The Noldor

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

/ stephencwinter / 2 Comments

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?

“Farewell! Maybe Thou Shalt Find Valimar.” Galadriel’s Beautiful Farewell to The Fellowship of the Ring.

/ stephencwinter / 8 Comments

The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 367-369

Farewell! Namárië! This is the last word spoken by Galadriel as the three boats that hold the members of the Fellowship float down the Silverlode to its confluence with the Anduin and so away from the earthly paradise of Lothlórien, into the empty lands beyond and all the adventures that lie before each one of them; adventures that lie before their feet but which they cannot know except as they take each step of the way.

Galadriel’s farewell is a song that she sings to them in “the ancient tongue of the Elves beyond the sea”, in Quenya, a language spoken both by the Noldor of whom Galadriel is a Queen and by the Vanyar. It is the language that Gildor and his party speak in the Shire when they meet Frodo, Sam and Pippin at the beginning of their journey and it is a language of which Frodo has little knowledge. But, as T.S Eliot wrote on the subject of language, communication goes deeper than understanding, and in a documentary on Eliot’s poem, The Wasteland, the comment is made that it is the music of Eliot’s language that communicates before any understanding of the text. Perhaps it is to this that Tolkien refers when he speaks of “the way of Elvish words” that they remain “graven” in Frodo’s memory.

Throughout the years of her long sojourn that “have passed like swift draughts of the sweet mead in lofty halls beyond the West” Galadriel has spoken with her husband and with her people in Sindarin, the language of the Elves who never made the journey to Valinor, but now she pours out her heart in the language of her own people. For Galadriel has long nurtured a divided heart in which, as we read of her in Unfinished Tales “there dwelt in her the noble and generous spirit of the Vanyar, and a reverence for the Valar that she could not forget.” But there has also lain within her the part that she played in the rebellion of Fëanor and the Noldor, when although she opposed Fëanor in the kinslaying of Alqualondë nevertheless she still went with her people to Middle-earth against the command of the Valar and at the end of the First Age refused the pardon that the Valar extended to all who had been a part of the rebellion of Fëanor but had fought against Morgoth. As Tolkien says of her in Unfinished Tales “she had dreams of far lands and dominions that might be her own to order as she would without tutelage”. It was these dreams that began to take shape in her heart in the form of a thought as to what she might do if ever the Ring of Power might fall within her reach.

It was this thought, born of her ancient dreams, but dreams perhaps and even thoughts that had lain dormant through her long practice of the rejection of evil, a practice aided by Nenya the Ring of Adamant, that suddenly returned to her with almost overwhelming force when Frodo offered her the Ring at the episode of her mirror. But Tolkien tells us, when the moment of testing came “her wisdom was full grown and she rejected it, and passing the last test departed from Middle-earth for ever”.

That was to be her final destiny but at this moment, the moment of her singing her farewell song to the Fellowship, she has no knowledge of the pardon that she will receive and so all that they (and we also) can hear is her heartbreaking lament and her longing.

“Now lost, lost to those from the East is Valimar! Farewell! Maybe thou shalt find Valimar. Maybe even thou shalt find it. Farewell!”

Was it to Frodo most of all of that company to whom she sang those words? It is Frodo, amongst all of them, that the longing for healing and of peace is strongest, a longing revealed in his dreams in the House of Tom Bombadil and a longing revealed, perhaps also, in the graving of Galadriel’s song upon his memory. These words stay within his heart upon every step of his journey to Mordor and maybe they become, against even his conscious thought, a lode star beyond the “end of all things” in the Cracks of Doom in Orodruin that will carry him, along with the faithful and loving service of Sam, both to that terrible moment and beyond it also. Maybe Frodo will find it.