The Death of Melkor and the Life of the Elves

Thus spake Mandos in prophecy, when the Gods sat in judgement in Valinor, and the rumour of his words was whispered among all the Elves of the West. When the world is old and the Powers grow weary, then Morgoth, seeing that the guard sleepeth, shall come back through the Door of Night out of the Timeless Void; and he shall destroy the Sun and Moon. But Eärendel shall descend upon him as a white and searing flame and drive him from the airs. Then shall the Last Battle be gathered on the fields of Valinor. In that day Tulkas shall strive with Morgoth, and on his right hand shall be Fionwë, and on his left Túrin Turambar, son of Húrin, coming from the halls of Mandos; and the black sword of Túrin shall deal unto Morgoth his death and final end; and so shall the children of Húrin and all Men be avenged.

            (The Lost Road 333) 

I have always taken great pleasure in the story that in the final battle at the end of time Túrin will return from Death to kill Melkor, avenging his family and all Men. Nor am I alone in this. The prophecy of Túrin's return rings so true with so many because in it we hear the Final Chord of Ilúvatar resounding on the Fields of Time. Yet when composing The Silmarillion for publication, Christopher Tolkien chose to leave it out because he felt that, when writing the Valaquenta in 1958, his father had abandoned the so-called 'Second Prophecy of Mandos' in which this claim appeared (LR 333; Morgoth 204). He points out that his father had crossed it out in the manuscript. For this decision Douglas Charles Kane in his book Arda Reconstructed has faulted him (236-238). Kane argues, quite reasonably, that Tolkien did not cross out the entire Second Prophecy, and that he left the part which pertains to Túrin. Thus, Kane believes, the story of his returing and killing Melkor should have been preserved and printed in The Silmarillion. 

I can't really disagree with Kane's argument, but I believe there may be another, more metaphysical, reason for why Tolkien might have chosen to shelve the Second Prophecy. A letter of Tolkien's, which also comes from 1958, provides a clue:

That Sauron was not himself destroyed in the anger of the One [at the drowning of Númenor] is not my fault: the problem of evil, and its apparent toleration, is a permanent one for all who concern themselves with our world. The indestructibility of spirits with free wills, even by the Creator of them, is also an inevitable feature, if one either believes in their existence, or feigns it in a story.

            Letters no. 158 p. 280

This is consistent with something Tolkien wrote in The Book of Lost Tales a generation earlier. There the narrator explains that, when Melko (as he's called early in the legendarium) was taken captive by the Valar to protect the newly awakened Elves from him, he could not be put to death because "the great Gods may not yet be slain" (LT I 104). Notice that word "yet," which seems to suggest that a time may come when they might be slain? Well, that word wasn't there in the original text (LT I 104 n. 4). Tolkien added it, perhaps because he was anticipating the story that in the final battle Melko would in fact be slain. Not by Túrin, however, though he is present (LT I 219; LT II 281-282). So, it seems that Tolkien initially had an opnion resembling what he says in the 1958 letter, but changed his mind. Killing Melko was just too appealing an idea at the time, and even more so when Tolkien decided that Túrin really ought to be the one to do it. 

Yet by the 1950s, right about when Tolkien crossed out some, but not all, of the Second Prophecy of Mandos, Tolkien appears to hold an opinion that clashes with the part of the Second Prophecy he did not cross out. But if even God cannot destroy spirits possessing free will, what does that mean for the Elves, whose lives are said to end when Arda ends? One way out is to argue, as some have done, that Elves do not have free will. Or perhaps it means, as Finrod speculates -- prophesies even -- in the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth that the Elves will somehow survive the end of Arda. He also foresees that Eru himself will one day enter Arda to heal its hurts, which at least at first glance does not harmonize well with the vengeance of Túrin. The Athrabeth is of course also a work of the mid to late 1950s, when Tolkien wrote the letter quoted above and crossed out some of the Second Prophecy. Did he cross out all he meant to at that moment? Or did he allow metaphysics to trump myth hereafter?

Why Does the Roaring of the Sea Disquiet the Valar?

The Sea -- Copyright © Ted Nasmith. All rights reserved.

A well known theme that runs throughout Tolkien's legendarium is that longing or unquiet which the Sea causes in Elves and Men.  Many will recall Legolas speaking of it in The Last Debate:

'Look!' he cried. 'Gulls! They are flying far inland. A wonder they are to me and a trouble to my heart. Never in all my life had I met them, until we came to Pelargir, and there I heard them crying in the air as we rode to the battle of the ships. Then I stood still, forgetting war in Middle-earth; for their wailing voices spoke to me of the Sea. The Sea! Alas! I have not yet beheld it. But deep in the hearts of all my kindred lies the sea-longing, which it is perilous to stir. Alas! for the gulls. No peace shall I have again under beech or under elm.'  

(RK 5.ix.873)

This passage clarifies the 'dark words' which Galadriel had sent to Legolas through Gandalf:

Legolas Greenleaf long under tree
In joy hast thou lived. Beware of the Sea!
If thou hearest the cry of the gull on the shore,
Thy heart shall then rest in the forest no more.

(TT 3.v.503)

But Legolas is not the first character on whom the sound of the Sea has a disquieting effect. For even before the hobbits have left The Shire Frodo had a dream:

Then he heard a noise in the distance. At first he thought it was a great wind coming over the leaves of the forest. Then he knew that it was not leaves, but the sound of the Sea far-off; a sound he had never heard in waking life, though it had often troubled his dreams. Suddenly he found he was out in the open. There were no trees after all. He was on a dark heath, and there was a strange salt smell in the air. Looking up he saw before him a tall white tower, standing alone on a high ridge. A great desire came over him to climb the tower and see the Sea. He started to struggle up the ridge towards the tower: but suddenly a light came in the sky, and there was a noise of thunder.

(FR 1.v.108)

We can trace this troublous longing, this Sehnsucht, all the way back to the beginning of Tolkien's works, to the longing of Eriol and Ælfwine for the Sea and to the earliest version of The Music of the Ainur in The Book of Lost Tales. It is particularly prominent in Tuor from his beginning in The Fall of Gondolin and the bones of The Tale of Eärendel within The Book of Lost Tales, through the earliest versions of The Quenta Silmarillion and Annals of Beleriand, to Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin in Unfinished Tales, and in the end to The  Grey Annals, to The Tale of Years, and to the published Silmarillion.¹ And while the term 'The Unquiet of Ulmo' seems coined almost especially for him, it would apply equally well to Aldarion in The Tale of Aldarion and Erendis (UT 175-76, 178, 185).  There is even the hint that it may have affected Hobbits, including one and perhaps two Took uncles of Bilbo (FR Pr. 7; RK App. C 1103 [Isengar and Hildifons]; The Hobbit 11, 13-14).

As we can easily see, the sea-longing is not something particular to Elves.  Mortal and Immortal alike feel it.  If we turn next to a passage from The Ainulindalë, we shall see that the longing and disquiet caused by the Sea is fundamental in the profoundest sense. Ilúvatar grants the Ainur a vision of the Music they have just sung:

But the other Ainur looked upon this habitation set within the vast spaces of the World, which the Elves call Arda, the Earth; and their hearts rejoiced in light, and their eyes beholding many colours were filled with gladness; but because of the roaring of the sea they felt a great unquiet. And they observed the winds and the air, and the matters of which Arda was made, of iron and stone and silver and gold and many substances: but of all these water they most greatly praised. And it is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance else that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the

Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.

(The Silmarillion, 19)

What's most curious here is the reaction of the Ainur to the sound of the Sea, which causes them 'a great unquiet.'  We are used to thinking of Elves and Men, the Children of Ilúvatar, as beset by such disquiet and longing, but not the Valar themselves. Since the Valar have not yet entered Arda, which so far exists only in thought (20), the sea's effect extends beyond 'the circles of the world' and suggests that all sentient beings, whether of flesh or of spirit, are within its reach. That this is so even in a vision attests the power of what they have seen, or, to be more precise, what they have heard, because that is clearly the avenue through which the unquiet and longing come to them.

