The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology

CHAPTER 7

VISIONS AND REVISIONS The Shaping of ‘The Silmarillion’

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are the works which have made Tolkien’s reputation. They were not, however, ‘the work of his heart’, as I have called it elsewhere (Author, ch. 5). This was the immense complex of stories, repeatedly told and retold in quite different forms, which I call ‘the Silmarillion’, but distinguish from The Silmarillion: which is the selection from that immense complex made by Christopher Tolkien and published in 1977, arranged as the latter explains ‘in such a way as seemed to me to produce the most coherent and internally self-consistent narrative’. Tolkien worked on his hobbit-cycle for nearly thirty years, if one accepts that he began composing The Hobbit about 1929 and was still working on the Appendices to The Lord of the Rings in 1955 (see Bibliography, pp. 7, 96). He worked on ‘the Silmarillion’, however, for more than twice as long, for his unpublished ‘Story of Kullervo’, written in 1914, contains the seed of the story of Túrin Turambar, later to be one of the ‘Great Tales’ (Letters, pp. 7, 214–5), while he was still thinking and writing about these texts and their problems in the last year of his life, 1973 (see Peoples, pp. 377–92). These sixty years of development are now set out in Christopher Tolkien’s ‘History of Middle-earth’, most particularly in volumes I–V and IX–XII (VI–VIII being concerned for the most part with the four parts of ‘The History of The Lord of the Rings’).

The best short account of these sixty years is that of Charles Noad, in his essay ‘On the Construction of “The Silmarillion”’ in Legendarium pp. 31–68¹, now supplemented and extended by John Garth’s detailed and full-length study of Tolkien’s war years, Tolkien and the Great War² , works of which I can give only brief summary here. But briefly: the first glimmerings of Tolkien’s new mythology are contained in a series of poems, mostly unpublished at the time and written while Tolkien was an Oxford undergraduate, 1914–1916 (a collection of these poems was rejected by the publishers Sidgwick and Jackson in April 1916). For most of the rest of that year Tolkien was training as an officer or on active service at the Battle of the Somme. Late in October 1916, however, he was returned to hospital in England with ‘trench fever’, and remained a convalescent with recurrent bouts of fever for the next two years. During this time, and for the most part in 1917, Tolkien wrote the material eventually published as The Book of Lost Tales, Parts One and Two, the first two volumes of ‘The History of Middle-earth’. These sixteen chapters contain a great part of the material which was to become The Silmarillion, including (under different titles) the ‘Great Tales’ of Beren and Lúthien, of Túrin Turambar, the Fall of Gondolin and the Tale of Eärendil, as also the elvish tales of ‘The Darkening of Valinor’ and ‘The Coming of the Noldoli’, and the mythological tales of ‘The Music of the Ainur’, ‘The Coming of the Valar’ and ‘The Chaining of Melko’. It is not too much to say that the outline of The Silmarillion was visible by the end of 1917 – or would have been if it had found any readers. For some years thereafter Tolkien was no doubt preoccupied with earning a living, but once he had found stable employment at the University of Leeds and then the University of Oxford, he began to put the tale of Túrin into alliterative verse and the tale of Beren into rhymed verse as ‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’ and ‘The Lay of Leithian’ respectively, both these now published as The Lays of Beleriand, volume III of ‘The History of Middle-earth’; the first task occupied him approximately 1920–25, the second 1926–31. In 1926, though, Tolkien decided to show some of his poems, including a part of ‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’ to his former schoolteacher R. W. Reynolds, and wrote a brief epitome of the ‘Lost Tales’ to give him some necessary background. This ‘Earliest “Silmarillion”’ led on to a longer epitome, the ‘Quenta’ or ‘Qenta Noldorinwa … drawn from the Book of Lost Tales’, written in 1930, and to two sets of annals, the ‘Annals of Valinor’ and ‘of Beleriand’ written at roughly the same time. These would lead on in their turn to two later sets of annals and a further expanded epitome, the ‘Quenta Silmarillion’, written between 1930 and 1937. These two bodies of work, from 1926–30 and 1930–37, appear in volumes IV and V of ‘The History of Middle-earth’, respectively The Shaping of Middle-earth and The Lost Road. In 1937, furthermore, Tolkien was asked by Stanley Unwin, publisher of The Hobbit, if he had any other material suitable for publication, and he sent him several manuscripts including ‘The Lay of Leithian’ and ‘The Quenta Silmarillion’. The publisher’s reader, Edward Crankshaw, seems to have been given only the former to read and some pages of the latter as background, and seems also to have been quite baffled by both, and by how they related to each other. Stanley Unwin accordingly gave Tolkien a polite rejection and urged him to start working on a sequel to The Hobbit. Tolkien took the rejection as being a rejection of the ‘Silmarillion’ material – which had in fact hardly been read at all – and started work on the Hobbit-sequel which was to become The Lord of the Rings.

The ironies of this situation are well set out by Christopher Tolkien in The Lays of Beleriand, pp. 364–7, but one effect was that Tolkien ceased working on anything but the hobbit-cycle (with one significant exception discussed below, pp. 336–45) for more than a decade. Once The Lord of the Rings was effectively completed, however, he turned back with renewed energy to ‘the Silmarillion’, and in the early 1950s wrote two further sets of annals, ‘The Annals of Aman’ and ‘The Grey Annals’, along with a yet longer epitome, ‘The Later “Quenta Silmarillion”’, all these published along with much else in volumes X and XI of ‘The History of Middle-earth’, Morgoth’s Ring and The War of the Jewels. From this body of materials, dating from 1917, from the 1920s, the 1930s, and the 1950s, much of it written over and over again so as to become ‘a chaotic palimpsest, with layer upon layer of correction and wholesale rewriting, of riders and deletions’ (Lost Road, p. 199), Christopher Tolkien was eventually to extract the work published as The Silmarillion in 1977. In Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth three years later he went on to give significant expansions of some of the ‘Silmarillion’ material, including the longest and most developed account of the Túrin story, ‘The Narn i Hîn Húrin’ or ‘Tale of the Children of Húrin’, as well as of the Second Age (that of Númenor), and the Third Age, which ran from the first defeat of Sauron by Elendil, Gil-galad and Isildur to the destruction of the Ring and the departure of Frodo over sea.

These two works, The Silmarillion of 1977 and the Unfinished Tales of 1980, are the subject of the rest of this chapter. It is true, of course, and as should be clear from the paragraphs above, that these are posthumous works which never reached the final shape intended by their author. But in the first place their author never reached a final intention, so his wishes are not being flouted; in the second place, he clearly very deeply wished to see the materials on which he had worked for so long at last published, as his son records (Lost Tales 1, p. 5); and in the third place, The Silmarillion has by now found millions of readers to confirm its existence as a substantial text. Many of those readers have furthermore found it a difficult and challenging text: as I remark below, it ‘could never be anything but hard to read’, so that some account of it is not only called for but likely to be actually useful. Meanwhile, the main reason for deciding to treat it and the Unfinished Tales here, instead of where (some would say) they belong, i.e. before The Hobbit and along with the ‘Philological Inquiries’ of chapter 2, is that that is the way most readers experience them. Probably ninety-nine people out of a hundred come to The Silmarillion and the Unfinished Tales only after reading The Lord of the Rings, while because of the uncompromising nature of the posthumously-published works, it will probably always be hard for most readers to understand them except after reading The Lord of the Rings. In that work Tolkien had set himself to write a romance for an audience brought up on novels. In the others, whether we consider them as earlier or later, we are left with far less guidance. It is accordingly the main aim of this chapter to help people to read The Silmarillion (I use once again the phrase which Tolkien and Gordon used of their edition of Sir Gawain) ‘with an appreciation as far as possible of the sort which its author may be supposed to have desired’. Subsidiary to that, though still important, are the issues of what it has to say and how it came to be: ‘sources’ and ‘designs’ once more, both things Tolkien disliked, but useful if not essential to a proper reading.

I am grateful, however, for the opportunity to correct much of what I wrote twenty years ago in the light not only of the published material discussed above, but also of Christopher Tolkien’s comments on my initial version, for which see Lost Tales 1, pp. 1–4, 7, and Lost Tales 2, p. 57. The Dangers of Going On

Before beginning any commentary, though, there is one very obvious question to ask, which is why Tolkien never saw The Silmarillion into print himself, and why the Unfinished Tales remained unfinished. There were, after all, nearly eighteen years between the appearance of The Return of the King and Tolkien’s death on 2 September 1973 – as long an interval as that between The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring. During most of that period Tolkien was furthermore relieved of distracting academic duties, while he was not putting his energies into other creative work: almost all the sixteen poems in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962) had seen print before, his contribution to The Road Goes Ever On (1968) consisted mostly of explanation and footnote, and Smith of Wootton Major (1967) is on the same relatively small scale as ‘Leaf by Niggle’. Besides, to repeat the point made above, The Silmarillion was very largely in existence from 1937 on; was also known to be in existence, and very much in demand! Why, then, could Tolkien not finish his legends of the First Age off?

An answer to this, of a personal kind, has been given by Humphrey Carpenter on pp. 318–20 of his Biography. There was in Tolkien’s later life, he notes, ‘a perpetual discontinuity, a breaking of threads which delayed achievement and frustrated him more and more’. Partly the causes were external – loss of friends, hosts of visitors – but partly temperamental: Tolkien could not ‘discipline himself into adopting regular working methods’ (a fault of which he had been aware since the time of ‘Leaf by Niggle’). The Silmarillion was accordingly held up to a great extent, in Mr Carpenter’s view, by procrastination and bother over inessentials, by crosswords and games of Patience, by drawing heraldic doodles and answering readers’ letters – all compounded, one might add, by the failing energies of age (see Letters, p. 228). This is a convincing picture, and no doubt partly true. Yet it is not a picture of someone taking things easy: rather of continual, if misdirected, intellectual effort. One may remark that it is common experience to find that conscientious people who have a job to do that is too much for them (like writing a book) turn in their uncertainty to doing a succession of easier jobs instead (like answering their mail, drawing up syllabuses, or rationalising office organisation). Something like this seems to have been the case with Tolkien. He may have frittered his time away in constructing etymologies and writing kindly letters to strangers. But these activities occupied him, one may well think, because he could see he had painted himself into a corner: there were purely literary reasons for not finishing The Silmarillion, and these can be deduced not only from that work itself, but from almost the whole of Tolkien’s professional career. For one thing, both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings can be seen as primarily works of mediation. In the former Bilbo acts as the link between modern times and the archaic world of dwarves and dragons. In the latter Frodo and his Shire companions play a similar part, though the world they move in has also and in more complex ways been ‘mediated’, turned into a Limbo. Outside these works, though, hobbits are not to be met with, it would be almost impossible for them to exist in the much more rarefied air of the legends of the First Age, and without their existence modern readers lack guidance and a secure point of comparison. The very success of the hobbit-cycle was bound to make a work without hobbits a disappointment, or a puzzle.

But there may have been a more complex reason for Tolkien’s long hesitation. To go back to ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’: if this makes one thing clear it is that the literary quality Tolkien valued above all was the ‘impression of depth … effect of antiquity … illusion of historical truth and perspective’ which he found in Beowulf, in the Aeneid, or for that matter in Macbeth, Sir Orfeo, or the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. In all these works there was a sense that the author knew more than he was telling, that behind his immediate story there was a coherent, consistent, deeply fascinating world about which he had no time (then) to speak. Of course this sense, as Tolkien kept repeating, was largely an illusion, even a provocation to which a wise man should not respond. The ‘heroic lays’ which the Beowulf-poet knew and alluded to sound very fine from his allusions, but if we had them we might discover that the fascination came from his art, not theirs. ‘Alas for the lost lore, the annals and old poets that Virgil knew, and only used in the making of a new thing!’, wrote Tolkien, and he meant it. However he also meant everyone to realise that the ‘new thing’ was worth more than the ‘lost lore’.

