Another Bede influence on Tolkien

This one was a bit surprising, since the story in Tolkien struck me as pretty imaginative.

St. Bede reports the events of a certain foolish man who lived wickedly. His companions frequently urged him to repent, but he ignored them. It happened eventually that he became ill, and his friends became all the more fervent in their efforts to persuade him, but he replied that if he repented out of fear of death then people would charge him with doing something that he wouldn't have done when healthy.

Silly man.

His illness got worse. At last an occasion came when he was visited by two angels. They showed him a beautiful tiny book - a book containing every good deed he had ever done. There were very, very few of them.

Then an army of demons appeared, and they showed him "a volume of enormous size and almost unbearable weight, horrible to behold," which contained a record, "in hideous handwriting," of every sin of thought and word and deed that he had ever committed. The demons asked the angels, "Why do you sit here since you know that this man is certainly ours?"

"You speak the truth," said the angels; "take him away to help make up the number of the damned."

Then two very wicked spirits who had daggers in their hands struck me, one on the head and one on the foot. These daggers are now creeping into the interior of my body with great torment and, as soon as they meet, I shall die and, as the devils are all ready to seize me, I shall be dragged down into the dungeons of hell.

The similarities here to Frodo's experience on Weathertop with the blade of the Nazgul are pretty obvious.

I think this man's experience also sounds a warning to us all that I have discussed before. The life that we lead now will make it easy or hard for us to be faithful to God. The fact that we might be given a last chance to repent doesn't mean that we'll take it. We need to live lives of repentance now, when we have the chance, because there may not be another one.

Bede and Tolkien

No, I don't suppose that there is any particular connection between the two other than as fellow Catholics. But I've stumbled across a few references while reading St. Bede that were amusingly interesting to me (and maybe no one else).

The office of "thain" is apparently ancient in England. St. Bede refers to one in II.9, named Lilla, who saved the king's life by taking a poisoned sword for him. According to notes in this edition of EH, a "thegn" (apparently the old Anglo-Saxon spelling) would have been not necessarily a bodyguard (as this little anecdote might suggest to a modern reader) but a member of the royal household; reference.com describes the thegn or thain as a "minor noble."

The poisoned sword that Lilla took for king Edwin was thrust by the assassin Eomer. Ha! (laughing not at or even near the honorable Lilla, but rather at Tolkien's source of a name).

Lastly, in II.5 Bede refers to a Kentish dynasty surnamed Oisc as oiscingas. So we see in these references that if I had known for all these years a little more English history, I might have known better how much Tolkien drew upon it in crafting The Lord of the Rings. Although I find it hard to imagine any sense in which Eomer son of Eomund has anything in common with an assassin except possibly in the twisted mind of Saruman :-) But I do find it interesting that the "ingas" suffix used in reference to a dynasty isn't something that Tolkien invented at all (as I thought) but is something he took from his own heritage.