But why? What is it about the 'voices of the Sea' that is so poignant? '[T]hat in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur' is not a sufficient answer in itself, since it does not explain why the Valar find this reminder of their own music disquieting.  Two clues may help us here.  The first is that Elves and Men do not recognize what they hear, but presumably the Valar do. The second is that Ulmo -- 'of all [the Valar] most deeply was he instructed by Ilúvatar in music' (19) -- has a conversation with Ilúvatar even as the music was being envisioned before them, in which Ilúvatar demonstrates to him that the worst efforts of Melkor have but made water and the world more beautiful than Ulmo had imagined in his music. This harks back to Ilúvatar's statement to Melkor that 'no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall but prove mine instrument in devising things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined' (17).

If the themes which the Ainur elaborated in making their music come from Ilúvatar, then it is the voice of Ilúvatar that Valar, Elves, and Men all hear in the 'voices of the sea.' The Valar recognize this. Elves and Men, who have not seen Ilúvatar face to face, as it were, do not.  But all who hearken long for the creator from whom the world divides them, or, in the case of the Valar who are about to enter into Arda and be bound there until the end, will divide them.²

What would the echo of God's voice evoke if not longing?

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¹ Eriol and Ælfwine (BoLT 1.46; 2.6, 314); The Music of the Ainur (BoLT 1.56); Tuor (BoLT 2.151-52, 156, 196, 254); The Quenta Silmarillion and The Annals of Beleriand  (HoME IV.37, 142-43, 145, 149, 151-52, 214, 308); Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin (UT 24-25, 34); The Grey Annals and The Tale of Years (HoME XI.90-91, 348, 352);  Of Tuor and the Fall of Gondolin (The Silmarillion 238, 244-45; cf. 246).

² To be strictly accurate the Valar are a subset of the Ainur who entered the world after the Music:

Thus it came to pass that of the Ainur some abode still with Ilúvatar beyond the confines of the World; but others, and among them many of the greatest and most fair, took the leave of Ilúvatar and descended into it. But this condition Ilúvatar made, or it is the necessity of their love, that their power should thenceforward be contained and bounded in the World, to be within it for ever, until it is complete, so that they are its life and it is theirs. And therefore they are named the Valar, the Powers of the World. 

(Silmarillion 20)

Is That An Allusion To Ulmo and Tuor in "The Great River" (FR 2.ix.380-81)?

... they let the River bear them on at its own pace, having no desire to hasten towards the perils that lay beyond, whichever course they took in the end. Aragorn let them drift with the stream as they wished, husbanding their strength against weariness to come. But he insisted that at least they should start early each day and journey on far into the evening; for he felt in his heart that time was pressing, and he feared that the Dark Lord had not been idle while they lingered in Lorien. 

Nonetheless they saw no sign of an enemy that day, nor the next. The dull grey hours passed without event. As the third day of their voyage wore on the lands changed slowly: the trees thinned and then failed altogether. On the eastern bank to their left they saw long formless slopes stretching up and away toward the sky; brown and withered they looked, as if fire had passed over them, leaving no living blade of green: an unfriendly waste without even a broken tree or a bold stone to relieve the emptiness. They had come to the Brown Lands that lay, vast and desolate, between Southern Mirkwood and the hills of the Emyn Muil. What pestilence or war or evil deed of the Enemy had so blasted all that region even Aragorn could not tell.

Upon the west to their right the land was treeless also, but it was flat, and in many places green with wide plains of grass. On this side of the River they passed forests of great reeds, so tall that they shut out all view to the west, as the little boats went rustling by along their fluttering borders. Their dark withered plumes bent and tossed in the light cold airs, hissing softly and sadly. Here and there through openings Frodo could catch sudden glimpses of rolling meads, and far beyond them hills in the sunset, and away on the edge of sight a dark line, where marched the southernmost ranks of the Misty Mountains. 

There was no sign of living moving things, save birds. Of these there were many: small fowl whistling and piping in the reeds, but they were seldom seen. Once or twice the travellers heard the rush and whine of swan-wings, and looking up they saw a great phalanx streaming along the sky.

'Swans!' said Sam. 'And mighty big ones too!' 

'Yes,' said Aragorn, 'and they are black swans.'

(FR 2.ix.380-81)

The Valar and Ilúvatar are famously obscure in The Lord of the Rings.  While the Dark Power, Sauron, is named and identified as a present actor in the affairs of this world from near the very beginning (FR 1.ii.47, 51), the other Powers are much harder to descry. The best example is of course Elbereth.  She is mentioned by Frodo as early as Three's Company (FR 1.iii.79) as someone whom the High Elves greatly revere. Clearly she is a godlike figure of great power -- she made the stars themselves -- but neither here nor later is she identified as one of the Valar, and it is not suggested that she is anything more than a source of inspiration or illumination to the Elves of Middle-Earth. She is sung of, sung to, invoked (with varying effect), and her name is even used as a password, but, within The Lord of the Rings itself, she is never explained.¹ Manwë, her spouse and ruler of the Valar, receives notice only from Bilbo in a single mention of the 'Elder King' in the poem Eärendil (FR 2.i.235);

Moreover, Frodo's ability in Three's Company to recognize the Elves he meets as High Elves because they call Elbereth's name reveals almost nothing.  Even an atheist, for example, could recognize as Roman Catholic someone heard reciting the Hail Mary, and could know that devout Catholics honor the Virgin Mary with a special reverence, but that does not imply any greater knowledge of the Virgin Mary or Roman Catholicism on the part of the atheist.²

It is likely, moreover, that Frodo knows little or nothing about the Valar in general or Elbereth in particular at this point -- not to mention Eru Ilúvatar -- since he is rather mystified when Gandalf hints at the intervention of Providence within time:

‘There was more than one power at work, Frodo. The Ring was trying to get back to its master. It had slipped from Isildur’s hand and betrayed him; then when a chance came it caught poor Déagol, and he was murdered; and after that Gollum, and it had devoured him. It could make no further use of him: he was too small and mean; and as long as it stayed with him he would never leave his deep pool again. So now, when its master was awake once more and sending out his dark thought from Mirkwood, it abandoned Gollum. Only to be picked up by the most unlikely person imaginable:  Bilbo from the Shire! 

‘Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that maybe an encouraging thought.' 

‘It is not,’ said Frodo.  'Though I am not sure that I understand you.' 

(FR 1.ii.56, emphasis original)

One could well regard Frodo's lack of knowledge and clarity here as typical, at least for the hobbits, by whom and from whose viewpoint the Tale is told.  When, for example, Gildor invokes Elbereth's protection for Frodo, his instant response is hardly one of faith and understanding, and not at all unlike his reply to Gandalf: 'But where shall I find courage?... That is what I chiefly need' (FR 1.iii.84).

Another example of this comes in Henneth Annûn.  Faramir and the other Dunedain of Gondor turn to the West for a moment of silence before they eat, as they 'look towards Númenor that was, and beyond that to Elvenhome that is, and to that which is beyond Elvenhome and will ever be' (TT 4.v.676), but this custom is unknown to the hobbits, who are left 'feeling strangely rustic and untutored' (TT 4.v.676).  Here again the Valar are alluded to quite vaguely, not even named, not even in a periphrasis of the kind Elrond had used when he said that 'they who dwell beyond the Sea would not take' the Ring (FR 2.ii.266).  Here reference is buried in an allusion to a nameless land, remote and eternal.

Indeed the word Valar appears only three times in The Lord of the Rings. In Ithilien a soldier of Gondor calls upon them for protection from the Mûmak (TT 4.iv.661). At Aragorn's coronation Gandalf wishes that the days of the King may 'be blessed for as long as the thrones of the Valar endure' (RK 6.v.968).³ And finally in a moment that is as shining and evocative as it is mysterious, the narrator likens Théoden to 'Oromë the Great in the battle of the Valar when the world was young' (RK 5.v.838).

