Pendell reads the Silmarillion

[Divayth Fyr]

This is the kind of things why Inwould greatly appreciate it if someone could quote from an English copy of Unfinished Tales to confirm my on-the-fly translation of a translation did not deform meaning.

For with the consent of Eru they sent members of their own high order, but clad in bodies as of Men, real and not feigned, but subject to the fears and pains and weariness of earth, able to hunger and thirst and be slain; though because of their noble spirits they did not die, and aged only by the cares and labours of many long years. And this the Valar did, desiring to amend the errors of old, especially that they had attempted to guard and seclude the Eldar by their own might and glory fully revealed; whereas now their emissaries were forbidden to reveal themselves in forms of majesty, or to seek to rule the wills of Men or Elves by open display of power, but coming in shapes weak and humble were bidden to advise and persuade Men and Elves to good, and to seek to unite in love and understanding all those whom Sauron, should he come again, would endeavour to dominate and corrupt.
(...)
The first to come was one of noble mien and bearing, with raven hair, and a fair voice, and he was clad in white; great skill he had in works of hand, and he was regarded by well-nigh all, even by the Eldar, as the head of the Order.
(...)
For it is said indeed that being embodied the Istari had need to learn much anew by slow experience, and though they knew whence they came the memory of the Blessed Realm was to them a vision from afar off, for which (so long as they remained true to their mission) they yearned exceedingly. Thus by enduring of free will the pangs of exile and the deceits of Sauron they might redress the evils of that time.

[Fyraltari]

Thank you!

[Precure]

At least for the Ainur, there's no such thing as inner personality not matching physical sex.

Because they have no physical bodies.

They can't manifest otherwise, unlike for example Loki, who took the form of a mare to hide and accidentally got pregnant with Sleipnir.

Nothing says that they can't take bodies of "opposite sex." In the book, their physical bodies compared to men/women clothes.

[pendell]

Can't? Or won't?

There's no record of the Valar or Maiar ever taking an opposite sex body. Eru might have made some kind of prohibition, but Melkor's people don't do it either and they certainly don't care about Eru's rules.

Weird. We're going to find records of people turning into orcs, wolves, vampire bats, birds, but never into a human of the opposite sex.

Is it that it's impossible for them to do? Or is it technically possible, but they are so tightly bound to their gender identity that changing it , even for a disguise, is something that simply doesn't enter their minds?

One thing is for sure: Words like "intersex" or "XXY chromosome" were not common parlance in the 1930s. Heck, I didn't learn about most of this stuff until the 2010s myself, and I've been online talking to members of the LGBT community since the 90s. Asking Tolkien to think about these issues is like asking a fish to write a story about living on land; much of the conversation we have about gender today simply didn't happen in the 1930s and 40s.

Mind, he probably had encountered bisexual and homosexuals. To hear C.S. Lewis tell it in his autobiography , homosexual relationships were extremely common at his boarding school. And of course there was Alan Turing . But the world Tolkien lived in was one where not only were most people in the closet, those closets were hermetically sealed. If you didn't know what to look for it would be easy to travel through life without ever questioning your assumptions or seeing anything to make you do so; Think of it as "straight privilege" experienced by hetero people in a hetero culture in which other voices are allowed no room, to such an extent the dominant culture doesn't even realize it's silencing voices.

*Thinks about it*

Actually, this is a good month to discuss this sort of thing.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Caledonian]

Because they have no physical bodies.

Too simplistic a statement. They aren't inherently designed to require bodies made of the world's matter, as are elves and humans, whose spirits are designed to interact with a body and suffer greatly if they are separated. But in order to conveniently interact with the world, the Ainur must assume physical forms, which they are capable of. And when they assume forms, there are certain limits to the nature of the forms they choose.

Nothing says that they can't take bodies of "opposite sex." In the book, their physical bodies compared to men/women clothes.

Wrong - the comparison to different clothing styles for men and women takes for granted that men don't wear women's clothes and women don't wear men's clothes. The clothes don't impose themselves on the body, but in reality the body's nature doesn't impose itself on the clothing either. Which is NOT what happens with the Ainur. The sex of the form they take is a limitation for all of them - and some of them, who diminish in power and glory over time, develop further limitations, as we are eventually told further in the Silmarillion.

Read onwards!

[Fyraltari]

Can't? Or won't?

There's no record of the Valar or Maiar ever taking an opposite sex body. Eru might have made some kind of prohibition, but Melkor's people don't do it either and they certainly don't care about Eru's rules.

Weird. We're going to find records of people turning into orcs, wolves, vampire bats, birds, but never into a human of the opposite sex.

Is it that it's impossible for them to do? Or is it technically possible, but they are so tightly bound to their gender identity that changing it , even for a disguise, is something that simply doesn't enter their minds?

Why would it be recorded? I can think of one time an Ainu disguised himself as a mortal and we don't even know who that Ainu was.

