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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!
no subject
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… Tolkien explains… Mary, as an unfallen person, did not actually suffer childbirth pangs with Jesus, and Elvish women also must not. -- Your powers of interpretation are unparalleled, Tolkien is honestly rather cute for this, and yet, I prefer to imagine that this proves that Elves are marsupials.
Tolkien: twins are rare among Elves
Also Tolkien: four pairs of plot-relevant Elven twins, only two sets of which whose twinning genetics could have originated from the same maternal line
Truly, who among us is free from the desire to write significant literary twins?
Regarding the age of Arda, I found that whole section super interesting knowing that it was being written more or less contemporaneously with the ferment of discovery around geology and geochronology taking place in England with Wegener, Arthur Holmes, and others. I wonder how much Tolkien knew of that debate as it raged? I remember reading through Tolkien's thinking about the vast spans of time Arda encompasses, and really feeling for a moment how exciting those decades must have been for scientists and academics, despite it all, as they made these (so to speak!) groundbreaking discoveries.
I too wish we got so much more about Arwen and her apparent specialness! I always remember, in her otherwise brief and lackluster introductory description, the "thought and knowledge" that were "in her glance," and think about what they might mean for her own experiences before and during the events of the novel.
no subject
I thought Tolkien's Maeglin shenanigans were interesting! Like I mentioned in my other reply, JRRT seemed to be really into the math/science stuff in his later years, and was willing to make drastic adjustments to the story to make that work. That also seems reflected in Tolkien's later intention of altering the cosmology in terms of the rise of the Sun, shape of the world, etc to be scientifically accurate, and just didn't get around to finishing the overhaul he absolutely intended. I don't particularly care for those changes but he was really into them!
TBH I'm not super invested in Gondolin in general (though Aredhel is one of my favorite Elves) and don't own The Fall of Gondolin or The War of the Jewels, but it definitely seemed to me that Tolkien was working very hard to find some compromise between his desire to impose a degree of mathematical rigor on the world building and the requirements of the Gondolin plot's structure. I thought it was really intriguing that, even after LOTR, he seemed to be prioritizing the math above the narrative structure he'd worked on for years! IIRC a lot of the Gondolin material (esp in the published Silm) is actually from long before the NOME material was written, and he never found a particularly satisfactory solution to the timeline issues.
(I do think the idea of Eöl waylaying Aredhel before she could see the Two Trees has a certain spiritual horror to it, but just the idea that he was willing to change so much is kind of fascinating. Even his conclusion that Maeglin, while definitely an adult, would have seemed kind of creepily youthful to the much older Idril is ... damn, there's a lot going on.)
One nice or endearing part of reading NoME for me, considering both the Tolkien As God-Genius and Nothing Is Ever Anything But A Faux-Translation camps of interpretation I sometimes see, was indeed watching him make little mathematical and continuity errors like these and facepalm about them
Yep! I genuinely love him confusing Elenwë and Anairë for that reason.
Your powers of interpretation are unparalleled, Tolkien is honestly rather cute for this, and yet, I prefer to imagine that this proves that Elves are marsupials.
LOL!
My bio dad is Catholic (though he boringly has reservations about "the Mary stuff," aka the best parts of Catholicism in my totally unbiased judgment, rather than about *gestures at everything else*), so it did kind of leap out. I do appreciate Hostetter actually citing Tolkien's earnest explanation of Mary's uniquely unfallen nature in his theology, however, and how that relates to Elves.
Also Tolkien: four pairs of plot-relevant Elven twins, only two sets of which whose twinning genetics could have originated from the same maternal line
I don't think Tolkien twins work at all scientifically, lol (which undoubtedly would have bothered him immensely if he'd gotten around to thinking about it). For one, most of the Elvish or peredhil twins appear to be identical, which iirc is purely chance IRL and does not run in families! I was actually just thinking about it because of a D&D campaign I'm in, in which one of my best friends and I are playing identical twins from a family in which they are common for mystical reasons that don't correspond in any way to actual science. I did some research to see if I wanted to use any RL science for our characters and was like "hmm. no."
In-story, though, I guess four twins among all the known Elves and peredhil isn't that many, really, esp considering that three of those pairs are obviously meant to follow a family strain and aren't randomly occurring along the lines of Amrod and Amras.
I wonder how much Tolkien knew of that debate as it raged? I remember reading through Tolkien's thinking about the vast spans of time Arda encompasses, and really feeling for a moment how exciting those decades must have been for scientists and academics, despite it all, as they made these (so to speak!) groundbreaking discoveries.
That is definitely interesting, esp considering how interested he obviously was in "no it must be Scientifically Accurate." I'm not sure how closely he would have followed that specific field, though, and he does talk a bit about how his reading was slowing down pretty drastically (but he read and liked Asimov!).
I always remember, in her otherwise brief and lackluster introductory description, the "thought and knowledge" that were "in her glance," and think about what they might mean for her own experiences before and during the events of the novel.
Yup. In LOTR as is, Arwen is pretty obviously tacked-on to give Aragorn a bride Tolkien considered suitable and to evoke
EdithLúthien without a lot of effort taken to integrate her properly into the story. But there's quite a bit about her that could be woven into something really compelling. I've always thought of her as an inverted Eärendil in certain ways—someone who is so clearly aligned with Elves (where her brothers are much more ambiguous figures in that sense! they hang out with the Dúnedain while Arwen barely interacts with mortals at all until her marriage) yet chooses mortality for love, where Eärendil preferred mortality but chose to stay with Elwing. And the ultimate bittersweetness of Arwen's choice is really interesting even though her quasi-regret isn't even in LOTR proper. IDK, there is potentially a whole lot going on with her and her life that doesn't have to be all about Aragorn, and I do like the hint that she was special in her own right and not only as Lúthien 2.0 or Aragorn's bride or whatever.no subject
Arwen as inverted-Eärendil is absolutely my thematic take on her, too; both of them make me so sad. Her choice actually seems so much less rational to me than Eärendil's, though on its face the motivation is the same-- after all, to be with Aragorn for the rest of his life, she did not have to choose mortality! The potential for regret, or ignorance, or reluctance, is very intriguing to me. Sometimes I do wonder, in the range of unsupported flights of fancy, if her earlier alienation from Men (plus a healthy does of Elrond "lesser Men" Peredhil as a father) was a contributing factor in Aragorn's expansionism post-LOTR, or at least, explanatory for the lack of check.
no subject
The K-T event was discovered, debated, and proved in my lifetime. I grew up with "we don't know what caused the dinosaurs' extinction, but climate change is our best guess" and during my 20s that changed to "A big fucking rock fell out of the sky, caused mass death and destruction AND enough sudden climate change to wipe the survivors". The "climate change" guys weren't wrong, they just hadn't guessed what caused the climate change.
"Continental Drift" went from "fringe theory" to "Plate tectonics, it actually explains all this stuff we were puzzled by" during my childhood, though the pop-sci articles didn't appear until I was a teen.
...and I lost half my post somewhere when I tried to recopy it. Suffice it to say I rambled about the changes in dinosaurs (Birds!) and the discovering of lithophiles and how exciting science has been in the last several decades.
no subject
An interesting point, in any case!