Yet the Valar and Ilúvatar are involved, exerting a subtle but important influence on events from afar that may be detected through seeming coincidence.  Gandalf suggests (but cannot openly say) as much in his remarks to an uncomprehending Frodo in The Shadow of the Past. In the same conversation the wizard also points out that Frodo was 'chosen,' but without saying by whom (FR 1.ii.61), and that '[i]t was the strangest event in the whole history of the Ring so far: Bilbo's arrival just at that time, and putting his hand on it, blindly, in the dark' (FR 1.ii.55-56).⁴ Gildor says of his meeting the hobbits that '[i]n this meeting there may be more than chance' (FR 1.iii.84). Bombadil remarks: 'Just chance brought me then, if chance you call it. It was no plan of mine....' (FR 1.vii.126). And finally Elrond states at the beginning of the Council:

'...The Ring! What shall we do with the Ring, the least of rings, the trifle that Sauron fancies? That is the doom that we must deem. 

'That is the purpose for which you are called hither. Called, I say. though I have not called you to me, strangers from distant lands. You have come and are here met, in this very nick of time, by chance as it may seem. Yet it is not so. Believe rather that it is so ordered that we, who sit here, and none others, must now find counsel for the peril of the world.' 

(FR 2.ii.242)

'Tuor is Led by the Swans to Vinyamar'© Ted Nasmith

We needn't labor this point. It is long established and well understood, and obvious to every attentive reader. What is not so obvious is what looks like an allusion to the Vala Ulmo, the Lord of Waters -- of lakes, streams, and rivers as well as seas -- and to Tuor, an important forefather of Aragorn, an allusion so subtly made and so quickly passed by that I've only just caught it after over four decades of reading The Lord of the Rings. Though I had at times wondered about Aragorn's comment about the swans when I encountered it, I had never given it any further thought in all the years I had known it.

Elsewhere in Tolkien, in works ranging across his entire career of work on the legendarium -- in The Book of Lost Tales, in Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin, and in The Silmarillion -- Ulmo is the Vala who most openly involves himself in the affairs of Elves and Men in their war against Morgoth.⁵ And not just then, it would appear: '[n]or has he ever forsaken Middle-earth, and whatsoever may have since befallen of ruin or of change has not ceased to take thought for it, and will not until the end of days' (Silmarillion, 40). So not only did Tolkien continue to cherish the links between Ulmo and Tuor and the swans as important elements in his tales, but he asserts that Ulmo's concern for Middle-earth never ended; and the intertextuality between The Lord of the Rings and the versions of Tuor's tale quoted below harmonizes nicely with Ulmo's ongoing devotion to the affairs of Middle-earth.  Let's turn to those other works for a moment.

One morning while casting his eye along the shore -- and it was then the latest days of summer -- Tuor saw three swans flying high and strong from the northward.  Now these birds he had not before seen in these regions, and he took them for a sign, and said: "Long has my heart been set on a journey far from here; lo! now at length I will follow these swans." Behold, the swans dropped into the water of his cove and there swimming thrice about rose again and winged slowly south along the coast, and Tuor bearing his harp and spear followed them. 

(BoLT 2.152)

Then Ulmo arose and spake to him.... And Ulmo said: 'O Tuor of the lonely heart, I will not that thou dwell for ever in fair places of birds and flowers.... But fare now on thy destined journey and tarry not, for far from hence is thy weird set.  Now thou must seek through the lands for the city of [Gondolin]....

(BoLT 2.155) 

And, maybe, from afar birds saw the fell winter that was to come; for those that were want to go south gathered early to depart, and others that used to dwell in the North came from their homes to Nevrast.  And one day, as Tuor sat upon the shore, he heard the rush and whine of great wings, and he looked up and saw seven white swans flying in a swift wedge southward.  But as they came above him they wheeled and flew suddenly down, and alighted with a great plash and churning of water. 

Now Tuor loved swans, which he knew on the grey pools of Mithrim; and the swan moreover had been the token of Annael and his foster-folk. He rose therefore to greet the birds, and called to them, marvelling to behold that they were greater and prouder than any of their kind that he had seen before; but they beat their wings and uttered harsh cries, as if they were wroth with him and would drive him from the shore.  Then with a great noise they rose again from the water and flew above his head, so that the rush of their wings blew upon him as a whistling wind; and wheeling in a wide circle they ascended into the high air and went away south.

Then Tuor cried aloud: 'Here now comes another sign that I have tarried too long!' And straightaway he climbed to the cliff-top, and there beheld the swans still wheeling on high; but when he turned southward and set out to follow them, they flew swiftly away. 

(Of Tuor and his Coming to Gondolin, in UT, 25-26)

And Tuor came into Nevrast, and looking upon Belegaer the Great Sea he was enamoured of it, and the sound of it and the longing for it were ever in his heart and ear, and an unquiet was on him that took him at last into the depths of the realms of Ulmo. Then he dwelt in Nevrast alone, and the summer of that year passed, and the doom of Nargothrond drew near; but when the autumn came he saw seven great swans flying south, and he knew them for a sign that he had tarried overlong, and he followed their flight along the shores of the sea. Thus he came at length to the deserted halls of Vinyamar beneath Mount Taras, and he entered in, and found there the shield and hauberk, and the sword and helm, that Turgon had left there by the command of Ulmo long before; and he arrayed himself in those arms, and went down to the shore. But there came a great storm out of the west, and out of that storm Ulmo the Lord of Waters arose in majesty and spoke to Tuor as he stood beside the sea. And Ulmo bade him depart from that place and seek out the hidden kingdom of Gondolin; and he gave Tuor a great cloak, to mantle him in shadow from the eyes of his enemies.  

(Silmarillion, 238-39)

While the presence of the swans alone clinches the allusion, I think, there's more here to link these passages than that. The swans in The Lord of the Rings seem to be flying south, just as Tuor's were. For the members of the fellowship detect them only when they hear the whirring of their wings, which suggests that the swans came up from behind them. In both cases they are also of a remarkable size, large even for swans. And like his distant ancestor Tuor, Aragorn has an errand to a white city that is nearly the last bastion of defense against the evil of its age, and the names of their destinations echo each other by sound and etymology: Gondor and Gondolin. Moreover, one of the names of Gondolin in The Book of Lost Tales is Gwarestrin, which means Tower of the Guard, just like Minas Tirith (BoLT 2.158).  Both Tuor and Aragorn feel that they have tarried on their errand.

But why black swans?  It seems too trite to think that Tolkien is here playing with the belief popular from antiquity to the 18th century that black swans did not exist -- the very source of the phrase rara avis -- or with the superstition that associated black animals with evil. Aragorn does not react to them as he did to the spying crows in Hollin (FR 2.iii.284-86). If anything, he seems surprised and pleased by the sight of them. Clearly he regards their color as noteworthy, neither common, which would call for less comment, nor unheard of, which would call for more. But what makes it noteworthy?

In Tolkien swans are most commonly identified or associated with ships, and in a lengthy scene, almost the last before this one, Galadriel comes in a swanship to bid farewell to the company, who have already embarked in their boats.

They turned a sharp bend in the river, and there, sailing proudly down the stream toward them, they saw a swan of great size. The water rippled on either side of the white breast beneath its curving neck. Its beak shone like burnished gold, and its eyes glinted like jet set in yellow stones; its huge white wings were half lifted. A music came down the river as it drew nearer; and suddenly they perceived that it was a ship, wrought and carved with elven-skill in the likeness of a bird. 

(FR 2.viii.372)

But if swans mean ships, then black swans mean black ships. What of that? Again in a scene during the company's sojourn in Lothlórien, in the powerful and memorable vision Frodo sees in Galadriel's mirror, we find black ships:

The mist cleared and he saw a sight which he had never seen before but knew at once: the Sea. Darkness fell. The sea rose and raged in a great storm. Then he saw against the Sun, sinking blood-red into a wrack of clouds, the black outline of a tall ship with torn sails riding up out of the West. Then a wide river flowing through a populous city. Then a white fortress with seven towers. And then again a ship with black sails, but now it was morning again, and the water rippled with light, and a banner bearing the emblem of a white tree shone in the sun. A smoke as of fire and battle arose, and again the sun went down in a burning red that faded into a grey mist; and into the mist a small ship passed away, twinkling with lights. 

