Ronnie James Dio: Putting the sword to the dragon of cancer, still defying the ravages of time

—The best steel goes through the fire

Ronnie James Dio, Hide in the Rainbow

If you’re a fan of heavy metal music, you’re probably aware that legendary frontman Ronnie James Dio, 67, is in the midst of a grim battle against stomach cancer. On November 25, 2009, Dio’s wife broke the news and announced that he was starting immediate treatment at the Mayo Clinic. Her message: Dio was ready to fight back, tooth and nail, to achieve victory against this dreaded disease:

After he kills this dragon, Ronnie will be back on stage, where he belongs, doing what he loves best, performing for his fans. Long live rock and roll, long live Ronnie James Dio. Thanks to all the friends and fans from all over the world that have sent well wishes. This has really helped to keep his spirit up.

Fortunately for metal fans, it’s a battle Dio appears to be winning. The latest news according to Dio’s web site is that the man who made the sign of the horns a household symbol recently had his seventh chemotherapy treatment, and that the main tumor in his stomach has shrunk considerably. I hope it’s a fight he ultimately wins and that one day we’ll see him back on stage, belting out Holy Diver while wielding a two-handed sword.

At this point you may be thinking, that’s cool and all, but why write about Dio on a web site devoted to the works of Robert E. Howard, J.R.R. Tolkien, and other authors?

To which I would answer: Have you ever listened to Dio’s lyrics? They’re fantasy fiction set to music, man.

To read the rest of this post, visit The Cimmerian Web site.

Closing the book on The Silmarillion

Re-reading The Silmarillion was a lot of fun—as I knew it would be. From the Dagor Brallogach to the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, from The Fall of Gondolin to the Voyage of Eärendil, how could it be otherwise? The Silmarillion might not be for everyone, but it never fails to awe, inspire, and move me. Telephone directory in Elvish my ass (okay, that particular description makes me smile, inaccurate though it may be).

I found my most recent trip through Tolkien’s legendarium particularly rewarding because blogging as I read forced me to organize my thoughts and get them down on paper. Committing to a series of posts had the byproduct of making me think more deeply and rigorously about the subject at hand. I hope you enjoyed Blogging The Silmarillion and I want to thank you all for the great comments.

I do feel obligated to mention the edition of The Silmarillion I used to write this series, in part because I borrowed so much of its artwork. It’s a hardcover published in 2004 by the Houghton Mifflin Company containing 45 gorgeous, full-page color illustrations by artist Ted Nasmith. This isn’t just a book, it’s a work of art, one of the gems of my bookshelf. I’m a reader, not a collector, but I am proud to own this particular volume (you can find it pictured above).

While he may not be as well-known a Tolkien illustrator as John Howe or Alan Lee, Nasmith is perhaps my favorite artist of the trio. He’s particularly good at painting detailed landscapes and broad vistas, which makes him a natural fit for the epic, scenic sweep of the stories contained in The Silmarillion.

One of the most affecting images that I’ve ever experienced in my mind’s eye is a young Tolkien on the battlefields of the Somme, wreathed in the reek of cordite and blood and fear, hope for survival minimal, writing down the tale of The Fall of Gondolin. Some combination of chance or fate allowed him to survive those horrors and deliver his wonderful tales of Middle-earth to us, posthumously, with the 1977 publication of The Silmarillion. I’m glad we have it.

Critical works referenced

Carpenter, Humphrey, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien and J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

Flieger, Verlyn, Splintered Light

Garth, John, Tolkien and the Great War

Shippey, Tom, Author of the Century and The Road to Middle-earth

Zimbardo, Rose; Isaacs, Neil: Understanding the Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism

REH and other omissions aside, Rings, Swords, and Monsters: Exploring Fantasy Literature a worthy listen

Note: This post originally appeared on The Cimmerian website.

Slowly—too slowly and decades overdue, in my opinion—fantasy literature is gaining a foothold in colleges and universities. Long ignored and/or the subject of sneering intellectuals and defenders of the literary “canon,” works like J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings are finally starting to appear on a handful of college syllabi. (To geek out a moment and quote Gandalf the Grey, “that is an encouraging thought.”)

