The Repentance of Angels: a Curious Departure in Tolkien

In the Ainulindalë Melkor chooses to follow his own will rather than the design of Ilúvatar and to usurp the act of creation (S 16-17). It's noteworthy here that in response Ilúvatar does not cast Melkor out, but tries to explain to him why he is unable to create independently and the harm that his attempt to do so has caused for the created world. Ilúvatar even allows Melkor to go down into the world on the pretext (advanced by Melkor) that he will work to repair the harm he has done. It seems entirely clear that Melkor could have repented in truth as he pretended to do. This is true from the very beginning, appearing in The Book of Lost Tales (LT I 53-55, 57). We later see Aulë make a similar mistake in fashioning the Dwarves, but he is humble and repents when Ilúvatar speaks to him about it (S 43-44). Later still, even after all the evils he had committed in the First Age, repentance and a return to the fold was open even to Sauron (S 285).

Now Tolkien often compared the Valar and Maiar to the angels which are a part of the Christian religion. In the early days of the legendarium he even described them as gods. In The Book of Lost Tales I & II, for example, he refers to them in this way 319 times--yes, I counted*--which leads to a revealing contrast with his practice in his letters, where he almost always puts the word in quotations marks, 'gods,' or qualifies it with another word, 'roughly,' or phrase 'if you will.' Calling them 'gods' and likening them to angels often occur in the same letters and about the same number of times ('gods' 19; 'angels/angelic' etc. 20). When doing so Tolkien is being careful to make clear to readers not named Tolkien or Lewis that they are not really gods, but only gods so to speak. They occupy the mythological, not theological, place of gods (cf. Letters² #212 p. 405). So calling them 'gods' is also implicitly a comparison.

Just how much of a comparison it is we can see from how great a departure Tolkien is making from Christian doctrine with the Valar and Maiar. For it has long been doctrine that the fallen angels cannot repent, as Melkor pretends to do, Sauron almost does, and as Aulë succeeds in doing. The seeming glance to the West that the spirit of Saruman takes immediately after death shows that he believed repentance for him might be possible (RK 6.viii.1020). Being both fallen and dead, Saruman's answer is blowing in the wind.

In discussing fallen angels Saint Thomas Aquinas quotes Saint John Damascene to help make his point. Aquinas's quotation in the Summa Theologiae includes only the first of the two sentences below (ST 1 64.2). A fuller quotation of Saint John Damascene's De Fide Orthodoxa is illustrative (II.4):

“…hoc est hominibus mors, quod angelis casus. Post casum enim non est eis paenitentia, quemadmodum neque hominibus post mortem.”

Or, if your Latin's rusty: 

“…death is to men what the fall is to angels. For after their fall there is no repentance for them, just as there is none for men after death.” 

Aquinas says further that the fall of the angels happened not because they desired evil per se, but because they desired a good inordinately, thus placing their own will before God's (ST 1 63.1 ad 4): "et hoc modo angelus peccavit, convertendo se per liberum arbitrium ad proprium bonum, absque ordine ad regulam divinae voluntatis." "And in this manner the angel fell, by turning himself to a good of his own [which was determined] by his own free will, and out of order with the rule established by God's will."

Lucifer is presumably "the angel" Aquinas refers to here. So, too, Melkor desired to create things of his own according to his own design (S 16).

While Tolkien is clearly, obviously, and by his own admission, a very religious man whose faith and worldview play a great part in the way he shaped his legendarium, here is an instance where we can see that his mythology is not simply a reproduction of his theology. Just as making the Elves immortal and able to reincarnate allows him to examine human concerns about life and death in ways not possible otherwise, allowing for repentance among the "angels"  affords still other possibilities that deserve to be noted and explored.

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*I count only instances in the text of The Book of Lost Tales I & II, or times when Christopher Tolkien quotes a different draft of his father's work. I do not count Christopher's own use of 'gods' in the notes and commentary; 'gods' in the notes and commentary that reproduces what has already been counted in the text; 'gods' when quoted from later works; or any of the front or back matter of The Book of Lost Tales 

Prophecy, Hope, Despair, and Sorrow in "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen."

