A DICTIONARY
OF SOURCES
AA
Alfirin. To the Elves, the Alfirin flowers were like the great gold bell of Valinor in miniature.
AEGIR A Norse nature spirit, or jötunn, comparable to the Greco-Roman sea-god Pontus and Tolkien’s Ossë, the Maia of the Waves. Aegir was subservient to Njörd, the Norse god of the sea, just as Ossë is to Tolkien’s Ulmo, the Lord of Waters. Like Ossë and Pontus, Aegir was known for his wildly shifting moods and his tempestuous nature, and was much feared by mariners.
AEGLOS (“SNOW POINT” OR “ICICLE”) The Elf-forged spear of Gil-galad, the High King of the Noldor of Middle-earth in the Second Age. Aeglos’s inspiration was likely Gungnir—meaning “swaying one”—the magical Dwarf-forged spear of Odin, the Norse god. Like Aeglos, Gungnir was a weapon before which “none could stand” and that would always strike its mark. Aeglos is broken when Gil-galad falls in his duel with Sauron at the close of the War of the Last Alliance. Gungnir was broken when Odin carried it into the final battle of Ragnarök.
AENEAS The mythical prince of the ancient city of Troy and Tolkien’s Prince Eärendil the Mariner have parallel lives, both being founders of nations. According to the Roman poet Virgil in his epic poem the Aeneid (completed 19 BC), the progenitor of the Romans was Aeneas, the son of the mortal Prince Anchises and the immortal goddess Venus. According to Tolkien, the progenitor of the Númenóreans is Prince Eärendil, the son of the mortal nobleman Tuor and Idril, the immortal Elven princess. Aeneas survived the destruction of the royal city of Troy and then sailed for many years lost in the paths of many enchanted isles, while Eärendil survived the destruction of the royal city of Gondolin and then sailed for many years lost in the paths of the Enchanted Isles. With the help of the goddess Venus, Aeneas traveled to Elysium, the Land of the Blessed, then returned to guide his people into a western sea and their promised land in Italy. Similarly, with the help of Elwing, the Elvish princess, Eärendil travels to Aman, the Blessed Realm, then returns to guide his people into the Western Sea and the promised land of Númenor.
In Italy, descendants of Aeneas, the brothers Romulus and Remus, founded Rome, a city and civilization that was destined to develop into an empire that would conquer and rule the world. In Middle-earth, descendants of Eärendil, the brothers Isildur and Anárion, founded Gondor, a city and civilization that was destined to create an empire that would likewise conquer and rule the world.
AESIR One of the two groups of Norse gods (the other being the Vanir) who united to form a single pantheon. In many respects, the Aesir are comparable to the Vanir, one of the two groups of “angelic powers” in Tolkien’s legendarium (the other being the Maiar). Although in terms of their hierarchical structure, Tolkien’s Valarian pantheon clearly shows the influence of the Greco-Roman gods of Olympus, in appearance and temperament the Valar and Maiar have far more in common with the gods of the Norsemen and other Germanic peoples. The home of the Aesir was Asgard, one of the Nine Worlds of the Norse cosmos, located at one end of Bifröst, the rainbow bridge, and on the highest branch of the Yggdrasil, the world tree. Tolkien’s Manwë, king of the Valar, is enthroned on Taniquetil, the highest mountain in Arda, while Odin, king of the Aesir, was enthroned in Hildskjalf, the highest hall in Asgard. Among the other Aesir gods were Thor, Frigg, Tyr, Loki, Baldur, Heimdall, Idunn, and Bragi. The Vanir gods, including Freya, Freyr, Njörd, and Nerthus, lived in the nearby world of Vanaheim, on another branch of Yggdrasil.
AGLAROND Meaning “Caves of Glory” in Sindarin (Grey Elvish), Aglarond is the name given to the spectacular caverns in the White Mountains, close to Helm’s Deep. Aglarond, as translated from the common tongue of Westron, is known as the “Glittering Caves.” There, in the wake of the War of the Ring, Gimli the Dwarf founds a new colony of Durin’s Folk. Tolkien acknowledged that the caves were inspired by the vast real-world caves of Cheddar Gorge in the Mendip Hills of Somerset, in southwestern England. One of the greatest “natural wonders” of Britain, this vast limestone gorge and cave complex is the site of some of the island’s earliest Paleolithic human remains. Aglarond and the Cheddar Gorge and Caves both appear to have been formed by underground rivers, and their vast galleries contain deep reflecting pools with remarkable stalactite and stalagmite formations. Tolkien was known to have visited Cheddar Gorge and its caves on at least two occasions: in 1916, while on his honeymoon, and again in 1940.
See also: GIMLI
AINUR The “Holy Ones” are the angelic powers serving Tolkien’s supreme being, Eru, “The One.” The Ainur are comparable to the angels in the service of the one God, the biblical Jehovah or Yahweh, in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In Tolkien’s cosmology, it is the Ainur as a celestial choir who, at the bidding of Eru, sing the world into existence. The contribution of the Judeo-Christian tradition to Tolkien’s imaginative writing is profound in its moral implications. However, in most respects, the ancient Judeo-Christian world is very unlike Tolkien’s.
As Tolkien informs us, the Ainur, many of whom subsequently enter the created world of Arda, are “beings of the same order of beauty, power, and majesty as the gods of higher mythology.” Indeed, those Ainur who enter Arda become known as the Valar and the Maiar, taking physical forms comparable to the gods of ancient Greek, Roman, and Germanic mythology. And although the inhabitants of Tolkien’s world do not quite worship these “gods,” the beliefs they hold surrounding these angelic powers are much closer to those of the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Germanic peoples than they are to the fierce monotheism of the ancient Israelites.
See also: ANGELS; MAIAR; “MUSIC OF THE AINUR”; VALAR
AKALLABÊTH “The Downfall of Númenor” is Tolkien’s reinvention of the ancient Greek Atlantis legend. Tolkien often mentioned that he had “an Atlantis complex,” which took the form of a “terrible recurrent dream of the Great Wave, towering up, and coming in ineluctably over the trees and green fields.” He appears to have believed that this was some kind of racial memory of the ancient catastrophe of the sinking of Atlantis, and stated on more than one occasion that he had inherited this dream from his parents and had passed it on to his son Michael. In the writing of Akallabêth, however, Tolkien found that he had managed to exorcise this disturbing dream. Evidently, the dream did not reoccur after he dramatized the event in his own tale of the catastrophe. The original legend of Atlantis comes from Plato’s dialogues, Timaeus and Critias (both c. 360 BC), which include the story of an island kingdom that some nine thousand years before had been home to the mightiest civilization the world had ever known. Atlantis was an island about the size of Spain in the western sea beyond the Pillars of Heracles. Its power extended over all the nations of Europe and the Mediterranean, but the overwhelming pride of these powerful people brought them into conflict with the immortals. Finally, a great cataclysm in the form of a volcanic eruption and a tidal wave resulted in Atlantis sinking beneath the sea. Tolkien used Plato’s legend as an outline for Akallabêth. However, Tolkien seems to have been incapable of doing what most authors would have done—writing a straightforward dramatic narrative based on the legend. Typically, he just couldn’t help adding little personal touches such as the compilation of three thousand years of detailed history, sociology, geography, linguistics, and genealogy.
See also: ATLANTIS
Akallabêth
ALCUIN OF YORK (c.735-804)
The Christian tutor and adviser to Charlemagne, King of the Franks and Holy Roman Emperor. His role is comparable to that of Gandalf as Aragorn’s mentor, counselor, and spiritual guide. Just as the Wizard Gandalf inspired Aragorn’s revival of the Reunited Kingdom of Arnor and Gondor, so the English churchman Alcuin was the driving force behind Charlemagne’s revival of the Roman Empire. There is a deeper, theological connection between the two figures, however. Alcuin dared to remind Charlemagne that an emperor’s authority was only borrowed from God, advising him: “Do not think of yourself as a lord of the world, but as a steward.” Alcuin’s words may remind us of those of Gandalf to Denethor the Ruling Steward of Gondor: “For I am also a steward. Did you not know?” Both Alcuin the churchman and Gandalf the Wizard had obligations far beyond the rise and fall of the petty kingdoms of mortal humans. Gandalf the Wizard is the embodied form of the immortal Maia Olórin and his allegiance is to the Guardians of Arda, whose authority is only borrowed from Eru Ilúvatar. Ultimately, Gandalf is steward to Eru the One, as Alcuin was steward to his Christian God.
See also: CHARLEMAGNE
ALFIRIN An often white, bell-like flower of Middle-earth known for blooming profusely about the tombs of Men. To the Men of Rohan it is Simbelmynë (“evermind”), while its Elvish name, Alfirin, means “immortal”—both names suggesting its association with commemoration of the dead. As a flower, Tolkien himself compared it to the anemone, which the ancient Greeks associated with mourning: when the goddess of love Aphrodite wept over the grave of her lover Adonis, her tears turned into anemones.
ALI BABA In the famous Middle Eastern folktale, Ali Baba is the unassuming hero who discovers that the secret to opening the stone door of the Forty Thieves’ treasure cave is uttering the words: “Open Sesame!” The “door in the mountain” theme is a common one in fairy tales and legends, found, for example, not only in “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” but also in “Aladdin” and “The Pied Piper of Hamelin.” Tolkien, too, drew on the motif. Entry into the treasure cave of the Dwarves in The Hobbit is by way of a secret door in the Lonely Mountain of Erebor, and he repeats the motif in The Lord of the Rings. When the Fellowship of the Ring arrives at the West Door of Moria, the entrance is sealed shut, though, as Gandalf states: “these doors are probably governed by words.” In this case, the West Door of Moria is unlocked and opened by uttering the Elvish word mellon, meaning “friend.” For Tolkien, however, the motif—and Gandalf’s statement—had a deeper, creative meaning. Words were the keys to all of Tolkien’s kingdoms of Middle-earth: a world he explored and discovered through language, runes, gnomic script, and riddles. Words unlocked the doors of Tolkien’s imagination as a writer.
ALFHEIM One of the Nine Worlds of the Norse world and comparable to Tolkien’s land of Eldamar in the Undying Lands. As the name Alfheim implies, this was the “home of the elves,” or, more specifically, of the light elves. There was a second Norse elf-world called Swartalfheim, “home of the dark elves.” These divisions reappear in Tolkien’s division of his race of Elves: the Caliquendi, the Light-Elves who came, at least for a while, to the immortal lands of Eldamar (“Elvenhome”), and the Moriquendi, or Dark-Elves, who remained in the mortal lands of Middle-earth.
ANCALAGON THE BLACK The first and greatest of the vast legion of Winged Fire Drakes that Morgoth releases from the deep dungeons of Angband in the last battle of the War of Wrath at the end of the First Age. The attack of Ancalagon (meaning “rushing jaws”) in that last Great Battle has a precedent in the account of the great Norse battle of Ragnarök found in the Old Norse poem Völuspá (part of the Poetic Edda) where “the flying dragon, glowing serpent” known as Nidhogg (meaning “malice striker”) emerges from the underworld, Niflheim. Like Nidhogg, the ravening majesty that is Ancalagon unleashes a terrible withering fire down from the heavens. In the Prose Edda’s account of Ragnarök, we have another dragonlike monster, Jörmungandr, the World-Serpent, who rises up with the giants to do battle with the gods, and bring about the destruction of the Nine Worlds. In this version of Ragnarök, the god Thor appears in his flying chariot and, armed with the thunderbolt hammer Mjölnir, slays Jörmungandr. In Tolkien’s Great Battle, the hero Eärendil, appears in his flying ship Vingilótë and, armed with a Silmaril, slays Ancalagon.
ANDÚRIL The reforged ancestral sword of the kings of Arnor whose name means “flame of the west.” Originally known as Narsil (“red and white flame”), it is first forged by Telchar, the Dwarf-smith of Nogrod and wielded by King Elendil. The weapon largely has its inspiration in the thirteenth-century Icelandic poem Völsunga Saga, where the dynastic sword of the Völsung clan, known as Gram (“wrath”), is forged by the elves of Alfheim and first wielded by King Sigmund, until the blade was broken in his duel with Odin, the Lord of Battles. This is comparable to the fate of Narsil, which is wielded by Elendil until the blade is broken in his duel with Sauron, the Dark Lord.
Ancalagon the Black
The shards of Narsil are reforged by the Elves of Rivendell for Aragorn, the rightful heir to the kings of Arnor, and renamed Andúril. Its unbreakable blade flickers with a living red flame in sunlight and a white flame in moonlight. Similarly, the Völsung sword Gram is reforged by Regin the Dwarf-smith for Sigurd, the rightful heir to the kings of the Völsungs. Its unbreakable blade is distinguished by the blue flames that play along its razor-sharp edge.
See also: TELCHAR
ANDVARI In Norse mythology, a dwarf who lives under a waterfall and possesses a magical ring called the Andvarinaut, or “Gift of Andvari.” In some respects, Andvari’s tale resembles that of Gollum. Both are solitary hoarders of magic rings but lose them through trickery: Andvari is tricked by the god Loki, and Gollum by the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins. Both lust after its return, and both curse ever after all those who take possession of the ring. In the Norse tradition, the ring was also known as “Andvari’s loom” because of its power “to weave gold” and was believed to be the ultimate source of the cursed gold of the Nibelung and Völsung treasure hoards. This ring is comparable in its powers to that of the Seven Dwarf Rings of Middle-earth: the ultimate source of the cursed gold of the Seven Dwarf treasure hoards. As Tolkien would also have been aware, these ancient ring legends were the source of the riddling story “Rumpelstiltskin,” where the ring is substituted with a spinning wheel that has the power “to spin gold”—a fairy-tale version of “Andvari’s loom.” In Richard Wagner’s opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (first performed 1876), Andvari appears as the dwarf Alberich the Nibelung.
ANGBAND (“IRON PRISON”) A subterranean fortress and armory inhabited by Morgoth, the Dark Enemy, and his army of fallen Maiar spirits. In many respects, Angband is comparable to the subterranean fortress and armory of Tartarus or Hell in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (first edition, 1667), inhabited by the biblical Satan, the Prince of Darkness, and his army of fallen angels. A major difference, however, is that the pits of Angband are created by Morgoth and his allies because of their love of evil and hellish darkness, while Tartarus is created as a place of punishment for Satan and the other fallen angels. Both Angband and Tartarus serve as mighty fortresses and armories out of which lords of darkness launch their wars against the forces of light.
See also: STRONGHOLDS
ANGELS The mighty spirits who serve the god Jehovah/Yahweh in Judeo-Christian tradition provide some of the inspiration for the Ainur, or “Holy Ones,” in Tolkien’s cosmology. The Ainur are brought into being as thoughts from the mind of Eru Ilúvatar. Drawing on the ancient classical tradition of the Music of the Spheres (attributed to Pythagoras), Tolkien’s creation myth, told in Ainulindalë, has these angelic powers form a heavenly choir and sing the cosmos into existence. Thereafter, many of the angelic spirits choose to enter the newly created world of Arda in the form of the Valar and Maiar, supernatural beings of the same order and power as the gods of the Germanic and Greco-Roman pantheons.
See also: RELIGION: CHRISTIANITY
ANGMAR (“IRON HOME”) One of the domains of the Hill-men, lying on the northern borders of Eriador in the foothills of the Misty Mountains. By the year 1300 TA the area is ruled by the Lord of the Nazgûl, who subsequently becomes known as the fearful “Witch-king of Angmar.”
In the context of European history, the Hill-men of Angmar most resemble the Basques, the indigenous mountain people of the western Pyrenees bordering modern France and Spain. For centuries the Basques fought against Roman, French, and Spanish incursions into their lands, and constantly rebelled against those powers. The Basques were long resentful of the powerful Roman Empire and its later successor states, just as the Hill-men, too, resent the kings of Arnor. Consequently, the Hill-men were easily corrupted by the Witch-king and persuaded to enter into a disastrous war of attrition. After seven centuries, the Witch-king’s long war ended with the Battle of Fornost (1975 TA) and the mutual destruction of both Arnor and Angmar.
Aragorn II. The last Chieftain of the Dúnedain of the North after he was crowned King Elessar of the Reunited Kingdom of Gondor and Arnor after the War of the Ring.
ANNATAR
See: PROMETHEUS
ARAGORN Tolkien’s archetypal hero and future king of the Reunited Kingdom of Arnor and Gondor. English-language readers of The Lord of the Rings frequently register a connection between the legendary King Arthur and Aragorn. What is not often apparent, however, is that twelfth-to fourteenth-century Arthurian romances are often based on fifth-century AD Germanic–Gothic oral epics—epics that now only survive in the myths of their Norse and Icelandic descendants. Tolkien was far more interested in the early Germanic elements of his tales, which link Aragorn with Sigurd the Völsung, the archetypal hero of the Teutonic ring legend.
Although all three heroic warrior kings—Sigurd, Arthur, and Aragorn—are clearly similar, the context out of which each arises—in pagan saga, medieval romance, and modern fantasy—is very different. The creation of the essentially medieval King Arthur and his court of Camelot, with its Christian ethos, naturally resulted in some reshaping of many of the fiercer aspects of the early pagan tradition. Sigurd the Völsung is a wild warrior who would have been out of place at Arthur’s polite, courtly Round Table. Curiously, although Tolkien’s Aragorn is an essentially a pagan hero, he is often even more upright and ethically driven than the Christian King Arthur.
ARAWN A Celtic otherworld deity and the likely inspiration for Tolkien’s Oromë, the Huntsman of the Valar. Arawn provides an imaginative link between the fictional history of the Elves and the mythological world of the ancient Britons. The Welsh knew this god as Arawn the Huntsman, while Oromë (meaning “horn blower”) was known to the Sindar (Grey Elves) as Araw the Huntsman. The Welsh Arawn was an immortal huntsman who like Araw/Oromë rode like the wind with horse and hounds through the forests of the mortal world. In the First Branch of the Mabinogi, Arawn the Huntsman befriends the mortal Welsh king, Pwyll, who travels into the immortal Otherworld of Annwn. In the mortal lands of Middle-earth, Araw/Oromë the Huntsman befriends three Elven kings (Ingwë, Finwë, and Elwë), who travel to the immortal Undying Lands of Aman.
ARDA The High Elven (Quenya) name for Tolkien’s fictional world, encompassing the mortal lands of Middle-earth and the immortal Undying Lands of Aman. Arda, Tolkien insisted, is not another planet, but our world: the planet Earth. As the author himself explained: “The theatre of my tale is this earth, the one in which we now live, but the historical period is imaginary.” The connection is made clear in the name: Arda is connected to the Old High German Erda and Gothic airþa, both of which translate as “Earth.”
See also: MIDDLE-EARTH
ARIEN Maia maiden spirit of fire who each day carries the Sun aloft, illuminating Tolkien’s world of Arda. She is very much like the Norse goddess Sunna, who was the guardian and fiery personification of the Sun.
In the ages following the destruction of the Trees of Light in Arda, the angelic Arien rises into the air and carries aloft the crystal vessel that contains the last glowing fruit of the Golden Tree of the Valar into the firmament. Similarly, it was the Norse goddess Sunna who drove the chariot of the Sun across the sky each day to light the Nine Worlds. Sunna’s brother was Mani, the Norse god and personification of the moon, who in turn is comparable to Tolkien’s Maia moon spirit, Tilion of the Silver Bow. Both Tolkien’s and Norse mythology reverse the more commonly found gender of the deities of the Sun and Moon. The Greek and Roman deities of the Sun, for example, were respectively the male gods Helios and Sol while the Greek and Roman deities of the Moon were respectively the female goddesses Selene and Luna.
ARMAGEDDON The location of the prophesied great battle fought between the forces of good and evil at the “end of time” (and by extension the name of the cataclysm itself), as revealed in the Book of Revelation in the New Testament. Tolkien’s Great Battle in the War of Wrath at the end of the First Age owes some of its inspiration to the biblical Armageddon. However, instead of an ultimate duel between Tolkien’s Eärendil the Mariner and Ancalagon the Black Dragon, we have a duel between the Archangel Michael and the “Red Dragon,” as described in the Book of Revelation (12:7–10): “Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.” Just as the Red Dragon’s downfall marks Satan’s defeat, so the Black Dragon’s downfall marks the defeat of Morgoth in Middle-earth. The Host of the West, like the Host of Heaven, prevails, and, as with Satan, no mercy or forgiveness is granted: Morgoth the Dark Enemy is cast forever after into the darkness of the Eternal Void.