If one day Ossë decided to have a woman's body for a week, would it show up in the Silm? Why? We don't really have a precise account of what they were all up to.

It seems to me that they could regularly genderbend if they wanted to, but since they all identify with as either female or male most never do because they aren't comfortable in bodies of the wrong sex, which in turn means the elves wrote down that they don't genderbend. The only issue with this is that ignores the possibility of non-binary Ainur, but like you said, 1930s.

[Caledonian]

The Elves are so idealized, by Tolkien's standards, that they find the idea of a first cousin wanting to have a physical relationship with the other to be distressing and a sign of the corruption of the world. Even the corrupted Ainur, who become absolute monsters of fallen angels, aren't noted to have ever appeared in bodies of the opposite sex.

The likely reason for this is a FORBIDDEN TOPIC that we cannot discuss on these forums.

[pendell]

It seems to me that they could regularly genderbend if they wanted to, but since they all identify with as either female or male most never do because they aren't comfortable in bodies of the wrong sex, which in turn means the elves wrote down that they don't genderbend. The only issue with this is that ignores the possibility of non-binary Ainur, but like you said, 1930s.

Or, crazy speculation for which there is no evidence, the elves wrote down that Ainur didn't genderbend because they didn't do it themselves, and what they could not imagine they could not conceive of in others. We're seeing the Ainur through Elvish eyes, not third person omniscient, which means there are big, big gaps in our understanding of what the Ainur are and how they operate.


This is actually a plot point which will show up later in the story ; those who don't have something in their lived experience have a hard time putting themselves in someone else's place. It's the weakness of the golden rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is a great starting point, but if you can't imagine what it's like to be the other person, projecting your own wants and desires and feelings on them can be misleading at best, actively harmful at worst.

Consider: Perhaps a nice chocolate cake is the very thing you want for your birthday, so you give it to your best friend on theirs -- only finding out then that it is NOT welcome at all, because said friend is diabetic. What is sweetness and happiness to you is a hospital trip for them.

If I can be tolerated to muse for a minute, it occurs to me that because of this phenomenon, love of another person has to start with understanding another person. Because if you don't really know them, not only can you not effectively do good to them, to an extent you're not loving them at all, just your own mental image of who they are.


Happily, most human beings are sufficiently similar that the golden rule works well enough, but you do get these outliers when the model doesn't work at all. A person like me trying to project my own thoughts and feelings about gender on a nonbinary person is precisely one of those points where it won't work.


Respectfully,

Brian P.

[pendell]

Chapter 2: of Aule And Yavanna

In which two intelligent races are born from a marital spat

Spoiler

Show

The chapter starts with Aule getting bored and restless waiting for the Children of Iluvatar to come. He wants children of his own, people
to teach all his knowledge to. So he decides to make his own.

He made them in the image Iluvatar gave them, at least so far as Aule could make out from what he remembered of the song, and he made them to be strong and enduring, knowing that living in Melkor's world would require great strength. And so he makes them under the mountains. But they are lifeless, like dolls or robots.

Iluvatar is aware of his action and confronts him almost immediately, chiding Aule that what he attempts is both beyond his authority and power. Aule's being itself comes from Iluvatar, and without Iluvatar's spark the creatures can only move when Aule commands them to, and stand idle otherwise, mute and unmoving. What does he want out of this?

Aule replies: "I desire things other than I am, to love and to teach them, so that they too might perceive the beauty of Ea. ... in my impatience I have fallen into folly. Yet 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 ... as a child to his father I offer you these things, the work of the hands thou has made."

Thus making his appeal, he draws up a hammer to destroy his creations, but as he does so, they quail away!

He is astonished; they shouldn't do that if they were only his own creations ...

Eru explains the mystery : Aule's offer was accepted even as it was being made, an Eru himself has given them both life and a place in his design alongside the other children.

Aule is flabberghasted and deeply moved by this act of deep grace by Iluvatar , asking him to bless Aule's work and improve it beyond Aule's own thought.

Eru agrees, but with one proviso: They don't get to be senior to the children Eru made himself. They must sleep in suspended animation until the Elves are awake, at which time the dwarves may awaken also.


"They shall sleep now in the darkness under stone, and shall not come forth until the firstborn have awakened upon Earth; and until that time thou and they shall wait, though long it seem. But when the time comes I will awaken them , and they shall be to thee as children; and often strife will arise between thine and mine, the children of my adoption and the children of my choice."

So Aule takes these, the seven fathers of the dwarves, and places them each in a secret place under a different mountain. One of these is Durin, Thorin's distant ancestor. Also, when a dwarf die they are reincarnated in their children. As noted in the Appendices of Return of the King, there were six Durins before the time of the books, of whom the last was slain when the original Khazad-Dum was overthrown by the Balrog. There will be a seventh Durin in the last days. After the final great battle and the world is reconstructed aright, the dwarves will awaken beside Aule and labor with him in the mending of the world.

