Splintered Light

Splin-
tered
Light
Logos and Language
in Tolkien’s World

Verlyn Flieger

The Kent State University Press Kent & London

 © 2002 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Card Catalog Number 2002073175
isbn 0-87338-744-9

Second edition
First edition published by William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1983

10 09 08 07 06     5 4 3 2 1

Material from J. R. R. Tolkien’s following works are reprinted by permission of

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.: The Hobbit, 1938; The Lord of the Rings, 1991; The
Silmarillion, 1999; The History of Middle-earth, 12 vols., 1984–96; The Letters of
J. R. R. Tolkien, 1981; Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, 1983.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Flieger, Verlyn, 1933–

Splintered light : logos and language and Tolkien’s world / Verlyn Flieger.—2nd. ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-87338-744-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) ∞
1. Tolkien, J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel), 1892–1973. Silmarillion. 2. Tolkien, J. R. R.
(John Ronald Reuel), 1892–1973—Language. 3. Christianity and literature—England—
History—20th century. 4. Fantasy fiction, English—History and criticism. 5. Light
and darkness in literature. 6. Middle Earth (Imaginary place) I. Title.

pr6039.o32 s5325 2003

823’.912—dc21  2002073175

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.

 Contents

Preface to the Second Edition vii

Preface to the First Edition xi
Introduction xiii
1 A Man of Antitheses 1
2 Dyscatastrophe 11
3 Eucatastrophe 21
4 Poetic Diction and Splintered Light 33
5 Fantasy and Phenomena 45
6 Splintered Light and Splintered Being 49
7 Theme and Variations 57
8 A Disease of Mythology 67
9 Perception = Name = Identity 73
10 Ourselves as Others See Us 81
11 amazing wine and cellar doors 87
12 Light and Heat 97
13 Making versus Hoarding 107
14 Light Out of Darkness 119
15 Beyond the Music 127
16 Light for Light 132
17 Beren and Thingol 139
18 The Smallest Fragment 147
19 Filled with Clear Light 155
20 One Good Custom 167
Afterword 175
Notes 177
Works Consulted 183
Index 185
 Preface to the Second Edition

Since Splintered Light was first published, Owen Barfield has died. At
ninety-eight he was not only the last of the Inklings, he was the last link
to a generation of thinkers whose ideas provided a countercurrent to
the existentialist philosophy that seemed to characterize the twentieth
century. The effect of Barfield’s work on the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien,
and consequently on the present study of Tolkien’s fantasy, would be
hard to overestimate. I owe him a great deal, and it is my hope that the
republication of Splintered Light, and thus of some of the central tenets
of his thought, will in small measure repay my debt.
A great deal of work has been done in Tolkien studies since the
present book was first written. Of primary importance is Christopher
Tolkien’s The History of Middle-earth, an edition with commentary on
the entire body of work his father came to call the Silmarillion. This
is more than helpful; it is indispensable. Chris­topher’s contribution to
his father’s work and to Tolkien studies is of central importance not
just to Tolkien scholars but to all readers of Tolkien’s fiction. The first
volume, The Book of Lost Tales, was published in 1984, a year after
Splintered Light. Completed in 1996 in twelve volumes, this invaluable
series makes available to scholar and general reader alike the length
and breadth of Tolkien’s mythology from its beginnings through all its
changes and developments, modifications, variations, and competing
versions. It shows the range and depth of Tolkien’s imagination and
his mythopoeic thought. It shows where The Silmarillion came from
and how its rather compressed account of Tolkien’s world relates to
the whole. It gives an invaluable picture of how The Lord of the Rings
turned inevitably and ineluctably toward the parent myth as the story
took shape.

vii
viii Preface to the Second Edition

The Preface to the first edition of Splintered Light defended the

importance of Tolkien’s fantasy as a vehicle for philosophical and
meta­physical speculation. It was correct in this, but too limited, I now
believe, in suggesting that its subject matter was more relevant to such
speculation than to the concerns of ordinary modern life. The interven-
ing years have shown increasingly that Tolkien’s work is highly relevant,
that it speaks to and for the anxieties that marked his century (now
past) and speaks even more profoundly to the new one he never lived to
see. Moreover, it expresses those anxieties more tellingly precisely for
being couched as fantasy fiction and has lasted longer than many more
realistic works that have come and gone since The Lord of the Rings
was first published. The first Preface asked “Why should anyone read
Tolkien?” My answer at that time was, “For refreshment and entertain-
ment.” I know more about Tolkien and his work now than I did then,
and I would amend my original answer to read: “For refreshment and
entertainment and, even more important, for a deeper understanding
of the ambiguities of good and evil and of ethical and moral dilemmas
of a world constantly embroiled in wars with itself.”
While the first edition dealt with some aspects of The Lord of the
Rings, the argument was based largely on two books published after
Tolkien’s death and some twenty or so years after that work appeared.
The Silmarillion is an admittedly synoptic version of Tolkien’s cos-
mology, a one-volume overview edited and published by Christopher
Tolkien in 1977. Unfinished Tales, containing supplementary (and often
longer versions) of stories in The Silmarillion, was published three years
after that. Using these works to throw new light on The Lord of the
Rings, until then read in something of a mythological vacuum, Splin-
tered Light argued for the toughness of Tolkien’s imaginative vision.
It examined the role of his invented languages in creating his fictive
world and explored their function in reflecting its ethos.
As the twentieth century drew to a close, Tolkien came more and
more to be seen as what the title of T. A. Shippey’s recent book calls
him, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Far from sinking out of
sight as escapist fantasy or being shouldered aside by more “realistic”
fiction, Tolkien’s work is coming to be recognized as being in step with
his time and as reflecting its wars, precarious peacetimes, and increas-
ing anxiety about the stability of modern life. Tolkien’s work is more
relevant to the world today than it appeared to be when The Lord of the
Rings was first published in the mid-1950s. Readers initially enchanted
 Preface to the Second Edition ix

by its fantasy world return again and again to the story for its soberer
reflection of the real one.
Tolkien’s great essay “On Fairy-stories” is the best and deepest con-
sideration I have encountered of the nature, origin, and value of myth
and fantasy, as well as the most cogent commentary on his own work.
Here, among the many nuggets of pure gold, is the clearest statement
of his working theory of fantasy. “For creative fantasy,” he writes, “is
founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it
appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it”
(The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays [MC] 144).
Just so. Things in the world are as they are. It is the function of fan-
tasy and its greatest strength to make that hard recognition and enable
the audience to make it as well. That audience may come for escape
to another world (or think that they do), but they must return to their
own with the recognition, hard and uncompromising, that things are so
in this world. This is the ultimate importance of The Lord of the Rings
and The Silmarillion to Tolkien’s own, to this, or to any century.
 Preface to the First Edition

In this uneasy century whose people are no more divided from one an-
other than from themselves, when the likelihood of annihilation is the
only constant in an age of change, what relevance is to be found in a
reactionary English professor’s anachronistic flight of fancy about elves
and dragons and hobbits and magic jewels? That the books of this “hobbit
don,” as a skeptical colleague once termed J. R. R. Tolkien, topped the
New York Times best-seller list for many weeks only shows the doubters
the perennial appeal of escapism and the intellectual sloth of hoi pol-
loi. Tolkien’s fiction does not anatomize the empty lives of the middle
class or the squalor and pathos of the poor; it offers no sex (though it
has a surprising amount of violence), no social comment, no anger, no
alienation. It has, in fact, little or no relationship to (as Oscar Wilde’s
Gwendolyn puts it) “the actual facts of real life as we know them.”
Gwendolyn is talking about metaphysical speculation, and while
Tolkien has a fairly low opinion of real life, and much prefers truth
to facts, he would disagree with her that metaphysical speculation is
irrelevant to either. The bones of his fiction are exactly such specula-
tion, although they are fleshed with enchantment rather than reality
and clothed in imagination rather than fact.
WhyshouldanyonereadTolkien?Forrefreshmentandentertainment.Why
should anyone take his work seriously—as seriously (and that is very seriously
indeed) as he took it? Because it is tough, uncompromising, honest. Because
it confronts directly, albeit imaginatively, those two awkward, embarrassing,
even forbidden subjects that our time shrinks from: death and the relationship
between humanity and God. If we do read Tolkien, and if we do take him seri-
ously, we may learn about ourselves—learn much that we did not know and
even more that we once knew and have now forgotten.

xi
xii Preface to the First Edition

Tolkien puts us in touch with the supernatural; he opens our eyes

to wonder; he gives us, for however brief a period, a universe of beauty
and meaning and purpose. Whether there really is such a universe is less
important than the undeniable truth that we need one badly, that we are
deeply uneasy at the lack of one and at the prospect that we may have
to make, or remake, one ourselves. Tolkien shows us a way to do that.
Above all, he gives us back words, those tired old counters worn with
use, and makes them new again in all their power, variety, and magic.
He remembers for us what we have forgotten, that spell is both a noun
and a verb, that it means incantation as well as the formation of a word
by letters, and that to use it in either sense inevitably involves using it
in both senses.
If, as Horace maintained, the aim of the poet is to inform and to de-
light, he will succeed at the former only insofar as he succeeds at the
latter. The delight offered by Tolkien—enchantment, poetry (I do not
mean verse), vision—engages the imagination, while his metaphysical
speculation engages the intellect. The questions Tolkien raises are the
same ones mankind has always asked: where do we fit in? what do we
mean? why are we here? Mythology is as proper a forum for such ques-
tions as philosophy; and while philosophies come and go, mythologies
tend to endure as stories long after they have ceased to command belief.
Tolkien’s mythology enriches, reevaluates, and melds the great
mythologies of Western man. It takes up the established patterns of
mythic thought and turns them so that they catch new light. Tolkien’s
achievement in letters is distinguished, both in fiction and in scholar-
ship. As for its relevance to the twentieth century, he may well turn
out to be its greatest mythographer, its greatest exponent of myth, of
the songs and stories of old times, of the tales of how we and the world
came to be and how we need each other. In a world too long deprived
of myth, that is no small achievement.
 Introduction

The Silmarillion is without doubt the most difficult and problematic of

Tolkien’s major works.1 Unlike The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings,
it is not a single story or even a continuous narrative. Rather, it is a
compilation from diverse texts, some written years apart, selected and
arranged so as to present a coherent picture of Tolkien’s “mythology
for England.” As mythic fantasy, it strikes out into philosophical and
theological territory seldom looked for by readers of the genre. As fic-
tion, it lacks the hobbit earthiness that grounds The Hobbit and The
Lord of the Rings. Its style is more formal, and its narrative conveys
little of the moment-to-moment sense of excitement and peril that
characterizes those books. The stories of Bilbo and the dwarves, and
of Frodo and the Fellowship in the world of Middle-earth, are tales of
adventure with mythic overtones. The Silmarillion is the parent myth
that resonates in those overtones.
The book is a difficult fit with the other two works due not just to
its style and subject matter but also to the confusing chronology of its
composition, which encompassed the more compressed composition of
the other major works. There is as well the circumstance of its publica-
tion four years after Tolkien died and long after The Hobbit and The
Lord of the Rings had attained the status of classics. Its long-awaited
appearance in the wake of its predecessors raised expectations that its
elevated style and content inevitably failed to satisfy. Finally, its literary
place in the canon as a whole is the subject of debate and disagreement
still unresolved. How important is The Silmarillion when judged against
the other works? Is it Tolkien’s definitive statement, his philosophical
manifesto? Is it a major contribution not just to modern fantasy but to
English letters in the twentieth century, as its defenders maintain? Or

xiii
xiv Introduction

is it inflated, tedious, inferior to his other fiction, as his critics insist?

Has the enormous popularity of The Lord of the Rings obscured its real
value? Does it ride on the coattails of its predecessor? Should it be seen
as the major work, or is it merely background material?
These and similar questions have been and will continue to be raised
as the debate goes on. The history of the composition of Tolkien’s myth­
ology, its chronological relationship to his other fiction, and his difficul-
ties in negotiating for its publication during his lifetime were presented
succinctly in Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien and have been
augmented by Christopher Tolkien’s own editing and commentary in
The History of Middle-earth. A recently issued second edition of The
Silmarillion includes as a preface major portions of Tolkien’s 1951 letter
to Milton Waldman of Collins Publishers, in which he explained for a
prospective publisher his ambition to dedicate a mythology “to England”
and described in detail both his vision and his design.

Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I
had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging
from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story—
the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser
drawing splendour from the vast backcloths—which I could dedicate
simply to: to England; to my country. . . . I would draw some of the
great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme
and sketched. The cycles would be linked to a majestic whole, and
yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music
and drama. Absurd. (Silm. xii)

The passage says as much about the man who wrote it as it does about
the work itself. The tone of mixed hope and diffidence, the deprecating
opening and closing phrases “Do not laugh!” and “Absurd” reveal a
sensibility braced for ridicule. Tolkien was plainly both eager and afraid
to expose his dream, fearful that what he once described to his publisher
Stanley Unwin as “private and beloved nonsense” (Letters 26) would be
misunderstood or made fun of. Yet his words belie his true feelings. All
that is known about Tolkien—the evidence of his works, his letters,
the picture that emerges from Carpenter’s biography—makes it clear
that he did not think his dream was nonsense or that his ambition was
absurd, but that he took both very seriously indeed. That being the case,
it would profit scholars and students of Tolkien’s work to follow his
 Introduction xv

lead, to take his myth seriously and to enter into it with understanding
and sympathy. For it was his lifework and his magnum opus, The Lord
of the Rings notwithstanding. It was nearest to his heart, and as Chris-
topher Tolkien points out in his Foreword, it became over the course of
time “the vehicle and depository of his profoundest reflections” (vii).
Aside from what it revealed about Tolkien himself, the most striking
aspect of his description is the sheer size and scope of the project, “the
body of more or less connected legend,” the range from the cosmogonic
to fairy tale, the “vast backcloths.” To be sure, this is a fair description
of most primary mythologies—those real bodies of connected legend,
Norse, Celtic, Hebrew, and above all Finnish—that were Tolkien’s
models. Stories of primary myth are retrieved from ancient documents
or strung together out of oral material painstaking collected, in either
case arranged and edited by scholars.
To conceive and execute such a scheme, to generate a secondary
mythology out of a single creative imagination, calls for extraordinary
vision and equally extraordinary ambition. Even Milton, arguably the
premier mythographer in the English language, did no more than retell
the existing Christian mythos. To find anything remotely paralleling
Tolkien’s achievement we must turn to Blake.2 Even here, it is worth
remembering that Blake’s mythology was met with incomprehension
and a certain critical reserve when it first appeared, and even today it is
more studied as part of academic syllabi than read and enjoyed by the
general public. However ambitious the conception, Tolkien came near
to bringing it off. It occupied him over the space of some fifty years, for
he began serious work on it in 1917 with a handwritten notebook titled
“The Book of Lost Tales” (later to become the first title and text in The
History of Middle-earth) and was still reworking the stories when he
died on September 2, 1973.
When he wrote to Milton Waldman in 1951, Tolkien was negotiat-
ing with Collins for joint publication of The Lord of the Rings and the
Silmarillion. The publishers of The Hobbit, George Allen and Unwin,
seemed ready to go ahead with the one but were cautious, even nega-
tive, about the other. Tolkien felt and insisted that the two works were
inextricably linked and that the history of the Ring not only rested on
the earlier work but was its “continuation and completion, requiring the
Silmarillion [sic] to be fully intelligible” (Letters 136–37). But beyond
this, he was afraid that if the Silmarillion were not brought out with
The Lord of the Rings, it would not be published at all.
xvi Introduction

For a long time it seemed that his fears were justified. The projected
arrangement with Collins fell through; publishing costs increased, and
no publisher would undertake so long a work as the joint Silmarillion
and The Lord of the Rings. Finally, he agreed with Allen and Unwin to
have The Lord of the Rings published alone. For over twenty years it
was read and understood as an independent work. This has caused and
still causes critical difficulties and has contributed not a little to the
confusion over the relative importance of the two works. Critics lauding
the richness of Tolkien’s world and the detail and dense texture of its
background did not altogether appreciate that what they had was only
one enlarged corner of a vast canvas, a corner meaningful in itself but
with much greater meaning as part of the whole and an extension of it.
Granted, the book’s appendices gave glimpses of earlier history, but
only glimpses. Based on these, rumors of a store of unpublished mate-
rial circulated, but ordinary readers and scholars alike had to take The
Lord of the Rings as it stood. This was not disastrous, but it was cer-
tainly unfortunate, for it deprived readers (and those who read the book
wanted more) of the “vast backcloth” that was at the same time the
heart of the matter. The ethos of Tolkien’s created world was missing.
The genesis and continuing history, the religio-philosophical basis on
which it stands, the governing principles—all these are explicit in the
Silmarillion, implicit in The Lord of the Rings. Without the one, the
other could not exist.
The importance of this cannot be emphasized too strongly. To read
The Lord of the Rings—or, even better, to reread it—in the light of The
Silmarillion is to be newly aware of an immensely greater perspective,
a suddenly increased depth of field. Obscure references take on their
proper meaning, shadowy figures leap into prominence. The Lord of the
Rings clearly now has what Tolkien planned for it to have all along, that
same illusion of depth that he found and praised in Beowulf, the illusion
of “surveying a past . . . noble and fraught with a deep significance—a
past which itself had depth and reached backward into a dark antiquity
of sorrow” (MC 27). Tolkien’s tale is now placed within a larger history,
and what had seemed digressions of little relevance are now seen to be
essential elements enhancing both plot and theme.
The irony in all this is that without the separate and prior publication
of The Lord of the Rings there would have been no audience for The
Silmarillion. Without previous familiarity with Middle-earth and hob-
bits, without the drama of the Ring saga, readers would not have been
 Introduction xvii

prepared for the more complex and rarefied Silmarillion. Enthusiasm

and interest, appetites whetted by more than two decades of waiting
for more, created a ready-made readership for The Silmarillion when
it finally appeared in 1977.
Even so, the initial reception for Tolkien’s mythology was mixed
and, in a furtherance of the irony, mixed precisely because its precur-
sor had set up expectations that it was never the intent or purpose of
The Silmarillion to fulfill. Readers eager to re-inhabit the world of the
Shire and the Old Forest and Fangorn were given instead an abstruse
creation story, lists of gods and goddesses with explanations of their
various natures and functions, and a confusing proliferation of names
and genealogies with no readily apparent import. Many lovers of Tol­
kien’s earlier works were put off; many were downright bored. Hopes
for the romance of high adventure, for Tolkien’s signature combination
of epic and earthiness, were damped by language of biblical gravity and
a narrative structured along the lines of the Old Testament.
Reviewers and critics seemed not to know quite what to make of
what they had. Time magazine for October 24, 1977, while conceding
that some of The Silmarillion was “majestic,” called the rest “at least
half fustian and more than a yard long,” declaring that Tolkien’s elevated
prose sounded like “a parody of Edgar Rice Burroughs in the style of
The Book of Revelation” (120). The New York Review of Books for
November 14, 1977, predicted that there would be “far more purchasers
of the new volume than ever read it through” and suggested that had
it been published first, “it might well have laid a blight on the entire
series” (22).
Not all comment was negative. There were those who understood
what Tolkien was attempting, had sympathy for his aim, and admired
his achievement. On September 3, 1977, the Washington Post Book
World carried Joseph McLellan’s review on its front page under the
perceptive title “Frodo and the Cosmos.” McLellan perceived correctly
the relationship between The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion
and saw also how completely the former was likely to overshadow the
latter: “Tolkien found an enthusiastic audience for one small corner
of his massive vision and no market at all for the greater part of his
imaginings. And like a true professional . . . he adapted—shrank—his
vision to suit the available market. One is reminded of Shakespeare,
whose magnificent series of historical plays produced, offhand and
almost by accident, a minor character named Falstaff” (3).
xviii Introduction

Another who understood Tolkien’s vision, though he could not praise

it without qualification, was John Gardner, whose lengthy comments
in the New York Times Book Review for October 12, 1977, explored at
length what he called “the eccentric heroism of Tolkien’s attempt.” As
a medievalist, Gardner was well equipped to grasp the central concepts
of Tolkien’s myth and to recognize the forces that shape his cosmos.
Gardner came very near the mark when he declared, “music is the central
symbol and the total myth of ‘The Silmarillion,’ a symbol that becomes
interchangeable with light (music’s projection) ” (40).
These are indeed the central ideas. Gardner is mistaken only in calling
them symbols. It is the essence of Tolkien’s conception and design that
these are neither symbols nor metaphors (though they more and more
take on these values as the story progresses) but actualities intended
to be understood literally. Nevertheless, Gardner knew the medieval
background and worldview from which Tolkien was working, and he
reached the heart of Tolkien’s myth when he said,

What is medieval in Tolkien’s vision is his set of organizing principles,

his symbols and his pattern of legends and events. In the work of
Boëthius and the scholastic philosophers, as in Dante and Chaucer,
musical harmony is the first principle of cosmic balance, and the
melody of individuals—the expression of individual free will—is the
standard figure for the play of free will within the overall design of
Providence. This concord of will and overall design was simultane-
ously expressed, in medieval thought, in terms of light: the founda-
tion of music was the orderly tuning of the spheres. Other lights—
lights borrowed from the cosmic originals—came to be important in
exegetical writings and of course in medieval poetry: famous jewels
or works in gold and silver were regularly symbolic of the order that
tests individual will. . . . (40)

His scholarly background notwithstanding, Gardner as a reader has

reservations about The Silmarillion, and as a reader he clearly preferred
The Lord of the Rings, declaring that it “looms already as one of the
truly great works of the human spirit, giving luster to its less awesome
but still miraculous satellites, ‘The Hobbit’ and now ‘The Silmarillion’”
(1). Even now, more than twenty years after he wrote, Gardner would
still seem to speak for the general reader. Moreover, while a modest
 Introduction xix

body of scholarship is beginning to accrue for The Silmarillion, critical

opinion seems still to be weighted in favor of The Lord of the Rings.
One of the most acute and perceptive of Tolkien scholars, T. A. Ship­
pey, himself a medievalist and philologist and thus admirably equipped
to evaluate Tolkien on his own turf, as it were, asserted in The Road to
Middle-earth that Tolkien “showed himself out of step with his time.”
Shippey’s opinion, when his book was published in 1982, was that
“The Silmarillion could never be anything but hard to read” (201, 202).
Writing eighteen years later in J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century,
Shippey has not changed his mind. At the close of his chapter on The
Silmarillion, he makes very nearly the same pronouncement: “For all
that has been said, The Silmarillion can never be anything but hard to
read,” going on to declare that “like Joyce with Finnegan’s Wake he
[Tolkien] demanded too much for most audiences” (261).
Of the critical work on the book,3 Shippey’s above-mentioned chap-
ter gives a fair and balanced reading. Randel Helms’s Tolkien and the
Silmarils gives a useful general overview. In the first edition of her
Tolkien’s Art: A Mythology for England, Jane Chance frankly admit-
ted that she found The Silmarillion “difficult to read and even more
difficult to enjoy” (129), but her second, revised edition devotes a final
chapter to The Silmarillion, calling it Tolkien’s “Book of Lost Tales.”
Even here, however, she calls it a “coda” to his other work.
If so, it is quite literally the tail (coda: Ital., from Lat. cauda, “tail”)
that wags the dog. One might as accurately say that the Old Testa-
ment is the coda to the New Testament. The Silmarillion precedes
and prepares for The Lord of the Rings, but both are parts of the same
continuous story, that “body of more or less connected legend” of which
The Silmarillion is unmistakably the “cosmogonic,” while in relation
to it the Lord of the Rings is “the lesser in contact with the earth” and
drawing much of its splendour from The Silmarillion’s vast backcloth.
One important benefit that knowledge of The Silmarillion confers
on Tolkien scholarship is a better perspective on the relationship of
his work to that of those with whom he is all too often associated as a
writer—C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams. The basis of this seems to
have been their shared Christianity (though Tolkien was Roman Catho-
lic, Lewis and Williams Anglican) and their informal membership in the
Inklings—a loosely organized fellowship of like-minded men who met
fairly regularly in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen College to talk and drink
xx Introduction

and often share their writing. There are as well su­per­ficial similarities
in their use of fantasy as a mode of expression. All this has resulted in
a tendency to lump them together as writers with a common religious
purpose and whose writing had a common religious bias.
That this was never the case is made clear by Humphrey Carpenter,
who devotes a chapter of his book on the Inklings to investigating, care-
fully considering, and finally dismissing the idea.4 Carpenter’s conclu-
sion is that the Inklings were a highly informal group with a somewhat
shifting population who had common interests and ideas but no sense of
mission or any common goal. Nevertheless, the notion of the similarity
dies hard, and Middle-earth is still compared with Narnia and Logres.
The Silmarillion provides needed evidence that as a writer (and also as a
Christian) Tolkien was distinct from both Lewis and Williams, far more
unlike than he was like them.
As developed in The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s theology was manifestly
tougher and darker than Lewis’s, less occult than Williams’s, and far
less hopeful than either man’s. Tolkien’s belief is precarious, constantly
renewed yet always in jeopardy. It is this precariousness that gives
his work its knife-edge excitement. The outcome is always in doubt.
Where Lewis based his Christianity in logic, defending it on rational
rather than mystical grounds, Tolkien’s Christianity is measured by
and against experience and constantly put to the test.
Moreover, only in the most general sense can The Silmarillion be
characterized as Christian, and in no sense at all can The Lord of the
Rings be given so definitive a label. That both works are informed with
the spirit of Christianity is clear. However, the seeker after explicit
Christian reference, as distinct from Christian meaning, will find little
in either book to get a grip on. This is no accident; it is Tolkien’s de-
clared intent, as several statements in his letters make clear. In a letter
written in 1953 to Father Robert Murray, S.J., Tolkien commented of
The Lord of the Rings, “I have not put in, or have cut out, practically
all references to anything like ‘religion,’ to cults or practices, in the
imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story
and the symbolism” (Letters 172). And in his long descriptive letter
to Waldman, he gave his reasons for discounting the Arthurian legend
as England’s myth. This was, he wrote, “because it is involved in, and
explicitly contains the Christian religion. For reasons which I will not
elaborate, that seems to me fatal. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art,
reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth
 Introduction xxi

(or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‘real’
world” (Silm. xii).
So, for example, there is in Tolkien’s mythology no explicit Christ
episode (though the reappearance of Gandalf comes close) such as the
sacrificial death and resurrection of Aslan in Lewis’s The Lion, the
Witch, and the Wardrobe. There is no Graal, as in Williams’s War in
Heaven, or overt Christian reference, as in Williams’s Ar­thur­ian po-
ems. The Silmarillion is Tolkien’s gloss on Christianity, illustrating its
universals, not repeating its specifics. The legendarium is concerned,
he wrote to Waldman, “with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine” (xiii),
subjects that, in their broadest sense, are the concern of all mythologies
in all ages.
Independent though he is of Lewis and Williams, Tolkien manifests
a surprising similarity of thought with the “other Inkling,” the less
known, less popular, but most influential of all—Owen Barfield, the
unobtrusive fourth to the big three. Barfield is not a fantasist (though he
is the author of a deftly humorous retelling of “The Frog Prince,” The
Silver Trumpet). Primarily, however, Barfield is a speculative thinker
and philosopher whose interest lies chiefly in the relationship between
language, myth, and cultural reality.
Evidence that Tolkien was aware of Barfield’s influence can be found
in his reference to Barfield in a letter written to C. A. Furth of Allen and
Unwin, dated August 31, 1937. Here he said, “The only philological
remark (I think) in The Hobbit is on p. 221 (lines 6–7 from end): an odd
mythological way of referring to linguistic philosophy, and a point that
will (happily) be missed by any who have not read Barfield (few have),
and probably by those who have” (Letters 22). Tolkien was, of course,
referring to the first edition. The lines in question, describing Bilbo’s re-
sponse to his first sight of Smaug and his treasure (paginated differently
in later editions), read as follows: “There are no words left to express his
staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves
in the days when all the world was wonderful.” (Clarification of the
significance of this sentence, and discussion of the relationship between
Tolkien’s work and Barfield’s, is discussed hererin in chapter 4.)
Saving the Beowulf poet, Barfield’s theory of the interdependence of
myth and language is the primary influence on Tolkien’s mythos. It is
very much present in Tolkien’s fictive assumption, the very founda-
tion and basis of his invented world, that language creates the reality it
describes and that myth and language work reciprocally on each other.
xxii Introduction

Moreover, Barfield’s theory is central to the theme of The Sil­marillion,

that the polarities of light and dark, perceived through, ex­pressed in, and
configuring language, define one another and the realities of Tol­kien’s
world.
The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings are parts of a whole vision,
made separate by the exigencies and delays of publishing. Nevertheless,
separated though they have been, they derive from and express that vi-
sion—Tolkien’s obliquely orthodox, highly unorthodox, ultra-Christian,
extra-Christian exercise in creative imagination. The Sil­mar­illion can
be fully understood without reference to The Lord of the Rings, but
the reverse is not the case. Any attempt to read, to understand, and to
evaluate Tolkien’s fiction and his contribution to twentieth-century
thought and fiction should begin where he began—at the beginning.
Only then can there be any understanding of where he is going and,
even more important, of why he is going there.
 1
A Man of Antitheses

I perceived or thought of the Light of God and in it suspended

one small mote (or millions of motes to only one of which was
my small mind directed), glittering white because of the
individual ray from the Light which both held and lit it. (Not that there were
individual rays issuing from the Light, but the mere existence of the mote and
its position in relation to the Light was in itself a line, and the line was Light).
And the ray was the Guardian Angel of the mote: not a thing interposed be-
tween God and the creature, but God’s very attention itself, personalized.
—Tolkien in a letter to his son Christopher

. . . if there is a God . . .
—Tolkien in a letter to his son Michael

Antithetical though they seem, both these statements are typical of

Tolkien. They were written at different times, in letters to different
sons, and obviously engendered by different circumstances and different
thoughts. What is typical is not just the contrasting message each con-
veys but also the distance between them, the 180-degree shift of mood.
It is this distance that led Tolkien’s biographer, Humphrey Carpenter,
to characterize Tolkien as “a man of antitheses” (Biography 95). The
illuminating and otherworldly beauty of the first and the bleak doubt
of the second, the oscillation between hope and despair, are evidence of

1
2 Splintered Light

extreme shifts of outlook. The man who wrote both knew the heights
and the depths.
This is not to say that such shifts of mood are unique to Tolkien;
the road between belief and doubt is traveled in either direction at one
time or another by many thinking believers of all faiths. Tolkien’s
statements, however, betoken something more than brief moments
of belief and doubt: they are emblematic of the poles of his emotional
life. Even more, they are the boundary markers of his worlds—both the
world he perceived around him and the world he created in his fiction.
No careful reader of Tolkien’s fiction can fail to be aware of the polari-
ties that give it form and tension. His work is built on contrasts—be-
tween hope and despair, between good and evil, between enlightenment
and ignorance—and these contrasts are embodied in the polarities of
light and dark that are the creative outgrowth of his contrary moods,
the “antitheses” of his nature. Carpenter describes him as a man of
extreme contrasts, one who was “never moderate: love, intellectual
enthusiasm, distaste, anger, self-doubt, guilt, laughter, each was in his
mind exclusively and in full force when he experienced it” (129).
Carpenter’s biography suggests that these contrasts can be traced to
certain formative events in Tolkien’s early years. First was the sepa-
ration from his father when he was three. To escape the heat of their
home in Bloemfontein, South Africa, his mother took Tolkien and his
younger brother, Hilary, to visit relatives in Birmingham in the English
Midlands. Arthur Tolkien died while his family was on home leave,
so the young Ronald never saw his father after he was three, and, says
Carpenter, came to regard him “as belonging to an almost legendary
past.” (17). This first separation followed by irretrievable loss led to an
unusually close relationship with the one parent left. Tolkien’s happiest
years were those spent with his mother and Hilary in the house she
found for herself and her boys in Sarehole, a rural Warwickshire hamlet
just outside Birmingham. The second loss, her sudden and unexpected
death when he was twelve (a precarious age for any child), shook the
foundations of his world. These events, especially the latter, seem to
have contributed directly to Tolkien’s mercurial shifts of feeling. Most
important, his feeling for his mother was deeply connected to (perhaps
the wellspring of) his enduring devotion to his religion.
Mabel Tolkien’s conversion to Catholicism when her son was eight
years old estranged her from her Protestant relatives on both sides of
the family. Her father was Unitarian, while her husband’s people were
 A Man of Antitheses 3

Baptists; both were strongly opposed to Catholicism. Her determina-

tion to bring up her children—John and Hilary—in the Catholic faith
cut her off from the emotional and to a large extent from the financial
support of her family. Her life thereafter was a struggle to maintain a
household and care for her sons. Tolkien came to feel that his mother’s
heroic efforts to raise and educate her sons had drained her strength
and that this was the direct cause of her death. When she died, he was
bereft. “The loss of his mother,” Carpenter tells us, “had a profound ef-
fect on his personality. It made him into a pessimist. Or rather, it made
him into two people.” Carpenter goes on to characterize Tolkien’s two
sides: “He was by nature a cheerful almost irrepressible person with a
great zest for life. . . . But from now onwards there was to be a second
side, more private but predominant in his diaries and letters. This side
of him was capable of bouts of profound despair. More precisely, and
more closely related to his mother’s death, when he was in this mood
he had a deep sense of impending loss. Nothing was safe. Nothing
would last. No battle would be won forever” (31).
His solace was his religion, but these feelings colored his religious
outlook and gave it the same mixture of light and dark. “My own dear
mother was a martyr indeed,” he wrote, “and it not to everybody that
God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and my-
self, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble to
ensure us keeping the faith” (31). The description of his mother’s death
as an “easy” way to God is hard to fathom, for it is clear that he took
her suffering to heart, and the shock of her death affected him deeply.
Yet the statement is evidence of the close, emotional association
he always made between his mother and his faith. The contradiction
is more than polarity; it is paradox. His Catholicism was inextricably
link­ed with his mother, but in his view, it was her adherence to that
religion which led to the circumstances that caused her death and thus
his bereavement. “I think of my mother’s death,” he wrote in 1965,
“worn out with persecution, poverty, and, largely consequent, disease,
in the effort to hand on to us small boys the Faith” (Letters 353–54).
The very thing that gave him his faith robbed him of his mother and
thus mixed with that faith a sense of irretrievable loss.
The contrast apparent here is also apparent in this chapter’s epi-
graphs, the contrast that led to Carpenter’s description of him as two
people, one a naturally cheerful and outgoing man, the other pessimis-
tic and despairing. However, this may be a too-simple description of
4 Splintered Light

the complexity of feelings that Tolkien experienced and that his work
reflects, for these feelings found a Christian context in his view of the
world as fallen and of man as imperfect. Pessimism is disappointed
optimism, but a Christian acceptance of the Fall leads inevitably to
the idea that imperfection is the state of things in this world and that
human actions, however hopeful, cannot rise above that imperfection.
It is the “hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears
under the sun” (MC 144) on which he insisted that creative fantasy
must be based and on which he did indeed base his own invented world.
“Actually I am a Christian,” he wrote of himself, “and indeed a Ro-
man Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long
defeat’—though it contains (and in legend may contain more clearly and
movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory” (Letters 255). The
world, then, must be seen as a place of defeat and disappointment, and
man must be seen as born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. Tolkien’s
enclosure of the word “history” in quotation marks suggests that he
means history in contrast to eternity and that the “long defeat” has
to do with humanity’s work in this world, not its expectations of the
next.
All this adds up to an outlook at once psychological and religious in
which the one can hardly be distinguished from the other, an outlook
derived from the sense of expulsion from both a private and a communal
Eden. Tolkien’s pull toward the dark springs from his personal sense
of loss but is coupled with his acceptance of humanity’s exile from the
Garden. His world is shadowed by its past as well as by his own past,
lighted intermittently by the vision of the white Light that holds the
mote. That vision of the Light remains just that—a vision, a Grail to
be sought but never grasped by fallen humanity in a fallen world.
The alternation between the vision of hope and the experience of de-
spair—between light and dark—is the essence both of Tolkien and of his
work. The contrast and interplay of light and dark are essential elements
of his fiction. The light-dark polarity operates on all levels—literal, meta-
phoric, symbolic. It is active in Creation and Fall, it engenders language
and imbues it; its interplay becomes the interplay of good and evil, belief
and doubt, free will and fate. But the balance is tipped. Light and dark
are contending forces in Tolkien’s fiction, but the emotional weight is on
the dark side. The presence and power of the dark are among the most
effective elements in his mythology, for his vision of the light rides on
the dark as sound rides on silence, as spoken words ride on the pauses
 A Man of Antitheses 5

between them. Each needs the other. The shadow defines and thereby
reveals the light as the brightness of the light sharpens the shadow.
Opposite points on the circle, they are held in tension by simultaneous
attraction and repulsion. Their interdependence embodies all the polari-
ties in Tolkien’s theme, for, as light cannot be known without darkness,
so hope needs the contrast of despair to give it meaning, and free will
opposes, yet is defined by, the concept of fate.
Tolkien’s medium for all of this is words, a point so obvious that it
may seem absurd to make a note of it. But words were also his profes-
sion. His field was philology, the history of words and their chrono-
logical development. All of his study was devoted to the importance
of the word; it was the very bedrock and foundation of his scholarship
and of his fiction as well. His profession as a philologist and his voca-
tion as a writer of mythic fantasy overlapped and mutually supported
one another. For Tolkien, understanding and appreciation of any text
depended on a proper understanding of the words, their literal meaning
and their historical development. Words are important as the expression
of any speaker or writer, but they are just as important as manifesta-
tions of the outlook of an entire culture, or of an age. We do not truly
understand a text until we understand the words not only as they are
currently used but as they were used in the time in which they were
composed. Only with this understanding is it possible to touch the
mind of the author and of his first audience, to bridge the temporal
distance (whether short or long) between that time and the present.
Tolkien’s scholarship was founded on this principle. His professional
work was in the service of the word, and we should expect his creative
work to be likewise. His scholarly articles are exemplary of this, so
that any sampling of his critical work will make the point. As often as
not, his work served to reveal a hitherto unnoticed or unappreciated
aspect of a text. A good example is his essay “Chaucer as a Philolo-
gist: The Reeve’s Tale” in Transactions of the Philological Society for
1934, a seventy-page investigation (he apologizes for its skimpiness)
into Chaucer’s use of northern dialect to characterize the speech (and
therefore the character) of the two clerks in The Reeve’s Tale. This use
of dialect, heretofore unremarked except as inconsistency in spelling,
was analyzed by Tolkien as a deliberate departure from the norm of
speech used by the others in the tale. Chaucer, he suggested, was con-
sciously putting regional dialect into the mouths of two characters for
comic and satiric effect. When the clerks, who have been stereotyped
6 Splintered Light

as country bumpkins, turn the tables on the Miller by seducing his

wife and daughter in retaliation for his theft of their grain, the story is
more than a simple case of the biter bit. With the addition of the dialect,
it becomes a case of country mice getting back at the town mouse, a
triumph of the provincials over the city slickers.
The value of this to illuminate the humor of the tale and underscore
Chaucer’s skill at his craft is obvious. Beyond this, Tolkien’s essay
makes the point that Chaucer’s London audience would have been
familiar enough with northern dialect to recognize it for what it was
and thus appreciate the joke. Awareness of this gives the modern reader
of Chaucer some idea of regional differences of speech in fourteenth-
century Eng­land, as well as a glimpse of how those regions perceived
one another—much as a modern dialect joke will reveal not only the
character of the actors within it but also the attitudes and perceptions
of both the jokester and the audience.
Such conscious and deliberate use of regional speech, said Tolkien,
could only have been made by “a man interested in language and con-
sciously observant of it” (Transactions 3). The description could serve
as well for Tolkien himself. Indeed, the title of the essay makes it clear
that one philologist is studying another. It takes one to know one. Not
just Chaucer’s practice of the craft but Tolkien’s own use of it to reveal
obscured meaning underscore the importance of studying, understand-
ing, and appreciating the word. Tolkien’s goal, as he explained it in his
essay, was to “recover the detail” of what Chaucer wrote, “even [down
to] forms and spellings, to recapture an idea of what it sounded like,
to make certain what it meant” (1). The key words here are “recover”
and “recapture,” with their treasure-hunter’s sense of retrieving lost
riches. In getting back Chaucer’s original intent, we experience as fully
as we can Chaucer’s meaning as understood by Chaucer’s audience in
Chau­cer’s time.
Tolkien did not keep his knowledge in compartments, and his schol-
arly expertise informed his creative work. Like Chaucer, Tolkien uses
regional, cultural, and psychological variations in language with telling
effect in his fiction. A seventy-page essay on “Tolkien as a Philologist:
The Lord of the Rings” is not an unlikely prospect. He carefully dif-
ferentiates between the more urbane speech of the Took, Baggins, and
Brandybuck hobbits and the rural dialect of the Cottons and the Gam-
gees. Elven language is musical and euphonious; elven diction (even in
the Common Speech) is formal and archaic. Orc speech is harsh and
 A Man of Antitheses 7

gutteral; orc diction is slang and argot. Strider’s language is plainer

and more direct than the epic high speech and diction of Aragorn—a
particularly nice touch, since they are the same man, and the change
in language signals the shift from Ranger to King.
The infatuated Eowyn pleads with Aragorn using the intimate “thou,”
while he keeps her at a distance with the formal “you.” Sam Gamgee,
with his use of aphorisms, his expletives such as “ninny­hammers!” or
“you”re nowt but a gowk!” Sam’s father the Gaffer, and above all Gol-
lum/Smeeagol exemplify Tolkien’s use of idiom, dialect, and idiosyn-
cratic speech for purposes of characterization. Gollum’s childish whin-
ings and mutterings mark him as regressive and infantile; his habitual
use of the plural to refer to himself signals his divided character; his
rare use of “I” heralds the infrequent return of his hobbit humanity.
Tolkien’s fascination with language goes beyond region or psychol-
ogy to focus on the meanings and resonances of specific words as they
illuminate a particular culture and that culture’s perception and world­
view. His two-part article “Sigelwara Land” (in Medium Aev­um, for
Dec. 1932, 183–96; June 1934, 95–111) on the use of the Old Eng­lish word
Sigelwaran or Sigelhearwan for Æthiops in old English glosses of Latin
texts and other Old English writings is itself an extended gloss. Here
he combined philological knowledge with his own special imaginative
sympathy for words to come up with a highly educated guess about
Old English mythic perception.
He established that the word in question, Sigelhearwa, must have
existed as an independent term before the appearance in language and
literature of the Greek Æthiops both as word and as concept. On the
basis of this, he suggests that Sigelhearwa is the preservation of “at
least a name, if no more, from the vanished native mythology or its
borderland of half-mythical geography” (192). His conclusion is that the
must “as a whole, have meant . . . something like ‘black people living
in a hot region’—whether as a rumour of the actual races of Africa,
or as a memory of some mythical Muspells megir [in Norse myth the
region of heat and fiery sparks] or realms of fire, or both” (193).
Tolkien’s analysis of the separate meanings of the words two ele-
ments finds sigel, “sun,” blended with the homonym sigel/sigle, “jewel,”
to convey a possible perception of the sun as a jewel and of jewels as
sunlike. The one word might easily carry both meanings without
necessarily being specific about either. Hearwa is connected to Gothic
haúri, “coal,” Old English hyr-r, “fire,” and related Old English heor†
8 Splintered Light

and hierstan, “roast.” This evidence suggests that the two elements
combined would convey a concept something like “sunjewel-burned”
or “jewelsun-roasted” people. Tolkien proposes an Old Eng­lish percep-
tion of black Africans as conflated with figures or concepts from Norse
mythology and thus seen as “rather the sons of Muspell than of Ham,
the ancestors of the Silhearwan with red-hot eyes that emitted sparks,
with faces black as soot” (110).
Since the essay combines philology with a leap of imagination, he is
honest enough to call his conclusions “guesswork” seeking to “probe a
past probably faded even before the earliest documents . . . which now
preserve mention of the Sigelhearwan were written.” Yet he goes on to
say in defense of his guesswork that “it may not be pointless to have
probed. Glimpses are caught, if dim and confused, of the background of
English and northern tradition and imagination” (111). Where “recover”
and “recapture” were the words that caught the spirit of the Chaucer
essay, the key word here is “imagination,” showing plainly that for
Tolkien the reward for such a painstaking and (it must be admitted)
obscure piece of research is the penetration into a lost attitude of mind,
the participation of his own imaginative faculty with that of a people
long gone.
In both essays Tolkien follows the word as far back as he can, back
to an early use by an author or an early appearance in a text. It is a
voyage to recover meaning and from that meaning to recapture the
imagination and perception of those for whom the word was current.
This careful exactitude joined with imaginative sympathy is the hall-
mark of his scholarship and is an important element in his creative
work as well. In his own use of words he strives always for the same
exactitude and richness of meaning that he seeks to recapture from
earlier texts. It is no exaggeration to say that his scholarship combined
with his imagination is the matrix of his fiction. Research into early
forms and uses of words, the search after obscure meanings and the
revealing of lost nuances—scientific study in the truest sense of the
term—led him through science into art and through art into an almost
spiritual realm wherein the word was the conveyer of primal truth, the
magic vehicle not just of communication but of communion.
As such, words were for Tolkien not simply a window on the past but
the key to that lost relationship between humanity and God of which
a sense of the Fall is the only memory. Words are the clearest record
of that “long defeat” of which he wrote, and we may imagine that he
 A Man of Antitheses 9

saw them also as the vehicles for the “glimpses of final victory” for
which he hoped. C. S. Lewis’s comment that Tolkien “had been inside
language” (Biography 134) was thus no figure of speech but the literal
truth. He had gone inside words, perceived through their lens, and seen
the world they had the power to create.
Others besides Lewis who knew Tolkien came to much the same
conclusion. Simonne d’Ardenne, one of Tolkien’s Oxford students and
herself a philologist, found another way to put it. In an essay called “The
Man and the Scholar,” her contribution to the memorial volume J. R.
R. Tolkien: Scholar and Storyteller, Mlle. d’Ardenne recalled saying
to him once, à propos his work: “You broke the veil, didn’t you, and
passed through?” (Salu 34). She adds that he “readily admitted” that he
had done so. Neither her question not his reply is in the usual mode of
philological inquiry. Both question and answer betoken an awareness
of and an acceptance of the word as one avenue into perception of the
super-natural, the super-real. To break the veil and pass through would
be to penetrate beyond normal human perception into another reality,
one always present but not readily accessible.
For Tolkien to admit to such experience implies that he felt his use
of the word as well as his study of it had carried him beyond imagina-
tion into a real vision of that which he wrote, that the word itself was
the light by which he saw. This implicit correlation between word and
light became explicit in his critical writing. This is most clearly appar-
ent in the theory of sub-creation he introduced in his essay “On Fairy-
stories,” but other statements carry the same message. He writes of
“reporting” and “recording” events in The Lord of the Rings and refers
to the early period when he was writing that book as a time when the
story ”was beginning to unroll itself and to unfold prospects of labour
and exploration in yet unknown country” (TR 31). Of the tales within
his mythology he says, “they arose in my mind as ‘given’ things, and
as they came, separately, so too the links grew” (Silm. xii). A letter to
a reader explained: “I have long ceased to invent . . . . I wait till I seem
to know what really happened” (Letters 231).
These statements are evidence of one of the most important aspects
of Tolkien’s concept of story in general and of myth, legend, and fairy
tale in particular—that they convey not fact but truth and, even more
important, that they are the best vehicles for certain kinds of truth. Of
myths and legends he wrote, “they must inevitably contain a large mea-
sure of ancient wide-spread motives or elements. After all, I believe that
10 Splintered Light

legends and myths are largely made of ‘truth,’ and indeed present aspects
of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths
and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear”
(Silm. xv). Certainly he felt that his own tales were true in this sense
and were as much a reappearance of long-ago truths as were primary
myth and legend. It seems clear that for Tolkien the fictive mode best
conveyed this kind of truth, bypassing as it does the dissecting intellect
to touch directly on imagination and intuition.
For Tolkien, story is the most effective carrier of truth because it works
with images rather than concepts, with forms rather than abstract ideas,
and with action rather than argument. It is more effective to show light
than to try to explain it, easier to imagine darkness than to analyze it,
simpler and more direct to illustrate through character and event than
to expatiate on the relative natures of hope and despair, belief and doubt,
good and evil. Certainly it was easiest of all for one who loved and lived
in words to picture light and dark as actualities and allow them to em-
body their own values. The polarities of light and dark that generate the
elements of Tolkien’s fictive world and motivate its action are created,
reflected, and conveyed through the power of the word.
That power is, by its nature, the power to alter as well as to express.
Behind the word is always that which it represents, but above it flickers
an evanescent, changing meaning that carries within it the ability to
heighten and ultimately to transcend the limit of a given definition.
There is thus inherent in words the vitality that makes them such an
effective medium for the transmutation of life into art. What in Tolk-
ien’s life was an imbalance in temperament, a contradiction of moods,
becomes in his art an oscillation of forces. The antitheses so evident in
the man become in his myth the paradox that is at once the governing
principle and the central mystery. Light and dark are translated from
extremes of outlook into forces held in tension by their opposition to
and dependence on one another.
Major, seemingly unassociated, aspects of Tolkien’s life—his swings
between hope and despair, his scholarly absorption in the word, his
imaginative capacity—come together in his fiction to show light at
once literal, metaphoric, and symbolic. And real.
 2
Dyscatastrophe

He is a man, and that for him and for many is sufficient tragedy.
—Tolkien on Beowulf

Tolkien’s use of light and dark as emblems of despair and hope is mani-
fest in his critical essays as well as in his fiction, but in a different mode,
for his essays use these words to mediate and explain, where his fiction
embodies them and makes them real. Two of his major critical essays,
written in the years when the world of hobbits was beginning to weave
itself into the world of the Silmarillion, are devoted to exploration of
dark and light, and to affirmation of both.1
“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” was first delivered on
November 25, 1936, as the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture to
the British Academy and was subsequently published in volume 22 of
the Proceedings of the Academy. “On Fairy-stories” was originally an
Andrew Lang Lecture given at the University of St. Andrews on March
8, 1939. It was revised and expanded for inclusion in Essays Presented
to Charles Williams, reissued together with Leaf by Niggle in Tree and
Leaf in 1964, which volume was subsequently folded into The Tolkien
Reader.
Analysis of these essays will lay the groundwork for an understanding
of Tolkien’s correlation of light and dark with the language basis of his
mythology. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” and “On Fairy-
stories” are different enough in subject matter and treatment that they
could with some truth be labeled, the former as “dark” and the latter as

11
12 Splintered Light

“light.” The titles themselves, the one referring to the grim and heroic
oldest English epic and the other to the traditional story-with-a-happy-
ending, suggest that the antitheses so much a part of Tolkien’s nature
are separated by subject matter into discrete components. Comparative
passages from each essay will illustrate the point.