Recently I have been reading Johm F. Whitmire Jr.'s interesting article, "An Archaeology of Hope and Despair in the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen," in the 2023 issue of Tolkien Studies (vol. XX pp. 59-76). I recommend its thoughtful analysis of the evolution of the Tale over several versions, which are published in The Peoples of Middle-earth (HoMe XII pp. 262-270). The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen is a favorite of mine in any case, and so I enjoyed the opportunity to read it again.

This time through I caught something I had not noticed before. Only six characters play a direct part in the action--others are mentioned--and only these six charactersspeak: Dírhael and Ivorwen, the parents of Gilraen, Aragorn's mother, Elrond, Arwen Undómiel, and Aragorn himself. What I find remarkable is that every one of these six speaking characters displays some degree of accurate prophetic foresight into the fates of the Dúnedain and the heirs of Isildur. 

1. Dírhael correctly foresees that Arathorn, Aragorn's father, will soon succeed his father, Arador, and perish himself not long after. For these reasons in particular, he opposed the betrothal of Gilraen to Arathorn.
2. Ivorwen correctly foresees that Arathorn and Gilraen must marry soon then. "If these two wed now, hope may be born for our people; but if they delay, it will not come while this age lasts.”
3. Gilraen gives Aragorn the name Estel (Hope) when his father is killed. Years later she will say that she had given Hope to her people, but kept none for herself.
4. Elrond foretells to Aragorn, when he reveals his true name to him, "that the span of your life shall be greater than the measure of Men, unless evil befalls you or you fail at the test. But the test will be hard and long. The Sceptre of Annúminas I withhold, for you have yet to earn it.”
5. When Aragorn first meets Arwen and calls her Tinúviel, she says "maybe my doom will be not unlike hers."
6. When Gilraen learns that Aragorn has fallen in love with Arwen, she tells him that Elrond will oppose marriage between them. Aragorn replies: "Then bitter will be my days, and I will walk in the wild alone." 
7. ‘“That will indeed be your fate,” said Gilraen; but though she had in a measure the foresight of her people, she said no more to him of her foreboding, nor did she speak to anyone of what her son had told her.
8. Elrond responds as Gilraen predicted and prophesies in turn: “Aragorn, Arathorn’s son, Lord of the Dúnedain, listen to me! A great doom awaits you, either to rise above the height of all your fathers since the days of Elendil, or to fall into darkness with all that is left of your kin. Many years of trial lie before you. You shall neither have wife, nor bind any woman to you in troth, until your time comes and you are found worthy of it.”
9. ‘“I see,” said Aragorn, “that I have turned my eyes to a treasure no less dear than the treasure of Thingol that Beren once desired. Such is my fate.” Then suddenly the foresight of his kindred came to him, and he said: “But lo! Master Elrond, the years of your abiding run short at last, and the choice must soon be laid on your children, to part either with you or with Middle-earth.”
10. The next time Aragorn sees Arwen many years later: "And thus it was that Arwen first beheld him again after their long parting; and as he came walking towards her under the trees of Caras Galadhon laden with flowers of gold, her choice was made and her doom appointed."
11. ‘And Arwen said: “Dark is the Shadow, and yet my heart rejoices; for you, Estel, shall be among the great whose valour will destroy it.”  ‘But Aragorn answered: “Alas! I cannot foresee it, and how it may come to pass is hidden from me. Yet with your hope I will hope."
12. ‘When Elrond learned the choice of his daughter, he was silent, though his heart was grieved and found the doom long feared none the easier to endure.' 
13. ‘“My son, years come when hope will fade, and beyond them little is clear to me. And now a shadow lies between us. Maybe, it has been appointed so, that by my loss the kingship of Men may be restored. Therefore, though I love you, I say to you: Arwen Undómiel shall not diminish her life’s grace for less cause. She shall not be the bride of any Man less than the King of both Gondor and Arnor. To me then even our victory can bring only sorrow and parting -but to you hope of joy for a while. Alas, my son! I fear that to Arwen the Doom of Men may seem hard at the ending.”