"They are stone-hard, stubborn, fast in friendship and in enmity, and they suffer toil and hunger and hurt of body more hardily than all other speaking peopels, and they live long, far beyond the span of [humans], yet not forever. "

... now , see, this is why I don't agree with the "Melkor did nothing wrong" crowd. It's not as if Eru is ungenerous, or that he hides the light or the flame imperishable away. All he asks is that these creations and innovations, such as the Dwarves , find a place in his grand design. Which is reasonable; he made the world, so it's only fair he has final say about what does and doesn't go into it. Eru made room for Aule's children and gave them the life Aule never could; if he did not do so for Melkor it's because Melkor went completely his own way, demanding that the world be run on his terms, as if HE were Eru in the world. And Eru's just not going for that. Eru is reasonable to the reasonable, and generous when approached as Aule was ... but he won't stand for being defied any more than a good teacher will tolerate unruliness in a classroom.

Anyway, Aule goes home and tells Yavanna all about it. Little does he note the dropping temperature in the conversation, until at last she responds, something like:

"So you not only were forgiven, you were reward? Well. HOW NICE FOR YOU. From my perspective that just means there's yet another band of axe-wielding maniacs out to cut down even more trees. We've already seen in the song there will be enough of that without dwarves as well."

Aule: "It isn't going to be as bad as all that. Sure, the speaking creatures will use your creation for their own purposes, but Eru's will is that they do so with both respect and gratitude."

If Yavanna were Serini in OOTS this would be the part where she hits him with her stick.

Yavanna: THWACK! "'With respect and gratitude'? Respect and gratitude still means acres of barren land where forests once grew. And if Melkor gets to them they won't just use a little out of 'respect and gratitude'. They'll plunder the land."

Seeing that talking to Aule is about as effective as talking to the stone he works with, she goes off to speak to Manwe to have a Word with him. She's worried about the fate of the earth at the hands of these children.

Manwe asks what she is MOST concerned about.

She responds : The trees, the vegetation. Animals can fight or run from human hunters , but trees can't. She would there would be such as would protect the trees and rebuke the Children when they took their exploitation of the world too far.

Manwe thinks this a strange thought.

Yavanna: "Yet it was in the song, for while thou were in the heavens and Ulmo built the clouds and pourd out the rains, I lifted up the branches of great trees to receive them, and some sang to Iluvatar amid the wind and the rain."

Manwe goes off to think, and to consult with what he knows of the will of Iluvatar, both in his mind and his memory of the song, and finds that Yavanna is right; the words she speaks are uplifted and upheld by Iluvatar. Her request shall be granted.

Interesting that Manwe has to commune this way with Iluvatar, but Iluvatar didn't appear to him as he did to Aule. Maybe Manwe's method of communing is the normal one for Valar? It's not every day the CEO shows up in your cubicle to fire you because you screwed up THAT Much. I guess that Aule's screw up was on that level, which is why he found himself confronting Iluvatar directly. Small wonder Yavanna is shocked he got off without even a punishment, but with actual reward!

Well, it's like our SAS friends say: "Who dares, wins."

Manwe goes to Yavanna and tells her that Eru has granted her wish;

Eru says through Manwe: "Do then any of the Valar supposed that I did not hear all the Song, even the least sound of the least voice? "

And so it is : There will be tree-shepherds who will dwell in nature, and whose wrath will be feared by any who would abuse them. For a time, anyway. During the time of the elves, and in the early days of humans.

Yavanna goes home to see Aule, who is busy in his smithy, pouring molten metal into a mold.

Paraphrasing this next bit.

"A-HA!" she says. "There's gonna be shepherds of those trees! Make sure your children are careful of them! There will be guardians in the woods whom your kids will disturb at their peril."

Aule looks up. Thinks a minute.

Says "Nonetheless they will have need of wood."

And goes back to his forge.

Chapter end.

Man, Aule is stone-cold at times. And now we know why he and Yavanna don't have little Vala littles running around.

And that's why dwarves in this world hate trees! It isn't because their gods told them to. It's because their primary interest in trees is in the wood they hold , while trees view them as a sort of obnoxious predator, something like an intelligent locust.

We can even see some of this tension between Gimli and Treebeard when they meet. Treebeard does not look kindly on an axe-bearer, and it takes intervention by Legolas to calm things down again.

And that's where we get Ents! And Entwives! And Entings!

Both dwarves and Ents get added to the story as if Eru as an elderly author being pestered by his young kids to add new characters to his story. I have to wonder to what extent that's a true portrait of what's happened. And , again, it shows why it's really Melkor who is in the wrong in all this, as if he's the oldest teenage son who's decided to start wearing motorcycle gear and tattoos and be all ' YOU'RE NOT MY REAL DAD!' To Eru.

And that's the chapter! Look forward to next week when the elves show up!