When we have read [the Beowulf poet’s] poem, as a poem, rather than
as a collection of episodes, we perceive that he who wrote hæleˆ l
under heofenum may have meant in dictionary terms “heroes under
heaven,” or “mighty men upon earth,” but he and his hearers were
thinking of the eormengrund, the great earth, ringed with garsecg,
the shoreless sea, beneath the sky’s inaccessible roof; whereon, as
in a little circle of light about their halls, men with courage as their
stay went forward to that battle with the hostile world and the off-
spring of the dark which ends for all, even the kings and champions,
in defeat. (MC 18)

The contrast between this and the following passage from the fairy-
story essay could not be more marked, even though this latter does not
specifically refer to light. “The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of
the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sud-
den joyous ‘turn.’ . . . does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe,
of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of
deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) univer-
sal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse
of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief” (MC 153).
Although the difference is obvious, it would be an oversimplifica-
tion to see these passages, or the essays from which they come, as
polar opposites only, without acknowledging that within each is the
same opposition of light and dark. Although one speaks movingly of
man’s defeat by “the offspring of the dark” and the other celebrates
“the joy of deliverance,” each essay acknowledges that both light and
dark are elements held in interdependent tension. The darkness that
is the focus of the first passage needs the “little circle of light” to give
it meaning; the “Joy” of the second passage is consoling only in light
of the possibility of sorrow. The final phrase, “poignant as grief,” con-
veys the idea of joy and grief (thus light and dark) as the two halves
of the circle, reversals of one another. The change from one essay to
the other resides in the emphasis. The balance shifts. In the Beowulf
 Dyscatastrophe 13

essay dark heavily outweighs light; heroes go from the circle of light
into the surrounding dark and down to final defeat. In the fairy-story
essay, light is victorious and joy triumphs over sorrow.
The essays are important in two respects. Each is a landmark in
its particular field. Each throws a different light on its author and on
his fiction. They were composed within a few years of one another
and at a time when Tolkien was deeply immersed in his mythology.
Independent as works of criticism, they can yet be read in the context
of one another and of his fiction as at once informing and informed by
his creative work.
The Beowulf essay stands as the most important and influential
piece of work on that poem in the twentieth century. The accepted
scholarly view of the poem current at the time Tolkien wrote held
that it was an important but puzzling and seriously flawed work that
inexplicably focused on such flights of fancy as monsters instead of
having its hero more realistically fight other human beings. Its value,
moreover, was chiefly as a philological and historical artifact. Tolkien
single-handedly reversed the critical direction, vehemently disagree-
ing with the critics on all counts. He defended Beowulf as a work of
art valuable as a poem, not a source for history or philology. He argued
that the poem’s “flaws” are actually its glories, that its hero’s battles
against monsters—the hostile offspring of the outer darkness—and his
final defeat by a dragon are in fact the embodiment of the poet’s theme.
“On Fairy-stories” did not reverse a trend; rather, it began one.
Tolkien was the first literary scholar since Aristotle to bend his atten-
tion to the development of a critical theory for the evaluation of fairy
tales. His essay took its point of departure from the work of folklorists
who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, had taken two
distinct approaches to the study of myth and folklore—one philologi-
cal and the other anthropological. Philology had been the first line of
approach, and the philologist Max Müller looked for (and found) the
explanations for the apparent irrationalities and barbarities of myths
and fairy tales in comparative philology, the study of changes in words
and their meanings over time. His opponent was Andrew Lang, the
man in whose honor Tolkien’s lecture was delivered. Lang, another
prominent folklorist, proposed that the key lay not in comparative
mythology or philology but in comparative anthropology. Lang sought
and found the explanations for the same irrationalities and barbarities
in the totemism and ritual of contemporary primitive tribes.
14 Splintered Light

Tolkien took a literary approach, finding the importance of fairy-

stories in their effect now on those who read the tales for pleasure
rather than for information. In an argument parallel to his Beowulf
position, he dared to suggest that fairy tale is a valid literary mode and
that fairy-stories are worthy of attention in their own right, rather than
being made “a quarry from which to dig evidence, or information” (MC
119). While looking briefly at the nature and origin of fairy-stories, his
essay concentrates on their function. He explores the value and spe-
cial appeal of this kind of fiction and sets up solid critical standards
by which to judge it. Like the Beowulf essay, the fairy-story essay has
become a standard critical text in its field. Moreover, it is worth noting
that each essay makes a point of taking seriously a subject which had,
until he wrote, been dismissed as unworthy of attention.
The opening section of the Beowulf essay, a refutation of the then-
current state of criticism, is essentially a defense of monsters—and
particularly dragons—as serious subject matter. For Tolkien, Beowulf’s
battles with monsters and his eventual defeat by one are what give the
poem its emotional and psychological impact, impact that would be
diminished or even lacking in mere battles with other men. Read as
the story of a man battling against the forces of darkness, the poem has
extraordinary power and an inherent sadness that make it immensely
moving. It is not an epic, declares Tolkien, “though if we must have a
term, we should choose rather ‘elegy.’ It an heroic-elegaic, poem” (MC
31), praising and lamenting a man who died, as all men must, fighting
“that battle with the hostile world and the offspring of the dark which
ends for all, even the kings and champions, in defeat.” For Tolkien the
point of the poem is the beauty and doomed glory of such a battle, made
more beautiful and more glorious precisely because its inevitable end
is death.
For all its emotion, the essay is grounded in Tolkien’s broad and
deep knowledge of Old English and of the early medieval period, but he
transcends scholarship to enter into the mood and theme of the poem
with an intuitive sympathy few scholars can muster. His review and
refutation of the criticism ends not with a bald summary of the state
of the question but with a vivid and moving allegory, one of the few
instances in which he used that narrative mode.

A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone,

part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used
 Dyscatastrophe 15

in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the
old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower.
But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb
the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient
building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order
to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence
the man’s distant forefathers had obtained their building material.
. . . And even the man’s own descendants, who might have been ex-
pected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur:
‘He is such an odd fellow! Imagine his using these old stones just
to build a nonsensical tower! Why did he not restore the old house?
He had no sense of proportion.’ But from the top of that tower the
man had been able to look out upon the sea. (MC 7–8)

The allegory is for the most part straightforward, and the concept
behind it is especially suited to Tolkien’s approach to language in
general, and to the language of Beowulf in particular. The old stone is
the myth-infused Old English language, and anyone familiar with Old
English will at once recognize the aptness of the image. Old English
is a massive-appearing, massive-sounding language. The words on the
page have mass, and the words spoken have weight and texture. They
are great blocks of sound, craggy-edged and dense with meaning. Words
as building-blocks—a concept underlying the word-percept correlation
on which Tolkien’s myth is founded—finds mention later in the essay,
where Tolkien compares the balance of the Old English poetic line to
masonry. “The lines do not go according to a tune. They are founded
on balance; an opposition between two halves of roughly equivalent
phonetic weight . . . . they are more like masonry than music” (MC 30).
The older hall from which the stones originally came can be read
as the ancient heritage of myth, legend, and history that informed the
poet’s diction, the word-hoard that was his stock in trade. The house
in which he actually lived, for which some of the old stone had been
used, would be the living language that he spoke. The tower, of course,
is the poem itself, the monumental work of art. Tolkien’s little story
ends, however, not with allegory but with poetry. After carefully build-
ing the one-to-one correspondences, his conclusion is that “from that
tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.” There is no
allegorical correlative to the sea, and the vision thus suggested cannot
be tied to any specific meaning.
16 Splintered Light

This final image combining sea and tower will be familiar to anyone
who has read The Lord of the Rings, where the same combination occurs
in an oddly evocative episode wholly unconnected with the immediate
plot. Asleep and dreaming in his house at Crickhollow, Frodo hears what
he at first takes to the sound of wind in the trees, but he then realizes
it is the sound of the sea, “a sound he had never heard in waking life,
though it had often troubled his dreams.” Finding himself on an open
heath, he sees “a tall white tower, standing alone on a high ridge. A
great desire came over him to climb the tower and see the sea” (LOTR
106). In this passage both sea and tower are actual. Moreover, both have
greater significance in the previous history of the Silmarillion than
in The Lord of the Rings. The reader, however, does not need to know
that history in order for the passage to be effective. The episode invites
comparison with the final line of the allegory in the Beowulf essay. In
both instances, the effect comes less from the images of tower and sea
than from the stated or implied desire to climb up and look outward to
the immense unknown. Tolkien’s use of this idea in both the essay and
The Lord of the Rings suggests that for him it transcended allegory to
express an indefinable but very real attribute of the human psyche: the
desire to seek something without knowing what it is.
Those who will not climb the tower, but instead push it over in order
to exercise their scholarship, deny this attribute. They will not give
themselves to the structure and purpose of the poem, and so have no
opportunity to be carried beyond themselves. Even worse, they ignore
the possibility that this could happen and negate any poetic vision by
their stubborn search through the tumbled stones for the nonpoetic—
those hidden carvings or inscriptions that in the allegory stand for
purely historical, archeological, or sociological information. They have
no sympathy with or understanding of the tower’s proper use, which
is to provide a vision of the sea.
It is important to Tolkien’s allegory, and perhaps to an understanding
of how he himself reads Beowulf, that the final transcendent, nonal-
legorical view from the tower leads the eye outward, not upward. The
illimitable vision carries no promise of hope or salvation. Tolkien has
pictured man as living “beneath the sky’s inaccessible roof,” a phrase
clearly conveying the concept of the sky as a ceiling and by extension
a limit on the upward reach of human speculation. He may have felt
that a culture that made no distinction between clear sky and clouds,
but used the same word, wolcen,2 for both, would not be likely to find
infinity by looking up.
 Dyscatastrophe 17

The effect of the poem, when it is read as a poem and not as a guide
to some other subject outside itself, comes from an understanding of
the inevitability of Beowulf’s final defeat. The poet has taken care
that there should be no suspense or uncertainty whatever about the
outcome. Like all heroes, indeed like all humanity, Beowulf is going
to die. “He is a man,” says Tolkien, “and that for him and for many is
sufficient tragedy.” A stark statement, and he follows it with one even
more bleak: “lif is læne: eal scæce∂ leoht and lif somod “life is transi-
tory [lit. “loan,” i.e. on loan]: light and life together hasten away” (MC
19). Like humanity itself, light is perishable, finally to be overcome by
the dark. The heroes, those “mighty men upon earth,” with courage
(not hope or faith) as their stay, must leave the precarious little circle
of light to go out into the darkness, to battle with the embodiments of
that darkness—the monsters—and ultimately to lose. Heroism in the
face of inevitable defeat is the theme of the poem, the pinnacle of the
tower that affords the view. Of the poem, Tolkien says, ” It glimpses
the cosmic [the sea, perhaps?] and moves with the thought of all men
concerning the fate of human life and efforts” (33).
It is not just the fact of death qua death that, according to Tolkien,
gives Beowulf its power and its theme, but death by the forces of dark-
ness embodied in the monsters. “It is just because the main foes in
Beowulf are inhuman that the story is larger and more significant,”
he declares (MC 33). The quality of the doomed battle, and its special
glory, resides as much in the nature of the opponent as in the fatality
of the outcome. No mere struggle against another man would carry
this weight of meaning. Beowulf the man must fight monsters—things
frighteningly larger and other than himself—for his defeat to be so
overwhelming, his death so grand that by means of these the reader can
glimpse the shoreless sea. It surely is no accident that Tolkien’s own
fiction engages its heroes in battles with monsters, battles in which the
outcome is ambiguous. Seldom is victory outright, and often when it
is, it is followed by death (as in the case of Theoden) or suffused with
irony (as in the case of Frodo).
Despite his praise of the poem’s quality of pagan stoicism, Tolkien
reads the Beowulf poet as a Christian writing about a pagan past, a
not-too-distant past that still held his imagination. “The shadow of its
despair, if only as a mood, as an intense emotion of regret, is still there”
(MC 23). That Tolkien is in sympathy with this despair is clear, but it is
just as clear that for him this in no way contradicts Christianity. “For
the monsters do not depart, whether the gods go or come. A Christian
18 Splintered Light

was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed in a hostile world”
(MC 22). While the poem may have been written, as Tolkien suggests, at
the point of intersection between new Christianity and old pagan tradi-
tion, its author, however Christian he may have been, “is still concerned
primarily with man on earth, rehandling in a new perspective an ancient
theme: that man, each man and all men and all their works shall die. A
theme no Christian need despise” (MC 23).
The phrase “man on earth,” with its emphatic italics, is the key to
Tolkien’s reading of the meeting of paganism and Christianity in the
poem and in his own philosophy as well. Humankind lives in a fallen
world, a hostile environment in which man is bound to die. Beowulf
stands for all men as much as for all heroes, all men “fallen and not yet
saved, disgraced but not dethroned” (MC 23). Beowulf’s battle is that of
all mortal men, and that battle and the defeat that follows it constitute
a theme no Christian, including Tolkien in his own work, need despise.
For all his sympathy with the poet, he adds the perspective of his
own century to his understanding of the Middle Ages in defending the
poet’s use of monsters as Beowulf’s opponents. His reading of the mon-
sters is psychological rather than allegorical. Grendel and the dragon
are both monsters, true; but they are not the same kind of monster. In
distinguishing between them, Tolkien is a modern, however powerful
his inclination toward the past. “In a sense,” he says in a note to the es-
say, “the foe is always both within and without. . . . Thus Grendel has a
perverted human shape. . . . For it is true of man, maker of myths, that
Grendel and the Dragon, in their lust, greed, and malice, have a part in
him” (MC 46). The monsters are within us as well as outside us. The
hostile dark is a part of man, not just his besieging foe. The dragon may
be the instrument of final defeat, but Grendel carries his own threat to
humanity, for he moves in the shape of a man. And though the youthful
Beowulf is victorious in his meeting with Grendel, that inner darkness,
no less than the dragon’s external threat, is always there to be battled.
The recurrence of these references to darkness, to the precariousness
of the light, to the monsters, is forceful evidence of the emotional pull
of the dark for Tolkien. His own reading of Christianity tends to em-
phasize the tragedy of the Fall and its consequences. (This is apparent
even in the fairy-story essay, where his affirmation of the happy ending
is counterbalanced by the idea that many of the desires that fairy tales
gratify are themselves the outcome of the Fall and its consequences.)
Tolkien’s ability to enter in to the mood and spirit of Beowulf is per-
 Dyscatastrophe 19

suasive evidence that he was acquainted firsthand with the battle and
that, as Humphrey Carpenter comments, his experience had taught
him that “no battle would be won forever.” He could not have seen so
deeply into the poem or experienced such near-identification with the
poet unless Beowulf had struck a sympathetic chord in his own nature.
It would seem clear that however he may qualify the pagan point of
view, his heart is with the tragedy.
 3
Eucatastrophe

. . . and they lived happily ever after.

To turn from the Beowulf essay to “On Fairy-stories” is almost literally

to turn from dark to light. The latter could not be more distant from
the former in attitude and approach, as well as informing spirit. This
is, to a large extent, a function of the markedly different subject mat-
ter; fairy stories are based on hope, not despair, and however terrifying
the adventures while they are occurring, they always culminate in the
happy ending. Nonetheless, the very choice of the subject is again an
indication of that antithesis so deeply rooted in Tolkien’s nature. That
he could be so powerfully attracted to two such opposing outlooks
shows plainly the antinomian tension in his own psychology.
Where the Beowulf essay extolled courage, the fairy-story essay val-
ues enchantment. The emphasis is on humanity’s need for the beauty
and wonder of another world, rather than his inevitable defeat in this
one. Instead of drawing a little circle of light and surrounding it with
darkness, Tolkien calls attention to the Otherworld of Faërie. Both
worlds are dangerous—he calls Faërie “the perilous realm”—but the
dark northern space of Grendel and the Dragon is replaced by a greater
and brighter threat, the possibility of losing one’s self and finding it
again in another and perhaps higher world.
The essays are as different in kind as in subject matter. The essay on
Beowulf is a tightly focused consideration of a single poem. Although

21
22 Splintered Light

Tolkien draws extensively on his knowledge of medieval heroic and

religious literature, it is all in the service of arguing for and bringing
out what he sees as the meaning of the poem. In contrast, “On Fairy-
stories” is broad based and wide focused. It is an amalgam of genre
history, critical analysis, theory of fantasy, and critical philosophy.
A latter-day defense of poesy, it derives from the folklore studies and
controversies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which
Tolkien addresses directly. In its approach to imagination, it owes a
considerable debt to the Romantics, especially Coleridge.
Beyond this, there is a certain resemblance between the two essays.
Like the Beowulf essay, “On Fairy-stories” is a report on and argument
against the then-current condition of the subject under discussion and a
rejection of the received wisdom that fairy tales are valuable largely for
the light they throw on things outside them—folk-customs, compara-
tive linguistics—but not worthy to be read in their own right for what
they are. One expects, if not a tower, at least a balcony with a sweep-
ing view. And like the Beowulf essay, “On Fairy-stories” is a trove of
information about Tolkien’s thoughts, feelings, and critical responses
to the matter at hand, and by extension, to his own work. His discus-
sion of the nature of fairy-stories and the criteria for creating fantasy
is larded with phrases and allusions—near-asides—that, when read in
the context of his fiction, become specific and recognizable references
to aspects of his own work. Such phrases and allusions, while always
germane to the particular subject under consideration, are also win-
dows into Tolkien’s own imaginative principles, affording a look at the
creative process as well as the critical one.
Delivered in 1939, the fairy-story essay (then a lecture) came more
than two years after the one on Beowulf, and at a time when Tolk-
ien’s thoughts and energies were newly engaged. The Hobbit had been
published to considerable success, and the request by his publisher for
“more on hobbits” had begun him on what was then envisioned as a
sequel (though it soon engulfed the earlier work). By 1939, “the new
Hobbit,” which became The Lord of the Rings, was already begin-
ning—in the manner of Beowulf—to reach backward into its own “dark
antiquity of sorrow,” the Silmarillion. It comes as no surprise, then,
that although the subject of his lecture is announced in the opening
sentence as fairy-stories, a considerable portion of it is devoted to the
hows and whys of myth and fantasy.
Tolkien proposes to answer, or try to answer, three questions: “What
 Eucatastrophe 23

are fairy-stories? What is their origin? What is the use of them?” (MC
109). As with his Beowulf essay, he begins by refuting some commonly
held misapprehensions: first, that fairies are tiny sprites and, second,
that fairy-stories are stories about fairies. The notion that fairies are
diminutive beings is a late arrival to the genre; moreover, the distin-
guishing characteristic of fairies is not their size but their power of
enchantment. Nor are fairies the chief actors in fairy-stories; they are
there simply to interact with, and often mystify, the human being
who through ignorance or accident wanders into the enchanted world
Tolkien called Faërie. His spelling of the word is deliberate. By Faërie,
he means fay-er-ie, the place and practice, the essential quality, of en-
chantment. It is this quality, above all, that distinguishes fairy-stories
from ordinary stories.
As to their origin, Tolkien concedes that this is a complex ques-
tion not susceptible of easy answer. “That must, of course, mean:
the origin or origins of the fairy element. To ask what is the origin
of stories (however qualified) is to ask what is the origin of language
and of the mind” (119). And a page or so later he states, “The history
of fairy-stories is probably more complex than the physical history of
the human race, and as complex as the history of human language”
(121). These are sweeping statements, and the recurrence in them of
the word language is worth noting, for it is language that Tolkien sees
as the ground of story, and it was language that gave him the basis of
his myth and the genesis of his fiction. The interrelationship of mind,
language, and story is essential to his theory of fantasy, as well as being
the practical basis on which his fiction is built. “The incarnate mind,
the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval ” (122).
Easier to address, he finds, is the question of what fairy stories are in
the present moment, whenever and however they may have originated.
Issues of independent invention as over against diffusion (which he calls
borrowing in space) or inheritance (which he calls borrowing in time)
are of less concern to him than the nature of the story as we have it.
Whatever may have been the circumstances of their origin, the stories
are now part of what Tolkien calls the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of
Story that has been simmering since feeling first found expression in
words. History, folktale, legend, and myth are all thrown into the Pot at
one time or another, and all contribute to the flavor of the Soup. What
is ladled out in any given instance is a single serving, a story. It is the
story as we have it to which we respond, not to the raw ingredients,
24 Splintered Light

what he quotes folklorist George Dasent as calling “the bones of the

ox out of which [the soup] has been boiled.” Though Tolkien hastens
to add that by the soup he means “the story as it is served up by its
author or teller, and by the ‘bones’ its sources or material” (MC 120).
In Tolkien’s estimation the third of his three questions—“what is
the use of them?”—is by far the most important, for it is the effect of
a work of imagination, not the cause, that keeps it alive. The effect of
Beowulf was to give a vision of the shoreless sea, an immensity beyond
the ordinary world. What, then, is the use or effect, the present value,
of fairy-stories? His answer is even clearer than in the Beowulf essay,
for it comes directly, not couched as allegory. Fairy stories offer their
readers four things that the human spirit needs: Fantasy, Recovery,
Escape, and Consolation. Of these, the primary element is Fantasy, for
the other three derive from it. Fantasy is both a mode of thinking and
the created result of that thinking. Recovery, Escape, and Consolation
are experiential terms describing varieties of response to Fantasy.
The section on Fantasy owes a clear debt to romantic critical the-
ory in general and to Coleridge’s famous statements on imagination
in particular. However, Tolkien is not in complete agreement with
Coleridge, and uses the essay to set him straight on one or two points.
Coleridge recognizes Primary Imagination, Secondary Imagination,
and Fancy. The Primary Imagination is for him “a repetition in the
finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.” This is
the manifestation of God’s creative Logos—the Word—in the human
mind. Secondary Imagination is alike in kind but lesser in degree. It
is an echo of the Primary Imagination “co-existing with the conscious
will.” More human, less Godlike, yet in essence the same. Fancy, on
the other hand, is in Coleridge’s view only “a mode of memory” with
“no other counters to play with but fixities and definites.”1 Fancy has
no power to create. It can remember, but it cannot make.
Tolkien disagrees. In his view, Fancy—“image-making”—is different
only in degree. Imagination is “the power of giving to ideal creations
the inner consistency of reality,” and Fancy is simply one aspect of this
power. “The perception of the image, the grasp of its implications, and
the control, which are necessary to a successful expression, may vary
in vividness and strength: but this is a difference of degree in Imagi-
nation, not a difference in kind” (MC 138–39). Fancy, says Tolkien, is
simply a reduced but still etymologically and semantically connected
form of the older word Fantasy. Under the heading of this older word he
 Eucatastrophe 25

combines both Fancy and Imagination, together with art, the “operative
link” with Imagination by which they are made manifest, which art
he calls “sub-creation.”
The term as Tolkien uses it embraces Coleridge’s “repetition in the
finite mind of the eternal act of creation.” In Tolkien’s words, Fantasy
“combines with its older and higher use as an equivalent of Imagination,
the derived notions of ‘unreality’ (that is, of unlikeness to the Primary
World), of freedom from the domination of observed ‘fact,’ in short of the
fantastic” (139). Fantasy is “the making or glimpsing of Other-worlds”
(135). Successful Fantasy is the conscious sub-creation of a Secondary
World by man, whose birthright it is to make in imitation of his Maker.
The other three terms—Recovery, Escape, and Consolation—describe
the effects on the reader of successful Fantasy. The first term, Recovery,
relates in principle to the “Chaucer” and “Sigelwara Land” essays; it
is the recovery, the getting back, of what was originally there. It is a
regaining of a clear view, “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to
see them” (146). Experiencing the fantastic, we recover a fresh view of
the unfantastic, a view too long dulled by familiarity. The fantastic
should enable us to see the ordinary as if for the first time and thereby to
regain a sense of its extraordinariness. “We should look at green again,
and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. We
should meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly
behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs, and horses—and
wolves. This recovery fairy-stories help us to make” (146).
Tolkien’s concept of Recovery is not unlike the Platonic concept of
recollection, the idea—best expressed in the Timaeus—that knowledge
is recollection of things already learned, that we constantly rediscover
and repossess what we have formerly known. Sub-creation thus has a
purpose beyond itself. The making of a Secondary World is not simply
the production of enchantment as its end result. The Secondary World
can and should redirect our attention to the Primary World and through
that World to its Maker. It should enable us to regain, to recollect what
we have always known but have forgotten how to see. Through imita-
tion of God, man has the opportunity to recover His works.
Tolkien’s last two terms, Escape and Consolation, are intercon-
nected, for it is through escape that we experience consolation. The
word “escape” must itself be recovered and reexplored in order fully
to appreciate the sense in which Tolkien uses it. Escapist literature is
generally thought of as diversionary reading, a temporary distraction
26 Splintered Light

from the often unpleasant facts of “real” life. While he does not argue
with this point of view, he does support the impulse behind it, finding
desire for escape to be a valid and defensible human need. He has little
use for real life if “real” refers to the grim face of industrialism, the
waste land of urban blight, the obtrusive noises of traffic and machines.
If escape can take us away from these things into a world more beauti-
ful (if in its own way no less terrible), then escape is a good thing. The
march of technology, with all its contributions to modern life, serves
largely to make things obsolete so that they may be replaced with
ever newer things, fated to be replaced in their turn. For Tolkien, the
beauties and eternalities of myth and Faërie, unreal though they may
seem, have outlasted and will outlast the improvements and artifacts
of ever-changing technology.
A strong reactionary tendency is evident here, one that did much
to shape and color Tolkien’s Middle-earth. He finds many of the de-
velopments of modern life, whatever may be their intent, to be ugly
and destructive in their effects. His notion of escape is informed by
longing for a simpler world. In biographical terms, it is the idyllic, rural
Warwickshire world that replaced the dusty aridity of Bloemfontein, a
world that was fast disappearing even as the child Tolkien discovered it.
The effect on his fiction was to suffuse the pastoral quiet of the Shire,
the melancholy gold-and-silver beauty of Lórien, even the wilderness of
Fangorn Forest with nostalgia for time past. Counterposed to these are
the belching furnaces, reeking smoke, sooty chimneys, and machinery
of Saruman and Mordor and the corrupted Shire.
This is more than mere reaction, more than nostalgia; it is only one
manifestation of an infinitely older and more profound longing that
Tol­kien suggests that fantasy can satisfy, if only for a while. For “there
are ancient limitations from which fairy-stories offer a sort of escape,
and old ambitions and desires (touching the very roots of fantasy) to
which they offer a kind of satisfaction and consolation” (151). Some are
simple, such as “the desire to visit, free as a fish, the deep sea, or the
longing for the noiseless, gracious, economical flight of a bird” (152).
Others are more profound, such as “the desire to converse with other
living things. On this desire, as ancient as the Fall, it largely founded
the talking of beasts and creatures in fairy-tales, and especially the
magical understanding of their proper speech” (152).
The phrase “as ancient as the Fall” is the key to Tolkien’s underly-
ing concern in this part of his discussion. Here he has gone beyond
 Eucatastrophe 27

that simple nostalgia for the past and for childhood which he, and all
humankind, has felt at one time or another, to touch what he clearly
feels is the deep source of that nostalgia—humankind’s longing for its
own past, the childhood before the Fall. The magical speech of beasts
in fairy tales is, to Tolkien, evidence of our sense of separation and
our longing for reunion. “A vivid sense of that separation is ancient,”
he says, and his repetition of the word “ancient” connects separation
with Fall. But he goes even further, to say that we have also “a sense
that it was a severance; a strange fate and a guilt lies on us” (152).
“Severance” is a harsher term than “separation,” suggesting a sharp
cutting-apart of things once rightly joined. His use in the next phrase
of the word “guilt” connects the blame for the severance to human-
kind. It seems clear that the discussion here is as much theological
as literary. Tolkien’s juxtaposition of “separation,” “severance,” and
“guilt” with each other and with the Fall gives all three words greater
and more specific meaning than they would otherwise have. Separa-
tion—no, severance—is the Fall, severance from God and from the rest
of creation, the original sin from which all the others derive.
Beyond the satisfaction (if only for a little while) of these primal,
ancient desires, Tolkien praises the fairy-story for its ability to give its
readers what he calls the Consolation of the Happy Ending. This last
concept he finds so important that he has coined a new term for the
moment in the story that leads to that ending: eucatastrophe. With
that fidelity to literal meaning which is a Tolkien trademark, he has
carefully predicated the term on its earliest use and built it from its
earliest components. Katastrophe is the dénouement of classical Greek
tragedy, coming from katastrephein, “to turn down or overturn.”2
Tolkien’s addition of the prefix eu, “well or good,” reverses the tragic
meaning to transform the word into “the good overturning,” the mo-
ment in the fairy tale when evil is overthrown and good triumphs.
This is the good catastrophe referred to in the quotation from the
essay on page 12 of the previous chapter. It is the “sudden joyous ‘turn’”
of apparently disastrous events, the moment past all hope when we
know that everything is going to be all right. Tolkien makes it clear,
however, that the joy of the turn, the consolation of eucatastrophe, is
dependent on the fear of its opposite, the bad turn toward sorrow and
failure. The ever-present possibility of dyscatastrophe is what makes
the joy at deliverance so piercing, and leads to the denial of “universal
final defeat.” This is the moment when the kiss awakens the sleeping
28 Splintered Light

princess, when Snow White opens her eyes, when Beauty’s declaration
of love resurrects and transforms the dying Beast.
Tolkien calls the last escape on his list “the oldest and deepest desire,
the Great Escape: the Escape from Death” (153). So closely is this tied to
the Consolation of the Happy Ending that the one cannot properly be
considered without the other. Desire for escape from death is a subject
that deeply concerned Tolkien. Of The Lord of the Rings, he wrote that
“it is mainly concerned with Death, and Immortality” (Letters 284),
and this particular concern is a persistent motif in The Silmarillion.
Through his immortal Elves and mortal Men, Tolkien explores the
positive and negative sides of death as well as its opposite, unending
life, and its corollary, life eternal. He makes a clear distinction between
unending life, which he sees as bondage to the world without hope of
renewal, and eternal life, which transcends death and leads to God.
As he points out, fairy-stories are written by humans, not fairies, and
thus are concerned with the escape from death, whereas “the Human
stories of the elves are doubtless full of the Escape from Deathlessness”
(153). Each wants what the other has without understanding what it is or
what it entails. Deathlessness is not true immortality, but simply pro-
longation of life. In Tolkien’s view, the real escape from death is through
death to eternal life. Thus the final Consolation, the Escape promised in
the Gospels, denies “universal final defeat” because it offers the reader
life beyond death. This is Tolkien’s evangelium, “giving a brief glimpse
of joy . . . beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”
As with eucatastrophe, Tolkien has chosen evangelium and joy for
their earliest, most literal meaning. Evangelium is Late Latin “good
news,” for which the Old English translation is godspell, which becomes
gospel and thus a major part of the Christian mythos. And when we find
that joy comes from Latin gaudére, “to rejoice,” and can be traced back to
Indo-European gau-, - “to rejoice, to have religious fear or awe [emphasis
added],” we can see clearly the direction of Tolkien’s thinking.
His Epilogue to the essay makes it plain, for here he connects the
fairy-story directly to the gospels of the New Testament. In Tolkien’s
eyes, the gospels contain “a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which
embraces all the essence of fairy-stories” (155). It is safe to conclude
that for him this is the true evangelium, the good news that evokes
joy—both rejoicing and religious awe. Certainly, this for him is “Joy
beyond the walls of the world,” for “this story has entered History and
the primary world, the desire and aspiration of sub-creation have been
 Eucatastrophe 29

raised to the fulfillment of creation. The birth of Christ is the euca­

tas­trophe of Man’s history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of
the story of the Incarnation” (156).
Tolkien is not simply imposing his view of Christianity on fairy-
stories; others have come to much the same conclusion, and he is in good
critical company. Erich Auerbach points out in Mimesis, his discussion
of the representation of reality in Western literature, that the story of
Christ is such an integral part of the mind and imagination of Western
culture that it has informed almost all Western narrative since its time
and has made the mix of everyday reality and high tragedy the norm for
narrative literature. It must be admitted, however, that Tolkien goes a
step beyond Auerbach. For him, the story’s mixture of potential tragedy
and the happy ending, operating as reality within History, embraces the
form of the fairy tale while lifting its reader beyond the secondary belief
demanded by fiction to the level of primary belief in the Primary World.
For Tolkien the story of Christ is the greatest fairy-story of them all
because for him it is not fiction but fact. It comes not from imagination
(though it has the power to inspire it), but from recorded history. It has
bridged the gap between Primary and Secondary Worlds and fulfilled
in Creation humankind’s longing for both Escape and Consolation,
consolation of the highest kind, absolving guilt, promising reunion,
looking forward to the final Happy Ending.
This is the ultimate “turn,” the reversal of direction when the down-
ward trend swings suddenly upward. For the true lover of fairy-story, to
read of the turn is to experience it, and to undergo a change of mood from
despair to joy, from dark to light, This is metanoia, reversal, a reversal
of the direction of the mind. The same word means “repentance.” The
turn, then, is a kind of conversion, and what we feel at the turn of a
fairy-story is, to however small a degree, a conversion experience.
If a fairy-story enjoyed as a Secondary World at the level of second-
ary belief were found to be true on the level of primary belief in the
Primary World, the joy of such a discovery would have, he declares,
“exactly the same quality, if not the same degree, as the joy which
the ‘turn’ in a fairy-story gives: such joy has the very taste of primary
truth. (Otherwise its name would not be joy.)” (156). At this point all
four of Tolkien’s terms—Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, Consolation—come
together to demonstrate what he found in fairy-stories and what he
wanted all readers to find.
The two essays, with their complex messages, the one of defeat as
30 Splintered Light

the end of life and the other of dyscatastrophe as essential to the happy
ending, are the hallmarks of a complex man. They are as well the keys
to his mythology. Both essays, with their seemingly contradictory
views, contain within themselves their opposites. Both acknowledge
and affirm the necessity of dark and light as components of human ex-
istence. Tolkien sees the Beowulf poet not as a pagan but as a Christian,
a man “looking back into the pit . . . perceiving the common tragedy
of inevitable ruin, and yet feeling this more poetically because he
was himself removed from the direct pressure of its despair” (MC 23).
Tolkien, too, is writing as a Christian, for all that the force of his essay
comes from his experience of the power of darkness. He can and does,
feel “the direct pressure of despair”; otherwise, he could not write so
movingly about it. But his faith resists this pressure by its affirmation
of the doctrine of salvation. “Man on earth” is doomed to defeat, as
the Beowulf essay makes clear. But that is only as far as man can see,
even from the tower. There is hope beyond that vision.
In both the poem Beowulf and Tolkien’s essay about it, the hope is
only a hope, not an observable reality. In the fairy-story essay that hope
is validated by the historicity of Christ and the observed and observable
Happy Ending of the Resurrection. That is not to say, however, that there
is no darkness. The outcome of the story must be truly in doubt, always
in doubt, otherwise there can be no turn. The doubt must be genuine;
it must come from the knowledge that there may be no happy ending,
that the thing which we greatly fear will indeed come upon us.
This means that doubt cannot be dismissed too easily or too quickly.
Doubt is a functional element necessary to the tone of both essays, but
it stems from the outlook of their author. Indeed, doubt is the spring-
board for the epilogue of the fairy-story essay. “There is no tale ever
told,” he says of the gospel, “that men would rather find was true, and
none which so many skeptical men have accepted as true on its own
merits. . . . To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath” (156).
The phrasing is curiously cautious; “would rather” is in the subjunc-
tive, not the indicative or declarative mood. It is a story that has been
“accepted as true,” which suggests what men want rather than what
men know. This is not to suggest that Tolkien did not believe the story
was true. Nothing in his life is clearer than his commitment to his
faith. Then, too, it is important to remember that he is speaking in the
context of stories that are not true, that is, of fairy-stories. A few lines
further on the same page he declares straight out and in the indicative
 Eucatastrophe 31

mood that “this story is supreme; and it is true.” This has the ring of
conviction. Yet his earlier words somewhat rob the statement of its
force. Hope, doubt, and belief are mingled.
There is precedent for Tolkien in the outcry on the cross. If Christ
felt forsaken, however briefly, surely doubt is admissible in his follow-
ers. The moment of greatest separation must be the moment of greatest
awareness of that separation and therefore greatest awareness of that
from which you are separate. Faith needs doubt as up needs down and
light needs dark—to define by opposition. The ability to acknowledge
contradictory concepts and to hold them in balanced tension is an attri-
bute of the creative mind. It was, quite clearly, an attribute of Tolkien’s
mind, central to his philosophy and to his fiction. In the work as in the
man, doubt and affirmation, despair and hope are positive and negative
poles, creating the force field that generated his Secondary World. The
polarities of light and dark generate the perception, the language, and
thus the action of his legendarium.
 4
Poetic Diction and
Splintered Light

Mythology is the ghost of concrete meaning.

—Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction

Both the Secondary World of Tolkien’s fiction and the force field that
holds it are built up out of words. Tolkien’s response to words, to their
shape and sound and meaning, was closer to that of a musician than a
grammarian, and his response to language was instinctive and intui-
tive as well as intellectual. That response did not occur in a vacuum.
His life-long occupation with the history and development of words
blossomed toward the close of an era of philological and mythological
discovery, research, and ferment, brought to an end by the outbreak
of war. Some background is necessary here, in order to place Tolkien
properly within a context at once personal, professional, and historical.
The start of World War I in August 1914 marked the end of what the
folklorist Richard Dorson has called “the golden century” of folklore
studies. The beginning saw the publication in 1812 of the first volume
of Kinder-und Hausmärchen, the Grimm brothers’ collection of Ger-
man folk and fairy tales by which they hoped to discover the Germanic
folk spirit and validate and unite the German people as one nation.
The Grimms were not alone in this quest for national identity through
language and myth; the whole of Western Europe and the British Isles
appeared to be engaged in the same search. Ireland, Scotland, Norway,
and Finland all ransacked their cultural attics for evidence of folktale,

33
34 Splintered Light

legend, and myth to uncover their heritage and validate their ethnicity.
Folktale collections proliferated. Asbjörnson and Moe’s Norske Folke­
eventyr, Jacob’s Celtic Fairy Tales, Lönnrot’s Finnish Kalevala, the
collecting of Islay in Scotland, Croker and Curtin in Ireland, Rhys in
Wales—it seemed that every language group wanted to discover itself
through myth. Comparative works such as Frazer’s The Golden Bough
explored the links and postulated universal themes behind the stories.
In this context it is no wonder the young Tolkien became fired with
the ambition to create a mythology and dedicate it “to England,” at the
time one of the few national entities without a mythological heritage.
Then came the war.
It was just then that Tolkien, an Oxford undergraduate preparing to
be called up for military service, embarked on his first tentative efforts
at what was to become the Silmarillion, a poem he called “The Voyage
of Earendel” (Biography 71). He had also for sometime been inventing
“private” languages and continued with this then-hobby during his
military service, whenever the war and life in the trenches allowed.
With the Armistice in 1918, and the return of something approximating
normal life, the folklore search picked up where it had left off. Tolkien,
now discharged from the army, a husband, and the father of a young
child, returned to civilian life and Oxford, found work on “the Diction-
ary” (the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, later called
simply The Oxford English Dictionary), and spent his spare time with
his languages and his mythology.
By now another generation of scholars was working with materials
the first had collected and with the explanations it had evolved for the
often horrific materials it turned up, tales of mayhem and violence—
child murder, mutilation, rape, incest, and cannibalism. The search for
origins to explain or rationalize or justify such material had turned
first to comparative philology and mythology and then to anthropol-
ogy, and the theories thus propounded and the controversy thus gener-
ated outlined the parameters of the study well into the next century.
Controversial or not, work in all these fields overlapped significantly
and produced a far more complex picture of the ancient cultures that
had generated the myths and languages than the early researchers had
supposed.
In particular, work done in England by Owen Barfield and in Ger-
many by Ernst Cassirer built on the foundations already laid and sug-
gested an interconnectedness of myth and language that spoke directly
 Poetic Diction and Splintered Light 35

to Tolkien’s interests, both professional and avocational. Of the two,

Barfield seems to have been the stronger influence on Tolkien. While
he could certainly have read Cassirer in German, his work was not
translated into English until much later.
Some time in or about 1928, Tolkien’s friend and Oxford colleague
C. S. Lewis remarked to his longtime friend Barfield: “You might like
to know that when Tolkien dined with me the other night he said, à
propos of something quite different, that your conception of the ancient
semantic unity had modified his whole outlook, and he was always just
going to say something in a lecture when your concept stopped him in
time. ‘It is one of those things,’ he said, ‘that when you’ve once seen
it there are all sorts of things you can never say again’” (Carpenter,
Inklings 42).
The concept of ancient semantic unity to which Tolkien’s remark
referred is the thesis of Barfield’s best-known critical book, Poetic Dic-
tion, published in 1928 and, quite clearly, freshly read by Tolkien. His
statement that Barfield’s concept had modified his whole outlook is
sweeping and invites exploration. Given Tolkien’s lifelong fascination
with words and with myth, his compendious knowledge of Western
European languages old and new as well as their history and the prin-
ciples underlying their development, what concept could have been
persuasive enough to modify his whole outlook? A very simple one,
as it turns out, but, like many simple things, one with far-reaching
philosophical implications. Some knowledge of Barfield’s theory, there-
fore, its development and its ramifications, will shed valuable light on
Tol­kien’s “whole outlook” on language and his use of it in creating his
mythology.
Because his interests extended over a wide range of disciplines,
Owen Barfield is a difficult figure to categorize. By profession, he was
for many years a solicitor. By avocation and natural inclination, he
was a philologist, a mythologist, and most of all a philosopher whose
work on the development of consciousness encompasses the other two
disciplines and draws extensively on his accumulated knowledge in
those fields.
Because of shared interests and even more because of friendship with
C. S. Lewis, Barfield was a member of that informal discussion group
that called itself the Inklings and gathered in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen
College to talk and drink and read aloud from works in progress. From all
accounts, Barfield and Tolkien enjoyed one another’s company, though
36 Splintered Light

both were better friends with Lewis than with one another. Barfield
had known Lewis since they were undergraduates at Oxford, Barfield at
Wadham and Lewis at University College. Their friendship continued,
deepened on annual walking tours of England and stimulated by a run-
ning battle of ideas that they called “the Great War.” This lively debate
pitted Lewis’s then-agnostic rationalism against Bar­field’s growing inter-
est in and enthusiasm for the writings of Rudolf Steiner. Through Steiner,
Barfield came to believe that that the universe was the product of design
and was suffused with meaning and, moreover, that imagination can be
used quite as well as logic and reason to gain a better understanding of
that universe and to comprehend the phenomena of the world around us.
Barfield’s reading of Steiner led him to adopt Steiner’s metaphysical
philosophy, called Anthroposophy. It is a difficult philosophy to synop-
size, or even to briefly describe and explain. Indeed, Barfield said that
he spent an evening explaining Anthroposophy to the Inklings (at their
request) and found it a formidable task.1 Humphrey Carpenter gives a
brief, cogent account of the principles of Anthroposophy in The Inklings,
his companion volume to his Tolkien biography. Some account is neces-
sary here for a proper understanding of Barfield’s own writing.
Steiner’s philosophy, which he felt to be in harmony with Christi-
anity though not sectarian, holds that the process of evolution, which
involves not just humankind but the whole universe, is anthropocen-
tric. It is a process of coming to consciousness in which humanity has
become progressively more aware, both of itself and of its surround-
ings, while at the same time (and indeed as an inevitable part of the
process) becoming increasingly separate from the surrounding world
and the power that began the whole process. This increasing conscious-
ness, now at a stage of complete sense of separation from the natural
and supernatural worlds, is a necessary step in the progression to full
consciousness, a final step of full self-awareness both of our human
individuality and our union with God and the universe.
While they apparently found Anthroposophy more than a little dif-
ficult to grasp, in other and even related areas the Inklings had much
in common with Barfield. All were staunch Christians, and all were
interested in words, in literature, in fantasy and myth. But where Tolk-
ien was a regular participant in Inklings gatherings, Barfield was, as
he puts it, “really only on the fringe” (Sugerman 10). He could not be
a regular, since the group was largely a part of the Oxford community,
while his home and his work were in London. Nevertheless, though he
 Poetic Diction and Splintered Light 37

attended meetings infrequently, he and Tolkien had some important

interests and attitudes in common and clearly found places where their
minds touched.
In particular, they shared an abiding interest in the history of lan-
guage and its relationship to myth. Beyond these, they seem to have
enjoyed a certain community of mind,2 for Barfield said that in some
areas, notably in the concept of the poet as world-maker (“sub-creator”
is Tolkien’s term), he felt that Tolkien was rather closer to his own point
of view than was Lewis, with whom Barfield enjoyed not so much com-
munity of mind as vigorous and challenging intellectual interaction.
Certainly, Barfield’s published work, especially his early books,
reflects many of the interests that engaged Tolkien. When he wrote
Poetic Diction, Barfield was already the author of a number of articles
and reviews, a witty and playful retelling for children of the fairy tale
of “The Frog Prince” called The Silver Trumpet, and a book on language
called History in English Words. The genesis of Poetic Diction was a
study Barfield had begun in 1922 for his B. Litt. Thesis on the history
and changing meaning of the word ruin. By 1928, the study of ruin was
one chapter in the larger, more comprehensive Poetic Diction, subtitled
A Study in Meaning. The focus had expanded from the changes in one
word to the whole question of meaning and of the relation of perception
to word and of word to concept.
It became, in Barfield’s words, “not merely a theory of poetic diction,
but a theory of poetry: and not merely a theory of poetry, but a theory
of knowledge” (PD 14). While the theory itself is simple and straight-
forward, it has profound implications for the development of language
and perception and the interrelationship of phenomenon, word, and
meaning. It does not lend itself to paraphrase. Barfield’s argument is so
seamlessly constructed that all parts are interdependent and of equal
value in their support of the thesis. Nevertheless, some explanation
is necessary in order to appreciate Tolkien’s ready acceptance of the
theory and to grasp his use of it in his fiction.
Barfield’s theory holds that myth, language, and humanity’s percep-
tion of the world are interlocked and inseparable. The word myth in
this context must be taken to mean that which describes humankind’s
perception of its relationship to the natural and supernatural worlds.
Words are expressed myth, the embodiments of mythic concepts and
a mythic worldview. Language in its beginnings made no distinction
between the literal and the metaphoric meaning of a word, as it does
38 Splintered Light

today. Indeed, the very concept of metaphor, or one thing described in

the terms of another, was nonexistent. All diction was literal, giving
direct voice to the perception of phenomena and humanity’s intuitive
mythic participation in them.
The modern distinction between the literal and metaphoric uses of a
word suggests a separation of the abstract from the concrete, an abstract-
ing of qualities from one thing in order to bestow them on another. This,
says Barfield, must surely have been a late development in the history
of language. Humankind in its beginnings had a sense of the cosmos
as a whole and of itself as a part of that whole, a sense that has long
since been left behind. We now perceive the cosmos as particularized,
fragmented, and entirely separate from ourselves. Our consciousness and
the language with which we express that consciousness have changed
and splintered. In that earlier, primal worldview every word would have
had its own unity of meaning embodying what we now can understand
only as a multiplicity of separate concepts, concepts for which we (no
longer able to participate in the original worldview) must use many
different words.
For example, says Barfield, the Greek word pneuma and the Latin
word spiritus originally each expressed a concept in which “wind,”
“breath,” and “spirit” were all perceived as one and the same phenom-
enon. He notes that in the King James translation of the third chapter
of the Gospel According to Saint John, the word pneuma is rendered
into English as spirit in verse five and as wind in verse eight. Appar-
ently, for John and his audience, pneuma had an undivided meaning
that later perception could no longer grasp entirely and for which a later
mentality must find different words to fit what by then it perceives as
different meanings.
Barfield pushes this concept even further to postulate a kind of proto-
meaning antedating even that undivided meaning we can only recognize
as lost: “We must, therefore, imagine a time when ‘spiritus’ or [pneuma],
or older words from which these had descended, meant neither breath, not
wind, nor spirit, nor yet all three of these things, but when they simply
had their own old peculiar meaning, which has since, in the course of
the evolution of consciousness, crystallized into the three meanings
specified—and no doubt into others also, for which separate words had
already been found by Greek and Roman times” (PD 81).
The Gospel of Saint John provides yet another example. The open-
ing sentence, “In the beginning was the Word,” translated the Greek
 Poetic Diction and Splintered Light 39

logos as “word.” To John and his audience, logos would have conveyed
co-equally with word, “speech,” “reason,” “organizing principle,” and
“cosmic harmony.” All of these now-discrete concepts would have been
apprehended as the same phenomenon. To translate logos, as we are forced
to do today, by selecting one from among these meanings, is arbitrarily
to isolate that meaning and that concept from the entirety of meaning it
must have originally expressed. Word, percept, and concept have altered
so that the former wholeness has, of necessity, been fragmented.
Although overcompressed, this summary gives a general idea of the
salient features of Barfield’s “theory of the ancient semantic unity”
to which Tolkien referred in his conversation with Lewis. The theory
views words as indices and instruments of developing consciousness.
Hu­manity’s growing consciousness of itself as separate from the sur-
rounding phenomena, and of these phenomena as separate from one
another, results in a consequent fragmentation of perception and of the
vocabulary with which it is expressed. As the progression continues,
this fragmentation of vocabulary itself leads to further fragmentation of
perceptions: more refined percepts lead to more words, which give rise
to further percepts that generate new words—and a self-perpetuating
process is established.
This is the theory that, Tolkien told Lewis, had “modified his whole
outlook.” It is not difficult to see why. To accept such a theory—and
clearly Tolkien did—would be to accept a whole new way of looking
at words, would be to see them not just as parts of a language but as
fragments of the Logos, integral elements in the way we relate to our
surroundings. Tolkien told Lewis that Barfield’s concept “stopped him
in time” from saying “all sorts of things” about language that he could
“never say again,” presumably because he must have then seen them
as wrong or misleading. This is the negative, or constraining, side of
the revelation; but the positive side, far from stopping him, may have
enabled him to both see and say other sorts of things that he might not
have otherwise been able to say. Some evidence to suggest this can be
found in “Sigelwara Land,” written some six years after Tolkien read
Poetic Diction. In that essay Tolkien found in the title word a way into
the perception and imagination of those who used it.
It is difficult to imagine that Barfield’s concept could have influenced
Tolkien’s philological and scholarly work without at the same time
coloring the creative work in which he was also engaged, so much of
which was built on and out of language. Knowledge cannot be kept in
40 Splintered Light

compartments; it must inevitably spill over from one area into another.
When the two areas are as close to one another as were Tolkien’s stud-
ies and his fiction, the spillover is not only inevitable but productive,
each field fructifying the other. Thus Tolkien’s fictive world-making
enhanced his capacity to enter imaginatively, through the gateway of
one word, into a long-past culture and its language, while his scholar-
ship gave him a solid base on which to build imaginary peoples and
their languages.
The impact of Barfield’s concept on Tolkien’s thinking is evident in
“On Fairy-stories,” wherein Tolkien writes about the nature of fantasy,
the power of language to create a fantasy world, and the way in which
a word can modify perception, thus stimulating the imagination that
uses it (122). The same approach to words is at the heart of the central
concept of the Silmarillion, a work of Primary Imagination, in Coleridg-
ian terms, that strikingly illustrates the very kind of development and
fragmentation of language Barfield’s theory describes.
Excepting his 1914 poem “The Voyage of Earendel” and another poem
from about the same time, “The Shores of Faery,” Tolkien can be said to
have begun serious work on his mythology in 1917 and was still work-
ing and reworking the material at the time of his death more than five
decades later. The sequence of texts arranged and laid out in chrono-
logical order by Christopher Tolkien in The History of Middle-earth
is ample evidence that the tale grew in the telling and that Tolkien’s
vision expanded and deepened as his learning, experience, and practice
of his craft grew. During much of the time the legendarium was in the
making, his studies in philology and his interest in and teaching of early
Northern European languages and literature continued and developed,
while his encounter with Barfield and Poetic Diction broadened and
deepened his thinking about language in general. Given the two men’s
common interest in mythology, it is not unreasonable to suppose that
it could have validated and reinforced Tolkien’s myth­making, giving
his own languages a more mythical and perhaps more philosophical
bent.
Much of this, and much of Tolkien’s thinking about his own creative
work, is evident in the discussion of language that has such an impor-
tant place in the fairy-story essay, composed while he was in the early
process of writing The Lord of the Rings and beginning to fold it in to
his already-created mythological world. Sub-creation was the process
through which he made the Silmarillion, and his primary tool of sub-
 Poetic Diction and Splintered Light 41

creation, as well as an important component of the sub-created world,

was language used as Barfield had described it in Poetic Diction.
The essay and the mythology are mutually reflective, for Tolkien’s
mythos is both a source for and an illustration of the principles set
forth in “On Fairy-stories.” Tolkien lifts the central image from his
story—the light—and uses it to express his concept of his own creative
process. This concept in turn describes the Silmarillion in its major
aspects of plot and theme. Furthermore, these aspects illustrate in
concrete terms Tolkien’s ideas developed from Barfield about the na-
ture, the function, and the development of language. And finally, both
essay and mythology are paradigmatic of the role and importance of
the writer of fantasy.
The critical center of the essay is the section in which Tolkien dis-
cusses the writing of fantasy as an act of sub-creation. He describes it
as the making of a Secondary World in imitation of God, creator of the
Primary World. God is the Prime Mover, the First Creator; the writer
must therefore be a secondary creator, or sub-creator. For Tolkien this
is not a dismissive term but the title of a high calling. To be second to
God is no mean accomplishment. The writer’s tools of sub-creation are
words—a subdivision of the logos of John, and thus also are in imita-
tion of God. This being the case, words are not merely for describing or
reporting but for actual making, for real-izing in the literal sense of the
word the writer’s imaginary world. Two passages in the essay address
this directly, and while the similarities between them are striking, the
differences are revealing.
The first passage deals explicitly with words and the power of words
and recalls his statement, cited above, that “the incarnate mind, the
tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval.”

