J. R. R. Tolkien
The Silmarillion
"Valaquenta" Pt. 2
Account of the Valar and Maiar
according to the lore of the Eldar
The second part of The Silmarillion is not a story. It is more of an encyclopedic account of the Ainur who "entered into the World at the beginning of time" in order to fulfill the vision they had created at the behest of Eru or Iluvatar. In time they became known to the Eldar as the Valar and Maiar.
A strange combination of Biblical and pagan traditions, the Valar and the Maiar are much like angels from the Bible in that they are the creations of Eru or Iluvatar. For the most part they act like angels in that they carry out the wishes of the Creator, except of course for the greatest angel, Lucifer, and his counterpart among the Valar, Melkor.
The Valar
However, few of the Biblical angels are singled out: we have names of some of them and little is known either of their creation or their activities. This is in stark contrast to the pagan hierarchies that include numerous gods, such as the Greek, Roman, and Norse, as well as the Egyptian, Sumerian, and other religions of that area. There the resemblance in many cases is closer to that of a squabbling family, with a head deity--Zeus, Jupiter, Odin. Frequently, the various gods have special attributes attached to them. The Roman god Neptune and the Greek god Poseidon are the gods of the sea, Roman Mars and Greek Ares are the war gods, while others are gods of the underworld or rivers or the sky or the Sun. Tolkien's Valar and Maiar resemble the various pantheons in this way: they are named and each has assumed responsibility for some part of the planet.
Some of the most important among the Valar are the following:
Manwe: who, in the thought of Iluvatar, is the brother of Melkor, the mightiest of the Valar, but Melkor is no longer spoken of. Manwe is the closest to the thought of Iluvatar and in consequence is now the Lord of Earth and all that live within. He is the Lord of the winds, the clouds, and "all the regions of the air," from the highest to the lowest, and his favorites among the creatures on Earth (Arda) are the swift birds. Manwe can be seen as the Sky God.
Varda: the Lady of the Stars, she dwells with Manwe. She also is the Goddess of Light. The Elves call her Elbereth and hold her most in reverence and love.
Ulmo: Lord of the Waters, the equivalent of the Greek Poseidon or the Roman Neptune. He dwells alone and seldom appears in human guise.
Aule: the master of all the substances of which Middle Earth is made--a master craftsman and a skilled artisan, somewhat similar to the Greek god Hephaestus.
Yavanna, the spouse of Aule, is the Giver of Fruits -- lover of all things that grow in the earth.
Orome: the Great Huntsman and husband of Vana who was called the Queen of Blossoming Flowers and the Ever-young,
Mandos: Judge of the Dead and the Master of Doom, the equivalent of the Egyptian Osiris, the Judge of the Dead, and the Norse goddess Hel who presides over a realm of the Hel, where she receives a portion of the dead.
There are others, but these are the most significant, I think.
Have I left out one of your favorites?
The Maiar
The Maiar are powerful beings but less so than the Valar. The Maiar are associated with individual Valar, though the exact nature of that association is obscure. Many have at least two names, one apparently their true name and one the name they became known by in Middle Earth. Some of the significant Maiar are the following:
Curumo aka Saruman, initially associated with Aule the Smith.
Alwendil or Sauron, also associated with Aule the Smith.
Radagast the Brown is associated with Yavana
Mithrandir or Gandalf is also associated with Manwe and Varda
Bolrogs are Maiar who have been corrupted by Melkor
Note: it is curious that both Saruman and Sauron are associated with Aule the Smith. In addition, Aule created the dwarves, whereas the Elves and Men were created by Iluvatar.
The Enemy
Melkor: perhaps the mightiest of the Valar, brother to Manwe. He is no longer called by this name but is referred to as Morgoth, because he turned away from the Light and choose violence and tyranny instead. He desired Arda (Earth) for himself, and when he could not have it he descended through fire and wrath into the great burning, into Darkness. "Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven," Milton's Lucifer/Satan declares in Paradise Lost. Tolkien has tapped into a complex web of allusions here, especially among the various cultures and religious traditions bordering the Mediterranean Sea, far too many for this brief commentary. (If you are curious, simple type "Lucifer" into your search engine.)
Morgoth had many followers among the Maiar, the greatest of whom is Gorthaur the Cruel, perhaps better known as Sauron. Little of Sauron is known in the early days because he served Morgoth, but after Morgoth's passing, Sauron came into his own. His history then parallels that of his former ruler, and he follows the same path down into the Void.
The Silmarillion is a work in progress. Tolkien never finished it, and as far as I can find out, he never even completed a first draft. What we have here is Christopher Tolkien's reworking and editing of the material that Tolkien was working on when he died.
Showing posts with label TOLKIEN J. R. R.. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TOLKIEN J. R. R.. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
Friday, May 2, 2014
Some novels, stories, and poems that I revisit regularly
The following is a short list of some novels, poems, and short stories that I reread irregularly for the most part. There's no particular order or schedule to this. One day I will get the urge to read something once again, and so I dig it out, settle down in my recliner, surrender to the cat's demand for some lap time, and leave this world for a while. There are others whose names I can't come up with right now, but sometime tomorrow or the next day, week, month, year, I will see one in my bookcase or read a comment by somebody about it and that's it--time for a another visit.
J. R. R. Tolkien
The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings
These three books are the ones that I have read more than any other work on my reread list, which is strange because I prefer SF to fantasy. Right now, I am slowly reading The Silmarillion and expect to get to the others this year.
Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain
This may be the second most reread book on my list. I first read it while an undergraduate sometime during the years 1958-1961. It was for a lit course, and I had to choose a novel from a list provided by the professor to write the outside paper on. I choose this one, probably because of the title, and I haven't stopped reading it since. I am now on my second hardbound copy as the first one is falling apart.
Life in a TB sanitarium doesn't sound that enthralling, but once begun, I found it impossible to put down. It's partially based on a true experience. Mann's wife went to a sanitarium for several months because of a lung complaint. While visiting her, Mann underwent some testing and, like his hero Hans Castorp, was told that it would be a good idea if he signed himself in. Unlike Castorp, he refused and, instead, wrote a novel about the experience.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Crime and Punishment
I've reread this a number of times, perhaps as often as The Magic Mountain, or close to it anyway. I consider this book a very significant work because it first introduced me to Dostoyevsky (I think I've read everything of his that's been translated into English), secondly it introduced me to Russian literature, and thirdly it was my introduction to foreign literature. Moreover, I may not have selected Mann's The Magic Mountain a year or so later. and instead. I might have gone with an English language work instead.
Raskolnikov believes himself to be a superior person who is not bound by the laws of human society. The average person is someone who, if he kills someone, is caught and punished. On the other hand, superior people, such as Napoleon, can be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, and are seen as one of the Great Ones. He kills a pawnbroker, someone useless and odious, to prove that he belongs among the elite.
Jack Finney
Time and Again
Simply the best time travel novel ever written. Time is a mental construct, and the mind can be fooled into traveling into the past if the environment is appropriate and if the individual can be convinced that he or she is actually living at that particular time. It's a mystery and a romance, and Finney provides sufficient information, along with appropriate photos, to make this a special work, and one that leaves me wishing this was real.
Umberto Eco
The Name of the Rose
A marvelous amalgam of mystery and history and religious conflict is all that this is. Brother William of Baskerville, a monk, has been called to the monastery to act as a mediator and a witness between two conflicting religious ideas of importance. While there, he is persuaded to investigate a series of murders in the monastery, and his name should provide a vital clue as to his methods. If he is unable to solve the murders, the Inquisition will be called in, and nobody wants that. Adso or Adson of Melk is his amanuensis. The novel is supposedly an edited copy of Adso's recounting of their stay at the monastery.
PD James
Anything
I've read all of her mysteries a number of times, even though I have figured out the villain shortly after getting into the story. The plots and characters are complex, carefully drawn out. There seldom is the expected denouement at the end where Commander Adam Dalgliesh gathers all the suspects in the drawing room and slowly works his way around the room, pointing his finger at each in turn. Instead, the process is a slow one, developing throughout the novel as each suspect is considered and then dismissed until it's a matter of uncovering the final bit of evidence rather than uncovering the identity of the guilty party.
Jane Austen
Everything including her juvenilia.
I tried reading Pride and Prejudice several times, but I always stopped reading. Then at age 42 I returned to graduate school in the English Department. In the first course I took, the reading list included Sense and Sensibility. I groaned a bit and then settled down to read it. I loved it and then went out to read everything else by her. I guess I had to mature a bit before I was ready for her. If I was forced to list my favorites among her works, I would say Persuasion would be No. 1 and Mansfield Park would be next. The others follow closely behind. It's been a while since I read them all, so I shall probably dust them off and settle down once again.
Russell Hoban
Riddley Walker
This is one of my favorite post-holocaust novels, thanks to a Chaucer course I took a year or two prior to reading the novel. In the Chaucer course, we had to read The Canterbury Tales in Middle English (the language it was written in). I struggled mightily because I had always hated reading something that wasn't written in Standard English. I really didn't want to pay attention to the language; that was too much work. However, at the end of the course, leaving the classroom for the last time, I felt as if I had lost a world somehow that I would never return to.
A year or so later, I had to take my qualifying exams and The Tales was on the list. I decided to play it smart and bought a modern translation and settled down to read. However, something important was missing, and so I got out the Middle English text and happily reread it in Middle English.
What has this to do with Riddley Walker? The answer is simple: Russell Hoban has written the novel in what he speculates English would be like maybe 500 years from now after a nuclear war and during that period most people have been illiterate. Those few who could read and write learned from their predecessors and not from teachers or texts which would have kept the language unchanged. If I had not learned to accept non-standard English texts from the Chaucer course, I never would have finished the novel. The following is the opening paragraph. If you read it out loud, as you should do with poetry, you will find it much easier to read.
"On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he weren't all that big plus he lookit poorily. He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and make his rush and there we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, 'Your tern now my tern later. . ."
I've made some other posts about Riddley Walker and some other works by Russell Hoban. You may want to check them out. Russell Hoban is a unique writer, with a wild imagination. Reading anything by him is well worth the time spent.
Walter M. Miller, Jr.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
This is another of my favorite post-holocaust novels. It too is set hundreds of years after a nuclear war. The locale seems to be somewhere in New Mexico, where monks at a monastery manage to survive as monks did during the so-called Dark Ages perhaps almost 2000 years earlier. And, along with their farm duties (they have to be completely self-sustaining) they also are dedicated to keeping records of the achievements of the past, even if they don't know what it is that they are painstakingly copying. They have faith that some day human knowledge will increase to the point that these arcane books and schematics and diagrams will be not only intelligible but also help to spark a resurgence of human learning.
Their task is much like that of the Encyclopediasts in Isaac Asimov's "Foundation series." However, the monks of the Order of Blessed Leibowitz do not have high tech aides and spaceships to travel about, but only sandals, and if they are lucky, a mule. The novel is really three novellas, set roughly centuries apart, with only monastery and the monks' task of preserving knowledge to link them. Well, there's always Benjamin, but he really can't be the Wandering Jew, several thousand years old, could he?
Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness
I'm never certain about whether this is a short novel or a long novella, so I will guess this time and call it a novel. It's the work by Conrad that I've read most often for I find it fascinates me, both in its description of the countryside, the inhabitants, and the Europeans who plague the inhabitants. It's a biting indictment of the treatment of the black Africans by the white Europeans who have come there supposedly to civilize and bring the benefits of European civilization and in reality end up brutalizing them in search of profit.
The POV character is Marlow, but the center of the novel is Kurtz Marlow has taken a job as the captain of a steamer on the Congo River. Far up the river is a trading outpost run by Kurtz, who has been amazingly successful in obtaining ivory for the company. Suddenly all shipments stop, and after a few months of silence, Marlow is ordered to take the steamer up the river to Kurtz's trading post. He is accompanied by the district manager and a group of ivory hunters and treasure seekers, along with a crew consisting of a few cannibals. Marlow becomes obsessed with the idea of Kurtz and only slowly does he realize that Kurtz is not only at the heart of darkness, but also he is the heart of darkness.
The film, Apocalypse Now, is loosely, very loosely, based on the novel--more of an adaptation than a recounting. The film is set in Vietnam during the war. Captain Willard, of the US Army, is sent up the Nung River into Cambodia to find Col. Kurtz and assassinate who has set himself up as a god among the local tribes people and is conducting his own brand of guerrilla warfare against the Viet Cong. While much of the novel has been changed for the film, I still found the film to be very close in capturing the tone or atmosphere of the novel--the absurdity and arrogance of the white invaders.
Something happened that I did not account for. I initially said that this would be a short list, something around ten, maybe even fifteen, but the list keep growing. I'm now at ten and I still have the same amount left. I guess I will end this here and continue with the rest on Part Two. I hope this doesn't turn out to be similar to those fantasy trilogies that reach double digits.
J. R. R. Tolkien
The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings
These three books are the ones that I have read more than any other work on my reread list, which is strange because I prefer SF to fantasy. Right now, I am slowly reading The Silmarillion and expect to get to the others this year.
Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain
This may be the second most reread book on my list. I first read it while an undergraduate sometime during the years 1958-1961. It was for a lit course, and I had to choose a novel from a list provided by the professor to write the outside paper on. I choose this one, probably because of the title, and I haven't stopped reading it since. I am now on my second hardbound copy as the first one is falling apart.
Life in a TB sanitarium doesn't sound that enthralling, but once begun, I found it impossible to put down. It's partially based on a true experience. Mann's wife went to a sanitarium for several months because of a lung complaint. While visiting her, Mann underwent some testing and, like his hero Hans Castorp, was told that it would be a good idea if he signed himself in. Unlike Castorp, he refused and, instead, wrote a novel about the experience.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Crime and Punishment
I've reread this a number of times, perhaps as often as The Magic Mountain, or close to it anyway. I consider this book a very significant work because it first introduced me to Dostoyevsky (I think I've read everything of his that's been translated into English), secondly it introduced me to Russian literature, and thirdly it was my introduction to foreign literature. Moreover, I may not have selected Mann's The Magic Mountain a year or so later. and instead. I might have gone with an English language work instead.
Raskolnikov believes himself to be a superior person who is not bound by the laws of human society. The average person is someone who, if he kills someone, is caught and punished. On the other hand, superior people, such as Napoleon, can be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, and are seen as one of the Great Ones. He kills a pawnbroker, someone useless and odious, to prove that he belongs among the elite.
Jack Finney
Time and Again
Simply the best time travel novel ever written. Time is a mental construct, and the mind can be fooled into traveling into the past if the environment is appropriate and if the individual can be convinced that he or she is actually living at that particular time. It's a mystery and a romance, and Finney provides sufficient information, along with appropriate photos, to make this a special work, and one that leaves me wishing this was real.
Umberto Eco
The Name of the Rose
A marvelous amalgam of mystery and history and religious conflict is all that this is. Brother William of Baskerville, a monk, has been called to the monastery to act as a mediator and a witness between two conflicting religious ideas of importance. While there, he is persuaded to investigate a series of murders in the monastery, and his name should provide a vital clue as to his methods. If he is unable to solve the murders, the Inquisition will be called in, and nobody wants that. Adso or Adson of Melk is his amanuensis. The novel is supposedly an edited copy of Adso's recounting of their stay at the monastery.
PD James
Anything
I've read all of her mysteries a number of times, even though I have figured out the villain shortly after getting into the story. The plots and characters are complex, carefully drawn out. There seldom is the expected denouement at the end where Commander Adam Dalgliesh gathers all the suspects in the drawing room and slowly works his way around the room, pointing his finger at each in turn. Instead, the process is a slow one, developing throughout the novel as each suspect is considered and then dismissed until it's a matter of uncovering the final bit of evidence rather than uncovering the identity of the guilty party.
Jane Austen
Everything including her juvenilia.
I tried reading Pride and Prejudice several times, but I always stopped reading. Then at age 42 I returned to graduate school in the English Department. In the first course I took, the reading list included Sense and Sensibility. I groaned a bit and then settled down to read it. I loved it and then went out to read everything else by her. I guess I had to mature a bit before I was ready for her. If I was forced to list my favorites among her works, I would say Persuasion would be No. 1 and Mansfield Park would be next. The others follow closely behind. It's been a while since I read them all, so I shall probably dust them off and settle down once again.