AR-PHARAZÔN The twenty-fifth and last king of Númenor. His seduction and downfall through the deceit of Sauron the Ring Lord is comparable to the biblical legend of that other Ring Lord, King Solomon. In the tale of Solomon’s Ring (or Seal) found in Jewish tradition, we find a mighty demon, Asmodeus, who resembles Sauron at his most guileful. In the Hebrew story, Asmodeus—as the king of earthly demons—acts as a subtle agent of evil who corrupts the all-powerful but fatally proud King Solomon of Israel. In Sauron the Dark Lord, similarly, we see a subtle agent of evil who corrupts the all-powerful but fatally proud King Ar-Pharazôn of Númenor.
Just as Sauron surrenders to Ar-Pharazon and begs to be his trusted royal servant, so the demon Asmodeus, in his guise as a trusted royal servant, becomes Solomon’s evil tempter. Solomon is given visions of power and grandeur and begins sacrificing to the gods his various wives, going so far as to build a great temple to the goddess Ashtaroth on the slopes of Mount Moriah. As a consequence, he falls from the grace of Yahweh, the One God of the Israelites. This is comparable to Sauron’s temptation of Ar-Pharazôn through visions of conquest and immortality and to the building of a great temple to Morgoth on the slopes of Mount Meneltarma, where sacrifices were made to this evil god. Like Soloman, Ar-Pharazôn falls from the grace of Eru the One. Upon King Solomon’s death, it is prophesied, Solomon’s kingdom would be divided, his temple and books destroyed, and the demons of disease and war released again upon the world. The fate of Tolkien’s Númenor is even more disastrous: earthquakes and tidal waves destroy both nation and people as the island-continent sinks beneath the waters of the Western Sea.
ARTEMIS As well as goddess of the Moon, Artemis was the Greek goddess of the hunt and the protector of wild animals and wild places. Forest groves, meadows, and deer were sacred to this goddess, whom the Romans equated with the goddess Diana. Tolkien’s Nessa the Swift, the Vala sister of Oromë the Huntsman and the spouse of Tulkas the Strong, has some similarities with Artemis. Although Nessa is not a virgin huntress like Artemis, both are “swift as an arrow” with the ability to outrun the deer of the forest. Nessa cultivates all forms of animal and vegetable life in the Woods of Oromë in the Undying Lands. And, like Artemis, she also takes great delight in gatherings with other maids in its glades and meadows (both deities are closely associated with dancing). Another interesting comparison lies in the sibling kinship between Nessa and Oromë and Artemis and Apollo, although Tolkien does not elaborate on this.
ARTHUR The legendary British king is on many levels similar to Aragorn the Dúnedain, Tolkien’s most prominent hero in The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn is destined to become Elessar, the king of the Reunited Kingdom of Gondor and Arnor.
The comparison of Arthur and Aragorn demonstrates the power of archetypes, especially in dictating aspects of character in the heroes of legend and myth. If we look at their lives, we see certain identical patterns: Arthur and Aragorn are orphaned sons and rightful heirs to kings slain in battle; both are deprived of their inherited kingdoms and are in danger of assassination. Both are all apparently the last of their dynasty, their lineage ending if they were slain; and both are raised secretly in foster homes under the protection of a foreign noble who is a distant relative (Arthur is raised in the castle of Sir Ector and Aragorn in Rivendell in the house of Elrond). During their fostering—in childhood and as youths—each hero achieves feats of strength and skill that mark them for future greatness. Both fall in love with beautiful maidens, but must overcome several seemingly impossible obstacles before they can marry: Arthur to Guinevere and Aragorn to Arwen. And, ultimately, by overcoming these obstacles they win both love and their kingdoms.
See also: MORTE D’ARTHUR
ARWEN EVENSTAR The Elven princess also known as Arwen Undómiel, meaning “evening maid” or “nightingale.” Arwen has many links with the fairy-tale heroine Snow White, whose story was first written down by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. Both are raven-haired beauties with luminous white skin. Both have associations with supernaturally powerful queens who possess magic mirrors (although, unlike Snow White’s stepmother, Arwen’s grandmother Galadriel is a benign figure). And Arwen, like Snow White, has a “Prince Charming” lover: the future king of the Reunited Kingdom of Arnor and Gondor, Aragorn. Tolkien also pointedly links Arwen Evenstar to Varda Elentári, the Valarian “Queen of the Stars” who is also known by the epithet “Fanuilos,” meaning “Ever-White.”
ASGARD One of the Nine Worlds of the Norse cosmos, home to the all-powerful and immortal Aesir, ruled by Odin and Frigg, the king and queen of the gods. It has similarities with Tolkien’s Valinor, home to the Valar, ruled by Manwë and Varda. Asgard is divided into several regions, each of which has a great hall belonging to one of the gods. The greatest of the halls is Hildskjalf, which contains the high seat of Odin the Allfather. Valinor is similarly divided into several regions, each of which has a great hall belonging to one of the Valar. The greatest stands on Taniquetil, the highest mountain in Arda, where Manwë, Lord of the Winds, is enthroned.
ASMODEUS The powerful demon in the ancient Hebrew legend of Solomon’s Ring. As the king of earthly demons, Asmodeus’s role in the seduction of King Solomon is comparable to that of Sauron the Dark Lord in the seduction of Ar-Pharazôn, the twenty-fifth and last king of Númenor. Both Asmodeus and Sauron surrender to powerful human kings, but through guile, flattery, and promises of unfettered earthly power rise from captivity and virtual slavery to become the most trusted of royal advisers. Both subsequently corrupt their masters, leading them to war, false worship, and destruction. Both are aided in their usurping of power by all-powerful magical rings.
See also: AR-PHARAZÔN
ASTERIA The Titan goddess of falling stars and night oracles whose name means “of the stars” in Greek. She is comparable to Tolkien’s Ilmarë, handmaid of Varda, Lady of the Stars. Ilmarë is among the greatest of the Maiar spirits and her name, which may mean “starlight” in Quenya, appears to have been inspired by Ilmarinen, the Finnic smith-god who appears in the epic Kalevala.
ATHELAS A sweet-smelling herb with healing powers found in Middle-earth, which may have been inspired by basil. In Middle-earth, athelas is also known as kingsfoil or asëa aranion, meaning “leaf of kings,” in Quenya. The word “basil,” too, derives from the Greek for “king,” and in German the plant is sometimes known as Königskraut, or “king’s herb.” In Tolkien’s legendarium, the healing powers of the herb are believed to be greatly enhanced when royal hands apply it. In this, Tolkien was drawing on the ancient English and French tradition of “the healing hands of the king,” which dates at least to the reign of Edward the Confessor (1042–66). In the War of the Ring, Aragorn’s use of athelas to combat the deadly magic of the Black Breath after the Battle of the Pelennor Fields is seen by Gondorians as evidence that the king has returned to Gondor.
Athelas. The herbal lore attached to this herb relates to the European tradition of the “healing hands of the king.”
ATHENS The ancient Greek city-state—and its best-known mythical king, Theseus—are imaginatively linked to the city-state of Middle-earth’s Gondor. Both the citadel of Gondor and the Acropolis of Athens have comparable traditions of sacred fountains and sacred trees. In Athens, there was the Fountain of Poseidon and the Olive Tree of Athena, while in Gondor there is the Fountain of Minas Tirith and the White Tree of Gondor. Furthermore, the citadel of Gondor is similar in its basic structure to the Acropolis, including the ship-prow ridge that is a feature of both. From the heights of the Acropolis, the Athenians could look down on the Long Walls that linked Athens to its ports at Piraeus and Phalerum on the Aegean Sea, just as, from the heights of citadel, the citizens of Gondor can look down on the Great Wall that links the citadel to its ports on the Anduin River. In the siege of Gondor, toward the close of the War of the Ring, the appearance of black-sailed ships sailing upstream from the port-city of Umbar results in the suicide of Denethor, the Ruling Steward of Gondor. This was undoubtedly inspired by the ancient myth of Theseus, where the appearance of black-sailed ships from Crete results in the suicide of Aegeus, Theseus’ father and king of Athens. Both rulers mistake the black sail as signals of death and defeat when in fact their rescuers and heirs, Aragorn and Theseus, command the ships.
See also: BLACK SAILS
The Downfall of Númenor. The Downfall of Númenor was in large part inspired by Plato’s account of the ancient legend of the rise and fall of the mythical utopian island continent of Atlantis.
ATLANTIS The legendary island kingdom that inspired Tolkien’s tale Akallabêth, or “The Downfall of Númenor.” This was one very distinct case of Tolkien taking an ancient legend and rewriting it in such a way as to suggest that his tale is the real history on which the ancient myth was based. So that we do not miss the point, Tolkien tells us that the Quenya name for Númenor is Atalantë. Plato’s dialogues Timaeus and Critias are the primary sources for the Atlantis legend. In the Timaeus, Critias tells how the Athenian statesman Solon travels to Egypt where he learns the history of Atlantis. According to Plato, Atlantis lay in the ocean beyond the Pillars of Heracles (i.e., in the Atlantic Ocean) and that on “this island of Atlantis there existed a confederation of kings, of great and marvelous power, which held sway over all the island, and over many other islands also and parts of the continent.” In Tolkien’s retelling of the Atlantis story, the island continent of Númenor is located in the middle of the Western Sea between Middle-earth and the Undying Lands. Like Atlantis, Númenor is a fabulously rich and blessed realm whose kings wield great power and hold sway not only over all the island but, by dint of their fleets of mighty ships, over many parts of Middle-earth as well. The fate of Númenor is all but identical to that of Atlantis, as described by the first-century AD Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo, who wrote: “… in one day and one night [Atlantis] was overwhelmed by the sea in consequence of an extraordinary earthquake and inundation and suddenly disappeared, becoming sea, not indeed navigable, but full of gulfs and eddies.”
AULË In Tolkien’s Valarian god Aulë the Smith, the Maker of Mountains, we have the counterpart of the Greek god Hephaestus (the Roman Vulcan). Both are capable of forging untold wonders from the metals and elements of the Earth. Both are smiths, armorers, and jewelers. Like Hephaestus, Aulë is depicted as a true craftsman and artisan, someone who creates for the joy of making, not for the sake of possession or gaining power and dominion over others.
Aulë is also the maker of Tolkien’s race of Dwarves. These in their origins are very like the race of automatons created by Hephaestus, who appeared to be living creatures, but in fact were machines similar to robots designed to help in the smithy with the beating of metal and the working of the forges. In Tolkien, Aulë creates the Dwarves because he is impatient for pupils who can carry out his knowledge and craft. However, they are given true life and independent minds only at the command of Eru Ilúvatar. Among the Norsemen, Aulë’s counterpart as the smith to the gods and heroes is Völundr. Among the Anglo-Saxons, he is Wayland.
Aulë the Smith. His spouse is Yavanna the Fruitful.
AVALLÓNË A port and city on the “Lonely Isle” of Tol Eressëa, originally home to those of the Teleri Elves (the so-called Sea Elves), who came to Aman. Its name is reminiscent of Avalon, the “Isle of Apples,” to which the mortally wounded King Arthur is taken to be healed and given immortality. In a letter to a publisher, Tolkien acknowledged that this allusion was deliberately planned so as to give his Hobbit heroes, Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, an “Arthurian ending.” That is, like King Arthur, these Hobbit heroes sail off over the Western Sea to Avalon/Avallónë where they too find healing and are given immortality.
See also: AVALON
AVALON The isle to which the mortally wounded King Arthur is taken after the Battle of Camlann. In Tolkien we have its counterpart in Avallónë on Tol Eressëa, the “Lonely Isle” of the Teleri Sea Elves. Avalon means “Isle of Apples” and is comparable to the classical Garden of the Hesperides where the beautiful daughters of Atlas and Hesperis (“Evening”) tend the tree (or whole grove of trees) that bears the golden apples of immortality. A similar story can be found in Norse mythology, where Idunn, the goddess of youth, keeps golden apples that protect the Aesir from the ravages of time. The bittersweet ending of The Lord of the Rings—the departure of the Ring-bearers from the Grey Havens—is consciously modeled on the myths and legends surrounding King Arthur’s departure to the isle of Avalon. It is an ending that is derived from the Celtic aspects of the Arthurian tradition, rather than the Teutonic ones. After his final battle, the mortally wounded Arthur is carried onto a mysterious boat by a beautiful queen (or sometimes three queens) and taken westward across the water to the faerie land of Avalon, where he is healed and given immortality. This end to Arthur’s mortal life is very like the end of Tolkien’s novel. However, it is important to point out that this is not the end of Aragorn, the figure most like Arthur in The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn dies within the mortal world. The supreme reward of this voyage into the land of immortals is reserved for another. The “wounded king” who sails on the Elf-queen Galadriel’s ship across the Western Sea to the Elven towers of Avallónë is Frodo the Ring-bearer, the real hero of The Lord of the Rings.
AVARI The “Dark-elves,” or Avari, of Middle-earth were very likely inspired by the categorization of the two races of elves in Norse mythology who inhabited two distinct worlds: Alfheim and Swartalfheim. Alfheim was the “Elf home” of the light elves, while Swartalfheim was the home of the dark elves. These divisions are similar to those Tolkien imposed on his own race of Elves: the Calaquendi, or Light-elves, who live for the most part in the immortal lands of Eldamar; and the Moriquendi, or Dark-elves, who live in the mortal lands of Middle-earth.
See also: ALFHEIM
BB
Bats. Of the many creatures that Melkor the Dark Enemy bred in darkness, the blood-sucking bat was one. Sauron himself changed into a bat when he fled after the fall of Tol-in-Gaurhoth.
BAG END The Hobbit hole (smial) and ancestral home of the Baggins family of Hobbiton in the Shire. Bag End was the original name for Tolkien’s aunt Jane Neave’s Dormston Manor Farm, just a few miles from the author’s childhood home in the hamlet of Sarehole in what was then rural Worcestershire. The manor’s origins stretch back to Anglo-Saxon times, and it undoubtedly fired Tolkien’s imagination in his construction of the fictional world of Middle-earth. However, it was perhaps more than just his childhood memories that Tolkien drew on in his creation of Bag End. “I came from the end of a bag, but no bag went over me,” riddles Bilbo Baggins of Bag End in his contest of wits with the Dragon of Erebor. Just like the Hobbit, his creator was fascinated with puns, word games, and riddles, and by literary sleights of hand. Furthermore, there are elements of social satire in the name of Bag End. As the eminent Tolkien scholar Tom Shipley has observed, Bag End is a literal translation of the French cul de sac, a term employed by snobbish British real estate agents in the early twentieth century who felt the English term “dead-end road” was just too vulgar. Naturally, Tolkien’s very English Baggins family would have no truck with this kind of Frenchified silliness, and so decided upon this suitably authentic local English name of Bag End. As a rule, Tolkien despised the pretensions and snobbery that looked down on all things English. He preferred plain English in language, food, and culture. Calling the Hobbit home of Bilbo Baggins “Bag End” is the epitome of everything that is honest, plain, and thoroughly English. Through the Hobbits of Bag End, Tolkien both extols and gently parodies the Englishman’s love of simple home comforts, seen as both delightful and absurd. Overall, the only thing that seems surprising is that he didn’t write a parody aphorism along the lines of “The Hobbit’s hole is his castle.”
BAGGINS The family name of Tolkien’s principal Hobbit heroes in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It derives from a double source—the English Somerset surname Bagg, meaning “money-bag” or “wealthy,” and the term “baggins,” meaning “afternoon tea or snack between meals”—and is certainly appropriate for a prosperous and well-fed Hobbit.
Initially, the “original Hobbit,” Bilbo Baggins, is presented as a mildly comic, home-loving, rustic, middle-class “gentle-Hobbit.” He seems harmless and placid enough, if given to a little irritability, and full of gossip, homespun wisdom, wordy euphemisms, and elaborate family histories. He is largely concerned with domestic comforts, village fetes, dinner parties, flower gardens, vegetable gardens, and grain harvests. However, once recruited by Thorin and his Dwarf Company, the respectable Bilbo Baggins is revealed—much to his own astonishment—to be a highly skilled master burglar.
Tolkien always maintained that his tales were often inspired by names and words, and indeed, in the jargon of the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century criminal underworld there is a cluster of terms around “bag” and “baggage” that link up with one or other of the various highly specialized forms of larceny. Three are especially noteworthy: “to bag” means to capture, to acquire, or to steal; a “baggage man” is the outlaw who carries off the loot or booty; and a “bagman” is the man who collects and distributes money on behalf of others by dishonest means or for dishonest purposes.
It appears, then, that the name Baggins not only helped to create the character of Tolkien’s Hobbit hero, but also went a long way toward plotting the adventure his hero embarks on. For, in The Hobbit, we discover a Baggins who is hired by Dwarves to bag the Dragon’s treasure. He then becomes a baggage man who carries off the loot. However, after the death of the Dragon and because of a dispute after the Battle of Five Armies, the Baggins Hobbit becomes the bagman who collects the whole treasure together and distributes it among the victors.
Along with the Baggins name, further “baggage” is passed on to Bilbo’s heir, Frodo Baggins. In the context of the One Ring, there is a link between the name Baggins and another specialized underworld occupation: the bagger or bag thief. This bagger or bag thief has nothing to do with baggage, but was derived from the French bague, meaning “ring.” A bagger, then, is a thief who specializes in stealing rings by seizing a victim’s hand and stripping it of its rings. It appears to have been in common usage in Britain’s criminal underworld between about 1890 and 1940.
Consequently, one might speculate that from the beginning the Baggins name contained the seeds of the plot of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. For one step beyond Bilbo’s skill as a burglar, one might also conclude that—from the perspective of the Ring Lord (or indeed Gollum)—the Baggins baggers of Bag End, Bilbo and his heir, Frodo, are also natural-born Ring thieves.
BALCHOTH A barbarian horde of Easterlings from Rhovanion which, in 2510 TA, invade Gondor and engage with the Gondorian forces in the critical Battle of the Field of Celebrant. The tide of battle turns against the Balchoth when, unexpectedly, the cavalry of the Éothéod (ancestors of the Horsemen of Rohan) join forces with the Men of Gondor.
This has an historic precedent in the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields in AD 451 when the Roman army formed an alliance with the Visigoths (West Goths) and Lombard cavalry and defeated the barbarian horde of Attila the Hun. This is considered one of the most critical battles in the history of Europe as it turned back what seemed an unstoppable wave of Asiatic conquest of the West. In Middle-earth, in the wake of the Battle of the Field of Celebrant, the Balchoth confederacies rapidly disintegrated, as did the Hunnish confederacies after the Battle of Catalaunian Fields.
BALOR OF THE EVIL EYE King of a race of deformed Irish giants known as the Formorians. Balor’s name derives from the Celtic Baleros, meaning “the deadly one” suggestive of a spirit or god of drought and plague. He was also known as Balor Béimnech, meaning “Balor the Smiter,” and Balor Birugderc, meaning “Balor of the Piercing Eye.”
One of Balor’s eyes was normal, but the other was an evil eye that was so deadly that he opened it only when he was called into battle whereupon its searing glance would wreak terrible destruction on the opposing army. There are obvious affinities with the Eye of Sauron here, which is variously described as the “Evil Eye,” the “Red Eye,” the “Lidless Eye,” and the “Great Eye.” Unlike Balor’s Eye, however, it does not serve as a kind of supernatural artillery but has a psychic power and will that could overwhelm and conquer the minds and souls of servants and foes alike. As related in The Silmarillion, “the Eye of Sauron the Terrible few could endure.” Certainly, Christopher Tolkien concluded that, in the War of the Ring, his “father had come to identify the Eye of Barad-dûr with the mind and will of Sauron.”
Balchoth. One of the many great Easterling peoples who harry and assail Gondor during the Third Age.
In all cultures, eyes are believed to have special powers and are said to be windows of the soul. So Tolkien’s description of the evil Eye of Sauron gives us considerable insight into the Dark Lord himself: “The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat’s, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing.”
BALROGS OF ANGBAND Known as the Valaraukar or “Cruel Demons” in Quenya, these mighty Maiar fire spirits are among the most terrifying of Morgoth’s servants in the War of the Jewels. More commonly known to the Sindar of Beleriand as Balrogs, or “Demons of Might,” they take the form of man-shaped giants shrouded in darkness, with manes of fire, eyes that glow like burning coals, and nostrils that breathe flame. Balrogs wield many-thonged whips of fire in battle, in combination with a mace, ax, or flaming sword.