The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and

abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other
things (and finding it fair to look upon), but sees that it is green as
well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very
faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell
or incantation in Faërie is more potent. And that is not surprising:
such incantations might indeed be said to be only another view of
adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar.

So far, theory. Then he goes on to illustration.

42 Splintered Light

The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also
conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able
to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into swift
water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did
both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and
red from blood, we have already an enchanter’s power—upon one
plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to
our minds awakes. . . . In such ‘fantasy’ as it is called, new form is
made; Faërie begins; man becomes a sub-creator. (MC122)

Tolkien’s own enchantment with the power of words infuses this pas-
sage with vitality and creative excitement so that the idea is vividly,
energetically, and quite clearly conveyed.
Nevertheless, it seems that one illustration was not enough, for
he found occasion to express the same idea in different terms some
twenty or so pages later. The second passage is different also in being
poetry, not prose. Plainly, Tolkien felt that exposition in one mode was
not sufficient and that the concept needed reemphasis by being cast in
another mode. The lines are from “Mythopoeia,”3 a poem superscribed
from “Philomythus” to “Misomythus” that Tolkien had written in
reply to C. S. Lewis’s argument that myths and fairy tales are merely
fantasies, “lies breathed through silver.” The introduction of part of
this poem into the discussion of fantasy and sub-creation suggests a
desire on Tolkien’s part to expand, to restate, perhaps to redefine his
idea of the process of sub-creation.

“Dear Sir,” I said—“Although now long estranged,

Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,
And keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
Through whom is splintered from a single White
To many hues, and endlessly combined
In living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
With Elves and Goblins, though we dared to built
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seeds of dragons — ’twas our right
 Poetic Diction and Splintered Light 43

(used or misused). That right has not decayed:

we make still by the law in which we’re made. (MC 144)

More is contained in the lines quoted from the poem than in the
earlier prose passage; the implications and ramifications are more far-
reaching. The third line, “Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,”
is a near repetition of a line in the Beowulf essay referring to “man
fallen and not yet saved, disgraced but not dethroned.” Repetition of
the two key words, “disgraced“ and “dethroned,” even the addition of
hyphens to emphasize the meaning, suggests a three-way connection—
of the one essay with the other and of both with the poem. Moreover,
its poetic context gives the phrase greater force than it carried in the
Beowulf essay. There, it was used to characterize pagan yet noble man
doomed to find his only glory in the losing battle against the monsters.
Here it refers to “man, sub-creator,” man the maker rather than man
the fighter; fallen, yes, but not dethroned, still the child of God and
capable, like his creator, of creating.
In the poem, as opposed to the earlier prose passage about the adjec-
tive, Tolkien emphasizes the right to sub-create—not just to make, but
to make by “the law in which we’re made.” The preposition is impor-
tant; we are not made by a law but in that law. We are part of it not just
products of it. That law is the word, the Logos, the highest expression
of Barfield’s ancient semantic unity, the whole vision shattered as we
have fallen and as our perceptions have fragmented. Making still by
that law in which we’re made—the word—we have “dared to build/
gods and their houses out of dark and light.” This polarity adumbrates
the theme of the Silmarillion.
Finally and perhaps most important, the poem contains the vivid
image of Light splintered from the original White “to many hues” as
it is refracted through the prism of the sub-creative human mind. This
last shift from the prose passage is the most crucial, for it alters the
medium of creation from word to light. The sub-creative process is
now the splintering or dividing and recombining of light to create the
“living shapes that move from mind to mind,” whereas in the prose
passage it was simply the combining of words, the incantatory use of
adjectives in a mythical grammar.
The change from word to light appears to be a shift from the literal
to the metaphoric. Moreover, the metaphor seems at first to be an un-
44 Splintered Light

likely one. If we look at it closely, however, we will see that Tolkien

is using words with that awareness of their earliest meaning that is
his characteristic practice. In this case, he is invoking precisely that
mythic literality that Barfield’s concept of ancient semantic unity pos-
tulates, and the fact that he does so underscores his ready acceptance
of Barfield’s theory.
Both words and light are agents of perception, enabling us to see
phenomena. The word for a thing, the name, governs the way it is
perceived and can be said to make us “see” it. Something instinctive
in the use of language reaches for metaphors of light to convey mental
as well as physical perception. We clarify an argument. We say we see
when we mean we understand. A change in wording can put things
in a different light. Three uses of this kind of metaphor occur in the
previous paragraph. This is nothing new; any study of language will
regularly turn up such “dead” metaphor. The point is that for Tolkien
it is neither dead nor a metaphor; it is a living reality. For him the Word
is Light, enlightenment.
 5
Fantasy and Phenomena

We make still by the law in which we’re made

—“Mythopoeia”

Both the prose and poetic passages from Tolkien’s essay are addressed to
the writing, the sub-creating, of fantasy. He has already equated fantasy
with Coleridge’s Imagination and with “freedom from observed fact.”
For the perceiving human mind with its faculty of imagination, there
is much more than mere fact to be observed in this or any other world.
Appearances must be interpreted, and certainly there is more than
one way of seeing things. The word fantasy, which figures so largely
in Tolkien’s discussion of fairy-stories, is etymologically linked to the
word phenomena, and both have to do with appearances and percep-
tion. Phenomena is the word for the appearances of the Primary World,
appearances revealed by light and fixed as concepts by words. Fantasy
is involved in the making of a Secondary World, the appearances of
which are built up in words.
Both terms—phenomenon and fantasy—derive from Greek, phenom-
enon from phainesthai, “to appear,” and fantasy from phantazein, “to
make visible.” The difference is that one, phainesthai, is an intransitive
verb having no object, and the other, phantazein, is transitive; that is,
it affects an object external to and other than itself. Both phainesthai
and phantazein come from an earlier Greek phainein, “to show,” which

45
46 Splintered Light

as the prior and less distinct concept must then predate the transitive-
intransitive distinction that separates, by the word used, things that
appear from that which makes things appear. Nevertheless, much the
same concept is contained in all three words. Moreover, the distinction
indicated by the two later words illustrates that very fragmentation of
a previously unified concept that Barfield postulates.
The farther back in time, the closer to whole or unified the concept
appears to be. Furthermore, the earliest concept leads directly to light, for
all three words—phainesthai, phantazein, and phainein—can be traced
back to Indo-European bha-­ -1 “to shine.” It would seem, then, that there
must have been a time during humankind’s development of language
when phenomena and fantasy—“appearances perceived” and “appear-
ances made visible by imagination”—must have been more closely linked,
less easily distinguishable from one another than they are today.
Deriving as they do from bha-­ -1, both words must carry some concept
of throwing or reflecting light. It seems more than coincidence that
the entry directly after bha­--1 in the Indo-European Appendix to the
American Heritage Dictionary is Indo-European bha­--2, a root with the
same spelling and the same sound, this one meaning “to speak.” From
bha­--2 comes Greek pho-ne- “sound, voice,” developing into phone-in, “to
sound, speak,” and then into phonema, “an utterance.” Phonologically
at least, then, light and word can be traced back to the same sound. We
are free to speculate that there may have been at one time a semantic
link as well, implying a perceptual connection between the two. This
much is clear: phenomena and fantasy, related kinds of appearance,
can be revealed by light or by word and perhaps in an earlier, more
unified sense, by light as word, at once the instrument and expression
of humankind’s perception of the world.
Both light and word, then, as Tolkien sees them, can be instruments
of sub-creation. It seems clear, however, that Light extends the concept
further than does word. The White Light of the “Mythopoeia” poem
recalls the vision described in the epigraph to chapter 1, in which Tolk-
ien envisioned the White Light of God as holding the mote, but with
this difference: in the poem, man is not the mote but instead the prism
through which the White Light passes and is splintered into the hues
of the color spectrum. The parallel to Barfield’s theory of the splinter-
ing of whole meaning is clear; indeed, if we can accept the light-word
correspondence implied by the two relationships phenomena-fantasy
and bha-­ -1 and bha-­ -2, we can see Tolkien and Barfield as (at least in this
 Fantasy and Phenomena 47

instance) more than parallel, as addressing the same process through

related manifestations. Humankind, splintering light to many hues and
splintering original perception into many concepts and words, is using
fantasy to particularize and make manifest fragments of original truth.
For Tolkien, profoundly Christian and devoutly Catholic, all three
elements—humanity, light, and truth—have their origin in God. In act-
ing as a prism and this refracting light and word, “Man, sub-creator”
fulfills God’s purpose by making a fantasy world that will of necessity
reflect the phenomena of our world. Sub-creation, then, is not idle play
or random imitation of God; it is part of His intent.
That this was Tolkien’s view of sub-creation is clear from his words
at the end of the fairy-story essay. When he has dealt with evangelium
and Joy and proposed and explored the relationship between fairy-story
and the Gospels, between sub-creation and Creation, he brings all to-
gether in his concluding statement: “The Christian has still to work,
with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now
perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be
redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that
he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actu-
ally assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All
tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like
and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed,
will be like and unlike the fallen that we know” (156–67). This line of
thought extends Tolkien’s theory of sub-creation to its ultimate. Such
extension and the reasoning (and feeling) behind it are in very much
the same spirit as Barfield’s continuing examination of the fragmenta-
tion of meaning and his exploration of the function and purpose of that
fragmentation as developed in his later books and articles.
Both Tolkien and Barfield regarded the Word as the instrument of
Creation and words as instruments of humanity’s separation from God
and from the universe, as well as indices and measurements of that
separation. Both felt that the task of the poet was to bridge that separa-
tion, to use words to reconnect what they had severed. For each of them,
words were to be the poetic instruments of humankind’s ultimate and
conscious reunion with God. Poetic Diction makes it clear that it is in
and by words that we feel and express a sense of separation and that it
will be through the creative power of words that we can return. The poet,
through the use of metaphor, is a maker of meaning and a re-creator of
perception. Poetry—poetic diction—reinvests the world with meaning
48 Splintered Light

and rebuilds our relationship with it. This is splintered light “endlessly
combined,” that mythical grammar by which the sub-creator may assist
in the “effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation.”
Beyond his already discussed response to Poetic Diction, there is
no specific evidence to show that Tolkien was familiar with any of
Barfield’s other writings, which expand and deepen his theory of the
relationship of language and perception and their role in the develop-
ment of consciousness. No further reading would have been necessary,
however, since Barfield himself said of his own work that however many
books and articles he wrote he was “really saying the same thing over
and over again” (Rediscovery 3). Poetic Diction, then, would have been
suf­ficient for an informed reader such as Tolkien, whose particular
interests, education, experience, and knowledge had prepared him to
be sympathetic to the ideas it expressed.
Nor is there any evidence that Tolkien and Barfield discussed with
one another the ideas that the one proposed and the other took so to
heart that there were all sorts of things he could never say again. Bar­
field’s visits to Oxford were intermittent rather than regular, and it is
quite possible that the occasion may never have arisen for the two to
exchange their views in this area. It is worth noting that it was Lewis
who reported the remark to Barfield, and not Tolkien who told him
directly. Nonetheless, however infrequently they may have met, it
seems clear that they did share a community of interests and a similar
attitude toward language. Over and above that, each seems to have
reached independently much the same perspective on the development
of humankind and human language.
 6
Splintered Light and
Splintered Being

There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Ilúvatar

—The Silmarillion

ToturnfromPoeticDictionand“OnFairy-stories”toTheSilmarillionistogofrom
theory,variouslyexpressed,topractice.Theworkisasweepinglegendarium,an
imaginedmythologywithallthefamiliarmyth­ologicalcharacters,elements,and
themes—creation and transgression, gods and men, love and war, heroism and
doom. More than anything else, and more than most mythologies, it is a story
about light. Images of light in all stages—bright, dim, whole, refracted, clear, or
rainbow-hued—pervade the songs and stories of the fictive world. It is a world
peopled with sub-creators whose interactions with and attitudes toward the
light shape their world and their own destinies within it.
Tolkien’s treatment of light in The Silmarillion derives its primary
image from his Catholicism, its linguistic method from Barfield’s theory.
His approach is to first restore to words their primal unity of concept
and then to set up a progressive fragmentation of both word and per-
cept as these express a changing relationship to the fictive world and
a diminishing reflection of its light. His technique is to confer literal-
ity on what would in the primary world be called metaphor and then
to illustrate the process by which the literal becomes metaphoric. To
see this at work we must understand something of the principles and
major components of his Secondary World. Christopher Tolkien says

49
50 Splintered Light

of his father’s invented languages, “These languages were conceived,

of course, from the very beginning in a deeply ‘historical’ way: they
were embodied in a history, the history of the Elves who spoke them,
in which was to be found, as it evolved, a rich terrain for linguistic
separation and interaction: ‘a language requires a suitable habitation,
and a history in which it can develop’” (Lost Road 341; Letters 375)
Any semantic analysis must be done with caution, for there was
both an interior development, as Tolkien followed the course of his
Elven languages through the shifts and changes attendant on their
history in Middle-earth (as in the quote cited above), and an exterior
development, as that history itself shifted and changed over the course
of revisions and reconceptualizations. That said, some elements can be
identified and some patterns traced. Above all is the first cause, Eru,
with the epithet Ilúvatar. In Tolkien’s primary Elven language, Quenya,
the element er means “one, alone” (Silm. 358; Lost Road 356) and the
name Eru is translated in The Silmarillion as “The One.”1
Possible relationships between invented languages and actual ones
should be suggested with care and hesitation in the recognition that
there can be no actual generic connection. Nevertheless, the phonologi-
cal likeness of Tolkien’s er (and by extension Eru) to the Indo-European
root er1, “to set in motion,” and the related Germanic root *ar, “to
be, exist,” is difficult to ignore. Given Tolkien’s knowledge of Indo-
European language theory and of the roots of European languages, we
may at least take note of the obvious similarity, both in sound and
meaning, between Quenya er and the Indo-European and Germanic
roots cited above. Eru, “the One,” is the Prime Mover, that which is,
and the unity from which all existence emanates.
Within the interior, fictive history, Ilúvatar, “Allfather/Father of All,”
the Elven name or epithet by which Eru is most familiarly known, is
glossed in the linguistic “Appendix: Elements in Quenya and Sindarin
Names” in The Silmarillion as: “ilúvë, ‘the whole, the all’ in Ilúvatar”
(360). The “Etymologies” in The Lost Road show Ilúvatar deriving from
Proto-Elvish il— “all” through ilu— “universe” (361) to Quenya Ilú­va­­
tar. In its earliest appearance in the narrative portion of The Lost Road,
it is glossed as “the One” (63). Name and epithet are thus conceptually,
though not etymologically or phonologically, related. The shift from
“one” to “whole” to “all” is itself indicative of a change in perception
and/or consciousness from an indivisible unity to a whole (as opposed
to parts) to a totality or collection.
 Splintered Light and Splintered Being 51

Just below Eru in the hierarchy are the Ainur, “the Holy Ones” from
aina, meaning “holy” (Silm. 355). These beings are described as “the
offspring of his [Eru’s] thought, and they were with him before aught
else was made” (Silm. 15). The concept of offspring from One suggests
a sort of Pythagorean divisibility of a unity into component parts with-
out diminution of the whole. The Ainur are powers or principalities
emanating directly from the godhead and are developed in the text as
aspects of his nature. The next step in creation comes about when Eru
propounds a musical theme to the Ainur, inviting them to “adorn” it
and of it to make “a Great Music.” In this Music the world is conceived,
and out of the Music it is born.
Eventually the world is peopled by a variety of species, but two
major races predominate, Elves and Men. Both races embody aspects
of humankind, and through the continually shifting relationship of
each to the light Tolkien explores humanity’s relationship to God. A
problem of nomenclature arises here, in just how to characterize and
refer to the two peoples who are, with respect to the world around
them, far more like than they are different. Tolkien clearly thought of
Elves and Men as two quite distinct kinds of beings, almost different
species. Yet it is also clear that he thought of each as representing or
embodying different aspects of the human race. His comments make
this obvious. “Of course in reality,” he wrote, “my ‘elves’ are only a
representation or an apprehension of a part of human nature” (Silm.
xvi n.). And again, “I should say that they [Elves] represent really Men
with greatly enhanced aesthetic and creative faculties, greater beauty
and longer life” (Letters 176). He wrote of both his races: “Of course,
in fact exterior to my story, Elves and Men are just different aspects
of the Humane, and represent the problem of Death as seen by a finite
but willing and self-conscious person. In this mythological world the
Elves and Men are in their incarnate forms kindred, but in the relation
of their ‘spirits’ to the world in time represent different ‘experiments,’
each of which has its own natural trend, and weakness” (Letters 236).
The problem obtrudes when Elves and Men must be referred to to-
gether, when it becomes necessary to find a term that will encompass
both and yet leave the separation clear. Something of the same problem
arises with respect to Men and Hobbits. Tolkien wrote of these two:
“The Hobbits are, of course, really meant to be a branch of the spe­ci­
fically human race (not Elves or Dwarves)” (Letters 158 n). Here he
classes hobbits with Men as humans and excludes Elves. Presented thus
52 Splintered Light

with three distinct peoples, all of which are described as human at one
time or another, two of which (Elves and Hobbits) are compared with
men but not with each other, the reader can be excused for experiencing
some confusion. Niceties of distinction among Men, Elves, and Hob-
bits—clear enough in reference to any one of the three—begin to blur
when, as is bound to happen, it becomes necessary speak about them
in relation to their creator (Eru/Ilúvatar) or in comparison to actual
humans in the primary World. On those occasions when the problem
arises, the difficulty may be lessened, somewhat arbitrarily, by referring
to Elves and Men (separately and together) as humankind and Men and
Hobbits (separately and together) as mankind.
Differences between the two races are central to Tolkien’s purpose,
for these differences color the relationship of each to Eru/Ilúvatar and to
the surrounding world. The most important difference is that mankind
dies and leaves the world when its comparatively short span is over,
whereas Elves do not die and are bound to the world for as long as it lasts.
Tolkien commented, most frequently in his letters, that the theme of his
work was death and immortality. One citation, representative of many,
will make the point: “The real theme for me is about something much
more permanent and difficult [than war]: Death and Immortality: the
mystery of the love of the world in the hearts of a race ‘doomed’ to leave
and seemingly to lose it; the anguish in the hearts of a race ‘doomed’
not to leave it, until its whole evil-aroused story is complete” (Letters
246). Within the mythology, death is called the “Gift of Ilúvatar,” a gift
whose value is distorted and made to seem evil by the dark powers.
Beyond this “Gift,’’ Tolkien through his god-figure has conferred
another power on mankind: the virtue to “shape their life” beyond
the creational design of the Music “which is as fate to all things else.”
In bestowing this capability on mortals while withholding it from
the immortal Elves, Tolkien has deliberately introduced a paradox, a
world guided by both fate and free will, thus increasing the tension
inherent in intersecting lives and their possible effect on one another
and on events. At several points in The Silmarillion Tolkien presents
situations in which Elves appear to be given a choice between good
and evil or in which the decisions of Men have the power to affect the
fates of Elves. A possible distinction between them may be that Men
are given the power to act beyond the Music (that is, to alter external
events or circumstances), while Elves, though bound by the Music, have
the freedom to make internal choices, to alter some attitude toward
 Splintered Light and Splintered Being 53

themselves of other creatures or Eru. They may have power over their
own natures, though not over external happenings.
In a letter to a reviewer of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien declared
that both races were “rational creatures of free will in regard to God
(Letters 236). The key may lie in the phrase “in regard to God,” suggest-
ing that in the sub-created world God, Eru, who proposed the theme
but had the Ainur make the Music, is himself beyond and above it.
This implies a kind of Boëthian 2 concept in which the mind of God
encompasses any design perceivable by any of his creatures and is
explicit in such statements by Eru to the Ainur, as “no theme may be
played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the
music in my despite” (Silm. 17). This is more clearly stated not in The
Silmarillion itself but in the supplementary Unfinished Tales. Ulmo,
one of the Ainur, the offspring of Eru’s thought and thus an aspect of
him, declares to Tuor, a Man in whose actions Ulmo is intervening,
that, “in the armour of Fate (as the Children of Earth name it) there is
ever a rift, and in the walls of Doom a breach, until the full-making,
which ye call the End. So shall it be while I endure, a secret voice that
gainsayeth, and a light where darkness was decreed. Therefore, though
in the days of this darkness I seem to oppose the will of my brethren,
the lords of the West, that is my part among them, to which I was ap-
pointed ere the making of the World” (UT 29).
This seems to make it clear that in Tolkien’s cosmology, which
encompasses both fate and free will, the mind of the Prime Mover
extends beyond the Creation to leave room for what to earthbound
perceivers may appear as exceptions to the rule. The same idea is stated
more explicitly in a letter to Peter Hastings, manager of the Newman
Bookshop in Oxford, who wrote Tolkien asking if he had not somewhat
overstepped the line in respect of metaphysical matters: “Free will is
derivative, and is only operative within provided circumstances; but in
order that it may exist, it is necessary that the Author should guarantee
it, whatever it betides: sc. when it is ‘against His Will’ as we say, at any
rate as it appears in a finite view” (Letters 195). Within the confines
of his Secondary World, Eru’s gift to humankind of free will is only
“operative within provided circumstances,” that is, that have their
“uttermost source” in him. Elsewhere, Tolkien writes of “the Finger
of God, as the one wholly free Will and Agent” (Letters 204).
Unlike the biblical God, Tolkien’s Eru is a strikingly remote and
disengaged figure. He had little or no direct interaction in his world
54 Splintered Light

but leaves it to those of the Ainur called the Valar, the Powers of the
World, who choose to concern themselves specifically with the earth
and its inhabitants. Tolkien described them as “angelic powers, whose
function is to exercise delegated authority in their spheres,” and as
“divine,” existing before the creation of the world. Within the narra-
tive, the Valar function as limited god-figures. In his letter to Milton
Wald­man, Tolkien explained, “On the side of mere narrative device,
this is, of course, meant to provide beings of the same order of beauty,
power, and majesty as the ‘gods’ of higher mythology, which can yet
be accepted—well, shall we say baldly, by a mind that believes in the
Blessed Trinity” (Silm. xiv).
The concept of the Valar is especially important to the cosmology.
While their position in the hierarchy suggests angelic beings, their role
in the scheme of things is, from a strictly Christian point of view, ec-
centric. Tolkien’s treatment and use of them, the limited foreknowledge
he gives them, their power to act in ways seemingly both good and ill,
take them a good way beyond the conventional view of angels. They are
sub-creators who work with and within the fabric of the world to shape
it. In that capacity, they seem in some ways more comparable to the
creator God presented in Genesis than does Eru. Like Jahweh, as God
is called in Genesis 2, the Valar are present in and (when they so will)
manifest to the world they have fashioned. On the level of language,
however, they have a greater resemblance to Elohim, as God is called
in Genesis 1. It is worth noting that Elohim, which the translators of
the King James Bible rendered as God, is technically a plural form,
the plural intensive of the Hebrew El, which is, strictly speaking, the
name of God. As a plural, it can suggest not many gods but God in all
his aspects, God as multiplicity, a concept not unlike the multiplicity
of Eru’s thought who are the Valar.
Wisely, Tolkien never allows the comparison to be specific or explicit.
His Valar, he wrote in a draft of a letter to Rhona Beare, “take the imagi-
native but not the theological place of ‘gods’” (Letters 284). Manwë, the
chief of the Valar, is lord of the earth and is Eru’s deputy. His epithet is
Súlimo, “The Breather,” and he is master of the airs and winds, lord of
the airs of Arda, the world. Both in function and by epithet—that is, as
he is perceived—Manwë thus encompasses all the ancient meanings of
spiritus and pneuma cited by Barfield: “breath,” “wind,” and “spirit.”
The same nexus ties him to Genesis 2:1, in which the spirit of God,
Elohim, moves upon the waters. The Hebrew word ruach used in this
 Splintered Light and Splintered Being 55

verse, translated as “spirit” in the King James, can also mean “breath.”
Manwë thus has a function in Tolkien’s fictive world not unlike that of
God in Genesis 1. It is important to note, however, that Tol­kien makes
clear that Manwë is not God but a secondary figure.
The adjective Tolkien used to describe the labors of the Valar in
making the world is demiurgic. It recalls Plato’s use of “demiurge” to
describe the deity who fashions the material world and, as well, the
Gnostic use of the word for the same purpose. Tolkien’s Valar do, indeed,
create the material world of Arda, action that puts them closer to the
God of Genesis than to the angels. But Eru of The Silmarillion is not
the God of Genesis, and the clear distinction between Eru and the Valar
is essential to Tolkien’s design. There is only one Prime Mover—Eru,
the One. The Ainur, and more particularly the Valar, are sub-creators.
They participate in the physical making of the world but could not
have done so had not Eru first given them the theme. In the same letter
to Peter Hastings cited above, Tolkien stated clearly that “the whole
matter from beginning to end is mainly concerned with the relation of
Creation to making and sub-creation” (Letters 188); and further on in
the same letter he said of Creation (clearly a greater act than making),
“the act of Will of Eru the One that gives Reality to conceptions, is
distinguished from Making, which is permissive” (190 n).
Sub-creation, then, is demiurgic. Here again etymology may throw
light on Tol­kien’s intent. The word demiurge traces back to two distinct
Indo-European roots: da--, “to divide,” with suffixed form, and da--­mo,
perhaps “division of society,” as in Greek demos, combined with werg,1
“to do” as in Greek ergon, “work, action.” Their union in demi­urge may
have conveyed a meaning like “craftsman,” or “skilled workman,” as
a division of society. The Valar, as products of Eru’s thoughts, are that
division of the godhead which actively engages in the skilled work of
sub-creation, the physical activity of shaping the world. As divisions of
Eru, they are assisting in the further division and development whereby
the theme (also the product of his thought) is taken from him and shaped
by Valar into the Music and beyond it into the substance of the world.
They are thus also dividing the world from Eru, assisting in a process of
separation through which Eru and the world can contemplate each other.
In addition, the Valar suggest to the reader the gods of pagan my-
thologies, since each has a separate function and most have as well a
particular role in, or connection with, an element of the earth—air,
water, minerals, growing things. Some are associated with theoretical
56 Splintered Light

concepts, such as judgment or doom. The Valar themselves have subor-

dinates of the same order but lesser in degree and thus also the offspring
of Eru’s thought. These are a group of beings called Maiar, who seem to
be more local, suggesting demigods or inhabiting spirits, and to embody
a further subdivision of functions. Where the Vala Ulmo, for example,
is “Lord of Waters,” and “moves . . . in all the deep waters” (Silm. 26),
his “vassal” is Ossë, the Maia whose special province is not the deeps
but the shallows. Ossë, “master of the seas that wash the shores” (Silm.
30), loves the seacoasts and islands.
 7
Theme and Variations

In this Myth the rebellion of created

free-will precedes creation of the world.
—J. R. R. Tolkien

Quite literally setting the tone for all of creation in this sub-created
world is the Music, the initiating force and the design in which all is
contained. Eru propounds a musical theme to the Ainur and invites
them to elaborate it and develop it into a Great Music. This is the first
action and brings with it the first reaction. In the making of the Music
the first rebellion occurs. Melkor, the greatest of the Ainur and in his
nature and potential the closest to Eru, is not content to serve Eru’s
theme. He counters with a theme of his own, and the result is a kind
of war in heaven—two themes in contention with one another, one
melodious and harmonic, the other clamorous and discordant.
The reference is obvious, but at the same time more complex and
original that may at first appear. Two distinct ideas have been blended
to make a new and coherent whole. The first idea is the rebellion of
Lucifer, embedded in Christian theology through the Bible and in
Christian thought and imagination by Milton. The second is the con-
cept of sound, specifically music, as the ordering force of the universe.
Its origin is traceable to the Pythagorean philosophy that the heavens
and especially the solar system formed a musical scale whose ratios
created heavenly harmony. A viable concept well into the Middle Ages,

57
58 Splintered Light

the “music of the spheres” (for each planet was supposed to ride on its
own crystalline sphere sounding in harmonic vibration with the others)
persisted as a metaphor well into the eighteenth century, informing,
for example, Dryden’s “St. Cecelia’s Day Ode.”
Tolkien took these two ideas, celestial harmony and rebellious discord,
and wove them together, making each concept dependent on, as well as
the source of, the other. Rebellion is conflict and conflict is disharmony,
and in Tolkien’s invented world the disharmony is the essence and origin
of the rebellion. Most important to his concept is the actuality of all the
elements. What must be metaphoric in our Primary World is literal in
his imagined Secondary one. A clear difference is apparent here between
Tolkien’s invented myth and Christian mythology. The difference is de-
liberate and intentional and is part of his effort to exclude overt Christian
reference from his cosmology. Christian elements are undeniably present,
but they are also pre-Christian and extra-Christian. Moreover, Tolkien
consciously recombined these elements so that they pertain specifically
to his sub-created world. He wrote:

I suppose a difference between this Myth and what may be perhaps

called Christian mythology is this. In the latter the Fall of Man is
subsequent to and a consequence (though not a necessary conse-
quence) of the ‘Fall of the Angels’: a rebellion of created free-will
at a higher level than Man; but it is not clearly held (and in many
versions is not held at all) that this affected the ‘World’ in its nature:
evil was brought in from outside, by Satan. In this Myth the rebellion
of created free-will precedes creation of the world (Eä); and Eä has in
it, sub-creatively introduced, evil, rebellions, discordant elements
of its own nature already when the Let it Be was spoken. The Fall
or corruption, therefore of all things in it and all inhabitants of it,
was a possibility if not inevitable. (Letters 286–87)

As Melkor’s discord becomes an active part of the Music, so his re-

bellion directly affects the shape and being of the world that is to be. It
is important to note that the Music is not the physical act of creation,
but only its blueprint. It is the pattern for the world in potentia. The
appearance (phainesthai), is then shown to the Ainur by Eru, who gives
them sight to go with what until now has been only sound and who
says to them, “Behold your Music!” whereupon they see a new world
“made visible” [phantazein] before them (Silm. 17). Their task is then
 Theme and Variations 59

to go down into the World and make real the pattern in response to
Eru’s commanding Word: “Eä! Let these things Be!” (Silm. 20).
Among the many elements Tolkien synthesized in his concept of
music as the creative force are the two biblical accounts of creation,
the one from the first chapter of Genesis and the other from the open-
ing verse of the Gospel according to Saint John. Genesis begins with
God’s command that there be light; John declares that in the beginning
was the Word. As discussed earlier, word, logos, carried at one time far
more meaning than it does today. It had the force of order, principle of
organization, harmony. It meant something very close to music in the
Pythagorean sense. In Tolkien’s fictive world, the creative principles of
Genesis and John are combined. Light and music are conjoined elements
made manifest in the visible world sung as the Music of the Ainur.
The word Eä, which in Elvish means, “It is,” or “Let it Be,” is listed in
the Index to The Silmarillion as “the word of Ilúvatar when the World
began its existence” (325). It thus becomes the imperative form of the
Great Music, the vision as both light and logos.
The importance and power of the word for Tolkien cannot be too
strongly emphasized. “Chaucer as a Philologist” and “Sigelwara Land”
are evidence of the care he took with the words of a text, sifting orthog-
raphy and sound change, reconstructing where possible, in order to come
as close as the modern mind can approach to the original meaning and
original use. In his Valedictory Address to the University of Oxford on
the occasion of his retirement as Merton Professor of English Language
and Literature, he characterized his work as a scholar and a teacher.
“I would always rather try to wring the juice out of a single sentence,
or explore the implications of one word than try to sum up a period
in a lecture, or pot a poet in a paragraph” (MC 224). The Silmarillion
is testimony to his desire to “explore the implications of one word,”
for the whole vast sweep of his mythology is in truth just that—the
exploration of the implications and ramifications of the one word Eä.
The Valar, too, must explore those implications as the word unfolds,
for as Eru speaks it, the world is only potential. Entering into the
world, the Valar find that the real work is still to be done, “for it was
as if naught was as yet made which they had seen in vision, and all
was but on point to begin and yet unshaped, and it was dark. For the
Great Music had been but the growth and flowering of thought in the
Timeless Halls, and the Vision only a foreshowing; but now they had
entered in at the beginning of Time, and the Valar perceived that the
60 Splintered Light

World had been but foreshadowed and foresung, and they must achieve
it” (Silm. 20). The task of the Valar is to shape and light the world, but
the whole concept belongs to Eru alone. In fulfilling his purpose, the
Valar are already at one remove from his wholeness, for they bring to
the world not light but lights, a variety of lights of differing kinds and
progressively lessening intensities. Each light that comes is dimmer
than the one before it, splintered by Tolkien’s sub-creators.
This extended image of light diminished from its primal brilliance,
yet still and evermore faintly illuminating the world, is paralleled by
Tolkien’s presentation of the peoples of that world and of their language.
Increasingly as the story progresses, we are shown, through character,
deed, and word, that Elves and Men are in their different ways drawn
to the light and yet separated from it. The whole work is permeated by
an air of deepening sorrow, a sense of loss, of estrangement, and ever-
widening distance from the light and all that is signifies. Tolkien has
imagined a world and its peoples through which he can explore the
meaning and consequences of the Fall—the long separation of human-
ity from the light of God.
By making light a tangible reality and putting it into the hands of a
succession of sub-creators, Tolkien has invited his readers to experience
the newly created world of Eä as Barfield suggested that it was experi-
enced originally. What we might be tempted to separate into levels of
meaning—literal, metaphoric, symbolic—is here presented as a vital
whole, a re-creation of that original participation of man with the world
that Barfield postulates. This is essentially a mythic mode of thought;
and in a world where such a mode is no longer dominant, we must call
it “fantasy.” The realistic novel, deriving from and describing a world
in which mythic thinking has been out of fashion, will be unable to
present such material believably. The best available vehicle is fantasy;
the best and most persuasive method is sub-creation.
Such sub-creation should not be attempted lightly, for if it fails to
persuade, to induce in the reader the enchanted state of secondary be-
lief that Tolkien says is necessary; the results will be at best shallowly
commercial (and we have seen too much of that), or at worst laughable.
Good sub-creation must be built on that “inner consistency of reality”
that Tolkien describes in the fairy-story essay: “Anyone inheriting the
fantastic device of human language can say the green sun. Many can
then imagine or picture it. But that is not enough. . . . To make a Sec-
 Theme and Variations 61

ondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding
Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will
certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft” (MC 140).
At the risk of belaboring a point, let me call attention to Tolkien’s
use of the word fantastic to describe human language. He is talking
about the writing of fantasy, but he takes as a given that human lan-
guage is a “device” peculiarly designed for and particularly suited to
the creation of fantasy. Used literally, of course, the word fantastic will
mean “making visible or revealing appearances,” and we have seen that
for Tolkien this is a primary function of language. Use of so powerful
a tool to make a Secondary World must be backed up by “labour and
thought” and must be informed by skill beyond the ordinary, what he
calls “elvish craft.”
He is talking about himself, for he was well aware of his own skill, of
the level of elvish craft, he had developed in the writing and rewriting
of the stories of the Silmarillion. His own “green sun” in the Silmaril-
lion is light. His elvish craft is his ability to work with language. And
in his case “language” as a term must be extended beyond the English
language in which his work is (for the most part) written, though his
use of English is conscious and its expression important. “Language”
means also his invented languages—chiefly the primary Elvish and its
derivatives—spoken by the peoples of his fantastic Secondary World.
He said on more than one occasion that he created his world as the
background and justification for those invented languages that had
been his hobby since childhood. Language, then, came first, and his
development of it forced him to realize that there can be no language
without a people to speak it, no people without a culture that guides
and expresses them, no culture without a myth that informs and shapes
it—through the fantastic device of language. And so it comes full circle,
and the “inner consistency of reality” is one in which myth, language,
and culture reflect one another and shape the world that gives them
life.
Not only light but language as well permeates the story. Language
builds the world, colors events, shapes character. Above all, it supports
and embodies the theme. To explore this fully, however, we must go
back before language to begin with the time in Tolkien’s world when
the Valar are making actual the pattern of the Music. And here the
terms “language” and “speech” must be qualified. While Eru “speaks”
62 Splintered Light

to the Ainur, and the Ainur are frequently presented as in “speech”

with one another, it seems clear that such communication is meant to
be taken as preverbal, as some kind of supersensible converse among
unbodied spiritual beings.
The nearest Tolkien comes to suggesting language among the Ainur
is in his description of their Music. “Then the voices of the Ainur, like
unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and
like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the
theme of Ilúvatar to a great music” (Silm. 15; emphasis added). “Sing-
ing with words” might imply speech but for the modifying phrase “like
unto” that precedes all the instruments listed including the choirs.
Speech is here prefigured, in Tolkien’s words “foreshadowed and fore­
sung,” as is the rest of creation, but at this point in the narrative it is
not an actuality. Speech as the word is commonly used—the exercise
of vocal muscles to produce meaningful human sound—begins well
after the creation of the world. It is introduced into Middle-earth by
the Elves. Predictably, it comes out of light.
The shape of the earth, twisted out of its original pattern by Melkor’s
rebellion against Eru, undergoes further distortion in the actual mak-
ing. The contentious and quarrelsome Melkor again opposes the other
Valar for dominion in the molding of the earth. At every turn, he mars
their work, destroying what the others create, tearing down what they
build up, undoing or substantially altering every effort. After a time
he is defeated, but his war has marked the world. It is at this point in
creation, when order has been restored, that light, as it is commonly
understood, light as the necessary concomitant of a generative world, is
introduced. Yavanna, goddess of growing things, plants the earth with
seeds. Then, says the narrative, “there was need of light.” In Middle-
earth, as in the primary World, there can be no fruition without light.

Aulë at the prayer of Yavanna wrought two mighty lamps for the
lighting of the Middle-earth which he had built amid the encircling
seas. Then Varda [Queen of the Valar and goddess of light] filled the
lamps and Manwë hallowed them, and the Valar set them upon high
pillars, more lofty far than are any mountains of the later days. One
lamp they raised near to the north of Middle-earth, and it was named
Illuin; and the other was raised in the south, and it was named Ormal;
and the light of the Lamps of the Valar flowed out over the Earth, so
that all was lit as it were in a changeless day. (Silm. 35)
 Theme and Variations 63

As described, this first light seems to be something not far from

the primal light of God as conceived in the command in Genesis 1,
“Let there be light.” The light of the Lamps is brilliant and constant;
there is no night, no dark. Light (enlightenment) is ever-present and all-
illuminating. However, because strife is in the Music and strife shapes
the events of the world, this state of things cannot last. Coming forth
suddenly, Melkor throws down the pillars and breaks the Lamps. In
the tumult of their overthrow, the shapes of land and sea are changed
again. Flame from the Lamps spills out and scorches the land. In the
lovely but imperfect world of Middle-earth the uncontained light and
heat are too intense; they destroy what they touch. The first light is
quenched and cannot be renewed.
After a time, new light is brought into being, but the quality is
changed and the brightness is diminished. Now it is Yavanna who calls
forth light, but since her province is nature and growing things rather
than the air and fire that are the provinces of Manwë and Varda, this light
is different in kind from the primal, fiery element that lit the Lamps.
Through Yavanna’s singing the two light-emitting Trees, gold Laurelin
and silver Telperion, come into being. Again, the relationship is one of
light and music, but in lesser terms. The music is now a single voice,
not a cosmic choir, and the light itself is gentler and dimmer, not as
fierce but also not as illuminating.
The differences between the Lamps and the Trees are multiple and
striking and conform to the pattern of fragmentation and diminution
that underlies the whole mythology. Where the Lamps lighted all
of Middle-earth, the Trees shine only in Valinor, home of the Valar.
Moreover, theirs is a softer light, a gold and silver glow rather than an
unshielded flame. Rooted in the natural world, the Trees give light in
waxing and waning cycles of flower and fruit. Each tree shines in turn
for seven hours, and the waning hour of one is the awakening hour of
the other, so periodically the gold and silver lights overlap, blend, and
shine in concert.
The concept is extraordinarily beautiful, but the beauty has a function
and serves the theme. The alternating cycles of light mark the beginning
of days, a rhythm that suggests measured time. There is still no night,
no absolute dark, but there is a hesitation and pulsation, as if the light
must now be tempered to the life of the world and brought softly into
being. However dimmer, this is the light of the world. Tolkien wrote of
it: “The Light of Valinor (derived from light before any fall1) is the light
64 Splintered Light

of art undivorced from reason, that sees things both scientifically (or
philosophically) and imaginatively (or sub-creatively) and says that they
are good—as beautiful. The light of Sun (or Moon) is derived from the
Trees only after they were sullied by Evil” (Silm. xv n).
With the Trees there is now light in Valinor, but Middle-earth is dark,
robbed of the Lamps, benighted save for the stars, dim, inaccessible
points of light beyond reach. Thus even before the earth is peopled,
the light is withdrawn. With this development, we can see clearly how
Tolkien has used fantasy to reinvest metaphor with literality. Those
who seek the light can find it, but they must be shown the way. In
Middle-earth as in our own world, enlightenment is to be desired. But
in Middle-earth that light is a physical reality, not a metaphor for an
inner state of being, and to find it one must physically change one’s
state or place on the earth and so exchange darkness for light. A desire
to exchange one state of being for another entails literal action, not just
a change of heart or mind.
This diminution of the light cannot yet be called a splintering, though
it prefigures splintering in the lessening of brightness and the subtle
introduction of color where before all had been white that comes with
the shift from the glare of the Lamps to the glow of the Trees. The next
interaction of sub-creator and light, however, is a true splintering, and
it presages the beginning of true speech in the sub-created world. The
two Trees do not just radiate light; they exude it as a kind of dew, a
liquid that falls from the blossoms of each tree and is caught in vats set
about the boles. From the gathered dew of the silver Tree, Telperion,
Varda fashions new and brighter stars so that the Elves, when they
awaken in Middle-earth, may have some fragments of the light. This
is clearly to be seen as a sub-creative splintering of light. Varda breaks
liquid wholeness into parts from which she molds the stars to light, to
make visible, the world to those who will inhabit it.
Her purpose is to prepare for the awakening of the first true dwell-
ers in Middle-earth, the first people. While the Elves are to be seen as
humankind, albeit suprahuman in their beauty and power, Tolkien’s
treatment of their coming is unlike that of the coming of humanity
in most mythologies. There is no “first Elf,” no primordial ancestor
from whom the race springs. The Elves arise as a group. As a group,
they are created, as a group they awaken, and as a group they respond
to the light of Varda’s stars.
 Theme and Variations 65

The next step will be speech, and with it the clearest illustration so
far of Tolkien’s vivid and dramatic use of Barfield’s theory of language.
It is with and through speech and word that the Elves come to recognize
themselves and create for themselves that world of which they are a
part yet separate. From the first spoken word to the many languages
of Middle-earth, we trace precisely that development of perception
and growing awareness of self and phenomena as separate entities that
Barfield postulates.
The Elves and their languages now become Tolkien’s chief instru-
ments of sub-creation. Through their burgeoning and progressively
separating awareness of themselves in relation to their world, Middle-
earth comes to light before our eyes. From ancient unity to the frag-
mentation and splintering of light, of perception, of society, and of self,
Tolkien’s sub-created world mirrors our own. And through its people,
their wars and turmoils, their triumphs and disasters, we come gradu-
ally to recognize our world, to see and hear it as Tolkien saw and heard
it. In showing us his fantasy world Tolkien has enabled us to recover
our own, to know it and ourselves as we were and are so that we may
get some glimpse, however dim, of what we yet may be.
 8
A Disease of Mythology

To ask what is the origin of stories, however qualified, is

to ask what is the origin of language and of the mind.
—“On Fairy-Stories”

We come now to what for both Barfield and Tolkien was the heart of the
matter, and that is language. However idly Tolkien may have begun his
invention of languages as a hobby, he came to regard it, as his concept of
mythology grew, as no mere jeu d’esprit or exercise but as the index of a
world, the agent and reflection of its spiritual and cultural attitudes and
the repository of its myth and history. The languages of Middle-earth
in their development are so striking an illustration of Barfield’s thesis
that one might almost think Tolkien had kept Poetic Diction open be-
fore him as he worked. Of course, he didn’t need to, as the principles
therein set out chimed so harmoniously with those he came to hold.
Both “On Fairy-stories” and The Silmarillion contain clear references
to specific points of Barfield’s argument, and all three take their point
of departure from the linguistic and anthropological controversy among
the folklorists of the golden century cited in chapter 4 herein. This is
not the place to give a complete account of the folklore controversy,
fascinating though that history is. Nevertheless, some background is
necessary in order to understand fully what Barfield and Tolkien were
arguing against, and how that strengthened their own views.

