A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, First Edition. Edited by Stuart D. Lee.© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Middle-earth Mythology: An Overview

Leslie A. Donovan

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Tolkien’s Middle-earth is built not only on stories of heroes performing brave deeds and battling evil, but also on a vast mythology that explains its cultures, land-scapes, and attitudes. Early in the writing of his works, Tolkien intended to compose a group of interrelated stories that honored the lost mythic heritage of England as he imagined it might have been. Yet, as he spent much of his life writing, revising, and even completely rethinking these myths, his works outgrew their original purpose to become the mythology of an entire world, rather than of a single country or people. Although never published during his lifetime, texts such as The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The Children of Húrin, and The History of Middle-earth series document the scope and details of the mythological background for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.1

In a now famous 1951 letter to Milton Waldman,2 Tolkien outlines the scope and overall intentions of his mythology, which later became most fully realized in the posthumously published The Silmarillion. In this letter, Tolkien not only summarizes the origins, development, and history of the world he names Arda, but he also identi-fies the central aspects of the mythology as “Fall, Mortality, and the Machine” (Letters 145). Similar to Judeo-Christian concepts of a fall from grace (see ch. 30), Tolkien perceives that a Fall occurs in his sub-created world when possessiveness leads char-acters to “rebel against the laws of the Creator” (Letters 145). His notion of Mortality arises from the desire of the creative impulse to surpass “the satisfactions of plain ordinary biological life,” while he perceives the Machine as the “use of external plans or devices . . . instead of inherent inner powers or talents” (Letters 145–146). Along with these overarching themes, Tolkien further explains that these myths and legends

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stress how “frightful evil can and does arise from an apparently good root, the desire to benefit the world and others” and how “the great policies of world history, ‘the wheels of the world’, are often turned not by the Lords and Governors, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak” (Letters 146). Forming the background for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, such concerns enable Tolkien to construct his mythol-ogy as consonant with, yet nevertheless distinct from, the myths and legends of our own world.

Outline of the Mythology

Like most mythologies, Tolkien’s begins with a cosmogonical myth relating the crea-tion of Eä, the universe, and Arda, the Earth within it, of which Middle-earth is a part. Eä is created through music by a single, supreme deity, Eru or Ilúvatar, with the help of the Ainur, “angelic powers, whose function is to exercise delegated author-ity in their spheres” and whom Tolkien conceives as “of the same order of beauty, power, and majesty as the ‘gods’ of higher mythology” (Letters 146). When one of the Ainur, Melkor, attempts “to increase the power and glory of the part assigned to himself” (S 16), conflict arises, even though Ilúvatar turns the discord into a pattern of overall unity and purpose. Ilúvatar then allows some of the Ainur to dwell within Arda, where they become the Valar, immortal beings who govern Arda’s natural ele-ments and aid its inhabitants against Melkor’s malice. Arda’s inhabitants are the immortal Elves (the First-Born) and mortal Men (the Followers), and later also the Dwarves and other races such as the Hobbits.

At first, Arda consists of two main continents, the Undying Lands and Middle-earth.3 In the west, the Undying Lands contain all the regions inhabited by the Valar and connect to Middle-earth only by a land bridge at its most northeastern point. As the mythic conflict between Melkor and the Valar and their wards rages and subsides, Tolkien describes how the geography of Arda undergoes similarly mythic shifts: cata-clysms thrust up new mountains, fissures carve deep into plains, and entire landmasses are annihilated. Especially in the region of Middle-earth, continents, as well as king-doms, rise and fall because of mythological events. By the time portrayed in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the northwest portion of Middle-earth has become an area similar in shape to the northwest portion of Europe, with Mordor extending into the east and the land of Harad into the far south.

Tolkien presents the mythological evolution of his world in terms of chronological Ages, as recorded from the perspective of the Elves.4 While events occur in more and more historically definable time as these Ages progress, mythic talismans and acts of heroism remain crucial elements of the narratives. Alongside battles and the building of kingdoms and political alliances, the First Age witnesses the Elf-lord Fëanor’s construction of the three jewels known as the Silmarils to capture the light cast by the silver and gold Trees precious to the Valar. It also encompasses the mythically rendered Fall of Fëanor and his kindred, their Exile from the paradise in which they

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dwelt with the Valar, and the final loss of the Silmarils, “one in the sea, one in the deeps of earth, and one as a star of heaven” (Letters 148–149). Throughout the count-less deaths and ruined cities recorded in dramas of the First Age, Tolkien weaves myths that relate the history of the Silmarils, tales such as the heroic romance of the mortal Man Beren and the Elf-maiden Lúthien, and the daring voyage of Elwing and Eärendil to plead with the Valar for aid against Morgoth. By the end of the First Age, Tolkien has battles taking place in a semi-historical time period, but with conse-quences that remain mythological, as when Morgoth is banished into the Void beyond the confines of Eä.

