The Passing of Evenstar (with Homer on the side)

Since the early part of the fourteenth century, to say that someone has 'passed away' has often meant that they have died. (OED pass away c). That is certainly the normal understanding of the phrase today. There is also another meaning, of much the same vintage, though increasingly unfamiliar and all but obsolete, namely 'to leave' or 'to depart' (OED pass away b). At some point in the thirteenth century both of these meanings crossed from Anglo-Norman French into Middle English and appeared in written form soon after 1300. The related noun 'passing' arose in English by ca. 1350. It was used first to describe the death of a person and later the ceasing to exist of other things (OED passing).

No one in my audience will find it in the least surprising that I learned that 'pass away' can mean 'depart' from reading Tolkien. Nor will they fail to be amused that the last use of the word in this sense documented by the OED dates to 1879, seventy-five years before the publication of The Lord of the Rings. His first use of it in fact seems to play on both meanings, as well as to suggest the secondary connotation of pass away/depart, which the OED gives as 'to break away, to escape as from restraint.' At Weathertop, where Tolkien may have felt all the connotations of 'pass away' were in play, Aragorn uses it to sing of Beren and Lúthien:

Long was the way that fate them bore,
    O’er stony mountains cold and grey,
Through halls of iron and darkling door,
    And woods of nightshade morrowless.
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)

Since Beren and Lúthien both died and were restored to life before they departed into the forest singing sorrowless, their tale plays on all three of the meanings I mentioned above, death, departure, and escape from restraint. They of course die again in the end, but it is again mysterious, since in dying the death of Men, Lúthien breaks free from the world all other Elves are bound to remain within. Small wonder their tale is the Lay of Leithian, or the lay of 'release from bondage'. The more the reader knows of the history of the phrase and the backstory of Beren and Lúthien, the more the reader sees, but at the same time it becomes no easier to pin the phrase down to one meaning here. 

As this first instance suggests, we shall often find the phrase used in mythic contexts. It next appears in Bilbo's poem about Eärendil ('from east to west he passed away' -- FR 2.i.235) and Gimli's poem about Khazad-dûm (in Elder Days before the fall / of mighty kings in Nargothrond / and Gondolin, who now beyond / the Western Sea have passed away' -- FR 2.iv.316). In Lothlórien come the first entries in prose, but even so an air of enchantment attaches to 'the gentle rain that fell at times, and passed away leaving all things fresh and clean' (FR 2.vii.358), and in Frodo's vision in Galadriel's mirror 'a small ship passed away into the mist' in the west (FR 2.vii.364). That the next reference is merely lyrical and in prose, not mythic or poetic, comes as a surprise, until we realize that an east wind, in passing away, would pass away westward (FR 2.ix.385). And in his lament for his fallen comrade it is of the West Wind that Aragorn imagines someone asking for tidings of Boromir who, the West Wind replies, 'passed away / Into the shadows of the North. I saw him then no more' (TT 3.i.417). Only a few pages later Aragorn's epic chase of the orcs begins, redirecting the poem's search for news of Boromir to a pursuit of those who slew him and abducted those he was defending. Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, the Three Hunters disappear into the dusk (TT 3.i.420): 'They passed away, grey shadows in a stony land'.

Treebeard's two uses of the phrase are grim, once using it of the Elves fleeing the Great Darkness west across the Sea, which for him marks a dividing line between the 'old Elves', who 'wished to talk to everything' (TT 3.iv.468), and the Elves who took refuge in the West or in hidden valleys and sang only of the past. He then draws a sharp line both between the Ents and their own future and between the Elves who 'passed away'. The Ents will emerge from their hidden lives to challenge the darkness and help others before they 'pass away'. So unlike the Elves who 'departed' long ago, the Ents will 'die', in part because they have no offspring and in part because they will no longer hide from the enemy. Instead of composing songs about a lost past, they will attempt deeds worthy of song (TT 3.iv.486). Through the different senses of 'passing away' -- hiding versus marching, singing the 'glorious deeds of heroes'* versus performing deeds fit to be sung, departing versus dying -- Tolkien so aptly reveals what Treebeard feels about his world, the Elves, and his own people.

[* I interrupt this blogpost with a massively intrusive authorial aside, because I can:  

When the embassy comes to Achilles in Book 9 of the Iliad (9.189), they find him playing a lyre he had taken as plunder, 'with which he was delighting his heart and singing the glorious deeds of heroes' (κλὲα άνδρῶν). It's got nothing to do with Tolkien, but I love the phrase. So there.

On the other hand it is also true that singing such songs on a lyre he had plundered from a defeated enemy underlines the fact that Achilles is sitting in his tent singing songs about the past while his fellow Achaeans desperately need him to be performing such acts instead. By having Treebeard make references to songs the Elves who have 'passed away' make and songs which the deeds of the Ents before they 'pass way' will merit, Tolkien illustrates the character of Treebeard and his situation much as Homer did with Achilles and his situation.

End of aside. Move along.] 

The phrase can be just as poignant and revealing in connection with things that have not passed way, but where its use suggests something disheartening and unnatural. Hearing the trumpets ring out from the Black Gate lifts Frodo's heart for a moment, which sinks once he recognizes that the call portends 'no assault upon the Dark Lord by the men of Gondor, risen like avenging ghosts from the graves of valour long passed away' (TT 4.iii.639). Not only were the soldiers fit to make such an assault long gone to their graves, but so, it seemed to Frodo, was the necessary valor. While 'passed away' here strictly applies only to the 'valor' which has departed, as a transferred epithet it covers the ghosts of the men of Gondor in its shade. If, looking back from the end of this story, we know that Frodo's despair is premature, we should also know that it is not wholly unreasonable. For we must also look back with Frodo from this moment to the dead faces he saw in the marshes, illusions conjured by Sauron of the dead buried there long before. As the attack on the Black Gate in books Five and Six shows, such valor has not entirely passed away, but it is insufficient to defeat the armies of Mordor as the Men and Elves who lie buried in the Dead Marshes did. The world behind seems more and more an illusion, and soon to be forgotten, as they head towards Mordor, with no army at their backs or distracting the enemy, and ahead of them a land where night once fallen never seems to 'pass away' (TT 4.vii.699).

At Dunharrow the next day, Théoden takes the same darkness Frodo had seen flowing out of Mordor the day before as harbinger of 'the great battle of our time, in which many things shall pass away' (RK 5..iii.801). Unsurprisingly, light is closely associated with the departure or passing of Sauron's greatest weapons, the Ringwraiths, whose leader is twice called a 'shadow of despair' (RK 5.iv.818; vi.841). Sometimes the effect is direct and causal, as when Gandalf drives off the Nazgûl who are pursuing Faramir and his men (RK 5.iv.810). When Éowyn kills the fell beast ridden by the Witch-king, the shadow which had descended on the field with its arrival 'passed away; a light fell about her ....' (RK 5.vi.839-40, 842), but this shadow is at least as spiritual as it is physical. For its departure seems to free Merry from his terror of even being noticed by the Witch-king, so that he can stab him, saving Éowyn and enabling her to kill this 'shadow of despair.' Confronted with his own destiny, understanding too late the words of the prophecy of his downfall, the Witch-king, who could strike Frodo dumb and shatter his sword with a wave of his hand and with a word break the gates of Minas Tirith, has his words of power, the terror of his presence, and his threats of spiritual torture stripped from him. He is reduced to a merely physical assault and the cry of hatred he utters as he attacks Éowyn becomes a wailing cry that 'pass[es] with the wind' as he finally dies (RK 5.vi.842). 

Even the Witch-king's passing, however, does not lift every shadow. '[Y]our enemy has passed away', Aragorn says to her as he tries to heal her of her wounds, and not without effect, but as Aragorn knows her wounds are far deeper than any she could have suffered in battle (RK 5.viii.867). In Mordor, Sam finds his spirits lifted by the 'woe and dismay' which he hears in the voice of the Nazgûl bringing word of the Witch-king's destruction, but Frodo does not (RK 6.ii.919): 

‘Well no, not much, Sam,’ Frodo sighed. ‘That’s away beyond the mountains. We’re going east not west. And I’m so tired. And the Ring is so heavy, Sam. And I begin to see it in my mind all the time, like a great wheel of fire.’