(FR 2.vii.364)

The first black ship here is that of Elendil, whose heir Aragorn is, and who is also a descendant of Tuor.  Like Tuor, Elendil escaped from the destruction of his homeland to found a new hope. The second is the ship captured from the Corsairs of Umbar in which Aragorn arrives at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, just in time to turn the tide of battle and save Minas Tirith.

For this allusion to have weight for us, we need to know all this.  That is not so for Aragorn, however. Nothing suggests that he knew of Frodo's vision, but he did not need such knowledge to recall the story of Tuor and Ulmo and the swans here, and therefore to see in them an omen for himself. How much more he might have seen here is debatable.  He was familiar with the Corsairs of Umbar and the danger they posed to Gondor from the time of his service there decades earlier (RK App. A 1055), and black sails appear to have been an identifying characteristic of their ships (RK 5.vi.846-47; vii.853).  Both Galadriel and Elrond subsequently direct his attention that way, as if reminding him of something he already knows (TT 3.v.503; RK 5.ii.775, 781); and once he takes control of the palantír of Orthanc he sees the threat from the Corsairs and their black-sailed ships (RK 5.ii.780-81).

Of the allusion alone can we be sure. As for the rest we can only speculate. Yet I would not find it surprising if Tolkien, whose attention to detail in such matters is a constant revelation, left such an interpretation of this omen there to be found, just as he left the allusion to the tale of Tuor and Ulmo and the swans hanging by a single clue, Aragorn's remark upon their color.

____________________________

¹ I am attending here to only those mentions of the Valar and Eru contained in The Lord of the Rings proper, not the appendices, which within the conceit of authorship are represented in the Prologue as later additions (FR 14-16). Elbereth invoked: FR 1.xi.195, xii.198, 214; sung to: FR 1.iii.79; 2.i.238, TT 4.x.729 (perhaps also an invocation), RK 6.ix.1028; sung of FR 2.i.236, viii.377-78; password: RK 6.i.912-13.

At FR 1.xii.198 Aragorn states that Frodo's invocation of Elbereth on Weathertop (1.xi.195-96) had some effect on the Witch-king, but when Frodo does it again at the Ford of Bruinen it appears to have none at all (1.xii.214).  The resolution of this seeming contradiction probably lies in the greater desperation of the Nazgûl to retake the Ring before it reaches the comparative safety of Rivendell. This harmonizes with Aragorn's earlier description of their methods: they will not attack openly themselves, 'not until they are desperate, not while all the long leagues of Eriador lie before us' (FR 1.x.174).  On this showing Strider's 'leagues' could be those between Bree and Rivendell.

² I do not suggest here any connection between Elbereth and the Virgin Mary, except perhaps in the degree of reverence the Elves show her. The example means to indicate that the ability to identify someone as belonging to a certain group because of a reference that person makes does not entail any greater familiarity with that person's beliefs.

³ It is interesting to note that the word Valar is used in Gondor and by the people of Gondor. This contrasts with Elrond's avoidance of the word. Without more evidence it is difficult to say much, but this may reflect a difference in human and elven attitudes towards the Valar.

⁴ Gandalf then goes on to say: 'There was more than one power at work, Frodo. The Ring was trying to get back to its master.... So now, when its master was awake once more and sending out his dark thought from Mirkwood, it abandoned Gollum. Only to be picked up by the most unlikely person imaginable: Bilbo from the Shire!' We appear to have here an example of what Ilúvatar tells Melkor in the Ainulindalë: 

'And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.'

(Silmarillion, 17)

⁵ The Silmarillion, 26-27, 40, 103, 114-15, 125-26, 155, 158, 196, 209, 212, 238-41, 243-44, 247, 249.

From the Bliss of the Gods to a Jewel Shining in the Darkness -- What Tolkien's Kilbride Dedication Can Show Us

The sale at Sotheby's in London on 4 June 2015 of a first edition of The Hobbit for £137,000 has certainly drawn its share of attention, for having nearly tripled the last previous auction price of such a volume, and for Sotheby's misidentifying as Elvish a dedication which Tolkien had inscribed to Katherine Kilbride in Old English.¹ Here is an image from the page in the Sotheby's catalog:

We may transcribe the verses at the bottom of the page

 as follows:

Fela bið on westwegum werum uncuðra,
wundra and wihta, wlitescyne lond,
eardgeard ylfa, eorclanstanas
on dunscrafum digle scninað.

And translate them:

There's many a thing on westward ways unknown to men,
Wonders and creatures, a land of splendor,
The homeland of the Elves; precious stones
In mountain caves secretly shine.

The first thing we must note is that the last word, scninað, is a rather surprising scribal error by Tolkien.  There is no such verb in Old English as 'scninan.' Clearly it should be scinað, which means 'shine.'  Professor Susan Irvine of University College London, whom The Guardian consulted for its article, has also rightly pointed out that the last line and a half of this poem -- from eorclanstanas to the end -- diverges from a similar poem found in Tolkien's The Lost Road (44):

Thus cwæth Ælfwine Widlást:

Fela bith on Westwegum werum uncúthra,
wundra and wihta, wlitescéne land,
eardgeard elfa, and esa bliss.
Lyt ænig wat hwylc his longath sie
tham the eftsithes eldo getwæfeth.

Which Tolkien himself renders in prose as:

Thus said Ælfwine the far-travelled: "There's many a thing in the West-regions unknown to men, marvels and strange beings, a land fair and lovely, the homeland of the Elves, and the bliss of the Gods. Little doth any man know what longing is his whom old age cutteth off from return."

(LR 44)

Now Tolkien had been working on The Lost Road in the year or so just before The Hobbit appeared (21 September 1937), and it's entirely reasonable to think that as he was casting about for some verses to inscribe in this presentation copy his mind came to rest upon the lines from The Lost Road.  These verses, however, have a much darker tone, which Tolkien perhaps judged inappropriate for his former student, Katherine Kilbride, who was an invalid.  So, he removed the grim bits and wrote new lines that he deemed more fitting for the occasion and for the nature of the gift he was giving.

This much is prologue, I would argue.  For to describe these two poems as 'similar' and to say that the poem in The Hobbit 'diverges' or 'varies' from the poem in The Lost Road is quite an understatement.  As Tolkien himself famously remarked in On Fairy-stories:² 

... to take the extreme case of Red Riding Hood: it is of merely secondary interest that the retold version of this story, in which the little girl is saved by wood-cutters, is directly derived from Perrault's story in which she was eaten by the wolf. The really important thing is that the later version has a happy ending (more or less, and if we do not mourn the grandmother overmuch), and that Perrault's version had not. And that is a very profound difference....

A 'variation', a 'divergence', would be Bilbo's 'eager feet' (FR 1.i.35) and Frodo's 'weary feet' (FR 1.iii.73) in The Road Goes Ever On.  There a small change of the sort that Tolkien was so good at alters the tenor of the poem, and thereby the characterization of the speakers, suggesting something about their views of the roads they were about to set out upon.  We may also say the same of the last version of the The Road Goes Ever On (RK 6.vi.987), which in a few new lines reveals yet another road and the speaker's attitude toward it. These changes are improving variations on a theme. Each is linked to the next, each reflects the story that is, and hints at the journey to come, just as the very first version of this poem, sung by Bilbo at the end of The Hobbit (313), relishes looking back down that road as part of the joy of returning home. He knows where he is going, and what he has escaped.

