Is there an overlooked Tolkien source, in the now-forgotten medieval folk epic of Reynard the Fox? There is of course the obvious fact that when Tolkien was growing up versions of Reynard the Fox were still popular reading for children. For grown-ups Joseph Jacobs had issued his Caxton-derived modern-English The Most Delectable History of Reynard the Fox in 1895.

One might encounter Reynard claiming, in chapter 21, to have had a magical Wonderful Ring with a three-coloured stone, red, white and green…

“the red made the night as clear as day; the white cured all manner of diseases; and the green rendered the bearer invisible”. (Dictionary of Phrase & Fable).

Sounds rather similar to LoTR’s red ring of fire and light, the white ring of healing and mending, and then the One Ring itself. Actually, the invisibility is not to be found in either the Caxton or the Goethe versions of the tale. Instead there the green side of the ring’s gem gives victory in a clash of arms, and immunity from injury. Possibly the invisibility is in the 1498 version, which is elsewhere cited by the Dictionary of Phrase & Fable under “Invisibility”. One translation I found hints that the ring can issue a blinding light, which effectively makes the wearer invisible to enemies in a fight.

There is also deemed to be a fine inscription on this ring, as there is in LoTR. An ancient inscription that only the most learned Master of languages in the land can now read…

And furthermore the cunning Master said,
Whose finger bore that Ring, so he had read,
Should never freeze in winter’s direct cold,
And calmly live in years and honors old. [Goethe version]

So here we have a ring with the power of prolonging life, yet not infinitely since…

The power of Death alone it could not curb

The ring is also lost (along with his other imaginary jewels) claims Reynard to the King, but he may yet find it again. Perhaps, suggests Reynard… “We can order the Magician Alkarin to consult his books” and thus he can “search the earth” to determine the location. Again, all similar to LoTR, even including the name Alkarin (in Tolkien, the king under whom Gondor achieved its mightiest power).

Consider also that Reynard further thinks up “Reynard’s Globe of Glass”. This being an invaluable treasure…

“supposed to reveal what was being done — no matter how far off — and to afford any information on any subject that the person consulting it wished to know” (Dictionary of Phrase & Fable).

This sounds rather similar to one of the palantiri or ‘seeing stones’ in LoTR, although admittedly polished crystal ‘scrying’ balls provide a pre-existing template for the literary invention.

As a linked tale-cycle, Reynard the Fox had both the age and the cultural background to have interested Tolkien. In written form, drawing on Flemish (once called ‘Frankish’) folk tales via the wider French-German borderlands, this ‘wily fox’ epic dates from the 1100s and even earlier written fragments can be found. We know that Tolkien was interested in the names and folk tales of the Franks and the Lombards. The Franks had once known of an Auriwandalo (cognate for the Anglo-Saxon Earendel). The eminent Catholic scholar and church historian, Rev. F. G. Holweck, even had it that the great sung Antiphons — monastic chant-song heralds of Christmas, on which the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book’s fateful earendel lines directly drew — were… “of Frankish origin”.

Later in his life Tolkien was interested in the dialect in English parts of Pembrokeshire, a remote part of Wales, which had absorbed many Flemish [Frankish] families from the continent. In particular from Ghent, which incidentally was once a Vandal city (the Vandal tribal name rooting via philology to a very strong earendel connection).

Tolkien would also have known the great and pioneering scholar Grimm, who had long correspondence with Flemish experts and had early written on Reynard. Grimm (1824) had even mused on Reynard the Fox as being the survival of Frankish and thus Germanic mythological legend… and Tolkien knew his Grimm. Grimm’s early theory of ‘direct’ mythological survival has since fallen by the wayside, but the Flemish version of Reynard (source of all modern versions) might still have been a partial reliquary for bits of archaic folklore. Indeed, the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica observed that…

“[Grimm’s] theories, which have been much contested, have received additional support from the researches of K. Krohn, who discovered [1880s and 1890] many of the stories most characteristic of the cycle in existing Finnish folklore, where they can hardly have arrived through learned channels.”