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Corvus]

Dwarves were still first ;)

[factotum]

I really like the concept here. Having *all* the races of the world created purely by Eru takes agency away from the Valar to a large extent, so them being able to get it back this way is cool. It's also nice that Tolkien, a committed Christian, is so OK with having races in his works who operate under distinctly non-Christian rules--CS Lewis books can often feel a bit preachy, whereas Tolkien's works never do.

[Fyraltari]

Aule replies: "I desire things other than I am, to love and to teach them, so that they too might perceive the beauty of Ea. ... in my impatience I have fallen into folly. Yet 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 ... as a child to his father I offer you these things, the work of the hands thou has made."

Given The Professor's complex thoughts on worldbuilding (or "sub-creation"), I've always read that bit as him justifying his endeavour to himself and like-minded people.

asking him to bless Aule's work and improve it beyond Aule's own thought.

Eru agrees, but with one proviso: They don't get to be senior to the children Eru made himself.

Wait, what? I distinctly remember Eru refusing to improve them in any way beyond giving them actual Life, as Aulë made them they would remain, is my memory lying to me?

So Aule takes these, the seven fathers of the dwarves, and places them each in a secret place under a different mountain.

I think HoME clarifies that only Durin was alone and the other six were grouped in three pairs, hence why the dwarven kingdoms are often found in groups of two (like Nargothrond and Belegrond).

One of these is Durin, Thorin's distant ancestor. Also, when a dwarf die they are reincarnated in their children.

Is that all dwaves or just the original seven?

"A-HA!" she says. "There's gonna be shepherds of those trees! Make sure your children are careful of them! There will be guardians in the woods whom your kids will disturb at their peril."

Aule looks up. Thinks a minute.

Says "Nonetheless they will have need of wood."

And goes back to his forge.

Kemantari really got the short end of the stick in this one.

Man, Aule is stone-cold at times. And now we know why he and Yavanna don't have little Vala littles running around.

Since none of them do, and Eönwe went from Manwë's son to his favoured servant, I don't think that's the only reason.

Both dwarves and Ents get added to the story as if Eru as an elderly author being pestered by his young kids to add new characters to his story. I have to wonder to what extent that's a true portrait of what's happened.

Given that Mîm shows up as early as The Book of Lost Tales, I doubt it.

[pendell]

Wait, what? I distinctly remember Eru refusing to improve them in any way beyond giving them actual Life, as Aulë made them they would remain, is my memory lying to me?

Maybe there's something different in HoME, but based on Tolkien's background, a sincere request "May Eru bless my work and amend it" is not one that would be refused, not from a humble heart. But Eru insists they sleep until the Elves awake; that's the only condition I see in the text at this point. And even if that's all he did -- it was more than just giving them life, it was also altering his own design and fate for the world to accommodate the new species. Surely giving them a fate and a destiny when they didn't have one was work, and a gift far greater, than simply making them alive.

There wasn't any hint of this, so far as I can tell, in the music *at all*. It wasn't part of the symphony Eru gave out; this is something entirely new of Aule's. Yet Eru found a place for it. Ask a software engineer how hard it is to add a major new feature into a release after it's already been built; it will take awhile.

Heck, it's probably the same in writing. The larger and more complex the world, the harder it is to change anything in it. Look at how much trouble George RR Martin has had with Winds of Winter. But even that achievement is nothing compared to a real world where you can't just airbrush out most of the background characters.

Is that all dwaves or just the original seven?

*Rereads*. Silmarillion says it is legend among that the dwarves is it applies only to the original seven, while the other dwarves travel to the halls of mandos and wait in their own quarters, separate from those set up for elves, men and other spirits, until the end. Again, HoME may contradict this or add to it , but that's not part of my reading. If someone else has and wants to chime in, please do!

Kemantari really got the short end of the stick in this one.

They got the short end of the stick and the long one ... CAUSE THEY'RE WOOD!

Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week. :Runs off the stage, ducking and weaving to avoid the tomatoes thrown by the audience:


Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Grim Portent]

... now , see, this is why I don't agree with the "Melkor did nothing wrong" crowd. It's not as if Eru is ungenerous, or that he hides the light or the flame imperishable away. All he asks is that these creations and innovations, such as the Dwarves , find a place in his grand design. Which is reasonable; he made the world, so it's only fair he has final say about what does and doesn't go into it. Eru made room for Aule's children and gave them the life Aule never could; if he did not do so for Melkor it's because Melkor went completely his own way, demanding that the world be run on his terms, as if HE were Eru in the world. And Eru's just not going for that. Eru is reasonable to the reasonable, and generous when approached as Aule was ... but he won't stand for being defied any more than a good teacher will tolerate unruliness in a classroom.

Everything Melkor does is also part of Illuvatar's designs, per Illuvatar's own statement. Every mountain he sunders, every war started, every moment of harsh rain or bitter winter. His motivations for doing so might be arrogant and potentially outside Illuvatar's designs, but Eru is the one who made him and allows him to act the way he does.