The application of this to his own career must (once The Lord of the Rings was published) have seemed all too obvious. One quality which that work has in abundance is the Beowulfian ‘impression of depth’, created just as in the old epic by songs and digressions like Aragorn’s song of Beren and Lúthien, Sam Gamgee’s allusions to the Silmaril and the Iron Crown, Elrond’s account of Celebrimbor, and dozens more. This, however, is a quality of The Lord of the Rings, not of the inset stories. To tell these in their own right and expect them to retain the charm they got from their larger setting would be a terrible error, an error to which Tolkien would be more sensitive than any man alive – though as Christopher Tolkien points out (Lost Tales 1, p. 3) the error would be in the expectation, not in the telling. Tolkien saw the problem and expressed his sense of it in a revealing letter dated 20 September 1963. He had clearly been asked for a sequel to The Lord of the Rings, and replied that he could give ‘another volume (or many) about the same imaginary world’. But he had many other things to do, he feared ‘the presentation will need a lot of work’, and he saw that the legends had to be made consistent with each other and with what he had already published. He went on:

I am doubtful myself about the undertaking. Part of the attraction of The L.R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed. (Letters, p. 333)³

To go there is to destroy the magic. As for the revealing of ‘new unattainable vistas’, the problem there – as Tolkien must have thought many times – was that in The Lord of the Rings Middle-earth was already old, with a vast weight of history behind it. The Silmarillion, though, in its longer form, was bound to begin at the beginning. How could ‘depth’ be created when you had nothing to reach further back to?

The problem was not absolutely insoluble: Milton, after all, had managed to begin his epic very near the beginnings of time, in Paradise Lost. Furthermore one can perhaps see the solution to which Tolkien, in his philological way, was drawn, namely to present the First Age ‘as a complex of divergent texts interlinked by commentary’ (UT, p. 1), the texts themselves being supposedly written by Men, of different periods, looking back across the ages to vast rumours of whose truth they knew only part, like Sam Gamgee responding to Gimli’s song ‘Of mighty kings in Nargothrond / And Gondolin’ (see once more Lost Tales 1, p. 3). The Silmarillion might then have come to look like (for example) The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, written late but preserving intensely moving fragments of verse from some much older time now lost; even the editorial matter would then reinforce the effect of age and darkness (a device Tolkien used on a much smaller scale for The Adventures of Tom Bombadil). However that avenue was never explored to its end; and if it had been, one may doubt whether many readers would have grasped the total effect. A Silmarillion on that plan could have ended as merely a pastime for scholars. It is better, no doubt, to see it as it is now, ‘a completed and cohesive entity’ (UT, p. 1 again). But in any case The Lord of the Rings had created other problems for its author besides the issue of ‘depth’: these affected The Silmarillion, but show up more strongly in the Unfinished Tales.

One was the strong temptation towards explicitness and over-clarity. In Letters, p. 348, Tolkien noted the comic case of a Mr Shorthouse, who produced by accident a strange, queer, debatable book called John Inglesant. Slowly it caught on, became a bestseller, ‘the subject of public discussion from the Prime Minister downwards’. Success, however, ruined its author, who took to strange clothes and beliefs and ‘never wrote any more, but wasted the rest of his time trying to explain what he had and what he had not meant in John Inglesant’. ‘I have always tried to take him as a melancholy warning’ (wrote Tolkien in 1964), so the danger was seen. Still, it was there.

It emerges, for instance, if one considers water. No scene, perhaps, in The Lord of the Rings is more moving or more suggestive than the one in which Sam and Frodo, in Mordor, see the wind changing and the darkness driven back, and then as if in answer to prayer come upon a trickle of water: ‘ill-fated’ and ‘fruitless’ in appearance, but at that moment seemingly a message from the world outside, beyond the Shadow. In The Silmarillion we learn that water is the province of the Vala Ulmo, and that from it (sea or river) there often comes assistance; the incident with Sam and Frodo begins to seem less and less like chance, more and more of a ‘sending’. If this went too far, of course, the sense of supernatural assistance would destroy one’s awareness of the companions’ courage, as also the deeply-felt implicit moral that this is the way to behave. None of us can expect assistance from a Vala; nevertheless in any kind of Mordor it is one’s duty to go on. By the time The Lord of the Rings was finished, Tolkien was beginning to think of taking matters further. He had shown inspiration coming from Ulmo to Tuor, as the hero sat by a trickling stream, both in The Silmarillion (p. 238), and in ‘Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin’ (written c. 1951),⁴ in the Unfinished Tales, p. 20. Clearly the idea of water as a sanctity and an unfailing refuge from the Dark Lord had started to appeal to him; and in ‘The Hunt for the Ring’, accordingly, a sort of coda to The Lord of the Rings written c. 1955, he wrote that all the Nazgûl save their chief ‘feared water, and were unwilling, except in dire need, to enter it or to cross streams unless dryshod by a bridge’ (UT, p. 343). How then had they crossed Wilderland to the Shire? Christopher Tolkien notes that his father saw ‘the idea was difficult to sustain’. Besides that, it would have brought the Valar too far forward; at many points it would have destroyed the hobbits’ highly realistic sense of loneliness and confusion.

One may think that Tolkien was rightly pushing towards a clarification of his ‘mythology’.⁵ Yet at the same time he was edging back from his long concern with heroic valour, or hobbitic moral courage. It has been remarked already that he was in minor matters kind-hearted. As The Lord of the Rings came to an end this temptation, too, grew upon him. Bill the pony is saved in The Return of the King. In the ‘Epilogue’ to that work, eventually printed in SD pp. 114–35, we learn that Shadowfax will be saved too, to be taken on the last ship from the Havens to Aman, simply because Gandalf could not bear the parting. This would be a failure of nerve in a work which had sacrificed Lórien, and Tolkien, having written it, wisely decided to leave it out. Still, the second edition of The Lord of the Rings cuts out some minor, but convincing, asperity on the part of a strained Aragorn; it seemed too tough.⁶ More seriously, in the ‘late’ narrative of ‘The Disaster of the Gladden Fields’ (UT, pp. 271–87), one can see Tolkien reconsidering Isildur. His use of the ominous word ‘precious’ in The Fellowship of the Ring (p. 246) had been quite enough to suggest that he was already becoming ‘addicted’, that his death was in a way a mercy. In the later narrative, though, Isildur uses the Ring painfully and reluctantly, with much excuse and apology. The Ring seems to find no answer in him to its call. But this again is running against a crucial point in The Lord of the Rings, namely that no one can be trusted, not even ‘the Keepers of the Three’. Tolkien, no doubt, would have seen this point and dealt with it somehow if he had published a full account. Still, one can see him becoming more loath to accept the evil in the good: and while this is charitable, it does not make for powerful story.

A final straw in the wind may be Tolkien’s increasing desire to pull strands together. The Middle-earth of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is full of chaotic half-glimpsed independent lives, ears in the forest, fell voices on the wind, enemy powers older than Sauron and unconnected with him. In a letter of 1955 Tolkien had rather laughed at the idea that Willow-man and the wights were agents of the Dark Lord: ‘Cannot people imagine things hostile to men and hobbits who prey on them without being in league with the Devil!’ (Letters, p. 228). But in manuscript B of ‘The Hunt for the Ring’ (written at much the same time) just this idea is being entertained. The Chief Ringwraith stays on the Barrow-downs for some while before Frodo sets out, ‘and the Barrow-wights were roused, and all things of evil spirit, hostile to Elves and Men, were on the watch with malice in the Old Forest and on the Barrow-downs’ (UT, p. 348).

None of the points just mentioned is of any great significance in itself. As a whole, though, they do suggest an author looking back over his own work and trying to reduce it to order. The menace in that, as everyone knows, is that with system comes rationalisation and loss of vitality. There are moments when one fears that Tolkien, in the Unfinished Tales – and in fairness one must repeat that they are unfinished, were never finally ‘passed’ by their author – was turning against the sources of his inspiration. He tried to realign retrospectively things he had written many years before, for what at the time had been entirely adequate reasons. The point of making Bilbo both ‘bourgeois’ and ‘burglar’ has been explained above; and the scene in Bag End in chapter 1 of The Hobbit is completely successful as comedy. But by the time he wrote ‘The Quest of Erebor’ (perhaps around 1950), Tolkien had come to think it undignified. In repeated versions he explains laboriously that Gandalf forced Bilbo on Thorin out of some Valinorean ‘foresight’; or because he knew hobbits were stealthy; or because he thought Bilbo had the right ‘mix’ of Took and Baggins; while as for the word ‘burglar’, it was all a dwarvish misunderstanding. The very multiplicity of reasons suggests doubt; and in romance it is a good rule that not everything should be explained.

In any case one may well think that the sheer effort of dotting ‘i’s and crossing ‘t’s was draining. On one issue – the nature of the orcs – Tolkien seems very nearly to have arrived at a solution without quite being able to grasp it, a sign, perhaps, of exhaustion. There can be little doubt that the orcs entered Middle-earth originally just because the story needed a continual supply of enemies over whom one need feel no compunction, ‘the infantry of the old war’, to use Tolkien’s phrase from ‘Monsters’ (p. 264). But several readers had pointed out that if evil could not create, was only good perverted, then presumably the orcs had been by nature good and might in some way be saved; Tolkien certainly balked at calling them ‘irredeemable’, see Letters, pp. 195, 355. The Silmarillion accordingly expresses more than once the theory that orcs were in fact captured elves ‘by slow arts of cruelty … corrupted and enslaved’ (S, p. 50). One can only say that in that case there are an awful lot of them – ‘the pits of Angband seemed to hold store inexhaustible and ever-renewed’ (S, p. 157). They must have been bred, one thinks, and indeed we are told they multiplied ‘after the manner of the children of Ilúvatar’, i.e. sexually. But in that case one wonders (a) why what we would call ‘brainwashed’ creatures should breed true, and (b) why we never come upon female orcs. Tolkien shrank from that last, and recorded (UT, p. 385) a rival theory that the orcs were bred from something like the Drúedain, the Pûkel-men. I suspect that at the back of his mind there lurked a phrase from Beowulf, about those very similar monsters Grendel and his mother: no híe fæder cunnon, ‘men know of no father for them’. It would be a good solution to see the orcs as multiplying ‘like flies’, as if by some manufacturing process in hatcheries in Barad-dûr or Moria or the pits of Angband – maybe they ‘quickened in the earth like maggots’, as Snorri Sturluson had written centuries before (see above). Such beings would be ‘creatures’ of evil in a special sense, made and animated by their master in a way which falls just short of the heresy that evil can itself create. As Ilúvatar says of Aulë’s dwarves, they would have no being of their own, ‘moving when [he thinks] to move them, and if [his] thought is elsewhere, standing idle’. Tolkien saw the problem, and collected the parts of a solution. He did not, however, assemble the parts – perhaps because it would have involved, to be consistent, a complete revision of all his earlier work.⁷

The word underlying these last few pages is ‘thrift’. All minds possess a drive towards consistency, towards reducing data, events, characters to some smaller set of principles or categories. Much of Tolkien’s writing in Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales shows that urge, a strong and honourable one. It is fair to say, though, that against this basic drive all minds also possess a wish to ignore principles and concentrate instead on single entities regardless of their place in larger systems, to appreciate them simply for themselves. For most of his career Tolkien was a most extreme example of a man with this second urge strongly developed: he was fascinated by names, to give only one example, part of whose nature is that they are for one thing and one thing alone, very hard to reduce to system! Hence the supreme lavishness of Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings, with its vast store of plants and races, names and languages and individuals and landscapes. As he turned towards thrift, consistency, classification, Tolkien forfeited much of what he had valued before; he was contracting, not expanding. In a way the very success of The Lord of the Rings, founded on its immense solidity and scope, made life difficult for him afterwards. Not only would The Silmarillion have to achieve the ‘depth’ it had already been used to create, it would have to do so without contradicting, and while if possible reinforcing, all the millions of details Tolkien had handed over to his readership already. For these two reasons it is hardly any wonder that Tolkien balked, and that the Unfinished Tales in particular show a mind searching in different directions. After 1955 many ways forward were blocked. The question was, whether the vitality of his original conceptions and compositions of the period before The Lord of the Rings, indeed from the 1910s on, could survive.