Russell Hoban
Riddley Walker
This is one of my favorite post-holocaust novels, thanks to a Chaucer course I took a year or two prior to reading the novel. In the Chaucer course, we had to read The Canterbury Tales in Middle English (the language it was written in). I struggled mightily because I had always hated reading something that wasn't written in Standard English. I really didn't want to pay attention to the language; that was too much work. However, at the end of the course, leaving the classroom for the last time, I felt as if I had lost a world somehow that I would never return to.
A year or so later, I had to take my qualifying exams and The Tales was on the list. I decided to play it smart and bought a modern translation and settled down to read. However, something important was missing, and so I got out the Middle English text and happily reread it in Middle English.
What has this to do with Riddley Walker? The answer is simple: Russell Hoban has written the novel in what he speculates English would be like maybe 500 years from now after a nuclear war and during that period most people have been illiterate. Those few who could read and write learned from their predecessors and not from teachers or texts which would have kept the language unchanged. If I had not learned to accept non-standard English texts from the Chaucer course, I never would have finished the novel. The following is the opening paragraph. If you read it out loud, as you should do with poetry, you will find it much easier to read.
"On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he weren't all that big plus he lookit poorily. He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and make his rush and there we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, 'Your tern now my tern later. . ."
I've made some other posts about Riddley Walker and some other works by Russell Hoban. You may want to check them out. Russell Hoban is a unique writer, with a wild imagination. Reading anything by him is well worth the time spent.
Walter M. Miller, Jr.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
This is another of my favorite post-holocaust novels. It too is set hundreds of years after a nuclear war. The locale seems to be somewhere in New Mexico, where monks at a monastery manage to survive as monks did during the so-called Dark Ages perhaps almost 2000 years earlier. And, along with their farm duties (they have to be completely self-sustaining) they also are dedicated to keeping records of the achievements of the past, even if they don't know what it is that they are painstakingly copying. They have faith that some day human knowledge will increase to the point that these arcane books and schematics and diagrams will be not only intelligible but also help to spark a resurgence of human learning.
Their task is much like that of the Encyclopediasts in Isaac Asimov's "Foundation series." However, the monks of the Order of Blessed Leibowitz do not have high tech aides and spaceships to travel about, but only sandals, and if they are lucky, a mule. The novel is really three novellas, set roughly centuries apart, with only monastery and the monks' task of preserving knowledge to link them. Well, there's always Benjamin, but he really can't be the Wandering Jew, several thousand years old, could he?
Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness
I'm never certain about whether this is a short novel or a long novella, so I will guess this time and call it a novel. It's the work by Conrad that I've read most often for I find it fascinates me, both in its description of the countryside, the inhabitants, and the Europeans who plague the inhabitants. It's a biting indictment of the treatment of the black Africans by the white Europeans who have come there supposedly to civilize and bring the benefits of European civilization and in reality end up brutalizing them in search of profit.
The POV character is Marlow, but the center of the novel is Kurtz Marlow has taken a job as the captain of a steamer on the Congo River. Far up the river is a trading outpost run by Kurtz, who has been amazingly successful in obtaining ivory for the company. Suddenly all shipments stop, and after a few months of silence, Marlow is ordered to take the steamer up the river to Kurtz's trading post. He is accompanied by the district manager and a group of ivory hunters and treasure seekers, along with a crew consisting of a few cannibals. Marlow becomes obsessed with the idea of Kurtz and only slowly does he realize that Kurtz is not only at the heart of darkness, but also he is the heart of darkness.
The film, Apocalypse Now, is loosely, very loosely, based on the novel--more of an adaptation than a recounting. The film is set in Vietnam during the war. Captain Willard, of the US Army, is sent up the Nung River into Cambodia to find Col. Kurtz and assassinate who has set himself up as a god among the local tribes people and is conducting his own brand of guerrilla warfare against the Viet Cong. While much of the novel has been changed for the film, I still found the film to be very close in capturing the tone or atmosphere of the novel--the absurdity and arrogance of the white invaders.
Something happened that I did not account for. I initially said that this would be a short list, something around ten, maybe even fifteen, but the list keep growing. I'm now at ten and I still have the same amount left. I guess I will end this here and continue with the rest on Part Two. I hope this doesn't turn out to be similar to those fantasy trilogies that reach double digits.
Friday, March 7, 2014
J. R. R. Tolkien: THE SILMARILLION--"Ainulindale"
J. R. R. Tolkien
"Ainulindale"
Part One of The Silmarillion
"Ainulindale" is the first part, appropriately enough, of The Silmarillion, which is a collection of stories set in Middle Earth prior to the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I say appropriately enough since an alternate title for "Ainulindale" could easily be The Book of Genesis. In Genesis, the Lord says, "Let there be Light." Iluvator, in "Ainulindale," essentially says let there be music.
I find it difficult to read "Ainulindale" (A) without thinking of Genesis (G) , because of the similarities and the differences between them. There is but one God in both creation myths, and both depict God as the First and Only being who is responsible for all of creation.
And in both are spiritual or non-material beings: angels in G and the Ainur in A. However, I can find no specific mention of the creation of the angels in G, although one might assume they were created sometime during the six days of creation. The first mention I can find of an angel occurs when a Cherubim was stationed at the gate of Eden to prevent Adam and Eve from returning to eat the fruit of the Tree of Life and becoming immortal after they had been expelled for eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In contrast, in the first line of "The Ainulindale" Tolkien specifically states that Iluvatar created the Ainur.
Iluvatar, unlike the Creator in Genesis, does not work alone in the act of creation. He proposes a "Great Music" to the Ainur.
"Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme of Iluvatar to a great music: and a sound arose of endless interchange melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the place of the dwelling of Iluvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void."
Such is the act of Creation in "Ainulinidale."