Visually, the Balrogs, while male, are comparable to the demonic Erinyes (Furies) of Greek mythology, female chthonic deities and avenging spirits—called Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera—who emerged from the pits of the Underworld to pursue those guilty of crime. Furies were variously described as having snakes for hair, coal-black bodies, bats’ wings, and blood-red eyes. They attacked their victims with blazing torches and many-thonged brass-studded whips. There can be little doubt, however, that Tolkien’s primary source for the Balrogs was the fire giants of Muspelheim, the mythical Norse “region of fire.” The giant inhabitants of Muspelheim were demonic fire spirits who—once released—were as unstoppable as the volcanic lava floes that were so familiar to the Norsemen of Iceland.
There is also a link with Tolkien’s Anglo-Saxon studies. Since Joan Turville-Petre’s publication of Tolkien’s notes on the Old English poem Exodus, several scholars have linked this text with his invention of the Balrogs. In these notes, Tolkien took issue with the usual modern translation of the Exodus’s “Sigelwara land” as the land of the Ethiopians. Tolkien believed that Sigelwara was a scribal error for sigel-hearwa, the land of “sun-soot,” and was instead a reference to Muspelheim. The Sigelwara therefore were the fire giants—in Tolkien’s own words, “rather the sons of Músspel … than of Ham [the biblical ancestor of the Ethiopians], the ancestors of the Silhearwan with red-hot eyes that emitted sparks, with faces as black as soot.”
Tolkien changed his concept of Balrogs over time, the fire demons becoming fewer, larger, and more powerful. Through multiple drafts, Balrogs dwindled from “a host” of hundreds or even thousands, down to “at most seven,” as noted by Tolkien in a curious marginal note. Whatever their number, by the end of the First Age, Tolkien informs us, the Balrogs were entirely destroyed in the War of Wrath “save a few that fled and hid themselves in caverns inaccessible at the roots of the earth.”
BALROG OF MORIA A nameless terror known only as “Durin Bane.” For over a thousand years of the Third Age, the menace of the Balrog keeps the Dwarves from their ancient kingdom of Khazaddûm, named during that time Moria (“black pit”). It is not until Gandalf’s encounter with the creature during the Quest of the Ring that its identity is revealed as one of the Balrogs, the monstrous Maiar fire spirits inspired by the fire giants of Muspelheim in Norse mythology. This particular Balrog is a survivor of the War of Wrath in the First Age, having hidden itself for millennia deep beneath the Misty Mountains. It is only by chance, or perhaps fate, that it is awakened by the deep-delving Dwarves of Khazad-dûm.
The monster’s tenure in Moria ends with the fateful Battle on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm. This battle between Gandalf the Wizard and the Balrog of Moria actually has a very specific precedent in the Norse mythological battle between the god Freyr and the fire giant Surt on the last day of Ragnarök. Both battles begin with a blast of a battle horn. In Tolkien’s tale, Boromir blows the Horn of Gondor, while in the Norse myth the god Heimdall blows the Gjallarhorn, the horn of Asgard. Like the Balrog of Moria who fights Gandalf on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm, Surt, the Lord of Muspelheim, fought Freyr, the god of the sun and rain, on the Rainbow Bridge that links Middle-earth to Asgard. Tolkien’s Bridge of Khazad-dûm and the Norse Rainbow Bridge both collapse in the conflict and the combatants in both battles topple into the abyss below. Surt and Freyr are entirely destroyed in this battle, while the Balrog and Wizard continue their struggle until the Balrog is slain, though at the cost of Gandalf’s bodily form as the Grey Wizard.
BARD THE BOWMAN In The Hobbit, the slayer of Smaug the Dragon of Mount Erebor, liberator of the Men of Esgaroth and first king of the new kingdom of Dale. Bard is an archetypal dragon-slayer in the tradition of the Greek god Apollo, patron of archers, who slew the great serpent Python, which lived beside a spring at Delphi and terrorized the people of the locality. Just as Bard the Bowman slays Smaug with his bow and arrow, so Apollo the Archer arrow slew Python and liberated the people of Delphi, enabling the god to take possession of its oracle.
See also: DELPHI
BARROW-DOWNS Low hills in Eriador crowned with megaliths, tumuli, and long barrows that are the ancient burial grounds of Men dating back to the First Age of Middle-earth. In the Third Age they become the Great Barrows of the kings of Arnor but in the wake of Arnor’s destruction, they are invaded and haunted by evil spirits.
Tolkien took his inspiration for the Barrow-downs from Britain’s monumental Neolithic earthworks and later Anglo-Saxon barrow graves, which in later times often became the focus of folktales and legends. The Neolithic long barrows and Bronze Age round barrows of Normanton Down, on a ridge just south of Stonehenge in Wiltshire, southwestern England, is one possible real-world source for Tolkien’s Barrow-downs. Another candidate is an impressive Neolithic site just 20 miles from Oxford, locally known as Wayland’s Smithy. Tolkien had visited the site in outings with his family and knew well the many myths relating to Wayland the Smith (the Old Norse Völundr), a Germanic figure who was inspirational in the creation of the Elven Telchar the Smith. Both were master sword smiths who forged weapons with charmed blades like those discovered by the Hobbits in the Barrow-downs.
In 1939, at about the time Tolkien was writing the opening chapters of The Lord of the Rings, archeologists made an extraordinary discovery in Suffolk of three Anglo-Saxon long barrow graves at a site called Sutton Hoo. Covering about 16 acres, the site had been occupied for more than three and a half millennia before becoming an Anglo-Saxon burial site. The excavation also revealed the richest treasure trove of Anglo-Saxon artifacts ever found. The discoveries at Sutton Hoo were as revelatory of the Anglo-Saxon world as the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb was of the ancient Egyptian world.
While Tolkien makes no mention of Sutton Hoo in his letters, it is hard to resist the idea that the Hobbits’ imprisonment by a Barrow-wight in one of the barrows and their discovery of ancient swords were in part inspired by the great discoveries at Sutton Hoo.
See also: BARROW-WIGHTS
Barrow-wights. The wraiths and spirits who haunt the graves and tombs of the dead are a fixture of many cultures.
BARROW-WIGHTS Evil undead spirits that animate the bones of entombed Men in the Barrow-downs of Eriador. Early in The Lord of the Rings, one of the Barrow-wights briefly imprisons Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin in a barrow until Tom Bombadil frees them.
The Barrow-wights are not an original Tolkien creation since they already had a long history, especially in the sagas of the Norsemen. These Norse tales tell of encounters similar to those experienced by the Hobbits in which evil spirits with terrifying luminous eyes and hypnotic voices hold unwary travelers captive. Having paralyzed a victim with its skeletal grip, the wight performed rituals around the body before finally dispatching him using a sword, as a kind of bloody sacrifice.
A belief in haunted tombs and the cursed treasures of the dead is among the oldest of superstitions and also one of the most widespread. Truly bloodcurdling curses (meant as a deterrent to grave robbers) have been discovered written on the walls of Egyptian tombs. Other examples can be found in ancient cultures as different and mutually remote as China and Mexico. The Anglo-Saxons, too, had similar beliefs: after all, it is the disturbance of a barrow grave that leads directly to the death of Beowulf, the greatest hero in Anglo-Saxon literature. It was just Beowulf’s bad luck that the guardian of this particular barrow happened to be a fire-breathing dragon.
BATS
See: VAMPIRES
BATTLES Tolkien’s tales of Middle-earth abound in battles—from skirmishes and frays to cataclysmic conflicts of end-of-days proportions—and many have parallels with historic real-world battles as well as with those found in mythology and literature. The Battle of Dagorlad is comparable, in the utter destruction it wreaks and its massive body count, to the Battle of the Somme that Tolkien witnessed in 1916 during World War I. The Battle of the Field of Celebrant (between the invading Balchoth and the Men of Gondor and the Éothéod) has similarities to the Battle of Catalaunian Fields in which the Romans and the Visigoth cavalry allied against the Huns of Attila in AD 451. The Great Battle in the War of Wrath at the end of the First Age was, as Tolkien acknowledged, primarily inspired by the Norse myth of the final battle-to-be, known as Ragnarök. The Battle of Pelennor Fields, in The Lord of the Rings, is certainly the most spectacular and richly observed of all Tolkien’s battles and consequently has multiple parallels in, and allusions to, history, myth, and literature.
See also: CATALAUNIAN FIELDS; DAGORLAD; PELENNOR FIELDS
Battlefield. The carnage of the battlefield haunted Tolkien’s imagination.
BELEGAER The “Great Sea” that separates the mortal lands of Middle-earth from the immortal lands of Aman. This Western Sea was essentially inspired by the Atlantic Ocean, though as it was known or imagined in the mythology and legends of the ancient Greeks and Celts. The drowned island of Atlantis, the paradisical Fortunate Isles, inhabited by the Greek heroes after their deaths, and the Irish phantom-island of Hy-Brasil were all considered to lie somewhere in the Atlantic. All were inspirations for the islands of Númenor and Tol Eressëa.
BELERIAND In the First Age, a region in the northwest of Middle-earth that was home to several Elven kingdoms and cities, including Doriath, Gondolin, and Nargothrond. Toward the end of the First Age, during the War of Wrath, Belariand is largely destroyed and lost beneath the waves.
In Tolkien’s earliest drafts of The Silmarillion, his original name for Beleriand was Broceliand, obviously inspired by Brocéliande, the magical forest in Brittany, which features in many Arthurian tales. Tolkien’s conception of Beleriand—and especially the forested region of Doriath—owes a great deal to Brocéliande, which was closely associated with enchantments and perilous quests.
As a drowned land, Beleriand has parallels with the Welsh Cantref y Gwaelod in Cardigan Bay or the Cornish Lyonesse in the waters about the Isles of Scilly, two of the many “lost and drowned kingdoms” that abound in the Celtic legends of Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany.
BEORN Eponymous chieftain of the Beornings who can take the form of a bear. In human guise, he is a huge, black-bearded man garbed in a coarse wool tunic and armed with a woodsman’s ax.
Beorn’s appearance in latter half of the The Hobbit establishes the fact that we are now firmly in the heroic world of the Anglo-Saxons, for he appears to be something approaching a twin brother of the epic hero Beowulf. With his pride in his strength, his code of honor, his terrible wrath, and his hospitality, Beorn is Beowulf transposed and brought down in scale. Even his home seems a smaller version of Heorot, the mead hall of King Hrothgar in the Anglo-Saxon epic poem.
Indeed, Tolkien gives his character a name that, while it sounds and looks a little different from Beowulf’s, ends up having much the same meaning, via one of the author’s typically convoluted philological puns. Beorn’s name means “man” in Old English. However, in its Norse form, it means “bear.” Meanwhile, if we look at the Old English name Beowulf, we discover that it literally means “bee-wolf.” What, we may wonder, is a bee-wolf? This is typical of the sort of riddle-names that the Anglo-Saxons liked to construct. “What wolf hunts bees—and steals their honey?” The answer is obvious enough: “bee-wolf” is a kenning for a bear: Beowulf and Beorn, then, both mean “bear.” Beorn, moreover, is a keeper of bees and a lover of honey. One might say that Beowulf and Beorn are the same man with different names. Or, in their symbolic guise as bee-wolf and bear, they are the same animal in different skins.
Furthermore, Beorn is a “skin-changer,” whose people are the likewise shape-shifting Beornings (the “man-bear” people)—Tolkien’s fairy-tale version of the historic berserkers (from bear-sark, or “bear-shirt”) of the Germanic and Norse peoples. When the berserkers went into battle, they performed rituals and acts of wild frenzy in an attempt to transform into the bears that they believed possessed them. Likewise, in the Battle of Five Armies, Beorn transforms from fierce warrior to enraged Were-bear, a miraculous event that turns the tide of this critical battle.
BEOWULF The most famous epic poem of the Anglo-Saxons, composed as early as the eighth century AD and surviving in manuscript form until the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries. It was a touchstone for Tolkien’s writing both as an academic scholar and as a creative author. Tolkien acknowledged that the circumstances of Bilbo’s first encounter with the Dragon of Erebor were—at least subconsciously—inspired by a passage in Beowulf. In a letter to the English newspaper the Observer in 1938, Tolkien wrote: “Beowulf is among my most valued sources; though it was not consciously present to the mind in the process of writing, in which the episode of the theft arose naturally (and almost inevitably) from the circumstances.” While the two tales are not overtly similar, there are strong plot parallels between the dragon episode in Beowulf and the slaying of Smaug in The Hobbit. Beowulf’s dragon wakes when a thief finds his way into the creature’s cave and steals a jeweled cup from the treasure hoard. This scenario is duplicated when Bilbo finds his way into Smaug the Dragon’s cavern and steals a jeweled cup from the treasure hoard. Both thieves avoid immediate detection of their crime and the danger of the dragons themselves. However, nearby human settlements in the tales suffer terribly from the dragons’ wrath. Beyond this specific narrative parallel in The Hobbit, the influence of Beowulf is evident throughout Tolkien’s Middle-earth, in its landscapes, peoples, cultures, and languages, as well as in his use of language itself—the high epic tone of especially the last two books of The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s love of richly alliterative language and kennings.
See also: BEORN; DRAGONS; GOLLUM; ROHIRRIM
Beorn. One of the many characters for which Tolkien took his inspiration from Anglo-Saxon literature.
BEOWULF: THE MONSTERS AND THE CRITICS Tolkien’s most important and influential analysis of Anglo-Saxon literature, published in 1936. It was the first work by an Anglo-Saxon scholar to look at Beowulf’s literary value rather than its historic or linguistic aspects. Tolkien focused on the strong storytelling found in the epic and foregrounded the roles of Grendel and the Dragon, in which “the evil spirits took visible shape.” Even earlier than this study, between 1920 and 1926, Tolkien wrote his own rough translation of the epic, entitled Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary together with a Sellic Spell. This was posthumously edited by his son Christopher Tolkien, and published in 2017. Tolkien’s emphasis on the narrative power of Beowulf undoubtedly influenced his own storytelling craft.
BEREN One of the greatest heroes of the First Age of Middle-earth, and the character whose story (along with that of Beren’s beloved, Lúthien) was most meaningful to Tolkien himself. So great was the author’s identification with the hero that he had the names Lúthien and Beren included beneath his wife Edith’s and his own on their shared gravestone in Wolvercote Cemetery in Oxford.
Beren Erchamion and Lúthien Tinúviel are the central protagonists in the Quest for the Silmaril, the story of a mortal man’s quest for the hand of an immortal Elf-maid. As in many myths, legends, and fairy tales, the hero must prove his worthiness by achieving an impossible task, often set by the heroine’s father, who believes that the hero will die in the attempt. Here it is King Thingol who sets Beren the task of retrieving a Silmaril, set into the crown of Morhoth, who dwells in the evil fortress of Angband. To Thingol’s horror, Lúthien sets out on the quest alongside her beloved Beren.
As Tolkien freely acknowledged, the subsequent development of the tale was closely patterned on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, only with the male and female roles reversed. In the myth, the musician Orpheus attempts to bring Eurydice back from the dead. Making his descent into the underworld, Orpheus plays his harp and sings to make the three-headed hound Cerberus, who guards the gates of hell, fall asleep. Brought before Hades, king of the underworld, Orpheus again plays and sings so beautifully that the god is moved to grant him the life of Eurydice, on condition that he does not look back at her as they make their way back into the land of the living. At the last moment, at the mouth of the tunnel, Orpheus cannot resist looking back at his beloved and she is taken from him and returned to Hades forever.
In Tolkien, it is Lúthien who, when the lovers reach the gates of the underworld-like fortress of Angband, lulls its unsleeping guardian, the gigantic wolf Carcharoth. It is she, too, who lulls Morgoth—the king of this underworld—to sleep (rather than moving him), enabling Beren to prize one of the Silmarils from Morgoth’s crown. Like Orpheus and Eurydice, Tolkien’s lovers fail at the last hurdle when Carcharoth wakes before the lovers can make their escape. At this point in the narrative, Tolkien departs from the Greek tale and introduces an allusion to the Norse legend of Fenrir, the Great Wolf of Midgard, who bites off the hand of the god Tyr when the gods bind him. Carcharoth, too, bites off Beren’s hand and swallows both the hand and the Silmaril he is holding. It is from this episode that Beren gains the epithet Erchamion, meaning “One Handed.”
To underscore the connection between the Greek myth and his tale, Tolkien duplicates the descent into the underworld motif by having Lúthien pursue Beren’s soul after his death. This time, in the House of the Dead in the Undying Lands, Lúthien exactly repeats Orpheus’ journey by singing to Mandos, the Doomsman of the Valar (a figure comparable to the Greek Hades), and winning from him a second life for her lover. Unlike Orpheus and Eurydice, however, Lúthien and Beren are allowed to live out their newly won mortal lives quietly. Thus, in the Quest for the Silmaril, Tolkien not only reversed the roles of Orpheus and Eurydice, but also overturned that story’s tragic end. In so doing, for a time at least, Tolkien allowed love to conquer death.
BERSERKERS The frenzied bear-cult warriors found in Icelandic, Norse, and Germanic cultures whose name derives from bear-sark, meaning “bear-shirt.” The berserkers inspired Tolkien’s depiction of the Were-bear Beorn in The Hobbit.
In their “holy battle rage,” the historical berserkers felt themselves to be possessed by the spirits of enraged bears. As Odin’s holy warriors, wearing only bearskins, they sometimes charged into battle unarmed, but in such a rage that they tore the enemy limb from limb with their bare hands and teeth. Such states, however, were essentially in imitation of what was the core miracle of the bear cult: the incarnate transformation of man into bear. Once again, Tolkien uses a name to inspire his imagination. Beorn’s name in Norse means “bear,” and in The Hobbit we soon discover that Beorn is a “skin-changer” with the power of transformation from man to beast and beast to man. It is a supernatural power that eventually makes Beorn a critical factor in the outcome of the Battle of the Five Armies.
BIFROST (THE RAINBOW BRIDGE) In Norse mythology the bridge that links Asgard, the immortal world of the gods, to Midgard, the mortal world of human. In the great final battle of Ragnarök, it is there that Surt, the fire giant of Muspelheim, takes up his sword of flame and duels with Freyr, the god of sun and rain. The battle seems to be the inspiration for the Battle on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm between Gandalf the Grey and the Balrog of Moria in The Lord of the Rings.
See also: BALROG OF MORIA
BILBO BAGGINS The first and original Hobbit created by Tolkien, the comic antihero of the eponymous The Hobbit who goes off on a journey into a heroic world. It is a world where the commonplace collides with the heroic, where the corresponding values clash to entertaining effect. In Bilbo Baggins, we have a character with whose everyday sensibilities the reader may identify, while vicariously having an adventure in a heroic world.
As Tolkien often observed, “names often generate a story”; they also nearly always contributed and suggested something of the nature or character of the person, place, or thing named. (We look at the influence of the character’s family name in the entry “Baggins.”) Another aspect of Bilbo Baggins’s character may be revealed by an analysis of his first name. The word “bilbo” entered into the English language in the late sixteenth century as the name for a short but deadly piercing sword of the kind once made in the northern Spanish port-city of Bilbao, from whence the name.
This is an excellent description of Bilbo’s sword, the charmed Elf knife called Sting. Found in a Troll hoard, Bilbo’s “Bilbo” can pierce through armor or animal hide that would break any other sword. In The Hobbit, however, it is our hero’s sharp wit rather than his sharp sword that gives Bilbo the edge. In his bids to escape Orcs, Elves, Gollum, or the Dragon, Bilbo’s well-honed wits allow him to solve riddles, trick villains, and generally get himself out of sticky situations.
When we put the two names together as Bilbo Baggins, we have two aspects of our hero’s character and to some degree the character of Hobbits in general. On the face of it, the name Baggins suggests a harmless, well-to-do, contented character (though with criminal undertones!), while the name Bilbo suggests an individual who is sharp, intelligent, and even a little dangerous.
BLACK GATE Morannon (“Black Gate” in Sindarin Elvish) is the great fortified iron gate in the stone rampart that bars the way into Mordor at the pass of Cirith Gorgor. There is a possible inspiration for the Morannon in the legendary Gates of Alexander, built by Alexander the Great in the Caucasus to keep out the barbarians of the north. However, the Morannon, which keeps out the civilized forces of Gondor and its allies, inverts this idea.
