by Tom Shippey
Characters and Cobwebs
Aridness is, however, a vice of which The Silmarillion stands accused: partly, no doubt, from a (mistaken) disappointment in those who wanted a second Lord of the Rings, but largely, as was said at the start of this chapter, because of the absence from it of ‘mediators’ like the hobbits and a generally novelistic mode of presentation. Much can be said about the ‘meaning’ of The Silmarillion, and more about its ‘origins’. But it is more important in the end to get some idea of how to read it. And there are ways to appreciate The Silmarillion better, always provided that one is prepared to make certain basic assumptions.
One of these is that ‘character’ is in a sense fixed, static, even diagrammatic. Such was the common assumption of earlier times; as has been noted above, the modern saying that ‘all power tends to corrupt’ (with its assumption that character changes) is prefigured in Old English only by the saying that ‘a man shows what he’s like when he can do what he wants’ (which assumes that changes are only apparent). The convention of Norse saga, then, is to say what a man is like as soon as he comes into the story: ‘He was very hard to manage as he grew up, taciturn and unaffectionate, quarrelsome both in words and deeds’ (Grettir, in Grettir’s saga), or ‘he had a crooked nose and teeth which stuck out, looked rather ugly in the mouth and yet extremely warlike’ (Skarphethinn, in Njál’s saga). These statements are always true, though there is still an interest, and a suspense, in seeing how events will prove them so. In The Silmarillion Tolkien follows this convention closely: Fëanor ‘was tall, and fair of face, and masterful, his eyes piercingly bright and his hair raven-dark; in the pursuit of all his purposes eager and steadfast. Few ever changed his courses by counsel, none by force’; or, later, ‘Húrin was of less stature than his fathers, or his son after him; but he was tireless and enduring in body, lithe and swift after the manner of his mother’s kin, Hareth of the Haladin’.
This second ‘character-sketch’ furthermore introduces another point in which The Silmarillion follows Norse belief, if not Norse convention: this is the conviction, shared also by the Beowulf-poet, that people are their heredity. Sagas commonly introduce characters with a list of their ancestors, often significant in their distinction, wisdom, ferocity, or unreliability. Tolkien did not trespass so far on the short patience of modern times, but he did supply diagrams and family-trees: it is essential that these should be borne in mind. Thus one could easily say that the central tragedy of the Noldor is one between sámmoeðri and sundrmoeðri,16 between fullbrothers, half-brothers and cousins, a tragedy of mixed blood. The ‘Elves of the Light’ are divided into three groups, in order of seniority, or wisdom, or attachment to the Valar: the Vanyar, Noldor, Teleri. Fëanor is pure Noldor on both sides, as are his sons. After the death of his mother, though, his father marries again, so that Fëanor has two half-brothers (Fingolfin, Finarfin). It is vital to remember that their mother is not of the Noldor, but of the ‘senior’ race of the Vanyar. While junior to Fëanor in birth and even in talent, therefore, his two half-brothers are marked from the beginning as superior to him in restraint and generosity. Their children are then again differentiated by a further ‘outbreeding’, in that Finarfin, of mixed descent himself, marries a wife from the ‘junior’ elvish branch, the Teleri; his sons and daughters, who are only a quarter Noldor – they include Finrod Felagund and Galadriel – are more sympathetic than their uncle Fingolfin’s children such as the reckless Aredhel (mixed Noldor/Vanyar), and markedly more so than their other, pure-blooded Noldor cousins, the sons of Fëanor. One needs, perhaps, to ponder the diagram on p. 305 of The Silmarillion to see this clear. However once the picture is clear one can appreciate the significance of some of Tolkien’s oppositions, between Galadriel and Aredhel, for instance (bold as against rash), or between Finrod and Turgon (both founders of Hidden Kingdoms, but the latter retaining a connection with the higher wisdom of the Valar which the former, related to elves who refused the crossing to Aman, has given up). Nor do the oppositions stay on the level of diagram; they go on to shape narratives, and individual scenes.
