Morgoth's Ring (67 page)

being that 'it contradicts the fundamental notion that fea and hroa were each fitted to the other: since hroar have a physical descent, the body of rebirth, having different parents, must be different', and this must be a condition of pain to the reborn fea.

He was here abandoning, and for good, the long-rooted conception (see pp. 265 - 7) of rebirth as the mode by which the Elves might return to incarnate life: from his scrutiny of the mythical idea, questioning its validity in the terms he had adopted, it had come to seem to him a serious flaw in the metaphysic of Elvish existence. But, he said, it was a 'dilemma', for the reincarnation of the Elves 'seems an essential element in the tales'. 'The only solution,' he decided in this discussion, was the idea of the remaking in identical form of the hroa of the Dead in the manner declared by Eru in The Converse of Manu e'

and Eru: the fea retains a memory, an imprint, of its hroa, its 'former house', so powerful and precise that the reconstruction of an identical body can proceed from it.

The idea of a 'Converse' between Manwe and Eru was not abandoned, and is indeed referred to in 'Reincarnation of Elves' (but the 'Converse' as given above must have been in existence, since in it Eru expressly declares rebirth to be a mode of reincarnation open to the 'houseless' fea, whereas in the present discussion such an idea is firmly rejected and allowed no place in 'the only solution' to the

'dilemma'). The new conception proceeds, in outline, as follows. The Music of the Ainur had contained no prevision of the death of Elves and the existence of their 'houseless' fear, since according to their nature they were to be immortal within the life of Arda. There were many such fear of Elves who had died in Middle-earth gathered in the Halls of Mandos, but it was not until the death of Miriel in Aman that Manwe appealed directly to Eru for counsel. Eru 'accepted and ratified the position' - though making it plain to Manwe that the Valar should have contested Melkor's domination of Middle-earth far earlier, and that they had lacked estel: they should have trusted that in a legitimate war Eru would not have permitted Melkor so greatly to damage Arda that the Children could not come, or could not inhabit it (cf. LQ $20, p. 161: 'And Manwe said to the Valar: "This is the counsel of Iluvatar in my heart: that we should take up again the mastery of Arda, at whatsoever cost, and deliver the Quendi from the shadows of Melkor." Then Tulkas was glad; but Aule was grieved, and it is said

'.hat he (and others of the Valar) had before been unwilling to strive with Melkor, foreboding the hurts of the world that must come of that strife').

It is then said that 'the fear of the Dead all go to Mandos in Aman: or rather they are now summoned thither by the authority given by Eru. A place is made for them.' This appears to mean that it was only now that Mandos was empowered to summon the spirits of the Dead to Aman; but the following words 'A place is made for them' are hard to understand, since they seem to deny even that the Halls of Waiting existed before Manwe spoke to Eru (despite the statement earlier in

'Reincarnation of Elves' that there were many houseless fear gathered in Mandos before the 'Converse' took place).

The Valar are now given the authority to reincarnate the fear of Elves who have died in hroar identical to those they have lost; and the text continues: The re-housed fea will normally remain in Aman.

Only in very exceptional cases, as Beren and Luthien, will they be transported back to Middle-earth.... Hence death in Middle-earth had much of the same sort of sorrow and sunderance for Elves and Men. But, as Andreth saw, the certainty of living again and doing things in incarnate form made a vital difference to death as a personal terror' (cf. the Athrabeth p. 311).

In what appears to be a second thought my father then asked whether it might not be possible that the 'houseless' fea was itself allowed (being instructed) to rebuild its hroa from its memory (and this, as appears from very late writing on the subject of the reincarnation of Glorfindel of Gondolin, became his firm and stable view of the matter). He wrote here: 'Memory by a fea of experience is evidently powerful, vivid, and complete. So the underlying conception is that

"matter" will be taken up into "spirit", by becoming part of its knowledge - and so rendered timeless and under the spirit's command. As the Elves remaining in Middle-earth slowly "consumed"

their bodies - or made them into raiments of memory? The resurrection of the body (at least as far as Elves were concerned) was in a sense incorporeal. But while it could pass physical barriers at will, it could at will oppose a barrier to matter. If you touched a resurrected body you felt it. Or if it willed it could simply elude you - disappear. Its position in space was at will.'

Neither in the passage on the subject of reincarnation in the Commentary on the Athrabeth (p. 331, $6) nor in the Note 3 that refers to it (p. 339) is there any mention of rebirth; while the latter very evidently echoes the words of 'Resurrection of Elves'. Thus it is strongly implied in Note 3, if not expressly stated, that it was only at the time of Manwe s speech with Eru that Mandos was given the power actually to summon the fear of the Dead; and the passage that follows this in the Note is closely similar to what is said in 'Resurrection of Elves':

They were given the choice to remain houseless, or (if they wished) to be re-housed in the same form and shape as they had had.

Normally they must nonetheless remain in Aman. Therefore, if they dwelt in Middle-earth, their bereavement of friends and kin, and the bereavement of these, was not amended. Death was not wholly healed. But as Andreth saw, this certitude concerning their immediate future after death, and the knowledge that at the least they would again if they wished be able as incarnates to do and make things and continue their experience of Arda, made death to the Elves a totally different thing from death as it appeared to Men.

An interesting point in respect of the chronology of composition arises from the remark found both in 'Reincarnation of Elves' and in Note 3 to the Commentary that death for Elves and death for Men were very different things 'as Andreth saw'. Thus the Athrabeth was in existence when 'Reincarnation of Elves' was written; but the Commentary followed 'Reincarnation'. This seems clear evidence that there was an interval between the writing of the actual Debate of Finrod and Andreth and the writing of the Commentary on it.