Tolkien continues to incorporate mythic themes into events of the Second Age as well as later Ages. Stories from the Second Age feature the rise of Morgoth’s former captain Sauron, the creation of the Rings of Power (including the One Ring), and the achievements and downfall of Númenor, a great kingdom of Men. Yet, as realistically as Tolkien presents the arrogant choices and hubristic motivations of the Númenórean kings, the end of the Second Age also highlights mythological themes. When Ar-Pharazôn ignores the Ban forbidding Men to sail to the lands inhabited by the Valar, a cataclysm causes their island paradise of Númenor to sink Atlantis-like into the Sea. In addition, the Fall of Númenor results in the mythic sundering of the Undying Lands from the mortal world, so that only the immortal Elves “may still if they will, wearying of the circle of the world, take ship and find the ‘straight way’, and come to the ancient or True West” (Letters 156).

While Tolkien fashions the Third Age and the beginning of the Fourth Age told in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as historical time periods, the events of these Ages build upon the same mythological themes that characterize the earlier Ages. The stories of these later Ages relate the mythically based machinations of Sauron to dominate Middle-earth, the destruction of the One Ring, and the final sailing of the Elves to the Undying Lands of the West. Thus, Tolkien continues to promote the concepts of Fall, Mortality, and Machine as the foundation of his mythology from its earliest cosmological myths through its latest, but no less mythic stories.

Mythology for England

Initially, Tolkien planned to create a work that would “restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own” that he “could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country” (Letters 144). Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien’s foremost biographer, explained such intentions as founded in Tolkien’s desire to shape a “mythology for England” (1977, 100), a term that has become commonplace in modern Tolkien scholarship (see also ch. 5). Tolkien hoped such a mythology might redress the “poverty of [his] own beloved country,” which he perceived “had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil),” especially not of the “quality .  .  . [he] sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands” (Letters 144). He deeply appreciated the qualities of Greek, Celtic, Romance, Germanic, and

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Scandinavian legends and myths that he understood as integral to the spirit of those cultures, and he wanted to construct a parallel body of works that would be similarly evocative of English culture.

In particular, Tolkien admired Elias Lönnrot’s reconstruction of the Kalevala from fragments of Finnish folktales and regretted the lack of English stories imbued with similar cultural identity and impact (see ch. 18). However, folktales and national epics taking place on the island of Britain, in languages recognized as English, had not survived the various migrations and conquests of earlier peoples. As much as Tolkien studied and valued the Old English epic poem Beowulf, it could not meet his criteria for a work of English myth because it is set in Scandinavia rather than England. As a result, Tolkien’s myth-making, like Lönnrot’s, was founded on what Anne C. Petty describes as his desire “to render a service to the literary heritage” of his nation and “to provide historic continuity with the past through an epic that would serve as a mirror of the national soul expressed in its folk poetry” (2004, 71).

Yet, as Tolkien’s network of tales that he called a legendarium grew to include multiple versions of stories with complex literary histories and relationships to each other, Middle-earth’s mythology also outgrew its author’s original intention to focus his stories on a purely English tone and temperament. Instead, over the course of his lifetime, the ever-expanding scale of Tolkien’s legendarium developed from themes and concepts centering primarily on Germanic, Finnish, and Scandinavian myths and legends to the integration of mythic materials and fragments from many other cul-tures. As Verlyn Flieger comments, “the entire structure came to resemble real-world mythologies in the cumulative process and temporal span of its composition, as well as in the scope of its subject matter” (2005, xiv). Indeed, the city of Minas Tirith incorporates elements from Troy’s legend, while Beren and Lúthien’s romance echoes narrative patterns from the Greek tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. To cite other exam-ples, the history of Númenor recalls the Greek myth of Atlantis and the Mûmakil of the Haradrim are only barely disguised Indian elephants, which feature prominently in some Hindu myths.

Nevertheless, at its core, Middle-earth’s immense mythic history consistently high-lights particularly English and Germanic material. Not only do the Rohirrim speak the language of Beowulf, but as Carl F. Hostetter and Arden R. Smith note:

Erman and Elmir, the first Men .  .  . and Ingwe, both the Lord of the Light-elves and the King of Luthany – are all derived from English and Germanic mythology, so that Tolkien could in some measure satisfy his desire for a mythology for England. (1996, 289)

In another case, the word “earendel,” which Tolkien discovered in an Old English poem from the Exeter Book (Letters 385), became the kernel that inspired the story of Eärendel, the heroic mortal seafarer who marries an Elf woman, sails to Valinor to save Elves and Men, and bears a Silmaril through the firmament of the stars. The character of Eriol/Ælfwine, “the Anglo-Saxon chronicler of Elvish mythology,” also

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retains the Germanic influence on Tolkien’s mythology (Hostetter and Smith 1996, 289). Appearing only in unfinished material published in The History of Middle-earth series, Eriol/Ælfwine travels between Middle-earth and England “as an ambassador between Tolkien’s mythology and English legend” (Hostetter and Smith 1996, 286). Such characters remain emblematic of Tolkien’s early wish to integrate England’s lands and language, soil and tongue, into a mythology representing the national identity of its people.