For this slowly building acceptance of fantasy literature in academic circles, one has to acknowledge the work of the college professors who have cajoled, pled, or insisted that it be allowed into the hallowed halls of academia. These include men like Tom Shippey (former Chair of Humanities at Saint Louis University and author of J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century and The Road to Middle-earth), Corey Olsen, aka., The Tolkien Professor, an English Professor at Washington College, and Michael Drout, Chair of the English Department at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts.

Drout is editor of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Beowulf and the Critics and a co-editor of Tolkien Studies. At Wheaton he teaches Old English (Anglo-Saxon), Middle English, medieval literature, fantasy, science fiction, and writing. He also writes a blog, Wormtalk and Slugspeak, which is definitely worth adding to your list of links.

Drout also wrote and narrated a fine entry in The Modern Scholar audio book series, Rings, Swords, and Monsters: Exploring Fantasy Literature, which is the subject of this post. I recently had the pleasure of listening to it during my commute to work and found it immensely enjoyable, lucid, thought-provoking, and ambitious. It offers prima facie evidence for why fantasy literature deserves to be the subject of academic study.

Drout begins by outlining  the origins of modern fantasy literature, including Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, and H. Rider Haggard’s Eric Brighteyes, and then continues the fantastic journey all the way up through J.K. Rowling’ Harry Potter series.

Rings, Swords, and Monsters spends most of its time offering an excellent appraisal of J.R.R. Tolkien and his works. Tolkien has cast a long shadow over all fantasy literature since the publication of The Lord of the Rings in the mid-1950s, and Drout explains why in detail here, illuminating the timeless themes that place works like The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and The Lord of the Rings among the best novels of the 20th century. He also delves into Tolkien’s seminal works of scholarship, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” and “On Fairy-Stories.”

Drout places Tolkien in a semi-holy trinity of fantasy authors alongside Ursula LeGuin and Robert Holdstock. I agree with the choice of LeGuin, whose Earthsea books are a marvel, but Holdstock gets a firm “?” from me, as I have not read any his works. But Rings, Swords, and Monsters has convinced me to give Holdstock’s Mythago Wood (winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1985) a try. So I won’t be too quick to deal out judgment on this claim.

But the reach of Rings, Swords, and Monsters extends beyond just the heavy hitters of fantasy. For example, it offers the first serious, critical treatment I’ve ever seen (or more accurately, have heard) of authors Stephen Donaldson and Terry Brooks. Both fell under the spell of an “anxiety of influence” while laboring in Tolkien’s long shadow: Donaldson (of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever fame) was one of the first post-Tolkien writers to write in reaction to The Lord of the Rings, while Brooks’ Sword of Shannara was the poster-child of Tolkien clones.

Drout also spends considerable time detailing the golden age of young adult fantasy fiction, a period that ran from roughly the late 1960’s/1970s and included Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea books, Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain, and Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence. No arguments here: I enjoy and continue to enjoy all three series, which still hold up as fine reading for both children and adults. He also spends time analyzing C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series.

Drout classifies Arthurian literature as a subcategory of fantasy. Arthurian literature is considered more “serious” because in it magic and world-building are subordinate to male-female relationships and ethical dilemmas, which share more in common with romance. Drout calls T.H. White’s masterful The Once and Future King the most substantial and important work of Arthurian fiction since Malory, an assessment with which I wholeheartedly agree. He also touches on Malory, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Mary Stewart in this lecture.

Refereshingly, Drout is not only a medieval scholar but an obvious fan of the fantasy genre. Frankly, this is nice to see. He not only analyzes the books, but interjects personal opinion about them and reads passages aloud for their lyricism and beauty. Listening to Drout’s meticulous pronunciation of the Sindarian and Quenya tongues, or the first several lines of Beowulf in Old English, was an aural pleasure.

Drout concludes Rings, Swords, and Monsters with some brilliant commentary on what makes fantasy fiction “fantastic,” including how and why fantasy differs from realism. Broadly, Drout says that fantasy is about stories that physically cannot happen, while realistic fiction/historic fiction is about things that could have happened, but did not. He rejects the idea that fantasy is inherently conservative or religious, noting that Tolkien’s ideology differs from LeGuin who differs from Donaldson, for example, and that Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is anti-Christian.