The valor Frodo had hopelessly assumed was long passed away has not forgotten him, however. For a few days later Merry 'despondently' watches Aragorn's forces 'pass away out of sight down the great road', on their hopeless way to attack the Black Gate, in order to draw Sauron's attention away from Mordor and Frodo (RK 5.x.883). That the valor of this forlorn hope proved sufficient for its task helped save it in the end because it gave the Ring-bearer the chance to fulfill his quest (even if not in the way anyone might have guessed). 

Nevertheless, the passing of the One Ring is the passing of them all, and as Gandalf tells Aragorn, 'though much has been saved, much must now pass away' (RK 6.v.970). Some of what will pass away, however, is no bad thing. For Arwen arrives to marry Aragorn (RK 6.v.972):

And Frodo when he saw her come glimmering in the evening, with stars on her brow and a sweet fragrance about her, was moved with great wonder, and he said to Gandalf: ‘At last I understand why we have waited! This is the ending. Now not day only shall be beloved, but night too shall be beautiful and blessed and all its fear pass away!’

That Frodo speaks these words of the imminent marriage of two whose fate is closely woven with his own is surely significant -- Frodo who had been impatient to leave and who at Rivendell had been oblivious to the clues of Aragorn and Arwen's involvement. Gandalf had told him when he was eager to leave that Bilbo was waiting for the same day as they were (xxxxx), the day when all the night's fear should pass away. 'This is the ending' -- the happy ending for Aragorn and Arwen, who will live happily ever after till the end of their days.* 

But the passing away of the fear of the night for some is accompanied by the passing away of much else for others. Arwen herself says, when Frodo expresses his desire to see Bilbo and disappointment that he had not come to the wedding, that 'all that was done by that power [i.e., of the Ring] is now passing away' (RK 6.vi.974), which includes Bilbo's preservation to his vast age. When she further says that 'he awaits you, for he will not again make any long journey save one', she means that Frodo and Bilbo will make that journey together. And if Frodo does not understand her, as it seems by his reply he might not, she tells him that he may 'pass into the West' in her stead to find the healing that may (and will) elude him in Middle-earth (RK 6.vi.974). 

Frodo makes no reply to Arwen's offer, but silently accepts the jewel she says will bring him comfort 'when the memory of the fear and the darkness troubles' him'. More open and telling is the scene between Gimli and Éomer which follows at once. There with chivalrous courtesy they settle the matter of Éomer's 'rash words concerning the Lady in the Golden Wood', but end on a note of loss, since Gimli's 'heart forebodes fears that soon [the Morning, i.e., Galadriel] will pass away for ever'. What neither of them mentions, however, or perhaps even grasps is that the Evening, too will before long also pass away. Nor might the first time reader, since much is implicit in the phrase 'the Choice of Lúthien' which those who have not yet read the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen in Appendix A, or 'Of Beren and Lúthien' in The Silmarillion could well miss. The shift in scene from Aragorn, Arwen, and Frodo, to Gimli and Éomer underscores the larger perspective of what the world will lose when all that is to be lost will have passed away. 

As if to confirm this change in perspective the final appearance of the phrase within The Lord of the Rings proper comes in the famous scene Gandalf and Elrond, Galadriel and Celeborn converse telepathically far into the night after everyone else has gone to sleep. Like 'grey figures, carved in stone, memorials of forgotten things now lost in unpeopled lands', their near invisibility here prefigures their later disappearance into the West where they shall soon 'pass away'. Their silent conversations about times past and a future that they will not be present to see recall the image of the old hobbit Bilbo conjures in I sit beside the fire and think:

I sit beside the fire and think 

of people long ago, 

and people who will see a world

that I shall never know.

The next time we encounter the phrase is in Appendix A, where it is not dramatic, but historiographic, referring first to the dating of the end of the Third Age, 'when the Three Rings passed away in September 3021' (RK App. A 1033), and similarly to the persistent memory among Arvedui's descendants of the claim he had made to the throne of Gondor 'even when their kingship had passed away' (RK App. A, 1, iv, 1049-50). Though not without some poignancy, these references look back from a later time with a more detached perspective. 

Wholly unlike these are the uses of 'pass away' in The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, with its return to dramatic narrative and the theme of Death and Immortality immanent in The Lord of the Rings and the legendarium as a whole. As in The Lord of the Rings proper, we first meet the phrase in connection with the tale of Beren and Lúthien. Here again, as in A Knife in the Dark, Aragorn is singing the lay aloud, but suddenly seeing Arwen for the first time, he believes he is seeing Lúthien herself and 'fearing that she would pass away and never be seen again, he called to her crying, Tinúviel, Tinúviel! even as Beren had done in the Elder Days long ago' (RK App. A 1, v, 1058).

The fear that she will 'depart' or even 'escape', in short, that he will lose her for ever, spurs him to cry out the name Beren had cried out, unknowingly but correctly, as he tried to keep Lúthien from fleeing him. This meeting of course does not just set up Arwen's making the Choice of Lúthien. It adds depth to Aragorn's singing this song to the hobbits at Weathertop. Most importantly of all, perhaps, it foreshadows Arwen's calling Aragorn by his Elvish name when she faces his death, his passing away in the other sense: 

‘“Estel, Estel!” she cried, and with that even as he took her hand and kissed it, he fell into sleep. Then a great beauty was revealed in him, so that all who after came there looked on him in wonder; for they saw that the grace of his youth, and the valour of his manhood, and the wisdom and majesty of his age were blended together. And long there he lay, an image of the splendour of the Kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world. 

‘But Arwen went forth from the House, and the light of her eyes was quenched, and it seemed to her people that she had become cold and grey as nightfall in winter that comes without a star. Then she said farewell to Eldarion, and to her daughters, and to all whom she had loved; and she went out from the city of Minas Tirith and passed away to the land of Lórien, and dwelt there alone under the fading trees until winter came. Galadriel had passed away and Celeborn also was gone, and the land was silent.

‘There at last when the mallorn-leaves were falling, but spring had not yet come,1 she laid herself to rest upon Cerin Amroth; and there is her green grave, until the world is changed, and all the days of her life are utterly forgotten by men that come after, and elanor and niphredil bloom no more east of the Sea. 

‘Here ends this tale, as it has come to us from the South; and with the passing of Evenstar no more is said in this book of the days of old.’

(RK App. 1, v, 1063, emphasis added)

Aragorn does not stay because she has called him by his Elvish name, but the miraculous preservation of his body is a sign, a promise, that his Hope that there is something beyond the Death and that it is not merely memory is correct. As Beren waited for Lúthien, Aragorn will wait for Arwen. How else could we read this description of what happens when he returns the gift? So, too, Arwen, in sorrow but not despair, returns to Cerin Amroth where she and Aragorn had pledged themselves to each other and she had made the Choice of Lúthien, and just as he gave back the gift in the land of his ancestors, she gives back the gift in the land of hers, at the same time affirming the choice the Elves had made, which we see in the passing of Galadriel, to 'cast away all' rather than submit to Sauron. The enduring greenness of her grave, like the preservation of Aragorn's body, confirms that their Hope, the naked Estel of Elves and Men is correct, even if Men who come afterwards forget. The gift of memory is a belongs to the Elves, not to Men. 

Over and over we have seen Tolkien play on the different senses of 'pass away' to accentuate the sorrow and the loss of the world, but even when the good seem to pass into darkness, it is the evil and the darkness that are truly empty and transient, as Sam (and Tolkien) saw so clearly: 

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.921) 

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Σοφιστής and 'Saruman', part two

Recently I suggested that 'Saruman' is Tolkien's rendering into Old English of the Ancient Greek σοφιστής. Last night I discovered another interesting piece of evidence to support that suggestion. While looking at the entry for σοφιστής in the Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon, I found the following quotation from Demosthenes used to illustrate the pejorative sense of the word (II.2):

'γόητα καὶ σοφιστὴν ὀναμάζων' (Dem. 18.276).

We may easily render this straightforward phrase 'naming [me] a cheat and a sophist', but that would obscure a very interesting connection for us. The word γόητα, here translated 'cheat', is the accusative singular of γόης, the first meaning of which is 'sorcerer, wizard'. We find γόης and σοφιστής similarly paired at Plato Smp. 203d, with the addition of φαρμακεύς, another word for 'sorcerer'. Γοής is of course related to γοητεία, a word Tolkien knew well, as his discussion of it in a 1956 letter to Naomi Mitchison attests (Letters # 155). Note that the qualities Tolkien attributes to goeteia -- namely, 'to terrify and subjugate' and to 'deceive or bewilder unaware Men' -- are not at all unlike the qualities of Saruman's voice, by which he can persuade or daunt others.