It does come down to how you view the intersection of predetermination and free will really. I think Tolkien had a similar problem with the orcs to the one that I have with Melkor; the idea that Morgoth could create an entire race of damned souls from one of Eru's creations never really sat well with Tolkien, but by nature of the setting he had made (after it's earliest iterations in which goblins were made from rock by Morgoth) they could have no other origin. Similarly I view Melkor as having been made evil; proud, arrogant controlling and ambitious, all his decisions stemming from what he was made to be and his intended role in the world of Arda. He has a part to play and cannot stray outside the path. It's not so much that he did nothing wrong and more that he was intended to do wrong, and more or less only wrong, because it made the rest of creation somehow nicer in Illuvatar's eyes.

On the idea of Illuvatar being pestered to add the dwarves and ents, I think it's more that they were always meant to be there but were also always meant to be brought into being by the dynamic between Aule and Yavanna, because while the mortal races are part of the song, so are the incarnated Ainur. Yavanna brought up the voices of the trees from the song, and Illuvatar essentially went 'yep, I heard them too, they're supposed to be there.' I would presume his chastisement of Aule is similar, a response to something that was always supposed to happen anyway. Aule made the dwarves based on flawed memories of the elves or men that were not yet present, or at least thinks he did, perhaps he simply remembered the dwarves as they would be but failed to understand.

EDIT: Though it has been a while since I read the Silmarillion (and I have forgotten where my copy is, much like my hobby knife... which is somewhere that is hopefully not on the floor) does Illuvatar outright state the dwarves aren't part of the plan, or does he just imply it and leave the idea hanging as a test for Aule? Because there's a sustantial difference.

[pendell]

The specific sentence is:

Even as I gave being to the thoughts of the Ainur at the beginning of the world, so now I have taken up thy desire and given to it a place therein; but in no other way will I amend they handiwork, and as thou hast made it, so shall it be. But I will not suffer this: That these should come before the Firstborn of my design, nor that thy impatience shoudl be rewarded. They shall sleep now in the darkness under stone, and shall not come forth until the Firsborn have awakened upon Earth, and until that time thou and they shall wait, though long it seem.

First, it looks like Fyraltari's right; Iluvatar didn't change the dwarves more than 1) giving them life and 2) granted them a place in the world, a destiny. Even so, that is a great work.

Reading the document, it definitely looks like Iluvatar changed things based on Aule's actions and on his words. If Aule had mouthed off or done things differently, there would be no dwarves. Certainly there was no hint of any of this in the Song; See how Yavanna is taken by surprise by all this. Why should Aule labour 'in secret', if everyone else knew of it already from the song's foreshadowing?


It does raise a question to what extent Eru's change is real. If he's omnipotent and omniscient, surely none of this comes as a surprise? So did he really change His plans based on Aule's actions here, or did he foresee Aule's actions and thus know that the dwarves would enter the story at this point, even though there was no hint of it before?

Seems like a bit of a time travel paradox. It's the same sort of thing that a book author might experience in writing a story. Within the story, Frodo decides to take the ring to Mount Doom. Two books later, he meets Smeagol.

The events happen one after the other to the book's characters, and are greatly separated in time. But someone like Tolkien is outside the book's time. When he's writing "The Shadow of the Past" he's also writing "Flight to the Ford" and "Passage of the Marshes" and "Voice of Saruman". He can shift between working on the different chapters and pages in the story whenever he wants to, as easily as turning a page. And the changes he makes in book 3 he can retcon back into book 1 seamlessly. As an author, all times in the story are the same time, and he can access any page just as easily. So can we, the readers. I can skip ahead to the end of the book whenever I want, or go back and re-read an earlier chapter all times are the same to the reader. We can see the passage of time the characters experience but we aren't bound by it or experience it ourselves.

What DOES free will mean in the universe when you have at least one time traveler who can alter the time line? Is there really such a thing as anything that is not predetermined?

I would answer: Yes. Because as a book author will tell you (I know at least two), characters take on a life and logic of their own, and an author can't write against the previously set facts and personalities if they want the world to remain consistent. Reading the notes in HoME, Tolkien went through many drafts of this story before settling on the final edition. In one version, the Black Riders captured some of the hobbits. After playing with this, Tolkien discarded the idea , having concluded that the Black Riders would have no reason to keep any captured hobbits alive.

Tolkien changed his mind frequently over the course of many drafts as the story and characters became ever more fleshed out. Would Iluvatar really be so different?

So I conclude that free will of the created beings does make a difference, if the creator is going to respect the personality and decisions of his creation. In the Pratchett-verse, there is nowhere in any of the multiverses in which Sam Vimes kills Sybil. None. That's the character as Sir Terry made him, and he can't make him otherwise without making him someone else than Sam. So in a sense even fictional characters, who exist only in print, "push back" against their living human authors.