Rings, Swords, and Monsters makes a strong case that fantasy should be considered serious literature, and not just escapism, though I have long argued that escapism is a worthy function of fantasy literature, as it enables us to see our own world in a clearer light. Drout says as much, too: “Fantasy literature takes us further, deeper, and higher, so that when we return, we see the old world in a new way,” he says. He also says fantasy typically focuses on larger and more existential “needs” of characters (survival, defeating forces of evil that threaten to overwhelm worlds, grappling with the reality of death) while realistic fiction focuses on the “wants” of characters (i.e., compromised freedom, broken relationships, lack of respect, etc). Fantasy literature actually wrestles with the bigger issues (death, belief in God, etc.) better than modern, realistic novels by engaging them directly, Drout argues.

Drout also has some illuminating things to say about nostalgia and its connection to fantasy lit. While nostalgia for a lost, idyllic past informs the works of Tolkien and subsequent fantasy authors, this feeling should not be conflated with infantilism. Rather, nostalgia represents an honest desire of authors to offer their readers better models of reality than our own unsatisfactory present. They’re not trying to pull us back to an “authentic” time in our own history that never existed, but to create from whole cloth a better past that never was, providing us with shining examples that can use to make our own world a better place.

“Tolkien, LeGuin, Holdstock, Donaldson, Brooks, at their best, want to examine what it means to be human, just as any mainstream writer does, but they want to do it by removing the social structures of the present world and seeing how humans in all their variety might behave in a different world,” Drout says.

Howard who? And other absences

Rings, Swords, and Monsters does contain a few glaring omissions, one of which is almost unforgivable. I almost hate to mention it around these parts for fear of turning off readers of The Cimmerian to an otherwise fine course.

Of course I’m talking about Robert E. Howard, who Drout completely overlooks, save for one wince-inducing comparison in which he calls the psychological journey of Bilbo Baggins “far more interesting than a hero like Conan the Barbarian who just smashes everything in his path.” Now, I’m almost—almost—willing to overlook this, on the grounds that Drout may not consider REH’s stories fantasy, but rather in the pulp-action/swords-and-sorcery genre (Drout’s failure to mention authors like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Fritz Leiber lends further weight to this argument). He never makes this claim, but it’s a possibility.

I’m also willing to defend Drout for the simple fact that he attempts to offer a review of the entire corpus of fantasy literature on just seven CDs, each an hour or so in length. He obviously can’t cover everything.

However, I was disappointed not to hear anything about Howard, nor a few other authors whom I would place firmly among the greats in the fantasy genre, including Poul Anderson (The Broken Sword, Three Hearts and Three Lions) and E.R. Eddison, whose The Worm Ouroboros must surely be considered among the greatest fantasy novels ever written. Michael Moorcock, though not one of my favorite authors, also is overlooked here. The absence of Lord Dunsany and Gene Wolfe are also head-scratchers.

Drout’s world view of fantasy fiction is dominated by Tolkien, who he calls the “father figure” of fantasy literature. I would call Tolkien the dominant figure epic fantasy, while placing Howard as the pinnacle of a second tower of realistic, grim and gritty, action-oriented fantasy (aka, swords and sorcery). Howard’s tales are not just adventure stories but also have thematic and literary depth, which make them worthy of closer analysis and study. He is certainly a critical, weight-bearing pillar of the genre.

Nor is Drout’s evaluation of epic fantasy complete. For example, regarding the Tolkien clones, how did he overlook Dennis McKiernan, whose Iron Tower trilogy is LOTR in miniature with the serial numbers filed off? You can practically see the whiteout on the pages. In comparison, The Sword of Shannara is highly original. Though Rings, Swords, and Monsters was released in 2006, Drout also fails to mention George R.R. Martin, whose A Song of Ice and Fire series seems to offer a bridge of that realism/fantasy literature gap that he spends much time explaining. Not quite epic fantasy or swords and sorcery, A Song of Ice and Fire arguably shares more in common with the grim historic fiction of Bernard Cornwell than Tolkien. It would be interesting to see where and how Drout would classify these books. For that matter, I would have liked to have seen Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles covered in the Arthurian lecture, but although its fiction, Cornwell’s trilogy contains no overt magic or monsters and is faithful to 5th century Britain and perhaps is more accurately classified as historical fiction.