67
68 Splintered Light

In the chapter 4 of Poetic Diction, “Meaning and Myth,” Barfield

argued for his concept of ancient semantic unity against the view of
one of the giants in the field, the German philologist and folklorist
Max Müller. In a number of exhaustively researched works published
over a quarter of a century, such as Comparative Mythology (1856),
the four-volume Chips from a German Workshop (1867–75), Lectures
on the Science of Language (1861–64), Selected Essays on Language,
Mythology, and Religion (1881), Müller had proposed that humanity’s
use of language involved extracting meaning from already existing
concepts and applying that meaning like a coat of paint to observed
phenomena in a conscious, intellectual process of metaphorization and
myth-formation. To illustrate the conscious process he saw at work
in the making of metaphor, he gave as an example what he called the
“root” meaning “to shine.” Such a root, he theorized, was first applied
to phenomena such as fire or the sun and then extended into metaphor
to express the effect of spring, or morning light.
Müller proposed that myths as they have come down to us arose
through verbal misapprehension, the late misunderstanding of early,
primarily Sanskrit Vedic names for celestial phenomena. In what he
called the ”mythopoeic” age, observation of natural phenomena—sun,
wind, dawn, night, sky, earth—gave rise to the concepts of the Aryan
gods. As the migrations of the Indo-Aryan people splintered them into
separate groups, so their language and its related mythology splintered
into various offshoots. In this process, the original true, “nature/solar”
meanings were forgotten, surviving only in mythical words and phrases
retained even though their original referents were forgotten. The stories
and names that then developed to explain these phrases constituted Mül-
ler’s notion of mythology as “a disease of language,” that invalid under-
standing from which new stories—the myths as we know them—were
created. The celestial and meteoric phenomena originally referred to
were replaced by heroic personifications, such as Apollo, Zeus, Herakles.
Müller’s views are now largely discredited by the work of Cassirer,
Lévy-Bruhl, and others, and it may seem contrived to resurrect an
outdated argument in order to show it up. But familiarity with Mül-
ler’s theory is important to the development of a countertheory as this
evolved in the thought processes of both Barfield and Tolkien. Both
used Müller as their negative point of departure, for he was the chief
spokesman for a view against which they would argue their own, di-
rectly contrary, point of view. It was Müller’s dismissal of mythology
 A Disease of Mythology 69

as “a disease of language” that aroused the ire, or at least the vigorous

disagreement, of both Barfield and Tolkien.
Barfield was one of the first serious students of the history of words
to take issue with Müller, not by proposing (like the proponents of the
opposition school) that anthropology, not language, was the answer,
but by maintaining that Müller was off track not in his data but in his
interpretation. Barfield argued that “to shine,” far from being a “root”
that sprouted a multitude of meanings, must have had “its own old pecu-
liar meaning” that encompassed all the phenomena, both concrete and
metaphoric, that Müller cited. It was not, argues Barfield, “an empty root
meaning ‘to shine,’ but the same definite spiritual reality that was beheld
on the one hand in what has since become purely human thinking, and
on the other hand in what has since become physical light” (PD 88).
Tolkien made substantially the same argument in “On Fairy-stories.”
Writing some ten years after the publication of Poetic Diction, and at
a period in his creative life when he was at once in the midst of his
developing mythology and at the beginning of his work on The Lord
of the Rings, he also took issue with Max Müller. Indeed, he made a
special point of addressing Müller’s description of mythology as a dis-
ease of language in order to propose the reverse. Tolkien’s comment,
a masterpiece of understatement, was that Müller’s theory could be
“abandoned without regret.” Mythology, he declared, is not a disease
of language, though he conceded that like many human things it can
become diseased. He went on to suggest that it might be closer to the
truth to call languages, especially modern European ones, a disease of
mythology (MC 121–22).
Müller had postulated that mythmaking arose when the true refer-
ence points of the old concepts had been forgotten or misunderstood,
and the words no longer understood then became applied to new con-
cepts, creating new myths. Tolkien, however, found words to be the
symptom rather than the cause, both the outgrowth of and the agent
for mythic thinking, as in “Sigelwara Land,” where a phrase was gener-
ated to capture a cluster of related meanings encompassing sun, heat,
burning, and skin color. He might well have regarded modern European
languages, so often retaining mythic words but impoverished of any
real belief in the validity of the concepts behind them, as “diseased.”
The path from Barfield’s “Meaning and Myth” leads straight to “On
Fairy-stories” and thence to The Silmarillion. In “On Fairy-stories” Tol­
kien follows Barfield in arguing against Max Müller. In The Sil­maril­lion
70 Splintered Light

he uses “to shine,” the specific example proposed by Müller and refuted
by Barfield, as the formative mythological and philological concept be-
hind his fiction. The Silmarillion is all about light, light treated in just
that manner that Barfield proposed and defended. It is something that
begins as “a definite spiritual reality,” becomes divided into “pure hu-
man thinking” and “physical light,” and further divides, both as percepts
and as words, into a myriad fragments, all of which serve to express and
describe Tolkien’s world and those who dwell in it.
The polarity of light and dark that defines the physical and spiritual
realities of that world is both mirrored in and codified by the develop-
ing languages of Middle-earth. Inspired by light and imbued with the
consciousness of its meaning, Elven language, in its fragmentation from
whole perception into many views and tongues, illustrates precisely
the principle of splintered light that Tolkien made the guiding image
of his “Mythopoeia” poem. Moreover, the splintering process, while it
breaks and diffuses the whole, the White Light, nevertheless makes vis-
ible the color spectrum, giving rise to light of many hues. Since Tolkien
has deliberately linked light and language, the same will inevitably be
true of the languages of his world. The breaking-up of perception into
ever more discrete units will lead to narrowed but at the same time
more precise expression and therefore greater freedom in the interplay
of words and to an infinite variety of combinations in that “mythical
grammar” that is the instrument of sub-creation.
The shift from Light to lights brings color and variety to the world,
as does the shift from Word (logos) to words. The change to words does
not invalidate the Word; it simply narrows the focus. As Tolkien wrote
in a letter to Robert Murray, and as his mythology amply illustrates,
“The λο −γος is ultimately independent of the verbum.” It is just here that
Tolkien’s theory of sub-creation intersects Barfield’s theory of primal
unity of meaning with profound implications for the development of his
Secondary World. As language mutates and proliferates, reflecting the
changing consciousness and worldview of those who speak it, it reveals
grades and shades of changing perceptions ranging from the light-infused
Quenya of the High Elves of Valinor through the softer Sindarin speech
of the Grey-elves of Middle-earth to the Black Speech of Mordor.
It is clear from the amount of linguistic material now available that,
like his tale, his languages “grew in the telling,” so that a fixed and
immutable linguistic corpus was neither attained nor seen as desirable.
The languages proliferated, thick as leaves in Vallambrosa, but never
 A Disease of Mythology 71

attained a final or codified state; rather, they underwent constant and

ongoing modification and reinvention. This is borne out by Christopher
Tolkien’s comment that the mode of his father’s linguistic construc-
tion, “carried on through out his life and in very close relation to the
evolution of the narratives shows the same unceasing movement as do
they: a quality fundamental to the art, in which (as I believe) finality
and a system fixed at every point was not its underlying aim” (Lost
Road 341). In this regard, I take note that the amount of information
relating to Tolkien’s invented languages has expanded exponentially
from the little available when the first edition of Splintered Light was
published in 1983. In particular, linguistic material included in volumes
5 and 6 of The History of Middle-earth, The Lost Road, and The War
of the Jewels has added enormously to our knowledge of what Chris-
topher Tolkien calls “the astounding complexity of the phonological
and grammatical evolution of the Elvish languages” (Silm. 341).
Recent information in “The Lhammas” and “The Etymologies” sec-
tions of The Lost Road, and in the long essay on “Quendi and Eldar” in
The War of the Jewels, makes it clear that Tolkien was working from
the Indo-European model of a proto-language dividing and sub-dividing
into a branching tree of language families. Hand-drawn diagrams in
“The Lhammas” illustrating “The Tree of Tongues” (Lost Road 169,
170, 196) replicate the standard visual paradigm of the Indo-European
family of languages as displayed, for example, in the endpaper of The
American Heritage Dictionary, second edition.1 A companion diagram,
also hand-drawn and labeled “The Peoples of the Elves” (Lost Road 197),
shows the same branching and subdivision into separate groups. In both
kinds of diagrams, the concept is one of increasing separation. Chris-
topher Tolkien’s comment in his introduction to “The Etymologies,”
cited above, bears repeating here: “These languages were conceived,
of course, from the very beginning in a deeply ‘historical’ way: they
were embodied in a history of the Elves who spoke them, in which was
to be found, as it evolved, a rich terrain for linguistic separation and
interaction: ‘a language requires a suitable habitation and a history in
which it can develop’” (Lost Road 341; Letters 375). This bears out the
approach to The Sil­marillion originally taken in Splintered Light. The
new material, while it expands and particularizes the terrain of what
Christopher Tolkien calls “linguistic separation and interaction,” helps
refine that approach but does not substantially change it.
Eleven different languages are listed in “The Etymologies”: Primitive
72 Splintered Light

Quendian, Old Noldorin, Noldorin, Exilic Noldorin, Telerin, Danian,

Doriathrin, Eldarin, Ilkorin, Lindarin, and Ossiriandeb. While some of
these are clear developments one from another—for example, the emer-
gence of Noldorin and Exilic Noldorin from a primary Old Noldorin—the
list gives some impression of the diversification Tolkien was envision-
ing. It is beyond the scope of the present study to do more than note the
proliferation of names and groups of which this list gives evidence. I will
not attempt to follow this breakdown in my analysis of names in The
Silmarillion but will keep largely to the two main language branches,
Quenya and Sindarin, with the additional note here that Noldorin and
Sindarin are two names (one early and one late and, apparently, final) for
what is essentially the same language, hereinafter referred to as Sindarin.
Mirroring the presumed linguistic history of our own world, Tolkien
gives language a relatively late entry into Middle-earth. Long after cre-
ation and the wars of Melkor, the Elves, the Firstborn of Ilúvatar, awaken
in the starlit darkness by the lake Cuiviénen (thus in The Silmarillion
but spelled “Kuiviénen” in the earlier documents), called “The Waters
of Awakening.” With their coming to consciousness, language begins.
With their language, their history begins. In any world this is an event
of prime importance; in Tolkien’s world we see it happen. Asleep, the
Elves are an unconscious element in the creation they inhabit and of
which they are a part. With their awakening (and the word has both
a literal and a metaphoric value here) they begin to be aware of and
interact with their surroundings. With and through the Elves, Tolkien
makes real the interdependence of consciousness, language, and myth.
 9
Perception = Name = Identity

The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the

tale are in our world coeval.
—“On Fairy-stories”

When the fairy-tale ceased, there would be just

thunder, which no human ear had yet heard.
—“On Fairy-stories”

It would be tempting, at this point, to say to the reader, “If you are
not interested in Tolkien’s languages, you may skip the next several
chapters; they are short but dense, highly technical, complicated, and
focused on minutiae.” Unfortunately, I cannot in good conscience give
such permission. Tolkien’s languages are both the bed-rock and the
atmosphere of his world. If you stand in Tolkien’s world and breathe
its air (and you do, or you wouldn’t have read this far), then you must
be interested in his languages, whether you know it or not.
Like all language, whether that be of a Primary or a Secondary World,
Elven languages must derive from and be expressive of the perception
of their speakers, and so must both reflect and create their world. When
Tolkien’s Elves open their eyes for the first time in the semi-dark of
Middle-earth, their immediate first glance is upward. Thus their first
sight is of the night sky and the stars—splinters of the light of the Sil­­-
ver Tree shaped by Varda specifically in preparation for the anticipated

73
74 Splintered Light

moment of their awakening.1 The immediate result of this vision of

light is an act of speech. The Silmarillion’s “Appendix on Elements in
Quenya and Sindarin Names” cites the element “ele” as “according to
Elvish legend . . . a primitive exclamation ‘behold!’ made by the Elves
when they first saw the stars” (358). The entry under el in “Quendi and
Eldar” glosses Quenya ela! as “imperative exclamation directing sight
to an actually visible object” (Jewels 362). Note how reality is here tied
to perception and how the distinction between the Word and words is
made explicit. The primal Word was the Music, actualized by the first
imperative, “Eä! Let these things Be!” Both the Music and “Eä!” pre-
cede, and indeed determine, Elven perception. But “according to Elvish
legend,” that is, from the Elves’ point of view, necessarily limited to
their direct experience, the first word is “ele.”2 This, their first percep-
tion, is also the agent of their separation, dividing the see-ers from the
seen and at the same time characterizing those see-ers by what they
perceive. Ele is a primary percept, but already we are on the way to
metaphor, however gradual the road, as the Elves take this perception
into their lives, use it to shape their culture and identity, and refract it
through their languages.
The first Elven word is a response to the percept “to shine,” and car-
ries exactly that primal unity of meaning and perception that Barfield
insists words must once have had. Response to light is the initial
impulse behind Elven language, giving it form and direction. Equally
important, it gives the Elves a sense of themselves as perceiving crea-
tures. Light is the first observed phenomenon in their world, and as
such, reveals to them in one way or another all that they subsequently
come to perceive. From the light-engendered act of speech comes their
name for their language, Quenya, derived from quen (quet) “say, speak”
(Silm. 363). From the same base, quen, comes their first characteriza-
tion of themselves as beings. They are Quendi, “those that speak with
voices,” and this gives them their identity.
This much we can deduce from the Appendix on name elements.
But Christopher Tolkien’s headnote to the Appendix states clearly that
the information contained therein is “necessarily very compressed,
giving an air of certainty and finality that is not altogether justified,
and [is] very selective, this depending both on considerations of length
and the limitations of the editor’s knowledge” (Silm. 355). It must be
reemphasized here that the languages were never fixed in the manner
of classical Latin or Homeric Greek, but were, and were meant to be,
 Perception = Name = Identity 75

fluid. The trajectory of their development was as often as not formulated

backward; again, much in the manner of the Primary World’s estab-
lishment of hypothetical Indo-European “roots” from related words in
existing languages.
Nevertheless, certain ideas, present from the initial conception,
remain throughout. Tolkien’s own notes and commentaries on lan-
guage development, both early and late, illustrate the consistency of
his overall linguistic invention. New information contained in “The
Etymologies” section of The Lost Road, and elaborated in the “Quendi
and Eldar” essay included in The War of the Jewels, gives a fuller view
of the complexity of development and the lengths to which Tolkien
went in replicating imaginatively what he knew as a historical process
of the spread and diversity of language proliferation.
“The Etymologies,” which Christopher Tolkien dates to the period
1937–38 (that is, to the time when Tolkien abandoned the Quenta Sil-
marillion to begin work on The Lord of the Rings) list kwen(ed)- Elf
from an unattested *kwenede-: Q[uenya] qende Elf; and also kwet- say
(Lost Road 366). Turning to the “Quendi and Eldar” essay, which Chris-
topher Tolkien dates to the years 1958–60, we find a passage (necessarily
compressed to essentials) headed:

Appendix D.
–
*Kwen, Quenya, and the Elvish (especially Noldorin)
words for “Language”
The Noldorin Loremasters state often that the meaning of Quendi
was ‘speakers’, those who form words with voices . . . . It might be
objected that in fact no stem *kwen clearly referring to speech or
vocal sound is found in any known Elvish tongue. The nearest form
is the stem *kwet ‘speak, utter words, say.’ But in dealing with this
ancient word we must go back to the beginnings of Elvish speech,
before the later organisation of its basic structure . . . . If we assume,
then, that the oldest form of this stem referring to vocal speech was
*kwe, of which *kwene and *kwete were elaborations . . . . We may
therefore accept the etymology of *kwene, *kwe-n that would make
its original meaning ‘speaking, speaker, one using vocal language.’
It would indeed be natural for the Elves, requiring a word for one of
their own kind as distinguished from other creatures then known, to
select the use of speech as a chief characteristic. But once formed the
word must have taken the meaning ‘person.’ (War of the Jewels 391–93)
76 Splintered Light

However convoluted the etymological track, it seems clear that

Tolkien intended for both speech and self-consciousness to come
from awareness of light. The names Quenya and Quendi establish
the organizing principle of the Elven world and the Elven language.
Consciousness and self-consciousness, manifest in speech, express the
Elves’ relationship to light. In a real as well as metaphoric sense the
Elves are creating themselves in their own eyes; moreover, this creation,
like the primary creation by Eru and the Ainur, is one governed by the
interrelationship of light and word.
While the name Quendi is most closely associated with the Elves,
since it comes from their own inner impulse toward expression, it is
only the first of many names by which they come to be called. Behold-
ing them, the Valar named them Eldar, “People of the Stars.” While
this links the Elves with their first inspiration, at the same time and
paradoxically it establishes the distance between the two, and suggests
a greater sense of the separation between the Elves and the light than
does their own name for themselves. Yet the name Eldar is also related
to the light-speech principle, since the first element, el, corresponds to
the entry in the Appendix for êl, “star,” and both are clearly related to
the primary ele. The entry in the Appendix states clearly that “from this
origin derived the words êl and elen, meaning ‘star,’ and the adjectives
elda [for which the plural is eldar] and elena meaning ‘of the stars.’”
Subsequent differences in perception, arising from the continuing
process of subdivision, lead to even more names, characterized by the
various groups’ internal and external perceptions of themselves and oth-
ers in their relationships to light. Thus, from the first utterance through
a succession of percepts, names, and concepts, Elven language is in a
continuous process of modification and fragmentation. To appreciate
this fully, we must reexamine the forces that operate in Tol­kien’s world,
remembering always that language does not develop in a vacuum. It is
the product of countervailing pressures and influences and of conflict
leading to growth and separation leading to difference. The forces that
shape Elven language are partly external, impinging on Elven culture
from without, and partly internal, involving their varying responses
to circumstances and to each other.
Let us look first at the external forces. Like the Men who come
after them, Elves are exceptional in Arda, the world that is, since they
derive immediately from Eru and are not part of the creative labors of
the Valar. “For the Children of Ilúvatar were conceived by him alone;
 Perception = Name = Identity 77

and they came with the third theme, and were not in the theme that
Ilúvatar propounded at the beginning, and none of the Ainur had part
in their making” (Silm. 18). The inescapable conclusion is that the
creation of Elves and Men is a result or outcome of Melkor’s rebellion
and a conscious addition by Eru to Arda Marred. It is not unreason-
able to suppose therefore, that they are in some sense meant to be the
instruments of healing for the marred world and that their destinies,
intersecting and paired with one another, will together work through
the world’s trouble to some triumphant conclusion.
Having no part in their creation, the Valar do not fully understand
the Elves; nor do they comprehend entirely what part they are to play
in the unfolding history of the world. We must remember the differing
relationships that Eru and the Valar have with that world. Having pro-
vided the theme, Eru knows and understands the Music; yet he takes no
further action, leaving the fulfillment and orchestration of the theme
to the Valar. While their task is to realize the Music, their knowledge
of it is limited, for though it was sung in harmony, each knows only
what he or she sang. The Valar are the Powers of the World, but they
do not wholly know that world, or the extent of their own part in it. It
follows that their actions, however well-intended, will not always lead
directly to good ends.
Nowhere is this more clearly shown than in their decisions concerning
the Elves, decisions that directly affect the Elven relationship to light,
which relationship in turn changes their lives and their language. Rec-
ognizing and loving these new beings as “things other than themselves,”
the Valar debate how best to guide them. A few are in favor of leaving
them free to live as they choose in Middle-earth. Others, the majority,
are afraid for their safety “in the dangerous world amid the deceits of
the starlit dusk” (Silm. 52). Unwilling, finally, to allow the Elves to
determine their own future free of any influence, the Valar summon
them to Valinor to dwell in safety in the light of the Trees. This seem-
ingly beneficent decision is in fact an error in judgment, for, “from this
summons came many woes that afterwards befell” (Silm. 52).
Among these woes must be counted the fragmentation and dispersion
of the Elven peoples, which contribute materially to the fragmentation
and differentiation of their language. This mythology in process shows
Tolkien deliberately mirroring the presumed migrations of the Indo-
European peoples, with a concomitant fragmentation and differentia-
tion into a multitude of languages and myths. We should remember,
78 Splintered Light

however, that all this has been “foreshadowed and foresung,” for the
Children of Ilúvatar came with the third theme. Thus, all that happens,
however distorted from the design of the original first theme, must
ultimately derive from Eru.
The fragmentation of the Elves into distinct and separate groups
will lead to misunderstandings and alienation of one from another,
but it will also and therefore give rise to new perceptions and greater
individuality. The woes will be counterbalanced by new beauties that
otherwise would not have been. This seeming ambiguity in Tolkien’s
world, which allows for the building of “Gods and their houses out of
dark and light,” must then be understood as addressing (though not yet
solving) the polarity of light and dark with which it began and justifying
in large measure the tension between them.
Oppositions—light and dark, good and evil—are now always present
and in operation, though often (and this may be deliberate on Tolkien’s
part) it is not easy to tell which is which. The summons to Valinor,
intended to benefit the Elves, has mixed results. It brings them into the
light of the Trees, brighter by far than the light of the stars, but it also
forces decision on them rather than leaving them free. It complicates
their relationship to the light and in so doing also complicates their
language. From these complications arise new differences. Where their
first perception of the stars effectively separated the Elves from that
which they beheld, these new differences separate Elf from Elf, word
from word, and lead to the last splintering of the light itself as the
process continues and light, language, and peoples separate into ever
more discrete fragments.
It is here that the internal forces that work to shape event and lan-
guage come into play. In the first response to the summons of the Valar,
three Elven ambassadors, Ingwë, Finwë, and Elwë, go to Valinor to see
for themselves the light of the Trees. Returning to Middle-earth, they
urge the Elves to answer the summons. Not all the Elves want to go.
Here the next separation occurs, dividing the Elves into two groups and
eventually giving rise to two separate though related languages. The
name Quendi, describing a whole community by their possession of
speech, is no longer used. The name Eldar, originally used to refer to
all Elves, now comes to be used only for those who go to Valinor and
in this context acquires a prefix, tar, “high.”
The Tareldar, the High Elves, are those who reach Valinor and dwell
in its light. Those who choose not to go are called Avari, the “Unwill-
 Perception = Name = Identity 79

ing,” the “Refusers.” Over the course of time, their language becomes
differentiated from the original Quenya, reflecting their differentiation
from the High Elves. The Avari are those Elves who reject the light
and choose to remain in Middle-earth, “preferring the starlight . . . to
the rumour of the Trees” (Silm. 52). The word “rumour” is important.
The Avari are unwilling to predicate action on the basis of a rumour, of
something they have not themselves experienced. They have no faith.
The difference that separates the skeptic from the believer thus divides
the Avari from the High Elves. It will ultimately become the dividing
line between light and dark. Fragmentation is underway.
As the process continues, putting out branches in different directions,
other names come into being to further characterize the branch­ings
among the Elves in their differing responses to the light. The Elves who
go to Valinor acquire yet another name. From original Eldar they have
become Tareldar, and from original Quendi they are now Calaquendi,
Elves of the Light. The name is a modification of the original Quendi
by the addition of the morpheme kal or cal, “shine,” and reflects the
increasing impulse to use language to make ever finer distinctions. It
scarcely needs pointing out that it is also a perfect example of Barfield’s
unitary phrase “to shine” in the process of fragmenting from a “definite
spiritual reality” to “pure human thinking” and “physical light.”
For “shine” is not a concept arbitrarily chosen and applied to the
Calaquendi, as Müller’s “disease of language” theory would propose.
Rather, it represents the need to express in words a more precise and
differentiated meaning, a shift of perception from a whole, Quendi, to
a part of that whole which then becomes a new concept, Calaquendi.
Stemming from the first sight of the stars, both speech and the word de-
scribing it, quen, “speak,” came originally from the perception of “shine.”
Now only some speakers retain that concept, and the concept itself has
intensified from the faint light of the stars to the brighter light of the
Trees. Moreover, this meaning can no longer be wholly encompassed in
the original word but now must be glossed by another word.
 10
Ourselves as Others See Us

The gods may derive their colour and beauty from

the high splendours of nature, but it was Man who obtained
these for them . . . their personality they get direct from him;
the shadow or flicker of divinity that is upon them they receive
through him from the invisible world, the Supernatural.
—“On Fairy-stories”

And now the opposing concept—dark—enters the language. The Elves

who stay in Middle-earth, themselves originally Quendi, come to be
called Moriquendi, Elves of the Dark. A paragraph on these two terms
in “Quendi and Eldar” explains not just the process but the percep-
tions and attitudes engendered by those perceptions out of which new
names arose.

There also existed two old compounds containing *kwendi: *kala-

kwendi- and *mori-kwendi, the Light-folk and the Dark-folk. These
terms appear to go back to the period before the Separation. Or rather
to the time of the debate among the Quendi concerning the invita-
tion of the Valar. They were evidently made by the party favourable
to Oromë, and referred originally to those who desired the Light of
Valinor (where the ambassadors of the Elves reported that there was
no darkness), and those who did not wish for a place in which there
was no night. But already before the final separation *mori-kwendi-

81
82 Splintered Light

may have referred to the glooms and the clouds dimming the sun and
stars during the War of the Valar and Melkor, so that the term from the
beginning had a tinge of scorn, implying that such folk were not averse
to the shadows of Melkor upon Middle-earth. (War of the Jewels 373)

The word-formation process is the same as that for Calaquendi;

however, the addition of mor, “dark,” to the base noun is not just a
modification but a complete reversal of the original derivation of speech
from light. In this context, Tolkien’s capitalization of the word Separa-
tion is worth noting, for it gives the event its own identity and place
in history. The implications are profound. Embedded in each name
is a wealth of meaning relating word to phenomena and perception
of phenomena, and further discriminating one group from the other.
The Quendi, “those that speak with voices,” first spoke because they
perceived the stars, fragments of light. The name Calaquendi, a refine-
ment and intensi­fication of that original light-speech complex, would
literally mean “light-speakers” or “speakers of light.” Translated with
equal literality, Moriquendi would mean “dark-speakers.”
Here is fragmentation carried to extreme, the division of an original
whole perception into opposites, polarization expressed through name.
Such a division clearly parallels the division of Eldar from Avari, since
it describes the same groups of people and occurs in response to the
same set of actions. This later division, however, brings the language a
little closer to metaphor, since light and dark can easily translate into
enlightenment and obfuscation, and the two words thus reflect a mental
or spiritual state in physical terms. What would be metaphor in the
primary world is literal in Tolkien’s secondary one and yet manages to
convey a metaphoric meaning as well. One group of Elves sees more
clearly than does the other. Moreover, the name Moriquendi embodies
a judgment, for it is not the name by which the Avari call themselves,
but is what the Calaquendi call the Avari. It is plainly a comment made
about one people by another. The original, whole Quendi, “those that
speak with voices,” is now divided by differences of inclination, percep-
tion and—ultimately—vision.
Here, again, literality approaches metaphor. The Calaquendi see
the light, a perception reflected in their speech. The Moriquendi are
those who will not see the light, and this characteristic, imposed by the
Cala­quendi, will come to characterize their identity and their language.
To “see the light,” in our world a figure of speech, a metaphor for an
 Ourselves as Others See Us 83

inner experience, is in Tolkien’s world an external reality relating to a

historical event while at the same time describing the separate ethos
and cultural expression of two different peoples.
While this division of Elves into groups labeled Light and Dark
fits the reality of his world, the concept was not his invention. Like
many elements in Middle-earth, both the names and their concepts
are a borrowing from Norse mythology. The ljösalfar (light elves) and
döckalfar (dark elves) are part of the world of the Icelandic Prose Edda
and its source, the Poetic or Elder Edda. Tolkien carries the concept
beyond mere naming to create a context in which the differences that
underlie the distinction can be explained and justified. What gives the
concept its believability and solid reality is above all language. Elves
of the Light and Elves of the Dark, by their conflicting perceptions and
what will come to be related yet different modes of speech, build in
Tolkien’s world that inner consistency of reality that it is the function
of language to give to any world.
As the westward migration of the Calaquendi toward the light
begins, the fragmentation of peoples, of perceptions and languages
will follow a spasmodic and irregular course. A qualitative difference
arising from willingness or unwillingness to see the light has divided
what was originally a whole people. The increasing complexity of the
world leads to increasing fragmentation, and this will not halt with
the simple division of light from dark, or even follow a systematic
or clearly defined pattern. Eventually there will be many shades and
gradations of light among the peoples, with concomitant distinctions
in language. The process, however, is fitful, with stops and starts and
changes both gradual and sudden.
The first change is one of degree, and while it leads eventually to
changes in language, at first it involves only the relative promptness in
response to the summons of the Valar. For those Elves who go to Valinor
become further separated into subgroups by the degrees of eagerness
with which they seek the light, groups that as time passes become more
sharply distinguished one from another until each becomes an entity
unto itself, defined by its differences from the others and reflected in
the names by which it comes to be called. They are the Vanyar (the Fair
Elves), the Noldor (the Deep Elves), and the Teleri (the Lastcomers).
Each of the three groups is led by one of those Elven ambassadors who
went first to Valinor to see the light.
First to go are the Vanyar, led by Ingwë. Their epithet, Fair Elves,
84 Splintered Light

refers to their golden hair, the only such coloring among the otherwise
dark-haired Elves. The stem for this name is listed in “The Etymolo-
gies” under ban–, while “Quendi and Eldar” cites Vanyar “from an
adjectival derivative *wanja from the stem *wan and notes that the
–
name “was probably given to the First Clan by the N oldor” and that
it referred to the color of their hair (War of the Jewels 382–83). While
as with Moriquendi, the name describes the perception of one group
by another, it seems reasonable to suppose that both the epithet and
the coloring are also meant to associate the Vanyar with the light and
their readiness to seek it. Once in Valinor, these Elves never leave the
light but dwell always near it and in it. Perhaps because of their im-
plied spirituality, the Vanyar play little or no part in the subsequent
turbulent history of the Elves. Excitement and tension, after all, come
out of opposition, forces pushing against one another. There is neither
opposition nor excitement in the sound of one hand clapping.
Next to go to Valinor are the Noldor, the Deep Elves, led by Finwë.
While “Deep” might seem an odd epithet, Tolkien seems to have meant
the word in the dictionary sense of “learned, wise,” for he glosses the
name Noldor as “a name of wisdom.” The change from “fair” to “deep”
implies a judgment, for these Elves are not so closely allied with the
light. In Tolkien’s elven dictionary as well, the name Noldor means “the
wise” (Silm. 344). “The Etymologies” list ngol- “wise, wisdom,” with
derivatives ñolwe, “wisdom, secret lore,” and gûl, “magic,” and with
the subhead ñgolod- “one of the wise folk, Gnome” (Lost Road 377).1
Here again, a judgment is implied, for the Noldor are “wise in the sense
of possessing knowledge, not in the sense of possessing sagacity, sound
judgment” (Silm. 344). These characteristics of the Noldor, apparently
part of their makeup from early in the history of the myth­ology, are of
central importance in the legendarium, and will be directly instrumental
in the splintering of the light.
Last to go to Valinor are the Teleri, whose name is built on the stem
tel-, “finish, end, be last.” Led by Elwë, they are those who “were not
wholly of a mind to pass from the dusk to the light of Valinor” (Silm.
53). Not whole in intent, divided in mind between going and staying,
the Teleri hesitate, pulled between light and dark. Although most of
them eventually come into the light, some—and chief among these
Elwë—turn aside to stay in Middle-earth. These are given yet another
name, one that does not characterize them by what they are but by
what they are not. They are “those not of Aman”; the Úmanyar.
 Ourselves as Others See Us 85

Aman, from ma-n, “good, blessed, unmarred,” is not properly an Elv-

ish word. Rather, as glossed in “Quendi and Eldar,” it is Valarin, the
language of the Valar adapted into Elvish speech. Aman is the Valarin
name for the place the Elves call Valinor—in both Elven cultures the
home of the light. In particular, the introduction of the word blessed
into the gloss makes Tolkien’s intention clear. The light and those who
dwell in it are blessed, holy. The negative prefix of Úmanyar elides
original A to Ú, transforming Aman- to Úman-, and thereby signifying
unblessed, nonholy. It is important to note, however, that the ú, probably
equivalent to English un, indicates cancellation but not opposition. It
robs the attached word of its force but does not go so far as to make it
mean the contrary. Neither kal nor mor, neither Light nor Dark, the
Úmanyar occupy a neutral position midway between the two poles.
These subdivisions, important in themselves, give rise to even more
and even narrower concepts in the language, while the two major divi-
sions stand. The Fair Elves, the Deep Elves, and the Last-comers, while
differentiated from one another in nature and inclination, are yet Eldar or
Tareldar. They are all High Elves, all Calaquendi, all Elves of the Light.
“Fair,” “Deep,” “Last” are not conflicting terms, simply differences of
character among peoples. Similarly, the Úmanyar and Avari are both
Elves of the Dark, but within this blanket term they are distinguished
from one another by differing attitudes toward the light and degrees
of readiness to seek it. Those who refuse the light altogether are not
the same as those who are willing to seek it yet allow themselves to
become diverted from the path.
Within the developing polarities of light and dark among the Elven
peoples, degrees of intensity begin to fill in the force field between
the positive and negative poles of the Secondary World. The ensuing
history says relatively little about the Vanyar and the Avari. It is the
interaction, intersection, and clash of the Noldor, the Teleri, and the
Úmanyar that will generate action and give rise to song and story.
Both the polarities and the field of force between them are reflected
in the languages. We have seen that the very act of speech comes from
light: the primary language is formed and informed by that awareness of
light in which the Elves came to consciousness of themselves and their
world. As language develops and the primary group divides and subdi-
vides in ever more discrete entities, the language develops concomitant
awareness of degrees and kinds of light, as well as the shading that leads
to light’s opposite, dark. The concept “to shine” breaks into many kinds
86 Splintered Light

of shinings, into “gleam,” “sparkle,” “radiant.” Color words appear—

gold, silver, green, grey. Darker words come into being, words for dusk,
dimness, twilight shadow. Light diminished, darkness illumined, and
each throws the other into relief; for like all contraries, light and dark
exist because of one another as well at each other’s expense. Only in full
knowledge of either is it possible fully to know the other.
 amazing wine and cellar doors 87

11
amazing wine and cellar doors

[The names] are coherent and consistent and

made upon two related linguistic formulae.
—Letter to Stanley Unwin, Dec. 1937

As time passes after the Separation, the language itself begins to divide.
The original Proto-Eldarin splits into two related but distinct tongues,
Quenya and Sindarin. Although the widening distance between them
and the consequent independent evolution of each will take considerable
time, their emergence as two separate languages is the direct result of
the summons to Valinor. Sindarin is the language spoken by the Elves
of Middle-earth, while Quenya comes to be spoken only in Valinor and
only by those Elves who dwell in the light. Degree of proximity to light
thus affects the phonological, morphological and semantic elements
of each language. The same lessened perception of light that divides
Moriquendi from Calaquendi distinguishes Sindarin from Quenya.
Before embarking on an analysis of the differences between Tolkien’s
two chief invented languages, we must acknowledge that these differ-
ences exist on two levels, one real and one fictional. At the real level,
they are roughly (though not exactly) the differences between Finnish
(the phonological model for Quenya) and Welsh (the phonological model
for Sindarin) and are largely a function of Tolkien’s own preferences. He
liked the shape and sound of words in both languages. “It quite intoxi-
cated me,” he wrote of Finnish in a letter to W. H. Auden. “It was like

87
88 Splintered Light

discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing

wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before” (Letters 214). In the
same letter he wrote of the “fascination that Welsh names had . . . even
if only seen on coal-trucks.” And in his O’Donnell Lecture on “English
and Welsh,” he waxed as lyrical over the Welsh language as he had over
Finnish: “Most English-speaking people will admit that cellar door is
‘beautiful,’ especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling).
More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful.
Well, then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent”
(Angles and Britons 36).
Such enthusiasm on the real level notwithstanding, the fictional
level is the more important, both for its support of the reality of the
fictional world and in the context of its relation to Barfield’s theory.
Tolkien’s working method can with some labor be deduced from the
etymological information given in the appendices, indices, and linguis-
tic sections of various volumes of The History of Middle-earth, some
of which have already been cited. But a helpful shorthand account by
Humphrey Carpenter will save time and space. “The Elvish names in
The Silmarillion,” says Carpenter, “were constructed almost exclusively
from Quenya and Sindarin. It is impossible in a few sentences to give
an adequate account of how Tolkien used his elvish languages to make
names of the characters and places in his story. But briefly, what hap-
pened was this. When working to plan, he would form all these names
with great care, first deciding on the meaning, and then developing
its form first in one language and subsequently in the other; the form
finally used was most frequently that in Sindarin” (Biography 94). That
Tolkien more frequently used the Sindarin form of a word or name re-
flects the fact that in his fictive world Sindarin was more widely used
than Quenya. In a later chapter, we shall see why. In the meantime, it
will be instructive to trace how.
The path of light is traceable through individual words as Tolkien’s
language system develops, though the path itself wanders through a
complicated and often confusing linguistic maze of roots, derivations
and changing etymologies. I have tried to follow the larger signposts
and avoid side-roads and detours, however linguistically interesting in
themselves. I have relied chiefly on the Appendix to The Silmarillion,
checking this against “The Etymologies” and “Quendi and Eldar” where
it seemed advisable. The last two sources elaborate on the concepts
dealt with, and give variants in several languages in addition to Quenya
 amazing wine and cellar doors 89

and Sindarin but do not substantially alter the pattern or the concept.
Unless otherwise referenced, examples are drawn from the “Appendix
on Names” in The Silmarillion.
From the primal ele comes Proto-Eldarin êl, glossed by Tolkien as
“the ancient element El, “star” in Q[uenya] elen . . . S[indarin] el” (The
Road Goes 65). From these are derived the adjectival forms elena and
elda, “of the stars.” The plural of elda is eldar, which, with its variant
eldalië, then becomes the generic name of the Elves. The singular form
undergoes a semantic shift from “star” to “elf” in Quenya elda, a shift
that indicates the importance of the light-star concept to Elven identity.
The êl morpheme has thus come full circle, for it first marked an act
of perception—“behold!”—which established a separation between the
perceivers and that which they perceived. It then became a concept,
“star,” naming that which they recognized as separate from themselves.
It now becomes the word, “elf,” through which they identify themselves
in terms of what they have seen.
Following this line of development, êl becomes the basis for a number
of Elven names, all of them carrying the reference “star” with the em-
bedded meaning “light.” A good example is the name Elbereth. Readers
of The Lord of the Rings will recognize Elbereth as a name invoked in
time of extreme danger, having by its very sound the power to drive away
evil. Sung by Gildor and the Elves in the woods of the Shire, it drives
off the Black Rider who has been pursuing Frodo and his companions.
During the battle on Weathertop, Frodo’s cry “O Elbereth! Gilthoniel!”
drives off the King of the Ringwraiths (LOTR 191). When later Aragorn
examines the knife with which Frodo struck at his enemy, he comments,
“More deadly to him was the name of Elbereth” (193). When Sam and
Frodo flee from the Tower of Cirith Ungol, Sam’s cry, “Gilthoniel, A
Elbereth!” is a near-echo of Frodo’s exclamation at Weathertop. Sam’s
invocation breaks the evil power of the Watchers and allows the two
hobbits to escape.
What is the power of this Name? It is light. Elbereth is the Sindarin
form of an Elven name for Varda, Queen of the Valar. It was Varda who
kindled the Lamps, Varda who made stars from the dew of Telperion,
the silver Tree. More than any other being in The Silmarillion, Varda is
linked with light in both its physical and spiritual aspects. In one of the
few statements connecting light directly with Eru, the narrative describes
Varda as having “the light of Ilúvatar in her face” and says that “in light
is her power and her joy” (Silm. 26). As the bringer of light she is also the
90 Splintered Light

bringer of vision and perception. The narrative says of Manwë, King of

the Valar and spouse of Varda, that when he looks out from his throne,
“if Varda is beside him, he sees further than all other eyes” (Silm. 26).
All of this meaning is embedded in her Sindarin name, Elbereth, and
more explicitly in its Quenya equivalent, Elentári. Quenya elen and
Sindarin êl both carry the primal “star” meaning. Attached to elen, the
Quenya suffix tar, “high,” in its feminine form tári “high” (therefore
“queen”) creates Elentári, “Star-Queen,” by implication “Queen of
Light.” The more common Sindarin form, Elbereth, is also translated
“Star-Queen,” but analysis shows it to have a different connotation,
one typical of the diminution of light and perception explicit in the
shift from Quenya to Sindarin. The “star” element is retained in the
primary place of the first syllable, el, but the second element, bereth,
literally means “spouse” and translated as “Star-spouse” or “Starry
Spouse” can then mean “queen” only by extension, as “spouse of a
king” (The Road Goes 66). The shift from tári to bereth is thus in a
sense a demotion or diminution. The Quenya name recognizes Varda
as Queen in her own right, suggesting the elevated feminine principle
as bringer of light, while the Sindarin name emphasizes her position
first as wife and only second as queen.
Strictly speaking, Elentári and Elbereth are not true names but
epithets or by-names, characterizing Varda as she is perceived by
Cala­quen­d i and Moriquendi respectively. A number of Elves, how-
ever, do have true names that carry the “star (light)” morpheme as a
component. From Quenya el, Sindarin êl, come Proto-Eldarin Elwë,
“Star(-person)” (wë, which does not translate to a concept, is defined
as an “abstract suffix” [Lost Road 398] but appears to have a personal-
izing effect in proper names); Sindarin Elrond, “Star-dome,” or “sky,”
and Elros, “Star-foam”; and Elwing, “Star-spray.” From Sindarin edhel,
“elf” comes Aredhel, “High or Royal Elf,” and from the variant eledh
comes Eledhwen, “Elf-maiden.”1 From Quenya elen comes Elendil with
the combined meanings “Star-lover” and “Elf-friend.” Also from elen
come the names Elenwë, “Star (-person),” Elemmirë, “Star-jewel,” and
Elenna, “Starwards.” This last was originally a directional term that
later became the Elven name for Nú­menor.
The star-light concept proliferates as the languages develop. Its con-
tinuance can be traced semantically as well as phonologically. Semanti-
cally related to el is the noun ril, “brilliance” (as in Silmaril, combining
sil, “shine” [with white or silver light], with ril to mean “shining bril­­
 amazing wine and cellar doors 91

liance”). Added to the stem ita-, “sparkle,” this becomes the Quenya
name Itarillë or Itarildë, “Sparkling-brilliance,” subsequently shortened
to Sindarin Idril. This last name is of almost religious significance in
Elven history, for Idril is an Elven princess who marries Tuor, a mortal
man, and gives birth to Eärendil, the savior figure, of whom more later.
Phonologically separate from ita- but semantically linked is the stem
tin-, which also means ”sparkle” and occurs in Quenya tinwë, “spark,”
and tinta, “cause to sparkle. Tin combines with Eldarin do-me- (Quenya
lómë) to form tindómë, “starry twilight,” from which comes tindó­
merel, “daughter of twilight,” Sindarin Tinúviel. Like Idril, Tinúviel is
an important name in Elven history, for it is the epithet given by Beren
to Lúthien when he first beholds her. Again like Idril, Lúthien is an elven
princess, one even more closely connected with the light. Tin- is also the
basis for yet another Quenya epithet for Varda, Tintallë, “The Kindler,”
“She that causes sparkling, kindles lights” (The Road Goes 61).
Quenya kal-, Sindarin gal-, and Quenya sil-, Sindarin thil are concep-
tually related to el in that both mean “shine”—kal- in a general sense,
sil- more narrowly as in “white or silver light.” Kal- appears in Cal­a­
quendi, in Sindarin calen, “green” (glossed as etymologically “bright”)
and in slightly altered form in Quenya alcar/alkar, from which comes
Alcarinquë, “The Glorious,” a name for one of Varda’s stars, and in a
late appearance in the Númenorean segment of The Lost Road, a rare
epithet for Melkor, Alkar, “The Radiant” (Lost Road 416). The Sindarin
form is aglar, which occurs in Aglarond, the Glittering Caverns that so
entrance the dwarf Gimli at the Battle of Helm’s Deep. Extended forms
of gal- appear in Quenya Al(a)tariel, Sindarin Galadriel, derived from
Q. alata, “radiance,” S. galad. Galad appears also in Sindarin Gil-galad,
“Radiant Star” or “Star of Bright Light.”
The gil in Gil-galad is a Sindarin word that literally means “bright
spark” but which like Quenya tinwë, “spark,” was often used in
the sense of “star.” Gil appears also in Sindarin Gilthoniel, another
epithet for Varda, but one almost never occurring alone but always in
conjunction with Elbereth, as in Frodo’s cry “O Elbereth! Gilthoniel!”
and Sam’s “Gilthoniel! A Elbereth!” cited earlier. Gilthoniel translates
as “Star-Kindler” and is thus a Sindarin parallel to Quenya Tintallë,
“The Kind­ler.” A significant difference in the construction of the two
names is the Sindarin addition of gil, “spark,” to thoniel, “kindler,” a
redupli­cation of the whole meaning encompassed in the Quenya. In
effect, the Sindarin must say the same thing twice.
92 Splintered Light

The difference between Quenya and Sindarin is an index of the

greater sense of separation from light felt by the Elves of Middle-earth.
Quenya takes its name directly from the word for light-inspired speech.
Sindarin is filtered, formed from Quenya sinda, “grey,” a word that itself
is passed through another language to bring diminished light. While it
eventually becomes the principal language of Middle-earth, the first
to use it are the Sindar from whom it takes its name. The Sindar are
Grey-elves, called Elves of the Twilight, and with them a new shade
appears in Tol­kien’s spectrum. Grey is a middle shade, twilight a mid-
point between daylight and dark. Like their name, the Sindar occupy
the middle ground between Calaquendi and Moriquendi, between en-
lightenment and ignorance. This would seem to suggest—and Tolkien’s
development of plot and character supports the idea—that the Sindar
can go in either direction. Theirs is not just a case of seeking or reject-
ing the light. Theirs is a world in which even those who have not seen
the light can, if they wish, be aware of it and of its power.
Since they are of the Elves who never go to Valinor, but stay in Middle-
earth, the Sindar should be counted as Moriquendi. However, they are
separated from the Dark Elves by degrees of light (they are not dark but
grey) and identified with the special relationship to light of their king,
Elu Thingol, and his queen, Melian. Of all the Sindar, only these two
have actually seen the light. Melian is the greater of the two, for she is
a Maia, one of the lesser Ainur, and thus has lived in the light of the
Trees. Like Varda, she is a bringer of light, and like Yavanna, a singer of
songs. Coming from Valinor to Middle-earth at the time of the Elves’
awakening, she has “the light of Aman” in her face (Silm.55) and fills
the pre-dawn twilight with her singing. The association with both light
and song sets Melian very near the primacy of creation.
For all these likenesses, however, there are important differences. The
thematic associations with Varda and Yavanna are deliberate, intended
to set up similarities but also to point up the distinctions between them
and Melian. In all ways she is lesser. While the light of Aman is in her
face, it is not that direct and primary “light of Ilúvatar” that illumines
the face of Varda. Nor has her singing the power of that song with which
Yavanna brought to life the two Trees. Close to the light, possessing the
gift of song, Melian is yet a diminution of the primal light. The light she
brings to the Sindar is more than they have had in Middle-earth, less
than they might have known had they gone to Valinor. She represents
the middle ground of their possible choices.
 amazing wine and cellar doors 93

Unlike Melian, Thingol has not dwelt in the light, but he has seen
it and directly experienced it. He was that Elwë who with Ingwë and
Finwë went as an ambassador of the Elves to Valinor. He and his brother
Olwë led the Teleri, the Last-comers, on their long journey toward the
light. That in itself tells us something, for having seen the light, Elwë
is still the last to lead his people to Valinor. Moreover, he voluntarily
relinquishes his opportunity to see the light again, for although he
“desired greatly the light and splendour of the Trees” (52), he elects
to stay in Middle-earth rather than return to Valinor. In the course of
his final journey toward the light, Elwë hears the singing of Melian in
Nan Elmoth, the aptly named Valley of Star-dusk, and following the
sound, sees and falls in love with her. Forgetting his journey, he stays
with her in a trance of love “while long years were measured by the
wheeling stars above them” (55). Although for a while the Teleri search
for their lost leader, most of them eventually continue without him.
They complete their journey. He does not. Forgetting his desire for the
light, he stays in the starlit dusk of Middle-earth.
Yet he has light of a kind. “Greatly though he had desired to see
again the light of the Trees, in the face of Melian he beheld the light of
Aman as in an unclouded mirror, and in that light he was content” (58).
Tolkien’s reference to light as seen in the face of the beloved is perhaps
an allusion to the medieval concept of earthly love as the reflection of
divine love. Elwë’s love for Melian brings him as near the divine as any
earthly lover can come in mortal love, for Tolkien makes it clear that
she represents light. Nevertheless, she herself is not the light source
but the mirror, the reflector; while the mirror is “unclouded,” still the
light is at one remove from its source. However, reflected light is better
than no light at all. Though secondary and of necessity diminished, it
still contains something of the primary value.
Elwë also suggests diminished light, but more subtly through etymo-
logical changes in his name. His Quenya name is Elwë Singollo. As we
have seen, Elwë means simply “Star (-person)” and by extension “Light
(-person).” Singollo, while it does not cancel the implied light of his
first name, has the effect of muting it. This second name, more properly
a descriptive epithet like Elbereth or Tintallë, is formed from Quenya
sinda, “grey,” plus collo, “cloak,” with the last syllable of sinda dropped
and the voiceless c of the second element changed to voiced g to give
him the by-name “Greycloak” or “Greymantle.” The juxtaposition of
“Star/Light” with “Greymantle” implies light dimmed, initial brightness
94 Splintered Light

mantled or cloaked. The name thus prefigures Elwë’s choice of Middle-

earth and reflected light over Valinor and the light of the Trees. With this
change comes a change in his name that further suggests dimmed luster.
His Sindarin name is Elu, not Elwë. The abstract suffix wë weakens and
darkens to become u. Another change modifies Singollo to Thingol, shift-
ing the sibilant s to unvoiced th, and eliding the last syllable entirely.
Both semantically and phonologically, his name/light dim and soften.
The changes in Thingol’s name and the way in which they mirror his
choice of secondary light are typical of the differences between light-
infused Quenya and twilit Sindarin. The pattern is one of softening,
most clearly perceptible in consonants. For example, as in instances of
star and color words cited above, medial d in Quenya elda is dh (with
the value of voiced English th) in Sindarin eledh. Initial k or c in Que-
nya kal/cal is hard g in Sindarin gal. We have already seen that Quenya
sinda is Sindarin thin. Extensive comparison of Quenya and Sindarin is
complicated by the many other Elven tongues (in their various stages of
incompletion) with which Tolkien enriched the Babel of Middle-earth.
Nevertheless, it is possible to show in more or less general terms that
there is in Tolkien’s fictive world a clear correlation between what hap-
pens to light and what happens to language. All of the words cited above
are light-related, and all of them are softer in Sindarin than in Quenya.
The phonological differences between Finnish and Welsh march hand
in hand with Tolkien’s concept in his invented languages.
Qualitatively, the difference gives Sindarin a very different kind of
beauty from the more formal Quenya that Tolkien came to call Elven-
latin and describe as “a language of lore.” Each language has value for
those who speak it; each expressed for those speakers their perception
of the world in which they live. We must be sure not to turn observa-
tions of sound shifts into value judgments, or to assume because one is
“brighter” than the other that Quenya is therefore “good” and Sindarin
less good. Sindarin is farther from the light but closer to the activities
and concerns of Middle-earth.
If this seems to be a paradox, it is only one of many in the work of a
paradoxical man, “a man of antitheses” whose invented world derives its
energy from paradox and polarity. Tolkien thought of the development
of language as the proper activity of the mind of humanity. Nowhere
does his fiction imply that he conceived of language or languages as
having deteriorated from an earlier therefore better to a later therefore
worse state. Indeed, we must conclude on the basis of his knowledge of
 amazing wine and cellar doors 95

and love for the ancient and modern languages he spoke and read that
he saw and heard languages as beautiful in their variety, a congeries of
amazing wines and cellar doors enlivening the world they both create
and change. In his mythology he envisioned those changes as at once
following and describing the splintering of the light.
Tolkien loved the power latent in language—that “mythological
grammar” by which humanity can, through its perception and sub-
creation, bring into being a Secondary World. To hear or speak a new
language is to be, for the moment, in a new and strange world created by
unfamiliar words expressing different perceptions and a different imagi-
native vision—in effect a Secondary World whose colors are refracted
through the prism of language. We may say, then, that any world in
which human beings live and speak is sub-created by their words and
is thus a Secondary World. We can never experience directly what was
spoken into being with the first Word—the Logos—only what humanity
speaks and makes with splintered light. Tolkien felt that the Separa-
tion, the Fall, was tragic and that the splintering of light and language
were the result of the Fall. But he surely felt, too, with Augustine, the
possibilities for beauty that derived from the felix peccatum Adae,
the fortunate sin of Adam. Given light and language, it is our right
to “make still by that law in which we’re made” and by the making
to “assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation.” He
felt just as surely also with Barfield, that in the hands of the poets, the
makers, the “disease of mythology” called language will be the instru-
ment whereby sub-creation will finally reunite word and percept not
in an ancient but a new unity and reunite humanity with the Maker.
He said at the end of the essay “On Fairy-stories” that “all tales may
come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as
unlike the forms that we give them as man, finally redeemed, will be
like and unlike the fallen that we know” (MC 156–57).
 12
Light and Heat

Nothing is evil in the beginning.

—Elrond

Modification and proliferation of language, fragmentation of perception

and meaning, division and subdivision of peoples—all are manifesta-
tions of that splintering that Tolkien sees as the fate of the White Light
refracted. But what of the light itself? By Tolkien’s own standard for
sub-creation, light should manifest the same splintering if his Second-
ary World is to have the inner consistency of reality he declared was
essential for fantasy. Division and subdivision of light parallel these
same patterns among Tolkien’s peoples and his languages. In addition,
his treatment lends itself increasingly to the playing out of Barfield’s
division of “to shine” into spiritual reality and physical light. Tolkien
has devised for his light a sequence of diminution and fragmentation
leading to its increasing spiritual and physical distance from the peoples
of Middle-earth.
This sequence begins with the pervasive light of the Lamps, continues
with the softer pulsating and cyclical light of the Trees, and culminates
in the Silmarils, the three great jewels made with the light of the Trees
that hold the last of the light when the Trees are killed. Their resting
places, the “long home” of each in earth, sea, and sky, place the light
beyond the reach of Middle-earth. The last of the light, the star Eärendil,
which is the only Silmaril remaining above ground, appears to the sight of

97
98 Splintered Light

those in Middle-earth at morning and at evening, times of changing light.