Structures and Layers

Set within an alternate, primeval timeline and geography that predates the recordable chronologies of our own world, Tolkien’s sub-created mythology, like other primary myths in the real world, offers:

. . . a system of hereditary stories of ancient origin which were once believed to be true by a particular cultural group, and which served to explain (in terms of the intentions and actions of deities and other supernatural beings) why the world is as it is and things happen as they do. (Abrams 1999, 170)

While definitions vary, world myths typically: 1) are regarded as accounts of a remote past; 2) explain origins of life, the universe, and the natural world by means of logic and design; 3) evolve from the actions of supernatural or superhuman figures; 4) establish authority for social and cultural institutions, such as governing structures, racial divisions among people, and religious practices; 5) reflect basic behavioral structures related to values, morals, or attitudes, such as good vs. evil, light vs. dark, and rich vs. poor; and 6) evoke the contemplation of the sacred through mystery, ritual, or transcendent experience.5 Even though the world from which it draws its stories is fantastical in nature, Tolkien’s legendarium is built upon these same characteristics.

Along with these common conventions, most world mythologies are further organ-ized according to clearly defined hierarchies, and the structure of Tolkien’s mythology is no different. Tolkien constructs his world along a vertical configuration highly reminiscent of the Great Chain of Being, a metaphor by which ancient through Ren-aissance peoples perceived the order of their world.6 In Tolkien’s cosmos, Ilúvatar is the supreme being at the top of the chain, the Ainur are lesser beings below him, and those Ainur who choose to dwell in Arda occupy places below those who remain with Ilúvatar outside the world. The Maiar are also deities, but placed in the chain beneath the Valar. Within each category is a similarly organized structure. As “the first of all Kings” and “lord of the realm of Arda” (S 26), Manwë holds the highest position among the Valar, followed by Ulmo, then Aulë, and the rest ranked below these. While it is debatable whether Elves and Men are placed together on the same level

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in Tolkien’s order, it is clear that the Dwarves, beings created by Aulë, are considered lower on the chain than both Elves and Men. Such rankings imply a moral hierarchy organized according to a being’s closeness in nature and spirit to Ilúvatar.

Yet Tolkien takes great care to counterbalance the vertical, hierarchical structure of his mythos with an equally important, horizontal cosmic order based on the coop-erative union of differing forces. Each Vala generally is paired with another who is equally ranked and who has taken the shape of the opposite gender. These gender-balanced couples exercise complementary functions or spheres of influence. Thus, through their union, Tolkien explains that “When Manwë there ascends his throne and looks forth, if Varda is beside him, he sees further than all other eyes . . . And if Manwë is with her, Varda hears more clearly than all other ears” (S 26).

Not only does Tolkien establish the societal and moral order of the supernatural beings responsible for the design and origins of Middle-earth, but he also develops the cultural divisions and behavioral patterns of the other beings who populate his world. Unlike early cultural mythologies from the real world that are centered on narrowly defined climates, geographies, genetic characteristics, and ritual behaviors, Middle-earth myths incorporate wide variance among peoples, languages, cultures, and landscapes. The mythic history of the Elves and Men, for example, encompasses wide-ranging migrations that lead to differences in living habits as well as cultural heritage. Detailed descriptions of geographical landscapes and rationales for why dif-ferent groups of peoples inhabit or leave those places form a crucial part of Tolkien’s mythology.

In addition to structuring his “immense complex of stories” (Shippey 2005, 253) from patterns common to legends and myths from our own world’s ancient and medieval cultures, Tolkien also composes Middle-earth’s historic present to include layers of its fictional ancient past. By layering his fictional world’s past and present, Tolkien provides those texts of Middle-earth’s later history with a narrative “ ‘depth,’ the literary quality Tolkien valued most of all” (Shippey 2005, 351). Such internal layering of mythology and history connects events from Middle-earth’s past directly to its later circumstances. As Flieger remarks, “The chief function of any mythology, real or feigned, is to mirror a culture to itself, giving it a history and identity as well as a connection to the supernatural or transcendent” (2005, 139). In Tolkien’s world, the authenticity of Middle-earth’s mythic history and identity is realized frequently in characters as in events. Among those who embody both Middle-earth’s mythic past and its historical present are such figures as: Galadriel, who dwells in Valinor during the mythic time before the First Age, returns to Middle-earth during the First Age, and harbors the Fellowship’s quest at the end of the Third Age; Elrond, who is the son of the First Age’s mythic lovers Eärendil and Elwing, builds Rivendell and fights in the Last Alliance when the One Ring is taken from Sauron in the Second Age, and outfits the Fellowship in the Third Age; and Aragorn, a mortal Man of the Third Age whose lineage traces to Beren and Lúthien, the First Age’s most heroic lovers.

