![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
- book: lord of the rings,
- book: the nature of middle-earth,
- book: the silmarillion,
- book: unfinished tales,
- ch: aredhel,
- ch: arwen undómiel,
- ch: celebrían,
- ch: elladan,
- ch: elrohir,
- ch: elrond,
- ch: eöl,
- ch: idril,
- ch: maeglin,
- ch: tar-meneldur,
- elves,
- fandom: middle-earth,
- genre: canon,
- genre: meta,
- noldor,
- person: jrr tolkien,
- person: mary mother of jesus,
- pregnancy,
- religion,
- religion: catholicism,
- religion: christianity,
- wank
More Tolkien factoids!
I managed to integrate a lot of tangents into last night's infodump on Númenórean pregnancy because it turned up so many interesting sort-of related things, but there were STILL MORE details that I couldn't work in but was delighted in various ways by. A list:
1. Tolkien struggled to make the Maeglin story work with the developmental scheme he was trying to mathematically pin down for Elves, given that Maeglin's history requires him to be born much later than most of the other Elves of his generation. Tolkien concluded that Maeglin had to be an adult, but that he would have been very young in Elvish terms, and this is part of the reason Idril was so unsettled by his interest in her. He wasn't a literal child but he was kind of a kid from Idril's POV.
2. SPEAKING of Maeglin's history, another idea Tolkien came up with to deal with the Maeglin problem was the idea that Maeglin actually isn't that much younger, but instead, Aredhel was either persuaded or trapped by Eöl before ever reaching Aman! In this case, the "Dark Elf" descriptor for Eöl would have no racial subtext whatsoever—Eöl would not be Avari or Sindarin at all, but another Noldo who refused to finish the journey to Valinor and thus never saw the light of the Two Trees. The implication of Noldorin Exiles calling him "Dark Elf" is less "Sinda" and more "loser."
3. Tolkien makes a couple of errors in trying to figure out the math. Some of those mistakes are the math, or at least numerical (Arwen's birth year gave him a lot of trouble, more on this further down), but he also does things like mixing up Elenwë and Anairë at one point. IDK, there's so much hagiography in Tolkien discourse that it's kind of endearing to see him making ordinary writerly mistakes.
4. "The Mariner's Wife" in Unfinished Tales includes one of the only Tolkien kings I truly like, Tar-Meneldur, and he gets a NOME mention in a footnote:
goodforher.gif
5. I mentioned in the post that Tolkien says Elvish women do not experience pain in childbirth. To me, this seemed very obviously to follow from the Christian doctrinal point that childbirth pangs are the result of the Fall in the Garden of Eden, since the whole concept of Elves is that they're an "unfallen" people. They can be individually terrible people, but en masse they have not fallen in the sense that Men have.
In any case, this whole discussion is analyzed further in an Appendix that includes a letter where Tolkien earnestly talks about the nature of the Fall in the context of the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. The Immaculate Conception, contrary to popular perception, is not about the immaculate purity of Jesus from conception but of Mary, in the belief that only someone absolutely pure of original sin (and all sin) could have borne Jesus. Tolkien explains in the letter in question that this indicates Mary is thus the only "unfallen" purely human person to ever live (that is, not only by her time but through all of time and space). Conclusion: Mary, as an unfallen person, did not actually suffer childbirth pangs with Jesus, and Elvish women also must not.
It's so much but I kind of love it. (I will admit that Mary Lore is my favorite part of Christianity, though.)
6. There's also an incredible aside about Arwen that I really wish were more present in LOTR.
Context: Tolkien is meticulously explaining that Elves are not actually ageless, but their physical bodies are bound to Arda and only age at the rate of Arda itself. They are actually aging and he has equations to express their approximate ages in human terms and explains how this impacts appropriate ages for certain life events, the span of fertility etc. Given that 80% of Middle-earth runs on narrative rather than mathematical logic, however, he continually runs into problems that he "has" to solve (much like Maeglin's age above). Anyway, one of the equations he came up with for calculating half-Elves' aging patterns in relation to this makes Arwen around 27 (in human terms, she's unquestionably thousands of years old in reality) when she marries Aragorn. Another proposed equation makes her about 43, which he felt was pushing it a bit in terms of how long she'd be able to have children, though he acknowledged that Aragorn in that system would be almost exactly the same age as her (also functionally; he's literally in his late 80s). Either way, figuring out how to make her the right functional age led to Tolkien positing that maybe her birth year in LOTR is actually wrong, but any change to that would have to work with Celebrían's age.
And upon considering Celebrían's lifespan, Tolkien concludes that under this system, Celebrían would have been past childbearing age by the time she left for Valinor, in the Elvish equivalent of her 50s. And that suggests she actually could have had children after Arwen and it's a little peculiar that she didn't. While only having three children is not unusual for Elves, in this case we're only talking about two pregnancies because two of those children are twins (extremely rare among Elves, apparently) and so it is a little odd. So Tolkien concluded that, firstly, twins would be exhausting because of everything that goes into even a normal Elvish pregnancy (see the original linked post for more about this), but Arwen would have been even more exhausting for Celebrían to bear than a pair of twins because:
The beauty I got from LOTR, but—without being dismissive about the banner—I really wish we had a clearer sense of Arwen's unique stature in her own right in LOTR. She's presented so much in terms of Elrond and Lúthien and occasionally Galadriel and Celeborn, but Elladan and Elrohir are Elrond's children and Galadriel's grandchildren just as much as she is. Yet here she's clearly framed as special and powerful in a way they are not and which drew so much from Celebrían's (and possibly Elrond's) spiritual reserves that they couldn't have any more children. That seems like a big deal! Tell me more!