But we have nothing like these variations, these evolutions, in the poems we are considering here. The verses in the Kilbride dedication and from The Lost Road differ from each other as much as Errantry and Bilbo's Song of Eärendil in Rivendell (FR 2.i.233-36). For all the similarities of word and rhyme and meter in Errantry and Eärendil, for all that both tell of a mariner who sets out on a journey to convey a message, the two are different poems.  For the tale told in Errantry is silly and funny and the message slips the easily distracted mariner's mind, compelling him to start all over again, which is part of the humor of the poem. Eärendil, by contrast, is about the tragedy and triumph of a determined messenger who saves the world by delivering his message at great cost to himself.  The same is true here.  We have distinct poems that share part of a sentence.

Let's look first at those shared lines, ignoring the orthographic variations.

Fela bið on westwegum werum uncuðra,
wundra and wihta, wlitescyne lond,
eardgeard ylfa,

As so often in Tolkien, going all the way back to the early poems Goblin Feet and You and Me and the Cottage of Lost Play (The Book of Lost Tales 1.27-32) there is the image of a road and a journey. Westwegum, literally 'westways,' places the end of this road in eardgeard ylfa, the shining homeland of the elves: Elvenhome. This suggests not only the West beyond the sea in Middle-earth, but also -- and this is especially true for those unacquainted with Tolkien's legendarium in 1937, which is to say, for almost everyone -- conjures the other mythic western lands of the great sea, from the Isles of the Blessed to Tír na nÓg, from Atlantis to the unknown destination of Scyld's funeral ship (Beowulf 26-52). We can also likely detect a connection to England itself in this word, since, as Tolkien would have known, vestr-vegir, the cognate phrase in Old Icelandic, referred to the British Isles themselves; and of course Tolkien once meant to make England itself the homeland of the Elves (BoLT 1.22-27).

In The Lost Road the wonder and splendor to be revealed in the West reaches yet higher. Not only will we men find Elvenhome, but we will glimpse esa bliss, the bliss of the gods. Though not for long, it seems. Esa bliss slips quickly away, beyond our grasp.  We are left only with longing and old age.  The wonder and beauty of the first lines turn dark because we cannot attain such bliss. It is not for us.  Even the sight of it awakens a longing we can neither turn from nor satisfy. The divide between us and them could not be more clear.

These lines, moreover, are 'laden with the sadness of Mortal Men,' as Legolas puts it after hearing Aragorn recite a poem of the Rohirrim in their own language (TT 4.vi.508).  As such they touch upon themes of 'Death and the desire for deathlessness' which Tolkien later said lay at the heart of The Lord of the Rings.³ Not only does The Lost Road employ these lines with immediate personal relevance to the characters speaking and hearing them, a son and his aged, failing father, but it affords them a wider application.  For with this work begins the Tale of Númenor, the island where men reject the fate of death and try to seize immortality and the 'bliss of the gods' by force, with cataclysmic results. Tolkien continued to develop this story for decades (as was his wont), in The Lord of the Rings, in The Notion Club Papers, in Akallabêth, and finally in Athrabeth Finrod Ah Andreth, which depicts men as already embittered about their 'swift fate' before the First Age had ended.⁴ The verses in The Lost Road may be said to contain within them the seeds, and perhaps the summary, of these themes. In the end, every man knows the longing for the bliss of the gods from which old age and death cut him off.

How different is the world the Kilbride dedication depicts. So far from an elegy of loss and longing, here a treasure shines secretly before us in the mountain caverns of Elvenhome. This is of course quite apropos in a presentation copy of The Hobbit, as is Tolkien's use of eorclanstanas, another form of which, eorcanstan, in the singular gives us arkenstone.  But eorcanstan itself brims with allusion, as this marvelous post by Dr Eleanor Parker makes clear, most prominently to Sigurd and to Christ, both of whom are likened to precious jewels using this word -- for Sigurd it's the Old Norse cognate jarknasteinn -- and both of whom fight dragons. 'And,' as Dr Parker points out,

'there's not as big a gap as you might think between Sigurðr and Christ; the scene of Sigurðr killing the dragon appears on early carvings in a Christian context, which are difficult to interpret but may show Sigurðr's triumph being cast as a battle between good and evil.'

And in Tolkien's The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, which he was also working in the 1930s, there exists for Sigurd, though dead, the promise of bliss after death and the world's ending.

In the day of Doom
he shall deathless stand
who death tasted
and dies no more,
the serpent-slayer,
seed of Óðin:
not all shall end,
nor Earth perish.

On his head the Helm,
in his hand lightning,
afire his spirit,
in his face splendour.
When war passeth
in world rebuilt,
bliss shall they drink
who the bitter tasted.

(Völsungkviða en Nýja ix.80-81)

This mention of bliss here is interesting because even the possibility of it seemed to be denied to men in The Lost Road verses, and the defeat of old age and its sequel appeared quite final.  As above, it is not so difficult to see what Sigurd has to do with Christ: bliss beyond the ending of this world in a new heaven and a new earth. Others words, too, in the Kilbride dedication provide a link to Christ and his ancient enemy, the dragon. For the words 'on dunscrafum digle' allude to the bestiary poem The Panther* in the collection Physiologus.

Just as the common lines of both Tolkien poems begin by enumerating how 'many are' (fela bið) the wonders and creatures of the world, before narrowing the focus down to the homeland of the Elves, The Panther also begins by stating how 'many are' (monge sindon) the different kinds of creatures across the wide world, before drawing our attention to one single animal,the panther, who is the most wondrous of them all. He guards a far land and dwells æfter dunscrafum (12), 'among mountain caves.' Kind to all other creatures, he has but one enemy, the dragon, to whom he does all the harm he can (15-18).⁵  Twice he is described in terms familiar from the common lines of Tolkien's verses (19: wundrum scine; and 26-27: scinra / wundrum). And again after further descriptions of his beauty that dazzles the eye, with each of his hues more lovely than the last (19-30), and of his mild and moderate character, except when it comes to the dragon (30-34), we are told he retires to sleep for three days digle stowe under dunscrafum 'in a secret place beneath the mountain caves' (36-37). In the latter half of the poem (38-74), the panther is explicitly identified with Christ, now risen from the secret places of the earth (dīgle ārās, 62), and the poet ends with a formula like that with which he began:

monigfealde sind geond middangeard
god ungnyðe  þe ūs tō giefe dǣleð
and tō feorhnere Fæder ælmihtig,
and se ānga Hyht ealra gesceafta
uppe ge niþre. 

Many are the good things across middle-earth,
Abundant goods which the Almighty Father
Assigns us for grace and for salvation,
And he the only Hope of all creatures
Above and below.

So clearly points of contact exist between these texts, which help Tolkien to create the more hopeful tenor of the Kilbride dedication. For even if the reader of The Hobbit soon learns that the arkenstone glittering in secret beneath the mountain halls is guarded by a dragon, heroes, whether Sigurd or Christ, can also shine like a jewel in the darkness and defeat that venomous, ancient enemy (33-34: þām āttorsceaþan, his fyrngeflitan). And given his faith and his words on the wonders of far off Elvenhome, it is rather tempting to think that in the words geond middangeard Tolkien saw the meaning 'beyond Middle-earth.' However that may be, the allusive links are not to be doubted, even if in 1937 only C.S. Lewis and perhaps a few others could have felt their full import.

Within these two distinct poems -- for that is what they are -- we can see Tolkien working masterfully to create opposite effects through the 'divergence' of his materials. In The Lost Road we find elegy, in the Kilbride dedication to The Hobbit hope. And the difference that this makes suits the Tales he is telling in each work.  For The Hobbit is a Tale of hope and happy endings, of renewal and return. In The Lost Road the Tale of Númenor could only have ended in cataclysm, with the great green wave sweeping across the land and a world lost forever, just as it does in Akallabêth:

In an hour unlooked for by Men this doom befell, on the nine and thirtieth day since the passing of the fleets. Then suddenly fire burst from the Meneltarma, and there came a mighty wind and a tumult of the earth, and the sky reeled, and the hills slid, and Númenor went down into the sea, with all its children and its wives and its maidens and its ladies proud; and all its gardens and its halls and its towers, its tombs and its riches, and its jewels and its webs and its things painted and carven, and its lore: they vanished for ever. And last of all the mounting wave, green and cold and plumed with foam, climbing over the land, took to its bosom Tar-Míriel the Queen, fairer than silver or ivory or pearls. Too late she strove to ascend the steep ways of the Meneltarma to the holy place; for the waters overtook her, and her cry was lost in the roaring of the wind.