The whole story of the ruin of Doriath, for instance, might be said to run from the moment when Caranthir, fourth son of Fëanor, reacts angrily to the fact that his Teleri-descended cousins have been talking to their maternal great-uncle Elwë Singollo (in Sindarin Elu Thingol or ‘Greycloak’), to whom he is not related at all. He says (p. 112):
‘Let not the sons of Finarfin run hither and thither with their tales to this Dark Elf in his caves! Who made them our spokesmen to deal with him? And though they be come indeed to Beleriand, let them not so swiftly forget that their father is a lord of the Noldor, though their mother be of other kin.’
The last clause is weighted with contempt – an improper contempt, if one remembers that the ‘sons of Finarfin’ have both ‘junior’ Teleri and ‘senior’ Vanyar blood from their mother and grandmother. There is a further irony in the phrase ‘this Dark Elf in his caves’, for though Elwë is king of the Dark Elves, he himself is not one, since he was one of the three original ambassadors to the light of Valinor, though his love for Melian kept him from returning to it. Fifty-six pages earlier we were told that he alone of his people had seen ‘the Trees in the day of their flowering, and king though he was of Úmanyar, he was not accounted among the Moriquendi, but with the Elves of the Light …’ The reader who has forgotten his genealogies, or forgotten the original embassy to Valinor, or never realised the equation of ‘Dark Elves’ and ‘Moriquendi’, is left at a loss. The tension of the moment, the skewed relation between truth and whole truth, pass him by. And once the thread is lost, the bitter resentment of Angrod seventeen pages later, the cold mood in which Nargothrond is founded by Angrod’s brother Finrod, the whole structure indeed of The Silmarillion lose their connections and begin to seem mere happenstance.
An underlying stasis has to be picked out from genealogies, positions on the order of march to and from Valinor, relationships of all kinds. Yet once that has been done, it is possible to see a kind of dynamism in The Silmarillion, a chain of causes and effects. As often with Norse saga, a good question to keep asking is, with each disaster, ‘who is to blame?’ Answers are never simple. Take, for instance, the fall of Gondolin, the ‘Hidden City’ of which Tolkien had written as far back as 1917, and which had made its way even into The Hobbit. It was founded by Turgon under the direct guidance of the Valar, and from it comes in the end the stock of Eärendil, the Intercessor. How was it betrayed to Morgoth? Unfolding the answer takes in much of The Silmarillion, but one can say that again it turns on a ‘lyric core’, and a conflict of kinship.
The ‘lyric core’ is the single scene in which Húrin, ‘mightiest of the warriors of mortal Men’, having sat twenty-eight years as Morgoth’s prisoner observing the torments of his race, is released to wander. Neither elves nor men will take him in. He remembers his boyhood stay in Gondolin, as also the fact that he was captured, and his house destroyed, while covering the retreat of Turgon at the Fen of Serech. He goes therefore towards Gondolin, hoping the eagles will carry him to it. But though the eagles see him and tell Turgon, the king of Gondolin refuses to trust the man who saved him once; and when he changes his mind, after sitting ‘long in thought’, it is too late:
For Húrin stood in despair before the silent cliffs of the Echoriath, and the westering sun, piercing the clouds, stained his white hair with red. Then he cried aloud in the wilderness, heedless of any ears, and he cursed the pitiless land; and standing at last upon a high rock he looked towards Gondolin and called in a great voice: ‘Turgon, Turgon, remember the Fen of Serech! O Turgon, will you not hear in your hidden halls?’ But there was no sound save the wind in the dry grasses. ‘Even so they hissed in Serech at the sunset’, he said; and as he spoke the sun went behind the Mountains of Shadow, and a darkness fell about him, and the wind ceased, and there was silence in the waste.