So I think the beings of middle-earth both have the power to make their own decisions out of free will, and in fact do so. It's just that Illuvatar, being able to foresee those decisions and their outcomes, can craft past and future around them so it will always be "part of the plan". He's not restricted to responding to people's decisions after they make them. He's well within his rights to prepare for that decision decades or centuries in creation-time before it actually happens.

Actually, this does pose an interesting thought: time travel must be at least conceptually possible. We time-travel in the sub-creations of our favorite authors. It is at least conceivable that there might be some other domain in which our universe is a sub-domain of another in the same way a book's time is a sub-domain of ours. If this proved to be true, we might be able to achieve both time-travel and FTL by accessing this superdomain, leaving at one point and returning anywhere else in our space/time. That's partly what Flatland was getting at.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Fyraltari]

I don't think the writer comparison is apt, because an author is not omniscient. A writer may create a character without having thought of the way they would act in a particular scenario and, finding themselves writing that specific scene, realize that there is only one choice the character could make while stayong true to their established character. But Illuvatar is all-encompassing, all-knowing, all-powerful, he said himself that all that Melkor does is what he wanted him to do. All the characters in this book make choices that flow from who they are, but they all are who Illuvatar wants them to be, knowing what choices they will have to make. Ultimately none of the characters are absolved of their crimes or robbed of their glories, but Illuvatar is responsible for everything.

About whether Illuvatar changed the Music for Aulë, I don't think so. Remember that each of the Valar only know the part of the Music that they were involved with and there is a lot none of them know about. None of them knew about the Children of Illuvatar until he told them about them, most notably. So it seems logical that the Dwarves were always in the Music, but only Aulë knew about them, and he did not understand it.

[Grim Portent]

A line from Gandalf comes to mind.

'For even the very wise cannot see all ends.'

The Valar being ignorant of a given situation doesn't really tell us if it was part of the song or not, because their memory of it is spotty at best, it's too vast for them to fully comprehend. I get the impression they most closely remember the bits related to their domains, hence Yavanna recalling the ents and huorns despite them being a minor detail that the others would have overlooked.

Which would make some events make a lot more sense now I think about it. Morgoth constantly gets screwed over because he focused on his own triumphs and the despair of others, and forgot about the parts of history where he would fail and others would triumph because he wasn't paying attention to them. The others (except Tulkas) would be blindsided by his inevitable betrayals and attacks because they hadn't really paid attention to what he was singing about, instead paying attention to and joining in with the countersong that Illuvatar would weave in response.

[PirateMonk]

Who in the seven heavens IS he anyway? He's not in any of the lists of the Valar or the Maiar. He remembers the Dark Lord coming from Outside, which doesn't happen until the next chapter.

If I had to guess, I would hazard that he is Living Arda personified. Not a spirit entering the world from the realms beyond, whether of Melkor or of Manwe. Rather, this is what the Flame Imperishable made -- A spirit of the land itself. Made by Eru, as all of the world was, but part of the world rather than a colonizer entering into it. Made at the same time as the land and forever part of it. That's my guess. If anyone has a better one, I'm listening.

My favorite theory is that he's Ungoliant, which does a pretty good job of explaining the available evidence with only the minor drawback of being totally insane.

[Caledonian]

Wait, what? I distinctly remember Eru refusing to improve them in any way beyond giving them actual Life, as Aulë made them they would remain, is my memory lying to me?

No, you are correct: Eru explicitly says that he will NOT amend or alter Aulë's creations, which is part of why the dwarves are so limited in some ways: they were made without the input of Yavanna, so they lack an innate love for life and growing things, and also tend to be overwhelmingly male.

It's worth noting that both the people of Aulë and the people of Yavanna end up going extinct, for the same reason - lack of females. Hmmm, Tolkien couldn't possibly have been making a statement there...

[Grim Portent]

My favorite theory is that he's Ungoliant, which does a pretty good job of explaining the available evidence with only the minor drawback of being totally insane.

The main issue I see there, other than it being generally insane, is that Ungoliant herself comes from Outside and isn't native to Arda. Lot of other issues, like Ungoliant hating light even as she coveted and consumed it.

Also it doesn't really answer the question of 'what the hell is Bombadil?' because Ungoliant's own origins are largely unexplained beyond her being from the darkness outside the world.

[Caledonian]

I think it's pretty clear that Bombadil is one of the Maiar.

I think the reason Tolkien left him in, despite reworking the story multiple times, is that he's sort of the example of what Sauron could have been if he hadn't turned to evil. He's a Maiar associated with the Earth that has a specific territory he considers his domain. He's also the very first Ainur ever to enter Arda (I presume), the first one in the pool, so to speak.

Tolkien did a lot of comparing two things that were alike but distinctly different in an important way. I think Bombadil-Sauron is one of those comparisons.