No longer a pervasive presence, the light has become only a reminder and
a promise, a sign of what was and what yet may be.
This final splintering is the result of the last great act of sub-creation
in Tolkien’s world. Out of the mingled gold and silver light of the two
Trees Laurelin and Telperion, the great Noldorin smith Feänor creates
the three Silmarils. These jewels then become the focus for all the de-
sires, impulses, and conflicting emotions that Tolkien sees as responses
to light. At the same time they function as the prism for the refrac-
tion and diffusion of those responses. They are the crux, the center to
which everything that has gone before points, out of which everything
that will come after flows. Light and dark, positive and negative, good
and ill—all the opposites come together in the multiple effects of the
Silmarils, the last splinters of the light.
To see this in perspective, we must reexamine the separate charac-
teristics of the three Elven kindreds who go to Valinor. All three are
important, for Tolkien has assigned a special value to each. Taken to-
gether, they represent the spectrum of human spirituality and response
to the light. The first group to go, the smallest and also the most select
in terms of their affinity for light, are the Vanyar. Fair Elves, golden-
haired, after their arrival in Valinor they dwell always in the light.
The Vanyar come under the special guardianship of Manwë and Varda,
the highest of the Valar. This is significant, for relationships between
Elves and Valar embody much of Tolkien’s underlying philosophical
and theological concern.
The special provinces of Manwë and Varda are air and light, respec-
tively. Manwë, whose epithet is Súlimo, Lord of the Breath of Arda
(literally “The Breather”), is Lord of Arda, the earth. His presence is
manifest in wind and cloud and all the regions of the air. It scarcely
needs pointing out here that underlying Tolkien’s concept of Manwë
is that very spirit-wind-breath triad that Barfield used to illustrate
primal unity of meaning. Varda, whose epithets were discussed in the
previous chapter, is Lady of the Stars, queen of light. She kindled the
Lamps and made newer and brighter stars for the sky of Middle-earth
in preparation for the coming of the Elves. Through the guardianship
of Manwë and Varda, air and light—the least material, most spiritual
of the earth’s elements—are associated with the Vanyar.
At the opposite end of the spectrum are the Teleri. They are the last
to go to Valinor, the least eager for the light, and (in sad commentary
 Light and Heat 99

on humankind) the largest group. Like the majority of humanity, the

Teleri hesitate, vacillate, and are changeful in mind and spirit. This
changefulness is exemplified in the two figures (not the Elven ambas-
sadors) Tolkien chose to guide the Teleri. They are Ulmo, Lord of Waters,
the Vala whose province is the ocean deeps, and his vassal, the Maia
Ossë, master of the coastal shallows. The association of the Teleri with
water says much, for in Tolkien’s mythology water, more than any other
substance of Middle-earth, has in it the echo of the Music: “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” (Silm. 19).1 In the
real world’s mythologies, water can suggest creation, transformation,
death, the journey of the soul, and rebirth. It seems clear that Tolkien
is building on its real mythical and psychological value, but has taken
the image further. By investing the waters of Middle-earth with the
echo of the Music, he has employed the very nature of the element to
embody the strife, the beauty, and the contention of his creation myth.
In water there is the sound of music, but there is also storm; waves and
currents keep water in motion and mutable. All this is embodied in
the Teleri.
Their name for themselves is Lindar, the Singers. They love water
and live always near the sea, on the shores of both Valinor and Middle-
earth. But they are also conflicted, poised between Ulmo, lord of the
deeps and oceans, and Ossë, who rules the coasts and islands and who
delights in storms. Ulmo and Ossë do not always agree with one another,
and when Ulmo leads the Teleri to the shores of Aman, Ossë persuades
some of them to remain on the shores of Middle-earth. The Teleri are
thus literally and metaphorically marginal.
Between these extremes, between those most eager for light and those
least eager, are the Noldor. Because they are in the center, equidistant
between the poles, they are central to Tolkien’s concept and to the
theme and action of The Silmarillion. The Noldor, earlier called the
Noldoli and earlier still the Gnomes, have occupied this same central
position in Tolkien’s design since the beginnings of his mythology in the
1917 “Book of Lost Tales.” Although the framework has changed and
characters and names have come and gone, the overarching vision has
remained consistent. As Tolkien represents them, the Noldor embody
the highest level of humanity’s achievement and potential. Of all the
100 Splintered Light

Three Kindreds, they make the most material contributions to art and
science, to what we think of as civilization. They are the makers; they
are the poets, smiths, artists, craftsmen. They are beloved of Aulë, the
smith-Vala whose province is the fabric of the earth.
In one respect, Aulë is the most “human” of the Valar, for he is the
only one of them who has the impulse to create, to imitate his creator by
making a race of people. In making the Dwarves he exceeds his mandate
(as human makers tend to do) and is rebuked for his presumption by
Eru. His defense is a restatement of the line from “Mythopoeia” that
“we make still by that law in which we’re made,” for he replies to Eru
that “the making of things is in my heart from my own making by thee;
and the child of little understanding that makes a play of the deeds of
his father may do so without thought of mockery, but because he is
the son of his father” (Silm. 43). Aule’s unquestioning acceptance of
Eru’s chastisement and his willingness to destroy his creatures recalls
the unquestioning obedience of biblical Abraham and his willingness
to sacrifice his son Isaac at his God’s command.
The association of the Noldor with Aulë is surely part of Tolkien’s
intent to remind us of humankind’s great potential to excel but also
to exceed. The characteristics of the Noldor—ability to create, poten-
tial to excel, tendency to exceed the limits—raise questions about the
connection between obedience and freedom and illustrates vividly the
relationship between humanity and God as Tolkien sees it. The Noldor
have Aulë’s creativity and skill and his desire to make, but they do not
have his readiness to submit to a higher will or that absence of desire
that keeps Aulë free of possessiveness of his creations. For “the delight
and pride of Aulë is in the deed of making, and in the thing made, and
neither in possession nor in his own mastery” (Silm. 19).
Unlike Aulë, the Noldor cannot loose themselves from their posses-
sions or from their pride in their making. The greatness of these Elves,
which is also their greatest flaw and which leads them to rebellion and
ultimate disaster, is contained in their very name. They are “The Wise,”
yet only wise in the sense of possessing knowledge, not in the sense of
possessing sagacity, sound judgment (see chapter 10). Tolkien’s charac-
terization of the Noldor could stand as a historian’s description of any
of the great civilization builders of past ages; closer still to home, it is a
telling depiction of our own Western Renaissance and post-Renaissance
culture: “Great became their knowledge and their skill; yet even greater
was their thirst for more knowledge, and in many things they soon
 Light and Heat 101

surpassed their teachers. They were changeful in speech, for they had
great love of words, and sought ever to find names more fit for all things
they knew or imagined” (Silm. 60; emphasis added). And further, they
“advanced ever in skill and knowledge; and the long years were filled
with their joyful labours, in which many new things fair and wonder-
ful were devised. Then it was that the Noldor first bethought them of
letters, and Rúmil of Tirion was the name of the loremaster who first
achieved fitting signs for the recording of speech and song, some for
graving upon metal or in stone, others for drawing with brush or with
pen” (Silm. 63). Here is quintessential humanity, seeking knowledge,
devising new things, developing language, inventing writing, above all,
making ever newer and more precise names for what they perceive and,
equally important, what they are capable of imagining. Contained in
this last talent is their greatest potential, the ability to carry thought
beyond what is visible to that which can be made to appear; in short,
to go from phenomena to fantasy—to become sub-creators.
Their changefulness of speech, their “great love of words,” their ef-
forts always to find “names more fit,” more precise, and more clearly
descriptive lead them perforce to divide unity into more and more separate
parts and to refine those parts into ever more discrete units. The same
division and refinement operates in their making of letters and devising
of scripts, for the written words, while it fixes and preserves the name,
yet separates it even farther from the thing it names. Concept becomes
entirely independent of percept—indeed, becomes a thing in itself, trans-
mittable through signs that do even need the associated sound.
Of all the Noldor, the greatest, the most powerful, the most gifted,
therefore the one with the most potential for good or ill, is Fëanor, the
son of Finwë. If the Noldor are the quintessence of humanity, Fëanor
is the quintessence of the Noldor; in him are all their characteristics
magnified, all their virtues and flaws increased tenfold. Fëanor is crown
prince of the Noldor, the only offspring of their leader Finwë and his
wife, Miriel, whose other name is Serindë, “The Weaver.” His birth is
portentous for the fate of the Elves and of Middle-earth. The time of his
coming is described as a time of glory and bliss in Valinor, a time when
participation in the light of the Trees is at its height. With telling choice
of words, Tolkien calls this time “the Noontide of the Blessed Realm,”
the time of brightest light, the highest point between rising and setting.
The top is also the beginning of the descent, and this peak is the mo-
ment when the light begins to decline, to turn downward toward the
102 Splintered Light

dark. This is implicit in the advent of Fëanor, explicit in his later deeds.
His mother, Miriel, worn out in bearing him, longs only for “release
from the labour of living” (Silm. 63). Exhausted, depleted, she chooses to
resign life in the body and die, thus going against her Elven fate, which
is to live while the world exists. Her death leaves the headstrong Fëanor
motherless, bereft of her influence on his life and character.2 Further,
it leads to the remarriage of Finwë to Indis, a Vanya, and to the birth
of two more sons, Fingolfin and Finarfin. Rivalry and jealousy of his
half-brothers leads to the Exile of the Noldor and results in their long
travail in Middle-earth.
The death of Miriel has profound consequences that stem directly from
the unchecked nature of Fëanor. He embodies all the desire to achieve, all
the skill and knowledge, all the creativity, all the potential for good and
evil that characterizes the Noldor. His true name is Curu­finwë, made by
the addition of curu, “skill,” to his father’s name. It is Miriel who first
calls him Fëanor, “Spirit of Fire,” a by-name combining fëa, “spirit,”
with the genetive of nar, “fire.” By this name he is characterized and by
this name he is always known; but the fact that it is an epithet and not
a true name is significant, for it suggests a perception of the dominance
of one element of his nature to the exclusion of all others.
The appearance of fire at the Noontide of the light signals the pos-
sibility of qualitative change in the course of events. Heat will be a
factor, as well as light. As if at the same signal, the reappearance of
Melkor among the Valar parallels the appearance of Fëanor among the
Noldor. Melkor has been reinstated after long banishment, a forgiveness
that carries with it the hope for his true repentance and reform. The
appearance of both Fëanor and Melkor at this time suggests the precari-
ous perfection of the moment wherein the peak of brightness is also
the point of balance. Light and concepts deriving from light have been
the guiding images of the history so far: illumination, enlightenment,
clarity of vision have implied their opposites—darkness, ignorance,
dimmed perception.
Fire brings another force into the story, for it is heat as well as light
and is brightest when it is hottest. Of all earth’s elements, fire shares
most with its opposite, water, the semblance of life independent of any
external force. Fire is, in fact, more closely associated with humanity and
with its accomplishments than is light. It has in itself the immediate
potential either to help or to harm, to warm or to consume. The bringer
of fire is in many societies the supreme culture hero. The myth of Pro-
 Light and Heat 103

metheus inevitably comes to mind, and the comparison is not wholly

irrelevant, for Fëanor is the most decidedly Promethean figure in Tolk-
ien’s mythology. Without searching for one-to-one correspondences, we
can see in the stories of both Prometheus and Fëanor the time-honored
mythic theme of the overreacher, the figure whose excess is punished
yet whose accomplishments succeed in bringing a spark to humanity
that can elevate it above its original condition and carry it forward.
Tolkien makes sure that images of fire in all its negative and posi-
tive associations attach to Fëanor from his very beginning. In bearing
him, his mother Miriel is “consumed in spirit and body” (Silm. 63). As
Fëanor grows, his spirit burns “as a flame” (Silm. 60). Neither his hands
nor his mind are long at rest; he has a quickness, a leaping, flickering
restlessness of flame reminiscent of Loge, the figure whose name means
“Fire” in Wagner’s Nibelungenlied. He is “driven by the fire of his own
heart only, working ever swiftly and alone” (Silm. 66). He is incendiary,
aflame with the creative power that generates its own heat.
As a maker, Fëanor surpasses all his kindred. He is “of all the Nol­dor,
then or after, the most subtle in mind and the most skilled in hand”
(Silm. 64). Improving on the letters devised by Rúmil, he creates the
Tengwar of Fëanor, an uncial or cursive script of calligraphic beauty.
Fëanor’s Tengwar makes writing—an instrument for the conveyance
of meaning but at the same time wholly separate not just from the
thing meant but from the word that means it—into something close
to an artifact, a thing beautiful in itself. The disparity between script
and meaning is illustrated most vividly in the “fiery letters” engraved
on the Ring that Frodo first sees in his study at Bag End. Although the
outward appearance of the inscription is in itself beautiful, as can be
seen by its reproduction on the page (LOTR 49), the words themselves
are anything but, as can be heard in Gandalf’s translation at the Coun-
cil of Elrond (247), for they are in the Black Speech, the language of
Mordor. This might just be the ultimate expression of the fragmenta-
tion of consciousness and of the separation between sign and word and
between word and thing that is the continuing history of Tolkien’s
world. Fëanor’s spirit of fire persists in Middle-earth long ages after
his disappearance from the story.
His immediate appearance on the scene, however, seems to bring
only beauty and to enhance the quality of Valinor. Fëanor’s creativity
extends into many realms, for he is also a maker of jewels. The Noldor
have always excelled at this craft, digging gemstones from the earth and
104 Splintered Light

cutting and carving them into multiple shapes. As is his wont, Fëanor
excels his fellows in this as well. He discovers “how gems greater and
brighter than those of the Earth might be made with skill” (Silm. 64).
In this area, he comes near to Aulë, who has actually made the gems
of the Earth.
The specific words that the narrative uses in connection with Fëanor
are worth attention, for, as always, Tolkien means exactly what he says
and uses each word for all the resonance of which it is capable. Subtle
and skilled are words repeatedly coupled with Fëanor’s name. Anyone
familiar with the third chapter of Genesis will remember the descrip-
tion of the serpent as “the most subtle of the beasts of the field” and
will in consequence be alert to the negative connotations of subtle and
to Tolkien’s oblique association of Fëanor with the serpent of Genesis.
The word itself has several meanings, not all of which apply. We may
safely dispense with the first dictionary definition—“slight, not im-
mediately obvious”—since it plainly cannot apply to Fëanor, who is
anything but slight in stature, nature, or impact. Subsequent defini-
tions, however, do reveal him and make it clear that Tolkien is using
the word for all the force it carries.
The second definition, “able to make fine distinctions, keen,” and the
third, “characterized by skill or ingenuity, clever,” both describe Fëanor
as the reader first encounters him. Further definitions—“characterized
by craft or slyness, devious” and “operating in a hidden and usually
injurious way; insidious”—point to developments in Fëanor’s charac-
ter that the reader can clearly follow over the course of the narrative.
Subtle can be traced back to Indo-European teks-, “to weave, also to
fabricate,” from which it develops through the suffixed form teks-la
to Latin tela, “warp,” and thence to sub-tela, “thread passing under
the warp.” So the character of Fëanor, son of Miriel the weaver, runs
under and crosswise to the thread of life in Aman, becoming part of
the fabric but at a right angle to its direction.
Skill yields an equal wealth of meaning for our knowledge of Fëanor.
The word can be traced back to Indo-European skel-, “to cut,” and thus
suggests that tendency to divide and separate that is characteristic
of Elves as a whole, and most characteristic of the Noldor. We have
already seen this tendency at work in the larger development of Elven
language and culture, and it plays out, too, in their carving and cutting
of gemstones. Skel- is related to Old Norse skil, “reason, discernment,
knowledge,” and thus suggests that means of knowing through analysis,
 Light and Heat 105

through the establishing of distinctions among things and ideas that

is the distinguishing characteristic of the scientific method, and also
suggests that contribution of post-Renaissance humanity to Western
thought, the Age of Reason.
 13
Making versus Hoarding

Fëanor, being come to his full might, was filled with a new
thought, or it may be that some shadow of foreknowledge came
to him of the doom that drew near; and he pondered
how the light of the Trees, the glory of the Blessed Realm,
might be preserved imperishable. Then he began a long and secret
labour, and he summoned all his lore, and his power, and
his subtle skill; and at the end of all he made the Silmarils.
—from The Silmarillion

Consonant with the actual fragmentation of light in Tolkien’s world

is the fragmentation of meaning and the further division of meaning
into literal, metaphoric, and symbolic levels. It is a measure of Tolk-
ien’s creativity and the integrity of his concept that he achieves this at
no cost to the reality of his world or erosion of the believability of its
history. Of all Fëanor’s great works, the greatest is the creation of the
Silmarils, the gems of light that give their name to the legendarium as
a whole. The Silmarils, focus of much of the conflict and controversy
that mark Tolkien’s history, lend themselves to uses both dramatic and
thematic. They function at once as literal artifacts, as potent metaphors
for desire and, at the highest level, as symbols charged with a variety
of referents. The Silmarils are real, metaphoric, and symbolic without
ever being other than themselves.
As artifacts, the Silmarils embody light as a physical reality, tangible

107
108 Splintered Light

matter that can be touched, handled, and worked. As jewels, they are a
metaphor for the desire of humankind for beauty and for the neg­ative of
this desire—possessiveness, covetousness, selfishness, and lust. Since
the light of the Silmarils is enclosed in jewels, it does not necessarily
shine for all and on all, as does the light of the Trees from which it comes.
It can be owned, possessed by a single individual to the exclusion of
others; it can be held in the hand, worn as ornament, or hidden away
at the owner’s whim. While Fëanor’s motive in making the Silmarils
is to preserve the light, his choice of jewels as the containers or bodies
for that light leads to misunderstanding and misuse.
Their actuality, their physical possession and disposal, leads to the
dramatic action of the history of Middle-earth, and their metaphoric
value enriches Tolkien’s meaning. It is as symbols, however, that the
Silmarils work most powerfully. They are the embodiments of Tolkien’s
theme of the power of light. It is through the Silmarils that he makes
his clearest statement about the need for light, the impulse to seek it or
turn toward it, and the perversion of that impulse into lust and hatred as
desire turns in on itself and possession masters the possessor. The story
becomes an exploration of the various effects of light and the terrible
way in which this light, wholly good in itself, can yet lead into darkness,
can even in the ultimate inversion of its quality become that darkness.
The relationship between Fëanor and the Silmarils is a close one, not
just because he makes and cherishes them but because each is a kind
of likeness of the other, a reversed image. Miriel declared of her son,
“Never again shall I bear child, for strength that would have nourished
the life of many has gone forth into Fëanor” (Silm. 63). Of the Silmarils,
Fëanor declares, “Never again shall I make their like” (Silm. 78). The
crystal of the Silmarils is “but as is the body to the Children of Ilúvatar:
the house of its inner fire, that is within it and yet in all parts of it, and
is its life” (67). Fëanor, also, burns with an inner fire and grows “as if
a secret fire were kindled within him” (64).
The similarity is deliberate. The light of the Silmarils illumines dark-
ness, however opaque or evil it may be. Fëanor’s fire can also illumine—
indeed, it is that very fire which enables him alone of all his people to
conceive of and to make the Silmarils. The light of the Silmarils is hal-
lowed by Varda “so that thereafter no mortal flesh, nor hands unclean,
nor anything of evil will might touch them” (Silm 67). Fëanor’s inner
fire can also burn and consume. Like the light of the Silmarils but even
more like the primal fire of the Lamps, Fëanor’s fire is of such fierceness
 Making versus Hoarding 109

and intensity that when not properly contained and used, it scorches and
destroys what it touches. The intensity of his nature drives him both to
make and to break, and here again we see in him humanity’s potential
poised always on the edge, balanced between light and darkness.
Fëanor is the last and in many ways the most important of the sub-
creators who figure in Tolkien’s history of the light. His creation is
both a synthesis and a splintering, and as such vividly illustrates the
paradox at the heart of the mythology. The Silmarils have as their in-
ner fire “the blended light of the trees of Valinor” (Silm. 67). In them
Fëanor has recombined and made whole the refracted gold and silver
light of the Trees. Yet in taking part of that light and enclosing it in
the jewels he has of necessity fragmented it and created the possibility
for further splintering. For the jewels are three separate, discrete units,
each of which exists independent of the others. Each can—and eventu-
ally will—be separated by great distance from the others. Yet when the
Trees are destroyed, the last of the light lives only in the Silmarils and
without them would have disappeared entirely from the world. Syn-
thesis in fragmentation and recovery through division and dispersal are
the antinomies of Tolkien’s phil­osophy and the paradoxes of his world.
As for Fëanor himself, his greatest act of creation is also the beginning
of his downfall and is clearly meant to recall but not to recapitulate the
biblical Fall of Adam. Since through the Music the tendency toward dis-
cord and disharmony is inherent in Tolkien‘s world, a series of smaller
Falls replaces the one great Fall of Judeo-Christian mythology. Each is
in some way a fall into self-will and selfishness. Melkor falls prey to
the desire to make his own Music instead of subsuming his creative
powers to Eru’s theme. Fëanor falls prey to the temptation to love to
exclusion and to possess without sharing his own creations. This leads
him and his kindred into the Fall of the Noldor, and to much of the
ensuing strife of Middle-earth. Other falls will come, for in Tolkien’s
view, “there cannot be any ‘story’ without a fall—all stories are ulti-
mately about the fall—at least not for human minds as we know them
and have them” (Silm. xv).
Desire to possess is the cardinal temptation in Tolkien’s cosmology,
and possessiveness the great transgression. The only commandment—
stated only once but always implicit—is “Love not too well the work
of thy hands and the devices of thy heart” (Silm. 125). The first and
determinative Fall is that of Melkor. After it comes the Fall of the Elves
“through the possessive attitude of Fëanor” to the gems he has created.
108 Splintered Light

Tolkien’s purpose in “threading” (as he described it) his history upon

the Silmarils is made clear when within two lines he records the similar
responses of Fëanor and Melkor to the jewels. First, we learn that “the
heart of Fëanor was fast bound to these things that he himself had made,”
and in the next sentence we are told that “Melkor lusted for the Silmarils
and the very memory of their radiance was a gnawing fire in his heart”
(Silm. 67). Desire to possess the light is superseding desire to live in it.
The noontide is declining toward night.
With fitting irony it is Melkor and Fëanor, each once the best and
brightest of his kind, who usher in the darkness. Melkor’s lust for the
Silmarils leads him to sow dissension and mistrust among the Noldor
and to divide them from the Valar. In particular, he works to alienate
Fëanor from his half-brothers, Finarfin and Fingolfin. The same pos-
sessiveness that governs Fëanor’s feeling for the Silmarils leads him to
jeal­ousy and fear that his brothers may usurp his place. His pride keeps
him aloof, and more and more he comes to identify himself with the
Silmarils: “For Fëanor began to love the Silmarils with a greedy love,
and grudged the sight of them to all save to his father and his seven
sons; he seldom remembered now that the light within them was not
his own” (Silm. 69). He wears the jewels on his forehead at feasts, using
the light for adornment, and for the rest of the time he withholds them
from the sight of Valinor, keeping them “locked in the deep chambers
of his hoard” (Silm. 69).
To anyone familiar with the stories of northern mythology, Tolkien’s
use of the word hoard must recall the dragon hoards that in the stories
of Beowulf and Sigurd lead only to destruction and death. It is a more
subtle treatment of the same theme he explored in The Hobbit, where
the fall into greed and possessiveness of Thorin Oakenshield is the
direct result of his desire for the dragon-hoard and in particular for the
Arkenstone, a shimmering crystal gem whose likeness to the Silmarils
is unmistakable. The idea was clearly one that occupied Tolkien, for
possessiveness is also a major theme in The Lord of the Rings, where
desire to possess leads to the downfall of those who covet the Ring, and
very nearly destroys Frodo before the Ring itself is destroyed.
While Tolkien’s three major works dramatize this motif, he returned to
it again, developing it more theoretically in the Recovery section of “On
Fairy-stories.” There he wrote of the “appropriation” (literally “making
one’s own”) of “things which once attracted us by their glitter, or their
colour, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them
 Making versus Hoarding 109

in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them” (MC
146). It requires no great leap of imagination to recognize Fëanor in this
description or to find in Tolkien’s use and reuse of the motif of hoard-
ing, evidence of his deep philosophical and religious preoccupation with
the human tendency to grasp and keep, a tendency all too likely to turn
humankind inward and downward, away from the light. We cannot but
see in Fëanor’s appropriation and hoarding of the Silmarils a perversion
of desire for the light and as ruinous misuse of its essential quality.
Light is not to be held or flaunted as personal adornment or locked
away from the sight of all. Light is not to be the property of any per-
son, and those who seek to possess it exclusively have lost sight of it
altogether. Loving too well the work of his hands, in his very need to
treasure and hoard the light Fëanor has given up his capacity to see it
clearly. All of his subsequent actions stem from this need, which will
ultimately send him on a disastrous journey outward to dim and starlit
Middle-earth and on an equally disastrous journey inward and downward
into a psychological darkness at once real, metaphoric, and spiritual.
If there is one moment in Tolkien’s carefully orchestrated sequence
of events that can be called the turning point, the hinge on which all the
ensuing action hangs, it is surely Fëanor’s moment of decision following
the destruction of the Trees by Melkor and his accomplice, the giant
spider Ungoliant. This is the supreme test of Fëanor’s willingness to
give up his possessions, to let them go and be free of his need to hoard,
a test as momentous as Frodo’s later at the Cracks of Doom. Like Frodo,
Fëanor fails, but unlike Frodo’s failure, his decision has no Gollum to
reverse it and inadvertently to put things right. As Tolkien draws the
scene it is an archetypal meeting—almost a collision—between light
and dark, and as always, it operates on multiple levels.
The moment comes at the festival in Valinor when the harvest is
gathered in, when what has been sown is reaped. This particular harvest
gathers in not only the fruits of the earth but also the fruits of the lies
of Melkor and the pride and greed of Fëanor on which those lies have
worked. Banished by the Valar from Aman because of his hostility
toward his half-brothers, Fëanor is summoned now to the feast, and
there agrees to reconciliation. However, to neither the reconciliation
nor full participation in the feast does he give himself wholeheartedly.
He has refused to wear the Silmarils, leaving them locked in his hoard
at Formenos and thus denying sight of them to everyone. And to Fin-
golfin’s declaration of forgiveness, he makes no answering declaration,
108 Splintered Light

but says only, “So be it” (Silm. 75). This reservation, holding back a
part of himself, foreshadows the later and greater withholding that sets
the seal upon his doom.
The episode takes place at the hour of the mingling of the gold and
silver lights of the Trees, a time of transition that brings about a still
greater change. This twilight hour is the time chosen by Melkor and his
dreadful sidekick Ungoliant (surely one of Tolkien’s most dire creations)
to invade the feast and attack the Trees. The introduction of Ungoliant
at this point and for this purpose is further evidence of Tolkien’s con-
tinuing concern with the theme of light perverted. Ungoliant’s swollen,
monstrous spider shape is in itself repugnant, but Tolkien juxtaposes this
shape, normally associated with darkness and shadowed places, with the
light. Ungoliant needs light; she craves it more fiercely than Melkor,
or Fëanor, or any other creature in Tolkien’s world. It is her food; “she
hungered for light and hated it” (Silm. 73). She feeds on light, quite liter-
ally sucking it in and belching it forth as darkness, a ghastly perversion
of nourishment and a perversion also of the light. Meant to shine, it is
now ingested, turned in on itself and given out again as its opposite.
Coming sudden and unexpected to the feast, Melkor stabs the Trees,
Ungoliant sucks up their light, and the darkness falls. This Darkness,
the Unlight of Ungoliant, is not just darkness in the place of light; it is
darkness made out of light—a palpable emptiness that defeats the eye
and robs the world of appearance. “The Light failed; but the Darkness
that followed was more than loss of light. In that hour was made a
Darkness that seemed not lack but a thing with being of its own: for it
was indeed made by malice out of Light” (Silm. 76). The darkness that
now descends on Valinor is itself a paradox; it is the felt presence of an
absence—the absence of that light which had been the life of Valinor.
Note the distinction Tolkien makes here between darkness before
light and darkness after light—specifically, darkness where light should
be. Clearly, there is more than one kind of darkness in this cosmos.
The darkness of creation before the light of the Lamps is not to be seen
as a negative but as a neutral. This is true also of the starlit darkness
of Middle-earth in which the Elves awake. In The Lord of the Rings,
Tom Bombadil tells the four hobbits that he “knew the dark under the
stars when it was fearless—before the Dark Lord came from Outside”
(LOTR 129).
The darkness of Ungoliant is not just darkness after light but dark-
ness where there should be light. Fëanor compounds that darkness not
 Making versus Hoarding 109

just for Valinor but also for himself when he refuses Yavanna’s request
that he give back the light of the Silmarils to revive the Trees. The night
that follows the death of the Trees can be lit only if he gives up his
treasure. He has already established precedent by denying the sight of
the Silmarils to both Elves and Valar and by meeting the reconciliation
of Fingolfin with reserve. His first response to Yavanna is silence only.
When he is urged to speak, Aulë intervenes, the only Vala in a posi-
tion to comprehend his torment. “Be not hasty! We ask a greater thing
than thou knowest. Let him have peace yet awhile” (Silm. 78). Only
Aulë, who freely offered up his creation, can know how hard a sacrifice
is being asked, and his words say more about him than about Fëanor.
Tolkien’s point is clear: giving up is not an easy thing; it is only the right
thing. Fëanor will not do it. His answer—“This thing I will not do of
free will” (Silm. 79)—recalls Frodo’s very similar words at the Cracks
of Doom: “I will not do this deed” (LOTR 924). And so Fëanor sets his
seal upon darkness.
A terrible irony is at work here, for the Silmarils are no longer Fëanor’s
to keep or let go. While he deliberated with the Valar, Melkor broke into
his stronghold and stole the gems. They have passed out of his keep-
ing. Tolkien’s purpose in constructing such irony is complex. First, he
wants to show that the light so possessively hoarded was not Fëanor’s
by right and thus not his to give. Second, the incident illustrates that
greed fosters greed, and possessiveness engenders covetousness. Had
Fëanor worn the Silmarils to the feast instead of jealously denying the
sight of them to everyone but himself, they would perhaps not have
been stolen as they were.
But beyond these—and this is for Tolkien most important—Fëanor’s
decision in itself, irrespective of his power or lack thereof to make it
good, has a marked effect on his character. “The Silmarils had passed
away,” says the narrative, “and all one it may seem whether Fëanor
had said yea or nay to Yavanna; yet had he said yea at the first, before
the tidings came from Formenos, it may be that his after deeds would
have been other than they were” (Silm. 79). This seems an odd state-
ment in view of the fact that the Music of creation is “as Fate” to all
except Men in Tolkien’s world. If Fëanor cannot change the Music, if he
is bound by it, how could a different answer have made his subsequent
deeds “other than they were”?
The question is of central importance to an understanding of Tol­
kien’s vision of the working of fate and free will in his mythology. In
108 Splintered Light

this connection, it is worth repeating in full John Gardner’s comment

on this very issue in his review of The Silmarillion.

In the work of Boethius and the scholastic philosophers, as in Dante

and Chaucer, musical harmony is the first principle of cosmic bal-
ance, and the melody of individuals—the expression of individual
free will—is the standard figure for the play of free will within the
overall design of Providence. This concord of will and overall design
was simultaneously expressed, in medieval thought, in terms of
light: the foundation of music was the orderly tuning of the spheres.
Other lights—lights borrowed from the cosmic originals—came to
be important in exegetical writings and of course in medieval poetry:
famous jewels or works in gold and silver were regularly symbolic
of the order that tests individual will.

Fëanor’s response both to light and to the Silmarils is a clear example

of this medieval principle. His character embodies the polarities of
light and dark, and his reluctance to give up those “famous jewels” is
vivid illustration of the operation of free will within the overall design
of the Music.
In making the provocative and puzzling statement about Fëanor’s
choice of saying yea or nay, Tolkien’s point is neither the fate of the
Silmarils nor the ultimate destiny of Fëanor, but rather his attitude and
motives in the face of “the order that tests individual will.” If he could
have freely given up the Silmarils (even though it was no longer in his
power to do so), he would have been free of his bondage to them, and
his inner darkness might have been dispelled. Subsequent events or
deeds would not be externally different, but the motives behind them
could be different, as could his attitudes toward himself, the Silmarils,
and the peoples whose lives are intertwined with his.
The words of his answer to Yavanna—“This thing I will not do of
free will. But if the Valar will constrain me . . . ” (Silm. 79)—reveal his
limited perception of himself and the forces in his world. His notion
of freedom is restricted to the immediate context, and he is conscious
of no will save that of his own pitted against that of the Valar. Within
the context of the Music, his answer would seem to be meaningless.
He cannot alter events, and the fate of the Silmarils has passed out of
his hands. What he calls the constraint of the Valar is also meaning-
less, since they cannot constrain him against the Music any more than
 Making versus Hoarding 109

they can constrain Melkor; they can only request him to comply with
their wishes. For Fëanor to accede to their appeal would be for him to
acknowledge a higher necessity than his own, and this he cannot do.
Tolkien has deliberately constructed a situation in which Fëanor’s
decision can alter nothing and no one but himself. The Silmarils are
gone beyond recall, the Trees are dead and lightless, and Yavanna is
powerless to revive them. Tolkien’s purpose here is to show that free
will is more important as a factor in internal governance than as a
determiner of external events. The Music will always have the same
form, but how it is played (to extend the metaphor), whether fast or
slow, presto or andante, is up to the performers.
Fëanor is locked into his own performance not because he is bound
by the Music but because he is in bondage to his own desires and his
own creation. His determination to cling to that unrecognized bondage
in a situation in which he could relinquish it determines the subsequent
direction of his character, as well as the character of all the events lead-
ing out from it. His decision leads him to the oath of vengeance that
haunts his sons throughout their lives in Middle-earth and binds them
to a vendetta that they cannot abandon however much they come to
hate it. It leads to the exodus of the Noldor from Valinor, determined
to dominate Middle-earth and rule kingdoms at their own will, to be
“lords of the unsullied light” (Silm. 83). Most grievous of all, it leads
to the theft of the White Ships of the Teleri and the great transgression
of the Kinslaying that pits Elf against Elf, an episode whose repercus-
sions reach far beyond the perpetrators to affect the lives of those yet
unborn. The death of Finrod, the character of Maeglin, and the fall of
Gondolin are all traceable directly to the Kinslaying.
Both the theft of the White Ships and the disastrous slaying of kin by
kin, two interlinked occurrences, show just how far Fëanor has fallen,
taking with him the Elves who follow his banner. At the same time,
both are acts that push him even farther into the abyss. In taking the
White Ships to satisfy his own need, all unheeding of the needs and
vigorous protests of the Teleri, he makes himself no better than Melkor
in his theft of the Silmarils. The White Ships are the proudest handi-
work of the Teleri, creations that, as they tell Fëanor, are to them “as
are the gems of the Noldor: the work of our hearts, whose like we shall
not make again” (Silm. 86). The parallel with the Silmarils is explicit
and deliberate. Equally explicit and deliberate is the contrast between
their refusal to yield their ships to Fëanor and his refusal to yield the
108 Splintered Light

Silmarils to Yavanna. For they are right to refuse his request, which is
negative and destructive both in desire and in execution. Fëanor, on the
other hand, was wrong to refuse Yavanna’s request, which was positive
and would have restored the light and benefited all the world.
Moreover, Fëanor is lacking in that very understanding which the
loss of the Silmarils should have given him: understanding of how it
feels to be deprived of one’s most precious work. The contrast here is
with Aulë, who, because he could give up his own creation, knew first-
hand Fëanor’s anguish and understood his hesitation. Because Fëanor
could not relinquish his creation, his refusal has deadened his capacity
to understand or care about the Teleri. His determination to have the
ships by any means leads to the Kinslaying, and even those innocent
of his intent, such as his half-brother Fingolfin and nephew Fingon, are
caught in his guilt and will be haunted by it until their deaths. This
first killing of Elf by Elf is analogous to the murder of Abel by Cain,
and the Noldor are as doomed as was Cain. The words of Mandos, “Ye
have spilled the blood of your kindred unrighteously and have stained
the land of Aman” (Silm. 88), make clear the enormity of the sin and
the extent of Fëanor’s fall.
“Nothing is evil in the beginning,” Elrond tells Frodo. “Even Sauron
was not so” (LOTR 261). The “marring of Fëanor,” as Tolkien makes
clear, is no less evil a deed than the killing of the Trees. It is “of the
works of Melkor one of the most evil” (Silm. 98). As Fëanor was the
greatest of the Noldor, the brightest and the best and by far the most
creative, so he becomes the darkest and the most destructive. “The best
corrupted is the worst” is a text Tolkien returns to again and again—
with Melkor, with Fëanor, with Thingol, with Saruman, with the Men
of Númenor. Nowhere does Tolkien better illustrate the maxim than
in the drama of the fall of Fëanor.
Fëanor’s greatest virtues are also his greatest flaws; his darkness is
simply the obverse of his brightness. At every step he is controlled by
his own desires, yet he is unable to perceive this, or at least to see it
as a flaw. He is most bound when he thinks himself most free, most
ripe for evil when he thinks he is escaping it. In short, paradox defines
Fëa­nor; light leads him into darkness; the brightness of the Silmarils
blinds him to himself; his most creative act leads him to destruction;
his making is his breaking. And the ultimate inversion of good, his re-
fusal to unmake the Silmarils in order to remake the Trees, leads him
and his people to disastrous fragmentation.
 Making versus Hoarding 109

He breaks the Noldor away from Valinor and from their Eldarin kin-
dred. He breaks faith with the Teleri in theft and killing at Alqualondë.
He breaks with his own family in abandoning Fingolfin, leaving him
at Araman while he and his followers make the crossing of the Ice,
then refusing to go back for him. Fëanor’s obsession with the light, his
need to possess it to the exclusion of all others, divides families, sows
mistrust and hatred, and engenders feud and revenge. When they return
to Middle-earth, the Noldor are a divided people, marred by internal
strife that breeds even more strife and reverberates down the ages.
Fëanor’s own death comes not long after the death of the Trees he
refused to reillumine and the consequent pall of darkness that covers the
blessed realm. In his doomed and fruitless war with Melkor (now called
Morgoth), he is “consumed by the flame of his own wrath,” and in his
furious rage he overreaches himself, pursuing his enemy “far ahead of the
van of his host.” Surrounded by the forces of Morgoth, he is “wrapped in
fire and wounded with many wounds.” Fëanor, Spirit of Fire, is destroyed
by fire. Wrapped in Morgoth’s fire and consumed from within by his
own heat, he burns out and is burnt out, for “so fiery was his spirit that
as it sped his body fell to ash, and was borne away like smoke; and his
likeness has never again appeared in Arda, neither has his spirit left the
halls of Mandos” (Silm. 107). Like the Trees, like the Silmarils, like the
White Ships, Fëanor was unique, a creation never to be repeated.
Nevertheless, his legacy, both for good and for ill, lives on in the world
he has helped to change—for good in the Silmarils, the last splinters of
the light which keep that light alive as a hope and a vision; for ill in
Fëanor’s sons, forced to continue his vain pursuit. The sins of the father
are visited on the children in their obligation to uphold his Oath. Though
they come to hate the burden of that Oath, they fear to let it go and thus
remain prisoners of their father’s will. And for good and ill, the Noldor
have returned to Middle-earth, bringing with them all the giftedness that
makes them great and all the flaws that make them vulnerable, infusing
the life of Middle-earth with all their skill and their art and their conten-
tion, all their capacity to create and to divide.
For the process must go on. Light, language, and peoples will continue
to impinge upon one another, and the results, as can be expected, will
be turbulent. Progressive darkening will be lighted by unlooked-for
courage, great beauty, enduring loyalty, undying love. Light and dark
will come together and separate again and again, both literally and
metaphorically, as the Music plays itself out.
 14
Light Out of Darkness

Through darkness one may come to the light.

—Unfinished Tales

In the events following the darkening of the Trees, splintered light, con-
tained both in the Silmarils and in the Noldor who pursue them, returns
to Middle-earth. And now the fragmentation and diminution of both
light and peoples accelerates. It is as if the downhill spiral into spiritual
and psychological darkness has suddenly steepened, with concomitant
increase in momentum and inability to slow down. The gathering dark
is broken intermittently by flashes of light, some vivid, some dim but
seeming brighter by contrast with the surrounding dark. Light and dark
are now the established polarities of existence, each deriving meaning
from the other, each giving meaning to the struggle that is human life.
That struggle becomes the focus of the story. The action centers on the
Elven kingdoms of Middle-earth, both those already established centers
of the Sindar and the realms newly founded by the returning Noldor.
It is here that individual personality, the variousness of human nature
first introduced with Fëanor begins actively to determine the direction
of events. We are shown a spectrum of personalities of varying shades of
light and dark—Thingol, Melian, Turgon, Eöl, Idril, Lúthien. All of these,
through actions and reactions arising out of their individual natures,
move the world and shape its future. However, these Elves, Noldoran
and Sindarin, are no longer the sole inhabitors of their world. They are

119
120 Splintered Light

joined by Húrin, Tuor, Beren, Túrin—a catalog of heroic newcomers.

For coincident with the arrival of the Silmarils and the return of the
Noldor to Middle-earth, Tolkien introduces into his history the Younger
Children of Ilúvatar—the Atani, the Followers, mortal Men.
In sub-creative terms, this would seem at first to be an unnecessary
complication. As our primary reality amply demonstrates, a world with
one self-conscious two-legged species is complex enough; to add a second
seems superfluous. Tolkien’s world is already equipped to explore the
relationship between humanity and God through the major commu-
nities of Elves—Calaquendi and Moriquendi, Vanyar, Sindar, Noldor,
Teleri. Nevertheless, he has chosen to introduce another distinct race.
The rest of the narrative will deal with the interactions between Elves
and Men and of both with the world around them.
With the introduction of Men, Tolkien is tied a little closer to ob-
served reality, for they must reflect humankind as we know it if we are
to recognize and empathize with their actions. Elves, however human
they may be in their shape and psychology, are nevertheless wholly
imaginary. They are the stuff of fantasy, clearly no part of the real world.
This frees Tolkien to use them as he will and to compare them with
Men, not necessarily to the advantage of either. The presence of both
Elves and Men allows him to establish and explore contrasting concepts,
all the sharper for being embodied in two separate races. Deathlessness
contrasted with death, memory with desire, resistance to change with
turbulence, and commitment to the world with restiveness to go beyond
it—these can be distinguished more clearly when they are presented in
separate peoples.
The initial separation from the light has been developed through
the Elves. Although when they leave Valinor for Middle-earth, Valinor
is literally dark, their departure nonetheless signals a turn away from
light, for it is still metaphorically and symbolically the place of the
light. Middle-earth, in contrast, is both literally and metaphorically
dark, lighted only by the stars. True, it has the presence of Melian and
Thingol—both of the light—and has as well their people, the Grey-elves.
It is dominated, however, by the unseen presence of Morgoth, the Dark
Lord, the Black Enemy who has hidden away in his stronghold the last
of the light, the Silmarils.
Unlike Elves, Men have never seen the light, never felt its presence.
No Vala summoned them to Valinor. Like the Elves, they come to
consciousness in the dimness of starlit Middle-earth. But where Elves
 Light Out of Darkness 121

were summoned into the light, Men awake only after that light has
died, a time when the Trees are a legend and the Silmarils a rumor of
light heard about but never seen. Men have no direct experience of the
light of Aman. Their awakening is concomitant with the first rising of
the newly born sun. Beyond the glimmer of the stars, the only lights
of their world are the daily light of the sun and the inconstant light of
the moon, the last fruit and flower of the Trees.
Tolkien is explicit that these intermittent lights, neither constant
like the Lamps nor pulsating like the Trees, are different in more than
degree. While they derive from the Trees, they come “after they [the
Trees] were sullied by Evil” (quoted above). The contrast is with the
Silmarils, which contain “the last remnant of the unsullied light of
Paradise” (Letters 387). Unsullied versus sullied light, light “before any
fall” (Silm. xv n) and light after the Death of the Trees and the fall of the
Noldor are qualitatively distinct.1 Sun and moon are mere reminders of
the light that is gone, and their light is interrupted by periods of actual
dark with only the stars to soften it. They are light enough to live and
work by but are a long way from the unearthly light that made Valinor
the Blessed Realm. Tolkien has brought light to its lowest power with-
out making it go out altogether. Yet it is worth our notice that sun and
moon are fruit and flower, suggesting a ripening, unfolding process in
the nature of Men for whom they are the only external luminescence.
Another value obtrudes here, for at the metaphorical level both dark-
ness and light acquire directional value, beginning with the westward
source of light in Valinor and developing as Morgoth flees eastward into
darkness, followed by the Noldor. Two great tides of movement surge
and countersurge across the landscape. These are, in broadest terms, the
movement of Elves from west to east, and the corresponding movement of
Men from east to west. These are more than simple migrations; in Tolk-
ien’s world they are responses to light and darkness on both a literal and
a metaphorical level. They establish a pattern that illustrates in concrete
terms one of the central concerns of the entire mythology—how best to
seek the light and how best to benefit from it. The pattern is not a smooth
one, for Tolkien does not write of simple movements west to east or east
to west. In both sweeps there are contrary impulses, eddies and swirls
in which either movement can swerve, check, or turn back upon itself.
Still, the general design is constant, and as always with Tolkien’s vision,
works simultaneously at the literal, metaphorical, and symbolic levels.
At the literal level, this has to do with sun and moon. These bodies,
122 Splintered Light

after some initial adjustment, assume the courses of sun and moon in
the primary world; that is, they rise in the east, traverse the heavens,
and set in the west. Therefore, in traveling toward the east of their
world, the Elves are moving contrary to the light, a movement that
almost immediately assumes metaphorical dimension. What Tolkien
is using here is something commonly called the widdershins impulse,
which in folk belief is traditionally considered to be negative, bringing
bad luck. The dictionary defines widdershins or withershins as “in the
opposite direction, in reverse, counterclockwise.” To “go widdershins”
is to go “in a direction opposite to the course of the sun.” The word
itself comes from Old High German widar, “against,” plus sinnes, the
genetive case of sin, “journey.” It is thus the direction of the journey
in opposition to the light, “the journey against.” The Indo-European
bases of widdershins are wi–, “apart, in half,” and sent–, “to head for,
go.” In its earliest postulated formation, then, the word contained some
concept of division, of the impulse toward separation. This is entirely
in harmony with Tolkien’s fictive history, for the development of the
Elves, both culturally and linguistically, has been in the direction of
division, fragmentation, and separation from the light. Their impulse to
go against the light will contrast with the inborn, instinctive impulse
of Men to go toward the light, even though they have never seen it.
The Elven impulse to move away from the light is manifest not
only in the physical eastward journey of the Noldor as a group, but in
their behavior as individuals, in their interactions and inter-minglings
among themselves and with others. At its most negative, this impulse
is illustrated in the character and actions of the half-Noldor, half-Sindar
Maeglin, who by his parentage is a mixture of light, half-light, and dark,
in which dark predominates. As such, he is a model of what may happen
when light goes toward its opposite. Maeglin is the only son of two ill-
matched people who themselves exhibit inexplicable impulses toward
the dark. Maeglin’s mother is Aredhel Ar-Feiniel, called the White
Lady of the Noldor.2 She is the sister of Turgon, ruler of the Noldorin
kingdom of Gondolin. Maeglin’s father is Eöl, a kinsman of Thingol and
thus nominally a Grey-elf with direct ties to the light. However, he is
known as the Dark Elf, both because of his temperament and because
of his tendency to seek the dark and dwell in it. He lives far to the east
in Middle-earth, deep within the forest of Nan Elmoth.
The union of these two disparate individuals is almost a cautionary
tale on the subject of light misdirected or gone astray. Not through her
 Light Out of Darkness 123

inclination, but as a result of her restlessness and stubbornness, Aredhel,

the White Lady, is drawn toward and becomes ensnared in the dark.
Wearying of her circumscribed life in guarded and hidden Gondolin,
she desires freedom to travel. Turgon gives his reluctant consent but
counsels her, if she must go, to go west. Willful and independent, she
instead turns south, looking for the sons of Fëanor. Coming to the
Sindarin kingdom of Doriath, Aredhel is turned back by the Girdle of
Melian, the invisible but powerful shield that surrounds the kingdom
of Thingol and Melian, for Thingol will admit no Noldo on account of
the Kinslaying. She is directed instead to go east around Doriath toward
the hill of Himring, where Celegorm and Curufin, two of Fëanor’s sons,
are believed to dwell. She becomes lost, “enmeshed in shadows,” and
after a time, “seeking for new paths and untrodden glades” (Silm. 132),
becomes enmeshed in Nan Elmoth.
The Dark Elf sees the White Lady, “a gleam of white in the dim land”
(Silm. 133), wandering among the trees and sets spells to draw her to
him. Under his enchantment, she arrives at his house in the depths of
the wood, where he welcomes her and makes her his wife. The nar-
rative notes obliquely that “it is not said” (133) that she is unwilling.
As the wife of Eöl, Aredhel shuns the sunlight but wanders with Eöl
under a sickle moon or under stars, images of semi-darkness. It is here
and in these circumstances that their son is born. Aredhel’s name for
him is Lómion, “Child of Twilight.” Eöl calls him Maeglin, “Sharp
Glance.” Aredhel’s name is the most obviously fitting, for Maeg­lin is
a light declining toward the dark. Physically, externally, he resembles
his mother’s people, the Noldor, “but in mood and mind he was the
son of his father” (134).
Maeglin’s function in the story is to be darkness hidden within light,
a darkness that eventually (albeit only in part) overcomes the light.
The circumstances are these; he is closer to his mother than his father,
and after years in the shadows, the two leave Nan Elmoth against the
will of Eöl and return to Gondolin, where Maeglin is welcomed as a
kinsman by Turgon. There he meets and falls in love with Turgon’s
daughter Idril, “Sparkling Brilliance.” While this is a clear attraction of
dark toward light, his love is perverse and twisted, for Idril is his first
cousin, too close in kinship to marry. Equally important, Idril mistrusts
him and does not return his love. Ultimately Maeglin betrays Gondolin
to Mor­goth, although only after being captured and tortured. As inner
darkness, he brings about the downfall of one of the most pow­er­ful and
124 Splintered Light

beautiful of the elven strongholds of Middle-earth. Child of the twilight,

he has brought darkness with him out of the east.
Maeglin’s example is the most negative, least hopeful outcome of
the elven impulse toward the east. In a different mode, an eastern
journey of the elven prince Finrod Felagund has the effect of moving,
albeit indirectly, toward the light. Finrod is the eldest son of Fëanor’s
half-brother Finarfin, whose mother was Indis, a Fair Elf of the Vanyar.
Finrod is one of the best and (in terms of the properties of light) one of
the brightest of the Noldor in Middle-earth. He is also the first of the
Noldor to encounter the Atani, the Second Children of Ilúvatar, a para-
digmatic meeting between Elves and Men. Hunting “east of [the river]
Sirion” (Silm. 140), Finrod wearies of the chase, and as he continues
far into the east he encounters a strange people wandering westward
over the mountains. When he questions them about their origins, they
can tell him very little, for, unlike Elves, Men have almost no memory
of their beginnings or their early history. “A darkness lies behind us,”
says their leader, Bëor, “and we have turned our backs upon it, and we
do not desire to return thither even in thought. Westwards our hearts
have been turned, and we believe that there we shall find Light” (141).
Without having known it, without any sure way to reach it, Men are
seeking the light. Drawn toward it by some instinct beyond knowledge
(Bëor’s statement that their hearts have been turned toward light is
revealing), they are in the process of bringing themselves out of dark-
ness. Unlike the Elves, they have not been summoned by some external
power but are led by some force within themselves. A statement such
as Bëor’s makes plain the contrast between Elves and Men and implies
that the importance of each in Tolkien’s world relates to the light,
positively or negatively. Their separate functions, however, go beyond
simple contrast, for the two kinds do not simply inhabit the same space;
they work with—and sometimes against—one another. They interact,
intermarry, and cross and re-cross one another’s paths and destinies.
As children of Ilúvatar, deriving directly from the godhead, they seem
to need one another and to be mutually instrumental in working out
his purpose.
The key lies in the underlying, light-associated nature of directional
movement. It can be seen most clearly at those points of intersection
where westward-moving, light-seeking men cross the path of eastward-
moving, light-declining Elves. The primary encounter is that between
Finrod and Bëor, and its outcome is important. Finrod befriends the Men
 Light Out of Darkness 125

he meets, singing them songs of the making of the world and the bliss
of Valinor, that light which all-unknowing is the light they seek. He
gives them a context for their existence. Beyond that, he acts as their
guide, for Bëor and his people ally themselves with Finrod and follow
him westward when he returns home from his hunting journey. He
directs them on the right path, reinforcing their westward impulse.
Another such encounter between Man and Elf occurs at the beginning
of the first of Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales, that “Of Tuor and his Coming
to Gon­dolin.” Amid the turmoil of the constant wars with Morgoth
that wrack Middle-earth, Tuor, of the race of men, sets out in search of
Turgon and the Hidden Kingdom of Gondolin. His journey is directed
(though he does not know this) by the Valar, in particular Ulmo, Lord
of the Waters, in order to bring about his union with Turgon’s daughter
Idril—the first union of Men and Elves. Tuor himself is not aware of
this purpose, but seems to be following blind impulse.
He travels westward, led toward a destination not yet revealed to
him, guided by this impulse that he does not understand. On the third
day of his journey he meets an unexpected check. The stream he has
been following as an omen ever since it sprang up at his feet flows
under a seemingly impassable rock wall. Thwarted and bitter at what
appears to be the failure of his omen, Tuor halts as darkness falls. At
dawn of the next day, he sees two Elves, Gelmir and Arminas, coming
toward him through the water, following the stream east through a
dark passage from the westward side of the rock wall. Tuor tells them
of his journey and his frustration at the stream, which has “gone into
darkness” (UT 21). In reply, Gelmir states Tolkien’s (and perhaps Eru’s)
theme, that “through darkness one may come to the light” (21). Here is
a literal illustration of the metaphoric and symbolic levels underlying
the interactive pattern of light and dark in Tolkien’s world. With the
primary light removed, the only way to the light is through darkness—a
darkness at once physical, mental, and spiritual.
Gelmir’s next words to Tuor reinforce this and suggest at least part
of Tolkien’s purpose in creating two races. “Through darkness you shall
come to the light. We will set your feet on the road, but we cannot
guide you far” (21). The change in verb from may to shall is notable,
intentional, and important. As a lover of old meaning, Tolkien was well
aware of the difference between the Old English verbs magan, “may,”
and sculan, “shall.” The first denotes ability; the second, unlike its
modern English equivalent, denotes external necessity, that which
126 Splintered Light

must happen, that which is fated. By whatever means they can, using
whatever help they come across, Tolkien’s Men are going to find the
light.
This encounter and the dialogue that accompanies it are a gloss on
the first encounter between Finrod and Bëor, and both together are as
explicit a statement as can be found in his fiction of Tolkien’s intended
use of the two races. Elves moving counter to the light meet Men mak-
ing their way toward it. Paths cross with beneficent results for the Men.
In both instances, the Elves know where they are going, while the Men
have only an impulse to guide them. Tuor’s passage toward the light will
take him through darkness, just as Bëor’s journey toward light began in
darkness. In both instances, Elves can set men on the right path, although
in the case of Tuor they cannot guide him far. Why this should be the
case, why Elves can point out the path but cannot act as guides, goes
to the heart of Tolkien’s vision. The way to the light must be followed
independently, with no other constant guide but the inner impulse.
By separating the impulse to seek the light from the tendency to turn
away from it (both typical of humankind in the real world), Tolkien is
able to use Elves and Men to place each action in sharp focus and develop
the possibilities inherent in each. For each is a powerful force and both
are to be seen as simultaneously at work in his Secondary World, just
as they are in the Primary one. In addition, by crossing and re-crossing
the paths of Elves and Men, Tolkien develops fully the interaction of
dark and light as necessary elements of the pattern potentiated in the
Music.
 Beyond the Music 127

15
Beyond the Music

. . . but to Men I will appoint a task and give a great gift.