In spite of Tolkien's great, in-depth knowledge of Northern European myths, he elected to base his Creation myth on those of the Mediterranean area, and his treatment of the existence of evil in the universe comes from the same tradition. Melkor, like his counterparts in the Judeo-Christian-Moslem traditions, is actually a creation of God or Allah, and is one who turned against his creator as a result of pride.
Satan or Lucifer is not actually named as the tempter of Eve in the Garden, but later Christian theologians have decided that must be who the serpent was. Like Satan, Melkor was considered to be the brightest of Iluvatar's creations, and, just as in Christian teachings, Melkor could not created something that would live on its own. Melkor could only debase that what was already alive.
Evil has always been a problem for those religious traditions that posit a Supreme Good who creates all things. How does evil appear in the world created by one who is All Goodness, and why? One of the first thinkers who confronted the idea of evil in the world is Zoroaster, in the 7th BC. There may have been earlier conceptualizations of this problem, but the writings of Zoroastrianism are the earliest we have. From the Wikipedia entry on Zoroastrianism, we find the following:
"Zoroaster simplified the pantheon of early Iranian gods into two opposing forces: Ahura Mazda (Illuminating Wisdom) and Angra Mainyu (Destructive Spirit) in the 7th century BCD. Zoroaster's idea led to a formal religion bearing his name by about the 6th century BCE and have influenced other later religions including Judaism, Gnosticism, Christianity, and Islam."
Zoroaster appears to have been the first to have proposed the Final Judgement Day in which the forces of Good and Evil would meet in a final battle to determine who shall control the universe and these forces would include not only all those living but also those who had died before. According to Zoroaster, which side would win was in doubt.
The religious traditions that were influenced by Zoroaster all made several significant changes. In Zoroastrianism, the Destructive Spirit was an independent entity and equal in strength to Ahura Mazda and that evil might ultimately win out. In later religious traditions, the evil side is actually a creation of the Good and is one who has through pride isolated itself from the Supreme Good. In addition, in the later traditions the Evil force is weaker than the Good and is doomed to ultimate failure.
Melkor is clearly within this tradition as he cannot create anything on his own. He can only debase and deform what is already existing. He can create destructive storms but only because the elements are already there. Orcs are not created by Melkor, or his follower Sauron, but are the result of experiments on captive elves.
Many of the Ainur became enamored of Iluvatar's universe and elected to assume physical shapes and reside there, in order to protect it from Melkor's destructive meddling. These were called Valar, and each of the Valar assumed responsibility for a particular aspect of this new world. A more specific listing appears in the next part of The Silmarillion, "The Valaquenta." A great struggle ensues between the Valar and Melkor and his followers for control of Arda (Earth) and while Arda did not correspond to the ideas of the Valar, it slowly took shape.
In the next part, "Valaquenta," we learn much about Iluvatar's first creations: the Valar, the Maiar, and Melkor and his followers. Two names appear that will play an important role in The Lord of the Rings--Sauron, who was Melkor's chief follower, and Olorin, one of the Maiar, who is sometimes called Mithrandir, but who is probably better known as Gandalf.
"Ainulindale"
Part One of The Silmarillion
"Ainulindale" is the first part, appropriately enough, of The Silmarillion, which is a collection of stories set in Middle Earth prior to the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I say appropriately enough since an alternate title for "Ainulindale" could easily be The Book of Genesis. In Genesis, the Lord says, "Let there be Light." Iluvator, in "Ainulindale," essentially says let there be music.
I find it difficult to read "Ainulindale" (A) without thinking of Genesis (G) , because of the similarities and the differences between them. There is but one God in both creation myths, and both depict God as the First and Only being who is responsible for all of creation.
And in both are spiritual or non-material beings: angels in G and the Ainur in A. However, I can find no specific mention of the creation of the angels in G, although one might assume they were created sometime during the six days of creation. The first mention I can find of an angel occurs when a Cherubim was stationed at the gate of Eden to prevent Adam and Eve from returning to eat the fruit of the Tree of Life and becoming immortal after they had been expelled for eating of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In contrast, in the first line of "The Ainulindale" Tolkien specifically states that Iluvatar created the Ainur.
Iluvatar, unlike the Creator in Genesis, does not work alone in the act of creation. He proposes a "Great Music" to the Ainur.
"Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme of Iluvatar to a great music: and a sound arose of endless interchange melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the place of the dwelling of Iluvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void."
Such is the act of Creation in "Ainulinidale."
In spite of Tolkien's great, in-depth knowledge of Northern European myths, he elected to base his Creation myth on those of the Mediterranean area, and his treatment of the existence of evil in the universe comes from the same tradition. Melkor, like his counterparts in the Judeo-Christian-Moslem traditions, is actually a creation of God or Allah, and is one who turned against his creator as a result of pride.
Satan or Lucifer is not actually named as the tempter of Eve in the Garden, but later Christian theologians have decided that must be who the serpent was. Like Satan, Melkor was considered to be the brightest of Iluvatar's creations, and, just as in Christian teachings, Melkor could not created something that would live on its own. Melkor could only debase that what was already alive.
Evil has always been a problem for those religious traditions that posit a Supreme Good who creates all things. How does evil appear in the world created by one who is All Goodness, and why? One of the first thinkers who confronted the idea of evil in the world is Zoroaster, in the 7th BC. There may have been earlier conceptualizations of this problem, but the writings of Zoroastrianism are the earliest we have. From the Wikipedia entry on Zoroastrianism, we find the following:
"Zoroaster simplified the pantheon of early Iranian gods into two opposing forces: Ahura Mazda (Illuminating Wisdom) and Angra Mainyu (Destructive Spirit) in the 7th century BCD. Zoroaster's idea led to a formal religion bearing his name by about the 6th century BCE and have influenced other later religions including Judaism, Gnosticism, Christianity, and Islam."
