Hope Shall Come Again: 'The Choices of Master Samwise' and 'The Children of Húrin'

In 'The Choices of Master Samwise', when Sam believes Frodo to be dead, his anguish leads him to contemplate his own death, by suicide:

He looked on the bright point of the sword. He thought of the places behind where there was a black brink and an empty fall into nothingness. There was no escape that way. That was to do nothing, not even to grieve.

(TT 4.x.732)

When the orcs arrive in the pass and discover Frodo's dead body (as Sam still believes), Sam again imagines his own death:

How many can I kill before they get me? They’ll see the flame of the sword, as soon as I draw it, and they’ll get me sooner or later. I wonder if any song will ever mention it: How Samwise fell in the High Pass and made a wall of bodies round his master. No, no song. Of course not, for the Ring’ll be found, and there’ll be no more songs.

(TT 4.x.735)

In these moments one of the Great Tales of the First Age resonates within Sam's soul. Unlike the many explicit evocations of the Tale of Beren and Lúthien in The Lord of the Rings, the allusions here are far more obscure, to the Tale of the Children of Húrin, where Túrin fell upon his sword, where his sister, Nienor, leaped to her death; and where their father, Húrin, made the heroic last stand to end all heroic last stands. To catch these allusions, however, requires detailed knowledge of a Tale never mentioned at all in The Lord of the Rings. Its two chief figures, Húrin and his son Túrin are scarcely more than names on a list of elf-friends mentioned by Elrond (FR 2.ii.270). Until The Silmarillion was published in 1977, moreover, no other information was available. We don't even know that Húrin and Túrin are father and son. Húrin and his family might as well have been the cats of Queen Beruthiel. Their story seemed just as unknowable. 

What's more surprising is that, as far as I have been able to tell, no one spotted these allusions even after the publication of The Silmarillion. Despite multiple versions of the story appearing across the decades in Unfinished Tales, The Book of Lost Tales I, The Lays of Beleriand, The Shaping of Middle-earth, The Lost Road, The Children of Húrin, and elsewhere.

Part of what we see here is Tolkien's craft. He knows that he can draw on the mythic power of the Tale of the Children of Húrin without needing to draw our attention to the allusions by introducing explanations that would distract from the moment and the momentum of the story; and he can draw on this power in this way precisely because it is mythic and therefore transcends the particular details of the moment. What we see here is yet more evidence for how important these Great Tales are to the narrative and to the characters within it. The connection between the Tale of Frodo and Sam and the larger Tales of which theirs is a part does not need to be made explicit to be effective.

Part of it, finally, is that Sam is on the knife-edge of Tragedy here. If he makes a mistake in his choices, all is lost for him, and all is lost for Middle-earth. Sam, moreover, believing his master to be dead, already sees himself as in a story that has turned tragic. The Tale of the Children of Húrin is the tale for this crisis rather than the Tale of Beren and Lúthien because it is a Tragedy, and Beren and Lúthien, for all of its tragic moments, is a fairy-story that goes beyond sorrow into joy. We talk about Tolkien and fairy-stories far more often than we do about Tolkien and Tragedy. But in On Fairy-stories Tolkien speaks of the two types of story together. Each helps him define the other. He says:

At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite—I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.

(OFS ¶ 99)

And if the catastrophe that marks a Tragedy cleanses us or purges us by means of fear and pity, then we can see the parallel between Drama and Fairy-stories even more clearly. For the eucatastrophe that is the 'true form' and 'highest function' of a fairy tale cleanses us through Escape, Recovery, and Consolation. It includes the renewed clarity of 'vision' we gain through Recovery (OFS ¶ 83-84). but goes beyond it by allowing a 'vision' of a transcendent reality (OFS ¶ 103).

There is more to be explored here, which I don't have time for right now. For example, an essential aspect of the situation Sam finds himself in here is the battle he has with Shelob directly before he comes to believe Frodo dead. For the narrator there names both Beren, the fairy-tale hero who also fought giant spiderlike monsters, and Túrin, the tragic hero who slew a dragon by stabbing him from below only to learn terrible truths about his own life in doing so. Sam of course is neither of these great heroes, sons of the chieftains of their peoples, and further reflection on these passages may well help us more deeply understanding of On Fairy-stories, The Lord of the Rings, and how the dynamic balance of Tragedy and Eucatastrophe fundamentally shapes Tolkien's Secondary World.

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If anybody knows of another discussion of these particular allusions to The Children of Húrin in The Choices of Master Samwise, please do let me know. I would be eager to see it. 

The small hands of Beren and the smaller hands of Frodo

When we encounter Elrond's words at the council -- 'Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere' (FR 2.ii.269) -- we naturally think of the 'small hands' of the hobbits, of Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam who find and bear the Ring. And we are quite right to do so, but Elrond's proverbial 'oft' suggests that he has more than just the hobbits in mind. When we learn whose hands he means, it comes as quite a surprise. 

Here [i.e., in the story of Beren and Lúthien] we meet, among other things, the first example of the motive (to become dominant in Hobbits) that the great policies of world history, 'the wheels of the world', are often turned not by the Lords and Governors, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak – owing to the secret life in creation, and the part unknowable to all wisdom but One, that resides in the intrusions of the Children of God into the Drama. It is Beren the outlawed mortal who succeeds (with the help of Lúthien, a mere maiden even if an elf of royalty) where all the armies and warriors have failed: he penetrates the stronghold of the Enemy and wrests one of the Silmarilli from the Iron Crown. Thus he wins the hand of Lúthien and the first marriage of mortal and immortal is achieved.

Letters, no. 131, p. 149

It is only by stepping back from the tale of Beren and Lúthien itself and viewing it in its vast mythological context that we can see the hands of this 'outlawed mortal' and 'mere elf maiden' (!) as 'small'. How many comments by Tolkien could better illustrate the difference in perspective between the First Age mythology of the Silmarillion and the Third Age history of The Lord of the Rings? How many at the same time could reveal the essence of the continuing Tale that Beren and Lúthien and Frodo and Sam find themselves in over six thousand years apart? Or the all but inconceivable role of 'the Children of God in the Drama'?