—“The Book of Lost Tales”

The lines of force here described between West and East, light and dark,
Elves and Men are material evidence of the opposition and conflict set
up in the Music, yet these make clear the subtlest, most effective aspect
of Tolkien’s vision—that the Music is not the only structure shaping
this world. As Children of Ilúvatar, Elves and Men are described as
coming directly from the godhead. They are separate from the rest of
creation. The Ainur, for all else the intermediary agency between Eru
and the created world, have no hand in their coming and therefore do
not fully understand them or the part they are to play.
As both actuality and metaphor, the Music works wonderfully here
to realize the contending forces that activate and energize the world.
In those early moments of creation and rebellion, Ilúvatar propounds
to the Ainur three successive musical themes. The first is interrupted
by Melkor, who introduces “matters of his own imagining” (Silm. 16),
thus creating disharmony. The explicitly musical terms disharmony
and discord are thus metaphorically extended to nonmusical concepts
where they become expressive of the quarrels and contentions of hu-
man interaction. The second theme, begun anew by Ilúvatar, is also
in­ter­rupted by Melkor. His continuing efforts to assert his mastery
lead to the all-important third theme, in which Ilúvatar takes Melkor’s

127
128 Splintered Light

continuing discord and his efforts to impose his own ideas, and makes
them part of the Music.

For it seemed at first soft and sweet, a mere rippling of gentle sounds
in delicate melodies; but it could not be quenched, and it took to it-
self power and profundity. And it seemed at last that there were two
musics progressing at one time before the seat of Ilúvatar, and they
were utterly at variance. The one was deep and wide and beautiful, but
slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty
chiefly came. The other had now achieved a unity of its own; but it
was loud, and vain, and endlessly repeated; and it had little harmony,
but rather a clamorous unison as of many trumpets braying upon a
few notes. And it essayed to drown the other music by the violence
of its voice, but it seemed that its most triumphant notes were taken
by the other and woven into its own solemn pattern. (Silm. 16–17)

It is this third theme, blended with an immeasurable sorrow, that

brings with it the Children of Ilúvatar, for Tolkien is explicit that “the
Children of Ilúvatar were conceived by him alone; and they came with
the third theme” (Silm. 18). The preposition is crucial. The Children
come with, not (as might be expected) in the third theme, which is
not just the direct result of Melkor’s rebellion, but also Ilúvatar’s ac-
ceptance of it and decision to work with it. Nevertheless, for all their
directness of origin, Elves and Men will find their lives complicated and
profoundly affected by the Music, which accompanies their placement
in the world. After Melkor—and certainly to some degree because of
him—Elves and Men will live in a world of immeasurable sorrow as
part of a pattern that can take the most triumphant of the discordant
notes and weave them into the whole. Their lives come after the fall
but do not cause it and are not part of it. This is a notable and important
departure of Tolkien’s mythos from the Christian one with which it is
so often compared and associated.
Not content with the simple yet vividly expressive metaphor of the
Music, Tolkien has added a further complication. While Elves are bound
by the patterns of the Music—not necessarily within themselves but
in the external events of their lives—Men are not. Ilúvatar gives them
“a virtue to shape their life, amid the powers and chances of the world,
beyond the Music of the Ainur, which is as fate to all things else; and
of their operation everything should be, in form and deed, completed,
 Beyond the Music 129

and the world fulfilled unto the last and smallest” (Silm. 41–42). The
intent could not be clearer. Men can change the Music, which “is as fate
to all things else,” including Elves. Moreover, by the actions of Men,
the world shall be “fulfilled,” a potent word for which the dictionary
gives the primary definition “to bring into actuality.”
The interactions of Men and Elves, then, are to involve and embody
the interplay of free will and destiny. Tolkien clearly intended both to
be powerful albeit not always complementary forces in his world and
may well have envisioned each as the necessary function of the other.
For there can be no freedom in willing unless there is something from
which to be free. The destinies of Elves will affect the free choices of
Men, while the free choices of Men will have the power to alter the
destinies of Elves. Recall now the words of John Gardner regarding the
Boethian concept of free will and fate, that “musical harmony is the
first principle of cosmic balance, and the melody of individuals—the
expression of individual free will—is the standard figure for the play of
free will within the overall design of Providence.” Tolkien’s vision is
not as radical or as contradictory as it might appear at first, but has its
basis in good, solid medieval philosophy.
Tolkien is not here drawing a simple pattern of two paths intersecting.
His world, like the primary one, is more complex and more interesting
than that; it is more like a tapestry than a map. There are Elves such as
the Vanyar who find the light and never leave it. There are the Sindar
who choose the twilight, the between light, of Middle-earth. There are
half-Vanyar, half-Noldor Elves such as Fingolfin and his son Finrod, who
turn unwillingly from the light yet carry some glimmer of it always
with them. There are those Elves such as Fëanor and Thingol who
unknowingly turn toward the dark in vain pursuit of the light, never
aware of when or how they have gone wrong.
Men, too, are shown experiencing varying shades of dark and light.
Tuor passes through darkness into light; Beren goes from light into
dark and back out into light again, or—as Sam Gamgee describes it to
Frodo—“past the happiness and into grief and beyond it” (LOTR 696).
Húrin cries out “Aurë entuluva! Day shall come again!” as he fights
his losing battle against the forces of Morgoth (Silm. 195). The tragic
life of his son Túrin is a headlong rush into the darkness, hastened by
every effort he makes to find the light.
This may well be philosophy, but it is philosophy couched as fiction.
Except for the brief statement in The Silmarillion about Men’s freedom
130 Splintered Light

to go beyond the Music, there is no discussion of the pattern. Tolkien

does not explain his tapestry; he simply displays it. In fact, there is
evidence that he intentionally withheld the ultimate purpose of his
design. The original “hastily penciled and much emended” (Lost Tales
1:52) first draft of “the Music of the Ainur” reads: “‘ . . . but to Men I
will appoint a task and give a great gift.’ And he devised that they should
have free will and the power of fashioning and designing beyond the
original music of the Ainu, that by reason of their operations all things
shall in shape and deed be fulfilled, and the world that comes of the
music of the Ainu be completed unto the last and smallest” (Lost Tales
1:61). This statement of intent, so much more definite than the one
that appears in the published text, using words such as “appoint” and
“task,” as well as the explicit phrase “free will” (removed in the later
version) carries the strong suggestion that Ilúvatar (here called “Ilu,”)
has a specific purpose in mind for Men. They, the apparent lesser of
the two races in talent, beauty, and potential, will be the ones to work
their way through the chances and misfortunes of the world and bring
it to its ultimate fruition.
All the implications remain in the published version, but the words
have been deliberately made less explicit. Ilúvatar does not “appoint
a task” he simply gives a gift. Unlike a payment or an exchange, a gift
carries with it no obligation and has no strings attached. No special
assignment is laid out for Men as opposed to Elves. They are apparently
free to use Ilúvatar’s gift when and as they like. Moreover, there is no
way for them (or the reader) to know when they are acting beyond the
Music and when they are not. It is as if Tolkien intended his readers to
be as much in the dark about the relative powers of fate and free will in
his Secondary World as they are and always have been in the Primary
one.
 16
Light for Light

being immortal she shared in his mortality,

and being free received his chain
—“Of Beren and Lúthien”

The question, then, will be what happens to whom, and how, when the
paths of Men and Elves cross. Can the free will of Men alter the fate
of Elves? Does the fate of the Elf entangle the Man who intersects it?
Tol­kien gives few answers; he merely implies the questions. Both fate
and free will appear to be involved, for example, in the lives of Beren,
Lúthien, and Thingol—Mortal man, Elven princess, and Elven King.
Lúthien is the child of Thingol and Melian, he accounted one of the
Calaquendi and she a Maia of Valinor. Lúthien is in her own person
one of those manifestations of light that from time to time illuminate
the dimness of Middle-earth. Since she is the daughter of Melian, who
has lived in the light of the Trees, and Thingol, who though he turned
from it has seen that light at first hand, Lúthien’s light is inherent and
indwelling. If there were an aristocracy of light in Middle-earth—and
Tolkien hints it, though he is not explicit—Lúthien would certainly
be its crown princess, for she is of the “strain of the Ainur who were
with Ilúvatar before Ëa” (Silm. 56).
Nonetheless, she is light dimmed and diminished, as far removed
from its source in the Trees as she is physically removed from Valinor.

131
132 Splintered Light

Tolkien’s words describing her repeatedly evoke images of diminished

light. Her eyes are “grey as the starlit evening”; her hair “is dark as the
shadows of twilight”; her beauty is “as the light upon the leaves of trees
. . . as the stars above the mists of the world.” Beren first sees her “at a
time of evening under moonrise,” and again at “a time near dawn on the
eve of spring” (Silm. 165). All is subdued, shadowed, reflected, misted
over. The actual times at which he sees her are the between times, neither
one thing nor the other—evening, moonrise, dawn, on the eve of spring.
As might be expected, this concept of diminished light is manifest
in his invented language as that language reflects and expresses percep-
tions in his invented world. When Beren first sees Lúthien, he does not
know her name or who she is. Since she is singing, he calls her Tinúviel,
a Sindarin word meaning “daughter of twilight” and a poetic epithet
for the nightingale. The name fits Beren’s vision but must recall to the
reader Maeglin’s epithet, “Child of the Twilight.” The similarity is no
accident. Both names are to suggest aspects of diminished light. Maeglin
is the offspring of light seeking darkness and himself going further and
further into the dark even as he tried to embrace the light. Lúthien is
the last glimmer of the original light. She is in human form what the
Silmarils are as jewels—the embodiment of all the remaining light.
Like her mother, Melian, and like Yavanna, whom Melian served,
Lúthien has as one of her chief attributes the gift of song. Her namesake,
the nightingale, is a night bird, a singer of twilight, of lessened light.
In Tinúviel, Beren’s name for Lúthien, light and sound are once again
joined, but with an unmistakable diminution that descends from the
choirs of the Ainur to the song by which Yavanna created the Trees to
the twilight song of Lúthien Tinúviel. The elements from which the
epithet is built are worth examination. “The Etymologies” has entries
for the roots domo–, “faint, dim,” and tin–, “sparkle, emit slender
(silver, pale) beams,” and both roots include citations for the compound
tindóme, “starry twilight” or “starry dusk.” Similarly, the Appendix in
The Silmarillion traces the compound back to the nearly identical word
elements, tin–, “sparkle,” and do-me-–, “dusk.” As cited above, from
dome comes Quenya lómë and Sindarin dú, “dimness, dusk.” Combined
with lin–, a root meaning, “sing, make a musical sound,” lómë and dú
form Quenya lómelindë and Sindarin dúlin, literally “dusk-song” or
“dusk-singer.” From the compound tin-dómë, “starry twilight” come
Quenya tindómerel and Sindarin tinúviel. Both mean “nightingale.”
Transferred to Lúthien, the epithet links her with both light and
 Light for Light 133

dimness. It is a fitting by-name; for not only is she the literal daughter
of diminished light in the person of Thingol, she is a singer whose song
is instrumental in Beren’s recovery from Morgoth of a Silmaril, the last
splinter of the light of the Trees. Like her mother, Melian, Lúthien has
“in her face . . . a shining light” (Silm. 165), but the source of that light
is not named. We are not told, as we were with Melian, that it is the
light of Ilúvatar. Lúthien has never been to Valinor, never seen the light
of the Trees. She is grounded firmly in Middle-earth, which after all,
most needs light now in whatever form it appears.
The meeting of Beren and Lúthien is a deliberate echo of the meet-
ing of Thingol and Melian—song, dimmed light, nightingales, love at
first sight, and all. There is, however, one notable difference. Recall
that Thingol also first beheld Melian in a wood, “the starlit wood of
Nan Elmoth” (Silm. 55). Hearing the song of the lómelindi, the night-
ingales, he became enchanted (literally “en-songed”), and then beyond
the voices of the nightingales he heard the voice of Melian. Beren, too,
hears the song of Lúthien, like “the song of the lark that rises from the
gates of night and pours its voice among the dying stars, seeing the sun
beyond the walls of the world” (Silm. 165). The two fall in love at first
meeting, and it is just here that the difference between Thingol and
Beren becomes important, for unlike Thingol, who turns away from
the primary light to love it as reflected in the face of Melian, Beren’s
love for Lúthien leads him on a path towards the light. In flight from
Morgoth, the Dark Lord, Beren has stumbled into Doriath and there
found the light of Lúthien.
Both literally and metaphorically, the paths of Beren and Thingol
intersect, and while one of Tolkien’s purposes seems to be to show up
the differences between them, another may be to raise (but not to an-
swer) the question asked at the beginning of this chapter. The question
concerns not just Thingol, but Lúthien as well, for the narrative says at
one point that “as she looked on [Beren], doom fell upon her, and she
loved him.” Yet a few sentences later the narrative refers to “the fate
that was laid on him [Beren]; and in his fate Lúthien was caught, and
being immortal she shared in his mortality, and being free received his
chain” (Silm. 165–66). The juxtaposition of apparently contrary terms
such as doom and free and fate suggests that Tolkien is intentionally
mixing fate and free will, as if both are operant at the same time.
It is not a simple pattern of crossed paths, but a threeway intersection
involving Beren, Thingol, Lúthien, the light that Beren desires to have,
134 Splintered Light

the light that her father hopes to hold and withhold. In a mixture of
pride, possessiveness, and covetousness, Thingol demands as Lú­thien’s
bride-price a Silmaril from Morgoth’s Iron Crown. Actually intended
as a death trap from which he expects (and indeed hopes) this mortal
will not return, Thingol presents it as a test of Beren’s worthiness to be
given the hand of his daughter. It will be a greater test than he knows,
however, a test for himself as well as for Beren.
It is only on the thematic level that his actions appear unjustifiable;
on the level of plot, they are valid, backed by political and dynastic
necessity, and seem at first to support his character as one of those
who has seen the light. He is seeking to preserve both his kingdom and
his daughter’s heritage of Elven immortality. To see this clearly, we
must recall the situation in Middle-earth at the return of the Noldor.
Thingol’s kingdom of Doriath is hidden to protect it against the inva-
sions of Morgoth. So isolated, it has been an island of peace amid the
wars of Middle-earth. Although technically they are Moriquendi, his
people, the Grey-elves are described as the fairest and wisest and most
skillful of all the Elves of Middle-earth. The adjective fair recalls the
epithet of the Vanyar, the Fair Elves, and so lifts the Sindar well above
the other Elves of Middle-earth in the hierarchy of light. What is true
of his people is even more true of Thingol, described as “great among
the Eldar” and “not accounted among the Moriquendi, but with the
Elves of the Light, mighty upon Middle-earth” (Silm. 56).
The incursion of new peoples into Middle-earth is potentially det-
rimental to the security of his kingdom and the freedom of his people,
and to the extent that this is true, he is justified in trying to keep them
out. He gives the Noldor permission to dwell in the empty lands out-
side Doriath but will not allow them inside except as invited guests.
Thingol’s motive for this reflects Tolkien’s dictum, spoken in the voice
of Elrond in The Lord of the Rings, that “nothing is evil in the begin-
ning. Even Sauron was not so” (LOTR 261). And as a character he is
one of the clearest illustrations of the principle that evil begins always
with what appears to be good. His love for Melian led him to chose her
reflected light over the primary light of the Trees, and the dimmer light
and dimmer perception of Middle-earth over the brightness of Valinor.
Thingol’s actions, always motivated by apparent good, turn more and
more toward isolation and possessiveness. In political terms, his ter-
ritorial imperative is reasonable and justifiable, but it anticipates the
 Light for Light 135

greater, less reasonable possessiveness that he feels for Lúthien and that
he will come to feel for the Silmaril.
His next action is less politically sound and both literally and meta-
phorically darker. He bans from his realm not only the Noldor, but their
language as well. The language of the Noldor, who are Calaquendi,
Elves of the Light, is Quenya, the language spoken among the Elves in
Valinor. But after learning of the Kinslaying at Alqualondë in which
the Noldor slew many of the Teleri, his own people, Thingol forbids
Quenya to be spoken in his realm: “Never again in my ears shall be
heard the tongue of those who slew my kin in Alqualondë! Nor in all
my realm shall it be openly spoken, while my power endures. All the
Sindar shall hear my command that they shall neither speak with the
tongue of the Noldor nor answer to it” (Silm. 129).
This is the codification and implementation of the splintering process
already at work in the languages of Middle-earth. As the Sindar and
the returning Noldor meet and interact, the Noldor, whose language
is Quenya, quickly pick up the Grey-elven language, Sindarin, whereas
the Sindar are slower to learn Quenya. Again, metaphor and literality go
hand in hand. Fuller light and perception can comprehend the dimmer,
while the dimmer cannot encompass the greater. The inevitable result
is that the Noldor increasingly turn to Sindarin to communicate with
their Grey-elven kin. Their very facility betrays them, and they come
gradually to abandon the language of light for the softer language of
twilight. Quenya is kept as a language of lore, “Elven-latin,” but even-
tually, like Latin in the modern world, dies out as a living language. It
is known and read, but not spoken.
The linguistic process spurs a social and cultural one. “In many parts
of the land the Noldor and the Sindar became welded into one people,
and spoke the same [Sindarin] tongue” (Silm. 117). The assimilation
of the Noldor into the life of Middle-earth thus occurs in part through
language, and works subtly to alter them. If words express perception,
then by the same token they can alter it. In abandoning Quenya for
Sindarin, the Noldor exchange one vehicle of perception for another.
Increasingly distanced from the light, they become more in tune with
the character and the beauty of Middle-earth. The farther from Valinor—
the once literal but now metaphoric source of the light—the weaker
becomes the light itself, and the perception of it.
Having turned away from the light, Thingol pushes the abandonment
136 Splintered Light

of it still further, but his association of the language with the deeds of its
speakers is a potentially disastrous confusion of perceptions. He refuses
to distinguish between light itself and the uses to which it may be put.
In this respect, he becomes a kind of reversed image of Fëanor, who was
also unable to distinguish the light from its potential use and would
not break the Silmarils so their light could be used to revive the Trees.
Indeed, the two, Thingol and Fëanor, come more and more to mirror
one another from this point on. In following their own natures, both
become increasingly blind to the light, caught in the growing darkness
of their own perceptions.
Thingol’s prohibition against the speaking of Quenya is formative,
affecting all of Elven Middle-earth, as well as the Men who have begun
to share it with Elves. What has been de facto in practice has now by
decree been made de jure. The language of light has been legislated out
of use, “for the Sindar heard [Thingol’s] word, and thereafter throughout
Beleriand they refused the tongue of the Noldor, and shunned those
that spoke it aloud; but the Exiles took the Sindarin tongue in all their
daily uses” (Silm. 129).
In forbidding the use of Quenya, Thingol is for all practical purposes
forbidding light, for he is rejecting the opportunity to enhance the Sindar
spiritually through the infusion of greater brightness into their speech
and perceptions. In addition, he is creating a situation that will lead to
the further diminution and spiritual impoverishment of the Noldor.
Even worse for his own destiny, he is ranging himself against the light.
Where he once chose to turn away from the light, he now in a second
rejection, a second missed opportunity, turns light away from himself.
Thingol is narrowing his options.
The cumulative effect of these actions—each understandable, often
justifiable in itself—is to direct him further and further away from the
light and from a proper understanding of it, so that when he does gain
possession of light in the form of a Silmaril, he does not know how
to appreciate it nor how best to use it. Both of his most negative deci-
sions—forbidding free access to Doriath and prohibiting the speaking
of Quenya in his kingdom and by his people—work to further darken
a character whose tendency toward the dark is already manifest in the
very making of those decisions. Again, a comparison with Fëanor is
appropriate, for the same self-darkening behavior caught him in the
circular darkness of the Kinslaying and the theft and burning of the
White Ships. The diminution of light suggested by the alteration of
 Light for Light 137

Thingol’s name from Elwë to Elu and from Singollo to Thingol, indeed
the whole implication of the epithet “Greycloak,” deepens with each
decision he makes. Once taken, the path is difficult to abandon.
His next step down into the dark is his demand for a Silmaril as the
bride-price for Lúthien. The request comes from a compound of motives
and has complex effects, both negative and positive, that will reach far
beyond the initial action and bring with them both darkness and light.
The interactions of fate and free will are more tellingly presented here
than in any other episode of The Silmarillion. Thingol’s actions are
bound by the Music. Beren’s are not. Who then is free, and who bound
when their paths and actions intersect? Thingol’s response to Beren’s
declaration of love for Lúthien fixes Thingol’s own doom and that of his
kingdom. Yet paradoxically, it restores the light of at least one Silmaril
to a darkened world, and sets the stage for Eärendil’s later journey to
Valinor to plead for pardon for the Elves and the succour of both Elves
and Men from the sorrows of Middle-earth.
These actions are yet undreamed of when Thingol sets the price for
Lúthien. The task he demands of Beren—to bring him a Silmaril from
Morgoth’s Iron Crown—is the seemingly impossible quest typical of
medieval romance and fairy tale. A traditional motif, it is classified in
the Stith Thompson Motif Index of Folklore as “The Giant’s Daughter,”
in which a supernatural parent-figure tries to prevent the marriage of a
daughter by assigning tasks designed not to be achieved but to ensure
the death of the quester. Examples abound, from the catalogue of anoeth
or wonder-tasks in the tenth-century Arthurian fairy tale “Culhwch
and Olwen” from the Welsh Mabinogion to the bride-price set for the
heroes Ilmarinen and Lemmenkäinen in the Finnish Kalevala. Tolkien
knew both sources well, and his story owes its general pattern to their
inspiration.
In the context of his own work, however, the motif has multiple ef-
fects. Not only does it work materially for the success of the quester,
Beren (which is, of course, nearly always the outcome of the story),
but it also works spiritually and psychologically against the “giant,”
in this case Thingol. Since he has already promised Lúthien not to kill
Beren, the request for a Silmaril is intended to save face; it will accom-
plish Beren’s death and leave his own hands clean. In addition, it will
ensure that he does not lose Lúthien. He has no intention of giving up
his daughter to a short-lived mortal, but his possessiveness of her is
matched by the covetousness that makes him desire a Silmaril.
138 Splintered Light

On the face of it, what Thingol proposes seems to be a direct exchange

of one kind of light for another, the light of Lúthien for the light of a
Silmaril. Tolkien’s thesis, however, is that light is not to be possessed.
It is, after all, not so much a thing in itself as something to illuminate
other things. Light is meant to reveal, to make visible so that we may
see clearly and judge rightly. We may use it—indeed, we are meant to
use it—but we may not, cannot hold it. As we will see, this applies to
light in any form. Thus, Thingol’s possessiveness of Lúthien is wrongful,
just as his desire to possess a Silmaril is wrong. Most important, in a
very real sense, Lúthien’s light is not his to give. It is hers. And she has
already given herself to Beren, when “beyond his hope she returned to
him where he sat in darkness, and . . . laid her hand in his” (Silm. 166).
Light is its own possession, to shine where it likes.
For all his opportunities to perceive light, Thingol no longer has
the capacity to comprehend this. His perceptions and his motives are
darkened and twisted. With irony more bitter than he knows, he uses
the word jewel to refer to both the Silmaril and Lúthien, telling evi-
dence of how far he has fallen away from the light and how obscured
his own vision has become. To regard either form of light as ornament
or possession is to be blind to light’s real value and real worth. The
transaction he proposes to Beren—Lúthien for a Silmaril—is designed
to secure some form of light for himself no matter what the outcome
of the quest. Thingol is the pawn of his own desires. He covets the
one light yet cannot bring himself to relinquish the other. The parallel
with Fëanor, both in obsessive desire for the light and in lack of self-
knowledge, is clear and unmistakable.
 Beren and Thingol 139

17
Beren and Thingol

. . . fate to all things else . . .

—The Silmarillion

Beren’s path cuts across Thingol’s, and where they intersect the fates of
both are affected. Each is instrumental in the other’s destiny, and the
decisions and actions of both help to determine the future of the Silmaril
and of the two races of Elves and Men. Here again the interdependence
of fate and free will is crucial. In this instance the situation is more
complex than it was in the case of Fëanor, for this is one of the major
occasions on which the desires of Elves and Men run counter to each
other. Tolkien counterpoises the Music against the creator-bestowed
power of Men to go beyond the Music and have their choices affect
events. If Thingol’s fate is contained within the Music and Beren has
the freedom to shape his life beyond it, how do the two lives affect one
another? Is Thingol’s fate, already determined, merely triggered by his
meeting with Beren? Is Beren’s quest for the Silmaril determined by
Thingol’s challenge? By his love for Lúthien, which brings about the
whole situation? How much has the Music affected their meeting and
their love for one another?
The train of events set in motion by their meeting will include the
death of the Elf Finrod, the recovery of a Silmaril, the decline and death of
Thingol himself, the death and transfiguration of Beren and Lúthien, the

139
140 Splintered Light

voyage of Eärendil, and the defeat of Morgoth. Whatever the outcome, it

would seem that in the immediate situation, as in the decision of Fëanor,
Tolkien’s emphasis is on motive. Free will appears to be most powerful
and most perceptible in its inner effects rather than in the action and
interaction of externally observable events. It is the fate of a Silmaril to
be retrieved from Morgoth’s Iron Crown. Motivated by possessiveness and
greed, Thingol initiates the action by assigning the task to Beren. Beren
accepts the challenge because of his love and desire for Lúthien. Both
their courses of action must be judged as much for the reasons behind
them as for their external effects.
Ruled by the Music, Thingol has no control over events but does have
the power to respond to them well or badly. His death, for example, is
determined; but how he comes to die—for a good purpose or an evil
one, to a good end or a bad one—is within his power to control. His
actions, therefore, must be viewed and valued in the context of his mo-
tives as well as of their impact on the external world. And therein lies
the paradox, for his motives are mixed and the outcome of his actions
is both bad and good. Deaths and disasters follow in the wake of his
obsession with the Silmaril, his own death not the least. Yet through
him that Silmaril is recovered to shine upon Middle-earth, to be a sign
of hope to Elves and Men. Beren and Lúthien come together, and in
their child, Dior, they begin the half-elven race that will combine all
that is best of Elves and Men.
Beren’s motives, which contribute as much to this course of events,
are markedly different from Thingol’s. They are straightforward, not
devious. They are inspired by true love, not possessiveness and greed. It
is significant that Beren’s quest is aided and abetted by Lúthien, whose
choices as an Elf coincide with and further his choices as a Man. In the
shifting and ambiguous interactions of fate and free will as played out
in the lives of Elves and Men, Lúthien has a part both real and symbolic.
Like the Silmaril, she embodies what is left of the light. In loving her,
Beren is manifesting what must surely be understood at this point in
the narrative as the right way to seek and find the light—through hu-
man love leading at its highest to love of the divine. Where Thingol
allowed himself to be turned from the light of the Trees to reflected light
in the face of Melian, in this less visibly holy time, Beren finds light
in Lúthien that leads him toward the true light. He is not consciously
seeking this light, for Men have never experienced it. Yet he follows
the upward path to which, inadvertently echoing the actions of Gelmir
 Beren and Thingol 141

and Arminas with Tuor, and of Finrod with Bëor, Thingol has directed
him.
In contrast, Thingol’s own path continues its downward course, and
the angle of decline becomes progressively sharper, although the steep-
ening is scarcely perceptible at first. Because Thingol has been great,
because he has seen the light of the Trees, it takes a long time for the
light inherent in his name to be so dimmed that it goes out altogether.
Even after completion of the quest for the Silmaril, his greatness does
much to counterbalance his fall into darkness. His consent to Lúthien’s
marriage with Beren and his compassion for the family of Húrin, perhaps
the only ray of light in that tragic story, are evidence of his largeness of
mind and spirit.
Nonetheless, as time goes on, both Thingol’s mind and his spirit be-
come ever darker. Here again is paradox, for the agent of the darkening
is the Silmaril, although the cause is within Thingol. The beauty of the
jewel quickens the greed already dwelling within him. In succumbing
to desire to possess the jewel, and thus the light, Thingol, like Fëanor
before him, shows his inability to understand the true nature and
purpose of light. As the years pass, he becomes increasingly obsessed
with the Silmaril. He is “bound to it, and he liked not to let it rest even
behind the doors of his inmost treasury, and he was minded now to
bear it with him always, waking and sleeping” (Silm. 232). As it was
with Fëanor, the lesson is clear: the possessor becomes the possessed;
the holder of the jewel is held by it.
The likeness between the Silmarils and the One Ring of Sauron is
striking, at least in their effects. Comparison between the two is in-
evitable. Given that chronologically the Silmarils were Tolkien’s first
creation and must to some extent have affected his treatment of the
Ring, the likenesses between the two serve to point up the differences,
differences that are essential to Tolkien’s intention in creating each.
The Silmarils and the Ring are both artifacts beautiful in themselves,
and both are intrinsically desirable. The effect of each is intensified by
proximity and possession and is proportional to the nature and inherent
power of the holder. But there the likeness ends.
The Ring is inherently evil, made by evil for evil purpose. It works on
the inner darkness of the possessor with one consistent effect—it can
only corrupt. It is the embodiment of Lord Acton’s dictum that “power
tends to corrupt; and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Although
the Ring appears to confer power on its possessor, the reality is that it
142 Splintered Light

gains power over that person. Power, potency, potentia—the Ring is all
potential for evil, bringing out that potential in the wearer as it brings
out all the greed and covetousness inherent in human nature.
The Silmaril is light pure and simple, in the literal as well as the
rhetorical senses of those words. It is a holy jewel, a light shining in
darkness. It exerts no power over the wearer, but brings out whatever
qualities are there to begin with. Where the Ring binds—“One Ring to
bring them all and in the darkness bind them”—the Silmarils illuminate.
They show up darkness if it is there, but they also call forth light. No
bearer can escape the evil power of the Ring, but those who touch a
Silmaril will be affected according to their motives—good or evil—for
having it.
Thus the Silmaril reveals the clear difference between Beren and
Thingol in respect of its possession. Beren’s quest for the jewel is in its
motive and nature unselfish; he does not desire to possess it, but by it
to attain another light, that of Lúthien. The Silmaril is the object of the
quest, but Lúthien is the subject. Since he does not want the Silmaril,
but light as manifest in Lúthien, Beren can touch and hold the jewel
without taking harm. Those with darker motives who try to take it
wrongfully, such as Morgoth, the wolf Carcharoth, and the sons of
Fëanor, will be scorched by its light. The image of Beren’s hand holding
the Silmaril and illuminated by it from within is the emblem of this
story. Beren can grasp the jewel precisely because he is not grasping in
the metaphorical sense, because he does not want it.1
Beren’s hand holding the Silmaril becomes “as a shining lamp,” a
vehicle for transmitting light. When that hand is bitten off by the wolf
Carcharoth, who craves the Silmaril, the power of the jewel in his in-
nards sends him mad with pain. When he is killed and his body ripped
open, his belly is seen to be “consumed as with a fire,” but Beren’s hand
holding the Silmaril is still whole and“ incorrupt” (Silm. 186). The
word incorrupt has here a double force. Beren’s hand has not decayed;
his mortal flesh is not corrupted even though it has been bitten off
and devoured by the wolf. Beyond this, his hand is, as it were, morally
incorruptible; it is a force for good, neither perverted nor brought low.
It is otherwise with Thingol. His desire for the Silmaril is selfish, as
Fëanor’s grew to be. He wants it for himself alone, does not want to share
it, and so closely identifies with it that he must keep it with him at all
times. Similarly, Fëanor so identified with the jewels he made that he
forgot that the light within them was not his, not made by him, but only
 Beren and Thingol 143

housed. In describing Thingol as bound to the Silmaril, Tolkien uses

the same word he uses to describe the Ring’s purpose—“One Ring to
bind.” The difference lies in the two forms of the verb; one is active, the
other passive. The Ring binds; it acts on anyone who bears it.2 Thingol
becomes bound not by the jewel but by his own greed for it.
The Ring activates whatever darkness is latent in the wearer. The
cardinal example of this is Frodo, whose motive in taking the Ring
is unselfish to the point of self-sacrifice. He does not want the Ring;
indeed, on two occasions he tries to give it away. Nevertheless, he
eventually, after a long struggle, succumbs to its power. The Silmaril
is altogether different, for its effect is wholly determined by the motive
and character of the possessor in free response to the character of the
jewel. The Silmaril is a test, bringing out whatever qualities of good or
evil, light or dark, may be present in whoever touches it. Response to
it is an index of spiritual potential and receptivity to light.
The difference between Beren and Thingol, then, is exemplified in
their differing attitudes toward the Silmaril. Beren is truly drawn to the
light, whereas Thingol has shown a tendency to turn away, to settle for
less, from his first appearance in the history. Beginning as a Calaquendi,
an Elf of Light, he moves increasingly toward the dark. He abandons
the light of the Trees for the reflected light of Melian; he bans Quenya
in favor of Sindarin; he trades Lúthien for a Silmaril. Over the years his
brightness diminishes, dims, and shades into a darkness paradoxically
intensified by his possession of a Silmaril and contrasted with its light.
The glimmering hope mixed with Tolkien’s predominantly dark vi-
sion of human life on earth is manifest in his accounts of the varying
deaths of Beren, Lúthien, and Thingol. Two of these deaths, those of
Beren and Lúthien, carry a message of qualified hope, while Thingol’s
death has no redeeming brightness. Each death is related to the other
two, and each death is the fitting culmination, for the character, of all
that has gone before, the last, most typical act. The deaths of Beren and
Lúthien run counter to the pattern of death decreed for the race of each.
Beren dies as the result of wounds gotten defending Thingol from the
attack of the wolf Carcharoth. Nevertheless, his spirit does not leave
the world, but waits in the halls of Mandos for Lúthien. Even though
she is Elven and deathless, without Beren, Lúthien chooses to die. Both,
however, are given a qualified and limited resurrection. They are al-
lowed to return to Middle-earth, there to live as mortals, both subject
to a second death.
144 Splintered Light

In thus joining her life to the lives and deaths of Men, Lúthien goes
counter to the path of her Elven race. Through darkness and death,
both she and Beren come to the light, and in their union a new race is
born—the half-elven, who can choose the destiny of either race. With
them comes new hope for both races. Tolkien has called his story of
Beren and Lúthien the Lay of Leithian, “Release from Bondage,” and
I suggest that the key to his intended meaning is in the last word.3
Through death, Men can let go of life; they be released from bondage to
the world. With the exceptions of Fëanor’s mother Míriel, who chooses
to die after his birth, and of Lúthien, who chooses to share the fate of
Beren, Elves, in their deathlessness, their bondage to life, cannot let go.
The half-elven have the freedom to choose either fate. They can keep
the immortality of the Elves, as does Elrond of The Lord of the Rings,
or choose the mortality of Men, as does Elrond’s daughter, Arwen.
Release from bondage to the circles of the world comes not with im-
mortality but with death, the Gift of Ilúvatar to Men. But it is release
with no promise. Tolkien’s text gives no guarantees; what’s to come is
still unsure. Indeed, Tolkien explicitly stated that he was concerned
with death as belonging to the nature of humanity, and wanted to il-
lustrate the necessity of accepting “hope without guarantees” (Letters
237). There is in his story no assurance of any future beyond death.
The unknown must be accepted in faith. This is exactly the point. The
ability to let go, to trust, is the ability to rely on faith. To cling to the
known, the tangible—even if it is a Silmaril—is to be bound. Tolkien’s
deathless Elves are in his world exemplars of bondage to unending life.
Not unlike Swift’s Struldbrugs,4 although more attractive, they are a
powerful lesson in the folly of not letting go.
Thingol exemplifies this folly. He will not leave Middle-earth, he
will not (at first) let go of Lúthien, he will not relinquish the Silmaril,
and this final inability to let go is the cause of his death. When he com-
missions the Dwarves to make their great necklace, Nauglamiír, into
a setting for the Silmaril, he brings about a work of unique beauty that
unites the greatest works of Elves and Dwarves. Yet in doing so, he also
sets up a fateful clash between their two races, between his greed and
theirs. The Dwarves want to keep their necklace, and like Thingol,
they desire the Silmaril. When he denies them both, they kill him.
Thingol has traveled far—from the light of the Trees to the dark of
the underground caves where the Dwarves have their smithies. His path
has been a long one in terms both of time and of his spiritual regres-
 Beren and Thingol 145

sion. He dies in the dark with his last sight that of the Silmaril, the last
of the light but a light no longer accessible to him because of his very
possession of it. The darkness of his death works on several levels. He
is literally in the dark, deep in the underground caves of Menegroth.
Metaphorically, his mind and perception have been darkened so that
he can no longer see himself clearly. And spiritually, he has withdrawn
from the light, has gone against it, misunderstood it, and no longer sees
by it or knows how to live within it.
The paradox of the complex relationship between Elves and Men
resides in the fact that Thingol, just as much as Finrod or Lúthien or
Gelmir and Arminas, is instrumental in helping Men toward the light.
Paralleling in his actions the words of Gelmir and Arminas to Tuor,
he has helped to set Beren’s feet on the road, although he is not able
to guide him far. In their path toward the light Beren and Lúthien go
through several kinds of darkness. They are separated from one another;
they enter the dark strongholds of Sauron and Morgoth and do battle
with their dark minds; they put on darkness in the guises of werewolf
and vampire bat as they seek the Silmaril. All these darknesses are part
of their path because of the dark action of Thingol’s mind in devising
the quest. It could be said with some truth that the greatest darkness
through which they pass is Thingol’s own darkness, a darkness into
which he falls, out of which they emerge, though not unscathed. The
actions of all three are linked, so entangled that they cannot be sepa-
rated. So, too, are the results of those actions, the apparent good and the
apparent evil so mixed that only at the end of the story, at the unwritten
end of Tolkien’s world, will the proper relationship of each to each be
made clear.
What is clear now, even in this early stage of the history, is that Elves
need Men just as much as Men need Elves. Elves, going toward dark­ness,
will set Men’s feet on the path to the light. With that accomplished,
Men—less visibly great than Elves but with immeasurably greater
potential, may be able to turn back and assist Elves into the light. The
blending of the best of both races in the half-elven is itself a light in
the darkness, for the half-elven are a deliberate crossing of strains, a
hybridization that was to become a special aspect of Tolkien’s world.
He said of them, “The entering into Men of the Elven-strain is indeed
represented as part of a Divine Plan for the ennoblement of the Human
Race, from the beginning destined to replace the Elves” (Letters 194). It
may be that this indwelling light, inherent in the descendants of Elves
146 Splintered Light

who have seen the light and the descendants of men who are strug-
gling blindly toward it, is at last to replace the tangible, external light
that was present in the beginning and that lives yet in the Silmarils.
In Tolkien’s world, as in our own, it is only through darkness that one
may come to the light.
 The Smallest Fragment 147

18
The Smallest Fragment

. . . a study of a hobbit broken by a burden of fear and horror—

broken down, and in the end made into something quite different.
—Tolkien in a letter to High Brogan

Where in this complex and continuing history does The Lord of the Rings
fit? It did not begin as part of it but as “the new Hobbit” in response to
the publisher’s request for a sequel to that popular children’s book—and
began only after the publisher had turned down the Sil­ma­ril­lion as un-
publishable. This notwithstanding, the new Hobbit rapidly became drawn
into the older material—older both within and without the mythology
both as stories of the Elder Days and in respect to the chronology of its
composition. Only the first chapter of The Lord of the Rings echoes the
tone of The Hobbit, and even that evermore faintly as the chapter goes
on. By the second chapter, “The Shadow of the Past,” the story is firmly
ensconced within the older myth and carries it forward.1 The chapter title
itself reintroduces the light-dark motif and alerts the reader that what
has gone before will darken and affect what is to come.
The Lord of the Rings is not a children’s book in the sense that The
Hobbit is a children’s book (though even The Hobbit deals with matters
far beyond the scope of most children’s books, such as war, the politics
of national alliances, and the moral and psychological effects of greed).
It is not primarily directed at children, nor is it designed primarily to
interest them. But it is certainly literature for children in the sense

147
148 Splintered Light

that the Bible is literature for children, or Norse mythology, or Greek

mythology, or the Silmarillion—if by that is meant simply-told stories
of gods and heroes, of the human community struggling to order ex-
istence amid the shifting ebbs and surges of forces beyond its control
and understanding. What gives The Lord of the Rings its immediacy,
its poignancy, and its enduring power to move the reader, is Tolkien’s
combination of the high and far-off times, a great and god-imbued past,
with the ordinary, down-to-earth reality of the little man.
The fact that hobbits were not part of Tolkien’s original conception
makes no matter. That they were born of a phrase idly scribbled across
an exam paper—“in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”—and that
they found their way into the mythology almost by accident is irrelevant
to their function within the story and their value to it. If Tolkien’s ver-
sion of the Fall is a story of humanity’s separation from the Light, and
if that separation continues and proliferates through fragmentation of
light, language, and peoples, then the final working out of the principle
will be within the smallest fragments, and appropriately, within the
smallest people.
The story of the Silmarils proper ends with the disposition of the
three jewels, one each in earth, sea, and air. Only the last remains vis-
ible, the last splinter of unsullied light that becomes the evening and
morning star—Eärendil. This light is the last fragment now set beyond
the reach of human hands and the possessiveness of human nature. It
is the last beacon of hope, remote but apparent, yet the exploration of
humankind’s relationship to light continues. Integral to that explora-
tion is the action through the years of people separated from the light
and often from one another, struggling blindly to do right and make the
right choices in a darkened, confused, and uncertain world. Nowhere
in his continuing history of great deeds and great heroes does Tolkien
touch the heart more surely or more deeply than with the combination
in The Lord of the Rings of a great task and a little man.
However randomly hobbits arose in Tolkien’s imagination, they
became by the last chapters of The Lord of the Rings a necessary part
of the mythology. Their stature as undersized humans makes them
the ideal embodiment of the common man and suggests a new kind of
sep­aration to add to light and language—separation by physical type.
Hobbits are a splinter folk, clearly of the same stock as full-sized hu-
mans but just as clearly half their size, therefore expressing a distinc-
tion within a whole concept. These unshod little people are closer to
 The Smallest Fragment 149

the earth than their taller relatives, more physically in touch with it
and more completely in tune with it. Gaffer Gamgee, whose specialty
is roots, Farmer Maggott, with “earth under his old feet, and clay on
his fingers (LOTR 130),” Sam with his earthy practicality and shrewd
common sense—these are the stuff of the earth, its salt and savor.
Unexalted, smaller-than-life, hobbits do their jobs, one of which is,
as Elrond says, to move the wheels of the world while the eyes of the
great are elsewhere (LOTR 262).
It is through the hobbits more than any other of Tolkien’s peoples
that readers can see themselves—their pleasures, sorrows, weaknesses,
and strengths. Out of all Middle-earth, it is hobbits who are best fitted
to embody Tolkien’s feeling about his fellow creatures and the good and
bad that happens to them. Predictably, in his fallen world much of what
happens to them is bad. As the process of fragmentation and diminution
continues its course it leads inevitably to yet further separation—to the
separation of the individual from society, and at last to what may be the
final separation of all, that of the individual from himself. Viewed in the
context of the Silmarillion, what happens in Frodo’s story of separation
and dissolution is a logical part of the progression. Profoundly tragic
in the context of The Lord of the Rings, it is even more tragic as the
continuation of the Silmarillion. Nevertheless, Frodo’s fragmentation,
his alienation from society and from self anticipate, however faintly,
the final reunion. The arc can only curve so far from the starting-point
before it rounds on itself and begins the homeward journey. Tolkien
takes Frodo to the furthest reach of the arc and leaves him, so there is
nowhere to go but back.
The Lord of the Rings is a complex and multilayered narrative, en-
compassing many themes and a full chessboard of actions. But in the
final analysis it is the story of Frodo, and this gives the book its deep
humanity. The separation that Frodo undergoes—from his home, his
society, and himself—is all too recognizable as the common experience
of modern humanity. In Frodo we see ourselves, through his agon we
experience our own. Moreover, in light of the larger mythology we can
understand that this is no discrete phenomenon but part of a continuum,
one that is only complete within that context.
As Frodo’s story unfolds, the reader sees two things happening to him,
both corollary to, but neither a function of his adventures. First: as the
narrative progresses, Frodo gradually comes apart, his nature splitting
into component light and dark. We see this process externally embodied
150 Splintered Light

in his relationship with Gollum, and even more vividly in Gollum’s

relationship with himself. Second: Frodo fades, entering increasingly
into the other-world of the Ring, where the bright light of day dims to
grey and only the shadows are clear and sharp. Both the splitting and the
fading are recapitulations of the equivalent processes going on in light
and language. Frodo is the microcosm, the smallest particle wherein
the whole drama of splintering and diminution will be re-enacted. As
such, he implies the whole, as a grain of sand implies the desert, or a
mote of dust the round earth.
The story of The Lord of the Rings is a journey, both literally and
metaphorically. Moreover, in each case the direction has a meaning
beyond the specifically contextual. The pattern of movement that
began with the Exile of the Noldor, that great Elven sweep out of the
light, now begins to turn back on itself. Those of the Noldor still left
in Middle-earth after the disastrous wars with Morgoth are returning to
Valinor. They are Calaquendi, and have seen the light, and even though
that light is gone, Valinor—Aman—is still a holy place. Frodo’s doom
is to go against this tide and against the westward impulse of Men,
to go East into the dark. By now, little evidence of true light remains
in Middle-earth, and what there is seems distant from the affairs of
humanity. Sun and moon rise and set; stars shine far away against the
night sky. The stars, the most brilliant of which is Eärendil with the
Silmaril on his brow, are all that is left of the light of the Trees.
Sauron, the Dark Lord, rules with increasing scope and power, and
with the departing of the last Elves of the Light, his darkness is spread-
ing over the world. Some islands of light remain—Rivendell, Lórien,
even to some degree the Shire—but they are surrounded by gathering
darkness. No great perception is needed to see in this picture the em-
bodiment of the little circle of light Tolkien described in his Beowulf
essay, that light from which one must venture forth to battle with the
hostile world and the offspring of the dark. In the essay, as in his fictive
world, Tolkien recognizes two kinds of darkness—internal and exter-
nal. Exemplified in the essay by Grendel and the dragon respectively,
both kinds appear in The Lord of the Rings, less explicitly delineated
but nonetheless recognizable externally in the forces of Sauron and
represented internally by the corrupt and wretched figure of Gollum.
And of course there is the Ring, that external-internal darkness that
has entered the Shire and is working silently within the circle of light,
working on the darkness that sleeps in all human nature. In accepting
 The Smallest Fragment 151

the Ring and volunteering to carry it to the Cracks of Doom, Frodo takes
on all that it embodies in its power to awaken that sleeping darkness.
Journeying eastward into Mordor, Frodo goes widdershins, against the
light for the light’s sake.
His journey into the dark takes him away from everything he holds
dear and separates him even from himself. For if Frodo’s external journey
is eastward into Mordor, his inner journey is into his own darkness,
where he must meet and acknowledge his unadmitted self, that Grendel-
like prowler in the wilderness of the psyche that Jung calls the Shadow.
In Frodo’s case, the Shadow is personified in Gollum, who embodies
with horrible and pitiable clarity the darkness that the Ring evokes.
Gollum, who must be counted one of the most memorable figures in
twentieth-century fiction, is a brilliantly realized character, a double
self of “I” and “we,” of Sméagol and Gollum, of Slinker and Stinker.
He is Frodo turned inside out. He is the emblem of Frodo’s growing
division from himself, a division that we do not see in its entirety until
the final moment at the Cracks of Doom.
Where Frodo goes against the light because he has to, Gollum turns
away from the light because he wants to. Perhaps the ultimate refine-
ment of Tolkien’s concern with interactive fate and free will is embodied
in these two, for one willingly accepts his fate while the other is fated
to follow his will. Two brief statements in the text, widely separated in
time and easily overlooked in the larger contexts in which they occur,
make this clear. One is the declaration made by Frodo on Amon Hen
when, having just found the strength to take off the Ring and thus nar-
rowly escape the Eye of Sauron, “he spoke aloud to himself: ‘I will do
now what I must,’ he said” (LOTR 392). Frodo freely accepts what is
destined to happen. The other statement, made not by but about Gol-
lum, comes earlier in the narrative, at the Council of Elrond. Learning
from Legolas that Gollum has escaped from Mirkwood, Gandalf com-
ments philosophically that, “he must do what he will” (249). Gollum
is destined to be driven by his own desires. The conjunction in both
statements of will and must is not contradiction but paradox deliberately
introduced to both mirror and contrast the two characters.
Both have left the light to go into the dark, Frodo reluctantly, Gol-
lum by free choice. Light of any kind is hateful and actually painful to
Gol­lum. He avoids both daylight and moonshine. He is nocturnal, a
creature of night and nightmare, an image out of the unconscious forced
into the light of day to be confronted and recognized. And Frodo, who at
152 Splintered Light

first rejected indignantly the notion that Gollum could be in any way
connected with hobbits, comes at last by way of his own journey into
darkness to see Gollum clearly, to recognize the Gollum in himself,
and to pity the external creature. The two are one another’s Self and
Other, but it is the mark of Frodo’s greater humanity that only he can
recognize and acknowledge this.
In a final, shattering reversal, Frodo’s defeat in Mordor, his utter sur-
render to the Ring, is transformed into victory by Gollum, who here if
ever must do what he most wants to do. He repossesses the Ring and
falls into the Cracks of Doom. This inadvertent victory, however, does
not lessen the bleakness of Frodo’s defeat. Here is no eucatastrophe,
no consolation giving a glimpse of joy. What happens to Frodo is kata­
strophe, the downward turn in the action, when the hero is overcome.
Not the essay “On Fairy-stories,” but the essay on Beowulf provides
the tone and mood for this part of the story. It needs but little to see in
the climactic moment at the Cracks of Doom Tolkien’s own version of
the Germanic victory of the monsters. Tolkien’s Middle-earth becomes
eormungrund, the great earth ringed with garsecg, the shoreless sea,
and Frodo stands with all those heroes who with courage as their stay
went forward to that battle with the offspring of the dark that ends for
all in defeat.
The outcome of the battle is defeat—for Frodo as for Beowulf—but
the nature of the battle and the terms of the defeat are Tolkien’s own
and peculiarly the product of his age. The Lord of the Rings could only
have been written in the twentieth century and, more important, for
the twentieth century. The work may draw on ancient myths for its
truth, but it speaks directly to the modern age, an age acutely concerned
with the working of its own unconscious, a society familiar with psy-
chology, well acquainted with the concepts and terminology of Freud
and Jung. For the present age, the journey, the battle, and the monster
are both within and without. The outcome of the struggle is a blend of
Germanic heroism, Jungian psychology, and Judeo-Christian theology.
Frodo’s decision to claim the Ring is his final defeat by the monster, his
deepest meeting with himself, and, as an act of free will, a recapitulation
of the Fall of Adam. The whole episode is Tolkien’s extended gloss on
the nature of the Fall.
For the Fall is separation—in Christianity separation from God, in
Tolkien’s fictive world separation from the light, in modern parlance
from wholeness of self. In all these senses, Frodo is more than emblem-
 The Smallest Fragment 153

atic of fallen humanity, he is archetypal. His encounter with Gollum,

his shadow, his Grendel, is the outward manifestation of the growing
division of self within him. His very destination, the Cracks of Doom,
carries in its name the concept of crack-up, of coming apart, and embod-
ies in its volcanic nature his inner turmoil. Without overt psychologizing,
Tolkien shows in a series of vivid scenes Frodo’s continuing struggle
against darkness and division of self.
Two scenes in particular stand out sharply, pictured moments that
mark the boundaries of Frodo’s psychological and spiritual journey.
The first is the scene at Amon Hen already referred to, in the moment
when, caught between the contending wills of Sauron and Gandalf,
he takes off the Ring. The second is the scene at the Cracks of Doom
when he puts it on. Dramatically, psychologically, and thematically,
the first scene is preparation for the second: “The two powers strove in
him. For a moment, perfectly balanced between their piercing points,
he writhed, tormented. Suddenly he was aware of himself again. Frodo,
neither the Voice nor the Eye; free to choose and with one remaining
instant in which to do so. He took the Ring off his finger” (LOTR 392).
A great deal is going on here. The first thing to notice is the preposition.
The powers strive in him, not over him or about him. He is the battlefield,
and while the powers are clearly external forces, it seems clear that they
are also aspects of his own nature. Externally they are Sauron, the Dark
Lord, and (as we later learn) Gandalf, no longer the Grey but the White.
Within Frodo, however, they are simply the light and dark of his own
nature. Thus pinioned between light and dark both outside and inside,
Frodo is perfectly balanced and tormented by the equal stress exerted by
positive and negative forces. He is neither the one nor the other, nor yet
both. He is not Frodo, but the force field of op­posing powers. His release
comes when he is aware of himself again, aware as an independent being
with a will of his own. He is free to choose.
At the Cracks of Doom it is otherwise. There, weakened by his long
journey and his wounds, finally broken under the strain of his burden,
Frodo succumbs to the force of darkness. Working on the growing dark-
ness within him, the Ring has eroded his will so that he is no longer,
as he was on Amon Hen, himself. He is separated from his true being
and has become what Gollum so dreadfully embodies. Frodo’s words as
he sets the Ring on his finger and claims it are filled with awful irony:
“I do not choose now to do what I came to do,” and “I will not do this
deed” (LOTR 924). His use of choose and will makes it clear that he
154 Splintered Light

believes he is acting freely. But the negative, the repeated not is telling
evidence that his will has been perverted and his choice preempted.
The moment is shocking and powerful. The mind wants to reject it.
It is unthinkable that the best hobbit of them all, after his long struggle,
his sacrifice, and the humility and mercy he has shown, should go bad.
It is the triumph of evil. Having engineered such shock, Tolkien with
consummate timing shifts the spotlight to Gollum, shows his reaction
to Frodo’s action—more overwhelming that the reader’s—and brings
the scene to a close with the final triumph of evil undoing itself.
And yet, what has happened has happened. It was not necessarily
destined, not necessarily foresung in the Music, and yet the concatena-
tion of events is such that nothing else could have happened. The ring
is governed by fate, its very creation foresung in the Music. Gollum
and Frodo, each as a hobbit of the race of Men, of humankind, have
the power to act beyond the Music and to have their actions shape
events. In a letter, Tolkien described the destruction of the Ring and
the salvation of Frodo as “grace,” the unforeseeable result of free ac-
tions by Sam, Frodo, and Gollum. [Gollum] “did rob and injure [Frodo]
in the end—but by a ‘grace,’ that last betrayal was at a precise juncture
when the final evil deed was the most beneficial thing anyone cd. have
done for Frodo!” (Letters 234). Fate and free will have come together to
produce the inevitable, unpredictable, and necessary end.
 19
Filled with Clear Light

