"learn a few scraps of Horace and Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cads" **
H.G. Wells - The World Set Free
While the fantasy writers he inspired will as a rule just slap together something with old-timey medieval "feels" and call it a day, J.R.R. Tolkien himself rooted his works firmly in careful study, to the occasional point of recherché posturing. Alright man, we get it, you love Beowulf, but alliteration still sounds buffoonish in Normanized modern English.
Anyway, as random thoughts will oft pop into your head of their own accord, I woke up this morning to that rhyme about seven stars and seven stones and one white tree. When I first read The Silmarillion in my teens I glossed over the explanation of the stars symbolizing the dipper; for a SciFi fan, stars just made a generic cool symbol at face value, and seven's just a ubiquitous numerological gimmick. And, though I'd heard the term septentrional years or even decades ago, I never connected it with Tolkien using the seven stars as shorthand for the Numenoreans as northmen. Together with anchoring his reflections on Atlantis through the langobardi* (a.k.a. Lombards) in the earliest version of the Numenore myth, it's another reminder of just how much of Tolkien's early writing was an attempt to reconnect with his pre-Imperial heritage in a society dominated by the church, the entrenched Norman aristocracy and classical philology.
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* Thereafter mixed in with Saxons stylistically to create the Rohirrim, and linguistically repurposed for the Longbeards.
** Irony, in case you didn't look up the full quote, which I've cited here before vis-a-vis English delusions.
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