The Black Gate is the site of the terrible battle that closes the War of the Ring and sees the final overthrow of Sauron the Ring Lord and all his minions. In medieval German romance, this battle has a precedent in the famous battle between Dietrich von Bern and the forces of Janibas the Necromancer, who shares characteristics with both Sauron the Necromancer and the Witch-king of Angmar. Janibas appears in the form of a phantom Black Rider but commands massive armies of giants, evil men, monsters, and demons by the power of a sorcerer’s black tablet. This is comparable to the power and fate of Sauron’s One Ring in the Battle of the Black Gate. The ultimate contest comes when Janibas’s forces are about to overwhelm those of Dietrich’s at the gates to the mountain kingdom of Jeruspunt. In that moment the Black Tablet (like the One Ring) is destroyed and the mountains split and shatter and come thundering down in massive avalanches that bury the whole evil host of giants, demons, and undead phantoms forever.
BLACK NÚMENÓREANS Descendants of the King’s Men—supporters of Ar-Pharazôn, last king of the lost island-continent of Númenor—and sworn enemies of the Númenórean Men of Gondor and Arnor. After their settlement in the Númenórean colonies of Middle-earth, the Black Númenóreans—long corrupted by Sauron—continued to worship Morgoth and to flourish even after the downfall of Númenor. Their main center of power was the city, port, fortress, and empire of Umbar.
The portrayal of the Black Númenóreans of Umbar has clear similarities with the Punic inhabitants of the city, port, fortress, and empire of Carthage in North Africa. The Carthaginians had a rich, sophisticated culture, but their image in posterity has been largely formed by accounts written by their main rivals for dominance in the western Mediterranean, the Romans, who eventually destroyed Carthage in 146 BC. For the Romans, the Carthaginians were the barbarian “other,” whose practices —the worship of demonic gods and, most notoriously, the institution of child sacrifice—contrasted with and validated their own civilized values.
Black Númenórean
Similarly, in Tolkien’s works we typically see the Black Númenóreans through the eyes of the civilized Gondorians: they are lawless, being little better than pirates; they are worshippers of the Lord of the Dark, Morgoth/Melkor (whose name recalls that of Moloch, who is often identified with the Carthaginian chief god Baal Hammon); and they practice human sacrifice to Morgoth using fire, just as the Carthaginians were said to have burned children alive as an offering to Baal.
BLACK RIDERS Name given to the Nazgûl when Sauron sends them out on horseback to track down the Ring and its keeper, “Baggins.” They are the first truly evil entities to appear in The Lord of the Rings, in the green and pleasant Hobbit land of the Shire. The identity of these cloaked and hooded horsemen is not immediately revealed, but eventually they are proved to be the Ringwraiths. It is only later, through the eyes of the Ring-bearer Frodo Baggins, that the reader is given a glance of the Nazgûl as they appear to the Necromancer and those who inhabit the wraith-world. After slipping the One Ring on his finger, the Hobbit is suddenly able to see in the phantom shapes of the Ringwraiths their terrible white faces, gray hair, long gray robes, and “helms of silver.”
In some ways, the Black Riders are not unlike the phantom horsemen in the English poet John Keats’s ballad “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (1819): a ghostly host of men seduced and enslaved by the “beautiful lady without mercy” of the title, and described as “Pale kings and princes, too, / Pale warriors, death-pale were they all.” The “palely loitering” kings and sorcerers who make up the Nazgûl have been similarly seduced, though not by the charms of a beautiful enchantress, but by Sauron and their overweening desire for power and a near-eternal life.
See also: HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE
BLACK SAILS At a critical moment during the Battle of Pelennor Fields in the siege of Gondor, black sails appear upon the Anduin River. It is an episode that mirrors the climax of the ancient myth of the Greek hero Theseus. In the Greek tale, the hero is revealed as the heir to the throne of Athens. His father, King Atreus, welcomes him back despite prophecies of regicide and patricide. When Theseus discovers that Athens must pay an annual tribute to the Minoans of seven youths and seven maidens as sacrificial victims, he decides to end this bloody payment. Theseus sets out in a black-sailed tribute ship to Crete where, along with 13 other young Athenians, he is to be sacrificed to the monstrous Minotaur in the palace of King Minos. With the help of Ariadne, the Minoan princess, he is able to slay the Minotaur, save his companions, and flee Crete.
On leaving Athens, Theseus promised his father that if he slays the Minotaur and releases his people from bondage, he would change the sails to white for his return voyage as a signal of victory. In the rush of his triumph, however, Theseus forgets his promise. Tragically, his father, the old king, sees the tribute ship returning with its great black sail still set. Believing his son Theseus to be dead, and his nation still enslaved, the old king throws himself from the high lookout prow of the Acropolis onto the rocks far below.
In The Lord of the Rings, Denethor, the Ruling Steward of Gondor, sees a mighty fleet of the black-sailed ships of the Corsairs of Umbar sailing up the Anduin River at a critical moment in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. Believing that his son Faramir is dying of a poison wound, and that all his forces upon the battlefield are being overwhelmed and slaughtered, the Steward assumes that the black-sailed ships, and the reinforcements they carry, would make the defense of Gondor impossible. Mad with despair, Denethor commits suicide. However, like Theseus’ father, the Steward of Gondor is tragically mistaken.
In reality, Aragorn has been victorious: he has captured the black-sailed ships of the Corsairs, using them to transport fighting men from the coastal fiefs of Gondor and bring them to the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. It proves to be a decisive blow and turning point in the battle and the war. Just as Athens is freed from the threat of the tyrant Minos and Theseus succeeds his father as king, so Gondor is freed from the threat of the Witch-king, and Aragorn is restored as king.
Black Riders. The imagery of the Black Riders draws on popular representations of the figure of Death in Christian Europe.
BOROMIR Son and heir of Denethor II, Ruling Steward of Gondor. As a member of the Fellowship of the Ring, he survives many perils until the party reaches the foot of Amon Hen near the Rauros Falls. There, his desire to seize the One Ring from Frodo Baggins overcomes him. Although Boromir immediately repents, his actions result in the breaking and scattering of the Fellowship. Boromir sets off to look for Merry and Pippin and finds them surrounded by Orcs. He rescues them, but soon after an even bigger party of Orcs ambushes them. He fights valiantly to save them, but dies overwhelmed by the arrows of his enemies.
Tolkien’s account of Boromir’s heroic death is redolent of La Chanson de Roland. This, the best known of the medieval chansons de geste (songs of heroic deeds), is about Charlemagne’s most famous paladin, Roland, who makes his heroic last stand in the Roncevaux Pass in the Pyrenees while under attack from the Saracens. Ambushed and vastly outnumbered, Roland fights valiantly on until his sword breaks, and he is overwhelmed by the infidel hordes. As he dies, Roland blows his olifant (ivory hunting horn) to warn Charlemagne of the proximity of his foes. As Charlemagne hastens toward the pass, the Saracens flee, but the king is too late to save his liegeman.
Roland’s last stand is comparable to that of Boromir, Gondor’s greatest warrior, on the cliff pass above the Ramos Falls. Ambushed by a troop of Orcs and heavily armed Uruks, Boromir blows the Great Horn of Gondor. Aragorn, like Charlemagne, rushes to the site of the battle. The Dúnadan is too late to help Boromir, but is able to hear him utter a few last words of confession and to offer him hope and consolation. What marks out both scenes is a sense of ultimate victory despite the defeat of death.
“BRAVE LITTLE TAILOR, THE” A German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, but found in many versions. The story tells of how a poor young man, alone and armed only with his wits, is able to overcome all obstacles and slay powerful but slow-witted giants or trolls. In The Hobbit the three Trolls encountered by Bilbo Baggins and Thorin and Company are very like the Grimm Brothers’ trolls. Although immensely stupid by human and hobbit standards, these Trolls—Bert, Tom, and William Huggins—are capable of understanding and speaking Westron (though they have very poor grammar!). This makes them geniuses among the Trolls of Middle-earth, and almost smart enough to put an end to the Hobbit’s adventure. In the Grimm version of the tale, the Tailor hides from sight and throws a stone at each of the dim-witted trolls, who then accuse one another of the deed. This results in a fight that ends with the death of all the trolls. This scenario is largely repeated in The Hobbit. Here, however, it is the Wizard Gandalf who throws the stones that keep the Trolls quarreling until the Sun rises and they are turned to stone. As an aside, Tolkien as narrator adds: “Trolls, as you probably know, must be underground before dawn.” Here he is alluding to a folk belief likely dating back long before the twelfth century when it was first recorded in the Icelandic poem “Alvíssmál” in the Poetic Edda. In The Hobbit, it is through this particular episode that Gandalf provides Bilbo Baggins with his first lesson in using his wits to outsmart larger and more powerful foes. As is typical in such fairy tales, the reward is a treasure hoard and the acquisition of weapons that prove essential in the adventures ahead. In this instance, there are three Elven blades: one lethal sword each for Gandalf and Thorin, and one dagger that serves well enough as a Hobbit’s sword.
BRÍSINGAMEN A jeweled necklace or torc in Norse legend whose theft results in an endless war between two kings. The name is sometimes translated as the “shining necklace” or “the necklace of the Brisings [dwarfs].” In The Hobbit, the Elven-king of the Woodland Realm alludes to the theft of the Nauglamír, or “Necklace of the Dwarves,” that resulted in a 6,000-year feud between the Grey Elves of Doriath and the Dwarves of Belegost. Little more about the necklace’s history was known until the publication of The Silmarillion. There the king of Doriath, Thingol, commissions the Dwarves to reforge the necklace (originally a gift from the Dwarves to Finrod Felagund but which has passed into the king’s hands via Húrin) and set within it one of the three Silmarils. The Dwarves treacherously murder Thingol and take the necklace for themselves. This terrible deed eventually results in the destruction of all the Elf and Dwarf kingdoms of Beleriand in the First Age. The Norse legend as retold in a fourteenth-century Christian version by Jon Thordson and Magnus Throhalson was similarly disastrous and far more scandalous. Freya, the goddess of love and war, offered to pay for the “priceless” Brísingamen by bedding each of its four dwarf owners: Alfrigg, Dvalin, Berling, and Grerr. Loki, the god of mischief, steals the necklace and eventually it comes into the possession of Freya’s spouse, Odin, the bloodthirsty god of battles. The price of the necklace’s return was for Freya to establish a constant state of war between two kings whose armies would battle from dawn until dusk, and then the next day those slain would rise up and slaughter one another again. Both Brísingamen and Nauglamir are imitative of the far more ancient and well-known legend of the Necklace of Harmonia in Greek mythology. This is the tale of a beautiful and magical jeweled necklace forged by the crippled Hephaestus, the smith of the gods, as an act of vengeance against his wife, Aphrodite, the goddess of love, for her adulterous affair with Ares, the god of war. The result of their affair was Harmonia who married Cadmus to become queen of Thebes. At the wedding feast Hephaestus gifted this jeweled necklace to the young queen. Like Tolkien’s Nauglamir and Brísingamen, the Greek necklace magically enhanced the beauty of any who wore it, but also like those other necklaces, it carried a terrible curse. And just as Tolkien and the Norse necklaces brought death and disaster, so the cursed necklace foredoomed Harmonia, and visited tragedy upon the royal House of Thebes (and indeed upon their descendants), until its ultimate destruction in a murderous and all-consuming fire.
BROCÉLIANDE A forest in Brittany that is the setting for a number of Celtic and Arthurian legends. In Tolkien’s earliest drafts of The Silmarillion, the original name for the region of Beleriand—the setting of his tales of the First Age—is Brocéliand. Located in the northwest of Middle-earth and home to the Sindar (the Grey Elves), Beleriand is ruled for many ages by King Thingol and his queen, Melian the Maia. At the heart of Thingol’s kingdom are the enchanted forests of Doriath and its citadel, Menegroth, the “Thousand Caves.” While there are clear similarities between the two forest realms, there are important differences, too. The chief, perhaps, is that while Doriath is a place of safety, protected by the “Girdle of Melian,” Brocéliande is somewhat less benign in nature. The most famous story of Brocéliande is that of the enchantress Vivien, the Lady of the Lake, who comes upon the wizard Merlin asleep beneath a thorn tree. There the enchantress imprisons the magician in a “tower of air” from which he can never emerge. There is a superficial resemblance here with Thingol’s first meeting with Melian in the woods of Nan Elmoth and her subsequent enchantment of his realm, but in Tolkien’s tale the motive is love.
BROWNIES Originally a dialect name for rural household spirits in Scotland and northern England that became a common term in the folklore of farmers and farm laborers throughout Britain by the nineteenth century. These sprites were a diminutive, hairy, elusive race, and mostly friendly toward humans.
There are many characteristics common to brownies and Hobbits: both are about three feet tall with curly brown hair and brownish skin and are dressed largely in brown and earthy colors that blend in to the landscape. Both races are usually shy and secretive, capable of vanishing quickly and quietly from sight. Both are usually benevolent and helpful to humans, although occasionally of a humorous and mischievous disposition. There even appear to be different breeds of both races that prefer different types of landscape.
However, Tolkien’s Hobbits are more strongly linked in other ways to the later invaders of Britain, the Anglo-Saxons, and their descendants, the English. What Tolkien gives us in his tea-drinking, pipe-smoking, middle-class, home-and-garden-oriented Hobbits is a distinctively Victorian English transmutation of the rough and anything-but-middle-class Brownies. In 1865, Juliana Horatio Ewing, the popular children’s author much admired by Rudyard Kipling and Edith Nesbit, published her novel The Brownies. It was a story about helpful sprites that inspired Lord Baden-Powell—creator of the Boy Scouts—to adopt the name for this youngest level (ages 7 to 10) of girls in the Girl Guide movement.
BRYNHILD In the late thirteenth-century Icelandic Völsunga Saga, a Valkyrie (or battle maiden) who defies Odin and is subsequently pierced with a sleep-thorn and imprisoned in a ring of fire as punishment. She is awakened by Sigurd the Dragon-slayer, with whom she falls in love. In the medieval German epic Nibelungenlied, she becomes Brunhild (“armored warrior maid”), the warrior-queen of Iceland, who falls for the Sigurd’s medieval German equivalent, Siegfried. Brynhild/Brunhild is in some respects the model for Tolkien’s heroic character Éowyn, the shield maiden of Rohan who, with the aid of the Hobbit Meriadoc Brandybuck, slays the Witch-king in the Battle of Pelennor Fields. However, in the stories told about her, Brynhild/Brunhild always retains something dark and elemental. Éowyn, by contrast, is shown as resolutely good. Just as there are elements of Brynhild/Brunhild to be found in Éowyn, so there are comparisons to be drawn between Sigurd/Siegfried and Aragorn. It is Brynhild/Brunhild’s hopeless love for Sigurd/Siegfried that Tolkien draws on for Éowyn’s own unrequited feelings for Aragorn. Siegfried is betrothed to another queen, Kriemheld, in the same way that Aragorn is betrothed to Arwen Evenstar. And just as the warrior queen Brunhild puts her martial life behind her as the wife of King Gunnar, so too is Éowyn, the shield maiden, pacified through her marriage to Faramir, the Steward of Gondor.
BURGLARS In the everyday world, society shuns burglars, but in the world of fairy tale, the burglar is a hero whose skill, wit, and bravery are celebrated and whose deeds result in the enrichment of himself, his family, and/or people. This is typical of many fairy-tale plots, such as “Jack and the Beanstalk,” and of many myths where the hero travels to another realm and steals treasure, magical weapons, or even the secret of making fire. Bilbo the Burglar is more or less how Gandalf introduces Bilbo Baggins to the Dwarves of Thorin and Company at the beginning of Quest of Lonely Mountain. On the surface, this seemed an unlikely role, but there is always something different and contrary in Bilbo’s nature. He is a typical Hobbit full of practical common sense, but is also sharp-witted and very un-Hobbitish in his curiosity about the wider world. He has been chosen, Tolkien explains, as the “lucky number fourteen” to avoid the unlucky number of the thirteen adventurers who make up Thorin and Company. Nevertheless, most obviously, Bilbo has been chosen for the job of master burglar for his stealth, as Hobbits possess a natural ability to move quietly and unnoticed by larger folk.
As usual, too, there is some wordplay behind the choice. Bilbo Baggins is a burgher who becomes a burglar. Tom Shipley in his Road to Middle-earth (1982) explores this idea in the chapter “The Bourgeois Burglar.” A burgher, he observes, was a freeman of a burgh or borough (or, in this case, a burrow), which certainly applies to Bilbo Baggins. Even more, its derivative, bourgeois, describes a person with humdrum middle-class ideas. The Germanic root word Burg means “mound, fort, stockaded house.” A burger is one who owns a house. A burglar is one who plunders a house. So, we have the everyday humdrum middle-class burgher entering a fairy-tale world and being transformed into his opposite—a burglar!
BYZANTINE EMPIRE Name given to the Eastern Roman Empire, which had its capital at Constantinople. Founded on the site of the Greek colony of Byzantium by Emperor Constantine I as the “New Rome” in AD 330, it survived the sacking of Rome in AD 476 and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire by almost a thousand years. In some respects, its history is comparable to the fictional history of Middle-earth’s South-kingdom of Gondor with its capital first at Osgiliath and later Minas Anor (Minas Tirith). Gondor survived the destruction of the last remnant of the North-kingdom, Arthedain, in 1974 TA by a thousand years (at the time of the War of the Ring). On the other hand, while Gondor certainly has its own dark periods—notably the Kin-strife—the Byzantine Empire is notorious for its bloody and convoluted history of brutal palace murders, revolts, and all-out civil war.
CC
Celebrimbor Forges the Three Rings for Elves
CAMLANN The site of the last battle of the Arthurian age according to Welsh tradition as recorded by the twelfth-century cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth in his pseudo-historical Historia regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain; c. 1136). Such end-of-times battles fulfill a requirement common to epic poetry and romance whereby a golden age of heroes and heroines ends in cataclysm. In many respects, Camlann provided the template for the end of Tolkien’s Second Age in the last battle of the Last Alliance of Elves and Men where Gil-galad, the High King of the Noldor, takes part in a mutually fatal duel with Sauron, the Dark Lord of Mordor. This final alliance of warrior Elves and Men cannot fail to remind us of the alliance of the Knights of the Round Table in the Battle of Camlann, where a similar fatal duel is fought between Arthur, the high king of the Britons, and Mordred, the lord of an evil alliance of barbarian Picts, Scots, and Saxons.
CARCHAROTH (“RED MAW”) The greatest Wolf to appear in Middle-earth. Sired by Draugluin, the Father of Werewolves, and reared on living flesh by the hand of Morgoth, Carcharoth is the unsleeping guardian at the gates of the subterranean kingdom of Angband. Carcharoth is comparable to guardians of the gates in other mythological underworlds, such as the Norse Garm, the gigantic hound guardian of Helheim, and the Greek Cerberus, the monstrous three-headed hound that was the unsleeping guardian at the gates of Hades.
As Tolkien acknowledged, he patterned his Quest for the Silmaril on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, only with the roles of the lovers reversed. In Tolkien’s quest, it is the Elf-maid Lúthien who enchants Carcharoth in order to enter Angband’s underworld, while in the Greek tale it is the male musician Orpheus who enchants Cerberus in order to enter Hades. However, like the lovers Orpheus and Eurydice, Beren and Lúthien fail at the last hurdle to escape the underworld unscathed.
By the power of Lúthien’s enchantment, the lovers seize the Silmaril, but tragically Carcharoth wakes before the lovers can make their escape. Then, as in the Norse legend of Fenrir, the Father of Wolves that bites off the hand of the god Tyr, Carcharoth bites off Beren’s hand and swallows both the hand and the Silmaril in its grip. Only after a great hunt does Carcharoth finally meet his fate in the jaws of Huan, the Wolf Hound of the Valar, and the Silmaril is recovered.