As Elrond says, 'Who of all the Wise could have foreseen it?' (FR 2.ii.270).

'As it was told of old' -- Two observations on FR 1.xi.191

'Beren and Luthien in the Court of Thingol and Melian.' copyright 2017 Donato Giancola

'I will tell you the tale of Tinúviel,' said Strider, 'in brief – for it is a long tale of which the end is not known; and there are none now, except Elrond, that remember it aright as it was told of old. It is a fair tale, though it is sad, as are all the tales of Middle-earth, and yet it may lift up your hearts.'

(FR 1.xi.191)

Aragorn's words here indicate that the Tale of Beren and Lúthien was not remembered and told 'aright' in places other than Rivendell. Given the multiple, unfinished or abbreviated versions of the Tale Tolkien wrote, he may well be poking fun at himself here.

To say that the end of the Tale is 'not known' is not the same as to say that the lay is unfinished. Indeed the hobbits later hear it sung 'in full' at Rivendell (FR 2.iii.277). What Strider says here, at Weathertop, shows that he fully understands what Sam grasps only later on, that they're 'in the same tale still.  It's going on', because the 'great tales never end' (TT 4.viii.712). 

From Terrible Beauty to Beacon of Hope -- The Silmarils from Fëanor to Eärendil

One of the most fascinating developments in Tolkien's legendarium is the changing role played by the Silmarils in the fates of Arda. In the First Age from the death of the Two Trees onward the Silmarils are almost exclusively a curse upon the Elves and their allies. The theft of the jewels, the murder of Finwë, the oath of Fëanor, the three kinslayings, the Doom of Mandos, and the suffering and death that end not even with the overthrow of Morgoth -- all of these the rising of Eärendil's star casts into stark relief.  That star of course is the Silmaril Beren and Lúthien set free from Morgoth, and not even the oath-sick sons of Fëanor fail to see it as a sign of hope:

Now when first Vingilot was set to sail in the seas of heaven, it rose 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. And when this new star was seen at evening, Maedhros spoke to Maglor his brother, and he said: 'Surely that is a Silmaril that shines now in the West?' 

And Maglor answered: 'If it be truly the Silmaril which we saw cast into the sea that rises again by the power of the Valar, then let us be glad; for its glory is seen now by many, and is yet secure from all evil.' Then the Elves looked up, and despaired no longer; but Morgoth was filled with doubt. 

(Silm. 250)

This is the image of the Silmaril with which we are most familiar from The Lord of the Rings.  For in the Third Age the evils that once swirled around the Silmarils are long past, and the one remaining jewel is a sign of hope, even for the Elves who remember the sorrows of the First Age.

Far above the Ephel Dúath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master's, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo's side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.

(RK 6.ii.922)

Though more than six thousand years separate them, both Maglor and Sam understand that this Silmaril is 'secure from evil' and 'far beyond [the Shadow's] reach.'  It is this removal that allows its transformation into so potent a symbol of hope, as the evils attendant upon the continuing attempts of the sons of Fëanor to fulfill their oath amply demonstrate.  Moreover, the loss of the other two Silmarils in the sea and the earth balance the elevation of the first into the heavens, an outcome which in its context has more than a hint about it of something that was meant to be: 'And thus it came to pass that the Silmarils found their long homes: one in the airs of heaven, and one in the fires of the heart of the world, and one in the deep waters' (Silm 254).

Tolkien's wording here is of interest, as it so often is.  He calls the sky, the earth, and the sea, the 'long homes' of the jewels. 'Homes' of course tell us that they belong there, but the phrase 'long homes' evokes an image of the grave: 'because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets' (Ecclesiastes 12:5 KJV). But this phrase, especially as Tolkien uses it in The Silmarillion, alludes not just to the grave, but to a home removed forever from the evils of this world in which 'all is vanity,' as the final, far more famous summation of Ecclesiastes 12 proclaims.

For the Silmarils were from their creation like the stars themselves -- 'even in the darkness of the deepest treasury the Silmarils of their own radiance shone like the stars of Varda' (Silm. 67) -- and 'Mandos foretold that the fates of Arda, earth, sea, and air, lay locked within them' (Silm. 67). Note the corresponding references to earth, sea, and air here and in the 'long homes' of the Silmarils quoted above. Indeed The Silmarillion even suggests that 'some shadow of foreknowledge came to [Fëanor] of the doom that drew near; and he pondered how the light of the Trees, the glory of the Blessed Realm, might be preserved imperishable' (Silm. 67).

Yet it is also true that no sooner were they made than they became objects of destructive interest. The heart of Fëanor, their maker, was 'fast bound' to them, and the terms in which he thought of them changed. What had been meant to preserve 'the glory of the Blessed Realm' now seems more about the glory of possession and the glory of Fëanor: 

for though at great feasts Fëanor would wear them, blazing on his brow, at other times they were guarded close, locked in the deep chambers of his hoard in Tirion. For Fëanor began to love the Silmarils with a greedy love, and grudged the sight of them to all save to his father and his seven sons; he seldom remembered now that the light within them was not his own.

(Silm. 69).

The reaction of Melkor to the Silmarils was not dissimilar. He lusted for them, 'and the very memory of their radiance was a gnawing fire in his heart' (67).  Just as he had once wished to possess the Light 'for himself alone' (31), and fell when he could not have it, so now, once he has succeeded in stealing them with Ungoliant's aid, he refuses to let her even see them, and 'name[s] them to [him]self for ever' (80). We need only recall that he, too, wore them, 'blazing on his brow', in the 'deep chambers' of Angband, which he never left but once before his final overthrow.  In Melkor's hands, as in Fëanor's, the situation of the Silmarils is precisely the opposite of what Sam and Maglor witness: the glory of the Silmarils is seen by only a few. Yet it is the evil of Fëanor's greedy love and Melkor's lust that make it possible for the Silmarils to become the greatest symbols of hope in Middle-earth. The evil is a felix culpa, through which Ilúvatar brings into being 'things more wonderful' and 'beauty not before conceived' (Silm. 17, 98).

