JRR Tolkien: The ultimate author for bushcrafters?

To me at least, J.R.R. Tolkien’s whole Middle Earth series, or Legendarium, is a perfect read for bushcrafters - in particular The Lord of the Rings. It is quite a gentlemanly adventure, at least at first, as the Hobbits jump through a hole in the hedge, walking with their sticks, smoking their pipes, with their ruck sacks on their backs, eating and sleeping under old oak trees, and meeting Elves, and even a Ranger. I am sure they have Swiss Army Knives in their pockets which they use to uncork a bottle of Old Winyards (a wine from the Southfarthing). And of course, they find themselves in an adventure. It is an adventure told in an old fashioned sort of way, let’s says “traditional”, but then, so are many bushcrafters who like their steel high carbon, a Scandinavian grind, and their sheathes made of leather.

Tolkien’s Middle Earth is also very English, dare I say quite East Anglian (although I believe The Shire is somewhere between Oxford and the Cotswolds), and that is to say, Anglo-Saxon  but it is also rather Nordic too, literally… Gandalf and the Dwarves are right out of the Icelandic Elder Edda after all, and Middle Earth is translated directly from “Midgard” leaving us under no illusions of where our story is based, in a forgotten pre-Christian age reminiscent of Anglo-saxons and Vikings.

The Legendarium is therefore very much set in a Northern European climate and I suspect has a greater relevance (instinctually) to readers who live in these colder climes, not solely Northern Europe, but perhaps the more northern parts of Japan, Russia, Siberia perhaps, Canada and of course New Zealand.

I like Tolkien’s stories as they convey to me a sort of magicalness which I also feel when I am out in the countryside and woods of Middle England; where it is OK to enjoy an adventure at a sedate pace, enjoying the subtleties of nature, the beauty of a tree, the song of a Robin, the warmth of a fire, rather than those escapades I see on youtube which are referred to as "extreme sports", I suspect the average adrenalin junkie does not like Tolkien very much.

Tolkien’s work is very much a linguistic one, since he was a philologist and Professor of Anglo-Saxon (and unoffically also Old Norse) who invented languages in his spare time. Sometimes, when I am out in rural England, I see place names which remind me of names in his books. Place names such as Little Livermere, Methwold, Wicklewood, Winfarthing, Wood Dalling and Wood Norton, the River Witham, and The Deepings, and Deeping Gate; Bag Enderby, Brandy Wharf, Quadring, Frognall, Frogshall and Elveden. Sometimes I feel I am finding echoes of The Shire in these rural “shire” counties. I don't think that Tolkien necessarily got his names from the above, rather, he understood the roots of names, the archaeology of words, so that his languages and his names just fit authentically, as if they are real.

I have been acquainted with Lord of the Rings for many years, and whilst I still do enjoy to reading it, I find myself more intrigued by the first age of Middle Earth, The Silmarillion of course, but more precisely The Children of Hurin and also The Fall of Gondolin. Whilst these are more challenging reads, I find as I grow older that they intrigue me more and more, as do, as an aside, Tolkien’s Sigurd and Gudrun, and the Norse Myths in general.

I don’t what others think, but Tolkien seems to achieved what he set out to do, both as respected academic, but also in his spare (and retired) time, creating languages and a whole mythology of Nordic influence. I find it appeals to me due to my interest in nature and bushcraft…sentient talking trees anyone?

My view of bushcraft is probably quite narrow and there are, of course, many avenues for and of Bushcraft; for example, preppers, survivalists, the Bushman of the Savannah, the Pigmy’s of the Congo, tribes who live in the Amazon Rainforest. But for me – and I know this is hopelessly ethnocentric – Bushcraft is very much linked to the Nordic world of Tolkien, of rural Britain, of Beech trees, and old twisted Oak, Scots Pine, of hares, eagles and red stags…and in the mists of prehistory, of bison, wolves, lions, bears and the venerable woolly mammoth. Its essence is something fundamental that links us to our hunter-gatherer ancestors of the desolate ice age, and the magical world of the Siberian shaman and that vast Euroasian continent that was once contiguous with America. A veritable "Middle Earth".