Celtic influences on Tolkien

Tolkien and language

Tolkien's relationship with Celtic languages was complex: he professed to like Welsh but to dislike Old Irish and Scottish Gaelic, offering several conflicting explanations. He stated that liking the sound of a language was a matter of personal taste, and that he liked Welsh for its 'fondness for nasal consonants, especially the much favoured n', along with frequent word-patterns made with 'the soft and less sonorous w and the voiced spirants f and dd contrasted with the nasals.'

In his essay 'English and Welsh', he wrote that the basic pleasure lay in the phonetic elements of a language and the style of their patterns, and then in the association of word-forms with meanings. He believed that the sound of a language conveyed meaning and pleasure even to those who did not know it, a view the philologist Tom Shippey described as Tolkien's 'linguistic heresy', noting that while linguists of his time largely opposed it, evidence has emerged supporting it.

Irish

Rivendell consistently represents a sanctuary throughout the legendarium, a place that felt like home. The journalist Jane Ciabattari writes that a major reason for the popularity of The Lord of the Rings was the desire for escape among the Vietnam War generation, comparing the military-industrial complex with Mordor and suggesting they yearned for a place of peace like Rivendell. The medievalist Marjorie Burns writes that Rivendell and Lothlórien parallel the Celtic Otherworld (Tír na nÓg) in being hard to find, and that if one is admitted, one crosses a river symbolising a spiritual transition into a haven of Elven hospitality.

Burns notes that both 'Riven' and 'dell' suggest a low place into which one must descend, characteristic of Celtic tales of entry into the underground realm of the Tuatha Dé Danann. The exile of the Noldor Elves parallels the story of the Tuatha Dé Danann, who invaded Ireland from across the sea, burning their ships and fighting a battle. The loss of a hand by Maedhros parallels the mutilation of the Tuatha Dé Danann king Nuada Airgetlám, who received a silver hand; his appellation has the same meaning as the Elvish name Celebrimbor.

Welsh

Tolkien deliberately wove Celtic elements into the place names of Bree-land to signal that this region was older than the Shire, whose names are English or Old English. The name "Bree" itself means "hill," and the nearby hill is called "Bree-hill." This construction mirrors the real village of Brill in Buckinghamshire, which inspired Bree. Brill is a modern contraction of "Breʒ-hyll," where both parts mean "hill"—the first from Brythonic (Celtic) and the second from Old English.

As one scholar noted, this "hill-hill" formation is essentially nonsense, much like "Chetwode" (meaning "wood-wood") in Berkshire. Tolkien explained that he chose names like Archet, Bree, Chetwood, and Combe because they contained non-English elements, making them sound "queer" and evoking a style he felt readers would vaguely recognize as Celtic. Another philologist observed that Tolkien selected Celtic elements surviving in English place names—such as "bree" and "chet"—to mark Bree-land as older than the Shire, whose English and Old English names carry only a "hint of the past."

This careful, sophisticated naming reflects Tolkien's broader method of constructing a feigned history through translated Westron names.

Modern Celtic

In his film trilogy, Peter Jackson treated the first group of Elves seen by the Hobbits in the style of John Duncan's 1911 painting Riders of the Sidhe, with music by Howard Shore giving an 'ethereal' modern Celtic feeling. The folklorist Dimitra Fimi calls this the 'same “Celtic” feel' in the music for the Elves in Rivendell. Shore approached the Irish singer Enya, whose music represents 'Celticity as melancholy over a lost tradition'; her song 'Lothlórien' is an instrumental composition named for the Elvish realm.

Fimi notes that the 'Celtic air and ambience' is reinforced by the use of natural forms, flowing graceful lines, and elements of Art Nouveau and Celtic design. Both Tolkien and the historian Malcolm Chapman wrote mockingly about romantic stereotyping of Celts; Tolkien spoke of 'the wild incalculable poetic Celt, full of vague and misty imaginations', and Chapman of 'high-flown metaphysical and moral conclusions drawn from “Celtic” art.' The Tolkien scholar David Bratman sharply criticized Shore's use of modern Celtic music for the Shire and its Hobbits, stating that instruments like the bodhrán and Celtic harp were inappropriate given that the Hobbits' homeland was inspired by the English Midlands.