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Origins in Sound

The words, sounds, and even simple syllables of the languages Tolkien learned in school and cherished throughout his life provide the central aesthetic qualities for his invented languages and their associated mythology (see chs. 1 and 14). Captivated by the aural patterns of a wide variety of languages, most especially Welsh, Finnish, Old English, and Old Norse, Tolkien began early in his life to construct his own languages and then stories to explain both the content and the register of the words and pho-nemes in these languages. In a letter, Tolkien commented that his earliest stories developed from his languages, that his fictional world was “fundamentally linguistic in inspiration . . . The invention of languages is the foundation. The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse” (Letters 219, Tolkien’s emphasis). To lend his mythology “a consistency of linguistic style, and an illusion of historicity” (Letters 143), he carefully assessed and crafted the sounds of his lan-guages. Generally, Tolkien was most interested in promoting sounds he perceived as organically related to the cultural history of his characters, sounds that resonated throughout his world’s mythic past.

Not only is Tolkien’s mythology based in the evolution of his invented languages, but the style of his narrative language is often rooted in historical prototypes. Espe-cially in the story of Arda’s creation, his narrative style echoes the elevated, formal, distanced language of Genesis in the Bible. His expression of such language style was intentional, consciously designed to:

.  .  . give his creation story a strength and authority similar to that of the Creation in the Bible. The register of biblical language has for centuries carried a power and influ-ence greater than that of any other. Tolkien is exploiting the reader’s associations with this kind of language to give his own narrative, language, and myth greater resonance. (Hiley 2004, 848)

Along with the inspiration and affective expression of style afforded him by lan-guage, Tolkien’s mythology reflects overall the power of sound, especially through music. Noting the close connections between music and mythology, Bradford Lee Eden explains that “Tolkien knew and recognized the importance of music as an anthropomorphic reality and creational material in many mythologies” (2003, 183; see also ch. 34). While in Genesis the Word is the original source of inspiration, Tolkien intensifies the aural force of the Word in his creation myth by turning it into music. Myth, music, and history connect through the “fundamental mythical concep-tion, the world as a Great Music made visible, its history a fulfillment of creative purposes” (Rosebury 2003, 107). A source of mythic invocation, evolution, and propa-gation, music becomes the initiating power as well as an engaged constant that establishes and further promotes the foundational aspects of Arda and its development through time and space.

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Arda is created through celestial music that Ilúvatar initiates and is added to by the Ainur. As Tolkien describes the act of original creation in his mythology:

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 Ilúvatar to a great music . . . And as they looked and wondered this World began to unfold its history, and it seemed to them that it lived and grew. (S 15)

The Ainur participate in the song begun by Ilúvatar, and the music they create is both uniquely their own and a unified force grown beyond their individuated selves. Nevertheless, individually, they are not privy to all parts at once, and the music “contained things which they had not thought” (S 18). The multiplicity and incom-plete nature of their perceptions adds to the layering effect of Tolkien’s mythology. The Ainur’s personal investment in and comprehension of only a portion of Ilúvatar’s overall composition separates them from each other and elicits attentiveness to self-interests. By opening new possibilities for self-expression, the motives that evolve from the combined musical efforts of the Ainur and Ilúvatar enrich the mythological landscape of Arda. Despite the myriad voices, motivations, yearnings, and experiences within the music, the whole fits and builds together a unity of its own.

Yet, Arda’s creation is only one means by which Tolkien uses music as a mythic force. As Cami Agan argues, song is also presented as a compelling “mythic conduit” (2008, 50) in the legends of Middle-earth. To illustrate such use of song in The Lord of the Rings, Agan reminds us of the Hobbits’ first encounter with Elves en route to Woodhall: “the hobbits recall the experience as a kind of essence of numinous joy; Sam later describes the experience in terms of song: ‘it was the singing that went to my heart, if you know what I mean’ ” (2008, 50).

Steeped in the otherworldly origins and histories of Tolkien’s legendarium, the songs of these Elves resonate beyond personal experience to link Sam’s emotions with memory. In a similar way, as morning dawns on the Pelennor Fields and Théoden calls the charge of the Rohirrim, a grimmer connection between music, mythology, and history occurs:

. . . the battle-fury of his fathers ran like new fire in his veins, and he was borne up on Snowmane like a god of old, even as Oromë the Great in the battle of the Valar when the world was young . . . And then all the host of Rohan burst into song, and they sang as they slew, for the joy of battle was on them, and the sound of their singing that was fair and terrible came even to the City. (RK, V, v, 1097)

With scenes like this, Tolkien provides readers with “visionary” moments “wherein the actions of the ‘now’ resonate fully with the actions of the ancient myth” (Agan 2008, 61). Just so, near the end of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien confirms the power of music to form connections between the historical present and the mythic past. The minstrel sings of Frodo and Sam’s Quest to the crowd gathered upon the Field of Cormallen “until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy

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was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together” (RK, VI, iv, 1249–1250).