CARTHAGE An ancient city on the coast of North Africa, close to present-day Tunis, and capital of the mighty Punic Empire. From the third century BC, it was Rome’s great rival in the contest over control of the Mediterranean. Carthage’s mighty war fleets were the terror of the seas, and its powerful allies and mercenary armies—supported by war-elephants—were a terror over all the coastal lands. This is exactly comparable to Gondor’s great rival, Umbar, in Near Harad, in a contest over control of the vast Bay of Belfalas. Just as Umbar was originally a colony of the mighty sea power of Númenor for a thousand years, so Carthage was believed to be a colony of the mighty sea power of Phoenicia for a thousand years. In the wake of the destruction of the island nation of Númenor, Umbar became an independent and powerful maritime rival to Gondor. This has a parallel in the rise of Carthage as an independent and powerful maritime rival to Rome in the wake of the destruction of the Phoenician island city-state of Tyre. In the Third Age, after centuries of rivalry, the Ship Kings of Gondor engaged in the century-long wars (933–1050 TA) on sea and land that resulted in the eventual conquest and subjugation of Umbar and its Southron Empire. Historically, this is similar to the Rome’s century-long Punic Wars (256–146 BC) on sea and land, which resulted in the eventual conquest and subjugation of Carthage and its North African Empire. The Black Númenórean rulers of Umbar were slain or scattered, and the city and port served as Gondor’s southern fortress controlling its vast Haradrim territories. It was a fate comparable to that suffered by the Carthaginians who were slain or sold into slavery, and by Carthage, which subsequently served as Rome’s southern fortress controlling its vast North African territories. Tolkien’s chronologies inform us that, after five centuries, Umbar slipped from Gondor’s grasp. In 1448 TA Gondor rebelled and lords among the Haradrim captured Umbar. These new lords became known as the Corsairs of Umbar and their mighty pirate fleets once again became a terror of the seas that harassed and attacked Gondor and its allies. Similarly, we learn that after seven centuries, Carthage slipped from Rome’s grasp. In AD 439, the Vandals (who had been former allies of Rome) rebelled and captured Carthage. With the native Berbers, they ruled North Africa and the Mediterranean, and with their mighty pirate fleets became a terror of the seas that harassed and attacked Rome and its allies.
Carcharoth. Guardian of Angband.
The Corsairs’ fleets were ultimately destroyed by Aragorn II (the future King Elessar of Gondor) in his quest to win control of the seas and reunite the North and South Kingdoms of Gondor and Arnor. Suffering a similar fate, the historic Vandal fleets of Carthage were ultimately destroyed by the Eastern Roman emperor, Justinian the Great (ruled AD 527–65), in his quest to win control of the seas and reunite the Eastern and Western Empires of Rome.
CASTOR AND POLYDEUCES In Greek mythology, twin half-brothers and sons of the mortal woman Leda. Known as the Dioscuri (“Divine Twins”), Castor was the mortal son of Tyndareus, king of Sparta, while Polydeuces (or Pollux to the Romans) was the immortal son of Zeus, king of the gods. When Castor was slain in battle, Polydeuces suffered such terrible grief that Zeus took pity on him and transformed and reunited the brothers as the stellar constellation Gemini, the Heavenly Twins. In Tolkien’s world, Castor and Polydeuces have their counterparts in the twin brothers Elros and Elrond, though both are the sons of a mortal man, Eärendil the Mariner, and an immortal Elven maid, Elwing the White. Because of their mixed blood, each is allowed to choose their race and fate: the mortal world of Men or the immortal world of Elves. Elrond chooses to be immortal and eventually becomes the Elf Lord of Imladris on Middle-earth, while his brother, Elros, chooses to be mortal (although he is granted a lifespan of five centuries) and becomes the founding king of the Númenóreans. While Tolkien’s twins are not reunited and placed among the stars, there is a star connection in the figure of the twin’s father, Eärendil the Mariner. In The Silmarillion, we learn that Eärendil binds the shining Silmaril to his brow and forever rides his flying ship Vigilot through the firmament, where in the form of the Morning Star (the brightest “star”—the planet Venus) he guides all sailors and travelers.
See also: PEREDHIL
CATALAUNIAN FIELDS The site in present-day northeastern France of the one of the most critical battles in the history of Europe. In the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields in AD 451, the Roman army formed an alliance with the Visigoths and Lombard cavalry to defeat the barbarian horde of Attila the Hun (reigned AD 434–53). This victory was credited with turning back what was considered to be an unstoppable wave of Asiatic conquest of Europe. This historic battle is comparable to Tolkien’s critical Battle of the Field of Celebrant in 2050 TA when Gondor’s army engaged in battle with an invading Easterling barbarian horde known as the Balchoth. Only the unexpected appearance of the Éothéod cavalry (forebears of the Horsemen of Rohan) turned the tide of battle in the Gondorians’ favor. In the wake of the Battle of the Field of Celebrant, the Easterling and Balchoth confederacies rapidly disintegrated, much as the Hunnish confederacies did after the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields. The Huns’ defeat at the Catalaunian Fields, combined with the sudden and unexpected death of Attila, resulted in a chaotic dispute over succession that brought about the collapse and dissolution of the Hunnic Empire. The sixth-century AD historian Jordanes, in his Roma—one of Tolkien’s primary sources on Rome and the Goths—describes how the allies of the Hunnic Confederacy self-destructed at the Battle of Nedao in AD 454: “And so the bravest nations tore themselves to pieces. For then, I think, must have occurred a most remarkable spectacle, where one might see the Goths fighting with pikes, the Gepidae raging with the sword, the Rugi breaking off the spears in their own wounds, the Suavi fighting on foot, the Huns with bows, the Alani drawing up a battle-line of heavy-armed and the Heruli of light-armed warriors.” It is easy to see how such vivid historic records might have inspired Tolkien in his own accounts of Easterling wars.
CELEBRIMBOR (“SILVER-FIST”) A Noldor prince, the son of Curufin and grandson of Fëanor, the creator of the Silmarils. In the Second Age he becomes the Lord of the Gwaith-i-Mírdain, the Elven-smiths of Eregion, who under the influence of Annatar (Sauron the Ring Lord in disguise) forge the Rings of Power. Celebrimbor mistrusts Annatar and creates the Three Rings of the Elves, which remain uncorrupted by Sauron’s influence. The history and fate of Elves and Men in the Second and Third Ages are in large part determined by the struggle over the possession of the Rings of Power forged in Eregion and—above all—of the One Ring that is secretly forged by Sauron in the fires of Mount Doom. The Rings of Power and especially the One Ring are comparable to the ring of the Norse god Odin, known as Draupnir, meaning “the dripper.” This was a golden ring that had the power to drip eight other rings of equal size every nine days. Its possession by Odin was emblematic of his dominion over the Nine Worlds. This scenario seems to be fairly suggestive of Celebrimbor’s “Nine Rings of Mortal Men” that Sauron used to buy the allegiance of the Men of Middle-earth and ultimately entrap their souls. Sauron was less successful with the Seven Rings of the Dwarves, and failed altogether to gain influence over the Three Rings of the Elves. However, the rings resulted in the disastrous War of the Elves and Sauron (1693–1701 SA) that ended with the slaying of Celebrimbor and the destruction of Eregion.
CELTIC MYTHOLOGY One of the most important sources of inspiration in Tolkien’s creation of his Elves of Middle-earth and the Undying Lands. In general terms, it is quite easy to see how Tolkien largely aligned the traditions of the older Celtic peoples of the British Isles with his Elves, while the invading Romans, Anglo-Saxons, and Norse have the characteristics of his Men. The two most storied kindreds in Tolkien’s legendarium—the Sindar (Grey Elves) and the Noldor (Deep Elves)—are inspired by the mythologies of Wales and Ireland, respectively.
When we learn that the most important source of Welsh Celtic lore was preserved in the fourteenth-century Red Book of Hergest, we realize that Tolkien was making a small scholarly joke when he named his own source of Elf-lore the Red Book of Westmarch. The Red Book of Hergest is a manuscript that includes the most important compendium of Welsh legends, The Mabinogion (compiled in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries). That collection contains many stories of magic rings. In Owain, or the Lady of the Fountain Luned, the Lady of the Fountain gives a ring of invisibility to the hero Owain; in Geraint and Enid, Dame Lyonesse gives the hero Gareth a magic ring that will not allow him to be wounded, and in Peredur, Son of Efrawg, Peredur goes on a quest for a gold ring during which he slays the Black Serpent of the Barrows and wins a stone of invisibility and a gold-making stone.
It is important to understand that, before Tolkien, the term “elf” was very loose, most often associated with pixies, flower-fairies, gnomes, dwarfs, and goblins and considered to be of diminutive and inconsequential nature. Tolkien’s Elves are not a race of pixies. They are a powerful, full-blooded people who closely resemble the pre-human Irish race of immortals called the Tuatha Dé Danann. Like the Tuatha Dé Danann, Tolkien’s Elves are taller and stronger than mortals, are incapable of suffering sickness, are possessed of more than human beauty, and are filled with greater wisdom in all things. They possess talismans, jewels, and weapons that humans might consider magical in their powers. They ride supernatural horses and understand the languages of animals. They love song, poetry, and music, all of which they compose and perform perfectly.
See also: ARAWN; DADGA, THE; OLWYN; TUATHA DÉ DANANN; WHITE LADIES
CERBERUS The monstrous three-headed hound of hell in Greek mythology, the (usually) unsleeping guardian at the gates of the underground realm of Hades, god of the dead. In Middle-earth, Tolkien provides a comparable monster in Carcharoth, meaning “red maw,” a (usually) unsleeping guardian wolf at the gates of the Angband, the underworld realm of Morgoth the Dark Enemy. Considered the greatest of his race, Carcharoth is comparable to other hellhounds found in mythology, such as the Norse Garm.
CERES The Roman goddess of agriculture. It is from her association with grain crops that we derive the word “cereal.” In ancient times, the Roman cult of the goddess was associated with that of Demeter, the Greek goddess of the harvest. In the Norse pantheon she is comparable with Sif of the Golden Hair, another harvest goddess. In Tolkien’s world she is closest to Yavanna Kementári, who is the conceiver and guardian of all things that grow, including the grains of the harvest. The Vala’s name Yavanna means “giver of fruits,” and her epithet Kementari literally translates as “queen of the Earth.” In mythology Ceres/Demeter is known as the mother of Proserpine/Persephone, a goddess associated with the spring and flowers. Yavanna, meanwhile, has a younger sister named Vána the Ever-Young, at whose passing flowers blossom about her feet.
Yavanna Kementári. The protector of all living things in Arda, the Vala is especially associated with trees.
CHARLEMAGNE (AD 742–814) The warrior king of the Franks who became the first Holy Roman Emperor (reigned AD 800–814). Tolkien often pointed out the parallel between his hero Aragorn and the historic Charlemagne and their tasks of reconstructing lost or ruined empires (the Reunited Kingdom of the Dúnedain and the Roman Empire, respectively). Both Aragorn and Charlemagne fought many battles that resulted in the expulsion of invaders and the formation of military and civil alliances that brought about eras of peace and prosperity. Once their foes were defeated, both Aragorn and Charlemagne quickly reestablished the ancient common laws, rebuilt the ancient roads, and reestablished trade routes and postal systems. Both inspired a golden age of culture, art, and literature.
Geographically, Tolkien saw in the Reunited Kingdom an expanse of lands akin to the expanse of Charlemagne’s Empire and roughly equivalent to the European landmass. Indeed, in a letter Tolkien remarked: “The progress of the tale ends in what is … like the reestablishment of an effective Holy Roman Empire with its seat in Rome.” Charlemagne was crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor while Aragorn, under the name Elessar Telcondar, is crowned high king of the Reunited Kingdom of Arnor and Gondor.
Furthermore, both Charlemagne and Aragorn were credited with a charismatic power to heal and command. It is noteworthy that Aragorn is able to add authenticity to his claim as the true heir to the Dúnedain Kingdom by virtue of the “healing hands,” and is marked apart by his Elvish knowledge of the healing properties of plants and herbs. After the Siege of Gondor, Aragorn uses the herb athelas to bring Éowyn, shield maiden of Rohan, and others back from the deathlike trance induced by the poisonous Black Breath of the Witch-king. In Carolingian legends, Charlemagne was reputed to have been able to cure those struck down by the plague, the “Black Death,” by using the plant known as sow thistle. In both cases, these plants worked their magical cures only if administered by the healing hands of the king. This is acknowledged in the folklore of Middle-earth, where the common name for athelas is “kingsfoil.”
See also: ATHELAS
CHEDDAR GORGE A limestone gorge in the Mendip Hills in Somerset, southwestern England, famous for its intricate, spectacular caves. Tolkien acknowledged that the gorge and cave complex was the real-world inspiration for Helm’s Deep in Rohan, together with the Glittering Caves of Aglarond where Gimli founds a new Dwarf colony after the end of the War of the Ring.
See also: AGLAROND; HELM’S DEEP
CLOTHO In Greek mythology, one of the Morae, or Fates (the others being Lachesis and Atropos). To the Romans, Clotho was Nona the Spinner and one of the Parcae (the others being Decima and Morta), while to the Norsemen she was Urd, one of the Norns (the others being Verdandi and Skuld). All three sisters were conceived as the weavers of human destiny or fate. In Tolkien’s world, Clotho has a counterpart in the Valarian, Vairë the Weaver, who dwells in the Halls of Mandos and weaves the unfolding story of the world into the tapestries that hang upon its walls.
COOPER, JAMES FENIMORE (1789–1851) American writer of historical romances. Like many middle-class children who grew up in the Victorian and Edwardian age, Tolkien read Cooper’s novels with enthusiasm—stories about “Red Indians” were a childhood passion, he admitted. The inspiration of such novels as The Last of the Mohicans (1926) and The Pathfinder (1840), portraying adventurous journeys through the wilderness of America, have left their trace on Tolkien’s descriptions of the journeys of The Fellowship of the Ring through the wildernesses of Middle-earth, on foot and by boat. Cooper’s “romantic” hero in the Leatherstocking Tales, the scout Nathaniel Bumppo, has some similarities with the Aragorn in his rile as a Ranger of the North.
The Corsairs of Umbar. Pirates of the southern port-city of Umbar whose kings fell under the evil power of Sauron and made constant war on Gondor. Corsair ships had both oars and distinctive black sails.
CORSAIRS OF UMBAR, THE People of the port-city of Umbar, originally of Númenórean but increasingly of Haradrim blood, who use their naval power to ravage the coasts of Gondor through much of the Third Age right up until the time of the War of the Ring. The Corsairs (a term used to describe pirates and privateers in European history) are comparable with the ancient Carthaginians who were famous for their innovative seafaring skills and who used their domination of the Mediterranean to harry the Roman Empire.
CRACK OF DOOM A phrase or expression that long before Tolkien’s time had become something of a cliché. It first appears in literature in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth (1605), in the scene (Act IV, scene i) where Macbeth is shown prophetic visions of the murdered Banquo’s royal descendants by the witches: “What, will the line stretch out to th’ crack of doom?” The word “doom” itself comes from the Old English dom meaning “judgment,” and in origin the crack of doom is a biblical allusion to the sound that heralds the Last Judgment when God will weigh up the fates of all souls.
Tolkien took some delight in rehabilitating worn-out words and phrases, giving them new life, and reawakening the power innate within them. Consequently, Tolkien makes the “Cracks of Doom” into an actual place within Mount Doom, the massive volcanic mountain in Mordor that serves as Sauron the Ring Lord’s smithy in the forging of the One Ring of Power. And, ultimately, it proves to be the place of final reckoning in the story of Middle-earth.
See also: MACBETH
DD
Durin the Deathless
DAGDA, THE In Irish mythology, the great king of the Tuatha Dé Danann, a race of immortals who crossed a western sea and settled in Ireland. The history of this people closely resembles that of the Noldor (Deep Elves), a race of immortals who cross the Western Sea (though in the contrary direction!) and settle in Middle-earth.
The Dagda’s personal history is also comparable to that of Fingolfin, the High King of the Noldor. In Ireland, the Dagda led his people to victory in the Second Battle of Magh Tuireadh against an army of Fomorians, a monstrous race of underworld demons. In Beleriand, Fingolfin leads his people to victory in the Dagor Aglare—the Glorious Battle—against an army of underworld demons known as Orcs, Trolls, and Balrogs. The Dagda’s victory over the Fomorian legions gave the Tuatha Dé Danann an age of relative peace during which the king’s sons and those of his chieftains established fiefdoms over much of Ireland. In like manner, Fingolfin’s victory over Morgoth’s legions gives the Noldor nearly four centuries of relative peace. During that time Fingolfin’s sons and those of his brothers, Fëanor and Finarfin, establish a dozen Noldor fiefdoms in northern Beleriand as a bulwark against their foes.
DAGOR DAGORATH
See: RAGNARÖK
DAGORLAD (“BATTLE PLAIN”) The site, on the vast open plain in southeastern Rhovanion, near Mordor, of the greatest battle of Tolkien’s Second Age wherein “All living things were divided in that day, and some of every kind, even of beasts and birds.” Tolkien’s Battle of Dagorlad (3434 SA) is the single greatest battle in the War of the Last Alliance, fought between the forces of Gil-galad and Elendil on the one hand and the Orc army of Sauron on the other. Perhaps more than any other battle in the history of Middle-earth the Battle of Dagorlad was informed by the author’s own experience in the First World War and, specifically, as a soldier in the disastrous, semi-suicidal Battle of the Somme (July 1 to November 18, 1916).
In that terrible conflict, Tolkien witnessed the near-total obliteration of the French landscape whose fields and woods were transformed into a blood-soaked wasteland littered with rotting corpses. It was a futile battle in which the armies fought for months, resulting in over a million casualties. There are powerful reminiscences of this in Tolkien’s Battle of Dagorlad, which sees the greatest assemblage of combatants since the War of Wrath in the First Age, and which results in over a million casualties. The area, through which Frodo and Samwise pass in The Lord of the Rings, subsequently becomes a contaminated bogland where, even many centuries later, the faces of the slain can still be seen in the vile waters.
DARK ELVES The Norse myths tell of the realms of the light elves and dark elves—Alfheim (“elf-home”) and Swartalfheim (“dark elf-home”)—although surviving Norse literature does not provide an explanation for this division. There is a similar division in Tolkien, between the Dark-Elves (Moriquendi) and the Light-Elves (Caliquendi). The writer, however, provided a (relatively) clear explanation for the categorization. The Caliquendi were those who were in favor of accepting the offer of the Valar to migrate to Valinor and the Moriquendi those who refused to embark on the Great Migration. Those who actually completed the journey were the Light-Elves, or Eldar; those who remained were the Dark-Elves, or Avari—meaning the “Unwilling.” The Dark-Elves were considered to be far lesser beings than the Light-Elves, and even sinister, in that they seemed prepared to tolerate the evil works of Morgoth.
DÉAGOL The Stoorish Hobbit who first discovers the lost One Ring of Sauron in the shallows of the Anduin River. Corrupted by his own desire to possess the Ring, Déagol’s cousin Sméagol murders him and becomes the cursed and exiled ghoul known as Gollum. This scenario recalls the biblical story of Cain and Abel (Genesis 4:11–16), where the firstborn of Adam and Eve murders his brother (seemingly out of jealousy) and is condemned to a life of exile and wandering.
Déagol’s name literally means “secret.” This is doubly appropriate as the cursed Sméagol (meaning “burrowing and worming in”) always insists on his legitimate ownership of the Ring, and his darkest secret is that he acquired it only by murdering his kinsman Déagol. Guilt and fear that someone might discover his secret and take the Ring away from him so terrifies the miserable Sméagol that he hides himself away by “burrowing and worming in” beneath the roots of the Misty Mountains.
DEMETER The Greek goddess of the harvest who has her counterpart in Tolkien’s Yavanna Kementári, queen of the Earth, who planted the first seeds of “all things that grow” on Arda.
See also: CERES; YAVANNA
DIETRICH VON BERN One of the greatest heroes of medieval German romance. The legends concerning him were loosely based on a real historical figure, Theodoric the Great (AD 454–526), king of the Ostrogoths and later the conqueror and king of Italy. In the fictional cycle of tales featuring Dietrich, his rise to power is not unlike that of Tolkien’s Aragorn. Indeed, the tale of the hero’s war with Janibas the Necromancer has striking parallels with Aragorn’s war with Sauron the Ring Lord and his servants the Ringwraiths. Dietrich’s foe, Janibas, shares traits with both Sauron and the Witch-king, leader of the Ringwraiths: he is depicted as a powerful wizard who reveals himself in the form of a phantom black rider on a phantom steed and commands massive armies of giants, evil men, monsters, demons, and hellhounds in a mountainous stronghold in the Alps. Janibas, moreover, commands his forces by means of a magical Iron Tablet, which has comparable powers to those of the One Ring. The eventual destruction of the Iron Tablet causes the glaciers of the mountain passes to split and shatter and come thundering down in massive avalanches that bury Janibas’s entire evil host forever. The sorcerer’s cataclysmic end is reminiscent of the fate of Sauron the Ring Lord and his legions at the Black Gate in the wake of the destruction of the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom.