So we also have a Finnish link for Reynard, and of course the young Tolkien was deep into Finnish lore and the Kalevala. Kaarle Krohn was one of the leading Kalevala experts and he was the ‘father’ of the Finnish school of scholars on such matters. It seems inconceivable that Tolkien would not have known of his work, even though he appears to have published mostly in German.

While there was no foxy ur-epic to be found in Finland, looking at the wider distributions of key tales and clusters Krohn detected certain Reynard tale-sequences in existence for over a thousand years. He stated…

“It was clear that into Finland there came from the west Scandinavian versions, and from the east Russian versions of one and the same tale, and that Finland was not a land through which tales travelled, but was rather the final destination of two streams of tradition. … The most southern part of northern Europe which can be conceived of as the home of the tale of the bear and the fox is northern Germany. … We can conclude that in Germany the whole chain of adventures was present before the settling of the Saxons. … From Germany on the one hand the original form with the bear reached Scandinavia and on the other hand the form with the wolf, influenced by the fable literature and the animal epic, reached Russia.” (translated by Thompson, The Folktale, 1977)

Whatever the ultimate national/tribal origins, there is now enough evidence to suggest why Tolkien might have taken notice of Reynard.

Can a date then be suggested for Tolkien’s interest in Reynard? Possibly as early as 1920. In one early version of “The Tale of Tinuviel” (1920), Melko’s lieutenant (“he was in Melko’s constant following”) is called “Tiberth”, demon Prince of Cats (“whom the Gnomes have called Tiberth”). This name is similar to the central tom-cat character in Reynard, called Tibert (Flemish Tibert, Dutch Tybert, Old French Tibert, English Gilbert via a Chaucer translation from the French, all of which likely roots to the Germanic Theobald). Admittedly Tolkien’s use of Tiberth / Tibert is circumstantial, since the word does not necessarily have to come from Reynard, but was once in general use for a dominant male cat.

Skeat has… “I take Tybalt to be a shorter form of Theobald, which again is short for Theodbald … The A.S. [Anglo-Saxon] form is Theodbald, which occurs in Beda, [Bede] Hist. Eccl, bk. i. c. 34.” (Skeat, Notes on English etymology).

Pope usefully adds, for his era in England… “Tibbald (as pronounced) or “Theobald (as written)” (Dunciad). Today we still use ‘Tibbles’ as a common general cat name.

In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s only directly uses ‘Theobald’ once, and in variant form, as Tobold Hornblower. Who, perhaps interestingly, was the inventor of the smoking of pipe-weed and the founder of the Southfarthing industry that was then built around the production of Longbottom Leaf. Yet there seems no implication of ‘cats’ here, unless one can venture a creaky comparison with a cat’s delight in the pungent herb ‘cat-nip’. More likely is that the name carries the conventional English understanding of Theobald as a common personal name conveying people (his folk, leader of) | bold (in jeopardy), i.e. he is ‘a prince who will be bold in jeopardy to protect his people’. In Rohan, the name Theoden partakes of the same meaning.

There is also an Isengrim name in the Shire, this being a key name among the Tooks, since the famous Bullroarer was “son of Isengrim the Second”, the 10th Thain. Isengrim is the name of the wolf who is a central character throughout Reynard. Though even there, the name is uncertain in connection with Reynard, since Isengrim was an ancient tale-name used for a wolf long before the first instances of Reynard are known. Thus the two instances found in LoTR have only a shaky connection with Reynard, if any.

However, if I’m right about a Reynard source for Tolkien then this may illuminate the appearance of a talking fox. This male fox occurs near the start of The Lord of the Rings and his appearance rather jars some readers. We might now see this fox as not only an attempt to ease the reader’s transition between The Hobbit and the LoTR. It may have also been Tolkien’s nod to Reynard the Fox.