re: Lewis, Tolkien, and horses
Posted: July 2nd, 2006, 7:03 pmI saw a show on the Discovery Channel ( or maybe it was the History Channel) about DaVinci's Horse. Amazing story. 
Theo is correct and illuminating. The coastal languages of NW Europe were Celtic or Germanic, with minor exceptions, and the Germanic ones had a good deal of similarity. English does not act like a good well-behaved Germanic language in many ways, but OE did.
With Lewis and more especially Tolkien, I don't think that any element traces back to one thing only. They bring them up from their bones, and thus rely on many elements. Horses have a special status in many cultures worldwide, including England. The Indo-Europeans were horsemen with wheeled carts, which is believed to be their advantage over the other peoples north of the Mediterranean which allowed them to take over much of west and central Eurasia and become Our Ancestors.
Horses figure prominently in much of the heroic literature those Inklings spent their lives immersed in.
As to the Rohirrim, their language is technically not Anglo-Saxon, but is represented by Anglo-Saxon (see Appendix A). Tolkien had invented another language for them, but used Old English to give us the flavor but not the sound of their speech.