Each of these foretellings prove true, and they shape the Tale as much as the choices the characters make in response to them. But there is one final foretelling. It comes at the end of Aragorn's life when, as Elrond foresaw, the approaching end of their story seems hard. Aragorn's last words to Arwen foretell in no uncertain terms that there is hope beyond the sorrow of death:

    14. "In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory. Farewell!”

This last prophecy of course is the only one we do not see come true. How could we? Yet such is the weight of all the accurate foretellings that come before it by all the characters that this one is credible on its own. Tolkien has so composed The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen as presented in Appendix A, which importantly is explicitly called only a part of that Tale, that it focusses throughout on prophetic truth culminating in the hope with which Estel faces death, followed in time by Arwen's similar quiet acceptance of it despite her sorrow. The Dooms of Men and Elves, the coming together of mortal and immortal, the interplay of Fate and Free Will, and the Choice of Lúthien all come together here. 

The "Real Reason"® Hobbits Don't Like Boats

According to the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, the sea is a symbol of death to hobbits (FR Pr. 07). We tend to imagine mythical explanations for this perspective. From the Odyssey to Beowulf, the sea has often had associations with death. It's understandable. The sea is vast. It never rests. And it is not your friend. Water always wins. Even in Tolkien's legendarium, west across the sea is the direction the Elves sail off in never to return, and west across the sea lay the great island of Númenor that disappeared beneath the waves long ago. Hearing such stories even remotely, those who knew nothing of the sea, like the hobbits who came to Eriador from beyond the Misty Mountains, couldn't be blamed for thinking the sea was a place to avoid. It might even explain why some of the Stoors turned around and went back over the mountains.

I am here to set the record straight, because the real reason is much simpler than that. The evidence speaks plainly. 

• "Indeed, few Hobbits had ever seen or sailed upon the Sea, and fewer still had ever returned to report on it."
• Frodo's parents both fell into the Brandywine River and drowned.
• Even the rumor of this struck terror into the evening crowd at The Ivy Bush.
• After Bilbo's disappearance from the Shire, some insisted that he must have "run off.... and undoubtedly fallen into a pool or a river, and come to a tragic, but hardly an untimely, end."
• Pippin's great great uncle Hildefons "went off on a journey and never returned,"
• Sam leaps into the Anduin to try to catch Frodo before he can paddle away. and he sinks immediately. Frodo has to save him from drowning.

Clearly, Hobbits are negatively buoyant. 

They sink like a stone. 

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Dear internet: this is a joke, ok?

Joe Hoffman, this one's for you.

"Unfey, fearless, and his fate kept him" -- Túrin and Beowulf

The Lay of the Children of Húrin exists in two versions, neither of which tells the whole story its title promises. The second version is much more detailed than the first as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far. Both versions, however, describe Túrin's earliest days in battle defending the realm of Doriath. The first version offers the following account:

Ere manhood’s measure   he met and slew
the Orcs of Angband   and evil things
that roamed and ravened   on the realm’s borders.
There hard his life,     and hurts he got him,              385
the wounds of shaft     and warfain sword,
and his prowess was proven     and his praise renowned, 

and beyond his years     he was yielded honour;

(Lays p. 16, lines 382-88)

The second version is very much the same as the first for the first four and a half lines, but then it rapidly diverges, inserting four and a half entirely new lines before returning to the same conclusion the first version offers: 

Ere manhood’s measure    he met and he slew

Orcs of Angband    and evil things                              745
that roamed and ravened    on the realm’s borders.
There hard his life,    and hurts he lacked not,
the wounds of shaft   and the wavering sheen
of the sickle scimitars,   the swords of Hell,
the bloodfain blades   on black anvils                      750
in Angband smithied,   yet ever he smote
unfey, fearless,    and his fate kept him.
Thus his prowess was proven    and his praise was noised
and beyond his years     he was yielded honour... 