Yet there were ears that heard the words that Húrin spoke, and report of all came
soon to the Dark Throne in the north; and Morgoth smiled. (p. 228)
Obviously, everything in this scene is emblematic. Even narrative almost disappears, for the ‘long’ and thoughtful delay of Turgon seems to take no time at all. Húrin is in the same place, listening to the same ‘hissing’ wind, after the delay as before. In fact Turgon’s pause is there only to allow him to make a fateful decision and then regret it – or, one might say, to prove the adjective ‘pitiless’ in the passage quoted. It is not the land which has no pity, but Turgon, and the elves and men who rejected Húrin earlier. By similar transference cliffs are ‘silent’, grasses ‘dry’, the red sunset and white hair stand for future catastrophe and present despair, while the sun behind ‘Shadow’ marks the beginning of the end for Gondolin, as it revives the memory of a past sunset of defeat. Over all hangs the implication that the real sunset is in Húrin’s heart, a loss of hope to elvish, and natural, indifference. And yet the indifference is an illusion, the silence full of ears, the despair a fatal mistake …
The scene is a picture, a posed tableau. Yet it centres on an outcry of spontaneous passion (like so many scenes of medieval romance). Dynamism is generated from it as soon as one asks the question, ‘whose fault?’ Húrin’s, for despair? Turgon’s, for suspicion? One could even blame the rulers of Doriath, for the true embitterment of Húrin’s heart lies in the death of Túrin his son, in which many were involved. A full answer would consist of the whole unhappy history of Middle-earth. Yet that general answer still has to be reinforced by individual weakness, which is the true irony and wretchedness of the single scene. And still this is only a part of the fall of Gondolin. A second strand leads from Maeglin, spun once more from the strains of mixed blood.
Maeglin is the son of Turgon’s sister Aredhel, carried off by Eöl, ‘Dark Elf’ par excellence, one of those who never went to Valinor and saw all the elves who returned as dispossessors. In a sense that dispossession is the ultimate source of all Maeglin’s treachery, and yet it too has to be magnified by a chain of individual sins or errors. One is the forced detention of Aredhel by Eöl; this means that father is resented by son, son in the end cursed prophetically by father. Another, though, is the pride of the sons of Fëanor, who (as with Thingol) will not recognise kinship except by blood. Eöl’s relationship to them by marriage is ignored. Curufin tells him, ‘You have my leave but not my love … The sooner you depart from my land the better will it please me’ (p. 135). The Macbeth-style play on words is returned by Eöl (with a memory indeed of Hamlet), ‘It is good, Lord Curufin, to find a kinsman thus kindly at need’ (my italics). But the sarcasm only provokes outright disclaimer: ‘those who steal the daughters of the Noldor … do not gain kinship with their kin.’ It is significant that Turgon, though more injured than Curufin, does not make the same mistake and opens his speech, ‘Welcome, kinsman, for so I hold you …’ But by this time Eöl is embittered and refuses the relationship in his turn. He was at fault to begin with; Curufin has made matters worse; finally one could simply put the blame on Aredhel. She left Gondolin pridefully, against advice, and turned away from her wiser brothers to her more dangerous cousins, prompted by desire in the heart (p. 131), the evil attraction of Fëanorian fieriness. Her breach of the orders of Turgon is echoed by her son Maeglin 111 pages later, when he too goes illegally beyond ‘the leaguer of the hills’, to be caught by Morgoth and made a traitor. Even his motivation is multiple: fear, but also jealousy of Tuor the mortal, imperfect loyalty to a grandfather who killed his father, the ambitious desire for Idril which seems a last reflection of the Sindar desire to get their lands back from their supplanters. Húrin, Maeglin, Aredhel, Eöl, Curufin, Turgon: all interact to create the fall of Gondolin. In each case, one may say, character remains fixed, but its flaws (or strengths) are brought to light by the strains of action.
The Silmarillion is even more tightly constructed than The Lord of the Rings, and it would be easy to trace its entrelacements further: Gondolin, for instance, is only one of three Hidden Kingdoms, Gondolin, Nargothrond, Doriath, founded by three relatives (Turgon, Finrod, Thingol), each ruined and betrayed, each penetrated by a mortal (Tuor, Túrin, Beren), well-meaning but carrying a seed of destruction, and all three mortals related by blood (S, p. 307) and with their fates to some degree intertwined. The book is in fact a ‘web’. But that word does not so readily take the meaning of ‘woven tapestry’ as it did in The Lord of the Rings (see above). Rather it keeps its familiar sense of ‘cobweb’, a trap spun by a great spider. In spite of Eärendil the later-published work feels blacker and grimmer than the earlier, the sense that ‘chance’ or ‘luck’ may contain a providential element is not so strong. Much of Tolkien’s tonal intention for The Silmarillion can indeed be deduced by looking through its threads at his archaic alternatives for ‘luck’, the words ‘fate’ and ‘doom’.
