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?

Pity, Power, And Tolkien's Ring -- a bit of the Introduction

 

Boethius and the Unman in Perelandra

I have been spending a fair bit of time with Boethius and Saint Augustine lately. No, really that's okay. My next book will begin with quite a lengthy analysis of "The Music of the Ainur" from Tolkien's The Book of Lost Tales. Having walked carefully through the text and studied, among other things, how it shows Melko's descent into evil, I am now looking into Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy, and Augustine's The City of God and On Free Will. The connections of these authors and works to evil as portrayed in Tolkien has long been discussed by scholars, but those discussion have focussed largely on evil in The Lord of the Rings. 

"The Music of the Ainur" and The Lord of the Rings, however, are two very different kinds of text. The one is creation myth, told by Rúmil, the elf, to Eriol, the man, and based upon an account which Manwë, the Vala, gave to Rúmil's ancestors (LT I 52). The other, as the text itself claims, is the memoirs of Bilbo and Frodo and what hobbits did in the War of the Ring (RK 6.ix.1027). From its own perspective then, The Lord of the Rings is a work of history, not mythology. So what these two works have to say about evil will be said differently. 

Not only that. When he wrote The Book of Lost Tales Tolkien was a young man trying to use fairy-stories to make sense of how he felt about the fair and foul of the Great War, a task he began while the war was still going on. When he wrote The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien was a middle-aged man with sons of his own facing the evils of their own great war. Indeed, citing his own experience, he told his son, Christopher, in 1944 that maybe he should also try writing as a way to understand his own experience (Letters no. 66 p. 78). We can't assume that the younger Tolkien thought exactly the same thing as the older Tolkien. Anyone who has gone from youth to middle age without changing his opinions any number of times has not been paying attention.

Be that as it may, I have also been re-reading Perelandra by C. S. Lewis, just because it's been too long. While there are many passages in Lewis's works which jump up and down and shout "Boethius" at me, I ran across one this morning that not only shouted, but pointed quite obviously to a specific passage in The Consolation of Philosophy. First, here's the passage from Book Four, chapter Two of Boethius in the original and my translation. The italics in the translation are mine:

Nam uti cadaver hominem mortuum dixeris, simpliciter vero hominem appellare non possis, ita vitiosos malos quidem esse concesserim, sed esse absolute nequeam confiteri. Est enim, quod ordinem retinet servatque naturam; quod vero ab hac deficit, esse etiam, quod in sua natura situm est, derelinquit.

For just as you might say that a corpse is a dead man, but you could not simply call it a man, so I would grant that the wicked are evil indeed, but I could not allow that they are in absolute terms. For a thing which does not let go of its place and preserves its nature is. But a thing which forsakes its nature has also abandoned the being which depends on its nature.

4.2.33-36.

 Another passage further on explains what he means when he says that evil is nothing, that is, that evil has no independent existence of its own:

hoc igitur modo quicquid a bono deficit esse desistit. quo fit ut mali desinant esse quod fuerant. sed fuisse homines adhuc ipsa humani corporis reliqua species ostentat: quare uersi in malitiam humanam quoque amisere naturam.

Therefore anything which abandons the good in this manner ceases to be. Because of which it comes about that the evil cease to be what they had been – but their appearance, their human body, still remains and shows that they had been humans – and so when they turned to wickedness they also let go of their human nature.

4.3.15

Now here's what Lewis writes in chapter 9 of Perelandra:

Ransom kept his eyes fixed upon the enemy, but it took no notice of him. Its eyes moved like the eyes of a living man but it was hard to be sure what it was looking at, or whether it really used the eyes as organs of vision at all. One got the impression of a force that cleverly kept the pupils of those eyes fixed in a suitable direction while the mouth talked but which, for its own purpose, used wholly different modes of perception. The thing sat down close to the Lady’s head on the far side of her from Ransom. If you could call it sitting down. The body did not reach its squatting position by the normal movements of a man: it was more as if some external force maneuvered it into the right position and then let it drop. It was impossible to point to any particular motion which was definitely nonhuman. Ransom had the sense of watching an imitation of living motions which had been very well studied and was technically correct: but somehow it lacked the master touch. And he was chilled with an inarticulate, night-nursery horror of the thing he had to deal with— the managed corpse, the bogey, the Unman.