Collaboration and Cooperation

Unlike many epic narratives that recount the activities of solitary, idealized heroes who succeed at supremely difficult challenges without the aid of others, Tolkien’s myths and legends often privilege heroes who collaborate to achieve common goals. Tolkien insists over and over again that when characters join together and cooperate with each other, they succeed; but when they reject cooperation, tragedy ensues.

While readers are perhaps most familiar with the example of cooperation set by the Fellowship in The Lord of the Rings, characters from throughout the legendarium display this practice. For example, when the Elves and Men set aside their differences to form alliances, they gain victory over Morgoth. Only by collaborating with each other can Beren and Lúthien prevail in their quest to take a Silmaril from Morgoth. The great sea-faring hero Eärendil and his wife Elwing, both of whom are the children of cooperative unions between an immortal Elf and a mortal Man, achieve more by working together and with others than if they had worked alone. With Cirdan’s aid, Eärendil is able to build the ship Vingilot. With Elwing’s aid, Eärendil sails Vingilot to become the first mortal to find Valinor. Because Eärendil makes the journey not for his own sake, but for the sake of others who need the Valar’s aid, the Valar accept his request for their collaboration.

Echoing these same mythic lessons about the power of collaboration and incapacity of selfish isolation, The Lord of the Rings makes it clear that Frodo would not have gotten far in his quest without Sam, nor would the people of Minas Tirith have been victorious without the aid of their Rohirrim allies, who in turn were aided by the joined efforts of Legolas, Gimli, and Aragorn, who themselves sought their own fearful collaboration with the legendary oathbreakers bound to the Paths of the Dead. Further, the redemption of the oathbreakers is possible only through their cooperation with Aragorn to defeat the armies of the Corsairs. Such acts reinforce Tolkien’s mythic theme that collaboration offers the greatest possibility for political, cultural, and personal progress.

In contrast, when characters in Tolkien’s world act out of selfishness and fail to understand the centrality of cooperation with and on behalf of others, disaster follows. Fëanor’s insistence on keeping the Silmarils for himself alone instead of using them to restore the Light of the Two Trees to benefit all of Valinor causes his doom, as well as that of his brothers and sons and many others. Similarly, Túrin’s unwillingness to serve as part of a community or to coordinate his efforts for the benefit of others causes the death of his friends, his sister, and ultimately himself. In Tolkien’s mythology, selfishness is never valued or rewarded. As William Provost (1990) argues, the tension between selflessness and selfishness in Tolkien’s works is based on the struggle between power and love that rests at the heart of the struggle between evil and good.

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In tandem with the themes of collaboration and selflessness, the mythology of Middle-earth promotes love as the highest form of personal and political motivation and collaboration. Tolkien makes it plain that the Ainur’s works and deeds are moti-vated by a love not only of Ilúvatar, but also of those beings whom he creates, espe-cially the Elves. When the Ainur “beheld them, the more did they love them, being things other than themselves, strange and free, wherein they saw the mind of Ilúvatar reflected anew, and learned yet a little more of his wisdom” (S 18). In fact, Tolkien ties the Ainur’s love to Middle-earth when he writes that it is a “necessity of their love, that their power should thenceforward be contained and bounded in the World, to be within it for ever, until it is complete, so that they are its life and it is theirs” (S 20). Tolkien emphasizes the need for similar loving stewardship of beings or places throughout his mythology. The Elf-lord Thingol and his Maia wife Melian offer a model that emphasizes the political and societal benefits of loving care for a physical realm and its people, while Denethor’s rule of Gondor provides a negative example for how stewardship separated from love can go awry.

Further exploring the importance of love in the mythic context, Tolkien demon-strates how love can lead not only to rarified emotional capacities, but also to height-ened achievements. Melian and Thingol, and Beren and Lúthien, become the mythic patterns for possibilities available to Aragorn and Arwen, and even to Faramir and Éowyn. That such love is presented as romantic and unified, rather than sexual and conflicting, works in concord with other characteristics of collaboration in Tolkien’s mythology.

No less important than Tolkien’s insistence on male-female love as essential to the mythological order of his world is the vital power of friendship. The oath of “abiding friendship” that Finrod swears to Barahir and all his kin (S 152) typifies the love between friends that supports and defends powerful alliances against later evils. Simi-larly, friendship compels Fingon to search for and ultimately free Maedhros from his imprisonment on a precipice of Thangorodrim. Such patterns from myth and legend provide cues for friendships such as Legolas’s and Gimli’s, which exemplify the kinds of personal growth that lead to substantive forms of cultural, social, and political progress.