(Silmarillion, 279)

_________________________________

*Before anything else I would like to express my thanks to Dr Eleanor Parker for her gracious conversation and correspondence on the verses discussed above. It was she who brought The Panther to my attention. Any errors of translation or interpretation are entirely my own.

_________________________

¹The initial error in the Sotheby's catalog is doubly wrong, first as to the language of the dedicatory lines, and second in seeming to name John Rateliff as the source of that attribution: 'Rateliff identifies the Elvish verse as an extract from Tolkien's The Lost Road.' But in Rateliff's The History of the Hobbit (second edition, 2011) appendix v, which Sotheby's cites, Rateliff makes no mention of the language in which the verse is written. It is possible that Sotheby's did not intend the sentence to be read that way.

² On Fairy-stories has appeared in print and on the internet so many times that referring to a page number in any one edition is almost unfair. I shall follow the practice adopted by Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson in their Tolkien on Fairy-stories (2014), where they number the paragraphs. The quotation in the text above is from paragraph number 24.

³ See letter 203 (Letters 1981): 'But I should say, if asked, the tale is not really about Power and Dominion: that only sets the wheels going; it is about Death and the desire for deathlessness. Which is hardly more than to say it is a tale written by a Man!' And also 211: 'It is mainly concerned with Death, and Immortality; and the "escapes": serial longevity, and hoarding memory.' These letters date from 1957 and 1958, respectively.

⁴ The Athrabeth, or The Debate of Finrod and Andreth, seems to date from 1959 or a little earlier. See Morgoth's Ring (New York 1993) 303-304. The bitterness about their brief lives compared to the Eldar and the resentment men felt over it runs throughout the Athrabeth (303-366), appearing within the first page of the dialogue (307-308):

'More than a hundred years it is now,' said Andreth, 'since we came over the Mountains; and Bëor and Baran and Boron each lived beyond his ninetieth year.  Our passing was swifter before we found this land.'

'Then are you content here?' said Finrod. 

'Content?' said Andreth. 'No heart of Man is content.  All passing and dying is a grief to it; but if the withering is less soon then that is some amendment, a little lifting of the Shadow.' 

'What mean you by that?' said Finrod. 

'Surely you know well!' said Andreth. 'The darkness that is now confined to the North, but once'; and here she paused and her eyes darkled, as if he mind were gone back into black years best forgot. 'But once lay upon all Middle-earth, while ye dwelt in your bliss.' 

'It was not concerning the Shadow that I asked,' said Finrod. 'What mean you, I would say, by the lifting of it? Or how is the swift fate of men concerned with it?  Ye also, we hold (being instructed by the Great who know), are Children of Eru, and your fate and nature is from Him.' 

'I see,' said Andreth, 'that in this ye of the High-elves do not differ from your lesser kindred whom we have met in the world, though they have never dwelt in the Light.  All ye Elves deem that we die swiftly by our true kind.  That we are brittle and brief, and ye are strong and lasting.  We may be "Children of Eru", as ye say in your lore; but we are children to you also: to be loved a little maybe, and yet creatures of less worth, upon whom ye may look down from the height of your power and your knowledge, with a smile, or with pity, or with a shaking of heads.'

⁵ I find it impossible not to think of Aslan while reading of the panther, but it seems equally impossible that no one has never noted that before.

Swanships and Swanroads in Tolkien and Beowulf

From the earliest days of the legendarium the swanships were present.  In 1917 (or so) Tolkien wrote in The Book of Lost Tales, Part One¹:

Now do the Solosimpi take great joy of [?their] birds, and of the swans, and behold upon the lakes of Tol Eressëa already they fare on rafts of fallen timber, and some harness thereto swans and speed across the waters; but the more hardy dare out upon the sea and the gulls draw them, and when Ulmo saw that he was very glad.  For lo! the Teleri and the Noldoli complain much to Manwë of the separation of the Solosimpi, and the Gods desire them to be drawn to Valinor; but Ulmo cannot yet think of any device save by help of Ossë and the Oarni, and will not be humbled to this.  But now does he fare home in haste to Aulë, and those twain get them speedily to Tol Eressëa, and Oromë was with them, and there is the first hewing of trees that was done in the world outside Valinor. Now does Aulë of the sawn wood of pine and oak make great vessels like to the bodies of swans, and these he covers with the bark of silver birches, or .... with gathered feathers with the oily plumage of Ossë's birds, and they are nailed and [?sturdily] riveted and fastened with silver, and he carves the prows for them like the necks of upheld swans, but they are hollow and have no feet; and by cords of great strength and slimness are gulls and petrels harnessed to them, for they were tame to the hands of the Solosimpi, because their hearts were so turned by Ossë.

(BoLT 1.124)

And though Tolkien never wrote more than a few scraps and notes of Eärendil's tale, he nevertheless had at least one detail of his ship clear in his mind. It was 'shaped as a swan of pearls' (The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, 263).  Tuor, Eärendil's father, had a boat just like those of the Elves of Tol Eressëa, 'with a prow fashioned like to the neck of a swan' (BoLT 2.151), and he was subsequently guided by swans on a path that led him in time to Gondolin, where he adopted the swan's wing as the sign of his house (2.152-160).²  In his later years, after Gondolin had fallen, Tuor built a ship called 'Swanwing' in which he sought to sail to Valinor (2.253-55, 260, 263, 265), on whose shores was Alqualuntë (later Alqualondë), 'Swan-Haven,' where the ships of the Solosimpi were berthed (BoLT 1.163-64). 

In Tolkien's painting of Taniquetil from the 1920s, we can glimpse just such a ship

in the sea at the foot of the mountain:

Nor does Tolkien abandon the swanships as Middle Earth develops.  The one in which Galadriel comes to bid farewell to the Fellowship is only the most famous example from The Lord of the Rings (FR 2.viii.372-73):

They turned a sharp bend in the river, and there, sailing proudly down the stream toward them, they saw a swan of great size. The water rippled on either side of the white breast beneath its curving neck. Its beak shone like burnished gold, and its eyes glinted like jet set in yellow stones; its huge white wings were half lifted. A music came down the river as it drew nearer; and suddenly they perceived that it was a ship, wrought and carved with elven skill in the likeness of a bird.... 

Aragorn stayed his boat as the Swan-ship drew alongside.... 

The Swan passed on slowly to the hythe, and they turned their boats and followed it.

In the song Bilbo sings at Rivendell he can still say of Eärendil's ship: '[h]er prow he fashioned like a swan' (FR 2.i.234); and the banner of the Prince of Dol Amroth bears 'a white ship like a silver swan upon blue water' (RK 5.viii.871; cf. 6.iv.953). We can also find swans and swanships in The Silmarillion (61, 238), and the link between these birds and Tuor is maintained in the lengthy fragment Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin in Unfinished Tales (25-28). 

So clearly the images of the swans and the swan-ships had an abiding appeal for Tolkien, but where the swanships come from is a question that to my knowledge has not been answered.  There are a number of possibilities, and though I incline more to one than the others, it is not implausible or unlikely that several influences combined to produce the swanships.