But I suppose that, for the purposes of the tale, some would say that there is a latent distinction such as once was called the distinction between magia and goeteia. Galadriel speaks of the 'deceits of the Enemy'. Well enough, but magia could be, was, held good (per se), and goeteia bad. Neither is, in this tale, good or bad (per se), but only by motive or purpose or use. Both sides use both, but with different motives. The supremely bad motive is (for this tale, since it is specially about it) domination of other 'free' wills. The Enemy's operations are by no means all goetic deceits, but 'magic' that produces real effects in the physical world. But his magia he uses to bulldoze both people and things, and his goeteia to terrify and subjugate. Their magia the Elves and Gandalf use (sparingly): a magia, producing real results (like fire in a wet faggot) for specific beneficent purposes. Their goetic effects are entirely artistic and not intended to deceive: they never deceive Elves (but may deceive or bewilder unaware Men) since the difference is to them as clear as the difference to us between fiction, painting, and sculpture, and 'life'.

Goeteia -- and goety, its obsolete English descendant -- operate by invocation, that is to say, by being spoken or cried aloud. The Ancient Greek verb at the root of γοητεία is γοάω, to wail or bewail, especially the dead. That last sentence in the letter is of particular interest since it allows us to see a link between the power of Saruman's voice and Faërian Drama as a product of the power of Elvish minstrelsy. That, however, is an essay for another time. For today it will suffice to note the connections between γοητεία, σοφιστής, and Saruman, which make seeing Saruman as a translation of σοφιστής even more plausible. It draws Saruman even closer to those venal amoralists who used the power of their voices to make the morally worse argument defeat the morally better argument. 

When put to shame by a dwarf and fairy queen, shut up and take it. (FR 2.vii.359)

'Dark is the water of Kheled-zâram, and cold are the springs of Kibil-nâla, and fair were the many-pillared halls of Khazad-dûm in Elder Days before the fall of mighty kings beneath the stone.' She looked upon Gimli, who sat glowering and sad, and she smiled.  

And the Dwarf, hearing the names given in his own ancient tongue, looked up and met her eyes; and it seemed to him that he looked suddenly into the heart of an enemy and saw there love and understanding. Wonder came into his face, and then he smiled in answer. 

He rose clumsily and bowed in dwarf-fashion, saying: 'Yet more fair is the living land of Lórien, and the Lady Galadriel is above all the jewels that lie beneath the earth!' 

(FR 2.vii.356)

Often he took Gimli with him when he went abroad in the land, and the others wondered at this change.

(FR 2.vii.359)

A thought occurred to me on the drive home tonight. The reason for Legolas' change of heart towards Gimli once they got to Lothlórien lies in the interchange between Gimli and Galadriel. The kindness and understanding of the one and the humble courtesy and eloquence of the other shamed him, opening his eyes far more than Galadriel had opened Gimli's.




#headcanon

The Light that shines in the darkness -- Frodo and Sam in the Shadow of Death

Brocken Inaglory at the English Wikipedia [CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

Lately, as part of another project, I've been working very closely with Shelob's Lair and The Choices of Master Samwise in Book Four, and The Tower of Cirith Ungol in Book Six of The Lord of the Rings. There is so much to comment upon in these chapters, so many links among them as well as between them and other chapters that it would take a discussion of some length to lay them all out.(Working on it.) There is one connection I finally recognized last night that I found so charming that I wanted to say a few words about it.

In Shelob's Lair the narrator points out that Gollum 'had bowed down and worshiped her, and the darkness of her evil will walked through all the ways of his weariness beside him, cutting him off from light and from regret' (TT 4.ix.723). I had long felt that we have here an echo of the Twenty-Third Psalm: 'surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life' (23.6). I became certain of this the other day when I noted that in the hymn which Sam, without knowing what he is saying, sings to Elbereth, he uses the word 'nguruthos' (TT 4.x.729), which Tolkien translates in Letter 211 (p.278) as 'the shadow of (the fear of) death'.* It is hard to imagine that a man of Tolkien's time, upbringing, and piety, did not intend another echo of the same psalm: 'yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death' (23.4).

Since Galadriel plays an important role, at least in the minds of Frodo and Sam during the episode with Shelob, I had also been thinking of her gift to Frodo of the star-glass to be 'a light when all other lights go out' and of her appearance in Sam's vision out of a blaze of blinding light. This moment when the darkness of Shelob is debilitating both Frodo and Sam seems to have been foreseen by Galadriel and provided for with her gift. The interplay of the powers of light and darkness in this scene also reminds us of what Haldir said of Galadriel's power: 'In this high place you may see the two powers that are opposed one to another; and ever they strive now in thought, but whereas the light perceives the very heart of the darkness, its own secret has not been discovered. Not yet' (FR 2.vi.352; cf. 2.vii.364-65). 

The other night I was reading aloud to a particular friend what I had been writing about all this. She immediately quoted the Gospel of John (1.5) 'and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot comprehend it'. 

And, as happens at such moments of revelation, the circle suddenly closed. 

Allusion, of course, is what we find here, not allegory. The echoes of the Latin 'comprehenderunt', are heard quite loudly in the English translation of John, but in Tolkien, more fittingly, they sound as dimly as the horns of Elfland. Yet sound they do. The light of the silmaril as borne by Eärendil and captured in the water of Galadriel's mirror does not suggest that she or Eärendil are Christ figures. Rather, it is a matter of all myths reflecting the 'true' myth (the evangelium), and of all uses of the imagery of light and darkness to represent good and evil having common elements. Our knowledge of the one shapes and enhances our understanding of the other. If anything, so many of the characters suggested as 'Christ-figures' in The Lord of the Rings simply underline the need for Christ, for Eru to enter his creation himself, because the Children of Ilúvatar, being fallen, cannot overcome the evil that is the cause and consequence of their own fall.

It is intriguing also to note that the Earendel whom Tolkien found in the Old English poem Christ (1.104), and who sparked the creation of Middle-earth, was understood by some to represent Christ and by others John the Baptist**. In either event, he is the morning star, who presages the sun and brings light and hope to those who 'have had to endure the dark shadow of death' (1.118: deorc deaþes sceadu  dreogan sceoldan), like Sam facing Shelob and like the speaker of the psalm.

Most interesting, finally, are the words of John the Evangelist*** who seems almost in dialogue with this question of who 'the Light' is, as if answering a question already raised during the lifetime of John the Baptist and Jesus -- some thought Jesus might be John come again, others that the Baptist might be the Messiah -- or anticipating that such a question would be raised again and clarifying the truth of the matter ahead of time (1.6-8):

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light.

Tolkien asserted that his work was 'fundamentally Christian'. He meant that adverb literally, as in 'at its foundation'. This makes sense because his themes are themselves at the foundation of our reality and Middle-earth's. 

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* The parenthesis glosses the words before it, explaining them, not adding to them.

** See Cook The Christ of Cynewulf, a 1964 reprint of the 1909 impression, with the notes beginning on p. 88. Since identification of Earendel with Christ or with John the Baptist, except perhaps by Tolkien, is not relevant here, I have not engaged with scholarship later than Tolkien's discovery of him. Given Eärendil's role as the one who prepares the way for the (semi-)divine intervention of the Valar, Tolkien may have seen Earendel as more likely to be John the Baptist.

*** Coincidentally, perhaps, Tolkien regarded John the Evangelist as his patron saint (Letter 309), though the shared name was a coincidence.

The Last Enchantment -- FR 2.viii.377

As they passed her they turned and their eyes watched her slowly floating away from them. For so it seemed to them: Lórien was slipping backward, like a bright ship masted with enchanted trees, sailing on to forgotten shores, while they sat helpless upon the margin of the grey and leafless world. 

(FR 2.viii.377)

Up to this point in The Lord of the Rings the word 'enchantment' and forms of the verb 'enchant' are used synonymously, or nearly so, with 'spell'. Afterwards 'spell' has a negative meaning. A spell tricks or deceives or dominates those upon whom it is cast. The only time it may not do so is when Legolas, speaking of the Huorns, refers to 'the spell' of the forest (TT 3.viii.541). It is worth noting, however, that he is not affected by that spell, but Gimli's fear may well indicate that he is (TT 3.ix.549). At the very least Gimli could not be said to have a positive view of 'the spell of the forest'. 

