Fëanor

“To…Perceive The Unimaginable Hand and Mind of Fëanor at Their Work.” What Would Gandalf Want to See in The Palantír of Orthanc?

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 778-784

Gandalf and Pippin are sitting upon Shadowfax, flying across the plains of Rohan towards Edoras and then onwards to Minas Tirith and to war. A Nazgûl has just flown over them, a messenger from Barad-dûr to Isengard. Sauron wants to know why Saruman has not come to the Orthanc-stone. Soon a second messenger will be sent to bring Pippin back for further questioning but there will be no captive to send because Pippin is not in Orthanc. Sauron will want to know why he has seen a hobbit in the palantír and yet nothing is given to the Nazgûl. He will suspect treachery.

As they ride Gandalf thinks about the palantír and whether he might have wrested control of the stone from Sauron. He has already told Aragorn and Théoden that he is relieved that it was Pippin and not himself who first looked into it, that he has not been revealed to the Dark Lord, that there is still a brief window of doubt in Sauron’s mind that they might yet exploit, but he still wonders what he might have seen had he still had the palantír.

“Even now my heart desires to test my will upon it, to see if I could not wrench it from him and turn it where I would- to look across the wide seas of water and of time to Tirion the Fair, and perceive the unimaginable hand and mind of Fëanor at their work, while both the White Tree and Golden were in flower.”

When The Lord of the Rings was first published in 1954 only a handful of people knew anything about Fëanor or the two trees. In his famous review of The Hobbit C.S Lewis revealed that every character that readers meet in Wilderland spring from “deep sources in our blood and tradition” but he was one of the few who knew what they were. It was not until after Tolkien died in 1973 that The Silmarillion was published thanks to the work of his son, Christopher. That changed the way that everyone read The Lord of the Rings. At last we knew the back story.

In The Silmarillion Fëanor is a figure who is both incredibly gifted and yet deeply flawed. When Morgoth and Ungoliant, the monstrous spider creature and mother of Shelob, destroy the two trees, the source of light in Aman, the Valar turn to Fëanor who has caught the light within the Silmarils that he made. They ask for his help asking him to give up the Silmarils so that they might become the source of light in the uttermost west. Fëanor refuses to give them up but Morgoth steals them. Against the will of the Valar Fëanor leads the Noldor to Middle-earth to regain the Silmarils but he is slain in battle against Morgoth.

Gandalf’s desires to see Fëanor at work, to see the greatest maker in the whole history of Arda. Compared to Fëanor Sauron is a craftsman of little skill. Gandalf tells Pippin that Sauron could never have made the palantíri. He could only use them. Fëanor’s hand and mind are “unimaginable”. In him we see the ability of the Elves, the first born of the earth, to co-create with God, and we see Fëanor as the greatest of them. The early Fathers of the Church used to speak of a proper pride in our work. They spoke of parrhesia, of being able to speak freely to God, to look God in the eye and to say, “I have done this”. This, the Fathers taught, was lost in the Fall, as Humankind became competitors with God and not co-creators, but it is restored through the Incarnation. Fëanor’s pride, his desire to keep his own work as a private possession, brought him into competition with the Valar and with Ilúvatar himself. He was corrupted by Morgoth, coming to view the Valar with suspicion, believing that they wanted to use the things he had made for their own narrow self interest. Perhaps his death was a mercy. Had he defeated Morgoth might he have become a Dark Lord in his place?

“This Assuredly is The Stone of Orthanc From The Treasury of Elendil.” Some Thoughts About Palantíri and Other Communication Devices.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 775-784

We live in a world now in which there are so many communication devices that the palantír into which Pippin looked and in which he saw the Dark Lord himself might not seem so remarkable. And yet it is not so long ago when much of the world was not connected as it is now and the speed at which the world has changed has been so rapid that we have hardly had the time to think about all that has happened to us.

As a young man I taught in a school in Zambia, Central Africa, for six years in which there was only one phone and that was located in the headmaster’s house. I used that phone on only one occasion throughout the entire time that I was there. I now look back on that time as being a time of peace in which in order to communicate with someone I either had to go to see them or to write a letter.

But I also remember a conversation with a young Somali woman some years later who was in the UK for development studies. She spoke of her dream for her people and as I listened I became aware that this was an occasion for treading softly. She spoke of how she imagined every group of wandering herdsmen among her people possessing a communication device and how, as they sat around their campfires at night they could speak to each other, telling of where there was good pasture for their animals or of dangers to avoid. As she spoke my heart was carried out to the beauty of the African night and the soft beauty of African languages that I had heard there. Words spoken quietly in the still of the night under glittering starlight and the air feels like silk upon your face.

We can see why Elendil would have wanted the capacity to communicate in this way across his kingdoms in Middle-earth although how these seeing stones, created by Fëanor himself in the depths of time, came to be in his possession and not in the hands of the kings of Númenor I cannot tell. There were three stones in Gondor and three in Arnor and one in Orthanc, a fortress that in the early years of the two kingdoms linked them both. In an age in which a message sent from Osgiliath in Gondor to Annúminas in Arnor would have taken weeks even upon upon the swiftest horses such devices would have been of great value.

But in the years of the decline of Arnor all its stones were lost. One remained in Minas Tirith in Gondor although at this point in the story as Gandalf rides there with Pippin upon Shadowfax we do not know about its existence. Gandalf tells Pippin that the stone that Sauron possesses came from Minas Ithil, the tower of the moon, that is now the city of the Lord of the Nazgûl, Minas Morgul, and an evil place. And there was still the stone of Orthanc that is now in the possession of Aragon, Elendil’s heir, and to whom it rightfully belongs.

There is a mystery about the stones that Fëanor made so long ago that is conveyed in the stars that shone when Pippin first looked into it and the swirling images that cleared when at the last the Dark Lord came himself. And we are left with two questions. Is a palantír simply a communication device such as the ones that we all carry as a matter of course, or are our devices more mysterious than we usually think? Perhaps the answer is yes to both questions. Yes, perhaps the Stone of Orthanc is nothing more than the devices that we carry about with us all the time, and yes, our devices have something more of a palantír about them than we usually recognise.

It is easy for us to see in the palantíri of The Lord of the Rings a spiritual power at work, a battle between the wills of those who look into them, a battle in which it is wise not to regard one’s own power too highly, as Saruman did. Gandalf is relieved that he was saved from a battle of wills with Sauron by Pippin’s foolish act. But we have become so used to the devices that we carry that we are not aware of their spiritual nature and so, like Saruman, we look into them, confident in our own ability to deal with all that we see there, unaware that other wills are at work as well as our own. Unaware, perhaps, until we are trapped by them and we are enslaved to the will of others, whose power is so much greater than ours.