Shakespeare's influence on Tolkien

Tolkien disapproved in particular of Shakespeare's devaluation of elves, and was deeply disappointed by the prosaic explanation of how Birnam Wood came to Dunsinane Hill in Macbeth.

[1] He arguably drew on several other plays, including The Merchant of Venice, Henry IV, Part 1, and Love's Labour's Lost, as well as Shakespeare's poetry, for numerous effects in his Middle-earth writings.

[1] In a letter, he wrote of his "bitter disappointment and disgust from schooldays of the shabby use made in Shakespeare [in Macbeth] of the coming of 'Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill'".

[2] He quotes Carter's explanation that "Nineteenth-century nostalgia disinfected the wood, cleansing it of the grave, hideous and elemental beings with which the superstition of an earlier age had filled it.

In Curry's view, such a world has restored to it "the same sense of wonder that Keats experienced upon encountering Chapman's Homer", reconnecting to the ancient but living tradition of an almost forgotten England.

[8] She compares, too, the play's wild wood, which has been read as symbolising the irrational and unconscious, with Tolkien's Mirkwood, which "surely ... functions on just such a symbolic level".

She writes that Shakespeare's lovers find themselves in a hierarchy in the wood, above the six mechanicals but below the fairies; while Bilbo is above the intelligence and morality of the giant spiders, but below the Elves of the forest.

[8] Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario suggests that in A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Lord of the Rings, both Shakespeare and Tolkien drew on their personal experience of living in the county of Warwickshire, creating the mechanicals and the Hobbits of the Shire respectively.

[11] Shippey adds that the play's enchanted wood is "a model of sorts" for the Ents' Fangorn forest; just as The Tempest's protagonist, the sorcerer Prospero, could be for Gandalf's short temper.

[12] Tolkien's "Riddle of Strider", a rhyme about Aragorn,[T 8] echoes a line of Shakespeare's from The Merchant of Venice (Act II, scene 7).

Judith Kollman writes that Tolkien has inverted Shakespeare's line; she suggests it is a private joke, noting that it was applied to the hero Aragorn:[13] All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

10 "Strider") All that glisters is not gold(The Prince of Morocco reads from a scroll.Act II, scene 7) And like bright metal on a sullen ground, My reformation, glitt'ring o'er my fault(Prince Hal reflects.Act I, scene 2) Kollman adds that Tolkien used many folk sayings in The Lord of the Rings, as Shakespeare did in his plays, so the echo could be coincidental, but that Tolkien very rarely did anything by accident.

In contrast, Aragorn says he will take the Palantír of Orthanc, the seeing stone that was once in his ancestor Elendil's royal treasury; but he waits for Gandalf to give it to him.

She gives as an example firstly the poem that Bilbo recites to Frodo in Rivendell,[T 9] which recalls the final "Song" about winter in Love's Labour's Lost.

[9][10] When winter first begins to bite and stones crack in the frosty night, when pools are black and trees are bare, 'tis evil in the Wild to fare.

3 "The Ring Goes South") When icicles hang by the wall, And Dick the shepherd blows his nail, And Tom bears logs into the hall, And milk comes frozen home in pail, When blood is nipp’d and ways be foul, Then nightly sings the staring owl,