Concomitant with this narrowing of the meaning of 'spell' is the near disappearance of 'enchant' or 'enchantment' from the text. Only one form of it occurs hereafter, referring to Saruman's voice -- 'Suddenly another voice spoke, low and melodious, its very sound an enchantment' (TT 3.x.578) -- and significantly that enchantment fails to attain its ultimate goal.

When Lothlórien begins to fade from Middle-earth, enchantment fades with it. While we could not say that only 'the deceits of the enemy' remain (FR 2.vii.362), this shift in usage is a harbinger of the passing of Faërie in Middle-earth.

'untouchable now by pity' -- Frodo on the slopes of Mt Doom (RK 6.iii.944)

Then suddenly, as before under the eaves of the Emyn Muil, Sam saw these two rivals with other vision. A crouching shape, scarcely more than the shadow of a living thing, a creature now wholly ruined and defeated, yet filled with a hideous lust and rage; and before it stood stern, untouchable now by pity, a figure robed in white, but at its breast it held a wheel of fire. Out of the fire there spoke a commanding voice. 

(RK 6.iii.944)

The disturbing description of Frodo in this passage is fascinating. Frodo is now ‘a figure’, an 'it', not Frodo himself. He is ‘untouchable now by pity’, which given Gandalf’s emphasis on the crucial role of Pity (FR 1.ii.59), can only be a bad thing. That a commanding voice -- whose? -- speaks out of the fire blurs the distinction between Frodo and the Ring, the 'wheel of fire' which he has declared to be the only thing that he can see any more (RK 6.ii.919; iii.938). Indeed they now seem one, though whether it matters any longer whether Frodo has claimed the Ring or the Ring Frodo may be impossible to say.  What of “robed in white”? Gandalf is now robed in white, though Frodo doesn't know that. So was Saruman before he lost his way. Most importantly, perhaps, Galadriel wears white, while black is the color of Sauron and his servants. Is this the nearly fallen Frodo’s vision of himself that we are seeing? Like Galadriel’s projection of herself as a ruling queen? Yet she knew it would all end in despair.

In answer to these questions the text is silent. Yet it is Sam who takes up the Pity that the figure of Frodo has laid down (RK 6.iii.944).

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Faërian Drama: the Final Curtain? (FR 2.viii.377-78)

The singing drew nearer. One clear voice rose now above the others. It was singing in the fair elven-tongue, of which Frodo knew only a little, and the others knew nothing. Yet the sound blending with the melody seemed to shape itself in their thought into words which they only partly understood. This was the song as Frodo heard it.... 

(FR 1.iii.79)

If the power of Elvish song is such that those who do not know Elvish still understand it, as Frodo, Sam, and Pippin do when they encounter Gildor's troop in the woods of the Shire, why don't they also understand the lament of the Elves of Lothlórien for Gandalf, which Legolas refused to translate because it was too difficult and too painful (FR 2.vii.359); and why does Legolas feel the need to translate the song of Nimrodel (FR 2.vi.339)?

Or is it only poetry in Quenya and Sindarin that have this power? Legolas makes clear that the poem about Nimrodel is 'in the woodland tongue', by which he means the Silvan Elvish descended from Nandorin. Since the Elves of Lothlórien were of the same folk, their lament for Gandalf, which Legolas alone of the Company understood, was also in Silvan, or so it would seem. For, had it been in Sindarin, Aragorn and Boromir at least would have understood it.

This raises the intriguing and likely unanswerable question of why only song in Quenya and Sindarin might be capable of this effect. At first I thought that the power might be proper only to the High Elves, or Calaquendi, like Gildor or the minstrels in Rivendell, who are Noldorin. It would make a certain sense if singers who had dwelt in Valinor and seen the Light of the Trees possessed this ability, except that song the hobbits hear in the Shire is in Sindarin, and Daeron of Doriath, is said to have been 'the greatest of all the minstrels of the Elves east of the Sea, named even before Maglor son of Fëanor' (S. 183). It is perhaps not irrelevant here that Doriath had a twofold connection with Valinor, namely Thingol and Melian; and in the time of Daeron and Maglor, the fading of the Elves had scarcely begun. Still what we seem to be seeing is a clear distinction in powers of enchantment between different kinds of Elves.

We also should not ignore the two songs Galadriel sings before the departure of the company from Lothlórien.  The first, 'I sang of leaves' (FR 2.viii.372-73), they apparently understand at once, just as they did the hymn to Elbereth in the Shire and the songs at Rivendell. The narrator makes no comment to draw the reader's attention to their understanding of the language. Nor does he have any need to do so because of the continuity with these passages. On the contrary, it is precisely the failure to understand the songs of the woodland Elves that the narrator considers worthy of note.

In the case of 'Namarië', however, we find something strange and rather different, something which has had me wondering for decades and which I now believe I understand at last.  After Galadriel sings in Quenya, the narrator calls out the fact that Frodo has not understood her song, though he remembers the words and translates them, with difficulty, 'long afterwards'. Suddenly, the song of this most powerful and majestic of all the Elves in The Lord of the Rings, a lament to Varda herself in the language of Elven song, fails to convey its meaning to its audience, just as the songs of the woodland Elves did. 

The translation, moreover, is also into prose, not verse, which is odd in itself, given the power of Elven song to come to life, as it were, in the minds of its audience (FR 2.i.233; S. 140-41, 171). Finally -- and perhaps this is just a matter of taste --  that prose rendering, while sturdy and serviceable, has always seemed rather bookish and not the masterful elegy Galadriel's lament calls for. The rather intrusive 'scholarly' gloss on 'Varda', which we are probably meant to regard as the work of a later hand, only reinforces the lack of enchantment we find here. The answer, I would argue, lies in the introduction to the poem:

On the green bank near to the very point of the Tongue the Lady Galadriel stood alone and silent. As they passed her they turned and their eyes watched her slowly floating away from them. For so it seemed to them: Lórien was slipping backward, like a bright ship masted with enchanted trees, sailing on to forgotten shores, while they sat helpless upon the margin of the grey and leafless world. 

Even as they gazed, the Silverlode passed out into the currents of the Great River, and their boats turned and began to speed southwards. Soon the white form of the Lady was small and distant. She shone like a window of glass upon a far hill in the westering sun, or as a remote lake seen from a mountain: a crystal fallen in the lap of the land. Then it seemed to Frodo that she lifted her arms in a final farewell, and far but piercing-clear on the following wind came the sound of her voice singing. But now she sang in the ancient tongue of the Elves beyond the Sea, and he did not understand the words: fair was the music, but it did not comfort him. 

Yet as is the way of Elvish words, they remained graven in his memory, and long afterwards he interpreted them, as well as he could: the language was that of Elven-song and spoke of things little known on Middle-earth.

(FR 2.viii.377)

Lothlórien, as Verlyn Flieger has argued (1997: 89-115, 192-97), is the supreme example of Faërian Drama, where, to use Tolkien's words  'you are in a dream that some other mind is weaving, and the knowledge of that alarming fact may slip from your grasp' (OFS ¶ 74). Galadriel has already told us that Spring and Summer will never again come to Lothlórien (FR 2.viii.375). This song is over. Frodo does not understand 'Namarië' because the spell is broken. The curtain has come down on Faërian Drama, and Frodo must parse out his Quenya like the rest of us, huddled beneath our midnight lamps.

'Yet if you succeed, then our power is diminished, and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten.'

(FR 2.vii.365)

Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded, and suddenly she laughed again, and lo! she was shrunken: a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white, whose gentle voice was soft and sad. 

'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West and remain Galadriel.'  

(FR 2.vii.366)

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Did Boromir fall? (RK 5.iv.813)

'Comfort yourself!' said Gandalf. 'In no case would Boromir have brought it to you. He is dead, and died well; may he sleep in peace! Yet you deceive yourself. He would have stretched out his hand to this thing, and taking it he would have fallen. He would have kept it for his own, and when he returned you would not have known your son.' 

(RK 5.iv.813)

To judge by Gandalf's contrary to fact conditional statements, about what would have happened (but did not) if Boromir had taken the Ring (which he did not), Gandalf does not believe that Boromir fell by attempting to seize the Ring, but was redeemed by his immediate recovery and self-sacrifice. However close he may have come to a fall, taking the Ring is clearly the critical step in that descent.