Three passages, all of which recount similar moments, illuminate this transformation. In the first Fingon has come to Thangorodrim to rescue Maedhros.  Though the sight of Morgoth's realm leaves Fingon 'in despair', 'in defiance of the Orcs...he...sang a song of Valinor that the Noldor made of old' (Silm. 110). But Maedhros, whom Morgoth has hung from an inaccessible precipice far above, hears Fingon and sings back to him, revealing his location. Yet he remains in the grasp of evil beyond Fingon's reach. '[B]eing in anguish without hope' Maedhros asks Fingon to kill him with his bow; Fingon, 'seeing no better hope' prays to Manwë to guide his arrow. That Manwë responds by dispatching one of his eagles to help Fingon to rescue Maedhros -- though not without the sacrifice of his hand -- is inspiring and gratifying to reader and characters alike, but it also underscores the hopelessness of the Elves' unaided struggle to regain possession of the Silmarils. For the strength of Morgoth is such that 'no power of the Noldor would ever overthrow' it, as Fëanor himself saw 'with the foreknowledge of death' when he looked upon the towers of Thangorodrim (Silm. 107).

Ulmo's later words to Turgon, moreover, may be seen to offer commentary on the truth of this scene, if not on the scene itself. They allude to the lessons history offered -- the Silmarils, Fëanor's 'greedy love' for them, and the reckless, vengeful oath -- as well as prophesying that 'true hope' was something from beyond Middle-earth: 'love not too well the work of thy hands and the devices of thy heart; and remember that the true hope of the Noldor lieth in the West and cometh from the Sea' (Silm. 125). And, of course, the hope to which Ulmo alludes is the hope with which we began this essay, that embodied by Eärendil and his Silmaril.

In the second passage Beren lies imprisoned in Sauron's dungeon. Finrod has lost his contest of song against Sauron, and died saving Beren from a wolf.

In that hour Lúthien came, and standing upon the bridge that led to Sauron's isle she sang a song that no walls of stone could hinder. Beren heard, and he thought that he dreamed; for the stars shone above him, and in the trees nightingales were singing. And in answer he sang a song of challenge that he had made in praise of the Seven Stars, the Sickle of the Valar that Varda hung above the North as a sign for the fall of Morgoth. Then all strength left him and he fell down into darkness. 

But Lúthien heard his answering voice, and she sang then a song of greater power. The wolves howled, and the isle trembled.... 

(Silm. 174)

Finrod's defeat and death show once again that the solitary power of the Elves is insufficient to defeat the evil they face. Yet Sauron, who defeated Finrod by turning his song against him, does not contest the strength of Lúthien in songs of enchantment. Indeed the effect of her first song should remind us of Finrod's: hers leads Beren to see the stars shining and hear birds singing in the darkness of his prison cell, just as his conjured the sounds of birdsong in Nargothrond and of the sea sighing in Elvenhome (Silm. 171). Beren then defiantly sings a song of his own that invokes the promise of the Sickle of the Valar, a constellation set in the heavens by Varda as 'a sign of doom' for Morgoth (Silm. 48).  But Lúthien's second song shakes the entire island Sauron's tower stands upon. It also makes clear to Sauron that he is facing Lúthien, who is 'the daughter of Melian', and the power of whose song is famous, and he adopts a different strategy. Yet this also fails because Huan, the Hound of Valinor, is superior to all his strengths, whether gross or subtle (Silm. 175).  Sauron is vanquished and Lúthien's third song brings down the tower and sets Beren free. Almost every factor that gives hope against evil points beyond the sea to Valinor, to the Valar and Maiar rather than to the Elves.

But with Beren, the mortal, new elements are introduced.  For 'a great doom lay upon him' (Silm. 165), which leads him and Lúthien first to confront Sauron here and then Morgoth himself in Angband, where they win the Silmaril that their grand-daughter, Elwing gives to her husband, Eärendil. Until then, his attempts to reach Valinor to plead for help have been in vain, despite the fact he can speak for both Elves and Men, for those whose fate lies entirely within Arda and those whose fate lies beyond it. With it, he can pierce the veils that prevent anyone from reaching Valinor, to find that the Valar have been waiting for him. He is 'the looked for that cometh at unawares, the longed for that cometh beyond hope' (Silm. 248-49), to which Ulmo adds: 'for this he was born into the world' (249).

Just as Beren's doom allowed him to enter enchantment shrouded Doriath and then to achieve his quest to win a Silmaril, so Eärendil's fate drives him, by means of that same Silmaril, to reach hidden Valinor and achieve the hopes of Elves, Men, and Valar. Equally both of them must also pay a price: Beren loses his hand and his life, and Eärendil any possibility of ever returning to mortal lands. And the price they pay exceeds that which Maedhros paid because they are buying something far more precious, the hope that jealous possession of the Silmarils denies, whether it is moved by Melkor's lust or Fëanor's greedy love.

In the final passage Sam discovers the captive Frodo by singing in the tower of Cirith Ungol, just as Fingon had found Maedhros (RK 6.i.908-909). We have already seen this moment alluded to by Sam when a glimpse of Eärendil's star revealed to him that '[h]is song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself.'**  In this he was like Fingon at Thangorodrim, who sang in defiance of the orcs with no other purpose. Unlike Fingon, however, the song Sam sings is not one he knows of old or one that was written by another.  Rather 'words of his own came unbidden to fit the simple tune' (RK 6.1.908).  Yet, while Sam's defiant singing recalls Fingon's within the larger context of the legendarium, within the context of that part of the tale in which he finds himself his sudden inspiration recalls and contrasts his and Frodo's experiences crying out to Eärendil and Elbereth in their struggle against Shelob.