Here one must concentrate, not on those explanations of the Second and Third Ages which Tolkien wrote as background for The Lord of the Rings, but on his labour and preoccupation for nearly sixty years, the legends of the First Age: Tuor and Túrin in the Unfinished Tales, but beyond and around them the whole ‘narrative structure’ of The Silmarillion. To repeat questions posed earlier: what have these to say, and how did they come to be? Philosophical Inquiries

The most obvious fact about the design of The Silmarillion is that, like the Shire, it is a ‘calque’, though on the history of Genesis rather than the history of England. In chapter X of A Preface to Paradise Lost (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), C. S. Lewis gave a summary list of doctrines of the Fall of Man common to Milton, to St Augustine, and to ‘the Church as a whole’. Most of them reappear with little change in the Ainulindalë’ or “Valaquenta’. Thus Lewis asserts that ‘God created all things without exception good’; in Tolkien even Melkor begins with good intentions (S, p. 18). ‘What we call bad things are good things perverted … This perversion arises when a conscious creature becomes more interested in itself than in God … the sin of Pride’; compare Melkor in the music of the Ainur seeking ‘to increase the power and glory of the part assigned to himself’. Lewis again, ‘whoever tries to rebel against God produces the result opposite to his intention … Those who will not be God’s sons become his tools’; and Ilúvatar to Melkor, ‘no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me … he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined’ (my italics). It seems very likely that Lewis and Tolkien co-operated in their analysis of Christian essentials; The Silmarillion, with its exile from paradise, its ages of misery, and its Intercessor, is a calque on Christian story, an answer to Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.

Is it a rival to Christian story? The thought clearly occurred to Tolkien, if only to be repudiated. Significantly he left a gap in The Silmarillion, or designed a dovetail, for the Fall of Man as described in the Old Testament. In his work the human race does not originate ‘on stage’ in Beleriand, but drifts into it, already sundered in speech, from the East. There something terrible has happened to them of which they will not speak: ‘A darkness lies behind us … and we have turned our backs upon it’ (S, p. 141). Furthermore they have met ‘the Lord of the Dark’ before they meet the Elves; Morgoth went to them as soon as they were created, to ‘corrupt or destroy’. Clearly one can, if one wishes, assume that the exploit of Morgoth of which the Eldar never learnt was the traditional seduction of Adam and Eve by the serpent, while the incoming Edain and Easterlings are all descendants of Adam flying from Eden and subject to the curse of Babel. The Silmarillion, then, tells the story of the fall and partial redemption of the elves, without contradicting the story of the Fall and Redemption of Man.

There is no point, though, in merely repeating a known pattern. Tolkien, in his history of the elves, would not wish to go against what he accepted as doctrine universally true. He did however want to say something different: as with a linguistic ‘calque’, familiar structure has to join with strange or novel material. The alienness of Tolkien’s elves, the thing which makes their whole history different from that of humanity, is obviously that (in the natural course of things) they do not die. Accordingly they do not have to be rescued from death by a Saviour; nor from Hell, for they are not judged at death to Hell or Heaven, but sent to ‘the Halls of Mandos’, from which they may in time return. Orthodox correspondents of Tolkien worried about this, and thought he was overstepping the mark (see especially Letters no. 153). To their doubts Tolkien could only reply that he was writing fiction, he had a right to use his imagination, and that after all his elves were only ‘certain aspects of Men and their talents and desires, incarnated in my little world’. Romance, as Professor Kermode said (see above), is a stripped-down form which enables one to concentrate.

What Tolkien wanted to concentrate on, obviously, was death: more precisely perhaps on why people love this world and want so strongly to stay in it when it is an inescapable part of their nature ‘to die and go we know not where’. His imagination centred again on a kind of calque, a diagrammatic reversal. Since we die, he invented a race which did not. Since our ‘fairy-stories’ are full of the escape from death (as he remarked near the end of ‘On Fairy-Stories’, Tree p. 68), ‘the Human-stories of the elves are doubtless full of the Escape from Deathlessness’. Certainly one was, his own tale of Beren and Lúthien as embodied in his ‘Lay of Leithian, Release from Bondage’, in which Lúthien alone of the elves is allowed as a favour to ‘die indeed’ and leave the world like a mortal. Paradise Lost, one might say, exists to tell us that death is a just punishment, and anyway (see Paradise Regained) not final. The Silmarillion by contrast seems to be trying to persuade us to see death potentially as a gift or reward – an attitude to which other authors in this sceptical age have felt drawn.⁸ While the legends of the First Age are a ‘calque’, then, their resemblance to a known pattern directs us primarily to difference from that pattern; the elvishness of the elves is meant to reflect back on the humanity of man.

That seems, anyway, to be what Tolkien came to think. There must however be at least a suspicion that – as with the languages of Middle-earth – he created a structure of thought to justify a more primary urge, delight in language, delight in ancient story. Elves, like dragons, are embedded deeply in several different traditions of North-West Europe, and the inconsistencies of those traditions⁹ may only have made Tolkien itch to create a Zusammenhang. Did elves have souls, for instance? Could they be saved? Anyone who had read Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’ would know that they did not and could not – not unless they married a mortal, as with Lúthien. Tolkien did know ‘The Little Mermaid’, though he did not like it (Letters, p. 311), probably because he thought it too sentimental. Older and tougher belief on the same issue is embodied in another tale Tolkien had probably read, the Scottish story of ‘The Woman of Peace and the Bible’¹⁰: in this an elf-woman approaches an old man reading his Bible and asks ‘if there was any hope given in holy Scripture for such as she’. The old man replies kindly, but says there is no mention of salvation in the Good Book ‘for any but the sinful sons of Adam’ – at which the lady gives a cry of despair and hurls herself into the sea. The old man’s answer is strict and orthodox but (as with the view that preconversion heroes like Beowulf or Aragorn could not be saved) hardly seems fair. Why should only the ‘sinful’ be saved? However it was not Tolkien’s way to deny orthodoxy: nor to abjure equally old and traditional belief in the allure of elves and their separation from evil. He looked for a middle path. And in this activity he had at least one model.

This is not, for once, the Beowulf-poet, who took a strong line on ylfe or elves, putting them into a list with ‘ettens’ and indeed with ‘orcs’ – a very stern view of all non-human and un-Christian species. But at least one other English poet preceded Tolkien in being less sure, the author of the legend of St Michael in The Early South English Legendary, written about 1250. Tolkien never mentions reading this, but it is unlikely that as a medievalist he did not. What the Middle English poet has to say, in essence, is that in the war between God and Satan for men’s souls, there may perhaps be neutrals. In the War in Heaven not all the angels were whole-heartedly for God or for Lucifer. The ones who inclined toward the devils without actually joining them are accordingly confined in tempests till Doomsday, when they will go to Hell. Correspondingly, those who wavered towards God have been sent from Heaven to Earth, where ‘they will be in a certain pain up to the end of the world, but at Doomsday they shall return to Heaven. Others are still in the Earthly Paradise, and in other places on Earth, doing their penance.’ Both good and evil spirits come to Earth to protect or corrupt men, but these neutrals can be seen too:

And ofte in fourme of wommane: In many derne weye

grete compaygnie men i-seoth of heom: boþe hoppie and pleize,

Þat Eluene beoth i-cleopede: and ofte heo comiez to toune,

And bi daye muche in wodes heo beoth: and bi nizte ope heize dounes.

Þat beoth þe wrechche gostes: Þat out of heuene weren i-nome,

And manie of heom a-domesday: zeot schullen to reste come.

And often men see great numbers of them, shaped like women, dancing and sporting on many dark paths. These are called Elves (my italics), and often they come to town, and by day they are usually in the woods, by night on high hills. Those are the wretched spirits that were taken from Heaven. And at Doomsday many of them shall still come to rest.¹¹

It is surprising how much of these few lines finds an echo in The Silmarillion. Of course Tolkien could not accept the basic postulate that elves were angels; like the story of the fairy and the Bible-reader, that is the product of a strict Christianity with very little space for outsiders. However, his elves are very like fallen angels, quite similar enough for confusion in the minds of fallible men. They seem part of a hierarchy which goes from Valar (good and bad) to Maiar (good and bad) to Eldar; they are ‘like in nature to the Ainur, though less in might and stature’, close enough in one case (Melian and Elwë or Elu Thingol) to intermarry. For a man to say that Galadriel was an angel, for instance, might then seem natural enough.¹² Would she be a fallen angel? In a way the answer is ‘No’, for certainly the elves play no part in Tolkien’s War in Heaven, when Melkor is shut out. On the other hand Galadriel has been expelled from a kind of Heaven, the Deathless land of Valinor, and has been forbidden to return.¹³ One can imagine the expulsion to Earth (of Melkor) and the expulsion to Middle-earth (of Galadriel) coming, in a mind like Éomer’s, to seem much the same thing. Furthermore one notes the South English Legendary’s interesting conviction that some ‘neutrals’, or elves, are still on Earth, and others in the ‘Earthly Paradise’. In a way this too is made true by The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings combined; for the latter predicts that some elves will refuse to leave Middle-earth, however much they may ‘dwindle’, while the former shows that others remain in Valinor, once part of the Earth, though now in some mysterious way sundered from it. What Tolkien took from that passage (and others) was, in short, the ideas that elves were like angels; that they had however been involved in a ‘Fall’; that their fate at Doomsday is not clear (for men ‘shall join in the Second Music of the Ainur’, elves perhaps not, S, p. 42), that they are associated with the Earthly Paradise, and cannot die till the end of the world. No earlier source puts forward the idea of the Halls of Mandos, but that half-way house, like Limbo, seems almost to be demanded by the terms of the problem. Have elves souls? No, in that they are not free to leave the world; so far the Ross-shire Bible reader was right. Yes, in that they do not go out like a candle on death; so far natural justice is satisfied. One sees that, as well as Genesis, Northern folk-tradition has helped to frame The Silmarillion. Its story has a root in the puzzles of ancient texts. Pride and Possessiveness: another view

None of the foregoing says anything about the ‘Silmarils’ themselves, the jewels which give their name to The Silmarillion, and whose fate determines its plot. However they do in a way fit the scheme already outlined. The Silmarillion was based on the Christian story of Fall and Redemption, whether one took it from Genesis or Paradise Lost. It was different from the Christian story in being about a race which had not been punished by death, rather by weariness of life (see especially Letters, p. 236). A natural question is, what was their sin? To keep the pattern consistent, it ought not to be the same as that of Adam and Eve, by tradition Pride, the moment when, as Lewis said, ‘a conscious creature’ became ‘more interested in itself than in God’. In fact the elves seem much more susceptible to a specialised variety of pride not at all present in Paradise Lost, not quite Avarice or ‘possessiveness’ or wanting to own things (as has been suggested),¹⁴ but rather a restless desire to make things which will forever reflect or incarnate their own personality. So Melkor has the desire ‘to bring into Being things of his own’; Aulë, though subjecting himself to Ilúvatar, creates the dwarves without authority; Fëanor forges the Silmarils. One might rewrite Lewis’s phrase to say that in Valinor, as opposed to Eden, the Fall came when conscious creatures became ‘more interested in their own creations than in God’s’. The aspect of humanity which the elves represent most fully – both for good and ill – is the creative one.

There could be several reasons why Tolkien chose to write about fascination with the artefact (a theme present in his work since chapter 1 of The Hobbit). The most obvious is that he felt it himself: to him his fictions were what the Silmarils were to Fëanor or their ships to the Teleri, ‘the work of our hearts, whose like we shall not make again’. Significantly Fëanor learns not from Manwë, nor Ulmo, but from Aulë, the smith of the Valar and the most similar of them to Melkor; Aulë too is responsible for the despatch of Saruman to Middle-earth, see UT, p. 393; Aulë is the patron of all craftsmen, including ‘those that make not, but seek only for the understanding of what is’ – the philologists, one might say, but also the scopas, the ‘makers’, the fabbri, the poets. Tolkien could not help seeing a part of himself in Fëanor and Saruman, sharing their perhaps licit, perhaps illicit desire to ‘sub-create’. He wrote about his own temptations, and came close to presenting the revolt of the Noldor as a felix culpa, a ‘fortunate sin’, when Manwë accepts that their deeds will live in song, so that ‘beauty not before conceived [shall] be brought into Eä’; fiction, poetry, craftsmanship are seen as carrying their own justification and as all being much the same thing. Rightly, Tolkien must have thought, did the poet of Pearl call himself a ‘jeweller’.