This is consistent with Gandalf's statement that 'Galadriel told me that [Boromir] was in peril. But he escaped in the end' (TT 4.v.496), as well as the refusal of Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel to take the Ring (FR 1.ii.61; 2.ii.267, vii.x365-66).  We may also point to Aragorn's response to Boromir's dying declaration that he has failed: 'No! .... You have conquered. Few have gained such a victory' (TT 3.i.414).

None of which is to claim that it wasn't all a very near run thing for poor Boromir.

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Some Thoughts on Structure and Meaning in The Lord of the Rings

Yes, Simon. There she is again

Quite a few years ago now in his still highly relevant article, 'The Interlace Structure of The Lord of the Rings', Richard West made clear how intricately woven together The Lord of the Rings is. Unlike the simpler and more 'organic' practice common in modern novels, the medieval technique of '[i]nterlace, by contrast, seeks to mirror the perception of the flux of events in the world around us' (West 78), which leads to a narrative that, like life, is 'cluttered', 'digressive', and 'chaotic' (79). But there's more to it than that, as West points out:

Yet the apparently casual form of the interlace is deceptive; it actually has a very subtle kind of cohesion. No part of the narrative can be removed without damage to the whole, for within any given section there are echoes of previous parts and anticipations of later ones. The medieval memory (lacking modern information retrieval systems and therefore necessarily greater than ours) delighted in following repetitions and variations of themes, whether their different appearances were separated by scores or hundreds of pages. Musical art gives an analogous aesthetic pleasure and shows a similar structural binding ... but in literature, the interlace structure allows detailed examination of any number of facets of a theme.

(West 79)

Now in the course of The Lord of the Rings Frodo offers to give the Ring to others three times, but all of these come in the first two books, and never again after that.  A proximate cause is easy to spot -- Boromir's attempt to take the Ring at the end of the second book -- but that is only part of it. It is not the truest cause.  For in the first two books Tolkien weaves together a series of offers by Frodo with a series of (real and imagined) attempts by others to take the Ring. How these offers and attempts are made are telling in themselves, but as with Boromir each of them is part of the larger web of the story and allows us to reflect on questions of the effect the Ring has on those who possess it, claim it, or who have considered what they might accomplish if it were theirs.

1. In The Shadow of the Past Frodo offers the Ring to Gandalf in fear, but has just proved himself unable even to throw the Ring into his fireplace, which, it has already been demonstrated, is scarcely able to warm it up (FR 1.ii.49-50, 60-61). Gandalf refuses the Ring, also out of fear, because he knows his 'pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good' will make him a prey to the Ring's power. Given the truculence with which Bilbo, like Gollum before him, asserted and defended his claim to ownership of the Ring in A Long-expected Party, Frodo's offer to Gandalf is tantamount to a denial of a claim to the Ring. 


2. In The Council of Elrond Frodo, upon learning that Aragorn is Isildur's heir, seems almost relieved: '"Then [the Ring] belongs to you, and not to me at all!" cried Frodo in amazement, springing to his feet, as if he expected the Ring to be demanded at once.' Aragorn replies, 'It does not belong to either of us...but it has been ordained that you should hold it for a while' (FR 2.ii.237).  Frodo here in fact asserts Aragorn's claim to the Ring. This not only shows how true and wise Aragorn is by his refusal, but also supports the view taken above that Frodo has so far refused to claim the Ring. 


3. In The Mirror of Galadriel Frodo's perception of things that are hidden and secret is enlarged, because he is 'the Ring-bearer, and one who has seen the Eye' in Galadriel's Mirror. This puts him on more of an even footing with Galadriel, since it allows him to recognize her as another Ring-bearer. Now he asks her what she wants, just as she had asked all the members of the Fellowship earlier in this chapter, and the fears for Lothlórien she reveals in her response parallel Frodo's fears for the Shire in The Shadow of the Past (FR 1.ii.62), as well as those stirred in Sam by what he has just seen in the Mirror.  In all humility then, it seems, Frodo offers to give her the Ring, and by implication renounces any claim to it: 'I will give you the One Ring, if you ask for it. It is too great a matter for me.'  Like Gandalf and Aragorn, Galadriel also refuses, but not without admitting the dreams of power and glory she had dreamt, as she pondered what she would do if the Ring ever came into her possession; and not before giving Frodo a glimpse of the majesty she would attain with the One Ring on her hand (FR 2.vii.365-66). It is intriguing, however, that here the offer of the Ring is conditional -- 'if you ask for it.' Requiring her to ask for it is an assertion of power and control, and suggests that Frodo's attitude towards the Ring has been changing. It is also intriguing that no sooner does she reject the Ring than he asks her how he might use it to 'see all the [other Rings] and know the thoughts of others', which Galadriel warns him not to try, since to use the power of the Ring would require him to train his 'will to the domination of others.' To try, she says, 'would destroy you.'

In addition to these three offers to give up the Ring -- whether Frodo could have actually done so if anyone had accepted is another matter -- Books One and Two begin and end with attempts, two real and two imagined, to seize the Ring -- 

1. In A Long-expected Party Bilbo claims that the Ring is his when Gandalf urges him to give it to Frodo: 'It is my own. I found it. It came to me.' But, as Gandalf continues to press him, Bilbo grows paranoid and fears that Gandalf wants the Ring for himself and will try to take it by force.  He lays his hand on his sword, implicitly threatening the kind of violence he had so significantly eschewed by not stabbing Gollum when he had the chance (FR 1.i.34).  


2. In The Flight to the Ford the Black Riders very nearly catch Frodo at the Ford of Bruinen (FR 1.xii.213-15). He attempts to command them, but they laugh at him. His questioning Galadriel about using the Ring needs to be read in connection with his failure here. His later invocations of the Ring to control Gollum (TT 4.i.618, iii.640; RK 6.iii.943-44), his wondering whether he was ready to confront the Witch-king at Minas Morgul ('not yet' -- TT 4.viii.706), and his claiming the Ring for his own (RK 6.iii.945), are all obvious 'facets' of this 'theme', but so, too, is his subsequent mourning for its loss (RK 6.ix.1024)


3. In Many Meetings Bilbo's reaching out to touch the Ring sparks a reaction in Frodo as paranoid and close to violence as Bilbo's response to Gandalf had been (FR 2.i.232). This moment is significant in three ways: first, in showing the effect the Ring is already having on Frodo by recalling Bilbo's behavior in A Long-expected Party; second, by enabling Bilbo to understand at last what the Ring does to those who bear it; and third, by the alarmingly small effect this moment has on Frodo's understanding of what the Ring is doing to him: he just moves on. 


4. In The Breaking of the Fellowship Boromir almost succeeds in seizing the Ring for himself (FR 2.x.396-400).  Frodo escapes only because he uses the Ring, which also results in vastly expanding his perception of the world, but in doing so he nearly reveals himself to Sauron, just as he had almost done, it would seem, when looking into Galadriel's mirror 11 days earlier. 

As Boromir's attempt follows so closely upon Frodo' offer to Galadriel, it might be worthwhile to consider these two moments side by side. Galadriel confesses that she has wanted the Ring, but will not take it or ask for it. She knows well that any good she might do at first will only end in despair. Boromir does not have the wisdom to see this -- he imagines himself becoming 'a mighty king, benevolent and wise.'  He not only wants the Ring, but requests it and will brook no refusal.  Frodo's psychic brushes with Sauron in these episodes, which emphasize his own increasingly complex relationship with the Ring -- 'He heard himself crying out: Never, never! Or was it: Verily I come, I come to you?' (FR 2.x.401) -- must be viewed in context with Galadriel's silent probing of Boromir's mind at their first meeting in Lothlórien, an encounter   that left Boromir rattled and suspicious, and Galadriel concerned that he was in peril (TT 3.v.496). Who would grasp that peril better than she? Who would find her desire to save her land and people more unnerving than Boromir? As Faramir later wonders, from a fascinating perspective that encompasses both sides of the experience: 'What did she say to you, the Lady that dies not? What did she see? What woke in your heart then?' (TT 4.v.667).  Boromir and Galadriel will have seen in each other's thoughts a reflection of their own fears and desires.

There are of course other scenes in the first two books that we might examine in greater depth, to see how they might contribute to our understanding of the Ring and the relationship of Frodo and others to it. In addition to some of the passages cited within the points made above, the scenes in the Shire, at Bree, and on Weathertop would be worth closer inspection. From my discussion of these same passages we can also see that much more lies ahead, which I have not yet fully thought through, and which will doubtless alter my own understanding of what I have seen so far. Still it would be foolish to think that every last passage can or should be fitted into some sort of pattern, as tempting as that can often be. 