The first is simple, and might seem ridiculous.  Indeed it might be ridiculous, but that in itself does not rule it out.  When I first read of the swanship of Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings, I found it odd, but I could visualize it immediately.  At that time I was a little boy spending my summers in a small beach town adjacent to Asbury Park, NJ, and in the lake between the two towns there was a swan-boat:

As I was considering this, and actually inclining to dismiss it, the latest issue of The Tolkien Society's newsletter, Amon Hen (253), arrived in my mailbox.  Inside, by chance, was a request from one member, Mr Anthony Roland Clent, to contact him if anyone remembered 'the "Swan" boats at Hinksey boating pool' at Oxford in the 1940s and 1950s, which he saw as a possible source of inspiration for Tolkien. And while I don't consider chance-if-chance-you-call-it an adequate basis for scholarship, it made me think twice.  Now the swan-boats at Hinksey Park cannot be the inspiration for the swanships themselves, since the park did not exist until the mid 1930s,³ and both The Book of Lost Tales and the painting of Taniquetil predate this. It's quite possible, however, that the boats at Hinksey influenced Tolkien's description of them in The Lord of the Rings.⁴ As the gentleman from The Tolkien Society put it in his reply to my email:

I cannot but think that Tolkien used the idea of these two boats at Hinksey for his Swan boat of Galadriel. The description is uncannily similar to how I remember them, with their "white wings half lifted", and I guess Tolkien must have seen them if he ever walked down that way. They were not, alas, propelled by two elves clad in white, using black paddles....

For a medievalist and a man of his time like Tolkien inspiration might also be found in the tale, first found in the late 12th century, of the Knight of the Swan and more recently in Wagner's Lohengrin. In sum, a mysterious knight arrives in a boat drawn by a swan to rescue a woman in peril. Here there clearly seems to be a link to the passage of The Book of Lost Tales I quoted above, which describes the swans pulling the rafts on the lakes of Tol Eressëa.

Lohengrin Postcard ca. 1900

17th Century Woodcut

But while this might explain the swans drawing the boats in the lakes, it does not explain the swanships themselves.  For this we must look elsewhere.  Fortunately an answer seems to be ready at hand, in a source that will surprise no one.

                             Hét him ýþlidan
gódne gegyrwan;   cwæþ, hé gúþcyning
ofer swanrade        sécean wolde
mærne þéoden,      þá him wæs manna ðearf.

(Beowulf  198-201)

                             He ordered his ship built,
A great wave-walker, and said he would seek
Over the long sea, the swan's road,
that well-known king needing brave new men.

(transl. Williamson)

Swanrad, the swan-road, as the context makes clear, is a kenning for the sea, much like the better known hronrad, the whale-road (Beowulf 10). But there's something odd about it.  Swans may be water fowl, but they are not seabirds.  That Tolkien perceived this is evident: in the lakes of Tol Eressëa swans pull the rafts of the Elves; but in the salt sea petrels and gulls are harnessed to the swan-ships.  Robert Woodward resolved this oddity by pointing out that swanrad is in fact a double kenning, in which swan is itself first a kenning for ship, and then is joined to rad to become a kenning for the sea.⁵ And it's only a few lines later, as Woodward notes, that the poet likens the 'neck' of the ship to a bird's:

Gewát þá ofer wægholm    winde gefýsed
flota fámiheals    fugle gelícost,

(Beowulf  217-18)

Over the scending sea, driven by the wind,
Went the ship, foamy-necked much like a bird,

(transl. mine)⁶ 

Heals, the second element in the adjective fámiheals, means both prow and neck, and the poet plays ably on both these senses in fámiheals fugle gelícost.  Birds don't move fast enough through the water to make the sea foam around them, but ships do; and ships don't have necks, but birds do. 'Its foamy prow so like a bird's neck' catches, I think, the double sense of it, but loses the poem's eloquent compression. Nevertheless, the poet evokes the image of a bird here to describe Beowulf's ship, and it can hardly be an accident that seventeen lines earlier he had chosen to use swanrad when he could just as easily have used hronrad,⁷ but instead of the whale he conjured the swan, whose neck curves so like the prow of a ship of this era.

The famous Oseberg ship, built ca. 820

And Tolkien's close attention to this passage could not be more clear.  He chose these very lines (210-228) to illustrate his explanation of the workings of alliterative verse in his essay On Translating Beowulf (61-71), in which he also already discussed swanrad, though the meaning of rad was his subject there (51-52). We have three separate renderings of fámiheals fugle gelícost by him: in verse as 'foam-throated, like a flying bird;' in prose as 'with foam at the throat most like unto a bird;' and a literal prose version in the Old English word order, 'foamy-neck (to) bird likest.'⁸ 

If, moreover, we turn back for a moment to consider Galadriel's swan-ship, 'wrought and carved with elven skill in the likeness of a bird,' we can see an interesting progression in Tolkien's description of it.  When the members of the fellowship first see it, they take it to be a proper 'swan.' Then they realize that it is in fact a 'swan-ship.'  And finally it becomes a 'Swan.'  From 'swan' to 'swan-ship' to 'Swan,' it's like watching the birth of a kenning.  If Tolkien did not recognize the swan in swanrad as itself a kenning for ship, he turned it into one here.

Now Old English possesses a second word for swan, ilfette/ilfettu, which establishes another link to the swanships and the Elves in The Book of Lost Tales.  In a marginal gloss on the words 'Kópas Alqualuntë, the Haven of the Swanships,' Tolkien wrote Ielfethyþ. This word, Christopher Tolkien explains,

is Old English, representing the interpretation of the Elvish name made by Eriol in his own language: the first element meaning 'swan' (ielfetu), and the second (later 'hithe') meaning 'haven, landing place.'

(BoLT 1.164)

As Christopher Tolkien's note indicates, ielfethyþ is his father's coinage through the character of Eriol, the seafarer who finds his way to Tol Eressëa and learns the stories told in The Book of Lost Tales (1.13-27). Why use ielfethyþ when swanhyþ would have worked just as well? Not to conceal one connection by choosing the less obvious synonym, but, I would argue, to suggest another by echoing ilfe, the Old English for elves, the entry for which directly precedes ilfette in Bosworth Toller.⁹

Hyþ, the second element in ielfethyþ, also has echoes in this connection since 'hithe' is used by Tolkien only to describe the landing place where the swan-ship of Galadriel lands; he spells it 'hythe' in an archaic manner evocative of Old English; and the three times the word 'hythe' appears here are the only three times the word appears in The Lord of the Rings (FR 2.viii.371, 373, 377).  Except for Christopher Tolkien's note above, it also does not appear, in either spelling, in The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, The Book of Lost Tales, or Unfinished Tales.  In an author so careful of his words, so knowledgeable about them, and so inclined to archaic words in the right context, the fact that he uses 'hythe' three times here and nowhere else indicates great deliberateness in choosing it.  It was not merely an old word that meant 'landing.'

On balance then there seems to be ample evidence for tracing Tolkien's inspiration for the swanships to the combination of swanrad and fámiheals fugle gelícost. Other influences are not to be ignored for other aspects of the swanships, like the Knight of the Swan and the likelihood that Tolkien saw swanboats at Hinksey Park. Michael Martinez has summarized still other likely reasons for the imagery of swans in Tolkien.  But the ships themselves first sailed the swanroad.

_____________________________________

¹ For those not familiar with The Book of Lost Tales, a couple of quick observations may be useful. First, it contains early versions of many stories that we later see in The Silmarillion, but these stories often differ greatly in emphasis, tone, style, names, and characterization (to name a few). Some find these differences as surprising as The Silmarillion itself is to those who have known only The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The Book of Lost Tales, however, is as interesting a work in its own right as it is as a precursor to the later tales. Second, Christopher Tolkien performed heroic work on chaotic manuscripts to come up with a publishable version, reading nearly unreadable handwriting set down in faded 70 year old pencil on paper that had sometimes held older versions which had been erased and overwritten. No doubt an electron microscope and a palantír would have come in handy.

For the date see The Book of Lost Tales, Part One (Boston 1984) 1.203; The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two (Boston 1984) 2.146-47; Unfinished Tales (1981) 4-5.

² At BoLT 2.160 Tuor names himself as being 'of the house of the Swan.' He seems to have taken this description to himself rather than inheriting it: 'This [dwelling] by slow labor [Tuor] adorned with fair carvings of the beasts and trees and flowers and birds that he knew about the waters of Mithrim, and ever among them was the Swan the chief, for Tuor loved this emblem and it became the sign of himself, his kindred and folk thereafter' (2.152).