A more wide-ranging reason is that love of things, especially artificial things, could be seen as the besetting sin of modern civilisation, and in a way a new one, not quite Avarice and not quite Pride, but somehow attached to both. In that view The Silmarillion would have something like the distinctively modern ‘applicability’ of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, for all its archaic setting. Yet Tolkien believed, to repeat a point made already, that modern sins had ancient origins. The fall of the Noldor (S, p. 69) repeats a phrase from the Old English poem Maxims I about ‘inventing and tempering wounding swords’: the Anglo-Saxon poet seems to have looked back to Cain and Abel for the origin of evil, rather than Adam and Eve, and to have seen evil’s symptom in metallurgy. More deeply the Silmarils themselves seem to stem from yet one more philological crux, this time from Finnish.

The influence of that language and literature on The Silmarillion is undoubted. Finnish was ‘the original germ of The Silmarillion’, Tolkien wrote in 1944 (Letters, p. 87), and he repeated the assertion twenty years later (Letters, p. 345). Quenya itself is similar to Finnish in linguistic ‘style’; names like Ilúvatar and Ulmo recall the Ilmatar and Ilmo of the Kalevala; the Valar are the powers who have agreed to be ‘bounded in the world’, and vala in Finnish means ‘bond’; many more connections can be made.^* It is therefore almost inevitable that the great mystery of the epic of Finland, the Kalevala, should irresistibly recall the Silmarils: it is the riddle of the sampo. This object is described repeatedly in the Kalevala as the work of the master-smith Ilmarinen, handed over as payment for a bride, but then stolen back, broken in the pursuit, surviving only in fragments; yet no one knows what it is – or rather, what it was, for its loss is irrevocable. The singers themselves are uncertain, often replacing sampo (a word without a referent) by some other nonsense-word like sammas. Meanwhile the philologists, putting together the various clues inside the Kalevala – it is bright, it was forged, it is a kind of mill, it brings luck, it made the sea salt – have come up with innumerable solutions, at once vague and pedantic: the sampo was the Golden Fleece, some fertility-cult object, a Lappish pillar-idol, an allegory of the sky. In recent years, despondently, they have concluded ‘that questions about what the sampo was can never be satisfactorily answered and that even if they could, an answer would probably make little contribution to the understanding of the poems’.¹⁵ Nothing could be more provocative to Tolkien than a word without a referent (emnet, wodwos, Gandálfr, ent), except perhaps an ancient poem written off by modern scholars as hopelessly irrational. In this case he clearly decided that the sampo was at once a thing and an allegory, like the Silmarils: a jewel, bright, hypnotic, intrinsically valuable, but also the quintessence of the creative powers, provoking both good and evil, the maker’s personality itself. Some Finnish singers thought the sampo was their own poetry; all agreed that its fragments were the true prosperity of Suomi.

If only the Silmarils could inspire a true prosperity for England! As is well known, Tolkien’s grand design, or desire, was to give back to his own country the legends that had been taken from it in the Dark Ages after the Conquest, when elves and woodwoses and sigelhearwan too had all been forced into oblivion. For that to be possible, the Silmarils and their chain of stories would have to be multi-faceted indeed, leaving scope for ‘other minds and hands’ to add their own significances. Certainly Tolkien’s own efforts to say what The Silmarillion was ‘about’ were never completely illuminating. Still, his borrowings and his changes do at least define his area of interest. In The Silmarillion Tolkien played through once more the drama of ‘Paradise lost’; but he added to it a hint of ‘paradise well lost’ (for many of the elves preferred Middle-earth even to immortal life, like Arwen); and through the story there runs a delight in mutability, as languages change and treasures pass from hand to hand; the deepest fable is of beauty forged, stolen, and lost forever in recovery. Though springing from Genesis, this is at once more ambiguous, more heroic, and more humane. Eärendil: a Lyric Core

The preceding section (as Tolkien would have been the first to declare) probably falls into the perennial academic vice of neatness, over-valuing system and ‘invention’ instead of ‘inspiration’. To redress the balance, it is worth noting that Tolkien was capable of working in quite a different way. He said repeatedly and consistently (Letters, pp. 221, 345, 420) that the ‘kernel’ of his mythology in the story of Beren and Lúthien was not a thought, not a principle, not a calque, but the vision of ‘a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire’, where he saw his wife dancing. Everything else might be changed by the demands of story and of ratiocination – there are clear differences, for instance, between the accounts of that scene in the 1925 poem ‘Light as Leaf on Lindentree’ and in Aragorn’s song on Weathertop – but to the vision itself he remained true, working out from it as from the detailed paintings of Lake Mithrim, Nargothrond, Gondolin, etc., which he made in the 1920s (see Pictures 32–6 and further Artist, chapter 2). Probably Tolkien would have accepted the thesis (not unfamiliar to medievalists) that all great works of fiction should contain a kernel scene or a ‘lyric core’: to use the terminology of Marie de France, whose ‘Breton lays’ Tolkien imitated in ‘Aotrou and Itroun’, 1945, every conte or story comes from a lai or song. There is one very striking example in the Unfinished Tales, namely the tale of ‘Aldarion and Erendis: the Mariner’s Wife’. This may have some root in Tolkien’s own experience, for it stresses the unwisdom of fathers leaving their children – Tolkien hardly knew his own father – and seems to be groping towards a statement about the incompatibility of men and women, users and providers, wasters and winners. However as a story it reaches no conclusion. What it does is to create an image of total separation expressed in understatement. Having been left by her husband in his urge for voyages abroad, Erendis retreats to the centre of Númenor, away from the sea, where she hears only the bleating of sheep. ‘“Sweeter it is to my ears than the mewing of gulls”, she said.’ Tolkien must have been thinking of Njörthr the sea-god and Skathi, daughter of the mountain-giant, in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda. Obliged to marry, these two tried taking turns to live in each other’s homes. But the marriage was a failure, marked in Snorri’s account by sudden quotation from yet one more lost poem:

‘Leið erumk fjöll, vaska lengi á,

nætr einar niu;

ulfa þytr þóttumk illr vesa

hjá söngvi svana.’

‘Hateful to me were the mountains, I was there no longer than nine nights; the howling of wolves seemed ugly to me against the song of the swans.’

So Njörthr; his wife replies with a complaint about the noise of the sea-mews. Wolves and swans, gulls and sheep: the contrasts generate the Norse poem and Tolkien’s story by themselves.

Other tales in The Silmarillion are better worked up into narrative, and yet seem to spring likewise from single scenes, single outcries. An obvious case is that of Eärendil, the first character to take shape in Tolkien’s mythology. His ‘invention’, like that of hobbits, has been well-chronicled by Humphrey Carpenter (Biography, pp. 92 and 230); the two cases are in several ways similar. With Eärendil, what happened is that Tolkien was initially struck by several lines from an Old English poem in the Exeter Book, now known as Christ I or The Advent Lyrics:

Eala earendel, engla beorhtast,

ofer middangeard monnum sended …

‘Oh, Earendel, brightest of angels, sent to men above Middle-earth …’

These form the start of a speech by the prophets and patriachs in Hell, who appeal for an Ambassador – this is before Christ’s Advent – to bring them rescue from the deorc deaþes sceadu, the ‘dark shadow of death’. But the word earendel is strange, not ordinary Old English, and evidently predating its context; Tolkien was caught by a difference of texture, prompting his own verses on ‘The Voyage of Earendel’, in 1914, and the reply to G. B. Smith’s question as to what they were about, ‘I don’t know. I’ll try to find out.’

But actually Tolkien had no doubt already started finding out, taking the two obvious courses of looking up ‘Earendel’ in A. S. Cook’s 1900 edition of Christ and in the index of Jacob Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology. From the latter he would have learnt that Earendel-references appear in several Germanic languages. In the Prose Edda, for instance, Aurvandill is a companion of the god Thórr, who loses a toe to frostbite only to have it thrown into the sky to become a star; as one might have guessed from Christ, ‘Earendel’ is the old name of a star or planet. Grimm also referred though to the German poem of Orendel, written about 1200. In this Orendel is a king’s son shipwrecked in the Holy Land, but rescued naked by a fisherman. He retrieves a grey robe from a whale they catch, and in it returns to his own land to convert his heathen countrymen. The grawe roc he wears is the seamless robe Christ wore to the Crucifixion; in the end Orendel becomes der Graurock, ‘Greycloak’, is identified with his garment. What this may have suggested to Tolkien is that if the Old English and Old Norse sources agreed that ‘Earendel’ was a star, the Old English and medieval German ones agreed he was a messenger of hope to the heathens. Perhaps the hope-association was as old as the star one; perhaps ‘Earendel’ had contained a presentiment of salvation even for the old heroes (like Beowulf) who lived before Christianity was brought to them. The notes in Cook’s edition would meanwhile have told Tolkien that the Old English lines were based on a Latin antiphon, ‘O Oriens …’ (‘O Rising Light, splendour of eternal light and sun of justice: come and shine on those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death’). In a Christian context this appeal is to Christ; in a pre-Christian context they could be a pagan’s appeal, to a forerunner of Christ, to a Saviour whose nature he did not know.

These thoughts frame both the poem of 1914 and the Silmarillion account written many years later. In the latter Eärendil is, not a Redeemer, but an Intercessor, unlike the true Messiah in that it is not his own sacrifice which persuades the Valar to change the sad history of Middle-earth, but still ‘a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief’, hailed by Eönwë with eagle-like ambiguity as ‘the looked for that cometh at unawares, the longed for that cometh beyond hope’. In the former, it is perhaps the inadequacy of Earendel that is more prominent than his partial success; at the end of the poem his light is blotted out by the greater light of dawn. However one image is common to all Tolkien’s versions and to the Old English poem too. This, one might say, is the ‘lyric core’, the flashpoint of the imagination. It is the vision of people looking up from the depths, de profundis, from the ‘dark shadow of death’ and of despair, and seeing a new light: ‘unlooked for, glittering and bright; and the people of Middle-earth beheld it from afar and wondered, and they took it for a sign, and called it Gil-Estel, the Star of High Hope’. What the star was, how it was connected to Eärendil, how the name could cover both star and man, from what danger it signalled deliverance, whether that deliverance was final for the soulless elves … all these questions, and others, could find answers in the inventions of later narrative, in the different viewpoints of The Silmarillion or Bilbo’s song in The Fellowship of the Ring. However the image and the emotions associated with it did not change. They were central; part of Tolkien’s ‘data’; of the same order of importance as those other early captured scenes of Tinúviel dancing in the woods, Túrin answered by the ‘cold voice’ of his own sword, Valinor beyond the ‘sunless lands’ and ‘dangerous seas’. If ‘philosophical inquiries’ provided material for Tolkien to brood on, these ‘lyric cores’ gave him the stimulus to go on brooding, to keep philosophy from aridness. Characters and Cobwebs

Aridness is, however, a vice of which The Silmarillion stands accused: partly, no doubt, from a (mistaken) disappointment in those who wanted a second Lord of the Rings, but largely, as was said at the start of this chapter, because of the absence from it of ‘mediators’ like the hobbits and a generally novelistic mode of presentation. Much can be said about the ‘meaning’ of The Silmarillion, and more about its ‘origins’. But it is more important in the end to get some idea of how to read it. And there are ways to appreciate The Silmarillion better, always provided that one is prepared to make certain basic assumptions.