But there is one more rather eccentric piece of this puzzle that I think requires comment at this time. In The Old Forest Tom Bombadil comes plunging into the story like some rogue comet from the Oort Cloud. The hobbits spend most of three chapters in Tom's Country, measuring from the High Hay to the East Road beyond the Barrow-downs, just as they do later in Lothlórien. Unlike Galadriel, however, Bombadil asks to see the Ring, which Frodo, to his own surprise, gives him without demur, but when Bombadil puts on the Ring and makes it disappear instead of vanishing himself, Frodo becomes alarmed and suspicious. Even though Bombadil immediately returns the Ring, Frodo must test it to be sure he hasn't been tricked. Again, the Ring has no effect on old Tom, who sees Frodo quite clearly (FR 1.vii.132-33).  Pardoxically Frodo reveals himself by disappearing. The Ring is already at work on him. Unlike Galadriel and everyone else in The Lord of the Rings, however, Tom is his own Master and desires nothing but what he has. Thus the power of the Ring has no pull on him. He knows of the Ring, but seems to have little interest in it except as a curiosity (cf. FR 2.ii.265).

Like Lothlórien, Tom's Country is also Faërie. Under his mastery time there flows differently from time in Bree or The Shire or Rohan, but not in the same way as it does in Lórien, from which one emerges to find that one has fallen behind time in the mortal world. In Tom's Country it is always the present, but the past remains vibrant and accessible: Tom can still go singing out into the ancient starlight when only the Elf-sires were awake (FR 1.vi.131); the trees can remember 'the times when they were lords' (FR 1.vii.130); the Barrow-wights can recall the first Dark Lord (FR 1.viii.141); and visions of Dunedain kings, once and future, can rise up before the hobbits' eyes as well as in their dreams (FR 1.viii.143, 145-46).  In Galadriel's Golden Wood we may also see visions of times past and times perhaps to come, but the land itself is anchored in an age long gone: In Lórien the Elder Days 'still lived on in the waking world' (FR 2.vi.349), but only if she had the One Ring could she perhaps preserve it that way forever. Tom and his Country serve as another structural counterpoise to Galadriel and hers.

What, finally, is the theme whose facets we are examining through this extensive and intricate web? Perhaps that which Gandalf touched upon first in The Shadow of the Past and which Elrond expands upon in The Council of Elrond, two chapters which occupy the same position and play much the same part in their respective books:

‘A mortal, Frodo, who keeps one of the Great Rings, does not die, but he does not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues, until at last every minute is a weariness. And if he often uses the Ring to make himself invisible, he fades: he becomes in the end invisible permanently, and walks in the twilight under the eye of the dark power that rules the Rings. Yes, sooner or later – later, if he is strong or well-meaning to begin with, but neither strength nor good purpose will last – sooner or later the Dark Power will devour him.’

(FR 1.ii.47)

And:

'Alas, no,' said Elrond. 'We cannot use the Ruling Ring. That we now know too well. It belongs to Sauron and was made by him alone, and is altogether evil. Its strength, Boromir, is too great for anyone to wield at will, save only those who have already a great power of their own. But for them it holds an even deadlier peril. The very desire of it corrupts the heart. Consider Saruman. If any of the Wise should with this Ring overthrow the Lord of Mordor, using his own arts, he would then set himself on Sauron's throne, and yet another Dark Lord would appear. And that is another reason why the Ring should be destroyed: as long as it is in the world it will be a danger even to the Wise. For nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so. I fear to take the Ring to hide it. I will not take the Ring to wield it.' 

'Nor I,' said Gandalf. 

Boromir looked at them doubtfully, but he bowed his head. 'So be it,' he said.  

(FR 2.ii.267)

This is how good becomes evil. Boromir's question to Frodo on Amon Hen -- if the Wise won't wield the Ring, someone has to: 'Why not Boromir?' (FR 2.x.398) -- is not all that different from Frodo's asking Galadriel about using the Ring himself the moment she has refused his offer.

It will be interesting to see how this line of inquiry unfolds from here.




Richard C. West, 'The Interlace Structure of The Lord of the Rings' in Jared Lobdell, A Tolkien Compass (1975), pp. 77-94.

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'For some the only glimpse. For some the awaking.'

Titania, Queen of the Fairies -- C. Wilhelm

'It's a trap!' said Sam, and he laid his hand upon the hilt of his sword; and as he did so, he thought of the darkness of the barrow whence it came. 'I wish old Tom was near us now!' he thought. Then as he stood, darkness about him and a blackness of despair and anger in his heart, it seemed to him that he saw a light: a light in his mind, almost unbearably bright at first, as a sun-ray to the eyes of one long hidden in a windowless pit. Then the light became colour: green, gold, silver, white. Far off, as in a little picture drawn by elven-fingers, he saw the Lady Galadriel standing on the grass in Lórien, and gifts were in her hands. And you, Ring-bearer, he heard her say, remote but clear, for you I have prepared this.

(TT 4.ix.719-20)

This passage has always stuck in my mind for what seems to me a rather odd detail, the likening of Sam's vision of Galadriel to 'a little picture drawn by elven-fingers'. If not for the context of the scene and the sentences surrounding it, this image could well fit a description of one of those fairies, the tiny ones with dragonfly wings. What makes it more interesting is the way the whole passage develops around it and elevates it by pointing to a very different kind of Faërie. The touch of his sword brings him back to his first encounter with that perilous land in 'Tom's country', which in turn causes him to recall his second. And just as Bombadil's breaking open the barrow let the light of day dispel the darkness of the wight, so now the memory of that moment opens the 'blackness of despair and anger in his heart' to the light of Lórien and the star of Eärendil. 

With the light of the star-glass, moreover, yet another encounter is hinted at, since it was the light of the Silmaril that lit the way through the Shadowy Seas to Valinor. It is surely no accident that it is Sam, the character who is arguably the most alive to the power of Story, who makes these connections, or who, seeing the star of Eärendil itself, grasps what is perhaps the gist of all the great tales, 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). 

Years later Tolkien wrote in Smith of Wootton Major of the doll like figure of the Fairy Queen on the Great Cake (Smith, 14), and Smith himself upon knowingly meeting the Queen for the first time thinks back through his life as he converses in thought with her,

... until he came to the day of the Children's Feast and the coming of the star, and suddenly he saw again the little dancing figure with its wand, and in shame he lowered his eyes from the Queen's beauty. 

But she laughed again as she had laughed in the Vale of Evermorn. "Do not be grieved for me, Starbrow," she said. "Nor too much ashamed of you own folk. Better a little doll, maybe, than no memory of Faery at all. For some the only glimpse. For some the awaking. 

(Smith, 37-38)

The star, the small figure seen in the mind, the Queen -- so like Sam's description of Galadriel (TT 4.v.680; Smith 31-32, 36-38) --  and the link to Faërie, are all here again, in a very different context, which is to be sure less dramatic, but no less suggestive of the power and importance of enchantment, of Faërie itself. We may also see, I think, a moment late in Tolkien's life when he could look back beyond the dislike he had acquired for the cowslip fairies of his youth to an evening in April 1910 when he saw Peter Pan and wrote in his diary: 'Indescribable but shall never forget it as long as I live. Wish E[dith] had been with me' (Carpenter, 47-48).¹ 

¹ See also Dimitra Fimi here:

'Tolkien might be reflecting upon his own route as a writer, and especially on the evolution of his Elves from the tiny winged creatures of his early poems. Using the voice of the Queen of Faery, he seems to be fully accepting that the fairy creatures found in his early work are not worthy predecessors of his later Elves, but he also acknowledges that they triggered his interest and eventually led him to discover the real Land of Faery.'

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These Are Not The Elves You're Looking For. (I)

Cover Image © John Howe

Last year several friends asked me to join them in writing an article for a festschrift to honor the scholarly achievements of Verlyn Flieger. What emerged from our collaboration builds upon Professor Flieger's work, further exploring dreams and enchantment and how they expand the perception of time and the world in The Lord of the Rings. Like every other study, this one suggested new lines of inquiry. For one of us that meant investigating more deeply the relationship between forests and Faërie; for another a continuing effort to understand how On Fairy-stories relates to the legendarium as it unfolded.^[1]  As for me, I turned to the study of the Elves themselves, who, as Tolkien said, 'have their being' in Faërie (OFS para. 10).^[2]  Through scrutiny of 'their being' I hope to grope my way to a better understanding of Faërie itself.  The question is where to begin.