I have lost myself, and I know not the way, but let me be gone!
—“The Sea-bell”

Nevertheless, nothing is ever ended—in this world. Standing at the

brink, Sam sees Frodo, rid of the Ring, robbed of his finger, once again
“the dear master of the sweet days in the Shire” (LOTR 926). This is
wishful thinking. The view is through Sam’s eyes and Sam is blinded
by love and hope. Frodo is not what he was. He is not the same, nor
will he ever be. He has failed in his mission. He is broken and maimed,
diminished by more than the loss of his finger, or even the loss of the
Ring. He has lost the self he once was. He offered himself for a purpose,
was used, and buckled under the weight. The Ring-bearer was not equal
to the burden. As Tolkien describes him, he is “a hobbit broken by a
burden of fear and horror—broken down, and in the end made into
something quite different“ (Letters 186).
The two uses here of the word broken, one singly and one in the phrase
“broken down,” are worth noting. The second use enlarges the picture,
for “broken down” means something more and something other than
“broken.” To be broken down can mean to be broken to the point of
being unable to function, as a piece of machinery can break down after
repeated use; but it can also mean to be taken apart, to separated into
components, as light is refracted or broken down in passing through a
prism. Broken down in this second sense, Frodo can, without ever being

155
156 Splintered Light

other than himself, stand for all the fragmentation in Tolkien’s world. He
is the smallest common denominator, the least splinter. He is the mote.
The metaphor here is of light whole and light refracted, of the Logos
fragmented into the verbum, of the world of Middle-earth broken so
that it can be re-made, in the words of the fairy-story essay, of ”Man,
finally redeemed” and thus “like and unlike the fallen that we know.”
Tolkien shows us the first part of the process but withholds the second.
He goes to some lengths to show Frodo fallen, but barely adumbrates his
redemption and re-making, a treatment that is wholly consistent with
his view of history as a long defeat. While he may describe Frodo as “in
the end made into something quite different,” the story merely shows
him maimed, sick, uneasy, unhappy, and out of place in what was once
his home. At the end of the book he takes a ship for the Undying Lands,
there to be healed—if he can be healed. Tolkien was careful to leave even
that undetermined. “Frodo was sent or allowed to pass over Sea to heal
him—if that could be done, before he died. He would have eventually
to ‘pass away’: no mortal could, or can, abide for ever on earth, or within
Time. So he went both to a purgatory and to a reward, for a while: a
period of reflection and peace and a gaining of a truer understanding of
his position in littleness and in greatness” (Letters 328).
Frodo’s littleness is clear, as is his greatness in terms of his sacrifice.
Bur the greatness in terms of what he may become after being broken
down, the “something quite different” into which he may be made, is
not shown. There is no Recovery, no Consolation, no glimpse of Joy
beyond the walls of the world. Tolkien does not take Frodo that far. The
only hint at apotheosis is withheld from the end, tucked almost out of
sight in a little incident early in the story, at the opening of Book Two
of The Fellowship of the Ring. And hint it is, the merest of allusions to
things past, present, and (possibly) future. At Rivendell Gandalf pays a
bedside visit to Frodo, who is recuperating from his fight at Weathertop,
his dash to the Ford, and his last defiance of the Ring­wraiths. Although
he insists that he is recovering, Frodo shows the effects both of his
knife-wound and the burden of the Ring: “To the wiz­ard’s eye there
was a faint change, just a hint as it were of transparency, about him,
and especially about the left hand that lay outside upon the coverlet.
‘Still, that must be expected,’ said Gandalf to himself. ‘He is not half
through yet, and to what he will become in the end not even Elrond
can foretell. Not to evil, I think. He may become like a glass filled with
a clear light for eyes to see that can’” (LOTR 217).
 Filled with Clear Light 157

As with the more active description of Frodo on Amon Hen, a great

deal is going on here, albeit more quietly. The references to transparency
and the glass filled with clear light reach beyond the immediate context.
On the face of it, and in the context only of The Lord of the Rings, the
hint of transparency suggests that Frodo may be fading because of his
contact with evil, because of the wound from the Morgul-knife and the
burden of the Ring. This is to some extent the case, of course, although
it is not the whole story. One of the effects of the Ring is to make the
wearer “fade.” To wear it for the purpose of invisibility brings some
sort of cumulative and lasting effect, as if each trip into the invisible
robs the wearer of a fragment of concrete reality. Frodo is beginning to
fade out of the everyday world. Already he is more than a little inside
the shadow world of the Ring, where he is visible to evil and it is more
visible to him than his everyday reality. Tolkien has prepared for this
in his picture of the Ringwraiths, shadows of evil, and in Aragorn’s hor-
rified reaction to Frodo’s little joke about getting so thin that he will
become a wraith.
This is not just about wraiths and shadows, however. It is about
light and appearance. To become invisible, however useful it may be
for playing jokes on dwarves or avoiding the Sackville-Bagginses, is to
negate the effects of light, to deal in dis-appearances rather than appear-
ances. It the negative—not the opposite, which would be darkness—of
“to shine.” To be invisible is to be neither light nor dark. In terms of
light, it is not to be at all. Thus, Frodo is losing his physical self. In the
immediate context of his life and his journey, what is happening to him
is not good, but in the ultimate context of what Tolkien envisions as
humanity’s end, it may lead to good. Light no longer completely reveals
the external Frodo, and within him light and dark are at war. But when
the battle is over and the dark has won and destroyed itself and left the
field, his lack of material appearance, his transparency, may go beyond
mere fading to transcend materiality altogether. He is being emptied so
that he may be filled with clear light, so that the White Light that held
the mote may now be held within the mote, there to shine for eyes to
see that can.
Gandalf’s auxiliary verb is significant. He does not say Frodo will be-
come, or must become, but that he may become. This is speculation, not
prediction. May, Anglo-Saxon magma, “to be able,” describes capacity,
not actuality. What Gandalf sees in Frodo is potential; it may or may not
be realized. As the Music is the potential for the world that is, so this
158 Splintered Light

capacity to become is the potential of the Frodo that is. If it is realized,

it will come out of his willingness to be subsumed into a greater cause
than himself. Through his own actions, through the sacrifice in which
he lets himself be used for good, broken, and broken down by the power
of evil, he may paradoxically be redeemed by his own failure.
With a degree of self-abnegation matched only by Gandalf’s surren-
der of himself in Moria, Frodo goes beyond evil, beyond self, beyond
physical or mental wholeness to be completely broken down in order
that he may be remade. He is splintered light, and in his fragmentation
he makes obvious the need for that reunion with self, with the world,
and with God that Tolkien felt to be joy beyond the walls of the world.
He will never get back what he has lost, but he may get something else
and something more. He may be in the end “made into something quite
different,” for, as Tolkien wrote of humanity’s longing for a return to
Eden, “We shall never recover it, for that is not the way of repentance,
which works spirally and not in a closed circle; we may recover some-
thing like it, but on a higher plane” (Letters 110).
The image of Frodo broken down, a small splinter of light, invites
comparison with the book’s most vivid picture of white shattered into
the color spectrum—Saruman the White who renames himself Saruman
of Many Colours, whose robes, “which had seemed white, were not so,
but were woven of all colours, and if he moved they shimmered and
changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.” When Gandalf comments
that he likes white better, Saruman replies sneeringly that, “the white
light can be broken.” “In which case it is no longer white,” Gandalf
answers. “And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the
path of wisdom” (LOTR 252). In his overweening pride, Saruman has
broken himself, not, like Frodo, by yielding to a cause greater than
himself but by trying to impose himself upon the cause, by endeavor-
ing to control rather than submit. Instead of accepting his position of
greatness and littleness—the very opposite of Frodo’s “littleness and
greatness,” he has traded his greatness for the wrong kind of littleness.
The pettiness engendered by swollen pride, rather than the humble
realization of littleness, differentiates Saruman from Frodo far more
than the fact that one is a wizard and one a hobbit. Frodo knows how
small he is. He knows, too, how unfitted he is for the task assigned
to him—he is not made for perilous quests—and he recognizes and
acknowledges that he does not know how to achieve the end. “I will
take the Ring,” he says, “though I do not know the way” (LOTR 264).
 Filled with Clear Light 159

Saruman, in the inflation of his precious self, knows a little, but thinks
he knows more, and that it is enough. The very opposite is the case.
He does not know, and does not realize he does not know. A world of
psychological, moral, and spiritual difference separates him from Frodo.
The closest parallel to Frodo in terms of light is not another character,
but the light itself—the Phial of Galadriel, which contains the light of
Eärendil’s star, the Silmaril, caught in the waters of her fountain. This
light has been divided just as Frodo has been divided, broken down just
as he is gradually broken down. Nevertheless, as fragments, both the
light and Frodo have a purpose, and each must follow its own nature.
For the rest of his journey against the light, Frodo will carry the light
with him, finding his way “in dark places, when all other lights go out”
(LOTR 367) by the last splinter of the true light. When The Lord of the
Rings is read as Tolkien intended, in the context of the larger myth­
ology, the references to light, especially starlight, scattered through­out
the story assume coherence. They are not mere scenery, but pointers to
Tolkien’s meaning. Of all these, the star light in the Phial of Galadriel
is the most important.
A pattern of balance and opposition connects the Phial to Frodo and to
the Ring. As the story’s all-important artifact, the Ring and its darkness
are so powerful and so pervasive that no equally powerful counterbalance
is immediately perceivable. Nevertheless, like all forces in the story, the
Ring is balanced by an opposite, and that opposite is the Phial. As the
Ring is the cause of Frodo’s journey, so the Phial is the beacon to light his
way. As Galadriel’s gift to him, it matches the Ring, so often described as
a “present.” As light, it balances the Ring’s darkness. While the Ring is
designed to be worn, and thus encircles or contains its wearer, the Phial
is carried in the hand, contained within its bearer.
Frodo and the Phial are both fragments—Frodo of humanity, the
Phial of the light. Both are momentarily caught and held by Galadriel;
both are sent on their way by her. Again, this has greater significance
in the context of the larger mythology. Galadriel is an Exile, one of the
rebellious Noldor who returned to Middle-earth. Frodo, too, will be an
exile, destined not to remain in his homeland of the Shire. Galadriel,
who has seen the light, has left it behind. Frodo, who receives the light,
is afraid of the dark even as he goes into it. Finally, the Phial as it is—a
glass filled with clear light—is in its being what Frodo may attain in
his becoming. It anticipates his future.
So does the Ring. Here, Tolkien’s motif of coming to light through
160 Splintered Light

darkness is at its most powerful and immediate. The Ring and the
Phial bracket and define Frodo. He must succumb to the one before
he can have the hope of becoming like the other. Both are his closest
companions on the journey—one lighting his path to the unmaking
of the other. It is here that the next thread joins the pattern, running
counter to it, for in all Tolkien’s great story of sub-creation, The Lord of
the Rings is the one tale that is not about making but unmaking. Like
light and dark, good and evil, fate and free will, making and unmaking
are corollary to and defined by one another. The whole pattern of sub-
creation, of splintering and separating and dividing reaches its apogee
in the total destruction of Gollum and the Ring. In this ultimate separa-
tion, Frodo is most completely separated both from himself and from
the darkness that possesses him at the point where that very darkness
causes itself to be un-made. In the fallen world Tolkien has envisioned,
such a breakdown is inevitable. It is the next step in the process and
as such is both result and cause, predicated on all that has gone before,
the basis for what is still to come. It is the leaf mold of creation.
Just as the Ring is un-made, so Frodo is un-made, broken down so
that he may be transformed. But that transformation is withheld, for
Tolkien’s story ends before it can be shown. We know what may hap-
pen to Frodo, but we are given no guarantee that it will happen, any
more than we know what will happen to us. Hope without guarantees
is all we have. Moreover, this, and the gateway to that hope, which is
death, are the gifts of Ilúvatar to humankind. They are precarious gifts,
hard to appreciate and even harder to trust. For as Tolkien well knew,
it is hard to let go—of one’s treasure, of one’s self, of the world. Hope
without guarantees, by its very nature, must give little hint of what
comes after. Salvation and redemption and the Music played aright may
be alluded to, even foreshadowed, but they are not made manifest.
Tolkien wrote that the legendarium “ends with a vision of the end
of the world, its breaking and remaking, and the recovery of the Sil-
marilli and the ‘light before the sun’—after a final battle which owes,
I suppose, more to the Norse vision of Ragnarök than to anything else,
though it is not much like it” (Silm. xvi). It would be strange if he had
not envisioned such an end, for the mythologies on which he draws
most heavily, Judeo-Christian and Norse, both include remaking and
renewal in surprisingly similar terms.1 The Norse myth tells of a final
battle of the gods against the monsters and forces of darkness, their
defeat, and death, followed by renewal of the earth, the return of Baldr
 Filled with Clear Light 161

the dying god, the children of the gods, and a new man and woman to
begin human life again. The Judeo-Christian myth tells of a final battle,
the destruction of the old heaven and the old earth and a new heaven
and a new earth where the light of God shines and there is no night. In
neither myth, however, does this account comprise more than a fraction
of the subject matter. Both myths focus primarily on the world before
the end, and Tolkien’s does the same, for his heart is more concerned
with the struggle than the resolution. In the continuing interplay of
light and shadow, hope (which is always without guarantees, otherwise
it would not be hope but certainty) is balanced by doubt, if not by out-
right despair.
So the story ends as it must, with Frodo broken but not mended,
broken down but not re-made. He is wounded and sick—so much the
book tells us—and he will die, as Tolkien’s comments in his letters make
clear. Gandalf’s vision in Rivendell is the most positive look ahead,
but a curious and disturbing poem rather tenuously linked to Frodo
counters this with a very different picture. The poem is independent
of both the book and the parent mythology, and would go unremarked,
except that Tolkien went out of his way (long after the fact) to asso-
ciate the two. “The Sea-bell” is one of a group of poems included in
The Tolkien Reader as part of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. The
fictive conceit that unites the poems is that they are all pieces “found
on loose leaves,” or “written carelessly in margins and blank spaces”
in the “Red Book,” Bilbo’s memoir continued by Frodo and others. A
Preface in the scholarly editorial voice of a folklore collector informs
the reader that these verses are “legends and jests of the Shire at the end
of the Third Age.” Most, we are told, are by unknown authors, probably
hobbits, possibly Bilbo, his friends, and their descendants. They are “in
various hands, and were probably written down from oral tradition” (TR
191). They are presented as having some historical as well as literary
interest, supporting and extending the range of hobbit-lore. So much
for their fictive rationale. Their larger function, of course, is to add to
the sub-creative reality of Middle-earth.
“The Sea-bell” is number fifteen in the collection. It is included, says
the pseudo editor-cum-folklorist, “because a hand has scrawled at its
head Frodos Dreme. That is remarkable, and though the piece is most
unlikely to have been written by Frodo himself, the title shows that
it was associated with the dark and despairing dreams which visited
him in March and October during his last three years. But there were
162 Splintered Light

certainly other traditions concerning Hobbits that were taken by the

‘wandering madness,’ and if they ever returned were afterwards queer
and uncommunicable” (TR 194).
Like many of the poems, “The Sea-bell” was a part of Tolkien’s early
writing not explicitly connected with his mythology. A version first
appeared in 1934 in the Oxford Magazine under the title “Looney,”
which may have given rise to the later, “wandering madness” explana-
tion. There is little change between the early and late versions, only
the removal from the late of an addressee to whom the speaker is pre-
sumed to be talking. Both versions draw a picture of such unmitigated
alienation and despair as to negate hope of any kind, with or without
guarantees. Whatever its actual origin or its fictive provenance, whether
the author is Frodo, or someone who knew him, or a wandering hobbit,
Tolkien’s decision to publish the poem with the addition of “historical”
and “scholarly” editorial comment is notable, and worth examining
as a gauge of his feelings about Frodo’s eventual end. For, of course,
Tolkien is the poet, the annotator, the collector and the editor. It is his
judgment that chooses to present conflicting evidence about the poem.
The nameless speaker in the poem hears the call of a sea-bell, finds a
waiting ship, and is borne over the sea to an unknown destination. There
he finds an enchanted country very much like Valinor, with glittering,
jeweled sands, green hills, and fountains. The traveler climbs a stair
and walks through meadows. Although the land is peopled, he can see
no one. He hears echoes of song, of voices calling and feet dancing, but
silence falls wherever he goes. He calls but gets no answer, and at last,
through a dark cloud, he comes to a silent, bare, decaying wood. There
he stays, alone, for a year and a day, the traditional time of enchantment.
His despairing cry—“I have lost myself, and I know not the way, / but
let me be gone!”—recalls Frodo at the end of The Lord of the Rings.
When winter comes, the traveler returns over the sea to the land from
which he embarked, but finds no welcome there either. “Houses were
shuttered, wind round them muttered, / roads were empty.” Caught
between the world of humanity, pretty clearly Middle-earth or a version
thereof, and a land that could pass for Valinor, he is no part of either
world. He is lost from both, acknowledged in neither, “as in sad lane,
/ in blind alley and in long street / ragged I walk. To myself I talk; / for
still they speak not, men that I meet” (TR 244–47).
The speaker’s situation is recognizable as a variation of a common
fairy-tale motif, the story of the adventurer who wanders into Faërie
 Filled with Clear Light 163

and returns after an apparently brief time, often to find himself changed
and his world unrecognizable. Familiar versions occur in Washington
Irving’s story of Rip van Winkle and in a particular Irish tale type
known as immrama, stories of voyages, such as the Irish “Voyage of
Bran” and “Voyage of Máel Dúin” and later “Voyage of St. Brendan.”
Tolkien himself wrote a version of the “Voyage of St. Brendan” both
under his own name, which was published as Imram in Time & Tide
in 1955, and (in curious replication of the two-tiered publishing history
of “The Sea-bell”) a slightly different version attributed to a fictional
character, Philip Frank­ley, in The Notion Club Papers.2
The importance of “The Sea-bell” in the context of its presentation
in The Tolkien Reader, and the reciprocal effect of the poem and The
Lord of the Rings, should not be overlooked. Whatever its merits as
a poem—Auden called it “wonderful” (Letters 378)—“The Sea-bell”
provokes speculation on the possible state of mind of Frodo (if it is
Frodo) in his last years, and even more on the possible state of mind of
the author. For whether the speaker is Frodo or some other hobbit, the
voice behind the voice is certainly Tolkien. If the speaker is Frodo, the
reader is being told that he sees himself as irrecoverably lost, condemned
to a half life that is no life at all, suspended between two worlds. His
sacrifice has led to no redemption. Something in Tolkien wanted the
reader to hear Frodo in the poem and to link the poem’s situation with
what might have happened to him. Since the ultimate voice is Tolkien’s
own, we may speculate that he could hear in it Frodo’s voice and hear
himself behind Frodo, for he could only envision this end for Frodo if
he could imagine it for himself. Humphrey Carpenter’s comment on
Tolkien’s feelings after his mother’s death may be à propos: nothing is
safe; nothing will last; no battle will be won forever.
The same conflict of moods that we have seen in Tolkien’s work
from the first is apparent here. The combination of the poem with its
scholarly apparatus permits a number of things to be said and at the same
time to be called into question. The poem may be Frodo’s dream, and
then again it may not be. It may be no one’s dream, but simply a dark
and hopeless vision that somebody else has (rightly or wrongly) assigned
to Frodo because its extreme bleakness evokes Frodo’s troubled state
in his last years. Behind all these fictions lies the truth of the author’s
ability to understand and portray inner conflict. Behind the multiplicity
of personas is the man who is all of them, who has conflicting things
to express and chooses to say them in conflicting voices. One voice,
164 Splintered Light

however, the primary voice of the speaker in the poem, is recognizable

to the careful reader as the same voice that questioned the existence
of God in a letter to his son.
The dream concept suggested by the hand that is supposed to have
scrawled Frodos Dreme at the head of the poem (which I will call the
secondary voice) is important. It associates the poem with the medieval
literary convention of the dream vision, the function of which is to imply
that truth beyond observable reality is being revealed to the dream-voice,
and through that voice to the reader. As a scholar and teacher of medieval
literature, Tolkien, of course, knew this perfectly well. He was familiar
with the dream framework of Langland’s Piers Plowman and Chaucer’s
Book of the Duchess as well as the mad logic and modern surreality of
Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. He knew that dream is powerfully effective
both as real experience and as literary device, for in each case it serves
to bypass the rational intellect, speaking directly from the unconscious
to the waking mind. Humankind has always found meaning in dreams,
knowing, as Tolkien knew and stated that “in dreams strange powers
of the mind may be unlocked” (MC 116).
Thus, to call “The Sea-bell” Frodos Dreme is to invest it not with
reality but with truth, to give it validity as a vision of another reality
beyond the merely real or apparent. Nevertheless, before accepting
this superscripture as Tolkien’s last word on the subject we should
examine it in the light of two considerations. First, the unknown an-
notator’s “scrawl” is only one comment on the poem, one that Tolkien
deliberately leaves obscure. He may be hiding behind the obscurity, or
he may intend it to discount the poem’s importance. In any case, the
“editor’s” commentary has a double effect. In one sentence it seems
to offer significant information about Frodo’s state of being, and in the
next to undercut that significance with the suggestion of “other tradi-
tions” unconnected with Frodo.
Second, the “dreme” (if it is a dream) should be seen over against
another dream which gives a considerably more hopeful, though far
shorter—and in its own way equally ambiguous—picture. This is
Frodo’s last dream in the house of Tom Bombadil, which occupies no
more than a single, rather indefinite sentence at the beginning of the
chapter “Fog on the Barrow-downs”: “But either in his dreams or out
of them, he could not tell which, Frodo heard a sweet singing running
in his mind: a song that seemed to come like a pale light behind a grey
rain-curtain. And growing stronger to turn the veil all to glass and silver,
 Filled with Clear Light 165

until at last it was rolled back, and a far green country opened before
him under a swift sunrise” (LOTR 132). The picture thus given is im-
mediately withdrawn, as the vision (and neither Frodo nor the reader
can tell if it is a dream or not) “melts” into waking with the entrance
of Tom, “whistling like a tree-full of birds.”
Nothing more is said of it for the next eight hundred or so pages,
during which time the reader may be forgiven for having forgotten all
about it until it reappears as the culminating moment of Frodo’s last
voyage: “And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house
of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was
rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green
country under a swift sunrise” (LOTR 1007). This, too, is a vision, but
more like a vision come true, a dream made real in waking experience.
Nevertheless, the use of the word “seem” in each vision functions to
reserve both to the realm of perception. It appears to call their actual-
ity into question, but the deliberate repetition in the last of the images
evoked in the first underscores their importance to Frodo’s experience.
Caught thus between dreme and dream, where then are we? What,
in Tolkien’s view, has really happened to Frodo? Perhaps there is no
single final answer. It may be rather—as is so often the case with this
complex and seemingly contradictory author—that beneath the surface
lies the simple truth that he does not know. For Tolkien, hope and desire
seem to be always balanced by despair, so that this final vision remains
a vision only, called into question by his hard-won knowledge of the
dark, given affirmation by his continuing faith in the light.
 One Good Custom 167

20
One Good Custom

The Fall of Man is in the past and far off stage;

the Redemption of Man in the far future.
—Tolkien, letter to “Mr. Rang”

Two ideas crucial to Tolkien’s philosophy emerge with increasing clar-

ity as his mythology is studied. One is the inevitability and absolute
necessity of change. The other is the centrality of language and its
importance as both cause and result. The two ideas are linked psycho-
logically, philosophically, and spiritually. Each is an aspect of the other,
and both are best understood in conjunction. They are inextricably tied
into Tolkien’s mythology as agents and functions of its design. From
change, whether good or bad, gradual or cataclysmic, comes growth and
development. One of the chief agents of change is language, altering and
governing perception. Out of change comes new perception and hence
new language. Language separates, divides, distinguishes, breaking down
and refining aspects of original, undifferentiated reality. However, it
is more than a refiner of meaning; it is also the creator and preserver.
New concepts, new metaphors, incantatory adjectives can enhance or
deepen or change meaning and so sub-create a new reality. Tolkien’s
mythology is a record of change in history, in language, in peoples, and
of the cumulative result of these—change in awareness.
Language is the heart of his concept, and the speaker’s meaning is
essential to his design. And so the fact that “The Sea-bell” ends with

167
168 Splintered Light

a situation in which a speaker fails to generate meaning, fails in his

attempts to communicate with others, is a startling, unsettling devel-
opment. It is especially striking as the work of one for whom words
were not just a profession but a vocation, a philologist and creator of
languages. What does he mean by this? Where does it fit into his cre-
ative ethos? The man who said he wanted to create a world in which a
common greeting would be elen síla lúmenn’ omentielvo (“a star shines
on the hour of our meeting”) has created a situation in which there is
not only no greeting, there is no real meeting. A man whose lifework
was predicated on the power of the word has envisioned a moment in
which that power is negated. A man whose religion as well as his fiction
was based in the Logos that can speak ideas into being has created a
character whose language turns inward on itself and fails of its purpose.
“To myself I talk; for still they speak not, men that I meet.”
In Tolkien’s sub-created world language has shaped and been shaped
by its users, growing out of awareness and enhancing it. For the speaker
in “The Sea-bell” language is of no use, and the awareness thus created
of isolation and separation is so complete that nothing can bridge it. Cut
off from others, talking only to himself and thus both self-defined and
self-divided, the speaker in “The Sea-bell” has come as far as change
and language as he knows both will carry him. He is at the outermost
point of the circle from where he began. For the Elves in the Silmaril-
lion, the first utterance came with awareness of light. With light came
language and with language the beginning of separation but also of
communication. Now, for this nameless speaker (for he is no longer
“Looney,” just alone) in the moment of greatest separation and thus of
greatest awareness and impulse to speak, all utterance is useless. The
speaker without speech is psychologically and spiritually in the dark.
Shut out of the heaven to which he voyaged, cut off from the world to
which he has returned, he has nothing with which to bridge the separa-
tion, no light to illumine his path. He cannot communicate.
The word communicate is itself loaded with inherent meaning of
particular importance to Tolkien, carrying as it does in a single con-
cept the basis of both his profession and his faith. The idea embodied
in the word includes in both the literal and the metaphorical senses
language and feeling. Without communication there can be no com-
munity. Without community there can be no sense of communion.
Without Communion in the spiritual sense, fallen humanity is truly
separated not just from others but also from the source, the godhead.
 One Good Custom 169

In its Christian, specifically Catholic meaning, the rite of Communion,

called the Blessed Sacrament, is the act of atonement, of at-one-ment
and re-union with God. For Tolkien this was the most important and
meaningful of all the rites of his church. “The only cure for sagging
of fainting faith is Communion,” he wrote to his son Michael (Letters
338). The statement is straightforward, plain, unequivocal. It is clear
evidence of the firmness of his religious feeling. Yet the phrase “faint-
ing faith” addressed (as it seems) to his son’s need, testifies to his own
understanding of doubt and despair. That he was well acquainted with
fainting faith is suggested by Humphrey Carpenter, who wrote of him:
“when (as often happened) he could not bring himself to go to confession
he would deny himself communion [sic] and live in a pathetic state of
spiritual depression” (Biography 128).
No great leap of imagination is required to connect Tolkien’s feeling
for and about language with his feeling for and about Communion—the
one is the emblem of the other. Nor is it difficult to make an associa-
tion between the state of the speaker at the end of “The Sea-bell” and
Tolkien’s own “state of spiritual depression.” It seems safe to speculate
as well that the reverse of both states might also be comparable. Com-
munion in the religious sense is communication lifted beyond language
to the experience of the unutterable. To communicate with others is to
participate in community. To take Communion, to partake of the body
and blood of Christ, the Word made flesh, is to participate in God and
the word by means of God and the Word, to be in community with God.
Such an experience involves leaving one state of being and entering
another. It is to be re-formed and re-newed, to be changed. The con-
cept of change is embedded in both communicate and communion.
The obvious philological similarity between the two words suggests a
common ancestor and implies an original shared meaning in line with
Bar­field’s concept of original semantic unity. The evidence supports
this. Both words derive from Latin commu-nis, “common,” in the sense
of “shared by all alike.” Thus both words carry a sense of interchange
among people or between the individual and God, giving a sense of
community. Change is implicit at this point, but at the next step back
it is explicit. The parent word commu-nis comes from the compound
adjective *ko-moin-i-, “held in common,” which in turn comes from
*moi-n-, the suffixed o-grade form of Indo-European mei-1, “to change,
go, move.” The root or original concept, then, was one of change, to
which the prefix ko-, “together” added the idea of change in commu-
170 Splintered Light

nity, of going or moving toward one another or moving together toward

something or someone else.
The laws of movement that govern the macrocosm and the micro-
cosm, the universe and the individual, are laws of change—change of
state, change of direction, change of nature. So, too, are the laws that
govern Tolkien’s fictive world. His Prime Mover, Eru, whose name, as
we have seen, may be related to Indo-European er-1, “to set in motion,”
has through the Ainur imbued with change the world he set in motion,
giving it ebb and surge, advance and retreat. It is a world in which the
farthest point from the Light is also the beginning of the journey back.
While Tolkien’s psychological and emotional yearning was nostalgia
for aspects of his world that had vanished or were vanishing in his life-
time, still, his philosophical and religious position was that change is
necessary. Both feelings are evident in his work. His narrative mourns
the fading of Lórien and the disappearance of the Entwives. “I should be
sad,” says Theoden to Gandalf. “For however the fortunes of war shall
go, may it not so end that much that was fair and wonderful shall pass
forever out of Middle-earth?” Gandalf replies, “It may.” Then he adds,
“But to such days we are doomed. Let us now go on with the journey
we have begun!” (LOTR 537). Both speak for Tolkien. But Gan­dalf has
the last word.
The strongest evidence for Tolkien’s certainty of the necessity for
change is in his invention of the immortal and changeless Elves, whom,
as we have seen, he described as “embalmers.” Their desire to arrest
change is exemplified his notion (in fictive theory if not in his own life)
of what not to do. “Mere change as such,” he wrote of his invented world,
“is not represented as ‘evil’; it is the unfolding of the story and to refuse
this is of course against the design of God. But the Elvish weakness is
in these terms naturally to regret the past, and to become unwilling to
face change. . . . They desired some power over things as they are . . . to
arrest change, and keep things always fresh and fair” (Letters 236).
Desire to preserve a present good inevitably becomes desire to keep
it from passing, but this leads to stagnation. The process of change is
part of the design, and must continue if the design is to be fulfilled.
Opposite to the Elves in Tolkien’s concept are his Men, to whom he
has given the power to bring about change, to act “beyond the Music”
and through their actions to have “the world fulfilled unto the last
and smallest.” However good the present may be or seem, however
bad the future may look, the present is always passing, must become
 One Good Custom 171

that which has passed, the past. Acquainted as he was with Old Norse
(sometimes called Old Icelandic) Tolkien knew the mythic Norse view
of time embodied in the names of the Norns, the Northern Fates. They
are Urˆl (what has passed), Verˆlandi (what is present), and Skuld (what
is to come). All three are verb forms, and Verˆlandi is the present par-
ticiple of the verb verˆla, “to happen, take place, occur.” It is literally
“happening,” becoming, and so characterizes a process rather than a
state. The present, in this mode of thought, is not a static state but a
flowing transition always on its way from one state to another. We are
always in motion, and to look beck with regret, like Lot’s wife, is to risk
losing the capacity and will to go forward. “The old order changeth,”
said Tennyson’s departing King Arthur to the waiting knight Bedivere,
“yielding place to new, and God fulfills himself in many ways, lest one
good custom should corrupt the world.” Tolkien would agree.
Moreover, to try to arrest change is to stop as well that increase in
perception that change must bring. Any new experience will be internal
as well as external, involving what Barfield calls a “felt change of con-
sciousness” (PD 52). While his immediate reference is to the experience
of poetry, the phrase may be extended to any experience without doing
violence to the concept. For experience is perceived in our appreciation
of it, and the appreciation of experience, as Barfield says, depends no
more on what is being changed than on the change itself. The value
of speech is appreciated as it decays into silence, the value of light as
it shades into dark, the value of hope never more than at the moment
when it is replaced by despair.
Thus the speaker in “The Sea-bell” (who may be Frodo, is certainly
Tolkien, and very probably all humanity) is important to the myth
precisely because he experiences change. He is a man of antitheses,
both spiritually and literally between worlds, having lost one and not
yet gained another. He is poised in the moment of greatest loss, which
paradoxically will bring with it the experience of becoming.
If this seems to be carrying the poem too far, and loading it with more
meaning than it was intended to carry, it may be worth remembering
that the poet in the act of writing was also in transition, caught in the
force field between the poles of his hope and his despair. Worth remem-
bering, too, is his statement that his great predecessor and exemplar,
the Beowulf poet, was also a man at a point of historical transition,
the precise point where “new Scripture and old tradition touched and
ignited” (MC 26), inspired to creation by the intersection of the old
172 Splintered Light

belief with the new. Transition is the essence of poetry, as it is of the

world from which poetry springs, which world poetry seeks to re-create.
In this context, it is not inappropriate to see three individuals—the
speaker in “the Sea-bell” who may be Frodo, his creator, Tolkien, and
Tolkien’s master, the poet of Beowulf—as linked by poetry, to see all
three, moreover, as men of antitheses, conscious of loss and through
that loss conscious of change, poised at the turn.
“Turn,” let us not forget, is the word Tolkien uses for the moment
of change in fairy-stories, the moment of becoming. It is reversal,
metanoia, felt before the mind can grasp it, before the apprehension of
the happy ending and the consolation. The moment is precarious, on
the point, for katastrophe is imminent and has not yet become euca­
tastrophe. Yet if the moment is precarious, it is also precious, valuable
in and for itself because it is what generates sub-creation. If humankind,
like Tolkien himself, like Frodo in “The Sea-bell,” feels wounded, lost,
bereft of paradise, and not yet in sight of heaven, then it follows that
humankind is aware—painfully aware, perhaps, but out of that aware-
ness able to create. Tolkien is humanity’s exemplar, a maker, a poet,
a teller of tales, one for whom light and language are instruments of
sub-creation. Having built gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seeds of dragons, we must revere the gods and fight the
dragons. Of the two, it is the dragons that are the more immediate, for
“the monsters do not depart, whether the gods go or come” (MC 22).
In this world, within Time, the dragons of the darkness will prevail.
Tolkien—Christian, Roman Catholic, orphan in a fallen world—knew
that history can never be anything but a long defeat. This knowledge
notwithstanding, he had faith that through darkness one might come
to the light. One may lose the battle, lose oneself, lose one’s life—but
he that loses his life shall find it. In the making of poetry, in the sub-
creating of a world, we may be ourselves remade, carried beyond the
verbum to the Logos, and so become the architects, in collaboration
with the Primary Maker, of our own redemption.
Sub-creative collaboration with Creation, which for Tolkien was the
poet’s collaboration with God, was the acknowledged principle behind
his creative effort. His references to “reporting” and “recording” (LOTR,
xv; Letters 212 n.) rather than inventing, his allusions to finding out
rather than making up the etymologies of words in Quenya and Sindarin
(Biography 94) clearly indicate that he was aware of something more
and other than himself at work. He once referred to “the Writer of the
 One Good Custom 173

Story (by which I do not mean myself)“ (Letters 253). Tolkien knew
himself to be a poet, and had considerable confidence in and respect
for his own abilities and his elvish craft; but he also knew beyond any
doubt that he was the prism, not the light.
He was the sub-creator, the word-combiner, the mythical gram-
marian. Beyond him, working in and through him, he felt the Primary
Creator, the Prime Mover, the Initiator of Change. This concept is par-
alleled within his mythology, wherein all the sub-creators, the Ainur,
the Valar, are in one way or another functions or subdivisions of Eru.
They are weavers of the design and also threads in it. All authors must
be to some degree their characters, for they must find these in them-
selves in order to put them on paper. Yet for Tolkien, Eru represents
not a character but the Writer of the Story, and thus no part of himself.
And yet he must be both, since without Tolkien, without his Story (to
whomever he gives credit for its writing), there would be no mythology.
Of the lesser characters, the one who at first glance would seem to
reflect Tolkien most clearly is Aulë, the Maker-Vala whose creation of
the Dwarves is an admitted attempt to sub-create in imitation of his
creator. The fit is not perfect, however, for Aulë’s effort is abortive, and
since he is chastised for his impulse, it does not match the interlacing
of light and word that is so much a part of Tolkien’s design. Fëanor is a
possible candidate, but his rebellion and vain pursuit of the light nullify
his sub-creative abilities after his first great effort. Of all his characters,
the one with whom Tolkien most explicitly identified himself is not a
sub-creator at all, in the usual sense, for he is not a maker but a lover.
He is Beren, the hero of the legendarium’s great love story, the lover
of Lúthien and the light, the seeker after the Silmaril. It is no accident
that when his wife, Edith, died, Tolkien had the name Lúthien carved
on her grave marker, nor that when he died and was buried beside her,
his children added the name Beren to the stone.
Many years after he first wrote the story of Beren and Lúthien, and
not long after his wife’s death, Tolkien wrote of her that “she was (and
knew she was) my Lúthien” and that she was “the source of the story
that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion” (Letters 420).
Moreover, the meeting of Beren and Lúthien in the wood paralleled and
was clearly modeled on Tolkien’s memories of early moments in his
marriage. Nevertheless, as a character, Beren is more than a lover. He is
a quest-hero whose adventures arise out of his love for the light. Looking
at his centrality to the story—“the chief part of the Sil­maril­lion”—it
174 Splintered Light

is not unreasonable to speculate that Tolkien’s triple iden­tification of

himself with Beren, his wife with Lúthien, and Lúthien with light is
closely tied to the Silmaril, and that all are the component and inter-
locking parts of a whole vision.
Tolkien’s legendarium abounds in heroic figures—Huor, Húrin, Turin,
Tuor, Fingolfin, Fingon, Finrod, Beleg Strongbow, Frodo, Sam, to name
a few of the most outstanding. Among all these, it is Beren more than
any of in that illustrious company who is allowed to find the light by
coming through darkness, to make real the fleeting glimpse of joy, and
to find the consolation of the happy ending.1 Beren is the antithesis of
Frodo, and of the speaker in “The Sea-bell.” He counters Tolkien’s own
psychological pull toward the dark by his unhesitating journey into
the light. He is the embodiment of Tolkien’s hope, the converse of his
doubt and his despair.
Of all those who move through the Silmarillion, the sub-creators
who work with the light and splinter it and diffuse it, it is Beren, no
sub-creator but a renewer, who rescues the light from darkness and
brings it back into the world. Without Beren’s quest and heroic deed,
although the light would still exist, no one would be able to see it, no
one could be guided by it. To have identified himself with Beren as he
did, Tolkien must have known that, however flawed he might be as a
human in a fallen world, however dark his vision of that world, he too
had been allowed to bring a splinter of the light to Middle-earth.
 Afterword

It has been a great pleasure to return to this book and find it still valid
after nearly twenty years, during which time so much of Tolkien’s work
still unpublished when I first wrote has become available. For both these
reasons, to revise and update my work to keep abreast of his has been
a labor of love, but for the same reasons it has at times presented great
difficulty. Two decades have deepened my appreciation for the scope of
his vision, but they have also showed me how much I did not know in
1983. I have had to rethink almost every sentence and interrogate many
of my earlier conclusions in order to keep this text honest.
The linguistic material in particular has had to be rigorously over-
hauled to take into account the wealth of material now available on
Tol­kien’s languages, whose development is now seen to be at once more
complex and more fluid than was once supposed. Declarations that now
seem overstated, interpretations or assumptions that now appear facile or
superficial, conclusions that may have been made too easily have had to
be worked through, tested against the new material to see if they stand
up, and scrutinized closely for their fidelity to the larger concept.
I have changed nothing that I meant to say—indeed, I have found
many things to be even more true of Tolkien’s work now than they
seemed in 1983. Nevertheless, I have been compelled in many instances
to find better or clearer ways to say what needed to be said, or to express
an idea in a way more faithful to what I perceive to be Tolkien’s vision.
I am grateful for the opportunity.

175
 Notes

Introduction

1. Even the title is problematic. The name Silmarillion can refer to the
published book, to the legendarium as a whole, and to the Quenta Sil­maril­
lion, a subdivision of the larger work. A further complication is that writers
using the title to refer to any one of these (including Tolkien himself) are not
always consistent in their treatment. In the present text, the title of the book
as published will be in italic, other references will be capitalized in roman,
and where the name appears within a quote the cited author’s spelling will
be retained.
2. The omission of Spenser from these comparisons requires explanation,
for The Lord of the Rings has been likened to The Faerie Queene, and there
are striking parallels in aim, subject matter, and meaning between Spenser’s
great work and Tolkien’s. However, Spenser’s, unlike Tolkien’s, is consciously
and avowedly derived from other authors—from Ariosto, Tasso, Virgil, Ovid,
Homer, and Arthurian romance. Furthermore, Spenser’s treatment is delib-
erately allegorical, where Tolkien’s is allusive, suggesting relationships and
resonances of meaning without striving for one-to-one correlation.
3. Verlyn Flieger and Carl Hostetter, eds., Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays
on The History of Middle-earth (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000) is a col-
lection of essays devoted entirely to the Silmarillion.
4. Humphrey Carpenter, “A Fox That Isn’t There,” The Inklings: C. S.
Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends (Oxford: Claren­
don, 1998) examines the fellowship.

2. Dyscatastrophe

1. Quotations in the present work are taken from both essays as published
in The Monsters and the Critics, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: George
Allen & Unwin, 1983).

177
178 Notes to Pages 17–50

2. This may simply be an oblique comment on English weather, but it in-

vites inquiry into the nature of Anglo-Saxon perception. Wolcen is most often
translated as “cloud” in compounds such as wolcen-faru, “cloud host,” or
wolcen-wyrcende, “cloud-producing.” See Bosworth-Toller, An Anglo-Saxon
Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 1263–64; and John R. Clark Hall, A
Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 3d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press,1931), 418.

3. Eucatastrophe

1. These quotes are taken from the famous chapter 13 of Biographia Liter­
aria, Coleridge’s landmark in Romantic criticism, of which the definitive
edition is the Shawcross (Oxford, 1907). My citations come from Criticism:
The Major Texts, ed. W. J. Bate (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovan­ovich, 1970),
387; but these comments by Coleridge are to be found in any anthology of
Romantic criticism.
2. All definitions and etymologies are taken from The American Heri-
tage Dictionary, 2d ed. The Indo-European root is cited at the end of a word
entry and refers the reader to the Appendix on “Indo-European Roots” done
by Calvert Watkins of the Department of Linguistics, Harvard University.
Watkins’s entries refer the reader to the final authority in the field, Julius
Pokorny’s Indogermanisches Wörterbuch (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1959–). In
instances where Watkins differs from Pokorny, I have preferred Watkins.

4. Poetic Diction and Splintered Light

1. Letter from Owen Barfield to the author, Oct. 9, 1980.

2. Owen Barfield to the author during a conversation at Barfield’s home,
Orchard View, Kent, England, 1981.
3. The poem in its entirety is now published together with “On Fairy-
stories” and “Leaf by Niggle” as part of a new edition of Tree and Leaf (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1989). It is pure Barfield.

6. Splintered Light and Splintered Being

1. The unpacking layer by layer of Tolkien’s languages as they developed

over the years is a labor not yet complete, and to attempt to trace key names
to their beginnings in the earliest years is beyond all skill but that of the
elves to unravel, and certainly beyond the scope of the present study. I have
given first the name or word-element as it appears in The Silmarillion as
published, with cross-reference to the “Etymologies” section in volume 5
of The History of Middle-earth, The Lost Road. Readers who wish for more
detail on the study of Tolkien’s languages are referred to “The Gnomish Lexi-
con” (1995) and “The Quenya Lexicon” (1998), edited by Christopher Gilson,
 Notes to Pages 53–74 179

Patrick Wynne, Arden Smith, and Carl Hostetter, in Parma Eldalamberon 11

(1995) and 12 (1998), respectively; and to Vinyar Tengwar, a journal devoted
to Tolkienian linguistics.
2. Boëthius, a fifth-century Roman philosopher, whose De Consolatione
Philosophiae, “On the Consolation of Philosophy,” reconciled human free
will with God’s foreknowledge by postulating God as the foreknowing spec-
tator of events whose vision takes in the future quality of man’s actions.