            (Lays p. 116-17, lines 744-54) 

When studying Túrin, it's always a good idea to pay attention to any references to fate. So line 752-- "unfey, fearless, and his fate kept him"-- stuck out, with its two references to fate. "Fey," meaning "doomed to die," is not a word you see every day. "Unfey," meaning "not doomed to die," you see even less. The word has no entry in the OED, and though Google Ngram says it has been used it links to no books in which it is used. According to Google Ngram the word's usage peaked in 1896 -- peaked I say -- at a frequency of 0.0000000216% of all the words in all the books scanned by Google. That's 2.16 times out of every 10,000,000,000 words. For most purposes not requiring a supercollider, this is vanishingly small, quite literally. You need the Webb Telescope to find this thing.

Unless you're reading Tolkien, and you just happen to have been thinking about a line in Beowulf, where Beowulf talks about fighting sea monsters when he was young.

Ac on mergenne, mecum |wunde,                              565
be yðlafe uppe lægon,
sweordum aswefede, þæt syðþan na
ymb brontne ford brimliðende
lade ne letton. Leoht eastan com,
beorht beacen Godes, brimu swaþredon,                   570
þæt ic sænæssas geseon mihte
windige weallas. Wyrd oft nereð
unfægne eorl, þonne his ellen deah.

But in the morning [the sea monsters] lay dead
on the beach, wounded by my blade, 
slain by my sword,  so never again
did they hinder the voyages
of seamen on the deep sea.
Light had come in the east, God's bright beacon,
The sea had grown still, so I could see
the headlands and their windy walls. 
Fate often keeps an unfey man safe
when his courage avails.

The word unfægne is the masculine accusative singular of unfæge ("unfey"), an adjective which is modifying eorl ("man"), the direct object of the verb nereð ("keeps...safe"). Obviously unfæge derives from fæge ("fey"). Another, related word from elsewhere in Beowulf that should ring a bell is deaðfæge, "doomed to die/death," as in "Nine for mortal men doomed to die." It's important to recognize when reading this line from the Ring-verse that all mortal men are fated to die. That's the whole point, redundant though it may be, of the word "mortal." It is part of their nature. This is true whether we are thinking of fæge, unfæge, or deaðfæge; and this is what makes the escape from death those nine rings seem to promise "the chief bait of Sauron. It leads the small to a Gollum, and the great to a Ringwraith" (Letters #212).

So how can Beowulf speak of a man as unfæge when all men are fæge? As Beowulf himself says when explaining how he survived his fight with Grendel's mother: "Næs ic fæge ða gyt" -- "I was not doomed to die just yet" (line 2146). So fate (wyrd) and courage (ellen) can keep a man safe from dying at the wrong time. On the one hand this tells us that fate is not immutable, and on the other it does not necessarily mean that every man has a specific time to die. A man could be fated to do something he has not done just yet. It's also true that fate and courage do not save always, but merely often.

I find Tolkien's adaptation of Beowulf's words to describe Túrin here particularly interesting because I have been studying the workings of fate in the different versions of The Tale of the Children of Húrin. As I usually do, I am trying to understand this from the ground up, so to speak, looking at how it works in the story and what is said about it, rather than starting with a theory of how fate (doom, destiny, weird, etc) works and applying it to the text. 

In Tolkien's prose translation of Beowulf  he renders the phrase "Fate oft saveth a man not doomed to die, when his valour fails not" (Beowulf T&C 29). In his commentary on the lines he remarks (Beowulf T&C 256):

To go to the kernel of the matter at once: emotionally and in thought (so far as that was ever clear) this is basically an assertion not only of the worth in itself of the human will (and courage), but also of its practical effect as a possibility, that is, actually a denial of absolute Fate.

Tolkien also composed a translation in alliterative verse of the first 594 lines of Beowulf, which obviously would include lines 572-73. I would be very interested to see how closely it resembles "Unfey, fearless,   and his fate kept him" in The Lay of the Children of Húrin.

Which hand did Frodo put the Ring on?