One of these is that ‘character’ is in a sense fixed, static, even diagrammatic. Such was the common assumption of earlier times; as has been noted above, the modern saying that ‘all power tends to corrupt’ (with its assumption that character changes) is prefigured in Old English only by the saying that ‘a man shows what he’s like when he can do what he wants’ (which assumes that changes are only apparent). The convention of Norse saga, then, is to say what a man is like as soon as he comes into the story: ‘He was very hard to manage as he grew up, taciturn and unaffectionate, quarrelsome both in words and deeds’ (Grettir, in Grettir’s saga), or ‘he had a crooked nose and teeth which stuck out, looked rather ugly in the mouth and yet extremely warlike’ (Skarphethinn, in Njál’s saga). These statements are always true, though there is still an interest, and a suspense, in seeing how events will prove them so. In The Silmarillion Tolkien follows this convention closely: Fëanor ‘was tall, and fair of face, and masterful, his eyes piercingly bright and his hair raven-dark; in the pursuit of all his purposes eager and steadfast. Few ever changed his courses by counsel, none by force’; or, later, ‘Húrin was of less stature than his fathers, or his son after him; but he was tireless and enduring in body, lithe and swift after the manner of his mother’s kin, Hareth of the Haladin’.

This second ‘character-sketch’ furthermore introduces another point in which The Silmarillion follows Norse belief, if not Norse convention: this is the conviction, shared also by the Beowulf-poet, that people are their heredity. Sagas commonly introduce characters with a list of their ancestors, often significant in their distinction, wisdom, ferocity, or unreliability. Tolkien did not trespass so far on the short patience of modern times, but he did supply diagrams and family-trees: it is essential that these should be borne in mind. Thus one could easily say that the central tragedy of the Noldor is one between sámmoeðri and sundrmoeðri,¹⁶ between fullbrothers, half-brothers and cousins, a tragedy of mixed blood. The ‘Elves of the Light’ are divided into three groups, in order of seniority, or wisdom, or attachment to the Valar: the Vanyar, Noldor, Teleri. Fëanor is pure Noldor on both sides, as are his sons. After the death of his mother, though, his father marries again, so that Fëanor has two half-brothers (Fingolfin, Finarfin). It is vital to remember that their mother is not of the Noldor, but of the ‘senior’ race of the Vanyar. While junior to Fëanor in birth and even in talent, therefore, his two half-brothers are marked from the beginning as superior to him in restraint and generosity. Their children are then again differentiated by a further ‘outbreeding’, in that Finarfin, of mixed descent himself, marries a wife from the ‘junior’ elvish branch, the Teleri; his sons and daughters, who are only a quarter Noldor – they include Finrod Felagund and Galadriel – are more sympathetic than their uncle Fingolfin’s children such as the reckless Aredhel (mixed Noldor/Vanyar), and markedly more so than their other, pure-blooded Noldor cousins, the sons of Fëanor. One needs, perhaps, to ponder the diagram on p. 305 of The Silmarillion to see this clear. However once the picture is clear one can appreciate the significance of some of Tolkien’s oppositions, between Galadriel and Aredhel, for instance (bold as against rash), or between Finrod and Turgon (both founders of Hidden Kingdoms, but the latter retaining a connection with the higher wisdom of the Valar which the former, related to elves who refused the crossing to Aman, has given up). Nor do the oppositions stay on the level of diagram; they go on to shape narratives, and individual scenes.

The whole story of the ruin of Doriath, for instance, might be said to run from the moment when Caranthir, fourth son of Fëanor, reacts angrily to the fact that his Teleri-descended cousins have been talking to their maternal great-uncle Elwë Singollo (in Sindarin Elu Thingol or ‘Greycloak’), to whom he is not related at all. He says (p. 112):

‘Let not the sons of Finarfin run hither and thither with their tales to this Dark Elf in his caves! Who made them our spokesmen to deal with him? And though they be come indeed to Beleriand, let them not so swiftly forget that their father is a lord of the Noldor, though their mother be of other kin.’

The last clause is weighted with contempt – an improper contempt, if one remembers that the ‘sons of Finarfin’ have both ‘junior’ Teleri and ‘senior’ Vanyar blood from their mother and grandmother. There is a further irony in the phrase ‘this Dark Elf in his caves’, for though Elwë is king of the Dark Elves, he himself is not one, since he was one of the three original ambassadors to the light of Valinor, though his love for Melian kept him from returning to it. Fifty-six pages earlier we were told that he alone of his people had seen ‘the Trees in the day of their flowering, and king though he was of Úmanyar, he was not accounted among the Moriquendi, but with the Elves of the Light …’ The reader who has forgotten his genealogies, or forgotten the original embassy to Valinor, or never realised the equation of ‘Dark Elves’ and ‘Moriquendi’, is left at a loss. The tension of the moment, the skewed relation between truth and whole truth, pass him by. And once the thread is lost, the bitter resentment of Angrod seventeen pages later, the cold mood in which Nargothrond is founded by Angrod’s brother Finrod, the whole structure indeed of The Silmarillion lose their connections and begin to seem mere happenstance.

An underlying stasis has to be picked out from genealogies, positions on the order of march to and from Valinor, relationships of all kinds. Yet once that has been done, it is possible to see a kind of dynamism in The Silmarillion, a chain of causes and effects. As often with Norse saga, a good question to keep asking is, with each disaster, ‘who is to blame?’ Answers are never simple. Take, for instance, the fall of Gondolin, the ‘Hidden City’ of which Tolkien had written as far back as 1917, and which had made its way even into The Hobbit. It was founded by Turgon under the direct guidance of the Valar, and from it comes in the end the stock of Eärendil, the Intercessor. How was it betrayed to Morgoth? Unfolding the answer takes in much of The Silmarillion, but one can say that again it turns on a ‘lyric core’, and a conflict of kinship.

The ‘lyric core’ is the single scene in which Húrin, ‘mightiest of the warriors of mortal Men’, having sat twenty-eight years as Morgoth’s prisoner observing the torments of his race, is released to wander. Neither elves nor men will take him in. He remembers his boyhood stay in Gondolin, as also the fact that he was captured, and his house destroyed, while covering the retreat of Turgon at the Fen of Serech. He goes therefore towards Gondolin, hoping the eagles will carry him to it. But though the eagles see him and tell Turgon, the king of Gondolin refuses to trust the man who saved him once; and when he changes his mind, after sitting ‘long in thought’, it is too late:

For Húrin stood in despair before the silent cliffs of the Echoriath, and the westering sun, piercing the clouds, stained his white hair with red. Then he cried aloud in the wilderness, heedless of any ears, and he cursed the pitiless land; and standing at last upon a high rock he looked towards Gondolin and called in a great voice: ‘Turgon, Turgon, remember the Fen of Serech! O Turgon, will you not hear in your hidden halls?’ But there was no sound save the wind in the dry grasses. ‘Even so they hissed in Serech at the sunset’, he said; and as he spoke the sun went behind the Mountains of Shadow, and a darkness fell about him, and the wind ceased, and there was silence in the waste.

Yet there were ears that heard the words that Húrin spoke, and report of all came soon to the Dark Throne in the north; and Morgoth smiled. (p. 228)

Obviously, everything in this scene is emblematic. Even narrative almost disappears, for the ‘long’ and thoughtful delay of Turgon seems to take no time at all. Húrin is in the same place, listening to the same ‘hissing’ wind, after the delay as before. In fact Turgon’s pause is there only to allow him to make a fateful decision and then regret it – or, one might say, to prove the adjective ‘pitiless’ in the passage quoted. It is not the land which has no pity, but Turgon, and the elves and men who rejected Húrin earlier. By similar transference cliffs are ‘silent’, grasses ‘dry’, the red sunset and white hair stand for future catastrophe and present despair, while the sun behind ‘Shadow’ marks the beginning of the end for Gondolin, as it revives the memory of a past sunset of defeat. Over all hangs the implication that the real sunset is in Húrin’s heart, a loss of hope to elvish, and natural, indifference. And yet the indifference is an illusion, the silence full of ears, the despair a fatal mistake …

The scene is a picture, a posed tableau. Yet it centres on an outcry of spontaneous passion (like so many scenes of medieval romance). Dynamism is generated from it as soon as one asks the question, ‘whose fault?’ Húrin’s, for despair? Turgon’s, for suspicion? One could even blame the rulers of Doriath, for the true embitterment of Húrin’s heart lies in the death of Túrin his son, in which many were involved. A full answer would consist of the whole unhappy history of Middle-earth. Yet that general answer still has to be reinforced by individual weakness, which is the true irony and wretchedness of the single scene. And still this is only a part of the fall of Gondolin. A second strand leads from Maeglin, spun once more from the strains of mixed blood.

Maeglin is the son of Turgon’s sister Aredhel, carried off by Eöl, ‘Dark Elf’ par excellence, one of those who never went to Valinor and saw all the elves who returned as dispossessors. In a sense that dispossession is the ultimate source of all Maeglin’s treachery, and yet it too has to be magnified by a chain of individual sins or errors. One is the forced detention of Aredhel by Eöl; this means that father is resented by son, son in the end cursed prophetically by father. Another, though, is the pride of the sons of Fëanor, who (as with Thingol) will not recognise kinship except by blood. Eöl’s relationship to them by marriage is ignored. Curufin tells him, ‘You have my leave but not my love … The sooner you depart from my land the better will it please me’ (p. 135). The Macbeth-style play on words is returned by Eöl (with a memory indeed of Hamlet), ‘It is good, Lord Curufin, to find a kinsman thus kindly at need’ (my italics). But the sarcasm only provokes outright disclaimer: ‘those who steal the daughters of the Noldor … do not gain kinship with their kin.’ It is significant that Turgon, though more injured than Curufin, does not make the same mistake and opens his speech, ‘Welcome, kinsman, for so I hold you …’ But by this time Eöl is embittered and refuses the relationship in his turn. He was at fault to begin with; Curufin has made matters worse; finally one could simply put the blame on Aredhel. She left Gondolin pridefully, against advice, and turned away from her wiser brothers to her more dangerous cousins, prompted by desire in the heart (p. 131), the evil attraction of Fëanorian fieriness. Her breach of the orders of Turgon is echoed by her son Maeglin 111 pages later, when he too goes illegally beyond ‘the leaguer of the hills’, to be caught by Morgoth and made a traitor. Even his motivation is multiple: fear, but also jealousy of Tuor the mortal, imperfect loyalty to a grandfather who killed his father, the ambitious desire for Idril which seems a last reflection of the Sindar desire to get their lands back from their supplanters. Húrin, Maeglin, Aredhel, Eöl, Curufin, Turgon: all interact to create the fall of Gondolin. In each case, one may say, character remains fixed, but its flaws (or strengths) are brought to light by the strains of action.

The Silmarillion is even more tightly constructed than The Lord of the Rings, and it would be easy to trace its entrelacements further: Gondolin, for instance, is only one of three Hidden Kingdoms, Gondolin, Nargothrond, Doriath, founded by three relatives (Turgon, Finrod, Thingol), each ruined and betrayed, each penetrated by a mortal (Tuor, Túrin, Beren), well-meaning but carrying a seed of destruction, and all three mortals related by blood (S, p. 307) and with their fates to some degree intertwined. The book is in fact a ‘web’. But that word does not so readily take the meaning of ‘woven tapestry’ as it did in The Lord of the Rings (see above). Rather it keeps its familiar sense of ‘cobweb’, a trap spun by a great spider. In spite of Eärendil the later-published work feels blacker and grimmer than the earlier, the sense that ‘chance’ or ‘luck’ may contain a providential element is not so strong. Much of Tolkien’s tonal intention for The Silmarillion can indeed be deduced by looking through its threads at his archaic alternatives for ‘luck’, the words ‘fate’ and ‘doom’. Etymologies and ambiguities

Neither of these words is used in modern English any more, though phrases like ‘fatal accident’ or ‘doomed to disaster’ survive. The reason for their unpopularity lies in their etymology. ‘Fate’ is derived, as the OED says, from Latin fari, ‘to speak’, and means originally ‘that which has been spoken’, i.e. spoken by the gods. It has never been anything but a literary word in English. ‘Doom’ by contrast is native, the modern pronunciation of Old English dóm, a noun related to the verb déman, ‘to judge’. It too meant in early times what was spoken, what people said about you (especially once you were dead), but it had also the meaning of a judicial sentence, a law or a decision. If the king sentenced you to death, that was his ‘doom’, his decision, but of course it was your doom too, your now-determined fate. Judgement Day, the day at the end of the world when all souls will be tried and sentenced, was accordingly in Old English dómesdæg, ‘Doomsday’, which only strengthened the sense of ‘future disaster’ attached to the word. However, common to both words, ‘fate’ and ‘doom’, is the idea of a Power sitting above mortals and ruling their lives by its sentence or by its speech alone. This sense is completely absent from ‘luck’ or ‘chance’; and with the waning of belief in superior Powers the more neutral words have become the common ones.