Endings Fated and Chosen

In addition to cosmological stories about the origins of the world, many mythologies also present sequences of mythic history in terms of the nature of human behavior and how such behavior progresses from the action of either fate or free will. Although the larger cosmic plan of Tolkien’s mythology advances often through the choices afforded by free will, events governed by fate also play key roles. Even Melkor’s efforts to sow discord and achieve dominion over Arda suggest that Tolkien viewed his role as fated and inevitable, without hope for redemption. In another case, the tragedy of Túrin seems to be a lesson on the inexorability of fate. No matter how much Túrin

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tries to isolate himself from others, he cannot avoid the fate demanded by the curse on his family that Morgoth’s “hate shall pursue them to the ends of the world .  .  . they shall die without hope, cursing both life and death” (UT 87–88). In the end, Túrin unwittingly causes the death of all his family and friends; his efforts to do otherwise are futile before fate.

Nevertheless, although fate clearly operates in Tolkien’s mythology, the function of free will provides options for choice that are particularly central to his stories and their themes. In his works, Tolkien presents choice as linked closely to the eucatastrophic impulse to find hope even in final defeat, hope for a new world to arise as the result of the old world’s failure. Choice is the means by which independent free will makes possible unexpected results in the cosmic design. Characters who under-stand that their own free will gives them the authority to enact good or evil are less limited than other characters. For example, as Keith W. Jensen explains:

[much of Túrin’s] misfortune could have been avoided if he had not trusted so much to fate. Túrin never understands that humans make their own choices and can decide their own fate. He has no hope of redemption, and that lack of hope causes him to make poor, and often rash, choices. Nevertheless, they are choices, and while the life of this man ends in tragedy, he is the one who ultimately causes it. (2010, 110)

Túrin’s extreme focus on the cursed state of himself and his family compels him to make choices as an individual without attention to the needs or good of others. His free will becomes more and more constrained by his poor choices until he becomes trapped by a fate that no longer allows the operation of free will.

One of the central lessons about the function of free will in Tolkien’s mythology is that choices made on behalf of good lead to “good results, while evil intentions are self defeating” (Loy and Goodhew 2004, 8). Early in The Silmarillion, the music of Ilúvatar is disrupted when:

it came into the heart of Melkor to interweave matters of his own imagining that were not in accord with the theme of Ilúvatar; for he sought therein to increase the power and glory of the part assigned to himself. (S 16)

As Janet Brennan Croft explains, the decisions Sauron and Melkor make suggest that “free will is something the side of evil can’t control, understand, or plan for” (2010, 134). When Melkor seeks dominion over all of Middle-earth, it is not his free will that causes grievous results, but rather the choices he makes with that free will. Despite the choices Melkor makes for destruction and discord, Tolkien’s mythology asserts that individual will must always be given free rein in order to allow the pos-sibility of unexpected good. The opportunity for Ilúvatar to shape Melkor’s theme to be “but a part of the whole and tributary to its glory” (S 17) would not have arisen had Melkor’s free will been denied or limited to inevitable fate.

The roles fate and free will play in Middle-earth are also relevant to the eschato-logical features of its mythology. Middle-earth’s initial paradisial state hints at an

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afterlife, while its End of Days seems to be fated, if not always foreseeable. Although the incomplete nature of the legendarium at the time of Tolkien’s death leaves these crucial elements of his mythology outlined only in part, both the provident choices of individuals and a destined plan for a cosmos disinterested in the random possibili-ties offered by free will are evident in his mythic narratives.

In terms of a paradisial place or state, Tolkien repeatedly identifies Valinor as “an actual Earthly Paradise” (Letters 237), “a kind of Paradise, the home of the Gods” (Letters 148), “an earthly Elvish paradise” (Letters 198), and “ ‘Arda Unmarred,’ the Earth unspoiled by evil” (Letters 328). Melkor’s choice to seek dominion over others brings evil into Arda that mars its Edenic state, causing geographical and astronomical upheaval, strife between races and kindred, and spiritual devastation. Choices made by Melkor lead to choices made by Fëanor and his people, which then lead to the Valar’s decision to detach the Undying Lands from the paths of ordinary physical space in Middle-earth. While Tolkien implies that the discordant nature of Melkor’s will in relation to Ilúvatar’s impetus for concord and harmony makes such a decision inevitable, the fact that the legendarium indicates that other choices were and may still be possible allows hope for one day reunifying the Undying Lands with Middle-earth.

A. Keith Kelly and Michael Livingston (2009) note that Tolkien’s mythology refers to Aman (which contains Valinor) as an earthly paradise, recalling an Edenic location within the world, rather than a heavenly or celestial paradise characters enter after death. While Elves do not die utterly from the world, Men and other non-Elven peoples such as Hobbits and Dwarves are mortal and fated to die. Regardless of the impact of free will in other aspects of their lives, they have no choice in this matter. While Frodo and Bilbo choose to leave Middle-earth at the end of The Lord of the Rings to journey by sea to the “far green country” (RK, VI, ix, 1348) beyond the white shores, their choice allows them to dwell only for a time in the Undying Lands of Aman, rather than to escape their mortality or to choose a different destination for their afterlife. Tolkien insists that all mortals eventually will die in Aman, for it exists on earth (albeit in a removed location) and within time:

Frodo was sent or was 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. (Letters 328, Tolkien’s emphasis)

Although Tolkien’s mythology establishes the Halls of Mandos as the site in which Elves wait in the afterlife, no parallel location is mentioned for Men to enter when they die; even “the Eldar wondered much at the strange fate of Men, for in all their lore there was no account of it, and its end was hidden from them” (S 149).