For we all know that Tolkien came to scorn the cowslip fairies of his Victorian youth. Nevertheless, they left their mark on him, a mark clearly visible not only in early poems like Goblin Feet (1915),^[3]  but also in his more mature works.  It is, for example, quite prominent in Errantry (1933) and in the 'tra-la-la-lally' Elves of The Hobbit (1937).^[4]  We may even catch the vanishing echo of their song in the laughter of Gildor's troop in the woods of the Shire (FR 1.iii.78-85).  But by the time Tolkien was writing the first chapters of his 'new Hobbit' and preparing his essay On Fairy-stories,^[5] he had also seen that the 'business [of rationalization and literary fashion that led to the debasement of the fairies] began ... long before the nineteenth century, and long ago achieved tiresomeness, certainly the tiresomeness of trying to be funny and failing' (OFS para. 8-9).^[6]  Much of the blame for this he laid at the feet of Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream and of Michael Drayton (especially) in Nymphidia.

The matter is of course by no means pat, with a clear division between works in which we find fairies in the Victorian mold and works in which we do not.  For even in an early poem like You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play (1915), which is contemporary with Goblin Feet, there abides a more sober sense of loss and a longing which we find even more strongly in Kortirion among the Trees (1915).^[7]  And if in The Book of Lost Tales Tinúviel can be a bit silly and hide under flowers like a proper Victorian fairy, Turgon and Fëanor are made of more dangerous and tragic stuff.^[8]  But it is also clear from the narrative perspective of The Book of Lost Tales that a breach we cannot mend has opened between us and fairies, and between what the fairies were and what they have become. The fairies who tell Eriol the tales have diminished and gone into the West, but whether they have remained who they were before is not as certain.

This breach has two inseparable aspects, the one literary, the other mythological. The English literary tradition turned away from what Tolkien called the 'true tradition' of  Faërie that we find still alive in The Faërie Queene of Edmund Spenser, in which fairies were powerful and perilous and fair.^[9] A contemporary of Shakespeare like Drayton, Spenser shares in a mythology of Faërie descended from named poets like Gower, Chaucer, and Thomas the Rhymer, as well as from the unnamed poets of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and of Sir Orfeo. Much farther back, though unremembered in Spenser's day, was Beowulf, which for centuries lay lost in the streams of time, like the One Ring beneath the waters of Anduin, forgotten yet waiting only for the right hand to wield it.^[10] 

But it's a long road from the ylfe of Beowulf to the elves of Spenser.  The Beowulf poet traces the lineage of his elves to Cain himself (111-114),

Þanon untydras ealle onwocon,
eotenas 7 ylfe 7 orcneas,
swylce gi|[ga](ntas), þa wið Gode wunnon
lange þrag(e).(He) him ðæs lean forgeald!

From whom all monstrous creatures descend,
the ettens and elves and hellish undead,
the giants, too, who fought against God
for a long season; for that he repaid them.

By contrast Redcrosse, the first of Spenser's 'Faerie Knights' (FQ 1 proem 14), is called 'a valiant Elfe' (FQ 1.i.xvii.1 = Book 1, Canto 1, Stanza xvii, Line 1, for example) and described as very much a Christian:

And on his brest a bloudie Crosse he bore,
The deare remembrance of his dying Lord,
For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore,
And dead as living ever him ador'd.

(FQ 1.i.ii.1-4)

And though not an elf by blood, but a child stolen in infancy, Redcrosse was raised to believe he was of fairy race (FQ 1.i.lx.1-lxvi.9). Learning that he is a human changes nothing for him or his role. He still stands allegorically for Holiness, and still slays the dragon that laid Eden waste. The sort of divide we see between humans and elves in Beowulf does not exist in The Faerie Queene. They are not part of that monstrous race of Cain.  It's as if we begin with the Beowulf poet, who straddled the worlds of Northern and Christian myth, and confronted a question like that posed by Alcuin: 'What does Ingeld have to do with Christ?'; and then end with Spenser, who lived in a day when Reason and the Reformation were displacing Medieval views of the world and enchantment,^[11] and reducing fairies to 'a rustic folk of dell and cave' (FR 2.vii.365).  Yet Spenser's reply to Alcuin's question would seem to be 'everything.'

So, just as Tolkien's own presentation of fairies and elves over time admits of no pat distinctions, neither does the tradition on which he draws. As James Wade has recently argued in his Fairies in Medieval Romance, the fairies -- or perhaps we might say the 'being' of the fairies -- vary from work to work depending on the subcreative goals of the author. There was no canonical portrayal of fairies to which the writers of Romance had to adhere, no 'straightforward chronological process' in which the fairies evolved.^[12]  Even Morgan le Fay, who between the 12th and 16th centuries tended to grow increasingly human, never shakes the dust of Faërie off herself once and for all: she remains forever 'le Fay'; she must take Arthur to Avalon even when healing no longer awaits him there; and in some 16th century Romances like Huon de Bordeaux and Mervine son of Ogier, she fully reverts to her otherworldly state.^[13] Indeed, as Tolkien already knew, this indeterminacy is part of the essence of Faërie (OFS, para 12):

The definition of a fairy-story—what it is, or what it should be—does not, then, depend on any definition or historical account of elf or fairy, but upon the nature of Faërie: the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country. I will not attempt to define that, nor to describe it directly. It cannot be done. Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible. It has many ingredients, but analysis will not necessarily discover the secret of the whole.

As a philologist and a writer of fairy stories, Tolkien was in a rare position that few before him could have justly claimed, both to survey the entirety of the English literary tradition of the Otherworld, from Beowulf to Peter Pan, and in consequence to seek out the lost road to a truer and more perilous Faërie, where the Green Knight might take the head you came with quicker than Robin Goodfellow could give you another. Mending the literary aspect of the breach -- or at least stitching it up in the hope that it might heal -- would also repair the mythological, and reconnect England and its literary tradition to a lost mythology. That Tolkien said he had once hoped to do precisely this scarcely needs repeating,^[14] and we should not forget that directly before he began The Lord of the Rings and On Fairy-stories Tolkien had been working on The Lost Road and the Beowulfian King Sheave with their explicit connection of England, Men, and Elves. So a desire to mend that breach in the literary and mythological tradition is very much in evidence precisely as he begins to compose his great work and to articulate his notion of fairy stories.^[15] 

Now Tom Shippey has called Sir Orfeo ' "the master-text" for Tolkien's portrayal of the elves.'^[16]  Consider for just a moment how appropriate this is if true. The 'master-text' of Tolkien's own mythic figures draws on another tale with the deepest of roots, a remote and ancient myth that Tolkien found compelling (Letters, no. 153).^[17] Not only that but Sir Orfeo is a text that transforms important aspects of what it finds in Orpheus and Eurydice. Orfeo succeeds where Orpheus fails, and Faërie stands in for Hades. Otherworld replaces Underworld. To mend the literary-mythological breach, Tolkien draws on both Sir Orfeo and Orpheus and Eurydice to construct the Tale of Beren and Lúthien, which is so fundamental to his own legendarium and which has transformations of his own. Here a female elf sings to win back her dead mortal love. Since the Halls of Mandos are in the Undying Lands, moreover, we find the Underworld and Otherworld also combined. Most importantly Lúthien's success comes with a price. In reclaiming Beren from death she willingly sacrifices her own immortality, a choice whose effects will ripple through the entire history of Middle-earth. Thus, Tolkien uses myth to repair and refashion myth.  On this showing, Sir Orfeo would seem a very good place to start.

The first thing we see is that the 'being' of the fairies is different with respect to the world than the 'being' of men is. The world which they inhabit is larger. It spans the border between what we mortals see as the waking and dreaming worlds.  They come to Heurodis as she sleeps beneath the ympe-tree, first the two fairy knights, then the fairy king himself who abducts her, shows her his realm, and returns her, promising that he will take her away for good the next day and woe betide any attempt at resistance.  The following day, despite all Orfeo's preparations to fight for his wife, she vanishes without a trace from the midst of the troops surrounding her (57-194).^[18]

Now no one, not the two maids of Heurodis who watched while she slept, nor Orfeo her husband ever questions her experience or suggests that 'it was just a dream.' Not even the narrator calls it a dream (sweven). Everyone (including the reader) simply accepts that the world contains both seen and unseen, both ordinary mortals and fairies, of whom Heurodis can say 'I saw not ever anywhere / a folk so peerless and so fair' (147-48).  And though Orfeo marshals his troops to defend his wife, it is all for nothing:

And yet from the midst of that array
the queen was sudden snatched away;
by magic was she from them caught,
and none knew whither she was brought.