Frodo:

Seldom had he remembered it on the road, until they came to Morgul Vale, and never had he used it for fear of its revealing light. Aiya Eärendil Elenion Ancalima! he cried, and knew not what he had spoken; for it seemed that another voice spoke through his, clear, untroubled by the foul air of the pit.

(TT 4. ix.720)

and Sam:

Gilthoniel A Elbereth!

And then his tongue was loosed and his voice cried in a language which he did not know: 

A Elbereth Gilthoniel
o menel palan-diriel,
le nallon si di'nguruthos!
A tiro nin, Fanuilos!

(TT 4.x.729)

Sam's words and language in the tower are by contrast his own, and yet they come 'unbidden' by him. Given the inspired invocations of Elbereth and Eärendil we have just seen, some kind of external inspiration seems at work here, too. The light of the Silmaril, both in the star of Eärendil and captured in the phial of Galadriel, is indeed 'a light when all other lights go out'. It illuminates this part of Frodo and Sam's tale, from the moment on the stairs when they discuss the Tale of Beren and Lúthien and Sam makes the connection between it and the light of the star in the glass (TT 4.viii.712) until the moment when Sam sees the star itself (RK 6.ii.922). It repeatedly aids and inspires them to see beyond the darkness in which they find themselves otherwise nearly helpless. It is, as it were, a physical manifestation of that Power which speaks through them in a voice not their own and a language unknown to them, bringing them essential help from a world beyond their own.

The juxtaposition of the return of hope to Sam with his realization that his song had been defiance because 'then he was thinking of himself' (RK 6.ii.922) is also noteworthy. For it tells us something about the difference between the two in Tolkien's thought. Defiance, his explanation seems to say, thinks no farther than the self, but hope does. Which should perhaps remind us of Fëanor and his greedy, grudging 'love' of the Jewels: 'he seldom remembered now that the light within them was not his own' (Silm. 69). With Sam's epiphany in Mordor as he sees the star we may profitably compare the dying sight of Fëanor:

And looking out from the slopes of Ered Wethrin with his last sight he beheld far off the peaks of Thangorodrim, mightiest of the towers of Middle-earth, and knew with the foreknowledge of death that no power of the Noldor would ever overthrow them; but he cursed the name of Morgoth thrice, and laid it upon his sons to hold to their oath, and to avenge their father. 

(Silm. 107)

The Silmaril risen into the heavens reflects what Fëanor could have been, 'like' -- to borrow a phrase not without relevance -- 'a glass filled with a clear light for eyes to see that can' (FR 2.i.223). A remark made by the narrator of The Silmarillion is also of the greatest significance here: 'it may be that [Fëanor's] after deeds would have been other than they were', had he agreed to unlock the Silmarils so that Yavanna might thereby resuscitate the Two Trees (Silm. 79). For Fëanor would have had to renounce selfish possession of the Jewels, abandoning his 'greedy love' of them for ever, for the good of others.  As a result, we might almost describe them with the words of Maglor upon seeing the star rise for the first time and recognizing it for what it must be: 'its glory is seen now by many, and is yet secure from all evil' (Silm. 250). The same, of course, could be argued for Morgoth.

As we saw above, Mandos had prophesied that 'the fates of Arda ... lay locked' within the Jewels. The plural points to multiple possibilities, to good as well as evil, and here we have seen that the Silmarils, possessed or lusted after, led both Elves and Valar on to evil, but, once removed, led on to hope and the promise of deliverance from an evil that is ultimately transitory. Ilúvatar has brought forth still greater wonders, transforming the beauty of the Silmarils, terrible in its consequences when viewed selfishly, into the single most outstanding symbol of hope in Middle-earth.

Moreover, given Tolkien's identification of his Eärendil with Earendel in the poem Christ, whom Anglo-Saxons identified with John the Baptist,*** we may also see Eärendil as one who 'prepares the way of the Lord', though at a far greater remove than John the Baptist or any prophetic figure of the Old Testament. The salvation that Eärendil makes possible because, having two natures, he can speak for both Elves and Men, is by no means the same as the redemption that Christ, with his two natures, can enact. But the two resonate with each other, and thereby Tolkien evokes the intervention of the One in the woes of this world, an intervention necessarily foreseen since Middle-earth is our world. 

** The citation of this passage at RK App. A 1035 n. 5 shows that the star Sam sees is in fact the star of Eärendil.

*** I refer of course to the famous lines 'Éala Éarendel,    engla beorhtast / ofer middangeard     monnum sended' (Christ 1.104-05). The Blicking Homilies refer to John the Baptist as 'se níwa éorendel', 'the new Earendel.' One wonders how much influence that word 'new' had on Tolkien's thinking. 

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Works Consulted

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Image source

'She died' -- The Choice of Lúthien and the Destiny of the Elves (FR 1.xi.191-93)

In one of the most disappointing scenes in the extended edition of Peter Jackson's film, The Fellowship of the Ring, Strider and the hobbits are encamped in the wild. Frodo wakes to hear Strider singing The Lay of Leithian.  When Frodo asks him how the story ends, Strider murmurs sadly: 'She died.'  Given the fundamental and essential importance of the Tale of Beren and Lúthien to Tolkien's legendarium, as a lifelong reader of his works I could only be stunned by the choice Jackson made. I could only laugh in disbelief. I still do.

Now, whatever my opinion of the choice Peter Jackson made, it's his right as the film-maker to make it.  Clearly, since he chose to undermine the moral stature of nearly every mortal human in the story, and to change Aragorn from someone who has labored all his life towards this hour into someone full of doubts who has avoided the path that is as much his heritage as his destiny, the Tale of Beren and Lúthien cannot play the same role. To be fair, these choices make it very difficult to include it in any other way than he has done, as a sad commentary on the choice Arwen must make if she is to be with Aragorn. It is a limited and personal perspective.

