Skilled Smiths and Princes of Elves: The Wayland-legend and the First Age of Middle-earth

This article examines the influence of the legend of Wayland the Smith, a literary figure common to medieval Germanic literature, upon the fantasy writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. Although Tolkien did not publish on Wayland specifically, his scholarly interests included the figure, who frequently appeared in the Old English and Old Norse texts Tolkien studied and taught. Despite clear evidence of Tolkien’s interest in Wayland, and the frequency with which scholarly and creative discourse discussed Wayland in Tolkien’s lifetime, few scholars have engaged the connection between Tolkien’s writings and the medieval figure. This article attempts to address this lacuna in the scholarship. It does so by engaging the Wayland-legend in Tolkien’s work, examining it both in terms of his scholarly endeavors, by looking at his coursework and published literary criticism, and his creative writing, by examining parallels to the Wayland-legend in two characters of Tolkien’s legendarium, the Elven smiths Fëanor and Eöl. This article ultimately concludes that Wayland, especially via Vǫlundarkviða, profoundly influenced Tolkien’s development of Fëanor and Eöl, both of whom absorb Wayland’s possessive, vengeful nature. These Waylandish character traits – Fëanor’s over-attachment to his creations and Eöl’s dominating treatment of others – have vast thematic ramifications for the text: each character embodies one of the two chief evils of Tolkien’s sub-created world.