(191-94)

Even considering so little of Sir Orfeo as this, we can already see points of contact with Tolkien. The fairies' peerless beauty, a given, is merely the easiest to spot. For Ilúvatar made the Elves to be 'the fairest of all earthly creatures' (Silm. 41). That the Elves perceive and dwell in a larger world is clear in the ability of Gildor and Glorfindel to sense and recognize others concealed and at a distance (FR 1.iii.80; xii.209); in the power of Galadriel and Elrond to communicate directly and silently with the minds of others (FR 2.vii.356-58; RK 6.vi.985); and in the truth that Gandalf tells Frodo, that 'those who have dwelt in the Blessed Realm live in both worlds at once, and against both the Seen and the Unseen they have great power' (FR 2.i.222-23). We may also detect something of that larger world in Frodo's ability to see both the Black Riders themselves and the Elf lord 'as he is on the other side' only after the sorcery of the Morgul-blade has begun to alienate him from his own (FR 1.xii.222). Orfeo, too, cannot see the fairies until he has lost his own world and become a wildman in the forest, playing his harp and singing for the beasts who disregard him once his song is over (195-280).

But, as the studies of both Wade and Tolkien caution, we should not expect a direct and simple correspondence between the fairies of Sir Orfeo and the Elves of  Middle-earth. Tolkien borrows, chooses, and transforms what he finds. In Tolkien, for example, it is the Elves who have the power to stir up visions through song (Silm. 140-41, 170-71; FR 2.ii.233; RK A 1058); in Sir Orfeo, however, it is to a mortal man, Orfeo himself, that this power belongs:

no man hath in this world been born
who would not, hearing him, have sworn
that as before him Orfeo played
to joy of Paradise he had strayed
and sound of harpers heavenly,
such joy there was and melody. 

(41-46)

Moreover, the arbitrary and cruel exercise of the Fairy King's power in abducting Heurodis has no true parallel in Tolkien, only the very limited similarity found in Eöl's capture of Aredhel (Silm. 132-33), both of whom are Elves. The Elves of Tolkien are Good People, after all (Hobbit 60, 179). Yet, while they do not arbitrarily carry mortals off against their will, and while they may know some of them from afar -- Gildor recognizes Frodo, and two of the Elves at Rivendell seem to know Bilbo (Hobbit 59) -- they themselves remain mysterious, elusive, and inscrutable, just like the Fairy King in Sir Orfeo.

This has been only the briefest beginning on this project of mine, to examine closely the primary sources which Tolkien drew on to sub-create his Elves. The point is not source-hunting per se, but the far more important goal of seeing how Tolkien uses those sources to compose the 'heroic legends and high romance' that he so desired (Letters no. 163), and to create Elves of his own whose keen eyes never lose sight of the ‘starlight on the western seas’ (FR 1.iii.79), just as the feet of the hobbits never lose touch with the soil of the Shire.^[19] That he appears to do so as eclectically as his models did should surprise no one.


I presented a version of this post on 25 September 2016 at the 3rd Mythgard Midatlantic Speculative Fiction Symposium in College Park, MD.  A more complete analysis of the entirety of Sir Orfeo and the relationship of its fairies to Tolkien's Elves will appear in Tolkien Studies 16.

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 Works Consulted

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^[1] See Simon John Cook, How to Do Things with Words: Tolkien’s Theory of Fantasy in Practice, Journal of Tolkien Research: Vol. 3: Iss. 1, Article 6. Now available for download from: http://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol3/iss1/6

^[2] Nor of course does it just contain Elves: 'Faërie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted'(OFS para. 10).

^[3] Compare the impact which attending a performance of Peter Pan in April 1910 had on him: 'Indescribable but shall never forget it as long as I live. Wish E[dith] had been with me.' Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography (1977) 47-48, quoting from Tolkien's (unpublished) diary.

^[4] Though published in 1937 of course, The Hobbit had been completed by the beginning of 1933, and so therefore dates to about the same period as Errantry.  On the chronology of composition, see Rateliff, History (2011) xiii-xxii.

^[5]  See Cook, above n. 1.

^[6] OFS para. 7:

The diminutive being, elf or fairy, is (I guess) in England largely a sophisticated product of literary fancy. It is perhaps not unnatural that in England, the land where the love of the delicate and fine has often reappeared in art, fancy should in this matter turn towards the dainty and diminutive, as in France it went to court and put on powder and diamonds. Yet I suspect that this flower-and-butterfly minuteness was also a product of “rationalization,” which transformed the glamour of Elfland into mere finesse, and invisibility into a fragility that could hide in a cowslip or shrink behind a blade of grass. It seems to become fashionable soon after the great voyages had begun to make the world seem too narrow to hold both men and elves; when the magic land of Hy Breasail in the West had become the mere Brazils, the land of red-dye-wood. In any case it was largely a literary business in which William Shakespeare and Michael Drayton played a part. Drayton's Nymphidia is one ancestor of that long line of flower-fairies and fluttering sprites with antennae that I so disliked as a child, and which my children in their turn detested. 

The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries in England experienced a decline in the belief in magic, ghosts, and fairies. See Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth Century England, Penguin (1991) 724-34 on fairies in particular.

^[7]  On Tolkien and Warwick, Lynn Forest-Hill, 'Elves on the Avon,' TLS 8.7.05, is good, though she might give too much weight to the influence of biographical details.

^[8] As Rateliff, 119-21, notes, Tolkien at times 'blends two different traditions' and the sillier fairies are more often found in his poetry than his prose. On Lúthien, see The Book of Lost Tales 2.11-13;  on Turgon 2.160-62; on Fëanor 1.149-51, 162-68.

^[9] But are in most cases visually and, it would seem, physically indistinguishable from humans, like Spenser's Redcrosse.

^[10] On the loss and rediscovery of Old English, see John D. Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066-1901: Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past, Wiley Blackwell (2015), especially 49-108 on the 16th and 17th centuries. A visual clue to how thoroughly Beowulf was forgotten may be gleaned from the Google Ngram I have embedded at the end of this post.

^[11] See Thomas, above n. 6.

^[12] The phrase, which strictly refers to the transformation of Morgan le Fay only, is from James Wade, Fairies in Medieval Romance Palgrave MacMillan (2011) 18.

^[13] See the excellent discussion of these matters in Wade (2011) 1-21.

^[14] In late 1951 Tolkien wrote:

 'Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story-the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country'

(Letters, no. 131)

^[14] For recent discussion of Tolkien’s writing of the early chapters of The Lord of the Rings and On Fairy-stories, and of the effect these had on each other, see Cook, above n. 1.

^[16] Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth (2003) 62. To be fair, Shippey focuses his claim more precisely on 'the description of the hunting king in Sir Orfeo', lines 281-302.

^[17] As did Lewis. See An Experiment in Criticism, chapter 5, 'Myth'; and Barfield, who wrote Orpheus: a Poetic Drama (1983), a pdf of which is available from Barfield's literary estate.

^[18] The translation and line numbers of Sir Orfeo offered throughout are Tolkien's, since it is his perspective on and understanding of this poem that is at issue. Tolkien himself prepared an edition of the poem, upon which he based his translation, but it was not published until 2004. See Carl Hostetter, Sir Orfeo: A Middle English Version by J. R. R. Tolkien, Tolkien Studies 1 (2004) 85-123. http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/laskaya-and-salisbury-middle-english-breton-lays-sir-orfeo offers an easily accessible version of the standard text with notes and introduction.

^[19] Both the ‘being’ of the Elves and the ‘being’ of the hobbits are essential to The Lord of the Rings, as Tolkien suggests in his letter to Auden (no. 163):

Since The Hobbit was a success, a sequel was called for; and the remote Elvish Legends were turned down. A publisher's reader said they were too full of the kind of Celtic beauty that maddened Anglo-Saxons in a large dose. Very likely quite right. Anyway I myself saw the value of Hobbits, in putting earth under the feet of 'romance', and in providing subjects for 'ennoblement' and heroes more praiseworthy than the professionals: nolo heroizari is of course as good a start for a hero, as nolo episcopari for a bishop.