How different a role The Lay of Leithian plays in Tolkien. There, in a tense moment as the Ringwraiths are closing in on them, Strider sings a song not only of sorrow, but of joy and love, of sacrifice and victory against a heartless darkness. Unlike the bit of Bilbo's simple translation of The Fall of Gil-galad, which Sam had sung to them just that morning and which ends in sadness and uncertainty, Strider's rendering of the Lay is as lush and intricate as the fates of its heroes, with final words that echo onward through the reunion beyond death of Beren and Lúthien to the renewed triumph of Eärendil and the Silmaril that they had made possible.

The Sundering Seas between them lay,
And yet at last they met once more,
And long ago they passed away
In the forest singing sorrowless 

(FR 1.xi.193)

Like the earlier but harder to understand fairy-tale encounter with Tom Bombadil, or like Gandalf's prosaic and terrifying history lesson in The Shadow of the Past, this is one of the moments in the text when the world of Middle-earth suddenly opens up for both hobbits and readers alike. This was especially so for those of us who read The Lord of the Rings before The Silmarillion was published and before instant resources like The Tolkien Gateway came to exist.  This poem was all we had. With the Lay's moving account, and with Strider's commentary not only on what the future held for Beren and Lúthien and their descendants, but even on the prosody of the verses he has just chanted, fairy-story and history come together and come alive as they have not done before.

Part of what accomplishes this blending is the aptness of the tale to the situation in which Strider and the hobbits find themselves, menaced by the same darkness that destroyed Amon Sûl centuries ago, the same darkness that centuries earlier than that Gil-galad had set forth from this place to fight. Though Gil-galad's star fell into shadow, Beren and Lúthien won a silmaril from the darkness against all hope, and to revive hope that jewel became a star to rise above all darkness.

Part of what accomplishes this is the unexpected elan with which the till now dour and wry Strider tells it. The depth of his sudden passion carries with it conviction:

As Strider was speaking they watched his strange eager face, dimly lit in the red glow of the wood-fire. His eyes shone, and his voice was rich and deep. Above him was a black starry sky.

(FR 1.xi.194)

Part of what accomplishes this is the enchanting beauty of the verses themselves. We've already heard quite a few poems before now, pub songs and bath songs and walking songs from the hobbits, the impossibly lofty hymn to Elbereth, the chill spell of the Barrow-wight, and the running wonder and delight of Bombadil. But we haven't heard anything that tells a story with such beauty and power. I'm sure I can't speak for everyone, but it was these verses in particular that first seized me and shook me and made me pay attention to Tolkien's poetry.

And the last part of what accomplishes this blending comes from outside The Lord of the Rings itself. For as Corey Olsen has recently argued, and I believe quite rightly, it is here, with the introduction of the story of Beren and Lúthien into this story, that The Lord of the Rings, and perforce The Hobbit as well, become once and for all part of the world of The Silmarillion. The literal globing of Arda that began with The Fall of Númenor is now literarily complete. The lines that were parallel on the flat world cross on the round. The Elrond, Necromancer, and Gondolin of The Hobbit are no longer lesser, alternate universe versions of themselves. This meeting of the worlds of myth and history gives a life to them that they did not have before, and so transforms the Tale of Beren and Lúthien into a means by which past, present, and future are linked together and may be measured against each other.

Thus Frodo and Sam's discussion of this tale on the stairs of Cirith Ungol gives them strength and courage to go on, and even to laugh at the darkness before they reach the pass; it gives Sam the courage to fight on against Shelob, just as Beren fought against the spiders in Nan Dungortheb; and when Frodo seems dead it gives him the resolve to go on living when all seemed lost, as Beren did, and as Túrin did not.  (The names of both heroes are evoked in this episode.) And just as the light of Eärendil's star in the phial of Galadriel enables Sam to rescue Frodo from the tower, so the glimpse he has of the star itself allows him to grasp the meaning of the Tale:

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.

(RK 6.ii.922)

It is this same light and beauty arising from the Tale of Beren and Lúthien that moves Strider so in the dell beneath Weathertop. But the Tale plays more than one role here. For if Frodo and Sam are repeating it on the level of the quest, Aragorn and Arwen are repeating it on the level of the love story. At first of course the readers don't know that, nor do they receive the least hint until Arwen enters the scene at Rivendell, where she is described in a lofty language similar to that which Aragorn used of Lúthien herself:

So it was that Frodo saw her whom few mortals had yet seen; Arwen, daughter of Elrond, in whom it was said that the likeness of Lúthien had come on earth again; and she was called Undómiel, for she was the Evenstar of her people. Long she had been in the land of her mother's kin, in Lórien beyond the mountains, and was but lately returned to Rivendell to her father's house.  

(FR 2.i.227).  

So we see here a connection established between Arwen and Lúthien, but her link to Strider remains unexpressed. Bilbo's words to Aragorn after dinner -- 'Why weren't you at the feast? The Lady Arwen was there' -- allude to it, but not so clearly that Frodo gets it, since he is surprised to see Aragorn at her side later that evening (FR 2.i.238). Yet, although the relationship of Arwen and Aragorn becomes more apparent with time (FR 2.vi.352; viii.375; RK 6.ii.775, 784; vi.847), it does not truly emerge until late in the tale that their love rehearses the key element of Beren and Lúthien's. Arwen herself makes it explicit: 'I shall not go with [my father] now when he departs to the Havens; for mine is the choice of Lúthien, and as she so have I chosen, both the sweet and the bitter' (RK 6.vi.974). It receives its fullest expression, however, only in The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen as the two confront the choice of Lúthien and its inevitable consequence: death.

Which brings us back to 'she died,' a summary not without its importance. When the Aragorn of the film says it, he does so as if there were nothing more to say: no victory over Morgoth, no return from death, no silmaril, no Eärendil, no star to dispute the darkness forever. It is a story, in short, with no hope. This very hopelessness, however, allows us to see how ripe with hope Aragorn's telling of this tale is in the book; and when we turn again to The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen the reason Aragorn finds such hope in The Tale of Beren and Lúthien becomes clearer:

'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. And the Shadow I utterly reject. But neither, lady, is the Twilight for me; for I am mortal, and if you will cleave to me, Evenstar, then the Twilight you must also renounce." 