³ Hinksey Park was built on the grounds of the former Oxford Waterworks, which were purchased for this purpose in 1934.  See here.

⁴ I contacted the gentleman who had placed the notice in Amon Hen by email, to which he was kind enough to reply as quoted.  Unfortunately he did not have a photograph of his swan-boats, and I have so far been unable to find one.

⁵ Robert H. Woodward, 'Swanrad in Beowulf,' Modern Language Notes 69 (1954) 544-46.  He also identifies parallels in Old Norse using svan.

⁶ I supply my own translation here because I think a more literal rendering is necessary to the point being made. I also think Williamson's otherwise excellent translation of Beowulf stumbles on fámiheals fugle gelícost, for which he gives us 'the foam-necked floater.' To be sure flota is a rather colorless word for ship, but the super-literal 'floater' conceals more than it reveals. And revelation is what we seek here.

⁷ On hronrad see Tolkien, Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary (2014) 141-43, where he argues that "'whale road'-- which suggests a sort of semi-submarine steam engine running along submerged metal rails over the Atlantic" is not quite the right translation for this word.

⁸ The poetic and the literal prose translations come from On Translating Beowulf, 63 and 69 respectively, reprinted in in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (London, 2006), and the prose from Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary (New York 2014).

⁹ What the difference may be between swan and ilfette is unknown to me. Hexam. 8 suggests that to some there was one: sume fugelas beóþ langsweorede swá swá swanas ond ilfette. 'Some birds are long-necked like swanas and ilfette. According to Bosworth Toller, in Icelandic svanr, the cognate of swan is only poetical, while alpt/alft, the cognate of ilfette, was the normal word for swan, but it does not appear from the citations in Bosworth Toller that Old English maintained so neat a distinction.

Tolkien Reading Day 2015 -- On Friendship

The other day, thanks to +Jeremiah Burns, I read a BBC article on a 98 year old woman whose mother gave her the middle name of 'Somme' in remembrance of the horrific battle in which her father had died some months before she was born.  It was a moving piece.  The woman, Tiny Somme Gray, said she could not sign her name without thinking of the father she had never known.  Her mother did not speak of her husband's death, she told the BBC, or visit the local WWI memorial on which his name was inscribed.  But she made certain her daughter went there and would always remember.  The depth of her sorrow is clear even now, as is the depth of the love and friendship she must have shared with her husband.

Since we were just reading the first version of the story of Túrin in our class on The Book of Lost Tales, Part II at Mythgard, I was reminded of that story, in which Túrin's father, Húrin, goes off to fight in the battle that came to be known as the Battle of Unnumbered Tears.¹  But in addition to a son, Húrin left behind Morwen, his wife who was carrying their child. Since Húrin did not return from the battle and no news of his fate could be learnt, Morwen named their daughter 'Nienor, which is Mourning' (Unfinished Tales, 73).² 

Stories like this must have been all too common in WWI.  Thousands of children, conceived on a brief visit home or a briefer honeymoon, must have been born to wives who waited in what was most likely stoic dread for the word that their child would be born too late to know its father; or, if these wives were not left pregnant, many of them must have wondered if they would ever have children at all. Among these women was Edith Tolkien, who married Tolkien 99 years ago today, on 22 March 1916, but 'May found [him] crossing the Channel ... for the carnage of the Somme' (Letters, no. 43, p. 53). He was 'a Second Lieut. on 7/6 a day in the infantry where the chances of survival were against you heavily' (Letters, no. 43, p. 53). Their first child, John, was born in November 1917:

She married me in 1916 and John was born in 1917 (conceived and carried during the starvation-year of 1917 and the great U-boat campaign) round about the battle of Cambrai, when the end of the war seemed as far-off as it does now [in 1941].

(Letters, no. 43, p. 53)

Even a quarter of a century later everything is seen in terms of the doubt and peril of the war (which seemed to be repeating itself, only worse in March 1941, when England stood entirely alone). What must it have been like for Edith in 1916 and 1917, with letters and telegrams arriving in every town in Britain every day to transform a woman's worst fear into sorrow? I have heard it said that people hated the very sight of the telegram delivery man. 

It was a time of horrors that shattered the mirror of complacency in which Europe had long admired itself.  Old Poets, like Yeats, felt it in The Second Coming.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

And Young Poets felt it more so, men like Siegfried Sassoon, a contemporary of Tolkien, who also served in France and wrote many increasingly bitter poems about the war.

Suicide in the Trenches 

I knew a simple soldier boy 
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.  

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again. 

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

I could easily find and cite a hundred more poems -- not to mention short stories and novels -- that would bludgeon this point home, but the wonder here is that Tolkien did not become lost as so many others of his time did.³ And I at least always hear an echo of the disillusionment and despair that inform these poems in Frodo's words to Sam in Mordor:

'No taste of food, no feel of water, no sound of wind, no memory of tree or grass or flower, no image of moon or star, are left to me now.  I am naked in the dark, Sam, and there is no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I begin to see it even with my waking eyes, and all else fades.'

(RK 6.iii.937-938)

Frodo knew 'the hell where youth and laughter go.' And so, therefore, did Tolkien. Frodo never returned from that dark wood.  Sam and Tolkien did.  When you read the WWI poets you see the way they feel about England, and how much a part of their affection for their homeland some vision of the English countryside is.  This is especially true early on in the war.  But if you know your Tolkien, it is clear that his vision is much the same as theirs.  His found expression in the Shire.

Because of his faith, because of the stories he began to write down during the war, and probably just as importantly because of his friendship and love with his wife, Edith, who subsequently vanishes from our view into the life of raising her children, and whose presence is lost in the impossible whirlwind of her husband's stories and teaching and better known friendships with C. S. Lewis and the Inklings, Tolkien was able to transform that experience into something greater.  And I don't mean something as pseudo-intellectual as 'he transformed his experience into The Lord of the Rings.'  No, if anything his writing was a tool for him as much as it was a tale for others.  He transformed his experience into a full and round and thoughtful life.  And again I do not mean he sat down to write as a form of therapy.  That was just a large part of the way he approached the world and understood it.

What do most of us know of Edith?  Not much.  But if all we know is just one thing, it is that when she died Tolkien had 'Luthien' inscribed on the headstone, to be joined by 'Beren' when he died two years later. He even said at one point in a letter to his son, Christopher, that Edith had provided the inspiration for the Tale of Beren and Luthien (Letters no. 340, pp. 420-421).  This is of course all quite romantic and charming.  But if all we do is look warmly upon it, and think how sweet it is, we are missing something very important.  The relationship of Beren and Luthien changed their world.  They were not just lovers in the old or new sense of the word.  Through their love and friendship they worked together and accomplished what all the armies of Men and Elves could not; and their love and deeds had an effect that rippled down the ages, and more than once gave birth to hope in darkness. In that respect it is the most important Tale of Middle-Earth, and the Great Tales never do end. 

That is what love and friendship, as Tolkien sees them, can do. 

We should not neglect where the Tale went in remembering the sweetness of where it came from. 

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¹ British killed and wounded at the Somme between July and November 1916 numbered over 350,000. I have long thought that these casualties, combined with Tolkien's memory of Homer, who said that the destructive wrath of Achilles μυρί᾽ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε᾽ἔθηκε (Iliad 1.2) -- 'put unnumbered woes on the Achaeans' -- was the inspiration (hardly the proper word for something so grim) for the name 'Unnumbered Tears.' μυρία means 'numberless, countless, infinite.' I would be quite surprised if I were the first to point this out.

² I take a liberty here, using the more familiar, later forms of the names Húrin, Morwen, and Nienor. In The Book of Lost Tales, Part II they are called Úrin, Mavwin, and Nienóri.

³ For the WWI poets, see Santanu Das, The Cambridge Companion to the Poets of the First World War (2013); Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology, ed. Tim Kendall (2013); Max Egremont, Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew (2014); and John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: On the Threshold of Middle-Earth (2004).