It is worth remembering that Tolkien was not simply channelling Beowulf, the Eddas, and the Kalevala in his creative work, a Phuulish fellow notes, but that he was also interacting with more recent material, like H. Rider Haggard’s adventure novels:
By good fortune, She is one of the handful of books that Tolkien explicitly acknowledges as an influence. In a 1966 interview with Henry Resnick, Tolkien remarked:
I suppose as a boy She interested me as much as anything — like the Greek shard of Amyntas [Amenartas], which was the kind of machine by which everything got moving.
The shard of Amenartas is a purported ancient text, included by Rider Haggard as a means of providing some exposition to the story. Well and good. It is the incident that incites the start of the adventure. But the shard is no ordinary ancient text, at least in terms of presentation. Rider Haggard gives facsimiles of the fragment, in actual Greek.
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Don’t worry. Rider Haggard helpfully transcribes and translates the text. But the sheer effort the author went to, in terms of making the artefact look real and believable is noteworthy. It rather recalls the One Ring inscription, and the inscription on Balin’s Tomb, not to mention in-universe Tolkienian texts like The Book of Mazarbul and Thror’s Map. In terms of actual historical exposition, there is also a decent comparison between Rider Haggard’s protagonists puzzling out the Shard, and Gandalf learning about the Ring via the forgotten Scroll of Isildur in the archives of Minas Tirith.
(Yes, I am aware that Rider Haggard did not invent this trope. Jules Verne provides a runic manuscript in A Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1871). But Tolkien cites Rider Haggard, not Verne).
Perhaps the single cheekiest Tolkienian shout-out to Rider Haggard is the city of Kôr. In She, the city of Kôr is an ancient ruined city, so ancient that it was already long abandoned when Ayesha turned up, thousands of years before the narrative begins. Kôr predates the Egyptians, in terms of antiquity, and it adds some glorious atmosphere to the setting.
It may therefore interest you to know that Kôr was the original name of the great Noldorin city, Tirion upon Túna. The home of Finwë, Fëanor, et al. Moreover, in Tolkien’s initial conception – found in The Book of Lost Tales – the city ends up abandoned. An early Tolkienian poem, titled Kôr: In a City Lost and Dead, describes the scene, after the Elves have left it.
“She” and “King Solomon’s Mines” are crazy good, fast-moving narratives – bloody and violent as hell – and blunt about race in the way of their time. Haggard could really tell a tale.
For a moment, I thought that Tolkien had been meaningfully literarily influenced by a woman.
Then, of course, I snapped back to reality.
So the Great and Lauded Oxford Don transcribed pot boiler fiction? The Great One’s feet must surely have had Amahaggerian clay. Really loving the idea that Tolkien was reading the academic equivalent of penny dreadfuls and making them his own. Haggard never got the recognition from the Academy for his own works, yet Tolkien padded out his stories and became an intellectual darling, and deservedly so. Just waiting for the ultimate and darkest of secrets…That Tolkien had a subscription to Weird Tales and secretly met with Lovecraft. When that arcane knowledge is released from its crypt Cthulhu will Rise Again!