Etymologies and ambiguities
Neither of these words is used in modern English any more, though phrases like ‘fatal accident’ or ‘doomed to disaster’ survive. The reason for their unpopularity lies in their etymology. ‘Fate’ is derived, as the OED says, from Latin fari, ‘to speak’, and means originally ‘that which has been spoken’, i.e. spoken by the gods. It has never been anything but a literary word in English. ‘Doom’ by contrast is native, the modern pronunciation of Old English dóm, a noun related to the verb déman, ‘to judge’. It too meant in early times what was spoken, what people said about you (especially once you were dead), but it had also the meaning of a judicial sentence, a law or a decision. If the king sentenced you to death, that was his ‘doom’, his decision, but of course it was your doom too, your now-determined fate. Judgement Day, the day at the end of the world when all souls will be tried and sentenced, was accordingly in Old English dómesdæg, ‘Doomsday’, which only strengthened the sense of ‘future disaster’ attached to the word. However, common to both words, ‘fate’ and ‘doom’, is the idea of a Power sitting above mortals and ruling their lives by its sentence or by its speech alone. This sense is completely absent from ‘luck’ or ‘chance’; and with the waning of belief in superior Powers the more neutral words have become the common ones.
In The Silmarillion, though (unlike The Lord of the Rings) the influence of the Valar for good or ill is prominent, so that ‘fate’ and ‘doom’ become once again etymologically appropriate words, to be used frequently and with a complexity which determines the tone of several of its component stories. To take the simplest example, ‘fate’ in the story ‘Of Beren and Lúthien’ seems to have two meanings, related but separable even by grammar. On the one hand fate is an external force, which could without difficulty be capitalised: ‘fate drove’ Carcharoth the wolf through the protecting spells of Melian, and Beren managed the same feat because he was ‘defended by fate’. There are many more occasions, though, when ‘fate’ does not seem a proper name, a word for some external Power, but rather the personal possession of someone or something: to it must be attached either a personal pronoun (‘my fate’, ‘his fate’, ‘your fate’) or another noun in the genitive case (‘the fate of Arda’, ‘the fate of a mightier realm’, ‘the fates of Beren and Lúthien’) or else an identifying relative clause (‘the fate that was laid on him’, ‘the fate that lies before you’). What all these uses suggest is that fate is not something external and organising, like Providence, but something individual, like ‘life’ – something however, unlike ‘life’, which has been organised. The very use of the word thus brings up a question of free will.
The word ‘doom’, in The Silmarillion, is more complicated. It too can appear as an overmastering Power: when Lúthien first sees Beren ‘doom fell upon her’, a phrase also found in Aragorn’s ‘Lay of Tinúviel’ in The Lord of the Rings. However it can be something much more elementary, retaining its basic meaning of a sentence or a decision: in the Narn i Hîn Húrin in the Unfinished Tales we find Thingol holding ‘a court of doom’, waiting ‘to pronounce his doom’, and saying ‘otherwise shall my doom now
be’, or to paraphrase ‘I am now going to change my sentence’. Much more often, though, the reader cannot make a clear decision as to the word’s meaning. The sense of ‘future disaster’ is present: when Thingol challenges Beren to recover a Silmaril, the narrator says ‘Thus he wrought the doom of Doriath’, and means that Doriath will be ruined by Thingol’s words. So, when Melian says to him a few lines later (p. 168), ‘you have doomed either your daughter, or yourself’, she could mean either that he has given a judicial decision on Lúthien (old sense), or condemned himself to death (modern sense), or of course both, since both are true. There is a sense also in which ‘doom’ is a personal attribute, like ‘my fate’ or ‘my life’, but blacker and more hostile: ‘So their doom willed it’, says the narrator, as Beren and Lúthien make the fatal decision to go home, and Thingol recognises when he sees them that ‘their doom might not be withstood by any power of the world’. What does it mean, then, when Beren says ‘Now is the Quest achieved … and my doom full-wrought’? That sentence on him has finally been executed? Or that disaster has come at last? Or that his life has now reached a proper close, with all debts paid, promises and curses fulfilled? All these meanings are present, as they are in many instances in The Silmarillion; ‘doom’ and ‘fate’ determine the tone especially of the stories of Beren and of Túrin Turambar.