mythology for England. It might be asked, “Why for England especially?” England had managed without a mythology for centuries and suffered no apparent damage. Tolkien, however, was not the only Englishman who felt the lack. E. M. Forster, although no mythologist, had asked rhetorically in Howards End, “Why has not England a great mythology?” lamenting that, “Our folklore has never advanced beyond daintiness, and the greater melodies about our country-side have all issued through the pipes of Greece. . . . England still waits for . . . the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk” (Forster 279). Tolkien’s letter expressed much the same sentiment: “I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country; it had no stories of its own . . . . There was Greek,” he wrote, “and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me) but nothing English, save impoverished chapbook stuff ” (Letters 144). 1 It is not unreasonable to suppose that Tolkien might have seen himself as Forster’s “great poet,” perhaps even, through the multiple voices of his mythology, as “the thousand little poets” as well. Both Tolkien and Forster were responding to a perceived connection between mythology and nationalism that engendered what Tom Shippey has called a mythological “arms race” (Shippey, “Grimm, Grundtvig, Tolkien” 8). Beginning with the Grimms in the early nineteenth century, folklorists had ransacked the attics of the past for ancient texts whose stories and myth-embedded language would support cultural identity and encourage nationhood. Tolkien’s comment about Finnish is especially