DELPHI In ancient Greece, one of the most important sanctuaries of the god Apollo, situated on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. Its oracle was famous throughout the ancient classical world, consulted by kings and lords well into late antiquity. The name Delphi seems to come from the same root as the Greek word delphys, meaning “womb” or “cleft” in Greek. Beneath the Sanctuary of Apollo was a cleft or fissure in the sacred mountain from which rose vapors that induced a prophetic trance in Apollo’s priestess and oracle, the Pythia.
In some respects, Middle-earth’s Rivendell is comparable with Delphi, which shares its mountainous location as well as its associations with wisdom. There may even be references to Delphi’s name. Rivendell’s Westron name, Karningul, meaning “cleft valley,” is repeated in its Sindarin name Imladris, which means “deep cleft dale” because it is in a hidden rock cleft at the foot of a pass to the Misty Mountains. This is an Elvish allusion to Calacirya (“cleft of light”), a mountain pass in Aman through which the Light of the Trees of Valinor lit Eldamar. Light, we should remember, was closely associated with Apollo.
Both Imladris and Delphi were “sanctuaries” that were consulted before any great adventure or campaign of war. Rivendell not only houses a vast library of Elvish lore, but is the home of the immortal Elrond Half-elven, who is something of an oracle as a living witness to some six thousand years of history. There is a more explicit analogy, too. In The Lord of the Rings the Ringwraiths attempt an attack on Rivendell, but are repelled when the Bruinen River rises in a mighty flood that sweeps the demonic horsemen away. This is comparable to a historical attack made on the sacred sanctuary of Delphi during the Persian Wars (499–449 BC). Just as the Ford of Bruinen is protected by the power of Elrond’s Ring, Delphi was thought to be under the protection of Apollo.
As recorded by the Herodotus in Book 8 of The Histories, the Persian King Xerxes, upon invading Greece in 480 BC, sent a division of his army to march on the unfortified sanctuary of Delphi. As they drew near, however, “thunderbolts fell on them from the sky, and two pinnacles of rock torn from Parnassus, came crashing and rumbling down among them, killing a large number” and causing the Persians to flee. This attempted violation of the sacred sanctuary of Delphi was followed by a series of astonishing defeats in battle, and an end to war for Xerxes that was nearly as disastrous as the end of the War of the Ring is for Sauron.
Orcs. The evil underling race and soldiers of Morgoth and Sauron. They are a stunted, black-skinned, yellow-fanged, and crimson-eyed race of cannibal warriors whose only skills lie in murder and war.
DEMONS In numerous myths and tales from around the world demons have much in common with Tolkien’s Orcs as hideous, vicious underlings programmed to do the bidding of evil masters. The numerous demons mentioned in the Old Testament, like the Orcs, preferred to live in isolated, unclean places such as deserts and ruins and were greatly feared, especially at night. Like Orcs, demons were prone to acts of violence, mayhem, rage, gluttony, and greed. However, biblical demons are unlike Orcs in that they were most often invisible and were considered the unseen cause of physical ailments, plagues, and mental illnesses.
See also: BALROGS OF ANGBAND; DAGDA, THE; FURIES
DIANA In Roman mythology, a goddess associated with wild animals and woodlands. Groves, meadows, and deer were especially sacred to this goddess, whose personality and worship later became closely aligned with that of the Greek goddess Artemis. In Tolkien’s legendarium, Diana/Artemis most closely resembles the Vala Nessa the Swift, who was also associated with deer and dancing, though there are important differences.
See also: ARTEMIS; NESSA
DIOSCURI,THE
See: CASTOR AND POLYDEUCES
DORIATH A forest realm in Beleriand, which becomes known as the “Hidden Realm” after the Maia Melian, wife of King Thingol, casts a girdle of enchantment about it to protect the Sindar (Grey Elves) from the ravages of the War of the Jewels. Doriath means “Fenced Land,” in reference to the “Girdle of Melian,” a spell that prevents all from entering save those given leave by Thingol.
In Tolkien’s earliest drafts of The Silmarillion, his original name for Beleriand was Broceliand, a name clearly derived from the legendary forest of Brocéliande in Brittany that often features in medieval Arthurian romances. Tolkien’s Beleriand—and most specifically the enchanted forest of Doriath—was to a considerable degree modeled on Brocéliande: a vast forest with magical fountains, glittering grottoes, and hidden palaces, and the haunt of powerful enchantresses such as Vivien or Nimue, the Lady of the Lake, and King Arthur’s sister, Morgan le Faye.
The enchantments of Brocéliande, however, were somewhat less benign in nature than those of Doriath. Brocéliande was a place of temptations and entrapment for many of Arthur’s knights and, most famously, even for the great wizard Merlin, who is ensnared and imprisoned there by Vivien. By contrast, the enchantments of Doriath are entirely defensive in nature and succeed in keeping the Grey Elves of the “Hidden Kingdom” safe. In Doriath and Menegroth, its city, there is peace and the Sindar prosper while much of Beleriand suffers destruction.
Ultimately, Doriath does not survive into the Second Age. Menegroth is sacked and King Thingol is treacherously murdered by the Dwarves of Belegost over a dispute about the possession of a Silmaril. Melian abandons the kingdom, and, without the protection of her enchantment, Doriath is no longer protected against invasion by Orcs, Balrogs, and Dragons. Total ruin ultimately comes in the wake of the War of Wrath when almost all of Beleriand is broken apart and swallowed up by the Western Sea. Like the Welsh Cantref y Gwaelod in Cardigan Bay or the Cornish Lyonesse near the Isles of Scilly, Doriath and Beleriand may be numbered among those “lost and drowned kingdoms” that abound in the legends of the Celtic fringes of the British Isles.
DRAGONS Winged, lizardlike, and often fire-breathing beasts found in myths and legends around the world. As the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges once explained, dragons are a great mystery: “We are as ignorant of the meaning of the dragon as we are of the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the dragon’s image that appeals to the human imagination, and so we find the dragon in quite distant places and times. It is, so to speak, a necessary monster.” There is no doubt that Tolkien would have agreed with Borges. Indeed, the appeal of this “necessary monster” was embedded so early and deep in Tolkien’s mind that, by the age of seven, “a green great dragon” appeared in his very first original fictional composition. In his landmark lecture and essay “On Fairy-Stories” (lecture 1939; published 1947), Tolkien proudly proclaims this childhood obsession: “I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish to have them in the neighbourhood … but the world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir [a dragon in Norse mythology] was richer and more beautiful, at whatever the cost of peril.”
That childhood obsession eventually inspired his creation of Glaurung, the Father of Dragons, and Ancalagon the Black in The Silmarillion and Smaug the Golden in The Hobbit, who terrorize the inhabitants of Middle-earth during, respectively, the First and Third Ages. Glaurung was certainly directly inspired by Fáfnir the Dragon slain by Sigurd, the hero of the Völsunga Saga. Ancalagon owes his origin in part to the Norse poem Völuspá’s account of Ragnarök where a flying dragon, glowing serpent known as Nithog (meaning “malice striker”), appears in that final battle.
Dragons. The most terrible monsters of Middle-earth. Some slithered like snakes, others walked on clawed feet, and still others fly with lizard wings. Some fight with tooth and claw—the greatest breathed flames.
After the near-obliteration of the Dragons of Middle-earth at the end of the First Age in the last Great Battle of the War of Wrath, it is not until the twentieth century of the Third Age that the histories of Middle-earth speak again of dragons. These monsters are akin to the dragons found in the Middle High German heroic epics of Wolfdietrich and Ortnit. Like the dragons of the mountains of Lombardy who appear in these thirteenth-century tales, the monsters who make their presence known in the Grey Mountains of Middle-earth in the Third Age are Cold-drakes: a somewhat less formidable breed of dragon than either the Fire-drakes or the Winged Fire-drakes of the First Age. The mightiest of the Cold-drakes of the Grey Mountains is Scatha the Worm, who slaughters Dwarves and Men and takes possession of a great treasure hoard until he is slain by Fram, the fifth Lord of the Éothéod, in c. 2000 TA.
Tolkien was one who searched for “dragons, real dragons, essential both to the machinery and the ideas of a poem or tale.” He found it in his last Dragon tale of Middle-earth, The Hobbit, which features one of his most beguiling creations, Smaug the Golden Dragon of Erebor. For his tale, Tolkien took his inspiration from a fatal encounter with a dragon in the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. In that Old English poem, a thief enters the dragon’s lair and steals a gold cup. In Tolkien’s tale, the thief is the titular Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins. And, in both tales, the theft of a gold cup awakens a sleeping dragon, who then emerges from his lair to lay waste to a nearby kingdom. The Hobbit is essentially the Beowulf dragon story told from the thief’s point of view. In the creation of Smaug the Golden, however, we see the perfect fairy-tale dragon: a villain of great charm, intelligence, and fatal vanity; a flying, fire-breathing beast whose terrible wrath and vengeance somehow still wins our admiration. And so it is that, betrayed by his own vanity, Smaug the Smug is outwitted by a humble Hobbit—and then ultimately slain by the courageous Bard the Bowman.
DRAUGLUIN The Father of Werewolves—sire of all those “creatures that walk in wolf-shape” upon Middle-earth. His name in Sindarin means “Blue Wolf,” in reference to the color of his coat. Draugluin was bred by Morgoth or else was a corrupted Maia. He haunts the dungeons within the fortress of Tol-in-Gaurhoth (“Isle of Werewolves”) in Beleriand and plays a key role in the Quest for the Silmaril, where he is slain by Huan, the Hound of the Valar.
As a “hellhound” guardian, Draugluin shares many similarities with Carcharoth, whom he sires, and hence with other hellhounds such as Cerberus in Greek mythology and Garm in Norse mythology. As a demonic spirit, his creation may owe something to the darker aspects of both Odin and Zeus, who were both associated with wolves and werewolves.
DRAUPNIR In Norse mythology, the great gold ring of Odin, the king of the gods and ruler of the Nine Worlds. Draupnir means “the dripper”: this magical golden ring had the power to drip eight new rings of equal size every nine days. Its possession by Odin was not only emblematic of his dominion of the Nine Worlds but also consolidated his power by giving him a source of almost infinite wealth. This scenario seems to be fairly suggestive of Tolkien’s “Nine Rings of Mortal Men” that Sauron uses to buy the allegiance of the Men of Middle-earth and ultimately to entrap their souls. In Tolkien’s tale, all the skill of Celebrimbor, the greatest Elven-smith of Middle-earth, goes into the forging of the Rings of Power. Likewise, it takes all the knowledge and skill of Sauron the Dark Lord—who as a Maia learned his craft from the Vala Aulë the Smith—to forge the One Ring that strives to command all the others. In Norse myth, it was by means of all the knowledge and skill of Sindri and Brok—the greatest smiths (usually considered dwarfs) in the Norse Nine Worlds—to forge Draupnir, the ring of the king of the gods.
DRÚEDAIN
See: WOSES
DULLAHAN In Irish legend, the “Dark Man” is a terrifying demonic, headless horseman. Like Tolkien’s Witch-king of Angmar, the Dullahan is one variation in a tradition of archetypal phantom horsemen who personify death. By some accounts, each time the Dullahan halts his ride, a death occurs. In other versions, as the Dullahan horseman passes, he calls out a name and whoever is named is seized by death. It is the Dullahan who is perhaps addressed in the great Irish poet W. B. Yeats’s famous gravestone epitaph: “Cast a cold eye / On life, on death, / Horseman, pass by!” In Tolkien, the Witch-king appears before the gates of Gondor as the archetypal “Black Rider.” Defiantly, he flings back his hood to reveal “a kingly crown; yet upon no head visible was it set.” And to Gandalf this headless horseman declares: “This is my hour. Do you not know Death when you see it?”
See also: ARAWN; WILD HUNT
DÚNEDAIN (“MEN OF THE WEST”) The Númenóreans in exile who survive the downfall of their Atlantis-like island-continent of Númenor and found the South-and North-kingdoms of Gondor and Arnor in Middle-earth at the end of the Second Age. Tolkien’s tales at the end of the Second Age and throughout the three millennia of the Third Age are concerned primarily with the fate of these two kingdoms—only briefly united under High King Isildur—until their final (re)unification under Aragorn.
Tolkien’s account of the rise and fall of the Dúnedain kingdoms of Middle-earth owes much to his detailed knowledge of the history of the Roman Empire. Tolkien certainly encouraged this comparison. To begin with, he created a landmass for the Dúnedain kingdoms that was roughly equivalent to that of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, Britain, and Ireland combined. Also, in an interview with a journalist in the 1950s, he spoke of the action of the story taking place “in the north-west of Middle-earth, equivalent in latitude to the coastlines of Europe and the north shore of the Mediterranean.”
Importantly, too, there are some broad similarities between the historical fate of the Roman Empire and the Dúnedain kingdoms. The division of the Roman Empire into Western and Eastern parts and its eventual resurrection in the form of the Holy Roman Empire mirror the fate of the Númenórean empire in Middle-earth. Thus, it is reasonably easy to equate the disastrous military history of Arnor and its collapse with the similarly disastrous military history and collapse of the Western Roman Empire. We may even equate the successor kingdoms of Arthedain, Cardolan, and Rhudaur with the early medieval kingdoms that rose out of the ruins of the empire. Meanwhile, the long-enduring South-kingdom of Gondor has certain similarities with the Byzantine Empire, as the Eastern Roman Empire came to be called.
By the end of the Third Age, after three millennia of conflict, Tolkien presents the reader with a remarkable Dúnedain hero, Aragorn—comparable to the historic Charlemagne—who is also the legitimate heir to the double crown of the Dúnedain kingdoms. In so doing, Tolkien implicitly draws an analogy to what he called “the re-establishment of an effective Holy Roman Empire.”
DURIN THE DEATHLESS The first king of the Longbeards, one of the seven kindreds of Dwarves. The Longbeards—with whom Tolkien’s histories of the Dwarves of Middle-earth are largely concerned—are more commonly known as Durin’s Folk in honor of their first king.
The name Durin (or Durinn) is first recorded in the Icelandic Prose Edda, in the Dvergatal, or “Dwarf’s Roll.” The name translates as “The Sleeper” or “Sleepy” and is the key to Tolkien’s inspiration in his creation story of the “Seven Fathers of the Dwarves,” otherwise known as the “Seven Sleepers.” In The Silmarillion the first Dwarves are shaped by Aulë the Smith but, on the command of Eru, are kept sleeping “under stone” until awakened when the dark skies are filled with starlight by Varda.
As the founder of the greatest Dwarf kingdom of Khazad-dûm in the Misty Mountains, King Durin I is known as “Durin the Deathless,” though only in part because he is very long-lived. Tolkien’s Dwarves have a messianic belief—not unlike real-world beliefs about spiritual leaders—that each king who carries the name Durin is actually a reincarnation of the original Father of the Longbeards. It is an article of faith among the Longbeards that this mysterious cycle spanning many ages will end only with the seventh and final incarnation, Durin VII, who will appear at some undisclosed time in Middle-earth’s future ages.
The Dwarves of Belegost. They alone in the Battle of Unnumbered Tears are able to withstand the blaze of dragon-fire because on their helms they wear flameproof masks of steel.
Despite wars and conflicts over the millennia, Durin’s Folk prospered well until the year 1980 of the Third Age of the Sun when the Dwarves of Khazad-dûm, by chance or fate, delved too deep in their mines and awoke a monstrous demon of fire. This is an ancient Maia fire spirit known as a Balrog or Valaraukar, meaning “demon of might.” The source of Tolkien’s inspiration for this monster is the Norse fire giant Surt who was the Lord of Muspelheim, the evil volcanic underworld domain of fire. In Middle-earth, this Balrog with his flaming sword and “scourges of fire” slew King Durin VI and drove Durin’s folk from Khazad-dûm.
This disaster marked the beginning of the diaspora of Durin’s Folk. Driven from their ancient kingdom—renamed Moria, meaning “Black Chasm”—the Longbeards were constantly on the move, exiles in search of a safe new realm. But in the Third Age the terrors that lurked in the scattered realms of Durin’s Folk also endanger the kingdoms of the Dúnedain. The Balrog in Moria, Orcs in the Misty Mountains, and Dragons in the Grey Mountains and Erebor not only threatened the Dwarves of Durin’s Folk, but all the Free Peoples of Middle-earth. And so, in the Dúnedain of Arnor and Gondor, Durin’s Dwarves became natural allies in the War of the Ring as recounted in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
DVERGATAL (OR THE “DWARF’S ROLL”) A list of the names of mythological dwarfs found in the Icelandic twelfth-century text known as the Prose Edda on which Tolkien drew for many of his Dwarvish names. All the Dwarves in The Hobbit appear in this list: Thorin, Dwalin, Balin, Kili, Fili, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Dori, Nori, Ori, Óin, and Glóin. Other names of dwarfs which Tolkien also found in the Dvergatal, and which he used later, include: Thráin, Thrór, Dáin, and Náin. The Dvergatal, however, was not only a fruitful source of names but also an inspiration for Tolkien in creating the characters and backgrounds of his Dwarves.
Dwarf Kingdom of Belegost. “Belegost” is Elvish for “mighty fortress.” In Khuzdul, the language of the Dwarves, it is called Gabligathol, or Mickleburg.
Not surprisingly, the name of the leader of the Tolkien’s Company of adventurers, Thorin, means “Bold.” However, Tolkien also gave him another dwarf-name from the Dvergatal: Eikinskjaldi, meaning “he of the Oakenshield.” This name provoked Tolkien into inventing a complex piece of background history in which, during a battle in the Goblin Wars, Thorin breaks his sword but fights on by picking up an oak bough, which he uses as both club and shield. Another story-inspiring name is that of Thorin’s father, Thráin, meaning “stubborn,” who is slain while stubbornly resisting Dragon invasions of his realm. Thorin’s only sister and, interestingly, the only named female dwarf in Tolkien’s works, is named Dis, which simply means “Sister.” Unlike most of the male Dwarves—whose names mean or reflect a personal attribute—Dis, the “Sister” is solely identified by her family position in relation to Thorin. Thorin’s heir, Dáin II, known as Ironfoot, proves true to his warrior name (“deadly”) when he and several hundred Dwarves come to Thorin’s aid in the Battle of Five Armies. The names of other members of the Thorin’s Company were instrumental in Tolkien’s shaping of their characters. Bombur, meaning “Bulging,” is certainly the fattest of the Dwarves, and Nori, meaning “Peewee,” is the smallest; Balin, meaning “Burning One,” is fiery in battle, but warm with his friends; Ori, meaning “Furious,” fights furiously before he is slain in Moria; and Glóin, meaning “Glowing One,” wins glory and riches. There seems little doubt, then, that the Dvergatal was a rich inspiration for Tolkien and the means by which he “discovered” the characters of his Dwarves.
Dwarves
FROM THE POETIC EDDA, VOLUME I, LAYS OF THE GODS, VOLUSPO
10. There was Motsognir | the mightiest made
Of all the dwarfs, | and Durin next;
Many a likeness | of men they made,
The dwarfs in the earth, | as Durin said.
11. Nyi and Nithi, | Northri and Suthri,
Austri and Vestri, | Althjof, Dvalin,
Nar and Nain, | Niping, Dain,
Bifur, Bofur, | Bombur, Nori,
An and Onar, | Ai, Mjothvitnir.
12. Vigg and Gandalf | Vindalf, Thrain,
Thekk and Thorin, | Thror, Vit and Lit,
Nyr and Nyrath,—| now have I told—
Regin and Rathsvith—| the list aright.
13. Fili, Kili, | Fundin, Nali,
Heptifili, | Hannar, Sviur,
Frar, Hornbori, | Fraeg and Loni,
Aurvang, Jari, | Eikinskjaldi.
14. The race of the dwarfs | in Dvalin’s throng
Down to Lofar | the list must I tell;
The rocks they left, | and through wet lands
They sought a home | in the fields of sand.
15. There were Draupnir | and Dolgthrasir,
Hor, Haugspori, | Hlevang, Gloin,
Dori, Ori, | Duf, Andvari,
Skirfir, Virfir, | Skafith, Ai.