In summary, Rings, Swords, and Monsters offers a highly literate, engaging and detailed look at the sub-genre of epic or high fantasy, even as it falls short of offering a review of the entire depth and breadth of the genre. Perhaps we may one day see the Modern Scholar tackle pulp-inspired, heroic/swords and sorcery fantasy as well. Like Boromir hurling a stone into the waters of the dammed Sirannon, the ripples of Rings, Swords, and Monsters may awaken further academic analysis of rougher, more savage beasts that lurk beneath the waters of fantasy fiction.

Blogging The Silmarillion: Closing the book on the Third Age

Part nine of Blogging The Silmarillion concludes with Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age

“Many are the strange chances of the world,” said Mithrandir, “and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter.”

–J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

A recurring theme in The Silmarillion is Elves and/or Men meeting force with force, the result of which is endless cycles of war and ruin. In the Quenta Silmarillon Melkor steals the three Silmarils, and their maker, the Noldorin Elf Fëanor, vows to recover them at all costs. Fëanor’s destructive oath sets in motion a millennia-spanning series of conflicts that continue until the Valar intercede in the War of Wrath, another horribly destructive affair which mars Arda forever and ends the First Age of Middle-earth.

But even after Morgoth’s defeat in the War of Wrath, evil is not destroyed, nor are possessiveness and pride stamped out of the hearts of Men. In the Akallabêth the Númenóreans fall victim to the same Fëanor-like sins of pride and overreaching when they try to wrest immortality from the Valar. The result is the destruction of their civilization.

Thus far it’s been pretty bleak stuff from Tolkien, and with only one section of The Silmarillion left it’s still very much an open question whether Men and Elves will ever learn from their mistakes, or whether Middle-earth is doomed to ever more destructive wars of possession. And so we arrive at Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age.

After the drowning of Númenor, the surviving ships of the Faithful led by Elendil and his sons Isildur and Anárion alight on the shores of Middle-earth. They build great works whose gorgeous, evocative names I can’t resist repeating here: the watchtowers Emyn Beraid and Amon Sul; Minas Ithil, the Tower of the Rising Moon; Minas Anor, Tower of the Setting Sun; the massive Argonath statues; and the Pinnacle of Orthanc (Saruman’s future home). Atop these new towers the Númenóreans place the Seven Stones, aka the palantíri, which allow them to keep a vigilant watch on Sauron. They also settle the great realm of Gondor and construct the city of Osgiliath.

Meanwhile the disembodied, drowned spirit of Sauron eventually returns to the Mountains of Shadow where he sets his minions to work building Barad-dûr, the Dark Tower. Sauron takes up the One Ring, and after gathering his strength goes to war. His forces capture Minas Ithil (which later becomes Minas Morgul, “The Tower of Dark Sorcery”) and gain control of the palantír kept there.

Isildur vs. Sauron.

With Middle-earth in jeopardy of falling under Sauron’s dark rule, Elendil and the Noldorin high king Gil-galad unite in the Last Alliance, a great host of Elves and Men. In an all-out battle with Sauron’s forces on Dagorlad, the Battle Plain, the host of good prevails, then lays siege to Barad-dûr. Anárion is slain during the seven-year standoff. Finally Sauron himself issues forth, slaying both Gil-galad and Elendil in an epic throw-down. But Sauron is vanquished when Isildur cuts the Ruling Ring from his hand. This ushers in The Third Age and the events of The Lord of the Rings.

The Third Age doesn’t get off to an auspicious start for the forces of good as Isildur refuses to destroy the One Ring. Instead he opts to keep it as “weregild” for the death of his father and brother. A weregild is an Anglo-Saxon term meaning reparation for murder. In other words, the One Ring is a form of blood money and keeping it is a bad omen. It’s therefore not surprising when Isildur is slain by a band of orcs. The Ring is swept into the river Anduin and lost.

(This raises an interesting side-question: Is Isildur’s failure to cast the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom the result of the One Ring’s corruptive influence, or Isildur’s own lust for power? Tolkien leaves the issue open for interpretation.)