'And she stood then as still as a white tree, looking into the West, and at last she said: "I will cleave to you, Dúnadan, and turn from the Twilight. Yet there lies the land of my people and the long home of all my kin."

(RK A.1061)

'Yet with your hope I will hope' and 'I will cleave to you, Dúnadan' -- these are the words that inspire Strider at Weathertop as he sings the same song as when he first met Arwen and mistook her for Lúthien. Even in that moment Arwen said 'maybe my doom will not be unlike hers' (RK A.1058). Thus The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen expands our view of this scene. For by her choice Arwen does not just pledge herself to him, or merely repeat the choice of Lúthien, as romantic as that might be. She renews that choice by embracing the doom of Lúthien,

This doom [Lúthien] chose, forsaking the Blessed Realm, and putting aside all claim to kinship with those that dwell there; that thus whatever grief might lie in wait, the fates of Beren and Lúthien might be joined, and their paths lead together beyond the confines of the world. So it was that alone of the Eldalië she has died indeed, and left the world long ago. Yet in her choice the Two Kindreds have been joined; and she is the forerunner of many in whom the Eldar see yet, though all the world is changed, the likeness of Lúthien the beloved, whom they have lost.

(Silm. 187)

And

"I speak no comfort to you, [Aragorn said] for there is no comfort for such pain within the circles of the world. The uttermost choice is before you: to repent and go to the Havens and bear away into the West the memory of our days together that shall there be evergreen but never more than memory; or else to abide the Doom of Men."

"Nay, dear lord," [Arwen] said, "that choice is long over. There is now no ship that would bear the hence,and I must indeed abide the Doom of Men, whether I will or I nill: the loss and the silence. But I say to you, King of the Númenoreans, not till now have I understood the tale of your people and their fall. As wicked fools I scorned them, but I pity them at last. For if this is indeed, as the Eldar say, the gift of the One to Men, it is bitter to receive." 

"So it seems," [Aragorn] said. "But let us not be overthrown at the final test, who of old renounced the Shadow and the Ring. 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!"

(RK A 1062-63)

One of the most remarkable aspects of these passages from both tales, if taken together, is that in the end it is the Man who offers hope to the Elf. She must now hope with his hope, since she cannot foresee the end. Through the Choice of Lúthien the Man can offer the Elf something beyond memory, something beyond the bondage to the circles of the world to which the Elves are of their nature subject. What is more, since 'in her choice the Two Kindreds have been joined', and since through Arwen this choice was renewed, does this not suggest that the same hope may be in store for all Elves, and that they will not perish utterly with Arda at the world's ending? Is this then the 'release from bondage' which the very title of The Lay of Leithian proclaims?

To conclude that this is so would perhaps be hasty, and to argue that Lúthien and Arwen play some kind of messianic role would be foolish. Tolkien was seldom so clumsy. Yet it is clear that the Elves had their concerns about what would become of them after the end of the world (Silm. 42; Morgoth 311-26).  The Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, moreover, discusses these matters of life, death, and 'immortality', specifically in the context of 'the gulf that divides our kindreds' (Morgoth 323, emphasis original).  Finrod even suggests that part of the original role of Men might have been to help bring Elves across the gulf by facilitating the healing of Arda (Morgoth 318-19). Finally the dialogue of Finrod and Andreth ends with their discussion of the sad tale of the love of Andreth and Finrod's brother Aegnor, which could not bridge that gulf and join the kindreds as Beren and Lúthien were destined to do (Morgoth 323-25). Even so in its very last words Finrod asks Andreth to await Aegnor and himself in whatever light she finds beyond death (Morgoth 326), just as Lúthien later asks a dying Beren to wait for her (Silm. 186).

To be sure, some passages in the Athrabeth anticipate the biblical story of the Fall and the Incarnation, but that is hardly all there is. It is impossible not to see the Tale of Beren and Lúthien prefigured in the desperate lives of Andreth and Aegnor.  This attention to their failure to join their kindreds, presented in the culmination of the Athrabeth's discussion of life and death and the fates of Men and Elves in and beyond this world, is not to be slighted. It underlines the importance of those later loves that succeeded in bridging the gulf between the kindreds. Lúthien's departure beyond the circles of the world is as significant for the future of the Elves as Eärendil's rising as a star in the West is for the struggle against The Shadow. Each of them is a pathfinder and a testament to the 'deeper kind' of Hope or 'trust', the Elvish word for which is Estel (Morgoth 320).  It is also Aragorn's Elvish name, by which Arwen calls him in sorrow as he dies. The last word we hear from the mouth of Arwen Evenstar, who shared the doom of Lúthien and now shares the bitter gift of mortals, is hope.

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Works Consulted

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The Fairy King's Honor and the Elven King's Shame

Corot, 'Orpheus leidt Eurydice de Onderwereld uit', 1861

The Middle English Romance Sir Orfeo presents us with a retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which, as Kenneth Sisam says in his Fourteenth Century Verse & Prose, 'the Greek myth is almost lost in a tale of fairyland' (13).  Tolkien, of course, knew both versions of the story quite well. Not only did he call his tale of Beren and Lúthien, 'a kind of Orpheus-legend in reverse' (Letters, no. 153), but he translated Sir Orfeo into modern English as well as producing his own edition of the original text (Hostetter 2004).