16. Alf and Yngvi, | Eikinskjaldi,
Fjalar and Frosti, | Fith and Ginnar;
So for all time | shall the tale be known,
The list of all | the forbears of Lofar.
DWARFS The dwarfs of the fairy tales and mythologies of the Norse and other Germanic peoples were the primary source for Tolkien’s creation of his own race of “Dwarves.” Keen to distinguish this race from the latter-day use of the term “dwarf” to describe humans of diminutive stature, and to connect them instead with the bearded, stocky, cavern-dwelling beings of Germanic mythology, Tolkien began his attempt by recognizing a proper plural term. He came up with “Dwarves,” all the while acknowledging that, from a linguistic perspective, it would be more correct to call them “Dwarrows.”
By exploring Germanic mythology and traditional fairy tales, Tolkien also attempted to discover more about this race and their connection with mines, the hoarding of treasure, the forging of supernatural weapons, and the creation of magical jewelry and gifts. All of these aspects, to a greater or lesser degree, contributed to Tolkien’s reinvention of Dwarves for his tales of Middle-earth.
DWARVES Tolkien’s doughty race of Dwarves in Middle-earth was inspired by Norse and other Germanic tales of a powerful but stunted subterranean race that lived within mountain kingdoms: masters of fire and forge, makers of weapons and jewels, guardians of treasures, and bestowers of magical gifts. Dissatisfied with the portrayal of dwarfs in popular fairy tales as diminutive, rather comic creatures, Tolkien set out to create a race that was altogether more ambivalent, at times even sinister.
The reader’s initial impression of the Dwarves of Thorin and Company in The Hobbit is largely consistent with the dwarfs of the mildly comic fairytale variety. Even within the course of that book, however, the Dwarves seem to “grow in stature” and take on more heroic attributes. It is in The Silmarillion, though, that they most fully reveal their true nature as a dark and brooding race with the fatalistic character of the dwarf-smiths of Norse mythology. Indeed, Tolkien’s Dwarves are comparable—in all but size—to the Norsemen of Scandinavia: a proud race of warriors, craftsmen, and traders. Stoic and stubborn, both Dwarves and Norsemen are alike in their admiration of strength and bravery, in their sense of honor and loyalty, and in their love of gold and treasure. They are all but identical in their skill in the wielding and forging of weapons, in their stubborn pride, and their determination to avenge perceived injustice.
However brave and fearless Tolkien’s Dwarves are on their own ground (underground), they are mistrustful, dismissive, and fearful of all that they do not know. Unlike the Norsemen, they hate the open sea, deep forests, and wide plains. They would rather burn a boat than sail in it, cut down a tree than climb it, and carry a horse than ride it. Dwarves only find security in the deep roots of mountains and joy in the working of gold and precious metals, the forging of steel, the carving of stone, and the setting of gems.
Ultimately, however, we find that Tolkien remains largely consistent with ancient folk tradition: his Dwarves are the genies of the mountains, just as Hobbits are the genies of tilled soil and farmlands, and Ents are the genies of the forests. Through his research, Tolkien felt that he was able to understand fully the true nature and character of this secretive, stunted, mountain-dwelling race.
EE
The Eagles of Manwë. The Eagles numbered among the most ancient and wisest of races: they were made before the Stars were rekindled and the Elves awoke.
EAGLES OF MANWË Emissaries of Manwë, the king of the Valar, whose mansions are perched upon Taniquetil, the tallest mountain in the world. In the First Age, the Lord of Eagles is Thorondor whose wings measure 30 fathoms (180 ft.) and whose strength and power prove even greater than that of the mighty Dragons of Morgoth in that era-ending War of Wrath.
The Eagles of Manwë of Tolkienian mythology are consistent with the eagle emissaries of the Greek Zeus (and the Roman Jupiter) as the king of gods whose mansion stood on Mount Olympus, considered by the Greeks the tallest mountain in their world. Throughout Indo-European mythology, where the king of the gods is usually also a mountain and storm god, the eagle is typically found as one of his principal attributes or emblems. This also applied to the earthly rulers of most Eurasian empires. The aquila (eagle) was from early on associated with Roman imperial rule, carried as a standard by the Roman legions. And, subsequently, the Imperial Eagle was adopted by the Russian Czar, the German and Austro-Hungarian Kaisers, and the self-created emperor, Napoleon.
The Great Eagles of the Third Age are not a match in size to those of the First, but are nonetheless awesome birds capable of easily swooping down and carrying Men, Elves, and Dwarves aloft in their grip. The intervention of the Giant Eagles in Tolkien’s narratives is always crucial and climactic: they arrive at times of desperate need as, for example, in the Battle of the Five Armies in The Hobbit. They frequently appear when rescue can be achieved only by the power of flight, as in the rescue of Gandalf from Saruman’s tower of Orthanc, and Frodo and Sam from Mount Doom.
In this way, the Eagles seem to serve as vehicles of destiny, as dei ex machina who, when all seems lost, appear almost out of nowhere to save the day. They are part of a long tradition of eagle-emissaries in myth and literature, leading from the birds of the Greek god Zeus to the vassals of Manwë, the Lord of the Winds of Arda.
EÄRENDIL THE MARINER A Half-elven, son of Tuor and Idril, husband of Ewing, and father of Elrond and Elros, whose ultimate destiny is to carry one of the Silmarils through the sky as the Morning Star. He is one of Tolkien’s earliest original literary creations, born out of his philological studies.
One might say that Middle-earth all began with a star. In 1913, while still a student at Oxford, Tolkien discovered a bright star in the text of an Old English (Anglo-Saxon) mystical poem known as the Christ II (Ascension), written by the ninth-century AD churchman Cynewulf: “Hail, Eärendel, brightest of angels, / Above the middle-earth sent unto men.” The young scholar deduced that Eärendel must refer to the Morning Star—the planet Venus as it appears in the dawn sky—shining above the land of men midway between heaven and hell, otherwise known as “Middle-earth.” In Eärendil, “brightest of angels,” Tolkien believed that he had discovered an original Old English myth, which also survived in an Icelandic fairy tale about the hero Orentil, who, in Norse mythology was identified with the Morning Star. Over the following year, Tolkien set himself the task of imaginatively reconstructing what he considered the “true” myth of Eärendil—the end result of which was a poem entitled “The Voyage of Eärendil.”
Eärendil the Mariner. Círdan the Shipwright builds the ship Vingilótë in which Eärendil will sail through the Shadowy Seas and eventually through the sky.
Modest as the poem is (it remained unpublished until after Tolkien’s death), it seems to have been the spark that ignited Tolkien’s imaginative journey in the creation of Middle-earth. For, although his poem and tale had its genesis in the lines of another poem from another time, as Humphrey Carpenter explains in his biography of the author, Tolkien had created in Eärendil something uniquely his own—and more besides. As Carpenter put it: “It was in fact the beginning of Tolkien’s own mythology.”
Ultimately, the poem would evolve into one of the key stories of The Silmarillion, which tells of an emissary of the Elves and Edain of Beleriand, who, with a Silmaril bound to his brow, sails to the Undying Lands and successfully pleads for help against the enemy, Morgoth. Both Tolkien’s Eärendil poem and its Anglo-Saxon inspiration are echoed in the narrative of The Lord of the Rings: Bilbo composes (with Aragorn’s help) a “Song of Eärendil” in Rivendell after the safe arrival of the Fellowship. And later, in Shelob’s Lair, when Frodo wields the star-glass, which contains the light of Eärendil’s Silmaril, he exclaims: “Aiya Eärendil Elenion Ancalima!” (“Hail, Eärendil, brightest of stars!”), in a near-direct quotation of Cynewulf’s poem and Tolkien’s inspiration.
Easterlings. Easterlings are a westward-migrating barbarian nation on the eastern borders of Gondor—comparable to the historic Germanic tribes that threatened the eastern borders of the Roman Empire.
EASTERLINGS Men living in the east of Middle-earth, beyond Mordor and the Sea of Rhun, who from the First Age onward were largely allied with Morgoth and, after his downfall, his successor, Sauron. Easterlings is a translation of the Quenya Romenildi, meaning “East-Men.”
The east in Tolkien’s writing is both a geographic reality in Middle-earth and an evocation of the history of the European subcontinent, which, in Late Antiquity (third–sixth centuries AD) in particular, saw wave after wave of nomadic peoples, such as the Huns, migrating from the east.
Throughout the history of Tolkien’s world, Easterlings in Middle-earth are a constant threat to the kingdoms of the West, just as the Huns and others were a threat to the already crumbling Roman Empire.
In the First Age, the term “Easterling” was applied to Men who came to Beleriand long after the Edain. They were initially known to the Elves as the Swarthy Men on account of their dark hair and skin. One of the great Easterling chieftains is Ulfang the Black, who on his arrival swears allegiance to the Elves of Beleriand, even though he is secretly in league with Morgoth. His betrayal of the Elves in the middle of the Battle of Unnumbered Tears leads to the single most disastrous defeat in the history of Beleriand. This has similarities to the historic betrayal by the Germanic general Arminius (18/17 BC–AD 21), who swore allegiance to Rome but was secretly in league with other German tribes. In the Battle of Teutoburg Forest in AD 9, Arminius and his allies destroyed three Roman legions in what became known as the Varian Disaster, perhaps the single most costly defeat in Roman history.
As barbarian hordes in the service of Sauron the Necromancer, who for centuries menaced Gondor’s eastern borders and territories, the role of the Easterlings in the annals of the Third Age is much greater.
In this they are comparable to the Roman Empire’s Germanic barbarian hordes in the service of the Odin the Necromancer, who for centuries menaced the empire’s eastern borders.
Gondor’s century of Wainrider invasions (1851–1944 TA), which result in the loss of its eastern territories, owes something to real-world historic accounts of the century-long Roman conflict with the Ostrogoths (East Goths). The Wainriders of Rhûn are a nomadic confederacy of people that travels as an army and nation in vast caravans of wains (wagons) and war chariots. This is certainly comparable to the nomadic Ostrogoths (East Goths), whom one ancient historian described as “an entire nation on the move in great wains.”
Later, in 2050 TA, another massive invading Easterling horde known as the Balchoth almost routed the forces of Gondor in the critical Battle of the Field of Celebrant, but the tide is turned by the unexpected intervention of the cavalry of the Éothéod. This has a historical precedent in the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields in AD 451 when the Roman army formed an alliance with the Visigoths (West Goths) and the Lombard cavalry and defeated the massive barbarian horde of Attila the Hun.
EDAIN The heroic first Men in the east of Middle-earth who migrate westward into the Elf kingdoms of Beleriand during the early Years of the Sun and aid the Elves in their struggle against Morgoth.
Just as the earlier journey of the Elves during the Years of the Trees was inspired by tales relating to the historic westward migration of Celtic peoples, so the journey of Men was inspired by the historic westward migration of the Teutonic (Germanic) peoples. And just as the immortal Elves can be aligned with the myths and folk traditions of the Celts, so Tolkien’s mortal Men may be equally aligned with the myths and folk traditions of the Germans, Norsemen, and Anglo-Saxons. The contrast extends to the linguistic field, too. While the dominant language of the Elves of Beleriand is Sindarin, modeled on the Celtic language of Welsh, the dominant Mannish language of the Edain is Taliska, modeled on Gothic, a now-extinct East Germanic language of deep fascination to Tolkien.
Wainriders. The Wainriders are a formidable Easterling people who are comparable to the nomadic Ostrogoths who invaded the Roman Empire.
When the Edain enter Beleriand early in the fourth century of the First Age, Tolkien portrays them as a wild and proud tribal people who have endured terrible trials in their westward migration. Their suffering and brief lifespan draw the pity of the Elves, and yet they quickly reveal a primitive nobility and innate sense of honor that brings them close in spirit to the mortal heroes of Germanic and Norse mythology.
The Edain are comprised of three houses, or dynastic clans, each named after a founding ancestor: the House of Bëor, the House of Haleth, and the House of Marach (or Hador). We find similar dynastic clans in Norse and Germanic legend and protohistory, such as the Völsungs (to which Sigurd/Siegfried belongs) and the semilegendary House of Munsö. In their bravery, strong code of honor, and fierce pride, many of the prominent figures in the stories of the Edain—such as Beren, Huor, and Tuor—also bear a strong resemblance to the heroes of the Norse and Germanic sagas.
EGYPT Ancient Egypt and its long history were influential in Tolkien’s depiction and characterization of the Númenóreans. This is not by chance, as the story of Atlantis itself—the clear, primary inspiration for Tolkien’s island continent of Númenor—was, according to Plato, first revealed in ancient Egyptian texts.
In a letter, Tolkien explicitly compared the two peoples: “The Númenóreans of Gondor were proud, peculiar, and archaic, and I think are best pictured in (say) Egyptian terms. In many ways they resemble ‘Egyptians’—the love of, and power to construct, the gigantic and massive. And their great interest in ancestry and in tombs. (But not of course in ‘theology’: in which respect they were Hebraic and even more puritan … ).”
Curiously enough, in another of his letters, Tolkien compares the struggle of the North-and South-kingdoms of the Dúnedain toward unity with the efforts of the Egyptian pharaohs to unite Upper and Lower Egypt at the end of the fourth millennium BC. This comparison was made explicit in the author’s conception of the double crown of his Reunited Kingdom, for which he made a sketch. In the same letter, Tolkien noted: “I think the crown of Gondor (the South Kingdom) was very tall, like that of Egypt, but with wings attached, not set straight back but at an angle. The North Kingdom had only a diadem—Cf. the difference between the North and South kingdoms of Egypt.”
EIR THE MERCIFUL The Norse goddess of healing and one of the handmaidens of Frigg, queen of the gods. Eir, “the best of physicians,” lives in the woodlands of Lyfjaberg (“hill of healing”) and heals and protects the other gods and goddesses. She has a direct counterpart in Tolkien’s world in Estë the Gentle, the Vala who has the power to heal all hurts and soothe weariness. Estë lives on a wooded island on the lake of Lórellin in Valinor that provides rest and repose to the Valar and the Elves of Eldamar.
ELANOR A flower of Arda characterized by yellow, star-shaped flowers, hence its name, which means “sun-star” in Sindarin. According to one of Tolkien’s letters, it was inspired by the real-world flower the pimpernel.
ELDAMAR The land of the Eldar, or Light-Elves, in the Undying Lands. Eldamar, meaning “Elven home,” was the land of the Elves from the three kindreds of the Vanyar, Noldor, and Teleri people east of Valinor and west of the Great Sea. Eldamar was undoubtedly inspired by Alfheim, one of the Nine Worlds of the Norse cosmology and, as the name Alfheim (“elf-home”) implies, the homeland of the elves or, more specifically, the Light-Elves. An inspiration, likewise, were the related Elfhame (or Elphame) of Scottish folklore and the Faerie (or Fairyland) of English folklore. Both of these “otherworlds,” though largely benevolent, are shot through with a vein of peril for mortals that is not entirely absent from Tolkien’s conception of Eldamar. In The Hobbit, indeed, the Hobbitish name for Eldamar, or perhaps Valinor, is Faerie.
ELDAR (SINGULAR: ELDA) Originally the name for all Elves, but in time applied only to the West Elves who answered the summons of the Valar and who took part in the great migration from the east of the mortal lands of Middle-earth into the west and hence, with some exceptions, to Valinor. Eldar comes from the Quenya root word elda meaning “of the stars,” as the Elves were first awakened upon Middle-earth by the light of the stars set ablaze by Varda Elentári, queen of the Heavens. Tolkien noted but dismissed as accidental the similarity between the word Eldar—the Firstborn of the Children of Ilúvitar—and English word “elder.”
See also: ELVES
ELENDIL THE TALL The last Lord of Andúnië, who sails with his people into exile in seven ships and so survived the destruction and downfall of the Atlantis-like island-continent of Númenor. In the Aeneid (completed 19 BC) the ancient Roman poet Virgil wrote of how Aeneas, the last Trojan prince, survives the downfall of Troy and sails west to Italy where his descendants Romulus and Remus will eventually found the great city of Rome. Similarly, Tolkien’s histories tell of how Elendil, the last Númenórean prince, sails east to Middle-earth, where he and his sons, Isildur and Anárion, found the mighty Númenórean kingdoms-in-exile: the North-kingdom of Arnor and the South-kingdom of Gondor.
ELESSAR Formal title assumed by Aragorn II, the Chieftain of the Dunedain upon his coronation in the wake of the War of the Ring. Elessar means “Elfstone,” after the green jewel set into an eagle-shaped silver brooch, given to Aragorn by Galadriel when the Fellowship of the Ring departs from Lothlórien. Galadriel proclaims: “In this hour take the name that was foretold for you, Elessar, the Elfstone of the house of Elendil!”
Tolkien himself noted that Aragorn’s assumption of the title of Elessar, king of the Reunited Kingdom of the Dúnedain, is comparable to that of the historic figure of Charlemagne’s assumption of the title of the Holy Roman Emperor after his part in the reunification of the scattered provinces of the ancient Roman Empire. Both Aragorn and Charlemagne fight many battles that result in the expulsion of invaders and the formation of military and civil alliances that bring about eras of peace and prosperity.
ELROND Half-Elven Son of Eärendil the Mariner and Elwing the White, and twin brother of Elrond. He is first introduced to readers of The Hobbit as the Master of the “Last Homely House East of the Sea,” in Rivendell, the 4,000-year-old refuge of wisdom and great learning for all Elves and Men of goodwill. It was not until the publication of The Silmarillion that Elrond’s early history as one of the Peredhil (“Half-elven”) was fully revealed, shown as choosing the fate and immortality of the Elves.
At Rivendell, Elrond serves as a kind of oracle, providing the ancient lore and wisdom essential for the progress of questing heroes, and setting them off in a fresh direction. Just as Bilbo Baggins finds refuge and guidance from Elrond Half-elven in The Hobbit, a generation later Frodo Baggins finds healing, rest, and guidance during his own quest to destroy the ring. A figure like this commonly appears in quest stories, such as the hermits and wizards often met by the Arthurian knights, especially during the Quest of the Holy Grail.
For the psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875–1961), the Wise Old Man, or senex, is one of the archetypes of the human psyche and a stock character of storytelling. It should be noted, however, that Elrond, although some six and a half thousand years old at the time of the War of the Ring, is shown as ageless.
See also: DELPHI
ELROS Son of Eärendil the Mariner and Elwing the White, twin brother of Elrond, and the founder and first king of Númenor. Because they are Peredhil (Half-elven), the twins are allowed to choose their race and fate, Elrond choosing to be immortal and Elros to be mortal, though gifted with a lifespan of five centuries. The brothers have a counterpart in the Greek myth of the twin brothers Castor and Polydeuces, known as the Dioscuri (“divine twins”), one of whom was mortal and one immortal.
Elros’s long lifespan (he was already 90 when he began to rule in Númenor)—and that of the other kings and queens of the island-continent—may make us think of figures in the Old Testament such as Methuselah, who lived to be 969 years of age. Before the biblical Flood, humans had a much greater lifespan than after the cataclysm. Similarly, before the fall of Númenor and its loss beneath the waves, all Númenóreans enjoyed a long life (around 300 years) and those of the Line of Elros an even longer one. After the Downfall, their lifespan dwindled considerably.
ELVES In Tolkien’s world, elves were in large part inspired by the author’s wish to give precise definition to a multitude of lost traditions and mythologies relating to supernatural beings known as “Elfs” which, in the passage of history, had been reduced to little more than the pixies, flower-fairies, sprites, and gnomes of English folklore and Victorian children’s stories. Tolkien came to the rescue of these long-lost traditions and revived them again in the pages of literature. In the writing of The Silmarillion, Tolkien gave life and context to the millennia-long histories of over 40 races, nations, kindreds, and city-states of Elves.
Tolkien began his “rescue” of the Elves by clarifying matters linguistically, just as he had done with his Dwarves: “Elfs” became “Elves” and “Elfin” became “Elven.” Tolkien wished to define the “Elf” as a distinct and singularly important race. The word “elf “means white, related to the alba and Greek alphos (both meaning white), and also retains an association with “swan.” It is through this tracking back to the roots of language that Tolkien’s Elves gradually reemerged from the ancient legends of Britain, originally known as Albion (a name possibly related to the Indo-Euopean root albho, or white), which Tolkien implies could be literally translated as “Elf-land.”