Sauron, defeated but not destroyed, arises from the ashes a second time and begins to rebuild his armies. His thoughts return to finding and recovering the One Ring, his source of power, which eventually is recovered by the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. Bilbo’s nephew, Frodo, now has the unenviable task of taking it to Rivendell to allow the powers-that-be to decide what to do next.

Right about here a First Age hero may have confronted Sauron on the battlefield with the One Ring and destroyed him, but in the process becoming another Dark Lord in his stead. But this time, miraculously, evil is thwarted by an act of humble bravery by a meek, unlikely hero.

Frodo is unlike anyone we have seen in the First and Second Ages of Middle-earth. While the events of The Silmarillion are dominated by the long shadow of Fëanor, who vows to recover the great treasure of the Silmarils and inflict revenge on Melkor, its successor, The Lord of the Rings, is the inverse of this equation: It’s about a humble hero who bears an artifact with him into the heart of darkness with the intent to destroy it, not wield it as a weapon.

While Feanor is driven by a limitless pride in his own strength, Frodo is motivated by an inner sense of duty and undying loyalty to his friends. In the end he succeeds where greater Men and Elves would have (and have already) failed. The forces of the West would surely have been overcome at the last were it not for the hands of the weak, the long trek into Mordor of Frodo and Sam, who beyond all endurance and hope deliver Middle-earth from destruction. “For, as many songs have since sung, it was the Periannath, the Little People, dwellers in hillsides and meadows, that brought them deliverance,” writes Tolkien.

Frodo’s seemingly hopeless quest is the answer to the eternal question: How do you defeat force? The answer is through patient endurance and self-sacrifice. In other words, through unassuming, quiet heroism, by exhibiting pity for one’s enemies, and through subversion, by not playing by force’s rules. This is another of the great themes of Tolkien’s works, and one which he explains in a letter:

Of course, Allegory and Story converge, meeting somewhere in Truth … And one finds, even in imperfect human ‘literature,’ that the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easy it can be read ‘just as a story’; and the better and more closely woven a story is the more easy can those so minded find allegory in it. But the two start out from opposite ends. You can make the Ring into an allegory of our time, if you like: an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power. But that is only because all power magical or mechanical does always so work. You cannot write a story about an apparently simple magic ring without that bursting in, if you really take the ring seriously… 

--J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

But as is always the case, Tolkien’s works resist simple, reductive explanations. While we can interpret Frodo’s carrying of the One Ring to Christ’s burden of the Cross, for example, Middle-earth is not saved through pacifism and pity alone. The spirit of Feanor endures in the suicidal feint at the Black Gates of Mordor and the sacrifice on the Pelennor Fields, which I would argue are just as integral to victory as the quest into Mordor. The Elf-Lord Círdan says as much when gives Gandalf the Ring Narya, hoping that the some of the Ragnarök-like spirit of the First Age will help the heroes of the Third:

“For this is the Ring of Fire, and herewith, maybe, thou shalt rekindle hearts to the valour of old in a world that grows chill.”

It is the union of Northern courage and Christian faith, “hammerstrokes with compassion” as coined by C.S. Lewis, that ultimately delivers the Third Age from the black night of Sauron’s victory.

Terrific Tolkien: Finding joy in unhappy endings

In Tolkien’s legendarium victory is never the black-and-white happy ending that it appears to be. Yes, Sauron is destroyed when the One Ring is consumed in the fires of Mount Doom. But the Ring’s destruction opens an artery in the heartstrings of Middle-earth, from which magic drains away, along with its greatest heroes. Writes Tolkien:

In that time the last of the Noldor set sail from the Havens and left Middle-earth for ever. And latest of all the Keepers of the Three Rings rode to the Sea, and Master Elrond took there the ship that Cirdan had made ready. In the twilight of autumn it sailed out of Mithlond, until the seas of the Bent World fell away beneath it, and the winds of the round sky troubled it no more, and borne upon the high airs above the mists of the world it passed into the Ancient West, and an end was come for the Eldar of story and of song.

Last ship to Valinor.