Zoroaster appears to have been the first to have proposed the Final Judgement Day in which the forces of Good and Evil would meet in a final battle to determine who shall control the universe and these forces would include not only all those living but also those who had died before. According to Zoroaster, which side would win was in doubt.
The religious traditions that were influenced by Zoroaster all made several significant changes. In Zoroastrianism, the Destructive Spirit was an independent entity and equal in strength to Ahura Mazda and that evil might ultimately win out. In later religious traditions, the evil side is actually a creation of the Good and is one who has through pride isolated itself from the Supreme Good. In addition, in the later traditions the Evil force is weaker than the Good and is doomed to ultimate failure.
Melkor is clearly within this tradition as he cannot create anything on his own. He can only debase and deform what is already existing. He can create destructive storms but only because the elements are already there. Orcs are not created by Melkor, or his follower Sauron, but are the result of experiments on captive elves.
Many of the Ainur became enamored of Iluvatar's universe and elected to assume physical shapes and reside there, in order to protect it from Melkor's destructive meddling. These were called Valar, and each of the Valar assumed responsibility for a particular aspect of this new world. A more specific listing appears in the next part of The Silmarillion, "The Valaquenta." A great struggle ensues between the Valar and Melkor and his followers for control of Arda (Earth) and while Arda did not correspond to the ideas of the Valar, it slowly took shape.
In the next part, "Valaquenta," we learn much about Iluvatar's first creations: the Valar, the Maiar, and Melkor and his followers. Two names appear that will play an important role in The Lord of the Rings--Sauron, who was Melkor's chief follower, and Olorin, one of the Maiar, who is sometimes called Mithrandir, but who is probably better known as Gandalf.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
The Malevolent Willows
I'm not exactly one of the speediest readers around, and I suspect the reason is that I'm easily distracted. I would be reading a story or a poem or an essay, and the author would write some thing that would remind me of another story that I had read or perhaps something that had happened to me. Several minutes later I would return to whatever I was reading and move along until the next distraction. To be honest, that really doesn't disturb me for I find that one of the joys of reading.
Recently I was reading Death in Willow Pattern, one of W. J. Burley's mysteries featuring the eminent scholar, criminologist, and amateur detective, Dr. Henry Pym. I had moved on to these after having read most of Burley's "Superintendent Wycliffe" stories. I started reading the Wycliffe novels after having noticed the title of the first novel in the series: Wycliffe and the Three-Toed Pussy."
Speaking of being distracted . . . To return to my theme, the title of this novel refers to a willow. In the story is a stanza from a poem by William Thackeray, "The Willow-Tree." It occurs twice in the novel: once as the epigraph and once again after a mention of a particular willow tree.
"Know ye the willow-tree
Whose grey leaves quiver,
Whispering gloomily
To yon pale river?
Lady, at eventide
Wander not near it:
They say the branches hide
A sad lost spirit!"
W. M. Thackeray
from "The Willow-Tree"
The story behind the poem is of a young woman who sat under a willow-tree by a river and waited all night for her lover who never appeared. In the morning the willow-tree was there, but the young woman was never seen again.
Death in Willow Pattern is concerned with several missing and possibly murdered young women. And, there is an old, a very old and large willow tree on the estate of the landowner who has received poison pen letters accusing him of the same crimes that his ancestor centuries ago had committed. Several of the inhabitants of the estate express their dislike of the tree--saying that it is depressing. Others dismiss this as being influenced by the poem by Thackeray, and also by stories about those who had worked in the mine in the vicinity. The tree was haunted by their souls. Later, to reinforce this ominous air about the tree, there is a reference to the "vague spectral outline of the great willow."
This reminded me of one of my favorite short stories, "The Willows," by Algernon Blackwood. For those interested, I posted an entry about this story on Oct. 31, 2009 (Halloween Night, of course). Two men are on a boating trip down the Danube River and elect to stay the night on an island filled with willows. The narrator is disturbed, uneasy as it gets dark.
"But my emotion, so far as I could understand it, seemed to attach itself more particularly to the willow bushes, to those acres and acres of willows, crowding, so thickly growing there, swarming everywhere the eye could reach, pressing upon the river as though to suffocate it, standing in dense array mile after mile beneath the sky, watching waiting, listening. And, apart quite from the elements, the willows connected themselves subtly with my malaise, attacking the mind insidiously somehow by reason of their vast numbers, and contriving in some way or other to represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power moreover, not altogether friendly to us."
And, later the narrator tells us:
"With this general hush of the wind--though it still indulged in occasional brief gusts--the river seemed to me to grow blacker, the willows to stand more densely together. The latter, too, kept up a sort of independent movement of their own, rustling among themselves when no wind stirred, and shaking oddly from the roots upwards. When common objects in this way become charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us."
Blackwood's tale has the suggestion of the willows being imbued with a malignant spirit. The thought of a malignant willow brought another work to mind--J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. In the first volume, "The Fellowship of the Ring," the four hobbits have a dangerous encounter with Old Man Willow and have to be rescued by Tom Bombadil.
"Suddenly Frodo himself felt sleep overwhelming him. His head swam. There now seemed hardly a sound in the air. The flies had stopped buzzing. Only a gentle noise on the edge of hearing, a soft fluttering as of a song half whispered, seem to stir in the boughs above. He lifted his heavy eyes and saw leaning over him a huge willow-tree, old and hoary. Enormous it looked, its sprawling branches going up like reaching arms with many long-fingered hands, its knotted and twisted trunk gaping in wide fissures that creaked faintly as the boughs moved. The leaves fluttering against the bright sky dazzled him, and he toppled over, lying where he fell upon the grass."