A question posted online in a private group set me thinking about which hand Frodo wears the One Ring on. During The Lord of the Rings Frodo puts on the Ring six times: once in the house of Tom Bombadil; once at the Prancing Pony; once at Weathertop; twice on Amon Hen; and once in the Chambers of Fire within Mount Doom. The text mentions which hand he put it on only twice, but it's a different hand each time. That's the curious part.

The first time is on Weathertop:

Not with the hope of escape, or of doing anything, either good or bad: [Frodo] simply felt that he must take the Ring and put it on his finger. He could not speak. He felt Sam looking at him, as if he knew that his master was in some great trouble, but he could not turn towards him. He shut his eyes and struggled for a while; but resistance became unbearable, and at last he slowly drew out the chain, and slipped the Ring on the forefinger of his left hand. 

(FR 1.xi.195, emphasis added)

As we know, putting on the Ring reveals him to the Ringwraiths, who attack at once, and the Witch-king wounds Frodo in his left shoulder with a Morgul-knife. 

A shrill cry rang out in the night; and he felt a pain like a dart of poisoned ice pierce his left shoulder. Even as he swooned he caught, as through a swirling mist, a glimpse of Strider leaping out of the darkness with a flaming brand of wood in either hand. With a last effort Frodo, dropping his sword, slipped the Ring from his finger and closed his right hand tight upon it.

(1.xi.196, emphasis added).

In Rivendell Frodo is healed of the sorcerous wound to the extent that he can be, but Gandalf, and as we later learn (TT 4.iv.652), Sam, can see the effects.

Gandalf moved his chair to the bedside and took a good look at Frodo. The colour had come back to his face, and his eyes were clear, and fully awake and aware. He was smiling, and there seemed to be little wrong with him. But to the wizard’s eye there was a faint change, just a hint as it were of transparency, about him, and especially about the left hand that lay outside upon the coverlet.

        (FR 2.i.223, emphasis added) 

Even before Gandalf looks at him, Frodo has checked his left hand to see how it feels (2.i.221). Sam also takes Frodo's hand for the same reason when he enters subsequently (2.i.223). In both of these passages the text again specifies the left hand. The next time we can tell which hand he uses is in the Sammath Naur, but we don't learn it until Sam wakes up in "The Field of Cormallen." Now it is on his right hand (a different finger, too).

He sat up and then he saw that Frodo was lying beside him, and slept peacefully, one hand behind his head, and the other resting upon the coverlet. It was the right hand, and the third finger was missing. 

(RK 6.iv.951, emphasis added)

A few other passages are also noteworthy. When Sam puts on the Ring while Frodo is a prisoner, he puts it on his left hand (TT 4.x.734). When Frodo and Sam use the phial of Galadriel against Shelob, each of them holds that in his left hand (4.ix.721, 729). In the case of the phial each already has a sword in his other hand. Consider also this passage from "Mount Doom," ten pages before Frodo claims the Ring and (as we can deduce from which hand is later missing a finger, Watson) puts it on his right hand:

Anxiously Sam had noted how his master’s left hand would often be raised as if to ward off a blow, or to screen his shrinking eyes from a dreadful Eye that sought to look in them. And sometimes his right hand would creep to his breast, clutching, and then slowly, as the will recovered mastery, it would be withdrawn.

(RK 6.iii.935-36, emphasis added)

That Frodo uses his left hand here as if to hide or defend himself, while it's the right hand that's reaching for the Ring, seems quite suggestive. So, although I am not going to speculate about which hand Frodo used the other four times he wore the Ring, or whether his putting it on different fingers on different hands means anything. I will suggest that on balance we may well ask if there's a connection between claiming the Ring and wearing it on the dominant hand, the hand that almost exclusively wields a weapon. For the Ring is a weapon.

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It may also be worth noting that when Tom Bombadil banishes the wight, he holds up his right hand. Also in Chapter Five of second edition of The Hobbit Bilbo reaches into his pocket and slips the Ring on his left hand (Annotated Hobbit 129, 130, 135). In the first edition Bilbo uses his left hand once (Annotated Hobbit 134). Neither edition mentions his right hand.