For all the race’s previous acts of pride and stubbornness, it’s noteworthy that a Noldorin Elf commits the greatest self-sacrifice of all. Galadriel, one of the Eldest of the Eldar, has the One Ring in her grasp after Frodo offers it to her freely in Lothlórien. She could have taken it and used it to defeat Sauron. Think of her temptation: The fate of the One Ring is tied to the Three Rings. Had it not perished the three Elven Rings would also have endured, along with all the great works of the Elves which the Rings protect and preserve, including Lothlórien and Rivendell. Yet in the end Galadriel resists its temptation. The Elves choose to sacrifice the Ring and their Rings though it results in the destruction of all their works. They opt for freedom over immortality. It’s a wonderful inversion of everything we’ve seen so far in The Silmarillion.

Like The Lord of the Rings, I find the ending of The Silmarillion incredibly sad. I grieve for the departure of the Noldor, for the draining of magic from the world, for the last ship which pulls away from the Havens, and for our own, grayer world left in its wake. While reading Tolkien’s letters, I was interested to find that he began a story placed about 100 years after the downfall of Mordor, “but it proved both sinister and depressing,” and he wound up abandoning the project.

I can sympathize. During a few (all too fleeting) times in my life, I’ve felt glimpses of magic at the edges of my vision, dim remembrances of heroic ages separated by vast epochs of time. Just as quickly, these tantalizing images fade, and I’m back in the here and now of modern life, a world of banal existence, drab landscapes, and moral turpitude. Does this make me crazy? (Arguably) no, just someone who loves slipping into the world of fantasy fiction, and in particular the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. The Silmarillion provides these rare, exotic glimpses of a rich and wonderful secondary world, of which I have yet to find an equal. Everything in The Lord of the Rings is an echo of a grander, more epic work. The Silmarillion may not be as grounded, as accessible, nor ultimately as successful as a work of literature as The Lord of the Rings, but in my opinion it’s just as great. For it is myth writ large.

(Images by J.R.R. Tolkien, Jos, Ted Nasmith)

Blogging The Silmarillion: A straight road is bent and Men suffer punishment divine

Part eight of Blogging the Silmarillion continues with the Akallabêth.

According to scholar Tom Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien struggled to reconcile his belief in a Christian heaven with the uncertain fate of the pre-Christian heroes he so adored. Un-baptized and living in a pagan age, where would the spirits of great Northern heroes like Beowulf dwell after their death? Likewise, what would be the fate of his Middle-earth creations, for example the slain Elven heroes Fëanor, Fingon, and Fingolfin? And where would their living, immortal brethren ultimately take up residence? The answer as explained in The Silmarillion is twofold: The Halls of Mandos, which houses the spirits of Elves slain in battle, and Valinor, the Blessed Realm, a paradise on earth removed from the darkness of Middle-earth.

Valinor and the Halls of Mandos serve as halfway houses for pre-Christian souls, or as Shippey notes in The Road to Middle Earth, a “middle path” where they remain until the Ragnarök-like ending of the world. While the Halls of Mandos can perhaps be thought of as a less rowdy Valhalla, Valinor makes a wonderful, shifting metaphor: The Garden of Eden; a lost time of innocence; a dim remembrance of a better time in our own lives; a loved one separated by death but who we hope to rejoin one day; they’re all applicable ways of assigning meaning to the Undying Lands.

Of course Valinor is sadly beyond not only our reach, but the reach of the denizens of the Third Age of Middle-earth. It’s a divide not merely between heaven and earth, but a split on Middle-earth itself. This is Tolkien’s myth of The Lost Road, an impossible straight path on a curved earth that leads to a land of magic and deathlessness. Frodo, en route to the Grey Havens, sings of this myth in the final pages of The Lord of the Rings:

Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate;
And though I oft have passed them by,
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun

Though hidden, Valinor was still reachable by ship into the Second Age via a sea-journey into the west. But then a powerful race of Men called the Númenóreans decided that they too wanted in on the deathlessness, an ill choice which ultimately resulted in the separation of Valinor from Middle-earth (or heaven from earth, if you will). Their story is told in the Akallabêth, the penultimate section of The Silmarillion.

The set up to the Akallabêth is as follows: The Edain (Men who dwelt in Beleriand and were friendly with the Elves) are given the island of Númenor by the Valar as a gift for their valorous service in the wars against Morgoth. As the Second Age of Middle-earth begins they build splendid kingdoms and live for long years in unbridled peace and prosperity.