[Fyraltari]

My favorite theory is that he's Ungoliant, which does a pretty good job of explaining the available evidence with only the minor drawback of being totally insane.

Oh, doing crank Bombadil theory are we?

In this case, I would be remiss not to present the wondruous madnesses that are Oldest and Fatherless and The truth about Tom Bombadil.

[Talakeal]

The main issue I see there, other than it being generally insane, is that Ungoliant herself comes from Outside and isn't native to Arda. Lot of other issues, like Ungoliant hating light even as she coveted and consumed it.

Also it doesn't really answer the question of 'what the hell is Bombadil?' because Ungoliant's own origins are largely unexplained beyond her being from the darkness outside the world.

I have always paired Bombadil and Ungoliant in that they are both unexplained mysteries in creation.

But, inevitably when I bring it up, someone insists that one or both of them are just Maiar and kill the conversation.

[Razade]

I have always paired Bombadil and Ungoliant in that they are both unexplained mysteries in creation.

But, inevitably when I bring it up, someone insists that one or both of them are just Maiar and kill the conversation.

Tolkien said that Goldberry is the spirit of the seasonal changes of nature and that Tom is the spirit of the countryside, the embodiment of it. This is in his Letters and while referencing older works, I don't see why either of those two things would, or would need to change.

[pendell]

Tolkien said that Goldberry is the spirit of the seasonal changes of nature and that Tom is the spirit of the countryside, the embodiment of it. This is in his Letters and while referencing older works, I don't see why either of those two things would, or would need to change.

So they're outside the mythology of the Silmarillion, guests from another world, perhaps another dimension. I can see that.

As towards ungoliant -- I'm still arguing that she's a Maiar. Why couldn't she be? Sauron's a Maia, and he's not a weakling. Ungoliant certainly is no beast. She's intelligent. Which means she's likely one of the Ainur entering the world and, able to take any form she chooses, chooses the form of a spider.

And since we know all the names of the Valar , that leaves us with the Maiar as our grab-bag for immortal, powerful entities who existed before the creation of the world.

Shadow of War is a video game which explored this motif with shelob , who throughout the game is portrayed as an attractive humanoid female. The game's writers assume that Ungoliant was able to shape change, so her children could also.

From the perspective of canon, this is fanfiction, but still thought-provoking fanfiction, at least to me.

Another possibility is that she's not an Ainur , but a manifestation of pre-creation Chaos, like the Babylonian story of Tiamat . In the old stories of the Babylonian mythos, the world was created after the king of the gods slew the manifestation of chaos and so separated water from land, day from night. Before this, there was only chaos, portrayed as a raging, stormy sea.

I suppose that's defensible , but I still like the idea of Maiar. Are there other idea?

Y'know who else is a mystery of creation? Hobbits. There's not one clue in the story of creation we've read about hobbits at all. Are they a subspecies of humans? There are humans with dark skin, humans with red hair, humans with eyefolds. Why not short humans with furry feet?

Or are they a third theme? A minor bit of music woven in with the first and second themes which the Valar in the Song missed out on because they were paying attention to the major themes?

Or are they completely unheralded in the song? Eru's little joke, as it were? Something that neither the Valar nor the Enemies had any foreknowledge of, and therefore through all their calculations straight into the rubbish bin? That DOES sound like something Eru would do, but it's not conclusive.

Speaking of unexplained mysteries -- orcs , elves, and humans can all produce fertile offspring, right? Does that mean they are all the same species? Does that therefore mean orcs cannot be any more irredeemable than humans are?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Grim Portent]

I favour Ungoliant as a being of primordial darkness/chaos and atavistic hunger, but there's not really any evidence for it other than her descending from the darkness beyond the sky. Not really any evidence for her being one of the Ainur either, other than her being similarly powerful to them and the desire to fit things into defined categories.


Hobbits I think are supposed to be a sort of whimsical fey-like subrace of men. The in setting theory is that they are somehow related to men, but their genealogy and much of their history prior to their living in Anduin and then the Shire was lost. They speak a variant of the western human language, more closely resemble men than they do elves or dwarves, and men in turn resemble them more closely than they do elves or dwarves.

From a meta perspective they're supposed to represent a mixture of folklore about fairies and the people of the countryside of Tolkien's own youth and the times before him (as he saw them anyway,) an idyllic but diminishing lifestyle giving way to modernisation and industrialisation, and are more men than anything else in the story.


Elves, orcs and men can all interbreed, but I think it's incorrect to say they're the same species because species isn't a meaningful category for them anymore than it is for the Ainur. Their ability to interbreed has more in common with folklore, myth and magic than it does with biology. It's something of a mistake to try and think of things in terms of modern ideas about species, the more appropriate comparison is the demigods of Grecian myth or the half-fey of British folklore.