Each of the stories features a willow that is infused with a malignant spirit of some sort, or at least is perceived as threatening in some way. I wonder why the willow is singled out in this way. I can't think of any stories that focus on dangerous pines or oaks or maples. There probably are some, but I can't think of any now.
I'm not referring to a forest, but to a type of tree that's been selected to house evil forces in some way. Dangerous forests have probably played a role in stories for thousands of years. Several Greek myths tell of the dangers encountered by travelers or hunters in the forest. Many of King Arthur's knights had adventures there, and Hawthorne set several of his stories in the deep woods. And, of course, Tolkien himself had three forests that were more or less dangerous to the unwise, unwary, and unwelcome traveler.
Why willows? What is it about them that lends itself to playing this role in various stories?
Are there other types of trees that play similar roles to that played by the willows in the stories I've mentioned above?
Recently I was reading Death in Willow Pattern, one of W. J. Burley's mysteries featuring the eminent scholar, criminologist, and amateur detective, Dr. Henry Pym. I had moved on to these after having read most of Burley's "Superintendent Wycliffe" stories. I started reading the Wycliffe novels after having noticed the title of the first novel in the series: Wycliffe and the Three-Toed Pussy."
Speaking of being distracted . . . To return to my theme, the title of this novel refers to a willow. In the story is a stanza from a poem by William Thackeray, "The Willow-Tree." It occurs twice in the novel: once as the epigraph and once again after a mention of a particular willow tree.
"Know ye the willow-tree
Whose grey leaves quiver,
Whispering gloomily
To yon pale river?
Lady, at eventide
Wander not near it:
They say the branches hide
A sad lost spirit!"
W. M. Thackeray
from "The Willow-Tree"
The story behind the poem is of a young woman who sat under a willow-tree by a river and waited all night for her lover who never appeared. In the morning the willow-tree was there, but the young woman was never seen again.
Death in Willow Pattern is concerned with several missing and possibly murdered young women. And, there is an old, a very old and large willow tree on the estate of the landowner who has received poison pen letters accusing him of the same crimes that his ancestor centuries ago had committed. Several of the inhabitants of the estate express their dislike of the tree--saying that it is depressing. Others dismiss this as being influenced by the poem by Thackeray, and also by stories about those who had worked in the mine in the vicinity. The tree was haunted by their souls. Later, to reinforce this ominous air about the tree, there is a reference to the "vague spectral outline of the great willow."
This reminded me of one of my favorite short stories, "The Willows," by Algernon Blackwood. For those interested, I posted an entry about this story on Oct. 31, 2009 (Halloween Night, of course). Two men are on a boating trip down the Danube River and elect to stay the night on an island filled with willows. The narrator is disturbed, uneasy as it gets dark.
"But my emotion, so far as I could understand it, seemed to attach itself more particularly to the willow bushes, to those acres and acres of willows, crowding, so thickly growing there, swarming everywhere the eye could reach, pressing upon the river as though to suffocate it, standing in dense array mile after mile beneath the sky, watching waiting, listening. And, apart quite from the elements, the willows connected themselves subtly with my malaise, attacking the mind insidiously somehow by reason of their vast numbers, and contriving in some way or other to represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power moreover, not altogether friendly to us."
And, later the narrator tells us:
"With this general hush of the wind--though it still indulged in occasional brief gusts--the river seemed to me to grow blacker, the willows to stand more densely together. The latter, too, kept up a sort of independent movement of their own, rustling among themselves when no wind stirred, and shaking oddly from the roots upwards. When common objects in this way become charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us."
Blackwood's tale has the suggestion of the willows being imbued with a malignant spirit. The thought of a malignant willow brought another work to mind--J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. In the first volume, "The Fellowship of the Ring," the four hobbits have a dangerous encounter with Old Man Willow and have to be rescued by Tom Bombadil.
"Suddenly Frodo himself felt sleep overwhelming him. His head swam. There now seemed hardly a sound in the air. The flies had stopped buzzing. Only a gentle noise on the edge of hearing, a soft fluttering as of a song half whispered, seem to stir in the boughs above. He lifted his heavy eyes and saw leaning over him a huge willow-tree, old and hoary. Enormous it looked, its sprawling branches going up like reaching arms with many long-fingered hands, its knotted and twisted trunk gaping in wide fissures that creaked faintly as the boughs moved. The leaves fluttering against the bright sky dazzled him, and he toppled over, lying where he fell upon the grass."
Each of the stories features a willow that is infused with a malignant spirit of some sort, or at least is perceived as threatening in some way. I wonder why the willow is singled out in this way. I can't think of any stories that focus on dangerous pines or oaks or maples. There probably are some, but I can't think of any now.
I'm not referring to a forest, but to a type of tree that's been selected to house evil forces in some way. Dangerous forests have probably played a role in stories for thousands of years. Several Greek myths tell of the dangers encountered by travelers or hunters in the forest. Many of King Arthur's knights had adventures there, and Hawthorne set several of his stories in the deep woods. And, of course, Tolkien himself had three forests that were more or less dangerous to the unwise, unwary, and unwelcome traveler.
Why willows? What is it about them that lends itself to playing this role in various stories?
Are there other types of trees that play similar roles to that played by the willows in the stories I've mentioned above?