But the one seemingly unsolvable problem for the Númenóreans is that, as Men, they are mortal. Though they have much longer lifespans than modern Men, they will eventually grow old and die. Most do so gracefully in their time, accepting their fate. But some of the Númenóreans begin to question why this must be so. Valinor and its coastal city of Avallónë, just visible far off on the western horizon, seem to offer answers to this unsolved question. With the home of the deathless Elves in sight (serving as a nagging reminder of their own mortality), the Númenóreans begin to wonder why they too can’t get in on that action.

The Akallabêth can be viewed as one long exploration of Tolkien’s preoccupation with death, and also our purpose in this mortal, all-too-short life. As I see it, the answer Tolkien offers is that we’re not here on earth to hoard wealth, nor to use our minds and hands to build military strength, but to live in peace and fellowship and dignity until we pass beyond the Circles of the World. But as time passes the Númenóreans stray from the path. They turn toward military conquest and the acquisition of wealth. They build great tombs to house their dead, a symbol of the exaltation of the physical body and a distancing from the spiritual (I could draw parallels with the state of our great nation today and its infatuation with celebrities, plastic surgery, and physical beauty, but it’s too easy a target).

The Valar forbid the Númenóreans to sail to Valinor, warning of calamity should they tempt fate. For death is a gift to Men granted by Ilúvatar. But the Númenóreans, led by their 25th king, Ar-Pharazôn, continue to rebel (At least, most do—a separate faction led by Amandil called the Faithful continue to heed the words of the Valar, along with Amandil’s son Elendil. But they are in the minority).

This gap between the two groups grows into a gaping rift after Ar-Pharazôn falls in with the Dark Lord Sauron. Though he’s initially brought to Númenor as a humble captive, Sauron woos Ar-Pharazôn with his knowledge and guile. Soon a houseguest instead of a prisoner, Sauron spreads lies about the Valar among the Númenóreans. He finds a willing partner in crime in Ar-Pharazôn. Sauron gets the Númenórean king to cut down the white tree Nimloth (though not before Isildur, Elendil’s son, risks life and limb to steal a fruit from one of its boughs and carry on its line). At his suggestion Ar-Pharazôn also builds a temple in the heart of the city and the Númenóreans begin the practice of human sacrifice.

Downfall of Númenor.

Ultimately, Sauron’s destructive whisper campaign gets Ar-Pharazôn to launch the Númenórean fleet in an all-out attack on Valinor. The result is the destruction of the entire fleet and the sinking of Númenor. A towering wave, green and cold, overlaps the island, sending the once-great civilization beneath the waves. In the great flood Sauron is unmade, but not destroyed, and his spirit returns to Mordor, where he “wrought himself a new guise,” an image of malice and hatred made visible.

Most strikingly of all, Ilúvatar remakes the once-flat Arda as a round planet. Valinor no longer resides as an island in the west, but a mythic land hovering somewhere in the ether. Ships can no longer reach Valinor by sea “for all roads are now bent.” Only a few mortals, by the whim of the Valar, will ever reach Valinor and see its white shores before they die. Thereafter, the hearts of Men feel its loss keenly. That welling of nostalgia for something you cannot quite place when you stand on the shore and look to the sea? That’s Valinor.

Christianity, Arthuriana, and more

The Akallabêth is loaded with references to the Christian bible and parallels with the myths of Atlantis and King Arthur. For example, the Valar’s warning not to set foot on the Blessed Realm has echoes of the forbidden fruit. The Númenórean capital city of Armenelos devolves into a wicked den of sin in the mold of a Sodom or Gomorrah. In fact, the description of the awful goings-on in Armenelos, including human sacrifice on pagan altars, reminded me somewhat of a Stygian city from Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age. Writes Tolkien, “In that temple, with spilling of blood and torment and great wickedness, men made sacrifice to Melkor that he should release them from Death … Yet those were bitter days, and hate brings forth hate.” This is (to my knowledge) the first overt mention of an organized religion in The Silmarillion, and it is not portrayed well.

The ships of the faithful.