In The Silmarillion, though (unlike The Lord of the Rings) the influence of the Valar for good or ill is prominent, so that ‘fate’ and ‘doom’ become once again etymologically appropriate words, to be used frequently and with a complexity which determines the tone of several of its component stories. To take the simplest example, ‘fate’ in the story ‘Of Beren and Lúthien’ seems to have two meanings, related but separable even by grammar. On the one hand fate is an external force, which could without difficulty be capitalised: ‘fate drove’ Carcharoth the wolf through the protecting spells of Melian, and Beren managed the same feat because he was ‘defended by fate’. There are many more occasions, though, when ‘fate’ does not seem a proper name, a word for some external Power, but rather the personal possession of someone or something: to it must be attached either a personal pronoun (‘my fate’, ‘his fate’, ‘your fate’) or another noun in the genitive case (‘the fate of Arda’, ‘the fate of a mightier realm’, ‘the fates of Beren and Lúthien’) or else an identifying relative clause (‘the fate that was laid on him’, ‘the fate that lies before you’). What all these uses suggest is that fate is not something external and organising, like Providence, but something individual, like ‘life’ – something however, unlike ‘life’, which has been organised. The very use of the word thus brings up a question of free will.

The word ‘doom’, in The Silmarillion, is more complicated. It too can appear as an overmastering Power: when Lúthien first sees Beren ‘doom fell upon her’, a phrase also found in Aragorn’s ‘Lay of Tinúviel’ in The Lord of the Rings. However it can be something much more elementary, retaining its basic meaning of a sentence or a decision: in the Narn i Hîn Húrin in the Unfinished Tales we find Thingol holding ‘a court of doom’, waiting ‘to pronounce his doom’, and saying ‘otherwise shall my doom now be’, or to paraphrase ‘I am now going to change my sentence’. Much more often, though, the reader cannot make a clear decision as to the word’s meaning. The sense of ‘future disaster’ is present: when Thingol challenges Beren to recover a Silmaril, the narrator says ‘Thus he wrought the doom of Doriath’, and means that Doriath will be ruined by Thingol’s words. So, when Melian says to him a few lines later (p. 168), ‘you have doomed either your daughter, or yourself’, she could mean either that he has given a judicial decision on Lúthien (old sense), or condemned himself to death (modern sense), or of course both, since both are true. There is a sense also in which ‘doom’ is a personal attribute, like ‘my fate’ or ‘my life’, but blacker and more hostile: ‘So their doom willed it’, says the narrator, as Beren and Lúthien make the fatal decision to go home, and Thingol recognises when he sees them that ‘their doom might not be withstood by any power of the world’. What does it mean, then, when Beren says ‘Now is the Quest achieved … and my doom full-wrought’? That sentence on him has finally been executed? Or that disaster has come at last? Or that his life has now reached a proper close, with all debts paid, promises and curses fulfilled? All these meanings are present, as they are in many instances in The Silmarillion; ‘doom’ and ‘fate’ determine the tone especially of the stories of Beren and of Túrin Turambar.

What these words imply is in a sense illogical or self-contradictory. They indicate the presence of controlling powers, in whose toils the heroes are ‘caught’, ‘meshed’, ‘ensnared’; yet people can be told, as Túrin is, ‘the doom lies in yourself’. ‘Fate’ and ‘doom’ may be ‘wrought’ or ‘devised’ by people, and yet can take on a volition of their own; they ‘lie’ on characters, ‘fall’ on them, ‘lead’ them, but can at least in thought be ‘turned from’ or ‘denied’. Túrin calls himself ‘Turambar’, ‘Master of Doom’, only to have the boast thrown back in his epitaph A Túrin Turambar turún’ ambartanen, ‘Master of Doom, by doom mastered’. Are people free to determine their own fate, one might ask, or are they ‘the stars’ tennis-balls, struck and bandied / Which way please them’? To accept the second alternative would have been, for Tolkien, to go against an orthodox Christian doctrine; to state the first positively would have lost for him that sense of interlacing, of things working themselves out, of a poetic justice seen only in the large scale, to which he had been attached from near the start of his career.

The denial of logic, it may be added, is an ancient one, found in Old English, but part of the fibre of the Norse ‘family sagas’, which Tolkien had imitated in other ways. In the Saga of Gísli Súrsson, Gísli sends a warning to his brother-in-law Vesteinn to say if he comes home he will be killed. But the messengers ride along the top of a sandhill while he rides below it, and so miss him. When they catch up he says: ‘I would have turned back if you had met me earlier, but now all the streams run towards Dyrafjord and I shall ride there. And in any case I want to.’ He goes on, and is killed. In his decision there is a strand of volition, for he says he wants to; one of pride, for he would not like to be seen turning back; one of chance in the way the messengers miss him. However the centre of his speech is the remark about watersheds, and while this could be taken as merely practical, expressing the difficulty of travel in mountainous Iceland, all readers automatically take it as a sign of surrender to some superior force of embroilment. ‘The words of fate will be said by someone’, Gísli had remarked earlier. Individual will and external force, in other words, notoriously cooperate.

One sees in all this an echo of that dualism which had produced the Ring as hostile presence and psychic amplifier, or Sauron as enemy and as tempter. However it is enough to say that in his tales of heroes in The Silmarillion (and the Unfinished Tales), Tolkien was aiming at a tone, or perhaps better a ‘taste’ which he knew well but which had fallen outside the range of modern literature: a tone of stoicism, regret, inquiry, above all of awe moderated by complete refusal to be intimidated. The complexities of ‘fate’ and ‘doom’ show us the intention clearly enough. But, one must ask, how far is that intention realised: especially in those early and central tales of heroic mortals, ‘Of Beren and Lúthien’ in The Silmarillion and (in its two main prose versions in The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales) ‘Of Túrin Turambar’? The Tale of Beren

Opinions here may vary: and I come now to one place where I feel that Tolkien would not have agreed with the opinions I express. He clearly valued the tale of Beren and Lúthien in some ways above anything else he wrote, and he wrote it many times over: in 1917, when it was ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’ (Lost Tales 2), in 1925, as the poem ‘Light as Leaf on Lindentree’, rewritten as Aragorn’s ‘Song of Beren and Lúthien’ in The Fellowship of the Ring, in the early 1930s as ‘The Lay of Leithian’ in Lays of Beleriand, and repeatedly (1926, 1930, 1937, and in the 1950s) in the earlier and later versions of ‘The Silmarillion’. If one adds in all the annals and epitomes, we have more than a dozen versions of the story besides chapter 19 of The Silmarillion, the only full rendering to become familiar – some of their complex inter-relations are discussed in chapter 9. The tale was furthermore one of Tolkien’s first inspirations, based (see Biography, pp. 135–6) on a vision of his own wife; to that vision he remained loyal all his life, for through all the rewritings he never changed some essential features; he remained loyal to it even after death, for his tombstone and his wife’s read ‘Beren’ and ‘Lúthien’, a striking identification. Yet the tale as it emerged eventually in The Silmarillion has several faults, perhaps indeed connected with its early conception and long incubation.

It contains, to begin with, a strong element of duplication. Thus Beren, once he knows he has to win a Silmaril from the Iron Crown, goes to get help, only to fail, to be captured with Finrod, and to be rescued from the ‘Isle of the Werewolves’ by Lúthien and the hound Huan. He goes into the woods to spend an idyllic season with Lúthien. But then the pattern repeats itself. He leaves Lúthien again, to go into the enemy’s country, but is overtaken by her and Huan once more. They gain the Silmaril, lose it to the wolf, and then retire again to the woods and ‘houseless lands’, still with survival but without victory. The pattern is completed when Huan fights Carcharoth to recover the Silmaril, repeating his earlier battle against Carcharoth’s sire Draugluin. Two wolf-fights, three scenes of the power of song (including Sauron’s defeat of Finrod), three woodland idylls, two pursuits and rescues by Lúthien … Beren meanwhile is wounded three times, twice by Carcharoth, once by Celegorm, and interposes himself twice between dart and Lúthien, wolf’s teeth and Thingol. Three times Huan speaks, to advise Lúthien, to advise Beren, to bid farewell. Simultaneously the plot is traversed by the evil sons of Fëanor, Celegorm and Curufin: they capture Lúthien by coincidence on p. 173, and meet her and Beren by coincidence once again, after the rescue from Tol-in-Gaurhoth. Though they provide the knife Angrist that would cleave iron ‘as if it were green wood’, the scenes they contribute cost a good deal in contrivance. In ‘Beren and Lúthien’ as a whole there is too much plot.

The other side of that criticism is that on occasion Tolkien has to be rather brisk with his own inventions. Celegorm wounds Beren, and the hound Huan turns on his master and pursues him: ‘returning he brought to Lúthien a herb out of the forest. With that leaf she staunched Beren’s wound, and by her arts and her love she healed him …’ The motif of the healing herb is a common one, the centre for instance of the Breton lai of Eliduc (turned into conte by Marie de France). But in that it occupies a whole scene, if not a whole poem. In The Silmarillion it appears only to be dismissed in two lines, while Beren’s wound is inflicted and healed in five. Repeatedly one has this sense of summary. Christopher Tolkien points out, indeed (BLT 2, p. 57) that ‘summary’ is exactly right, for The Silmarillion is a summary and was even designed to feel like a summary, a compilation made much later than the events by one looking back over a great gap of time. In ‘The Lay of Leithian’, by contrast, the scene of the healing herb takes up more than 60 lines and the best part of two pages, see Lays, pp. 266–7. Just the same, the sense of briskness remains, as does a feeling here and there (rather surprising in what is overall a gloomy tale) of easy victory. Carcharoth is the Red Maw and the Jaws of Thirst, but when Lúthien stands before him her inner power fells him ‘as though lightning had smitten him’. The blindness, anxiety and dark dreams of Morgoth are built up better, as is the thawing of Thingol’s heart when he sees Beren’s mutilation. However the scene in the Halls of Mandos, when Lúthien moves the Lord of the Dead to pity, was beyond attempting, as Tolkien realised. One might say that this tale, more than any other of The Silmarillion, depends for success on its ‘lyric core’, the songs of Finrod, Sauron, Beren, and of Lúthien before Morgoth and before Mandos. However these could not be provided. One has to take the will for the deed.

A further criticism, and perhaps a connected one, is that in ‘Beren and Lúthien’ Tolkien had not yet freed himself from his many sources – as if trying to bring in all the bits of older literature that he liked instead of forging a story with an impetus of its own. The framework of the tale is the legend of Orpheus, the singer who challenges the power of the Underworld to rescue his wife. To this the Middle English ‘lay’ of Sir Orfeo had added the motif of the Rash Promise, by which the king of the Underworld – in Sir Orfeo the elf-king – has to stand by an undertaking carelessly worded. Tolkien picked this up too, converting it into the oath of Thingol (which provokes a corresponding oath from Beren). But around this we have the wizards’ singing-contests (from the Kalevala), the werewolves devouring bound men in the dark (from the Saga of the Volsungs), the rope of hair let down from a window (the Grimms’ ‘Rapunzel’), the ‘shadowy cloak’ of sleep and invisibility which recalls the *heoloðhelm of the Old English Genesis B. The hunting of the great wolf reminds one of the chase of the boar Twrch Trwyth in the Welsh Mabinogion, while the motif of ‘the hand in the wolf’s mouth’ is one of the most famous parts of the Prose Edda, told of Fenris Wolf and the god Tyr; Huan recalls several faithful hounds of legend, Garm, Gelert, Cafall. Of course old motifs often do their work, as when the Iron Crown rolls on the silent floor of Thangorodrim, or Lúthien’s rope of hair sways with more-than-elvish ‘glamour’ above the heads of her guards. However some of them could have been omitted. The effect is lavish where it ought to be spare.