Sunday, January 3, 2010
J. R. R. Tolkien: Jan. 3, 1892--Sept. 2, 1973
I have heard many readers express disappointment with Tolkien's The Silmarillion (TS). It isn't as good as The Lord of the Rings (LotR) or so many have said. Some claim it's boring. I think this reaction has two different causes. The first is that Tolkien died before he finished the work. His son Christopher Tolkien took on the task of completing it. Unfortunately Christopher Tolkien is not the writer his father was. However, I do not find the work to be poorly written; it may plod sometimes but the content is well worth the effort.
The second problem and the more serious one is that many readers misunderstand Tolkien's view of The Silmarillion. It was not, as far as I can see, to be a grand epic of a quest as was The Lord of the Rings, or even to a lesser extent, as was The Hobbit (TH). I think Tolkien had history in mind when he wrote The Silmarillion. It was to be a history of Middle Earth, prior to the events of the two novels. Tolkien was creating a universe. Consequently we don't have the same focus that we find in LotR or TH.
The one work I find that most closely approaches Tolkien's intentions is The Old Testament, the first book of which is Genesis, and it begins--
1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2. And the earth was without form, and void: and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3. And God said: Let there be light: and there was light.
This is, of course, the Creation story, as recounted in the King James Version. It is the creation of the world--the very beginning of time, of history, of the relationship between God and its creatures.
Now, the first book of The Silmarillion is "Ainulindale: The Music of the Ainur," and it begins as follows:
"There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Iluvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; and they sang before him, and he was glad. But for a long while they sang only each alone, or but few together, while the rest hearkened; for each comprehended only that part of the mind of Iluvatar from which he came, and in the understanding of their brethren they grew but slowly. Yet ever as they listened they came to deeper understanding, and increased in unison and harmony."
This clearly is a Creation story, the very beginning of the world of Middle Earth. However, in Tolkien's universe, God works with his first creation, the Ainur, to create the universe. And, instead of light, Eru, in a sense, says "Let there be music." He gives the Ainur "a mighty theme, unfolding to them things greater and more wonderful than he had yet revealed."
He then gives them their task: "ye shall show forth your powers in adorning this theme..."
"Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme of Iluvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights . . . and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void."
And later--
"But when they were come into the Void, Iluvatar said to them: 'Behold your music!' And he showed to them a vision, giving to them sight where before was only hearing; and they saw a new World made visible before them, and it was globed amid the Void, and it was sustained therein, but was not of it."
And . . .
"And they saw with amazement the coming of the Children of Iluvatar, and the habitation that was prepared for them; and they perceived that they themselves in the labour of their music had been busy with preparation of this dwelling, and yet knew not that it had any purpose beyond its own beauty. For the Children of Iluvatar are conceived by him alone. . . Now the Children of Iluvatar are Elves and Men, the Firstborn and the Followers."
While "Genesis" and "Ainulindale" differ, they do parallel each other in many respects, and I think that we should not force The Silmarillion into being something that it is not meant to be. It is a unique work, separate in design and intent from The Lord of the Rings, and it should be read with this in mind.
Overall Rating: highly recommended for those interested in Tolkien's universe.
The second problem and the more serious one is that many readers misunderstand Tolkien's view of The Silmarillion. It was not, as far as I can see, to be a grand epic of a quest as was The Lord of the Rings, or even to a lesser extent, as was The Hobbit (TH). I think Tolkien had history in mind when he wrote The Silmarillion. It was to be a history of Middle Earth, prior to the events of the two novels. Tolkien was creating a universe. Consequently we don't have the same focus that we find in LotR or TH.
The one work I find that most closely approaches Tolkien's intentions is The Old Testament, the first book of which is Genesis, and it begins--
1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2. And the earth was without form, and void: and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3. And God said: Let there be light: and there was light.
This is, of course, the Creation story, as recounted in the King James Version. It is the creation of the world--the very beginning of time, of history, of the relationship between God and its creatures.
Now, the first book of The Silmarillion is "Ainulindale: The Music of the Ainur," and it begins as follows:
"There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Iluvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; and they sang before him, and he was glad. But for a long while they sang only each alone, or but few together, while the rest hearkened; for each comprehended only that part of the mind of Iluvatar from which he came, and in the understanding of their brethren they grew but slowly. Yet ever as they listened they came to deeper understanding, and increased in unison and harmony."
This clearly is a Creation story, the very beginning of the world of Middle Earth. However, in Tolkien's universe, God works with his first creation, the Ainur, to create the universe. And, instead of light, Eru, in a sense, says "Let there be music." He gives the Ainur "a mighty theme, unfolding to them things greater and more wonderful than he had yet revealed."
He then gives them their task: "ye shall show forth your powers in adorning this theme..."
"Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme of Iluvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights . . . and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void."
And later--
"But when they were come into the Void, Iluvatar said to them: 'Behold your music!' And he showed to them a vision, giving to them sight where before was only hearing; and they saw a new World made visible before them, and it was globed amid the Void, and it was sustained therein, but was not of it."
And . . .
"And they saw with amazement the coming of the Children of Iluvatar, and the habitation that was prepared for them; and they perceived that they themselves in the labour of their music had been busy with preparation of this dwelling, and yet knew not that it had any purpose beyond its own beauty. For the Children of Iluvatar are conceived by him alone. . . Now the Children of Iluvatar are Elves and Men, the Firstborn and the Followers."
While "Genesis" and "Ainulindale" differ, they do parallel each other in many respects, and I think that we should not force The Silmarillion into being something that it is not meant to be. It is a unique work, separate in design and intent from The Lord of the Rings, and it should be read with this in mind.
Overall Rating: highly recommended for those interested in Tolkien's universe.
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