One further passage in 'Reincarnation of Elves' should be mentioned. In a sort of aside from the course of his thoughts, moving more rapidly (even) than his pen, my father remarked that 'the exact nature of existence in Aman or Eressea after their "removal" must be dubious and unexplained', as must the question of 'how "mortals" could go there at all'. On this he observed that Eru had 'long before' committed the Dead of mortals also to Mandos; cf. QS $86 (V.247): 'What befell their spirits after death the Elves know not. Some say that they too go to the halls of Mandos; but their place of waiting there is not that of the Elves; and Mandos under Iluvatar alone save Manwe knows whither they go after the time of recollection in those silent halls beside the Western Sea. The sojourn of Frodo (he went on) in Eressea - then on to Mandos? - was only an extended form of this.

Frodo would eventually leave the world (desiring to do so). So that the sailing in ship was equivalent to death.'

With this may be contrasted what he wrote at the end of his account of The Lord of the Rings in his letter to Milton Waldman of 1951 (a passage omitted in Letters but printed in IX.132): To Bilbo and Frodo the special grace is granted to go with the Elves they loved - an Arthurian ending, in which it is, of course, not made explicit whether this is an 'allegory' of death, or a mode of healing and restoration leading to a return.

In his letter to Naomi Mitchison of September 1954 (Letters no.154), however, he said:

... the mythical idea underlying is that for mortals, since their 'kind'

cannot be changed for ever, this is strictly only a temporary reward: a healing and redress of suffering. They cannot abide for ever, and though they cannot return to mortal earth, they can and will 'die' -

of free will, and leave the world. (In this setting the return of Arthur would be quite impossible, a vain imagining.)

And much later, in a draft letter of 1963 (Letters no.246), he wrote: Frodo was sent or allowed to pass over Sea to heal him - if that could be done, before he died. He would have eventually to 'pass away': no mortal could, or can, abide for ever on earth, or within Time. So he went both to a purgatory and to a reward, for a while: a period of reflection and peace and a gaining of a truer understanding of his position in littleness and in greatness, spent still in Time amid the natural beauty of 'Arda Unmarred', the Earth unspoiled by evil.

PART FIVE.

MYTHS

TRANSFORMED.

MYTHS TRANSFORMED.

In this last section of the book I give a number of late writings of my father's, various in nature but concerned with, broadly speaking, the reinterpretation of central elements in the 'mythology' (or legendarium as he called it) to accord with the imperatives of a greatly modified underlying conception. Some of these papers (there are notable exceptions) offer exceptional difficulty: fluidity of ideas, ambiguous and allusive expression, illegible passages. But the greatest problem is that there is very little firm indication of date external or relative: to order them into even an approximate sequence of composition seems impossible (though I believe that virtually all of them come from the years that saw the writing of Laws and Customs among the Eldar, the Athrabeth, and late revisions of parts of the Quenta Silmarillion -

the late 1950s, in the aftermath of the publication of The Lord of the Rings).

i'. In these writings can be read the record of a prolonged interior debate. Years before this time, the first signs have been seen of emerging ideas that if pursued would cause massive disturbance in The Silmarillion: I have shown, as I believe, that when my father first began to revise and rewrite the existing narratives of the Elder Days, before The Lord of the Rings was completed, he wrote a version of the Ainulindale that introduced a radical transformation of the astronomical myth, but that for that time he stayed his hand (pp. 3 - 6, 43).

But now, as will be seen in many of the essays and notes that follow, he had come to believe that such a vast upheaval was a necessity, that the cosmos of the old myth was no longer valid; and at the same time he was impelled to try to construct a more secure 'theoretical' or

'systematic' basis for elements in the legendarium that were not to be dislodged. With their questionings, their certainties giving way to doubt, their contradictory resolutions, these writings are to be read with a sense of intellectual and imaginative stress in the face of such a dismantling and reconstitution, believed to be an inescapable necessity, but never to be achieved.

The texts, arranged in a very loose 'thematic' sequence, are numbered in Roman numerals. Almost all have received very minor editing (matters of punctuation, insertion of omitted words, and suchlike).

Numbered notes (not present in all cases) follow the individual texts.

I.

I give first a short statement written on two slips found pinned to one of the typescripts of the Annals of Aman, which would date it to 1958 or later (if my general conclusions about dating are correct, p. 300).

This descends from the oldest forms of the mythology - when it was still intended to be no more than another primitive mythology, though more coherent and less 'savage'. It was consequently a 'Flat Earth' cosmogony (much easier to manage anyway): the Matter of Numenor had not been devised.

It is now clear to me that in any case the Mythology must actually be a 'Mannish' affair. (Men are really only interested in Men and in Men's ideas and visions.) The High Eldar living and being tutored by the demiurgic beings must have known, or at least their writers and loremasters must have known, the 'truth'

(according to their measure of understanding). What we have in the Silmarillion etc. are traditions (especially personalized, and centred upon actors, such as Feanor) handed on by Men in Numenor and later in Middle-earth (Arnor and Gondor); but already far back - from the first association of the Dunedain and Elf-friends with the Eldar in Beleriand - blended and confused with their own Mannish myths and cosmic ideas.

At that point (in reconsideration of the early cosmogonic parts) I was inclined to adhere to the Flat Earth and the astronomically absurd business of the making of the Sun and Moon. But you can make up stories of that kind when you live among people who have the same general background of imagination, when the Sun 'really' rises in the East and goes down in the West, etc. When however (no matter how little most people know or think about astronomy) it is the general belief that we live upon a 'spherical' island in 'Space' you cannot do this any more.