Tolkien, Iceland, and trolls
In a post titled “Bilbo’s Ride through Iceland,” our neighbor (give or take twenty miles), Nancy Marie Brown, recently wrote about the influence William Morris’s Journals of Travel in Iceland, 1871 – 73 may have had on Tolkien’s visualization of portions of Middle-earth — drawing particularly from Perilous Realms: Celtic and Norse in Tolkien’s Middle-earth by Marjorie Burns. As is usual with Nancy’s blog (God of Wednesday), the comments are interesting and informative. Specifically, Þóra Magnúsdóttir includes a link to an article in the 1999-02-28 issue of the Icelandic newspaper Morgunblað: “Barnfóstran frá Islandi og Tolkien-fjölskyldan” (“Au pair from Iceland and the Tolkien Family”) in which Linda Ásdísardóttir interviews Arndís Þorbjarnardóttir, one of the Icelandic nannies who lived with and worked for the Tolkiens in the late ’20s.…