Among the many points of contact between the fairies of Sir Orfeo and the Elves of Tolkien, some of which I discuss here, is a connection between the behavior of the Fairy King and Thingol in The Silmarillion.  Once Orfeo has performed before the Fairy King, the King promises to grant him any favor he wishes. Orfeo asks for Heroudis (Eurydice). Here is the scene as Tolkien rendered it:

At last when he his harping stayed,
this speech the king to him then made:
'Minstrel, thy music pleaseth me.
Come, ask of me whate'er it be,
and rich reward I will thee pay.
Come, speak, and prove now what I say!'
'Good sir,' he said, 'I beg of thee
that this thing thou wouldst give to me,
that very lady fair to see
who sleeps beneath the grafted tree.'
'Nay,' said the king, 'that would not do!'
A sorry pair ye'd make, ye two;
for thou are black, and rough, and lean,
and she is faultless, fair, and clean.
A monstrous thing then would it be
to see her in thy company.' 

'O sir,' he said, 'O gracious king,
but it would be a fouler thing
from mouth of thine to hear a lie.
Thy vow, sir, thou canst not deny.
Whate'er I asked, that should I gain,
and thou must needs thy word maintain.'
The king then said: 'Since that is so,
now take her hand in thine, and go;
I wish thee joy of her, my friend!'

(447-476)

In The Tale of Beren and Lúthien the contrast between the two lovers is also extreme. Lúthien is the 'the most beautiful of all the Children of Ilúvatar' (Silm 165), while Beren, after years of living rough in the forest, has come 'stumbling into Doriath grey and bowed as with many years of woe, so great had been the torment of the road' (165). And Thingol also finds the idea of Beren (or any man) with his daughter monstrous: 'Unhappy Men, children of little lords and brief kings, shall such as these lay hands on you, and yet live?' (167). The price for Lúthien's hand, he tells him, is one of the Silmarils: '[a]nd those that heard these words perceived that Thingol would save his oath, and yet send Beren to his death' (167). Now setting suitors impossible tasks is at least as old as The Odyssey, and the cleverness of the challenge, here as there, often has unexpected consequences. What is noteworthy in the context of Sir Orfeo is what follows:

Then at last Melian spoke, and she said to Thingol: 'O King, you have devised cunning counsel. But if my eyes have not lost their sight, it is ill for you, whether Beren fail in his errand, or achieve it. For you have doomed either your daughter, or yourself. And now is Doriath drawn within the fate of a mightier realm.' But Thingol answered: 'I sell not to Elves or Men those whom I love and cherish above all treasure. And if there were hope or fear that Beren should come ever back alive to Menegroth, he should not have looked again upon the light of heaven, though I had sworn it.' 

But Lúthien was silent, and from that hour she sang not again in Doriath. A brooding silence fell upon the woods, and the shadows lengthened in the kingdom of Thingol.

(168)

Unlike the Fairy King, who accepts Orfeo's reproof without demur and calls him 'friend' as he sets Heroudis free, Thingol disregards the warnings of his farseeing wife, and scorns the obligations imposed upon him by his own oath. Instead, he openly avows oath-breaking and murder. Moreover, there's a progression from 'Melian spoke' through 'Thingol answered' to '[b]ut Lúthien was silent', which tightly binds Thingol's 'cunning counsel' and his appalling willingness to break his oath to Lúthien's songless silence and the shadows grown long in Doriath. 

Thus both the taking of the oath by a fairy king and his willingness to be forsworn have consequences far beyond anything we moderns might at first suspect in Sir Orfeo, where it seems 'only' the Fairy King's honor is at stake. Yet the honor of the King of Faërie in a medieval Romance, or something modelled on one like The Tale of Beren and Lúthien, must be a serious matter. The Fairy King in Sir Orfeo certainly seems to think so, since his reluctance to keep his promise is overcome by a mere reminder of how 'foul' it would be for him to fail to do so. There is no question that he would shame himself if he denied his vow, and so he fulfills it. In Thingol, however, we see a character of greater moral complexity, but less intergrity, than the character on whom he is based. Of course, having children will do that to you.

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Works Consulted

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In the Dead Marshes We Hear No Larks at Morning

Paul Nash, We Are Making A New World, Imperial War Museum

Since at least the twelfth century larks at morning have featured in English poetry, at first not even in English, as these Latin lines from Alexander of Neckam show, playing on the similarity of 'lark' (alauda) and 'praises' (laudat) to derive a (false) etymology:

Laudat alauda diem, praenuncia laeta diei
    Laudat, et a laudis nomine nomen habet.
Quamvis moesta thorum properans Aurora Tithoni
    Linquat, surgentem laeta salutat avis. 

(De Laudibus Divinae Sapientiae, 2.765-68) 

The lark, day's happy herald, praises the day,
    She praises it, and from the name of 'praise' gets her name.
Though sad Aurora leaves in haste Tithonus' bed,
    The happy bird greets her as she arises.

Onward through the centuries in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Wordsworth, Meredith, and Hopkins, the lark is jubilant, protective of its own, and soaring high and free to greet the dawn. There's nothing to wonder at in all this poetry on the lark. For long ago in the quiet of the world when there was less noise and more green, every morning was full of birdsong. (In fact, it still is. Open your windows; mute your machines.)  As J. V. Baker, who knew firsthand what the poets he was writing about knew, said: 

 Any knowledge of the habits of the English lark will make it easy to see why it is always associated with rapturous and soaring flight; no bird is apparently more airy and carefree or ventures higher; yet it always has an invisible cord of attachment that pulls it back to its grassy nest concealed on the ground. My first recollection of larks is of hearing them above a wheatfield; the golden ranks of wheat, relieved here and there with blood-red poppies, stood right up to the edge of the chalk cliffs falling perpendicularly into the sea near Margate; and the blue sky was filled with the song of larks. 

(The Lark in English Poetry, p. 70)

It is thus no surprise that during World War One men raised on such poetry and such experiences would find solace in the larks that sang and soared about the fields of France at dawn. 'What the lark usually betokens' for the men at the front, writes Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (p. 242), 'is that one has got safely through another night', though men were also well aware of the absurdity of the birds singing while around them swirled a nightmare of slaughter, something the poets of the war saw both sides of.

