Refiner’s Fire: Answers about Middle-Earth

The questions can finally be answered. Who rules Middle-earth? How was it created? Where did evil come from? What is its theology—or does it have any? Is it pagan or Christian?

Christopher Tolkien has completed his editing of The Silmarillion (Houghton Mifflin, 368 pp., $10.95), which was to tell the tale of the three powerful rings made by the elf Fëanor. Rumors of its imminent publication began shortly after the Ring trilogy became popular more than ten years ago.

Tolkien fans who expect a gripping tale like The Lord of the Rings will be disappointed. The book reads more like Bulfinch’s Mythology; it merely summarizes events. In his introduction Christopher Tolkien explains that at the end of his life his father came to regard The Silmarillion as a compendium rather than a unified, structured story. And that’s as good a description as any.

Despite that major weakness, the book is interesting. We learn who and how Middle-earth was created. There is one being who rules its universe. Eru, the One, or Ilúvatar, created other holy beings, the Ainur. With them he created Middle-earth through a “Great Music.” But the mightiest of the Ainur, Melkor, had music of his own to compose—and it was evil. The account of creation is brief, and the reader may be tempted to draw close parallels with the creation of earth and the fall of Satan. Resist it. Tolkien disliked allegory and tried to stamp it out wherever he found it. He didn’t succeed in his own case, though.

The account of creation shows that Tolkien had a thoroughly developed theology upon which The Lord of the Rings rests. And it sounds rather Christian. Ilúvatar rules; he periodically sends messengers, such as the wizards, to Middle-earth to help his creatures; he has an intermediary, Manwë, to whom elves and men can plead for aid. Tolkien says that he is the “dearest to Ilúvatar and understands most clearly his purposes.”

We learn how elves and men, the children of Ilúvatar, were made. Dwarves were created by Aulë, one of the Ainur, who was impatient for the appearance of the children and thought he’d try out his own ideas. Tolkien gives no information about the coming of hobbits, though. Melkor perverts the elves and they rebel against the Ainur. The result: the first bloodshed, elf on elf. Sounds like Cain and Abel, right? Resist those allegorical urges. Melkor then perverts men. He succeeds both times by convincing the creatures that the Ainur and ultimately Ilúvatar want to keep them from freedom and knowledge. Again, a familiar biblical theme. The elves are immortal, but to men Ilúvatar gives the gift of death. At first they have very long lives. But their lives get shorter the farther away from the elder days and righteousness they go. Again reminiscent of the days of men after expulsion from Eden. Once Tolkien gets past the first days of Middle-earth the Genesis-like sound of the story weakens.

The strength of the Ring trilogy is its originality. Tolkien makes new creatures and myths. Yet in The Silmarillion he falls back on Genesis in an obvious fashion. Even his sentence structure and writing style have too much in common with the King James Version. The first few pages of the book are difficult to read because Tolkien constantly reverses the normal English sentence pattern and uses an irritating sing-song rhythm. For example, “Then Ilúvatar spoke, and he said: ‘Mighty are the Ainur, the mightiest among them is Melkor; but that he may know, and all the Ainur, that I am Ilúvatar, those things that ye have sung, I will show them forth, that ye may see what ye have done.’ ” His vocabulary, too, weakens the tale: thee, thou, ye, hearken, and it came to pass recur. These archaisms unnecessarily disrupt the flow of the tale, without providing a “high” style for the high matter it describes.

As the book progresses Tolkien leaves these infelicitous phrases behind—or maybe one gets used to them. And in certain chapters Tolkien stops summarizing and tells a good tale: “Of Beren and Luthien” and “Of the Voyage of Eärendil and the War of Wrath” are two examples.

Where does Sauron fit in? He was Melkor’s most important servant. After Manwë shut Melkor “beyond the World in the Void that is without,” Sauron began an evil work where his master had stopped his.

Because of the large number of characters involved in the tales and the variety of names for each one, the stories often are difficult to follow. But Tolkien provides some genealogical charts to help straighten out who is related to whom (for instance, Elrond is related to Aragom). The different groups of elves and their feuds with each other and with the various tribes of men show the breadth of Tolkien’s imagination and the detail in which he worked. But in the mass of material the reader searches anxiously for a familiar character like Galadriel or Gandalf. Christopher Tolkien indexes every name and gives short descriptions for each. The ingredients for an exciting creation are here, but without the chef to mix them we get nothing of what the flavor could be.

Fortunately The Silmarillion is not the only posthumously published volume of Tolkien’s. His fine translations of Gawain, Pearl, and Orfeo show his skill as both writer and scholar. For readers unconvinced that those medieval works still have power, Tolkien’s introduction should change their minds. His imagination was steeped in such tales as these and they are central in understanding his style and his myths.

Last December Houghton Mifflin published The Father Christmas Letters, edited by Christopher’s wife Baillie. Each year for over twenty years Tolkien sent his children a letter, supposedly from the North Pole. As Father Christmas he described the amusing and alarming antics of Polar Bear, snow-elves, and Red Gnomes. The book includes the large full-color drawings that Tolkien always sent with his letters. And in true Tolkien fashion we have another invented alphabet, the Goblin alphabet, developed by Polar Bear. The book is a delight.

These latest books, along with the biography by Humphrey Carpenter (see September 9 issue, page 35), provide a more complete picture of the art and imagination of J. R. R. Tolkien. As Carpenter explains, Tolkien left thousands of unpublished manuscript pages. Perhaps there will be more books to come. Christopher and Baillie Tolkien are to be commended for the work that they’ve already accomplished.

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