Similarly, Tolkien remains as cryptic about whether the End of Days in Middle-earth is fated or open to the choices of free will as he is about the afterlife of Men. However, as Elizabeth A. Whittingham (2007) details, the glimpses he gives of his world’s eschatology focus on three alternative mythic visions, which sometimes seem

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to be wholly separate options and at other times may be interrelated. Although the End of Days is briefly referenced at the end of the “Quenta Silmarillion” (S 255), most of Tolkien’s work exploring these possibilities occurs only in fragments from The History of Middle-earth series.

One of Tolkien’s possible ends for Middle-earth results from fulfilling the Second Music theme that was motivated originally by Ilúvatar, but spoiled by Melkor. In this scenario, the music would be performed in its full perfection, as it ought to have been without Melkor’s intervention. Another alternative Tolkien considered for his world’s mythic ending was a cataclysmic Last Battle, drawing heavily on the inevitable doom and complete annihilation of the world described in Old Norse mythology as Rag-narök. Interestingly, Túrin, Tolkien’s most tragic and ill-fated character, is presented in several of Tolkien’s notes in The History of Middle-earth series versions as the hero in the Last Battle who will be responsible for vanquishing Morgoth for all time. Tolkien’s third possible ending for Middle-earth involves the concept of restoring Arda to what it should have been, resulting in Arda Unmarred or Arda Healed.

The Arda Unmarred or Healed scenario presents the possibility that the final doom of Middle-earth is not catastrophic, but ultimately eucatastrophic in that Ilúvatar makes “it possible that even the most malicious of actions ‘shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful’ ” (Whitt 2010, 127). Whit-tingham further attaches such a vision as Arda Healed to Tolkien’s increasing desire as he aged to bring his world into even stronger accord with his religious faith. She writes that “the eschatology of Middle-earth demonstrates Tolkien’s move away from the Norse Doom of the Gods to a closer alignment with the Christian theology and images of trust and future vindication despite present defeat” (2007, 200).

Beyond England to Synthesis

One of Tolkien’s most persistent efforts in constructing his mythology was to synthe-size those aspects of our own world’s stories that mattered most to him. Thus, his mythology’s reworkings of both classical and medieval themes speaks to his love of those narratives that inspired his early thoughts and imagination. Shippey notes that Tolkien was “deeply conscious of the strong continuity between the heroic world and the modern one” (2000, xxviii). His Middle-earth mythology reflects this continuity by joining our world’s myths with his own and his world’s mythic past with its his-torical present. Tolkien populates Middle-earth’s history with myths of dragons and stars, of an ever-present eye of fire and a white horse with a lineage beyond time itself, and of lovers who change their shapes but never the yearning of their hearts to work together. Through mythic images like these, Tolkien evokes the heritage of our own world’s western culture, yet draws them with new outlines rendered for modern sensibilities.

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Beyond such literary intentions, Tolkien seeks a synthesis for his mythology that unites his readers, no less than his characters, in a collaborative effort to recognize and partake of the “sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur,” which he calls “eucatastrophe” (OFS 75, see ch. 5). Central to his mythic vision of Middle-earth, the possibility of eucatastrophe “is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies . . . universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief” (OFS 75). Frodo expects to die on Mount Doom, a place of mythic origins and deeds, but wakes instead in a bright sunlit room to the laughter of friends. From the darkest pit of Angband, Beren hears Lúthien’s answering song and knows hope where before despair was inevitable. Armor-clad Éowyn knows joy as she fulfills prophecy by killing the Witch-King on a blood-drenched field beside a white horse and her beloved lord. By drawing together such extraordinary images, Tolkien seeks a synthesis not only of literary materials, but also of those immeasurable qualities of heart and spirit that respond to stories of fantasy and mythology. For all his readers, that mythic convergence of image and word, of sound and story, creates the sudden “turn” which leaves “a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart’s desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through” (OFS 76).

Notes

1 The internal timeline of Tolkien’s Middle-earth is complicated by the fact that the major-ity of the history and mythology of his world was published posthumously. While most readers generally engage Tolkien’s world first through The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, some may welcome suggestions for reading the various parts of the history of Middle-earth in chronological order. For such readers, the approach proposed by David Bratman (2003) offers a straightforward and easily managed reading order, while Larry King’s more complex Chronological Tolkien system (2011) features a Reading Order Calculator that pro-vides highly detailed information for deter-mining the chronological order for a multitude of editions and formats of Tolkien’s works.