Lewis, Perelandra, chapter 9, pp. 104-05 

Now the analogy is by no means perfect, but its imperfection makes it that much more illustrative, as the following quote from the same chapter of Perelandra shows. Here the corpse of Weston (Ransom's human enemy) has been possessed and reanimated by a demon, but the descent from Weston to Unman is summed up eloquently in that last sentence. Weston 'did not defy goodness,' he 'ignored it to the point of annihilation.' His own. He has ceased to be what he was and has become the Unman. What Weston's possession and reanimation by the demon allows us to see more clearly is how both Weston and the demon have become non-existent in the way Boethius described.

[Ransom] saw a man who was certainly not ill .... He saw a man who was certainly Weston, to judge from his height and build and coloring and features. In that sense he was quite recognizable. But the terror was that he was also unrecognizable. He did not look like a sick man: but he looked very like a dead one. [His] face ... had that terrible power which the face of a corpse sometimes has of simply rebuffing every conceivable human attitude one can adopt towards it. The expressionless mouth, the unwinking stare of the eyes, something heavy and inorganic in the very folds of the cheek, said clearly: “I have features as you have, but there is nothing in common between you and me.” It was this that kept Ransom speechless. What could you say— what appeal or threat could have any meaning— to that? And now, forcing its way up into consciousness, thrusting aside every mental habit and every longing not to believe, came the conviction that this, in fact, was not a man: that Weston’s body was kept, walking and undecaying, in Perelandra by some wholly different kind of life, and that Weston himself was gone. 

It looked at Ransom in silence and at last began to smile. We have all often spoken— Ransom himself had often spoken— of a devilish smile. Now he realized that he had never taken the words seriously. The smile was not bitter, nor raging, nor, in an ordinary sense, sinister; it was not even mocking. It seemed to summon Ransom, with a horrible naïveté of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them. It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it. It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation.

Lewis, Perelandra, chapter 9, p. 95

I would be surprised if no one else had noticed this Boethian moment in Perelandra, but I wanted to share it. It makes such perfect sense that Lewis would have found the animation of Boethius' image of the dead man, which you could no longer call simply a man, to be just what he needed to convey what is at stake at this moment as the Unman tempts the Green Lady to defy the good.

Frodo, Too, Tips His Hand -- The Threat Outside the Black Gate (TT 4.iii.640)

When Frodo, Sam, and Gollum reach the Black Gate and Frodo declares that he must try to enter Mordor that way, a panic-stricken Gollum slips up and tells Frodo to give him the Ring rather than do anything so foolish. Frodo does not respond to Gollum's suggestion at first, not until he has learned that Gollum knows another way in. After grilling Gollum about it, he decides to trust him once again. Then and only then does he return to the suggestion Gollum had made about the Ring.

‘But I warn you, Sméagol, you are in danger.’

‘Yes, yes, master!’ said Gollum. ‘Dreadful danger! Sméagol’s bones shake to think of it, but he doesn’t run away. He must help nice master.’ 

‘I did not mean the danger that we all share,’ said Frodo. ‘I mean a danger to yourself alone. You swore a promise by what you call the Precious. Remember that! It will hold you to it; but it will seek a way to twist it to your own undoing. Already you are being twisted. You revealed yourself to me just now, foolishly. Give it back to Sméagol you said. Do not say that again! Do not let that thought grow in you! You will never get it back. But the desire of it may betray you to a bitter end. You will never get it back. In the last need, Sméagol, I should put on the Precious; and the Precious mastered you long ago. If I, wearing it, were to command you, you would obey, even if it were to leap from a precipice or to cast yourself into the fire. And such would be my command. So have a care, Sméagol!’