Then there’s the preparing of the ships of the Faithful, an obvious allusion to the myth of the Ark. Amandil tells Elendil to prepare a handful of ships “with all such things as your heart cannot bear to part with.” Elendil loads them up with artifacts, scrolls of lore, and a young tree, the scion of Nimloth the Fair. Perhaps this is Tolkien’s exaltation of knowledge and tradition, and the need to carry on the great works and memories of nations, which inevitably become corrupt and fall (another Howardian theme).

The legend of Númenor resonates in our own history in the myth of Atlantis (i.e., a prehistoric civilization that sinks after some great natural calamity).

Finally, its no great leap from Tolkien’s Avallónë to the Arthurian myth of Avalon. The dying King Arthur may have found healing in the Undying Lands after he is wounded by Mordred at the Battle of Camlann and sails away to the island of Avalon.

The future takes root in the present

Apart from its wonderful mythic elements, my recent re-reading of The Silmarillion reminded me of another reason why I’m partial to the Akallabêth: I can feel the connections with the Third Age coming together with an audible click, yet another reminder of the gorgeous tapestry that is Tolkien’s tightly-constructed universe. The names we encounter are quite familiar which makes my Lord of the Rings-obsessed heart skip a beat. For example, Sauron takes center stage in the Akallabêth, and it’s here we first hear of the forging the One Ring (I had forgotten until this re-read that, among the Nine, Sauron enslaves three great warrior-lords of the Númenóreans. This is another reason why the Nazgul are to be feared: The Númenóreans were mighty warriors).

I’ll admit that it’s strange to see Sauron—portrayed of course in LOTR an incorporeal spirit or a flaming eye—walking around in as a handsome man in the Akallabêth. Like Melkor, he too was once fair to look upon. Drowning is not good for the complexion, apparently.

Elendil and Isildur are also straight out of LOTR; the tale of father and son can be found in Chapter two of The Fellowship of the Ring, “The Shadow of the Past,” where Gandalf tells a wide-eyed Frodo about their combat with Sauron on the slopes of Mount Doom. The Akallabêth also provides some illumination on Aragorn’s shadowy history, first hinted at in a conversation between Bilbo and Frodo in Rivendell in The Fellowship of the Ring, Book II, Chapter One, “Many Meetings”:

“And why do you call him Dúnadan?” asked Frodo.

“The Dúnadan,” said Bilbo. “He is often called that here. But I thought you knew enough Elvish at least to know dún-adan: Man of the West, Númenórean. But this is not the time for lessons!”

Tolkien forges the final link in the chain from the past to the present of Middle-earth in the final section of The Silmarillion, “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age,” which I’ll tackle next week.

Terrific Tolkien: The last words of Amandil and other death-speeches

Has any fantasy author ever written such poignant, beautiful death-speeches as J.R.R. Tolkien? Despite accusations of his tendency to cave in to happy endings, Tolkien frequently writes noble characters who deliver heroic speeches just before suffering some grim end. For example, there’s Felagund dying in Beren’s arms in the pits of Sauron (“It may be that we shall not meet a second time in death or life, for the fates of our kindreds are apart. Farewell!”), and Huor’s final words to Turgon before his suicidal rear-guard action at the Battle of Unnumbered Tears (“This I say to you, lord, with the eyes of death: though we part here for ever, and I shall not look on your white walls again, from you and from me a new star shall arise. Farewell!”).

Equally lump-in-the-throat inducing are the last words of Amandil, father of Elendil, before he sets sail for Valinor. Like Eärendil, he hopes to reach the Undying Lands, in this instance to warn the Valar about the impending attack by the Númenórean fleet. Amandil tells his son to be ready should he fail to return, and the pathos is palpable:

“It may well prove that you will see me never again; and that I shall show you no such sign as Eärendil showed long ago. But hold you ever in readiness, for the end of the world that we have known is now at hand.”

Amandil’s words prove prophetic: He and his crew perish, suffering a cold, lonely death beneath the waves: “And never again were they heard of by word or sign in this world, nor is there any tale or guess of their fate. Men could not for a second time be saved by any such embassy.” Yet Elendil heeds his father’s words, and when the great green wave comes to envelop Númenor, he and his crews are ready.

Amandil’s final voyage may have been in vain, but his last words to his beloved son were not.

(Artwork by John Howe, Darrell Sweet, and Ted Nasmith)