7. Theme and Variation

1. This must, of course, mean before the fall of any earthly beings (i.e., the
Elves later in the story), since the primal fall of Melkor occurs in the process
of creation itself.

8. A Disease of Mythology

1. All paradigms eventually modify or are replaced by newer paradigms,

and the Indo-European model is no exception; it has been challenged. Whether
it is a valid representation of “truth” is less important to the present study
than the essential fact that it was the paradigm with which Tolkien worked
and on which he based his sub-creative one.

9. Perception = Name = Identity

1. Cf. Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne K. Langer (1946;
reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1951), which cites a study of the Cora
Indians, for whom “the first mythical impulse . . . was not toward making a
sun-god or a lunar deity, but a community of stars” (13). The likeness of this
real tribe to Tolkien’s fictional Elves is too striking to pass without comment.
Whether Tolkien was influenced by Cassirer (he could have read it in the
original German, where it was published in 1925 as Sprache und Mythos, no.
6 of Studien der Bibliothek Warburg), or whether he reached independently
for the same image, is of less importance than the fact that both men were
acknowledging an archetypal expression of mythmaking consciousness.
Cassirer’s work in this area, like Tolkien’s, began in the second and third
decades of the twentieth century, a time when Carl Jung was publishing on
the idea of the collective unconscious. Mythic thinking was in the air.
2. Tolkien’s choice of ele as the first human utterance recalls Dante’s de-
duction that the first word spoken by Adam must have been El, the Hebrew
name of God. Neither Tolkien’s ele nor its derivative, el, functions in his
proto-language as a name for God. Nevertheless, both are names for the first
light, which—as in Tolkien’s vision of the White Light—suggests God’s emana-
tion. The similarity of the fictive first utterance of Tolkien’s Elves to Dante’s
deduced first utterance should not go unremarked. Cf. Howell’s translation
180 Notes to Pages 84–102

of the “De Vulgari Eloquentia,” in A Translation of the Latin Works of Dante

Alighieri (London: J. M. Dent, 1904), 12.

10. Ourselves as Others See Us

1. Gnomes was an early term for what Tolkien later came to call the
Noldor, apparently harking back to Greek gnome, “thought, intelligence,”
and intended to convey their pursuit of knowledge. It persisted in early edi-
tions of The Hobbit; see The Book of Lost Tales, Part I, 43–44.

11. amazing wine and cellar doors

1. From The Silmarillion Appendix. “The Etymologies” has a subentry

éled- glossed as “Star-folk,” Elf, with Q[uenya] Elda N[oldorin] (later Sindarin)
Eledh, with the name Eledhwen (Elf-fair>) Elf-maid. The concept appears to
be the same in both texts.

12. Light and Heat

1. Tolkien’s explicit linking of the Sea with the Music of creation clari-
fies the episode cited in chapter 2 of Frodo’s dream of the tower and the sea.
Unknowing, Frodo still responds to the Music. While this cannot explain on
a logical basis Tolkien’s use of the same image in his Beowulf allegory, it may
illuminate it on a psychological one, in that Tolkien’s own perception of the
sea informs both his reading of Beowulf and his writing of The Silmarillion.
2. The question of Miriel is one of the most vexed in Tolkien’s mythology,
for in his treatment of her he appears to contravene the principles he himself
laid down for the operation of his world. Elves do not have free will, nor do
they die; yet Miriel exercises her will freely and against all persuasion makes
the choice to die, for “she yearned for release from the labour of living” and
“her spirit indeed departed her body and passed in silence to the halls of
Mandos” (Silm. 63, 64). Moreover, Tolkien was apparently of two minds when
she made this choice, for in The Silmarillion the event follows hard upon
the birth of Fëanor, while a later account, “The Shibboleth of Fëanor” in The
Peoples of Middle-earth, gives a different picture. Here we read that “Fëanor
loved his mother dearly” and that “while she lived she did much with gentle
counsel to soften and restrain him” and that “her death was a lasting grief
to Fëanor” (333). The discrepancy cannot be resolved; but in either case, the
important point is the same, that her death affected Fëanor adversely, that it
had an impact on his later behavior, and that it had disastrous consequences
both for Fëanor individually and for the subsequent history of the Noldor.
 Notes to Pages 121–147 181

14. Light Out of Darkness

1. This echo of Shelley’s “Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass stains

the white radiance of Eternity” may well be unconscious on Tolkien’s part
but is no less effective for being so.
2. Her name was originally Isfin, later changed to Írissë and still later to
Aredhel, which Tolkien glossed as “Noble Elf.” However, in a late typescript,
Tolkien emended this in two instances to Feiniel, “White Lady,” and in an-
other instance to Ar-Feiniel. Christopher Tolkien states that in the published
Silmarillion, his father combined the two; see The War of the Jewels, 318.

17. Beren and Thingol

1. The image of the hand, especially the hand maimed or cut off, is a fre-
quent motif in the mythology. It suggests sacrifice and the ability to give up
rather than to get. Beren loses his hand to the wolf, an episode recalling the
story of Tyr, the Norse god who sacrificed his hand to bind the wolf Fenrir.
Frodo loses his finger to a metaphorical wolf, Gollum, in his sacrifice of
himself to destroy the evil of the Ring.
2. It is central to the Ring’s meaning that it has no effect on Tom Bombadil.
He does not disappear when it is on his finger, and he is able to see Frodo
when Frodo puts it on. Tom is a force of nature, a kind of earth spirit, and so
control of the human will, which the Ring exerts, has no meaning for him
and therefore no power over him.
3. In his introductory note to the Lay of Leithian in The Lays of Beleriand,
Christopher Tolkien wrote, “My father never explained the name Leithien
‘Release from Bondage,’ and we are left to choose, if we will, among the vari-
ous applications that can be seen in the poem. . . . The only evidence of an
etymological nature I have found is a hasty note, impossible to date, which
refers to a stem leth–, ‘set free,’ with leithia ‘release’ and compares Lay of
Leithian” (154).
4. The Struldbrugs keep hold of life but not of youth, growing more and
more decrepit but still not dying. Swift meant it as a hideous fate; Tolkien
means it as an inappropriate one. Though he allowed his Elves to keep their
beauty, he called them “embalmers” (Letters 197) and described them as
desiring “to arrest change, and keep things always fresh and fair” (236).

18. The Smallest Fragment

1. Tolkien’s struggles to follow (and his eventual abandonment of) the

publisher’s request are admirably laid out in Christopher Tolkien’s account of
the writing of The Lord of the Rings, volumes 6–9 of The History of Middle-
earth.
182 Notes to Pages 161–174

19. Filled with Clear Light

1. It has been suggested that the Norse apocalyptic vision is influenced

by the biblical one, but there is no hard evidence to support this. Given that
all primary myths are based on the world as it is, with the common celestial
phenomena of sun, moon, and stars and the terrestrial ones of earth, fire, and
water, visions that describe the end of these will almost of necessity use the
same terms.
2. Published posthumously by Christopher Tolkien as Sauron Defeated,
volume 9 of The History of Middle-earth.

20. One Good Custom

1. References to the corresponding story of Tuor and the elven princess Idril,
whose name as noted means “Sparkling Brilliance,” are scattered through­out
the legendarium, and it seems clear that the two were intended to be a parallel
to Beren and Lúthien, though their story is nowhere given as comprehensive
a treatment. Tuor is mentioned in “Of Maeglin,” chapter 16 of the Quenta
Silmarillion in The Silmarillion. In The History of Middle-earth the story
appears in The Fall of Gondolin in The Book of Lost Tales, Part 2; in The Grey
Annals and “The Tale of Years,” part 1; and in the end of part 3 in The War
of the Jewels, volume 11. Its beginning is recounted in the magnificent but
incomplete Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin in Unfinished Tales. The
two couples—Beren and Lúthien and Tuor and Idril—were the first unions
of Elves and Men and founders of the race of the half-elven. Although Beren
and Lúthien are given the greater story, it is Tuor and Idril who become the
parents of Eärendil.
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The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Ed. William

Morris. New York: American Heritage, 1969.
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis. Trans. Willard B. Trask. Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1953.
Barfield, Owen. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning. 3d ed. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1973.
———. The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1977.
Bate, Walter Jackson. Criticism: The Major Texts. New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1970.
Bosworth, Joseph. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Ed. T. Northcote Toller.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.
Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles
Williams, and Their Friends. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979.
———. J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1977.
Cassirer, Ernst. Myth and Language. Trans. Susanne K. Langer. 1946. New
York: Dover Publications, 1953.
Chance, Jane. Tolkien’s Art: A “Mythology for England.” Rev. ed. Lexington:
Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2001.
Cleasby, Richard. An Icelandic-English Dictionary. Rev. ed. Gudbrand Vig­
fusson. 2d ed. Sir William Craigie. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962.
d’Ardenne, Simonne. “The Man and the Scholar.” In J.R.R. Tolkien: Scholar
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rell. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979.
Flieger, Verlyn, and Carl Hostetter, eds. Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on
The History of Middle-earth. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.
Gardner, John. “The World of Tolkien.” New York Times Book Review, Oct.
23, 1977.
Hall, John R. Clark. A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. 3d ed. Cambridge:
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Helms, Randel. Tolkien and the Silmarils. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

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Lewis, C. S., ed. Essays Presented to Charles Williams. London: Oxford Univ.
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McLellan, Joseph. “Frodo and the Cosmos.” Washington Post Book World,
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Pokorny, Julius. Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. Bern: Francke
Verlag, 1959–.
Shippey, T. A. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCol-
lins, 2000.
———. The Road to Middle-earth. 2d ed. London; HarperCollins, 1982.
Sugerman, Shirley, ed. Evolution of Consciousness: Studies in Polarity.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1977.
Tolkien, J. R. R. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” In The Monsters
and the Critics and Other Essays. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1983.
———. The Book of Lost Tales. Part 2. The History of Middle-earth. Vol. 2.
Ed. Christopher Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984.
———. “Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale.” In Transactions of the
Philological Society. London: David Nutt, 1934. 1–70.
———. The Hobbit. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1938.
———. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter, with Chris-
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———. “Looney.” The Oxford Magazine 52.5 (Nov. 9, 1933): 180.
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———. The Lost Road and Other Writings. Vol. 5 of The History of Middle-
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———. Sauron Defeated. Vol. 9 of The History of Middle-earth. Ed. Chris-
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———. “Sigelwara Land,” Part 1. Medium Aevum 1 (Dec. 1932): 183–96;
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———. Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. Ed. Christopher
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Acton’s law, 141
Adam, 95, 179n
Advent. See Christ.
Alkar, epithet for Melkor, 91.
Ainur, 170; as “Holy Ones,” 51; etymol-
ogy of name, 51; given sight, 58; Mu-
sic of, 53, 57, 130; offspring of Eru’s
thought, 51, 55; speech of, 61 –62; as
sub-creators, 55, 59; subdivisions of
Eru, 173
Allen & Unwin, xv, xvi, xxi
Alqualondë, Kinslaying at, 117, 135
Aman, 85
Aman: as holy place, 150; light of in
Melian, 92, 93; shores of, 99. See also
Valinor
Anglo-Saxon. See Old English
Anthroposophy. See Steiner, Rudolf
Aragorn: diction of, 7; and Elbereth, 89;
and Frodo’s wraith-joke, 157
Arda, 49; Elves and Men as exceptions
in, 76; Manwë as master of, 54–55;
Marred, 77
Aredhel, 122–23, 181n
Arkenstone, compared to Silmarils, 110
Arminas, meeting with Tuor, 125–25,
141, 145. See also Tuor
Arwen, as half-elven, 144
Aslan, xxi
Atani. See Men
Auden, W. H.: Tolkien letter to, 87–88;
on “The Sea-bell,” 163
Augustine, St., felix peccatum Adae, 95
Index 185
Index
Aulë: creates Dwarves, 100; creates
Lamps; as sub-creator, 100, 173; and
Noldor,100; and Fëanor, 113
Auerbach, Eric, Mimesis, 29
Avari: “Unwilling,” 78–79; division
from Quendi, 82; language splits from
Quenya, 79; as Moriquendi, “Elves of
Dark,” 85
Baggins, Bilbo, xiii; philology in reaction
to Smaug, xxi; Red Book, 161
Baggins, Frodo, xiii; 149–54, 174; at
Amon Hen, 151, 153, 157; and Beowulf
essay, 152; broken/broken down, 147,
155, 160, 161; compared to Music,
157–58; and Phial, 159–60; contrast
with Saruman, 158–59; at Cracks of
Doom, 111, 113, 151; divided self, 151,
153; dream of tower,16, 180n; dream
of grey rain-curtain, 164–65; as exile,
158; fading of, 157; invokes Elbereth,
89, 91; as “glass filled with clear light,”
156, 161; and free will, 151, 153, 154;
journey against light, 151; as “Looney”
162–63; loss of Ring, 155; as micro-
cosm, 150, 156; possessiveness of, 110;
and Red Book, 161; as Ring-bearer,
155, 156, 157; and Ring, 143, 151, 153,
156, 158, 159–60; and Ring inscription,
103; salvation by Grace, 154; and “The
Sea-bell,” 161–69, 171–72 as splintered
light, 158; wounded, 156, 157, 161
Baldr, return of, 160–61.
185
186 Index
Barfield, Owen, vii, xxi, 35–37; “Great
War” with Lewis,“ 36; influence on
Tolkien’s work, vii, xxi, 60; and “Myth-
opoeia,” 46; personal communications
to author, 178n; theory of language, xxi,
xxii, 39; 54, 55; 65, 57–68, 79; 95, 97,
98; Tolkien reference to, xxi, 39.
Beare, Rhona, Tolkien letter to, 54
Beleg Strongbow, 174
Bëor: on light, 124; and Finrod, 125, 126.
Beren, 91, 120, 173–74; antithesis of
Frodo, 174; crosses path of Thingol,
133; death of, 139, 143; drawn to
light, 133, 143; hand and Silmaril,
142, 181n; identified with Tolkien,
173–74; into light and dark, 129; fate
and free will in, 131, 133; meeting
with Lúthien, 132, and parallel in
Tolkien’s life, 173; quest determined
by Thingol, Lúthien, 139; recovery of
Silmaril, 133, 139; second death of,
143; as werewolf, 145
Beowulf, xvi; allegory of tower, 14–15,
180n; dragon hoard in, 110; effect of,
24; as elegy, 14; monsters in, 17–18
Beowulf poet, xxi; as Christian, 17–18,
30; at point of transition, 171; as
Tolkien’s master, 172
Bible, as literature for children, 149. See
also Genesis; King James Bible
Birmingham, 2
Black Speech, 70, 103
Blake, William, as mythmaker, xv
Bloemfontein, 2, 26
Boëthius, xviii, 53, 114, 129, 189n
Bombadil, Tom, 112, 164, 181 n
Brogan, Hugh, Tolkien letter to, 147
Burroughs, Edgar Rice, xvii
Brandybucks, 6
Calaquendi, Elves of Light, 79; literal
meaning of, 82; metaphorical mean-
ing of , 82–83; as word, 79; borrowed
from Eddas, 83
Carcharoth: Beren and, 181n; scorched
by Silmaril, 142
Carpenter, Humphrey: Tolkien: A
Biography, xiv, 1, 2–3, 88, 170; The
Inklings, xx, 19, 35, 36, 177n
Carroll, Lewis. See Dodgson, Charles
Lutwidge
Cassirer, Ernst, on myth and language,
34–35, 68, 179n
Celegorm. See Fëanor, sons of
Celtic mythology, xv
Chance, Jane: Tolkien’s Art: A Mythol-
ogy for England, xix
Chaucer, Geoffrey, xviii, 114; dialect in
The Reeve’s Tale, 5–6; The Book of
the Duchess, 164
Children of Ilúvatar: compared to Sil-
marils, 108; direct from godhead, 127;
with third theme, 78, 127, 128; and
water, 99. See also Elves; Men
Christ: Advent of, 29; historicity of, 30;
outcry on Cross, 31; Resurrection of,
29; story as truth, 29. See also Eucata-
strophe, “On Fairy-stories”
Cirith Ungol, Tower of, 89
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 178n; on
Imagination, 24, 40, 45; influence in
“On Fairy-stories,” 22, 25
Collins Publishers, Tolkien’s negotia-
tions with, xiv–xvi.
Communion, 168–70; as Blessed Sacra-
ment, 169; etymology of word, 169
Consolation, 152, 156. See also Joy; Re-
covery; Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories”
Cottons, rural speech in, 6
Council of Elrond, 103, 151
Cracks of Doom, 111, 113
Cuiviénen, 72
“Culhwch and Olwen,” motif of Giant’s
Daughter in, 137. See also Kalevala;
Lúthien; Thingol, Thompson, Stith
Curufin. See Fëanor, sons of
Dante, xviii, 114, 179n
Dasent, George, 24
d’Ardenne, Simonne, on Tolkien, 9
Death, xi, 51; and Immortality as
themes, 28, 52
Demiurge: etymology of 55; Plato’s use
of, 55; Valar as, 55

Dior, beginning of half-elven race, 140;
son of Beren and Lúthien, 140
Döckalfar, in Icelandic Eddas, 83
Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge, Alice
books, 164
Doriath. See Thingol
Dorson, Richard, 33
Dragon, as external threat, 18, 21, 150,
172
Dryden, John, St. Cecelia’s Day Ode, 58
Dwarves, xiii; create Nauglamír, 144;
creation of,100; and death of Thingol,
144; jokes on, 157; as sub-creations,
173
Dyscatastrophe, 11, 30. See also Eucata-
strophe; Joy; Tolkien, “On Fairy-
stories”
Eä: as sub-created world, 58; as Let It
Be, 58–59, 74; and Barfield, 60, 131
Eärendil, 91; as star, 97–98, 147, 150;
journey to Valinor,137, 140; and Phial
of Galadriel, 158; Tuor and Idril as
parents of, 182n
Eden, Garden of, 4; return to, 158
Elbereth, 89–90; as Gilthoniel, 91
Ele: and Dante, 179n; as Elven name-
element, 89–90 ; semantic cognates,
90–91
Eldar: acquisition of prefix tar-, 78;
etymology of, 76; as “People of the
Stars, 76
Elohim: God of Genesis 1, 54; as plural
intensive, 54; Valar compared to, 54,
55
Elrond, 97; “Nothing is Evil in the be-
ginning,” 116, 134; Gandalf on, 156;
as half-elven, 144; 149, 156
Elven languages, 50, 65; and Barfield’s
theory, 67; etymologies, 89–92; Proto-
Elvish/Eldarin, 50, 75, 87; fragmenta-
tion of, 70, 76, 104. See also Sindarin;
Quenya
Elves, awakening of, 64, 72, 73–74,
112, 168; bound by Music, 128 129;
creation of, 76–77; compared with
men, 51; contrasted with Men, 120,
Index 187
122, 124, 126; conceived by Eru, 76;
contrary to light, 122; and Death, 51;
and Deathlessness, 120, 144; drawn
to light, 60, 64; as “embalmers,”170,
181n; eastward movement of, 121;
Fall of, 109; fragmentation of, 71,
77–78, 79, 122; as Firstborn, 72; and
God, 120; as imaginary creatures,
120; immortality of, 28, 144; and
Miriel, 102; migrations of, 83, 98,
117, 121, 150; as part of human
nature, 51; and Men collectively as
“humankind,” 51; speech of, 6, 65,
74; and third theme, 77, 128. See
also Avari; Calaquendi; Eldar; Half-
elven; Moriquendi; Noldor; Sindar;
Tar-eldar; Teleri; Úmanyar; Vanyar;
Widdershins
Elves of Darkness. See Döckalfar;
Moriquendi
Elves of Light. See Calaquendi; Ljösalfar
Elves of Twilight. See Sindar
Elwë, becomes Thingol, 94, 137; as El-
ven ambassador, 78; leads Teleri, 84;
etymology of, 90, 93; and Melian, 92,
93. See also Thingol
Entwives, disappearance of, 170
Eöl, 119; as Dark Elf, 122; kinsman of
Thingol, 122
Eowyn, use of “thou,” 7
Eru, 49; “Behold your Music,” 58;
concept of world, 60; and free will,
53; glossed as “The One,” 50; and
light, 89; name related to I-E er1, 50,
170; knows Music, 77; outside the
Music, 53; as Prime Mover, 50, 55,
170; rebukes Aulë, 100; and theme,
51, 109, 125; unlike biblical God,
53; speech of, 61–62; and Word, 59;
as Writer of the Story, 173. See also
Ilúvatar
Escape, 24; 25–28; from Death, 28; from
Deathlessness 28. See also Consola-
tion; Resurrection; Tolkien, “On
Fairy-stories”
Evangelium, 28, 47. See also Gospel;
Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories”
188 Index
Eucatastrophe, 21; etymology of, 27; 28;
Advent and Resurrection as, 29; 152,
172
Faërie: incantation in, 41; meaning of
23; as “perilous realm,” 21; as Other-
world, 21, 23 26,162; as sub-creation,
42
Fall of Elves. See Noldor, Fall of
Fall of Man, 4, 8, 167; all stories about
fall, 109; outcome of, 18; longing for
past, 26–27; consequences of, 18,
58, 60, 95; and “Fall of Angels,” 58;
Fëanor recapitulates, 109; Frodo reca-
pitulates, 152; as separation, 26–27,
152; as separation from light, 147
Falstaff, xvii
Fangorn, xvii; nostalgia in, 26
Fantasy, 24–25; etymology of, 45–46; re-
lated to phenomena, 45–46; as truth,
29; as enrichment of creation, 47 See
also Consolatioon; Joy; Recovery;
Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories”
Fate, 4, Music as, 52, 113–15, 139; free
will and, 139, 151, 154, 160
Feänor, abandons Fingolfin at Araman,
117; answer to Yavanna, 113, 114,
115; compared to Aulë, 104; con-
trasted with Aulë, 116; creation of
Silmarils, 98, 107; as crossing thread,
104; effect of mother’s death on, 102,
180 n; etymology as “Spirit of Fire,”
102; fall of, 109, 116; fire associa-
tions, 102, 103, 108; free will and,
113–15; “greedy love” for Silmar-
ils110; hostility to half-brothers, 110,
111; invents Tengwar; theft of White
ships, 136; Kinslaying and, 136;
marring of, 116; mirrors, Thingol,
136; Oath of, 117; as Prometheus,
103; sons of, 117, 123, scorched by
Silmarils,142; “The Shibboleth of
Fëanor,” 180 n; as sub-creator, 109,
103, 173; and “subtle skill,” 104;
true name Curufinwë, 102, 101–16;
turn toward dark, 129; as unique
creation, 117; war with Melkor/Mor-
goth, 117; death of, 117
Fellowship of the Ring, xiii
Fellowship of the Ring,156
Fenrir, 181n
Finarfin, 103, 110; father of Finrod, 124
Finrod Felagund, 129,145,174; death of,
115, 139; Eastward journey of, 124;
meeting with Atani, 124; and Bëor,
124, 126, 141
Fingolfin, 102, 110, 174; abandoned at
Araman, 117; 129; forgives Fëanor,
111; haunted by Kinslaying, 116
Fingon, 174; haunted by Kinslaying, 116
Finnish language, 87–88; as “amazing
wine,” 88
Finnish mythology, xv, 137
Finwë: as Elven ambassador, 78, 93;
father of Fëanor, 101; father of Finar-
fin and Fingolfin, 102; remarriage to
Indis, 102; leads Noldor, 84
Folklore, 67–70. See also Dorson, Rich-
ard; Müller, Max; Thompson, Stith
“The Frog Prince.” See Barfield, The
Silver Trumpet
Free will, xvii, 4; Boethius and, 53, 114,
129; Beren and, 131, 133; Fëanor and,
113–15; inner effect of, 140; Music
and, 52, 53; rebellion of, 57; fate and,
139, 151, 154, 160
“Frodo and the Cosmos.” See McLellan,
Joseph
Frodos Dreme, 161–62, 163; and me-
dieval dream vision, 164. See also
Tolkien, “The Sea-bell”
Furth, C. A., xxi
Galadriel: as Exile, 158; as Noldo, 158.
See also Phial of Galadriel
Gamgee, Gaffer: idiomatic speech of, 7;
specialty roots, 149
Gamgee, Sam, 174; on Baren, 129; com-
mon sense of, 149; invokes Elbereth,
89, 91; use of aphorisms and exple-
tives, 7
Gamgees, rural speech in, 6
Gandalf: at Amon Hen, 153; answer to
Theoden 170; and Black Speech, 103;
on free will, 151; in Moria, 158; reap-
pearance of, xxi; and Saruman, 158;

vision of Frodo at Rivendell, 156, 161
Gardner, John: on The Hobbit, xviii; on
The Lord of the Rings, xviii; review of
The Silmarillion, xviii, 114, 129
Gelmir, meeting with Tuor, 125–26,
141, 145. See also Tuor
Genesis: Chap. 1, 54, 59; Chap. 2, 54,
63; serpent of, 104
Germanic root ar, relation to I-E er1,
Eru, 50
“Giant’s Daughter.” See Thompson,
Stith; Thingol; Lúthien
Gildor, song of Elbereth, 89
Gnomes, 180n. See also Noldor
Gnostic use of demiurge, 55
God: command for light, 63; existence
of questioned, 1, 164; Hebrew name
of, 179n; humanity’s relationship to,
xi, 3, 8, 51, 100, 120; and Logos, 24,
59; as Primary Creator, 41, 173; re-
union with, 158; self-awareness and,
36; separation from, 27, 60; Steiner
on, 36; sub-creation as imitation of,
47; Tolkien calls “wholly free will
and Agent,” 53; White Light of, 1, 46,
60; as “Writer of the Story,” 172–17.
See also Eru; Elohim; Ilúvatar; Jah-
weh; Genesis
Gollum: avoidance of light, 151; at
Cracks of Doom, 111, 154; destruc-
tion of Ring, 160; and free will, 151,
154; and Grace, 154; as Grendel, 153;
infantile speech of, 7; as internal
darkness/shadow, 150, 151; plural
pronouns as divided self, 7, 151; as
Slinker and Stinker, 151; as wolf,
181n
Gondolin: Aredhel in, 123; betrayal by
Maeglin, 123; fall of, 115; as hidden
Kingdom, 125
Gospels: Consolation in, 29; as Escape,
29; etymology of word 28; Tolkien’s
belief in, 310–11; as fairy-story, 29, 47
Gothic, 7
Graal, xxi
Grail, 4
Greek, 7; derivation of fantasy, 45–46;
derivation of phenomena, 45–46;
Index 189
katastrephein, meaning of, 27; logos,
meaning of, 38–39; pneuma, meaning
of, 38, 54; 74
Greek mythology, as literature for chil-
dren, 148
Grendel, as human, 18; 21; exemplifies
inner darkness, 150, as shadow, 153
Grey-elves. See Sindar
Half-elven, 182n; and “Divine Plan,”
145–46; freedom to chose fate, 144;
first unions Beren and Lúthien, Tuor,
and Idril, 182n. See also Dior, Elrond,
Arwen
Hastings, Peter, Tolkien letter to, 53
Hebrew mythology, xv
Hebrew language. See Elohim; Jahweh;
Ruach
Helms, Randel, Tolkien and the Silmar-
ils, xix
Hobbits, xvi; as branch of human race,
51, 147, 148, 154; close to earth, 149;
and Men collectively as “mankind,”
52; necessary to mythology, 148; not
originally part of mythology, 147;
reflect reader, 149
Horace, xii
Huor, 174
Húrin, 120, 174; fight against Morgoth,
129
Idril, 119; etymology of name, 91; and
Maeglin, 123, 182n
Illuin. See Lamps
Ilúvatar, 49; epithet for Eru, 50; etymol-
ogy of, 50; Gift of, 51, 144, 160; light
of, 89, 92; glossed as “the One”; Sec-
ond/Younger Children of, 120, 124,
127; sole conceiver of Men and Elves,
76; themes of, 127; third theme, 128;
and Word, 59. See also Eru
Ingwë: as Elven ambassador, 78; leads
Vanyar, 83
Indis: mother of Finarfin and Fingolfin,
102, 124; second wife of Finwë, 102;
as Vanya, 124
Indo-European: definitions and roots,
178n; language theory, 50; model for
190 Index
Indo-European (cont.)
Proto-Eldarin, 75; paradigm, 71; roots,
*ar, 50 ; bhà-1 46; bhà-2 46; dà-, 55;
er1, 50, 170; gàu-, 28; mei-1 ; sent-,
122; teks-,104; werg1, 55; wi- 122
Inklings, vii, x, xix, 35, 36
Jahweh, God of Genesis 2, 54
John, St., Gospel According to, 38–39,
41, 59
Joy, 27, 152. See also Consolation; Re-
covery; Tolkien, “On Fairy-stories”
Joyce, James, Finnegan’s Wake, xix
Judeo-Christian mythology, 161
Jung, Carl, 179n
Kalevala, 137
King James Bible, 38–39. See also
Genesis
Kinslaying, 115, 116, 117, 123, 135, 136
Lamps in Middle-earth, 62–63; de-
stroyed by Melkor, 63, 89; fire
compared to Fëanor, 108; light of, 97;
kindled by Varda, 98
Langland, William, Piers Plowman,164
Language. See Black Speech; Elven lan-
guages; Eldarin; Indo-European; Proto-
Eldarin; Quenya; Sindarin; Tolkien,
invented languages
Latin, 7; evangelium as “good news,” 28
(see also Gospel); spiritus, meaning
of, 38, 54, 74
Laurelin, Sun as fruit of, 121. See also
Trees
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 68
Lewis, C. S.: and Barfield, 35–36, 39, 48;
Christianity based in logic, xx; com-
pared to Tolkien, xix–xx; The Lion,
the Witch, and the Wardrobe, xxi;
“Mythopoeia” addressed, 42; Tolkien
“inside language,” 9
Lindar. See Teleri
Ljösalfar, light elves in Icelandic Eddas, 83
Loge. See Wagner, Richard
Logos, 24, 38–39, 70, 95, 156, 172; as
law “in which we’re made,” 43; as
Music, 59; words as subdivision of, 41
Logres, xx
Lórien: fading of, 170; as island of light,
150; nostalgia in 26
“Looney,” 162–63, 168. See also Bag-
gins, Frodo; Tolkien, “The Sea-bell”
Lúthien, 119; compared to Melian,
Yavanna 132; compared to Silmaril,
138, 140; death of, 139, 143, 144; as
diminished light, 131–33; fate and
free will in, 131, 133; as “Giant’s
Daughter, 137; as inherent light, 131,
133; and Maeglin, 132; as reality and
symbol, 140; and recovery of Silmaril,
133; second death of, 143; Silmaril
as bride-price for, 134, 137, 138; as
subject of quest, 142; as Tinúviel, 91,
132; as vampire bat, 145
Mabinogion. See“Culhwch and Olwen”
McLellan, Joseph, review of The Silmar-
illion, xvii
Maeglin, and Idril, 123; betrays Gon­
dol-in, 123–24; character of affected
by Kinslaying, 115; Child of Twilight;
123, 124; as mixed light, 122; parent­-
age of, 122; tortured by Morgoth, 123;
welcomed by Turgon, 123
Maggot, Farmer, 149
Maiar: subordinate to Valar, 56; off-
spring of Eru’s thought, 56
Mandos: Curse of, 116; halls of, 117,
143, 180n
Manwë: and Barfield, 54, 98; “The
Breather,” 54, 98; Eru’s deputy, 54;
hallows Lamps, 62; Lord of Arda, 98;
lord of air, 63; relationship to Vanyar,
98; vision of, 90
Melian, 119; as diminished/reflected
light, 92, 93, 134, 140, 143; Girdle of,
123; light and song, 92, 93; as light in
Middle-earth, 120; as Maia, 2; mother
of Lúthien, 131; thematic associa-
tion with Varda, Yavanna, 92; and
Thingol, 92–93
Melkor: alienates Fëanor from half-
brothers, 110; counter-theme, 57, 127;
destroys Lamps, 63; destroys Trees,
111, 112, 116; discord of, 58; epithet

Alkar, 91; Fall of, 109, 179n; lust for
Silmarils, 110; marring of Fëanor, 116;
as Morgoth, 117; opposed to Valar, 62;
reappearance of, 102; rebellion, 62,
77; steals Silmarils, 113; wars of, 72,
82. See also Morgoth
Men: awakening after death of Trees,
121; compared to Elves, 51; con-
trasted with Elves, 120, 122, 124; and
Death, 51, 120, 144; “designed to
replace the Elves,” 145; derived from
Eru, 76; drawn to light, 60, 122; and
Elves collectively as “humankind,”
52; as Followers, 120; free will of,
128–29, 129–30, 170; and Hobbits
collectively as “mankind,” 52; meet-
ing with Finrod, 124; and memory,
124; mortality of, 28, 144; as Second/
Younger Children, 120, 124; west-
ward movement of, 121, 150
Metanoia. See Reversal
Milton, John, xv; and rebellion of Lucifer,
57; reteller of Christian mythos, xv
Miriel, 101; consumed by Fëanor, 102,
108; death of, 102, 144, 180n
Moon: as flower of Telperion; 121; as
last light of Trees,121; light contrasted
with Silmarils, 121; “light sullied by
Evil,” 64, 121; movement of, 121–22,
150; suggests ripening process, 121
Mordor: industrialism in, 26; Frodo’s
defeat in, 152; language/speech of, 6,
70, 103
Morgoth: and Beren and Lúthien, 145;
defeat of, 140; flees Eastward, 121;
Iron Crown of, 134, 137, 140; in Mid-
dle-earth, 120; scorched by Silmarils,
142; Silmarils hidden by, 120; tortures
Maeglin, 123; wars in Middle-earth,
125, 150
Moria, Gandalf in, 158
Moriquendi: as Calaquendi term, 82;
concept borrowed from Eddas, 83;
as Elves of Dark, 81; metaphorical
meaning of, 82–83, 84
Müller, Max: “disease of language,” 68,
79; Indo-Aryan theory of, 68–70; solar
mythology, 68
Index 191
Murray, Fr. Robert, Tolkien letter to,
xx, 70
Music, as symbol for light, xviii, 114
Music, the, 51; blended themes in, 128;
conflict/disharmony in, 127; descrip-
tion of, 62; as fate, 52, 113–15, 137,
139, 140, 170; as initiating force of
creation, 57; literality in sub-created
world, 58; pattern in, 126; played
aright, 160; plays out, 117; and Ring;
as thought and vision, 59; in water,
99, 180n; as Word, 74
Muspell, 7
“Mythology for England.” See Tolkien,
Silmarillion
Myths and legends, truth in, 9–10
Narnia, xx
Nauglamír, 144
New Testament, xix, 28
Nightingale. See Lúthien
New York Times, xi, xviii
Noldor: abandon Quenya for Sindarin,
135, 136; assimilation into Middle-
earth through language, 135; and
Aule, 100; in “Book of Lost Tales, 99;
as Calaquendi, 150; as Calaquendi,
Eldar, Tareldar, 85; as Deep Elves,
83; etymology of name, 84; Eastward
movement of, 121, 150; Exile of, 150;
exodus from Valinor, 115; Fall of,
109, 121; human characteristics of,
100–101; importance to The Silmaril-
lion, 99; as “lords of the unsullied
Light,” 115; naming of Vanyar, 84; re-
turn to Middle-earth, 117, 120; return
to Valinor, 150
Noldorin. See Sindarin
Norns, names of, 171
Norse mythology, xv, 7, 83; as literature
for children, 148, 160
Old English, 7–8, 178n; in Beowulf, 15;
verbs, 125, 157
Old Forest, xvii
Old High German, 122. See also Wid-
dershins, Indo-European roots
Old Norse, 104, 171
192 Index
Old Testament, xvii, xix
Olwë, as leader of Teleri, 93
Orcs, language and diction, 6. See also
Black Speech
Ormal. See lamps
Oromë, 81
Oxford Magazine, 162. See also Tolkien,
“The Sea-bell”
Ossë: as Maia, 56, guardian of Teleri, 99
Phial of Galadriel: compared to Frodo,
159; contrast with Ring, 159; as splin-
ter of light, 158; as star light, 159
Plato: Timaeus, 25; use of demiurge, 55
Proto-Eldarin, 87, 89
Providence, xviii, 114, 129
Pythagoras, 51; music of the spheres,
57–58; music as Logos, 59
Quendi: meaning of word, 74, as whole
community, 78; division of, 82
Quenya, 50, 70, 72, 132, 172, 180n; as
Elven identity, 74; as “Elven-latin,”
94, 135; difference from Sindarin,
92; language of light, 135; less used
than Sindarin, 88; morphemes in, 90;
names and name elements in, 90–91,
93; phonology modeled on Finnish,
87; spoken only in Valinor, 87
Ragnarök, 160, 182n
Rang, Mr, Tolkien letter to, 167
Recovery, 156. See also Tolkien, “On
Fairy-stories”
Repentance, Tolkien on, 158. See also
Reversal
Resurrection, 30. See also Christ;
Eucatastrophe; Joy; Tolkien, “On
Fairy-stories”
Revelation, Book of, xvii
Reversal: as “turn,” 29, 172; as repen-
tance, 29, 172. See also Tolkien, “On
Fairy-stories”
Ring, the, xv, xvi; at Amon Hen, 151; at
Cracks of Doom, 151, 153; contrast
with Phial, 159; destruction of,
154,160; and fading, 156; “fiery let-
ters” on, 103; governed by fate, 154;
compared with Silmarils, 141–42,
143; inherently evil, 141–42; at work
in Shire, 150; 150–57; world of, 150,
157
Ringwraiths, 89, 156 157
Rivendell: as island of light, 150; Frodo
at, 156; Gandals’s vision at, 156, 161
Ruach, as breath, 54
Rúmil, creates writing, 101, 103
Sackvill-Bagginses, 157
Sarehole, 2
Saruman, 116, contrast with Frodo,
158–59; industrialism of 26; of Many
Colours, 158; and white light broken,
158
Sauron, 116, 134, 145; at Amon Hen,
151, 153; as external darkness, 150;
power in Middle-earth, 150
Shakespeare, William, xvii
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 181n
Shippey, T. A.: J. R. R. Tolkien: Author
of the Century, viii, xix; The Road to
Middle-earth, xix
Shire, the, xvii, 159; corrupted, 26; Fro-
do and, 155; Gildor in, 89; as island of
light, 150; legends in Red Book, 161;
nostalgia for past in, 26
Sigurd, and dragon hoard, 110
Silmaril, the, 174; as bride-price for
Lúthien, 134, 137; etymology of word,
90; fate of, 140; last sight of Thingol,
145; light in Phial, 159; Nauglamír
as setting for, 144; as object of quest,
142; as possessed light, 136; quest
for, 139, recovery of, 139, 140; as star,
147, 150; sign of hope, 140; as test,
142, 143
Silmarillion, problem of name, 177n
Silmarils, 97, 107; compared to Children
of Ilúvatar, 108; compared to One
Ring, 141–42; final disposition of,
147; as last of light, 117, 119, 146;
light of Trees in, 109; fate of, 113,
115; in Middle-earth, 120; recovery of,
160; as unique creations, 117
Silver Tree. See Telperion; Trees
Sindar, 70; as Elves of Twilight, 92;

etymology of, 92; Melian and Thingol
as, 92; as Moriquendi, 92, 134; refuse
Quenya, 136
Sindarin, 70, 72, 132, 172, 180n; differ-
ences from Quenya, 92, 94; language
of twilight, 135; more widely used
than Quenya, 88; morphemes in, 90;
names and name-elements in, 90–91,
93; phonology modeled on Welsh, 87;
sound diminution in, 94; split from
Proto-Eldarin, 87
Smaug, Bilbo’s response to sight of, xxi
Spell, meanings of, xii
Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene,
177n
Steiner, Rudolf, 36
Strider, speech of, 7
Struldbrugs, 144, 181n
Súlimo. See Manwë
Sun: as fruit suggests ripening process,
121; last light of Trees, 121; light
contrasted with Silmarils, 121; light
“sullied by Evil,” 64, 121; movement
of, 121–22, 150
Swift, Jonathan, 144, 181n
Tar-eldar, High Elves, 78; etymology
of, 78
Teleri: as coastal, marginal, 99; Kin-
slaying of at Alqualondë, 116, 117,
135, 136; Last-comers, 83; led by
Elwë, 84, 93; etymology of, 84; least
eager for light, 98–99; as Lindar,
99; and water, Ulmo, Ossë, 99; and
White Ships, 115
Telperion: dew used for stars, 64; light
of, 73, 89; moon as flower of, 121. See
also Trees
Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 171
Theoden, speech to Gandalf, 170
Thingol, 92, 116, 119; as bound by
Music, 137, 139, 140; “bound” to
Silmaril, 141, 143; as Calaquendi,
131, 134, 143; change of name, 136–
37; chooses secondary over primary
light, 134, 140, 143; contrast with
Beren, 133, 142, 143; comparison
with Fëanor, 136, 137, 141, 142; 143;
Index 193
consent to Lúthien’s marriage, 141;
demands Silmaril as bride-price,
137, 143; death of, 139, 140, 144–45;
devises quest, 145; as diminished
light, 93–94; as Elwë, 93; and family
of Húrin, 141; fate and free will in,
131, 140; father of Lúthien, 131;
forbids Quenya, 135–36, 143; as
“giant,” 137; as “Greycloak,” 93–94,
137; helps Men toward light, 145;
king of Doriath, 134; as light in
Middle-earth, 120, 134; and Melian,
92, 93; path crossed by Beren, 133;
prohibition against Noldor, 123,
134; possession of Silmaril, 136,
141; possessiveness in, 137–38, 140,
141; Silmaril agent of fall, 141; turn
toward dark, 129, 135–36, 138, 140,
141, 143, 145
Thorin Oakenshield, desire for Arken-
stone as Fall, 110
Thompson, Stith, Motif Index of Folk-
lore, 137
Time Magazine. See The Silmarillion,
reviews of
Time & Tide, 165
Tinúviel, etymology of, 132. See also
Lúthien
Tolkien, Christopher: editor of The
History of Middle-earth, vii, xiv, 40;
editor of The Silmarillion, viii, 1; edi-
tor of The Monsters and the Critics,
177n; editor of Unfinished Tales, viii;
on father’s languages, 50, 72, 74; on
father’s work, xiv, 50–51, 71; Fore-
word to The Silmarillion, xv
Tolkien, Arthur, 2
Tolkien, Edith, 173–74
Tolkien, Hilary, 2, 3
Tolkien, J. R. R., 1; Arthurian legends
rejected as England’s myth, xx;; on
Barfield’s influence, xxi, 34–35, 39,
49; Catholicism of, xix, 3, 47, 49;
Christianity of, xx, 30; Christian-
ity “fatal” in secondary myth, xx;;
compared with C. S. Lewis, xix–xx;
compared with Charles Williams,
194 Index
Tolkien, J. R. R. (cont.)
xix–xx; Communion and, 169; dic-
tionary, work on, 34; invented
languages, 34, 61, 67; The Letters, xx,
1, 9; 28, 54, 70, 147, 167; The Lord of
the Rings dependent on Silmarillion,
xv; God and mother’s death, 3; histo-
ry as “long defeat,” 4; loss of father, 2;
relationship to mother, 2–3; mother’s
death, 2; mother and Catholic faith,
3; “mythology for England,” 34; as
philologist, 5–7; Sarehole, childhood
in, 2; as “two people,” 3; Valedictory
Address, 59
——critical essays: “English and
Welsh,” 88; “Beowulf: The Monsters
and the Critics,” xvi; Israel Gollancz
Memorial Lecture, 11; tower al-
legory in, 14–15, 30, 180n; fallen
man in, 43; “Chaucer as a Philolo-
gist: The Reeve’s Tale, 5–6, 25, 59;
“On Fairy-stories,” 21-31, 73, 81,
95, 156; Barfield’s impact on, 40; 67;
“Cauldron of Story,” 23; Consolation
in 25–29; debt to Coleridge, 22, 24;
25; as defense of poesy, 22; Escape
in, 25–26, 29; evangelium in 28;
Fantasy in, ix, 24, 29; and folklore
controversy, 22, 67, 69–70; “green
sun” in, 60–61; hoarding in, 110; joy
in, 28, 29; language as “disease of
mythology,” 69, 95; Monsters and
the Critics, ix; “mythical grammar”
in, 41–42; “Pot of Soup,” 23; Recov-
ery in, 25, 29; and Silmarillion, 41;
sub-creation in, 9; “Sigelwara Land,”
7–8; 25, 39, 59; 69
——major works: The Book of Lost
Tales Part I, vii; 130; The History
of Middle-earth, xiv, xv; linguistic
material in, 71 (see also Tolkien,
minor works); The Hobbit, xiii, xv;
as children’s book, 147; first chapter
echoed in the Lord of the Rings, 147;
philological remark in, xxi; success
of, 22; possessiveness in, 110; The
Lays of Beleriand, 181n; The Lord
of the Rings, 116, 162; appendices,
xvi; Christian references removed,
xx; as completion of Silmarillion,
xv–xvi; Death and Immortality as
themes in, 28, 52; Elbereth as name
in, 89, 91; as “exploration in un-
known country,” 9; informed with
Christianity, xx; hobbits in, 147; as
“new Hobbit,” 22, 147; importance
of, ix; as journey, 150; Mclellan
connects to Silmarillion, xvii; more
grounded than The Silmarillion, xiii;
xix; and “On Fairy-stories,” 40, 49;
philology in , 6; popularity of xiv;
relevance to contemporary world,
viii–ix, speech in, 6; Tom Bombadil
in, 112; and twentieth century, 152;
The Lost Road, “Etymologies” in, 50,
71–72, 75, 88, 132, 178n, 180n; Elven
languages listed, 72; “Lhammas” in,
71; linguistic material in, 71; Núm-
enorean segment of, 91; Silmarillion,
vii; beginnings of, 34; Barfield’s influ-
ence in, 40, 41; as “dark antiquity of
sorrow,” 22; Frodo’s story as continu-
ation, 149; “green sun” as light in,
61; as literature for children, 147;
“Mythopoeia” foreshadows theme,
43; as illustration of “On Fairy-
stories,” 41; problems of publishing
xv, 147; as “vast backcloth” xvi;
The Peoples of Middle-earth 180n;
The Silmarillion,vii, 49, 107, 139;
Appendix , 50, 74, 76, 88, 89, 132,
178n; background to The Lord of the
Rings, xvi; and Barfield’s theory xxii,
67, 69–70; Beren story “chief part of,”
174; no Christian reference in, xx;
choice in, 52; as “cosmogonic” xix;
Death and Immortality as motif in,
28; difficult and problematic, xiii–xiv;
Eru in, 55; fate and free will in, 137;
gloss on Christianity, xxi; implica-
tions of Eä, 59; importance of, ix;
Index of Names, 59; languages in, 72;
as “mythology for England” xiv–xv;
names constructed from Quenya and
Sindarin, 88; as parent myth, xiii;
synoptic version of mythology viii;

place in canon, xiii; second edition
of xiv; reviews of xvii–xviii; tales as
“given things,” 9, 53; Unfinished
Tales, as supplement to The Silmaril-
lion, viii; 53, 119, 125; The War of the
Jewels linguistic material in, 71; Tuor
in, 182n “Quendi and Eldar” in, 71,
73, 75, 81–82; 84, 85
——minor/unpublished works: The
Adventures of Tom Bombadil, 161;
“Book of Lost Tales,”127, 130; as
beginning of mythology, vii; Noldor
in, 99; “Imram,” 163; Lay of Leithi-
an,144, 181n; “Mythopoeia,” 42–43,
45, 70, 78, 100; “The Sea-bell,” 155,
161–68, 172; “The Shores of Faery,”
40; The Notion Club Papers, 163;
“The Voyage of Earendel,” 34, 40
Tolkien, Mabel, 2, 3
Tolkien, Michael, 1, 164, 169
Tooks, 6
Trees: creation and light of, 63–64;
death of, 97, 109, 111, 112, 113, 117,
119, 131; as legend, 120; light as
dew, 64; light as primary, 134; light
combined in Silmarils, 98, 109; light
confined to Valinor, 63; light of, 77,
78, 92, 93, 94, 97, 108, 141, 143, 144,
150; light of at height, 101; mingling
of lights in 112; preserved by Fëanor,
107; relation to Music, song, 63,
92; revival of, 113, 136; as unique
creations, 117
Turgon, 119; ruler of Gondolin, 122;
brother of Aredhel, 122; Tuor in
search of, 125
Túrin, 120, 174; tragic life of, 129
Tuor, 53, 91, 120, 174; meeting with
Gelmir and Arminas, 125, 126, 141;
union woth Idril, 125, 192n
Tyr, 181n
Ulmo, 53; as Lord of Waters, 56 ; as
guardian of Teleri, 99; directs Tuor’s
journey, 125
Úmanyar, “not of Aman,” 84; etymol-
ogy of, 85; as Moriquendi, “Elves of
Dark,” 85
Index 195
Undying Lands, 156
Ungoliant, destruction of Trees, 111,
112; as perversion of light, 112; Un-
light of 112
Unwin, Sir Stanley, xiv, 87
Valar, as “angelic powers,” 54; as demi-
urgic, 55; place in hierarchy, 54–56;
as pagan gods, 55–56; as sub-creators,
54, 55, 59–60; limited knowledge of
Music, 77; makers of Music; 61; name
for Elves, 76; no part in creation of
Elves, Men; Powers of the World, 54,
77; sub-divisions of Eru, 173; sum-
mon Elves to Valinor, 77
Valarin, language of the Valar, 85
Valinor, 162; darkening of, 112; Elven
migrations to, 83–84; harvest festival
in, 111; and High Elves, 70; as holy
place, 150; home of Valar; light before
fall, 63–64; light of, 81; metaphori-
cal and symbolic light, 120, 135;
Noontide of, 101, 110; shores of, 99;
summons to, 78; Trees in, 63. See
also Aman
Vanyar: beloved of Manwë, Varda, 98; as
Fair Elves, 83, 134; etymology of, 84;
affinity for light, 98, 129
Varda: as bringer of vision, 89–90; as
Kindler, 91; lights Lamps, 62 98;
goddess of light, 63; creates stars,
64; splinters light, 64, 73; and light,
89, 92; epithets in Quenya, Sindarin,
89–90, 91; hallows Silmarils, 108; and
Vanyar, 98
“Voyage of Bran,” 163
“Voyage of Mael Dúin,” 163
“Voyage of St Brendan,” 163. See also
Tolkien, “Imram”
Wagner, Richard, 103
Waldman, Milton: Tolkien letter to, xiv,
xv, xx–xxi; on Valar, 54
Waters of Awakening. See Cuiviénen;
Elves
Weathertop, 89, 156
Welsh language, 88
196 Index
White Light, 1, 4, 179n; and Barfield’s
theory, 46–47; Frodo filled with,156,
157, 158; made whole by Féanor, 109;
in “Mythopoeia,” 42–43; 70; refract-
ed, 97; Saruman and, 158;
White Ships: theft of, 115; parallel with
Silmarils, 115; as unique creations,
117
Widdershins, against light, 122; ety-
mology of 122; Frodo’s journey, 151
Wilde, Oscar, xi
Williams, Charles: compared to Tolkien,
xix–xx; War in Heaven, xxi; Arthu-
rian poems, xxi;
World War I, 33, 34
Yavanna: Fëanor’s answer to, 113, 114,
155; asks for Lamps, 62; sings Trees
into being, 63, 92; request for Silmar-
ils, 112