Epilogue: he did not tell us more. Also, despite all of this difficulty around her birth date, when he revised some birth dates including her brothers' in the later 60s edition of LOTR, he decided not to alter Arwen's age after all!
1. Tolkien struggled to make the Maeglin story work with the developmental scheme he was trying to mathematically pin down for Elves, given that Maeglin's history requires him to be born much later than most of the other Elves of his generation. Tolkien concluded that Maeglin had to be an adult, but that he would have been very young in Elvish terms, and this is part of the reason Idril was so unsettled by his interest in her. He wasn't a literal child but he was kind of a kid from Idril's POV.
2. SPEAKING of Maeglin's history, another idea Tolkien came up with to deal with the Maeglin problem was the idea that Maeglin actually isn't that much younger, but instead, Aredhel was either persuaded or trapped by Eöl before ever reaching Aman! In this case, the "Dark Elf" descriptor for Eöl would have no racial subtext whatsoever—Eöl would not be Avari or Sindarin at all, but another Noldo who refused to finish the journey to Valinor and thus never saw the light of the Two Trees. The implication of Noldorin Exiles calling him "Dark Elf" is less "Sinda" and more "loser."
3. Tolkien makes a couple of errors in trying to figure out the math. Some of those mistakes are the math, or at least numerical (Arwen's birth year gave him a lot of trouble, more on this further down), but he also does things like mixing up Elenwë and Anairë at one point. IDK, there's so much hagiography in Tolkien discourse that it's kind of endearing to see him making ordinary writerly mistakes.
4. "The Mariner's Wife" in Unfinished Tales includes one of the only Tolkien kings I truly like, Tar-Meneldur, and he gets a NOME mention in a footnote:
"Actually for domestic and political reasons he [Tar-Meneldur] resigned in 883, and lived on in retirement (engaged in his favourite pursuit of astronomy) until 942."
goodforher.gif
5. I mentioned in the post that Tolkien says Elvish women do not experience pain in childbirth. To me, this seemed very obviously to follow from the Christian doctrinal point that childbirth pangs are the result of the Fall in the Garden of Eden, since the whole concept of Elves is that they're an "unfallen" people. They can be individually terrible people, but en masse they have not fallen in the sense that Men have.
In any case, this whole discussion is analyzed further in an Appendix that includes a letter where Tolkien earnestly talks about the nature of the Fall in the context of the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. The Immaculate Conception, contrary to popular perception, is not about the immaculate purity of Jesus from conception but of Mary, in the belief that only someone absolutely pure of original sin (and all sin) could have borne Jesus. Tolkien explains in the letter in question that this indicates Mary is thus the only "unfallen" purely human person to ever live (that is, not only by her time but through all of time and space). Conclusion: Mary, as an unfallen person, did not actually suffer childbirth pangs with Jesus, and Elvish women also must not.
It's so much but I kind of love it. (I will admit that Mary Lore is my favorite part of Christianity, though.)
6. There's also an incredible aside about Arwen that I really wish were more present in LOTR.
Context: Tolkien is meticulously explaining that Elves are not actually ageless, but their physical bodies are bound to Arda and only age at the rate of Arda itself. They are actually aging and he has equations to express their approximate ages in human terms and explains how this impacts appropriate ages for certain life events, the span of fertility etc. Given that 80% of Middle-earth runs on narrative rather than mathematical logic, however, he continually runs into problems that he "has" to solve (much like Maeglin's age above). Anyway, one of the equations he came up with for calculating half-Elves' aging patterns in relation to this makes Arwen around 27 (in human terms, she's unquestionably thousands of years old in reality) when she marries Aragorn. Another proposed equation makes her about 43, which he felt was pushing it a bit in terms of how long she'd be able to have children, though he acknowledged that Aragorn in that system would be almost exactly the same age as her (also functionally; he's literally in his late 80s). Either way, figuring out how to make her the right functional age led to Tolkien positing that maybe her birth year in LOTR is actually wrong, but any change to that would have to work with Celebrían's age.
And upon considering Celebrían's lifespan, Tolkien concludes that under this system, Celebrían would have been past childbearing age by the time she left for Valinor, in the Elvish equivalent of her 50s. And that suggests she actually could have had children after Arwen and it's a little peculiar that she didn't. While only having three children is not unusual for Elves, in this case we're only talking about two pregnancies because two of those children are twins (extremely rare among Elves, apparently) and so it is a little odd. So Tolkien concluded that, firstly, twins would be exhausting because of everything that goes into even a normal Elvish pregnancy (see the original linked post for more about this), but Arwen would have been even more exhausting for Celebrían to bear than a pair of twins because:
Arwen was a "special child" of great powers and beauty
The beauty I got from LOTR, but—without being dismissive about the banner—I really wish we had a clearer sense of Arwen's unique stature in her own right in LOTR. She's presented so much in terms of Elrond and Lúthien and occasionally Galadriel and Celeborn, but Elladan and Elrohir are Elrond's children and Galadriel's grandchildren just as much as she is. Yet here she's clearly framed as special and powerful in a way they are not and which drew so much from Celebrían's (and possibly Elrond's) spiritual reserves that they couldn't have any more children. That seems like a big deal! Tell me more!
Epilogue: he did not tell us more. Also, despite all of this difficulty around her birth date, when he revised some birth dates including her brothers' in the later 60s edition of LOTR, he decided not to alter Arwen's age after all!