The strength of the tale lies perhaps in its interweavings around the central fable. Its heart – as the tale stands in The Silmarillion, but see further below – is the ‘rash promise’ of Thingol, ‘Bring to me in your hand a Silmaril from Morgoth’s crown; and then, if she will, Lúthien may set her hand in yours’, with the countervailing promise by Beren, to be fulfilled in letter only and not spirit, ‘when we meet again my hand shall hold a Silmaril’. The tale works through to the ironic fulfilment of both. However, as it works other strands are drawn in, to raise, increasingly, retrospective questions. Oaths are commonly regretted in this story. Finrod’s oath ‘of abiding friendship and aid in every need to Barahir and all his kin’ was made in gratitude and affection, but when it comes to redeeming it he is sad for others rather than himself. What makes matters worse is that he had foreseen his own rashness long before, saying to Galadriel, ‘An oath I too shall swear, and must be free to fulfil it, and go into darkness. Nor shall anything of my realm endure that a son should inherit.’ How great the gratitude to overcome that foreboding; how much greater the disaster to quench that gratitude! Spontaneous motivations come to seem weak, and by reflection from the case of Finrod one may begin to wonder about others. The reaction of the sons of Fëanor against Beren seems spontaneous, but the narrator adds as gloss, ‘the curse of Mandos came upon [them]’. If one looks back one sees that that curse dictates failure ‘by treason of kin unto kin’, and the sons of Fëanor plot treason against their cousin Finrod, grandson of another mother. They remember also that since the rescue of Maedhros they have been ‘the Dispossessed’. Jealousy of Finrod, then, creeps into their contempt for Beren. From that jealousy Doriath will fall, and the sons of Fëanor themselves die.

But since motivations are so opaque one may look back at the offer of Thingol, the very heart of the story. To demand a Silmaril for Lúthien could be a fair offer: so Beren pretends to take it, calling it a ‘little price’. In fact, as everyone sees, it is an attempt to commit murder in circumvention of the earlier, regretted oath not to kill Beren himself. Beneath that, though, there may be a yet worse motive; the sudden ‘desire’ for a Silmaril could contain a genuine impulse of greed beneath a calculated impulse of hatred. In that case Beren’s insulting suggestion that Thingol values his daughter no more than a ‘thing made by craft’ would be true, if unconscious. The end of that strand is 65 pages later, when the dwarves in their turn seek ‘a pretext and fair cloak for their true intent’ in ‘desiring’ the Silmaril, and Thingol, like Beren before him, answers scornfully. His desire is like theirs, though, not like Beren’s. So his death ‘in the deep places of Menegroth’, far from the light which he alone of his kingdom had seen, becomes an analogue of his descent to greed and cunning.

Words overpower intentions. In any case intentions are not always known to the intenders. This is the sense of ‘doom’ which Tolkien strives to create from oaths and curses and bargains, and from the interweaving of the fates of objects, people and kingdoms. At moments in the tale ‘Of Beren and Lúthien’ it comes through strongly. Túrin Turambar turún’ ambartanen

For a successful striking of the note, however, one has to wait for the story ‘Of Túrin Turambar’ in The Silmarillion, or better still, for the longer version of it in the Unfinished Tales, the Narn i Hîn Húrin. The existence of these two variants immediately makes several points about Tolkien’s way of working. One is that ‘Of Túrin’ has been selectively compressed with regard to its major features; the interest in ‘doom’ is proclaimed by Túrin’s final nickname ‘Master of Doom’, yet in the Silmarillion version the word is used only some ten times in 29 pages, considerably less than in the slightly shorter chapter ‘Of Beren and Lúthien’. The Narn adds many more references, some of them prominent. It makes one wonder what the tale of Beren would be like if we had a full or final version, developed to the same extent as the Narn. A second point is that both accounts of Túrin seem to have digested their source much more fully than the Silmarillion account of Beren. The basic outline of the tale owes much to the ‘Story of Kullervo’ in the Kalevala, which Tolkien had begun to work on perhaps as early as 1912. In both a hero survives the ruin of his family to grow up with a cruel, wayward streak in fosterage; in both he marries (or seduces) a lost maiden, only for her to discover she is his sister and drown herself; in both the hero returns from his exploits to find his mother gone and home laid waste, and to be condemned by his own associates. Kullervo’s dog leads him only to the place where he met his sister, and like Túrin, when he asks his sword if it will drink his blood, it agrees scornfully:

‘Wherefore at thy heart’s desire

Should I not thy flesh devour,

And drink up thy blood so evil?

I who guiltless flesh have eaten,

Drank the blood of those who sinned not?’¹⁷

But for all these points of derivation, ‘Túrin’ goes beyond ‘Beren’ in neatness of structure. It is striking, though, that its true point becomes clear (to all but extremely perceptive eyes) only in the Narn.

The Narn i Hîn Húrin centres on Tolkien’s favourite question of how corruption worked, how far evil had power over the resisting mind. Possibly the most important scene added to the Narn, and not present in The Silmarillion, is the one in which Morgoth debates with his captive Húrin on top of the ‘Hill of Tears’, looking out over the kingdoms of the world like Christ and Satan in Paradise Regained. Morgoth’s temptation is perfunctory, however. His threat is that he will ruin Húrin’s family and break them on his will ‘though you all were made of steel’. He cannot do it, says Húrin, having no power to ‘govern them from afar’. He has a power of clouds and shadows, asserts Morgoth: ‘upon all whom you love my thought shall weigh as a cloud of Doom’. Húrin refuses to accept this last intangible, and claims that whatever happens Morgoth cannot pursue men beyond death and beyond ‘the Circles of the World’. This is not denied, any more than it is denied that Húrin’s family are free to resist. However the scene leaves a feeling that Morgoth is not entirely a liar, and that when he says Húrin does not understand the power of the Valar (including himself) he may be telling the truth. The power of the Valar, however, as one may remember from the ‘oliphaunt’ scene in The Two Towers, is to be equated with ‘chance’.

Chance indeed seems to control the tragedy of Túrin. He takes the seat of Saeros (in the Narn) ‘by ill-luck’. This leads to Saeros’s taunting, Túrin’s violent reply, the death of Saeros and expulsion of Túrin; so, stage by stage, to the fall of Nargothrond and ruin of Doriath. It is likewise a coincidence that orcs come on Nienor as she is led back from meeting the dragon; ‘Ill chance’, says Melian. It is a further ill chance that Nienor meets her brother exactly on the spot where his sentiments are most stirred, the grave of the woman he betrayed. At the same place Túrin meets Mablung, the one person who can confirm the secret he has been told. ‘What a sweet grace of fortuner,’ he cries, with hysterical irony. ‘Some strange and dreadful thing has chanced’, says Mablung. The plot of the Narn seems to work on coincidence.

But what is a coincidence (a question traditional in Oxford philosophy examinations)? Throughout the Narn there is a strong tendency, just as in The Lord of the Rings, see above, to give double explanations of what happens. Thus Túrin’s boyhood friend Sador Lobadal has been lamed ‘by ill-luck or the mishandling of his axe’. It might seem hardly material which it was; but if it were the latter one might say his pain was his own fault, as Túrin’s mother Morwen claims: ‘He is self-maimed by his own want of skill, and he is slow with his tasks, for he spends much time on trifles unbidden.’ Túrin’s father puts in a plea for good intentions, ‘An honest hand and a true heart may hew amiss’. Character is fate, says one; accidents will happen, says the other. The narrator keeps on expressing no opinion. Túrin escapes from Dor-lómin ‘by fate and courage’, Túrin and Hunthor cross the Teiglin ‘by skill and hardihood, or by fate’, Túrin survives the illness that killed his sister, ‘for such was his fate and the strength of life that was in him’. ‘Fate’ can always be offered as an explanation, it seems; but the word may mean nothing, be just what people say when they cannot find a better one.

There is a third possibility, which is that Morgoth was exactly what he said he was, ‘master of the fates of Arda’. He could have turned Sador’s axe. He did send the plague that carried off Lalaith. He could have had something to do with Saeros. The latter’s motivation is clearly largely his own, based on pride, jealousy, resentment of Beren and consequently all Beren’s kin. However after he has spoken the words that provoke Túrin’s outburst Mablung says, ‘I think that some shadow of the North has reached out to touch us tonight. Take heed, Saeros son of Ithilbor, lest you do the will of Morgoth in your pride’. The ‘shadow’ is not the jealousy, but Saeros’s accidental touching on Túrin’s sorest spot, his sense of having deserted mother and sister. ‘If the Men of Hithlum are so wild and fell, of what sort are the women of that land? Do they run like deer clad only in their hair?’ Being hunted with hounds was Sador’s explanation to Túrin of what it might be to be a thrall. It remains a possibility for Morwen and Nienor. The hunted woman with her clothes torn instantly sends Túrin into a fury among the Gaurwaith. And before the end Nienor does appear as a quarry, flying naked ‘as a beast that is hunted to heart-bursting’ – perhaps that is what stirs Túrin’s pity into love. One might say that this image, this fear, haunts the whole tale. For Saeros to pick on it unwittingly seems indeed more than chance. Morgoth put the words in his mouth; they are ‘the words of fate’, which will be spoken by someone, exactly as the Icelandic hero Gísli said.

Responsibility for saying them, however, remains on Saeros, and Túrin’s reaction too is largely his own fault. There is a cruel and morbid streak in the stripping and hunting of his enemy, even if it was meant to end short of death. Túrin repeatedly strikes too soon, at Saeros, Forweg, Beleg, Brandir, in the end himself. Where does this element come from? The Narn offers two answers, one reaching towards a kind of ‘characterisation’, the other more simply genetic. Like so many others in The Silmarillion, Túrin is a hybrid, his father of the house of Hador – fair, masterful, ‘quick to anger and to laughter’ – his mother of the house of Bëor, dark, clever, inveterate, ‘moved sooner to pity than to laughter … most like to the Noldor and most loved by them’. One might use an ancient racial stereotype and say that the one line seems ‘Germanic’, the other ‘Celtic’. Túrin, dark, taciturn and slow to forget, clearly takes after his mother, though he has his father’s soft-heartedness. In a way his life is a struggle between two sets of impulses; and another fact clearer in Narn than Silmarillion is that the impulses that come from Morwen are wrong. If one starts to disentangle the threads of blame for the fate of Túrin, Morwen holds a considerable share. Her husband’s advice to her was ‘Do not wait!’ She remembers this after his defeat, but does not obey – partly from fear for her unborn child, partly from hope that Húrin will come back, but largely from pride: ‘she would not yet humble her pride to be an alms-guest, not even of a king. Therefore the voice of Húrin … was denied, and the first strand of the fate of Túrin was woven.’

So mother and son are separated. Pride keeps up the separation, and separation generates the fear that turns Túrin savage. The pride which Túrin inherits from his mother also makes him refuse pardon; and with it comes, not cowardice, but something less than the dauntlessness of his father. ‘My father is not afraid’, says Túrin, ‘and I will not be; or at least, as my mother, I will be afraid and not show it.’ But he does show it. Glaurung the dragon, like Saeros, strikes the hidden fear when he calls Túrin ‘deserter of thy kin’; and so Túrin abandons Finduilas to save Morwen, comes too late to do anything but doom Aerin, and then falls into despair, rejecting the obvious solution of following his mother and sister to safety. ‘I cast a shadow wherever I dwell. Let Melian keep them! And I will leave them in peace unshadowed for a while.’ ‘Shadow’ is an ominous word; it may not come from Túrin. Similarly Morwen falls into despair and rushes from security to her own death and her daughter’s abandonment. Pride and fear, then, combine in mother and son to separate them and keep them apart. The ‘thought of Morgoth’ may influence their ‘fates’ and ‘dooms’, but also they take after each other, they co-operate.