2 Milton Waldman was an editor at Collins pub-lishers who briefly considered publishing The Silmarillion together with The Lord of the Rings after Allen & Unwin’s initial rejection of the work. This letter is published in both Letters and in the front matter to the second edition

of The Silmarillion, although both sources omit a portion that summarizes the events of The Lord of the Rings. The omitted portion may be found in Companion (742–749).

3 Especially useful sources for extensive and detailed maps of the geographical changes of Tolkien’s world over time are Karen Wynn Fonstad (1991) and the LOTR Project’s (2013) online interactive map of Middle-earth.

4 For those wishing a complete historical time-line of Tolkien’s world, the interactive online timeline at the LOTR Project (2013) is most helpful.

5 This summary is my own, taken from such sources as Roland Barthes (1993); Joseph Campbell (1968); William Doty (2004); Alan Dundes (1984); Mircea Eliade (1963); G. S. Kirk (1973); Margaret Hiley (2004); Claude Lévi-Strauss (1995); Robert Segal (2004); and Marta Weigle (1982).

6 Classic discussions of the Great Chain of Being in history and literature are Lovejoy (1964) and Tillyard (1959).

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Abrams, M. H. 1999. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th edn. Orlando, FL: Harcourt.

Agan, Cami. 2008. “Song as Mythic Conduit in The Fellowship of the Ring.” Mythlore, 26.3/4: 41–63.

Barthes, Roland. 1993. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Vintage.

Bratman, David. 2003. “The Order to Read Tolk-ien’s Books.” Available at http://home.earthlink .net/∼dbratman/tolkien_order.html, accessed May 15, 2013.

Campbell, Joseph. 1968. The Masks of God. Vol. 4: Creative Mythology. New York: Viking.

Carpenter, Humphrey. 1977. J. R. R. Tolkien – A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin.

Croft, Janet Brennan. 2010. “The Thread on Which Doom Hangs: Free Will, Disobedience, and Eucatastrophe in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.” Mythlore, 29.1–2: 131–150.

Doty, William. 2004. Myth: A Handbook. West-port, CT: Greenwood.

Dundes, Alan, ed. 1984. Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Eden, Bradford Lee. 2003. “The ‘Music of the Spheres’: Relationships between Tolkien’s The Sil-marillion and Medieval Cosmological and Reli-gious Theory.” In Tolkien the Medievalist, edited by Jane Chance, 183–193. London: Routledge.

Eliade, Mircea. 1963. Myth and Reality. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper & Row.

Flieger, Verlyn. 2005. Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.

Fonstad, Karen Wynn. 1991. The Atlas of Middle-earth. Rev. edn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Hiley, Margaret. 2004. “Stolen Language, Cosmic Models: Myth and Mythology in Tolkien.” Modern Fiction Studies, 50.4: 838–858.

Hostetter, Carl F. and Arden R. Smith. 1996. “A Mythology for England.” Mythlore, 21.2: 281–290.

Jensen, Keith W. 2010. “Dissonance in the Divine Theme: The Issue of Free Will in Tolkien’s Sil-marillion.” In Middle-earth Minstrel: Essays on Music in Tolkien, edited by Bradford Lee Eden, 102–113. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

Kelly, A. Keith and Michael Livingston. 2009. “ ‘A Far Green Country’: Tolkien, Paradise, and the End of All Things in Medieval Literature.” Mythlore, 27.3/4: 83–102.

King, Larry. 2011. “The Chronological Tolkien Page.” http://www.chronology.org/tolkien, accessed May 15, 2013.

Kirk, G. S. 1973. Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures. Berkeley: Univer-sity of California Press.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1995. Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture. New York: Schocken Books.

LOTR Project. 2013. http://lotrproject.com, accessed May 22, 2013.

Lovejoy, Arthur O. 1964. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Loy, David R. and Linda Goodhew. 2004. The Dharma of Dragons and Daemons: Buddhist Themes in Modern Fantasy. Boston: Wisdom Publications.

Petty, Anne C. 2004. “Identifying England’s Lönnrot.” Tolkien Studies, 1: 69–84.

Provost, William. 1990. “Language and Myth in the Fantasy Writings of J. R. R. Tolkien.” Modern Age, 33.1: 42–52.

Rosebury, Brian. 2003. Tolkien: A Cultural Phenom-enon. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Segal, Robert. 2004. Myth: A Very Short Introduc-tion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shippey, Tom. 2000. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. London: HarperCollins.

Shippey, Tom. 2005. The Road to Middle-earth. Rev. and expanded edn. London: HarperCollins.

Tillyard, E. M. W. 1959. The Elizabethan World Picture. New York: Vintage Books.

Weigle, Marta. 1982. Spiders & Spinsters: Women and Mythology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Whitt, Richard J. 2010. “Germanic Fate and Doom in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion.” Mythlore, 29.1/2: 115–129.

Whittingham, Elizabeth A. 2007. The Evolution of Tolkien’s Mythology: A Study of the History of Middle-earth. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

References