A Lark Above the Trenches  

Hushed is the shriek of hurtling shells: and hark!
Somewhere within that bit of soft blue sky-
Grand in his loneliness, his ecstasy,
His lyric wild and free – carols a lark. 

I in the trench, he lost in heaven afar,
I dream of Love, its ecstasy he sings;
Doth lure my soul to love till like a star
It flashes into Life: O tireless wings 

That beat love’s message into melody –
A song that touches in this place remote
Gladness supreme in its undying note
And stirs to life the soul of memory –
‘Tis strange that while you’re beating into life
Men here below are plunged in sanguine strife!

Will Streets

 And:

Returning, We Hear the Larks

Sombre the night is:
And, though we have our lives, we know
What sinister threat lurks there.

Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know
This poison-blasted track opens on our camp—
On a little safe sleep.

But hark! Joy—joy—strange joy.
Lo! Heights of night ringing with unseen larks:
Music showering on our upturned listening faces.

Death could drop from the dark
As easily as song—
But song only dropped,
Like a blind man's dreams on the sand
By dangerous tides;
Like a girl's dark hair, for she dreams no ruin lies there,
Or her kisses where a serpent hides. 

Isaac Rosenberg

Now, as has long been clear, Tolkien's experience of the Somme in WWI influenced his portrayal of Sam and Frodo's journey to Mordor with Gollum. We can see this most clearly in The Passage of the Marshes, as Tolkien conceded (Letters, no. 226), and as John Garth has amply demonstrated in his splendid (if hard to come by) " 'As under a green sea': Visions of War in the Dead Marshes". Now we should not expect Tolkien to have included every commonplace of English literature, nor of the WWI poets, in his translation of his experience. Nor would its absence be particularly noteworthy, or even noticeable, if he did not draw our attention to it:

As the day wore on the light increased a little, and the mists lifted, growing thinner and more transparent. Far above the rot and vapours of the world the Sun was riding high and golden now in a serene country with floors of dazzling foam, but only a passing ghost of her could they see below, bleared, pale, giving no colour and no warmth. But even at this faint reminder of her presence Gollum scowled and flinched. He halted their journey and they rested, squatting like little hunted animals, in the borders of a great brown reed-thicket. There was a deep silence, only scraped on its surfaces by the faint quiver of empty seed-plumes, and broken grass-blades trembling in small air-movements that they could not feel.  

'Not a bird!' said Sam mournfully.  

'No, no birds,' said Gollum. 'Nice birds!' He licked his teeth. 'No birds here. There are snakeses, wormses, things in the pools. Lots of things, lots of nasty things. No birds,' he ended sadly. Sam looked at him with distaste.

(TT 4.ii.626)

Larks belong to the serene, dazzling world of the golden sun, to a world where dawn came clear and bright, as it had not in the marshes that morning (TT 4.ii.625). Theirs is not the rotten, murky world in which the three hobbits seek to hide. Their absence is a silence that grieves and dispirits Sam. And Gollum, who regrets the lack of birds for a different reason, makes quite clear that their absence from the marshes is not merely a passing one. 

And Tolkien was well acquainted the image of the lark at dawn and the power it could have. He certainly knew it from Chaucer and from most if not all of the poets down to Meredith and Hopkins; and even if he had never read another WWI poet, he had edited Spring Harvest, the collection of his friend Geoffrey Bache Smith, who wrote of the lark in his poem 'Over the hills and hollows green' before perishing at the Somme. In The Lay of Leithian, moreover, he uses the image of the lark three times (Lays, 176, 291, 355), and then once in Aragorn's song of Beren and Lúthien in The Lord of the Rings (FR 1.xi.192).  But it is in The Silmarillion (165) that he uses it with most striking effect:

There came a time near dawn on the eve of spring, and Lúthien danced upon a green hill; and suddenly she began to sing. Keen, heart-piercing was her song as the song of the lark that rises from the gates of night and pours its voice among the dying stars, seeing the sun behind the walls of the world; and the song of Lúthien released the bonds of winter, and the frozen waters spoke, and flowers sprang from the cold earth where her feet had passed. 

Then the spell of silence fell from Beren .... 

That Tolkien here likens Lúthien Tinúviel, the nightingale who sings in the dusk, to the lark is fascinating in its own right, and I think this juxtaposition signals just how epochal the love of Beren and Lúthien will be. Yet more importantly for us here now is that in both these texts without the song of the lark silence has lease. In The Silmarillion Lúthien sings like the lark and breaks the spell on Beren, whose naming her Tinúviel, nightingale, then casts a spell of love over her, thus changing the world. In The Passage of the Marshes, without lark or song, things just get worse for Frodo and Sam. Ahead of them that very night are the 'things in the pools' that Gollum slyly alluded to, the dead from whom the marshes take their name (TT 4.ii.627-28); and when, still later that same night, they at last hear a cry upon the air and the rush of wings, it is no skylark welcoming the dawn, but a creature of horror whose coming snuffs out even the candles of the corpses: " 'Wraiths!' he wailed. 'Wraiths on wings!' " (TT 4.ii.630). As a result, a shadow falls on all their hearts. Gollum begins to revert to his former self, and Frodo himself grows increasingly silent, like Beren before Lúthien sang.  After two more such visitations (TT 4.ii.634-35), the chapter ends :

So they stumbled on through the weary end of the night, and until the coming of another day of fear they walked on in silence with bowed heads, seeing nothing and hearing nothing but the wind hissing in their ears.

(TT 4.ii.635)

So in The Passage of the Marshes not only does Tolkien eschew the common trope of larks at dawn, which is reasonable enough given the context, but by substituting the winged Nazgûl to break the larkless silence he reworks the trope to introduce the nightmare that will persist and deepen, with one contrasting interlude in Ithilien, until Mt Doom. 

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Works Consulted

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James V Baker, The Lark in English Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Spring 1950), pp. 70-79

Priscilla Bawcutt, The Lark in Chaucer and Some Later Poets, The Yearbook of English Studies,Vol. 2 (1972), pp. 5-12