As for the redeemability of orcs, I was thinking a bit about that the other day after looking into the different ideas Tolkien had for their origin, and it's an issue he struggled with. The idea that Morgoth could make men or elves permanently evil didn't sit right with him, but a lot of his thoughts seemed to be more directed at making the orcs not be from human or elvish stock rather than making them redeemable. He seemed committed to the idea that orcs were inherently beings of hate, that they could never leave it behind and join the other races in the light.

A creative decision which I find a bit strange, Tolkien was no stranger to the idea that people could become evil through terrible circumstance or ignorance, and that leaving evil behind was difficult. I would have thought he'd have it so that orcs were made evil by the act of being in thrall to the dark lords and the societies they created, but that during the periods when they were left to their own devices they would begin to make faltering steps towards, if not redemption, then a less wretched existence. Perhaps he felt that wouldn't have fit the mythical tone he was trying to set.

[factotum]

Elves, orcs and men can all interbreed, but I think it's incorrect to say they're the same species because species isn't a meaningful category for them anymore than it is for the Ainur. Their ability to interbreed has more in common with folklore, myth and magic than it does with biology.

Case in point: Earendil, Elros and Elrond, the only Half-elven we hear about (IIRC), had to be given the choice whether to count themselves among the elder race or that of Men. If it was just possible for any random coupling of human and elf to produce offspring then you'd expect the Powers to be rather busy asking that question! Also worth noting that (spoilers for later on):

Spoiler

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That particular bloodline also included Melian the Maia, so was undoubtedly rather special.

[Grim Portent]

I think in the case of the half-elven any coupling of man and elf could produce children, it was just a circumstance so rare that it basically never happened outside of that lineage, or at least rare among people of historical significance.

I can't imagine that anyone would care about one of the elven rivermen who took barrels to Esgaroth from Mirkwood having a relationship with one of the humans living on the lake, nor would any children of theirs be important. Presumably Manwe would find a way to inform such children of their choice between being man or elf.

By similar principles a Stoor hobbit married to a human in the lands north of Rohan would be of little note, as would a human being in a relationship with a dwarf. There's nothing to indicate such things happened, but I think Tolkien would have considered it something entirely plausible within the setting he was creating. The affairs of the commonfolk, romantic or otherwise, were mostly not important to his writing.

Whether dwarves and hobbits could breed with other races is another matter, but given that orcs could even in conceptual iterations where they were made from slime and rock and animated by malice or animals invested with a fragment of Morgoth's will I would assume that they could and Tolkien just never had any ideas for relevant half-dwarves or hobbit-men.

[Fyraltari]

Case in point: Earendil, Elros and Elrond, the only Half-elven we hear about (IIRC), had to be given the choice whether to count themselves among the elder race or that of Men. If it was just possible for any random coupling of human and elf to produce offspring then you'd expect the Powers to be rather busy asking that question! Also worth noting that (spoilers for later on):

Spoiler

Show

That particular bloodline also included Melian the Maia, so was undoubtedly rather special.

Spoiler: You forgot one

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Dior Eluchil, the son of Lùthien and Beren was half-Man, one fourth-Elf and one-fourth Ainu (assuming the Ainur have a genome to begin with, for all we know Luthien could be a partial genetic clone of her father). There isn't any word on the People he was counted among and he died at age thrity-ish, so who even knows.

I think in the case of the half-elven any coupling of man and elf could produce children, it was just a circumstance so rare that it basically never happened outside of that lineage, or at least rare among people of historical significance.

I can't imagine that anyone would care about one of the elven rivermen who took barrels to Esgaroth from Mirkwood having a relationship with one of the humans living on the lake, nor would any children of theirs be important. Presumably Manwe would find a way to inform such children of their choice between being man or elf.

By similar principles a Stoor hobbit married to a human in the lands north of Rohan would be of little note, as would a human being in a relationship with a dwarf. There's nothing to indicate such things happened, but I think Tolkien would have considered it something entirely plausible within the setting he was creating. The affairs of the commonfolk, romantic or otherwise, were mostly not important to his writing.

We know from Lord of the Rings that the princes of Dol Amroth are descended from a Numenorean called Imrazor and an Elf called Mithrellas. While they were probably nobility, they don't seem to have been very high (the lineage of Imrazor is unspecified and Mithrellas was a lady-in-waiting of Nimrodel whose lineage isn't specified either).

The Princes of Dol Amroth being counted among Men and the fact that while Elrond's children are given the choice of becoming Men but not Elros's (or the descendants of Aragorn and Arwen after she chooses Men) lead me to believe that Earendil's family was a special case and that overall the children of Men and Elves count as Men (which would square with the notion of death being Illuvatar's gift to Men, he gives it, he doesn't take it away.)

[Razade]

So they're outside the mythology of the Silmarillion, guests from another world, perhaps another dimension. I can see that.

No, they're living personifications of Arda's natural state. They're not from another world or another dimension any more than Bilbo is, being from a book outside and written before The Lord of the Rings was connected to it.