(TT 4.iii.640, italics mine)

Since Gollum is almost the last person Frodo would want to know that he was planning to throw the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom, neither he nor Sam have told Gollum why they must get into Mordor. In fact earlier in this very scene Sam reflects on just this: "‘And it’s a good thing neither half of the old villain don’t know what master means to do,’ he thought. ‘If he knew that Mr. Frodo is trying to put an end to his Precious for good and all, there’d be trouble pretty quick, I bet'" (TT 4.iii.639). It was only the night before Sam had overheard Gollum's two sides talking to each other about, among other things, 'what's the hobbit going to do with it, we wonders, yes, we wonders' (TT 4.ii.633).* 

Somehow it never crossed my mind until yesterday that Frodo reveals himself here just as much as Gollum had by suggesting Frodo give him the Ring back. His threat about commanding him to leap from a precipice might well pass unnoticed, but 'cast yourself into the fire' draws attention to itself. What fire? What fire large enough to cast oneself into? Gollum doesn't reply, doesn't ask. Frodo's taunting and threatening him and invoking the power of the Ring thoroughly cows him for the moment. He'll figure it out, however, as he follows Frodo and Sam across Mordor towards the fire of Mount Doom. There, on the road to the Sammath Naur, Gollum will grasp what fire his wicked master had been talking about.

__________________

*It's interesting to note that the phrase, 'we wonders ... we wonders' pops up twice before this moment. 

When Gollum first meets the hobbits, he says 'And where are they going in these cold hard lands. We wonders, yes, we wonders' (TT 4.i.615).

After Gollum attempts to escape, Sam hurls the words back at him: 'And where were you off to in these cold hard lands, Mr. Gollum.... We wonders, aye, wonders' (TT 4.i.617).

Detecting the Hand of the 'Translator' in The Lord of the Rings

Yesterday in my effort to catch up to Corey Olsen in Exploring the Lord of the Rings, I was listening to him talk about detecting the hand of the translator in The Lord of the Rings. Not the translator who turns Tolkien's English into German or French or Japanese, but the one who took the "original" Westron text and rendered it into English. According to the runes and tengwar on the title page, this is Tolkien himself of course. 

Corey was rightly noting that certain touches are obvious. For example, in Gandalf's pyrotechnic dragon which passes overhead 'like an express train' at Bilbo's party (FR 1.i.28), we encounter a simile that would have no meaning whatsoever to the inhabitants of Middle-earth. So clearly it is meant to communicate with us by the translator who is trying to get the meaning of the original across the language gap in a way in which a more 'faithful' and direct translation could not do.

I would like to suggest a few other types of clues. 

1. If you hear an echo of the Bible, that reveals the hand of the translator. 
2. If you hear an echo of Shakespeare or Chaucer or any writer of the Primary World, that reveals the hand of the translator.
3. If you meet an image or symbol that has meaning in the Primary World, but for which none can be discerned in the Secondary World, that reveals the hand of the translator. 

Let's take a quick look at a few examples. 

In Shelob's Lair we learn of Gollum's relationship with Shelob in a phrase that seems to evoke the words of the 23rd psalm, in a nightmarish antithesis:

• '...and the darkness of her evil will walked through all the ways of his weariness beside him, cutting him off from light and regret...' (TT 4.ix.723).
•  'yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou are with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.'

In The Shadow of the Past the allusion to Chaucer is obvious:

• 'there were several meals at which it snowed food and rained drink, as hobbits say.' (FR 1.ii.42)
• 'It snewed in his hous of mete and drink' (Cantebury Tales, General Prologue line 345).

'Mete' in Chaucer just means 'food.' Tolkien also adds to the humor by claiming the phrase as the hobbits' own. (Of course Chaucer may have been a hobbit. Do we have any idea how tall he was?)

In The Stairs of Cirith Ungol a nod to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar warns us (as if we needed the warning at this point) that Gollum is no one to be trusted even in the moment in which he comes closest to repenting of his plan to betray Frodo and Sam.

• 'A strange expression passed over his lean hungry face' (TT 4.viii.714).
• 'Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look' (Julius Caesar 1.ii.195).

Anyone who knows Macbeth will easily think of quite a few others which I won't detail here.

The two references Frodo makes to 'the wheel of fire' he sees in his mind I have discussed at length elsewhere. The image has many connections in the Primary World, but none at all in the legendarium.

There's a lot of ground to be explored here.