The other fatal element in Túrin’s character centres on the perception that in him something is missing: he is only half a man. This idea Tolkien clearly took from Norse sources, for instance from the famous Saga of Egill Skalfogrimsson. In that saga Egill’s grandfather is Kveld-Úlfr (‘Evening-Wolf’), not entirely human, ‘a great shape-changer’, very like Beorn in The Hobbit. Kveld-Úlfr has two sons, Thórólfr and Skalla-Grímr (‘Bald-Grim’), and the latter has two sons as well, Thórólfr junior and Egill himself. In each generation there is one fair, handsome, cheerful brother – these are the two Thórólfs – and one like Egill or Grimr who is big, bald, ugly, overbearing and greedy. As long as the handsome brother is alive the other can be kept in check, but when his own magnanimity kills him the brother who carries the marks of ogre descent becomes worse. So, in the saga, Egill sits silent and morose at the feast after Thórólfr’s death, half-drawing his sword and then slamming it back, alternately raising and lowering his eyebrows; his mood remains dangerous till the king of England quietly begins to load him with gold and silver. Túrin, admittedly, is not as bad as that. Nevertheless he has lost something – his sister Urwen or Lalaith, an analogue of Thórólfr, an image of Túrin’s paternal side in her fairness, her merriment, her ability to charm. Lalaith, we are told, means ‘laughter’. When she dies of the Evil Breath his nurse tells Túrin, ‘Speak no more of Lalaith … of your sister Urwen you must ask tidings of your mother’. Obviously the capital letter could be removed, and in that sense the sentence would still be true – ‘speak no more of laughter’ – and be obeyed. Túrin hardly ever laughs, and when he does it is ‘bitter’ or ‘shrill’: he is a fraction of a personality, bereft of ‘fairness’ or ability to see ‘the bright side’ (which is why his second sister Nienor, also golden-haired, has such fatal attraction for him). Filling out this sense of an imperfect humanity is Túrin’s affinity with evil, made concrete in his weapons – the Black Sword of Beleg, which kills him in the end, and even more the Dragon-helm of Dor-lómin.

This too is clearly based on a Norse idea, or word. In the Eddic poem Fáfnismál the dragon boasts of bearing an ægishjàlmr, a ‘helmet of fear’, over all the race of men. Is this a word for something intangible, awe or horror, or for some object that produces that effect, perhaps the ‘dragon-mask’ itself, the sight of the dragon’s face?^* Certainly both Nienor and Túrin are bespelled when they stare into the dragon’s eyes and feel his ‘fell spirit’; it seems that Túrin’s heirloom is designed to counterfeit this effect, its image of Glaurung striking ‘fear into the hearts of all beholders’. But is it right for heroes to use an ægishjàlmr? Sigurthr in the Norse poem had thought not, insisting that one would be no protection against true courage. Húrin seems to agree, declaring ‘I would rather look on my foes with my true face’. Túrin, however, is prepared to use the tactics of the enemy, fear and ‘terrorism’, and by doing so plays into Morgoth’s hands. It seems clear (from p. 153 of the Unfinished Tales) that Tolkien meant the acceptance of the name Gorthol, ‘Dread Helm’, to mark a stage in Túrin’s corruption. Certainly the decision to reveal himself seems the last stage in a progress from pity to fear, to despair, to a compensating rashness and that ‘Ragnarök-spirit’ which Tolkien had condemned elsewhere, a sign of courage without self-confidence or that ultimate hope Húrin had expressed on top of the ‘Hill of Tears’.

Túrin’s tragedy is silently opposed by the actions and fate of his cousin Tuor, whose path intersects with Túrin’s at one point (see p. 239 of The Silmarillion, and pp. 37–8 of Unfinished Tales). The one relies on himself, the other on the Valar, the one brings hope to Middle-earth by his descendant Eärendil, the other leaves nothing behind. Yet the moral of the tale of Túrin remains uncertain in all versions: much is his fault, much the fault of the ‘malice’ that emanates from Morgoth – a word used repeatedly in the Narn, a word which the OED interestingly notes as having a sense in English law as ‘That kind of evil intent which constitutes the aggravation of guilt distinctive of certain offences’. Malice turns manslaughter into murder, turns accident into crime; in the same way one feels that the circumstances of Túrin’s life would have been similar in any case, but that his resentful attitude makes matters qualitatively worse. Had he any right to call himself Turambar, ‘Master of Doom’? In the sense that he had free will, that he could have changed his attitudes, Yes. However ‘Doom’ is equated in the Narn with ‘the Dark Shadow’, and that Shadow knows how to turn strength to weakness. That is why the ‘Master of Doom’ ends ‘by doom mastered’; it is an inextricably blended process of temptation and assault. The ironies of the tale of Túrin, one is meant to see, are constructed by Morgoth.

In places in this tale Tolkien comes close to supersitition – unlucky objects, inherited failings, changing one’s name to change one’s luck, and so on. To that extent the Narn i Hîn Húrin, like The Lord of the Rings, approaches fairy-tale. At the same time one ought to recognise that it is capable, in its most fully worked-up passages, of exposing exactly the type of subtle internal treachery which has been the staple of the English novel since its inception. ‘What is fate?’ asks Túrin as a child. He might as well have asked ‘How are the heroes betrayed?’, a question as applicable to him as to that other victim of ‘dark imaginings’, Othello. Finally one should note that, just as Hamlet peeped out of the tale of Eöl, so Macbeth was once more in Tolkien’s mind with Túrin. At the end Túrin comes to the gorge of Cabed-en-Anas, and sees ‘that all the trees near and far were withered, and their sere leaves fell mournfully’ (UT, p. 145, cp. S, p. 225). He might well have said, ‘My way of life / Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf’. Like Macbeth, he has been caught in a web of prophecy and inner weakness, has slid down the scale from ‘man’ to ‘monster’, and to murderer. The best epitaph he might have chosen for himself is Macbeth’s vaunt:

‘The mind I sway by, and the heart I bear,

Shall never sag with doubt nor shake with fear.’

Both tales are about the hardening of the heart. Some Conclusions

The Silmarillion as a whole (and by this I mean as well those variants of its component parts printed in the Unfinished Tales) shows two of Tolkien’s great strengths. One is ‘inspiration’: he was capable of producing, from some recess of the mind, images, words, phrases, scenes in themselves irresistibly compelling – Lúthien watched among the hemlocks by Beren, Húrin calling to the cliffs, Thingol’s death in the dark while he looks at the captured Light. The other is ‘invention’: having seen the vision Tolkien was capable of brooding over it for decades, not altering it but making sense of it, fitting it into more and more extraordinary sequences of explanation. So the boat of Eärendil generates a disaster, a rescue, an explanation of why the rescue has had to be so long delayed. The processes are exactly the same as the generation of Bilbo Baggins from ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit …’, and the expansion of his story all the way to the last explanation of holbytla seventeen years and 1500 pages later.

Where The Silmarillion differs from Tolkien’s earlier works is in its refusal to accept novelistic convention. Most novels (including The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings) pick a character to put in the foreground, like Frodo and Bilbo, and then tell the story as it happens to him. The novelist of course is inventing the story, and so retains omniscience: he can explain, or show, what is ‘really’ happening and contrast it with the limited perception of his character, as Tolkien does with Frodo lamenting his ill choices in The Two Towers (we have seen that Aragorn’s similar laments were unfounded), or as Joseph Conrad does when his Dr Monygham tells Nostromo if he had the treasure he would give it to their enemies (we know Nostromo has the treasure, but is bitterly offended to have his efforts made vain). Novels work on a mixture of suspense and special knowledge: there is about them, one may as well say, something wildly unrealistic.

Against this The Silmarillion tries to preserve something much closer to the texture of reality, namely, that the full meaning of events can only ever be perceived retrospectively. Its stories are full of ironies only grasped on second reading. ‘False hopes are more dangerous than fears’, says Sador in the Narn. Once we have realised how Morwen ruined her life and her son’s by waiting for Húrin we see that Sador is, unwittingly, a ‘soothsayer’, and read all his remarks with much greater attention. At first reading, though, that point is invisible. So are most of the moments that lead to future disaster, like Aredhel’s turn southward outside Gondolin, or Finrod’s ignorance of the Noegyth Nibin (on S, p. 114). ‘Ominous’ statements are common enough – ‘Their swords and their counsels shall have two edges’ (Melian, S, p. 128), or ‘Not the first’ (Mandos, fifty pages before) – but for their immediate meaning one has to wait, and their full meaning often depends on unravelling the entire book. The Silmarillion could never be anything but hard to read: that is arguably because it is trying to say something about the relationship between events and their actors which could not be said through the omniscient selectiveness of the ordinary novel.

None of this, however, waves away the very nearly prophetic remark by Frodo sitting on ‘The Stairs of Cirith Ungol’ in The Two Towers. Sam Gamgee has just given a summary of the tale of Beren and Lúthien, and remarked that he and Frodo appear to be in the same tale: perhaps some hobbit-child in the future will demand the story of ‘Frodo and the Ring’. Yes, says Frodo, and he will demand ‘Samwise the stouthearted’ too: ‘I want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why didn’t they put in more of his talk, dad? That’s what I like, it makes me laugh.’ This embryonic piece of literary criticism does make a point about The Silmarillion, which is that it is all on the level of ‘high mimesis’ or ‘romance’, with no Gamgees in it. Not only children find that a lack. There is a reason for the decision once more, in that Tolkien was quite clearly, in the Silmarillion stories, recommending virtues to which most moderns no longer dare aspire: stoicism, nonchalance, piety, fidelity. In The Lord of the Rings he had learnt – by mixing hobbits in with heroes – to present them relatively unprovocatively. In The Silmarillion feelings of antagonism or doubt are often accidentally triggered, as when Fingon ‘dared a deed which is justly renowned’ or we are told the same of ‘the Leap of Beren’. ‘Don’t tell us, show us’, is the reply. ‘We are not impressed by scale so much as by effort – by Bilbo going on alone in the dark.’

But the debate between ancient and modern modes of presentation, and between ancient and modern theories of virtue, need not be protracted. In his maturity, from the scenes at the end of The Hobbit almost all the way through The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien was able to hold a balance between them. In youth he had not learnt it, and in his later years he was unable to recover it – especially as recovering that balance would have meant what is notoriously one of the hardest jobs in the literary world, namely making a radical revision of something which has already taken a fixed shape of its own. Tolkien did not solve the problem of ‘depth’; nor of ‘novelising’ romance; and in ignoring the one, as in brooding over the other, he showed himself out of step with his time, and exposed himself even more to lack of sympathy and careless reading. His decision to bring back the modes of the past was, however, not indefensible (as this chapter ought to show). It was also his last and boldest defiance of all the practitioners of ‘lit.’.

^* The point is made much more explicitly in Jim Allan’s An Introduction to Elvish (Hayes: Bran’s Head, 1978): Quenya resembles Finnish in ‘style’, especially in its complex noun-declensions, Sindarin is close to Welsh in for instance its sound-changes. A philological point not made by Allan is that Finnish preserves several words borrowed from Early Germanic in their early (or *) form: kuningas for ‘king’, var(k)as for ‘warg’, jetanas for ‘etten’ or ‘giant’. Tulkas, the warlike Vala of The Silmarillion seems a similar formation, cp. the Norse word tulkr (‘tolke’ in Sir Gawain), ‘man, fighting man’.

^* For some reason, several medieval words mean both ‘mask’ and ‘ghost’: Latin mascha, larva, but also the Old English word grima (as in Gríma Wormtongue). Grima, however, is also applied to helmets; the Anglo-Saxon helmet found at Sutton Hoo is a mask as well. In conjunctions the words suggest a buried memory of a fearsome, uncanny war-mask, linked with belief in dragons. See also the Nazgûl in The Two Towers, p. 691, ‘helmed and crowned with fear’, and note 6 to chapter 5.