We know that Tolkien also looked to Norse mythology for the history of his Elves. In Norse mythology, there are references to both the light elfs of Alfheim (“elf home”) and the rather sinister dark elfs of the subterranean Svartalfheim (“black elf home”). Tolkien took this somewhat mysterious division and used it to create the first great event in the history of his Elves: the “Sundering of the Elves” after their awakening by Cuiviénen, between the Calaquendi (“Light-Elves”) who made the journey to Eldamar (meaning “elven home”) and the Moriquendi (“Dark-Elves”) who refused the journey and remained under the starlight in the east of Middle-earth, never seeing the divine Trees of Light in the Undying Lands.
Journey of the Elves
Above all, it should be stressed that Tolkien’s Elves are not a race of pixies. They are a powerful, full-blooded people who closely resemble the prehuman Irish race of immortals called the Tuatha Dé Danann. Like the Tuatha Dé Danann, Tolkien’s Elves are taller and stronger than mortals, are incapable of suffering sickness, are possessed of more-than-human beauty, and are filled with greater wisdom in all things. Tolkien took the sketchy myths and legends of the Tuatha Dé Danann and created a vast civilization, history, and genealogy for his Elves. He gave them a rich family of languages and a vast cultural inheritance that, for all that it was rooted in real traditions, required all his genius and imagination to truly flourish.
Elves Listening to a Minstrel. Music plays an important role in the culture of the Elves, especially the Teleri.
ELWING (“STAR-SPRAY”) THE WHITE The daughter of Dior and Nimloth, granddaughter of Beren and Lúthien, wife of Eärendil, and the inheritor of the Silmaril. While by birth she is Halfelven, she ultimately chooses the fate of the Elves.
The story of Elwing’s love for her husband takes some of its inspiration from Richard Wagner’s opera Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman; 1847), in which the Dutchman of the title is doomed to sail the oceans forever unless he can find the love of a true woman. The heroine, Senta, the daughter of a sea captain, falls instantly in love with the Dutchman when her father brings him home after a voyage (under the terms of his curse he is allowed to set foot on land once in every seven years). When the Dutchman sets sail again, Senta leaps into the sea, and so lifts the curse on his soul. The opera ends with the reunited couple’s ascent into heaven.
The motif of the leap into the sea features prominently in Tolkien’s tale of Eärendil and Elwing. While her husband wanders lost at sea, Elwing find herself at the mercy of the sons of Fëanor. Rather than be captured, she duplicates Senta’s final act by leaping to a seemingly certain death from a high cliff into the sea. However, unlike Senta, Elwing is transformed into a seabird and in this form flies to Eärendil, carrying the Silmaril, the holy jewel of living light in her beak. Paralleling the Dutchman and Senta’s ascent to heaven, Eärendil, with the Silmaril bound to his brow lighting the way, succeeds at last in steering his ship to the shores of the Undying Lands.
There may be a further connection between Elwing the White, with her strong maritime associations, and the Greek myth of Ino, a Theban princess who leaps into the sea and is transformed into the sea goddess Leucothea (“white goddess”). In Homer’s Odyssey she rescues the shipwrecked Odysseus, just as Elwing rescues her husband from his hopeless sea wanderings.
ENGLISH MYTHOLOGY The mythology of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, as Tolkien saw it, survived only in a single surviving epic, Beowulf, a handful of Old English poems (such as The Wanderer), and a scattering of folktales. As he once wrote in a letter to a reader: “I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own, not of the quality that I sought and found in legends of other lands. There was Greek and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish; but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff.” It was Tolkien’s wish to find a means of “rediscovering” that lost mythology through his imaginative writing. So great was his obsession that it could be argued that the literary merits of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and other related works were almost of secondary concern to him (although they are undoubtedly present). Important as the novel is, any analysis of Tolkien’s life and work makes one aware that his greatest passion and grandest ambition were focused on the creation of an entire mythological system for the English people. “I had in mind the large and cosmogenic, to the level of romantic fairy-story … which I could dedicate simply: to England, to my country.”
ENTS Treelike beings and “Shepherds of Trees” of Middle-earth, and among Tolkien’s most original creations. Once asked about the origin of his Ents, Tolkien wrote: “I should say that Ents are composed of philology, literature, and life. They owe their name to the eald enta geweorc of Anglo-Saxon.” The Anglo-Saxon reference is to a fragment of the hauntingly beautiful Old English poem The Wanderer. The word enta there is usually translated “giant,” so that the phrase means “old work of giants,” and relates to the prehistoric stone ruins of Britain, then considered to be the work of an ancient race of giants. Out of such simple philological origins, Tolkien created beings of great and beguiling complexity—generally slow and gentle in their thoughts, words, and deeds but capable of swift and elemental violence when roused, as in their overthrow of Isengard.
To find beings of myth and legend that correspond directly to the Ents, Tolkien had only to look back into English folklore, in which the Green Man plays a such a key and distinctive part. Green Man stories and carvings are common in Tolkien’s beloved West Midlands as well as in the Welsh Marches just beyond. The Green Man was in origin a Celtic nature spirit and tree god who represented the victory of the powers of growth over the powers of ice and frost. Essentially benevolent, he could also be powerful and destructive, just like the Ents and the even more belligerent Huorn tree spirits.
The March of the Ents—one of the most powerfully imagined events in The Lord of the Rings—also has a more personal inspiration. The creation of the Ents, Tolkien once explained, “is due, I think, to my bitter disappointment and disgust from schooldays with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of ‘Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill’: I longed to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war.” The reference here is to the play Macbeth (1606) where the English army advances on Macbeth’s fortress of Dunsinane by shielding themselves with tree branches, thereby fulfilling a prophecy about the usurper-king’s downfall.
Tolkien believed that Shakespeare had trivialized and misinterpreted an ancient and authentic myth, providing a cheap, simplistic interpretation of the prophecy of this march of a wood against a hill. Thus, in The Lord of the Rings he devised a situation in which the Ents, the spirits of the forest and personifications of growth and renewal, march against their foes, the Orcs, the spirits of the mountain and personifications of winter and death.
EÖNWË THE HERALD OF VALAR The greatest of the Maiar and the standard-bearer of Manwë, king of the Valar. He bears some resemblance to the Greco-Roman god Hermes/Mercury in his guise as herald and messenger to Zeus/Jupiter, king of the gods. However, because of the more martial quality of his character, Eönwë (whose strength in battle rivals that of even the Valar) has a greater affinity with the Norse god Heimdall, the herald of the gods, who will blow his horn to announce Ragnarök, the last great battle between the gods and giants. It is Eönwë, too, who blows his horn to announce the Great Battle in the War of Wrath, in which the host of the Valar, Maiar, and Eldar destroy the host of Morgoth, the Dark Enemy of the World, marking the end of the First Age.
ÉOTHÉOD A group of Northmen who settle in the Vales of the Anduin in the twentieth century of the Third Age and who are the ancestors of the Rohirrim. A strong and fair-haired race of horsemen and men-at-arms, in 2050 TA they unexpectedly come to the aid of the Men of Gondor. Led by Eorl the Young, the Éothéod cavalry turn the tide of war in the critical Battle of the Field of Celebrant in favor of Gondor, resulting in the rout of the Balchoth, a barbarian horde of invading Easterlings.
Culturally, the Éothéod take much of their inspiration from the Anglo-Saxons in that they live in small villages rather than towns; have a strong oral tradition of heroic song, rather than books; and have a high regard for horses and horsemanship. The horse is central to the lives of the Éothéod, meaning “horse-people,” as it was to the Anglo-Saxons, although among the latter, mounted warfare was probably confined to the elite, with horses reserved primarily for transportation.
See also: CATALAUNIAN FIELDS; ROHIRRIM; MERCIA
ÉOWYN Noblewoman of Rohan, sister of Éomer and niece of King Théoden. In The Lord of the Rings she disguises herself as a young cavalryman, rides to Gondor, and takes part in the Battle of Pelennor Fields, slaying the Witch-king of Morgul. Éowyn belongs to the ancient Germanic tradition of the shield-maiden (Old Norse: skjaldmaer), warrior women found widely in the world of epic romance and saga, most notably the semidivine figures of the Valkyries. Whether shield-maidens existed in reality is much debated.
Éowyn owes most to the twin figures of Brynhild and Brunhild, found in the Norse Völsunga Saga and the German Nibelungenlied, respectively. In the Völsunga Saga, Brynhild is a Valkyrie, a beautiful battle maiden who defies Odin and was subsequently pierced with a sleep-thorn and imprisoned in a ring of fire. Like Sleeping Beauty, she is awakened from sleep by Sigurd the Dragon-slayer, with whom she falls in love. In the Nibelungenlied, Brunhild (“armored warrior maid”) is the warrior-queen of Iceland, who falls for Sigurd’s medieval German equivalent, Siegfried.
Tolkien’s conception of Éowyn, however, might be said to be somewhat Christianized. In Éowyn’s combination of patriotism and goodness we cannot help being reminded of the historic Joan of Arc (c. 1412–31), the “Maid of Orleans,” who led the forces of the French against the English in a phase of the Hundred Years War. It is also somewhat romanticized, since her donning of a male disguise to assert her personality and achieve her goals in a male world makes us think of any number of Shakespearean heroines, such as Rosalind in As You Like It (1599).
See also: BRYNHILD
ERU (“THE ONE”) The creator-god of Tolkien’s world of Arda, known to the Elves as Ilúvatar (“Allfather”). He was certainly in part inspired by the Judeo-Christian creator-god, Yahweh/Jehovah, although there are important differences in conception.
In the beginning, Tolkien tells us his cosmogony (creation myth), Eru’s “thoughts” took the form of entities known as the Ainur, or “Holy Ones,” vastly powerful spirits that are comparable to the Judeo-Christian angels and archangels. He then commands the Ainur to sing in a celestial choir, thereby revealing his vision of “what was, and is, and is to come.” Eru creates and wakens first the Elves and then Men (just as Yahweh/Jehovah creates Adam). And, like the God of the Bible, Eru is conceived of as making decisive interventions in world history, such as the destruction of the fleet of King Ar-Pharazôn and the reembodiment of Gandalf after his death in Moria.
In most other respects, however, the early Judeo-Christian world is very unlike Tolkien’s world. Tolkien purposely created a world that is without formal religion, and Eru is far from being the vengeful, jealous deity of the Old Testament (it is Melkor/Morgoth who perhaps takes on these aspects). And, although the inhabitants of Tolkien’s world do not quite worship “gods,” their beliefs are shown as more closely resembling the pantheism of the pagan Teutons, Celts, and Greeks.
ESTË THE GENTLE One of the seven queens of the Valar, who has the power to heal all hurts and relieve weariness. She dwells with her spouse, Irmo (also known as Lórien), the master of visions and dreams, in the Gardens of Lórien on a wooded island in the lake of Lórellin in Valinor. In Norse mythology Eir the Merciful is a comparable goddess of healing, as is the Greek goddess of healing, Hygieia, from whose name, meaning “health,” we get the word “hygiene.” Of Estë (meaning “rest”) we are told, “Grey is her raiment; and rest is her gift.”
EURYDICE In Greek mythology the wife of Orpheus, the poet and musician who descends into the underworld after her death and attempts to bring her back to the world of the living through the enchantment of music and song. This famous legend of a lover’s attempt to defeat death was acknowledged by Tolkien as his inspiration for his tale of Beren and Lúthien, though in Tolkien’s adaptation the male and female roles are reversed and the Eurydice figure is given a far more important and heroic role in the tale. For more on Tolkien’s tale—one of the most significant in the history of Middle-earth and personally for the author—and its inspiration, see BEREN; LÚTHIEN.
EVIL EYE A widespread superstition throughout human history, recorded in ancient Greek and Roman texts as well as many religious scriptures, from the Koran to the Bible, by which an individual, often a sorcerer, has the power to injure or harm by means of a simple, but baleful, glance. Attempts to ward off the power of the evil eye have resulted in the creation of talismans featuring a staring eye, which is supposed to reflect back the malicious gaze on the evildoer. Such talismans are found painted on the prows of boats and ships, on houses and vehicles, and are worn as beads and jewels in a multitude of cultures from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean.
In all cultures, eyes are believed to have special powers and are said to be windows onto the soul. So Tolkien’s description of the evil Eye of Sauron gives us considerable insight into the Dark Lord himself: “The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat’s, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing.” That last descriptive phrase, “a window into nothing,” reveals Tolkien’s Catholic and Augustinian moral view that evil is essentially the absence of good, and that ultimately evil in itself is a soul-destroying nothingness.
Eye of Sauron
EYE OF SAURON The most common visible manifestation of the spirit of the Dark Lord of Mordor in the Third Age. In The Lord of the Rings, the fiery “Eye of Sauron” is variously described as the “Red Eye,” the “Evil Eye,” the “Lidless Eye,” and the “Great Eye.” Tolkien developed this malign manifestation in part out of the tradition of the Evil Eye and imbued it with such a hallucinatory, elemental quality that it has the power to disturb and even terrify the reader.
It is difficult to determine whether the spirit of Sauron, after his defeat at the end of the Second Age, was ever able to regain an actual material form—a disembodiment, perhaps, that makes his malign power seem all the greater. Late in the last century of the Third Age, we are given one fearful encounter describing the Dark Lord’s four-fingered “Black Hand,” but whether this is a phantom shape or the actual material form of the Dark Lord is open to debate. Nonetheless we have it on the authority of Tolkien’s son and executor, Christopher Tolkien, that in the War of the Ring it is the Eye that was the Dark Lord’s primary manifestation: “father had come to identify the Eye of Barad-dûr with the mind and will of Sauron.”
There is one important mythological source for the Eye. More generally, Odin in his guise as necromancer was the mythological figure who most obviously informed the identity of Sauron the Necromancer and, not coincidentally, was also known as the One-Eyed God. In the Norse canon, Odin sacrificed one of his eyes in exchange for one deep draft from Mirmir’s Well, the “Well of Secret Knowledge.” Thereafter, Odin—like Sauron—was able to consult with and command wraiths, phantoms, and spirits of the dead.
FF
Fëanor. The greatest of the Eldar whose pride brings disaster on his kinsmen.
FÁFNIR In Norse mythology the great dragon slain by Sigurd, originally a dwarf prince who transformed himself in order to protect his stolen treasure hoard. His story is told in the Old Norse Völsunga Saga. In the opera cycle Ring der Nibelungen (1848–74) by Richard Wagner, Fáfnir is portrayed originally as a giant.
Fáfnir was Tolkien’s primary source of inspiration when he began to cast about for a dragon appropriate to the setting of Angband, Morgoth the Enemy’s fortress. Tolkien required a creature that was brutal, murderous, and filled with low cunning. He wanted a creature that wallowed in the pleasures of torture of mind, body, and spirit. Tolkien knew exactly what he wanted and where to find it: the embodiment of something akin to the most evil of all monsters created by the collective imagination of the Germanic and Norse peoples. Few would disagree with Tolkien when it came to his choice: (and his inspiration for Glaurung the Father of Dragons): Fáfnir, the “Prince of All Dragons,” and the spectacularly patricidal, fratricidal, genocidal, and deeply unpleasant usurper of the cursed golden treasure of Andvari.
Tolkien acknowledged that he had first encountered Fáfnir as a child, in Andrew Lang’s The Red Fairy Book (1890). This included “The Story of Sigurd,” a condensed version of William Morris and Eiríkur Magnússon’s translation of the Old Norse Völsunga Saga. It was a tale that would fuel his imagination for the rest of his life. This early enthusiasm not only led to his study of Norse and Germanic literature and language—the focus of his life as a scholar—but also inspired his first serious attempt, at 22 years of age, as the creator of his own original stories. Those early compositions—drafted long before a glimmer of a Hobbit or a Ring Lord entered his mind—resulted in Tolkien’s creation of his own full-blooded, fire-breathing monster.
In Tolkien’s great Dragon of the First Age, Glaurung, we find a match in evil with Fáfnir. For, beyond dragon-fire and serpent-strength, Glaurung has more subtle powers: the keenest eyesight, the greatest sense of hearing and smell. He is a serpent of great cunning and cleverness, but his intelligence—like that of his entire race in Norse and Germanic legend—has the flaws of vanity, gluttony, greed, and deceit. The life and death of Glaurung the Deceiver is the tale of a powerful and original character that is central to The Silmarillion. While very much inspired by the Völsunga Saga, in many ways Tolkien’s portrayal and characterization of this father of Dragons is much more nuanced and complex than his ancient model. And yet, in the end, Glaurung and Fáfnir suffer almost identical deaths. For just as Tolkien’s hero Túrin Turambar plunges his sword Gurthang into Glaurung’s soft underbelly in the slaying of the “Father of Dragons,” so Sigurd the Völsung plunges his sword Gram into Fáfnir’s soft underbelly in the slaying of the “Prince of All Dragons.”
FALLOHIDE The least numerous and the most unconventional of the three kindreds of Hobbit, in origin woodland-dwelling and thus most friendly with the Elves. Usually the tallest and slimmest of their race, they are commonly fair-skinned, fair-haired, and most likely to go on adventures. Almost any display of individuality or ambition exhibited by a normally conventional Hobbit is usually attributed to a distant Fallohide bloodline.
The name Fallohide provides some of the inspiration for the character Tolkien gives to this kindred. Falo is an Old High German word meaning “pale yellow” (as in the color of a fallow deer), and “hide,” of course, is a skin or pelt, and so together is descriptive of the outward appearance of the Fallohides. Fallow, meanwhile, is also Old English for “newly plowed land,” and hide is an Old English measure of land sufficient for a household (about one hundred acres). This second derivation suggests the characteristics shared by all Hobbits: a love of newly tilled land and an uncanny ability to hide away in the landscape, so as to appear almost invisible to Men. Furthermore, one cannot help but think that there is yet another layer of wordplay with “Follow and Hide” as a Hobbitish version of the game of Hide and Seek. Typically fair-haired Fallohide family names are Fairbairn, Goold, and Goldworthy, while their unconventional, independent nature and their intelligence are suggested by such names as Headstrong and Boffin.
FALL OF ARTHUR, THE Tolkien’s unfinished long poem about the death of King Arthur, largely written in the early 1930s, and edited and posthumously published by his son, Christopher, in 2013. Although Tolkien employed Arthurian motifs throughout his creative writing about Middle-earth and the Undying Lands, he did not care for the largely French-inspired courtly elements of Arthurian romance, as found, for example, in Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (1485). Consequently, his own Fall of Arthur is an alliterative poem of nearly a thousand verses in the style and meter of the Old English Beowulf in which Arthur is a British military leader fighting a dark shadowy army of invaders out of the east led by the evil, dark knight Mordred. “The endless East in anger woke, / and black thunder born in dungeons / under mountains of menace moved above them.” These lines could be directly transferred to Tolkien’s Middle-earth to perfectly describe the dark forces of Mordor. It is tempting to link, too, the forces of Mordor led by the Nazgûl with Tolkien’s description of Mordred’s “wan horsemen wild in windy clouds” who appear as almost spectral warriors “shadow-helmed to war, shapes disastrous.”
FASTITOCALON In Hobbit lore, a vast Turtle-fish that Men believe is an island in the seas. Men build their camps on its back, but when they light their fires, the beast dives beneath the sea drowning all and sundry. A poem about the Fastitocalon is included in Tolkien’s The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1968) and is based on medieval legends of the aspidochelone—a giant whale or sea turtle that sailors often mistook for an island and made landfall on its back. An Old English poem about the creature called “The Whal” provided Tolkien with his direct source.
FARAMIR The second son of Denethor II, the last Ruling Steward of Gondor, and the Captain of the Rangers of Ithilien. Somewhat overshadowed by Boromir, his bold and ambitious brother, Faramir is depicted as humbler but more thoughtful, and just as steadfast in his defense of his homeland. Farimir is the character in The Lord of the Rings with whom the writer was most empathetic (though he could not claim his bravery), and so we may think of him as in some sense a selfportrait and certainly as a cypher for the author’s outlook. Tolkien’s personal perspective on heroism can be deduced from this quiet hero’s eloquent statement: “I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, not the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only for that which they defend.”
The Fall of Gondolin. The destruction of the Elven city of Gondolin in 511 FA recalls the fall of Troy in Greek mythology—a city likewise famous for its massive walls.
FËANOR The eldest son of Finwë, the High King of the Noldor Elves of Beleriand and creator of the Silmarils. Called Curufinwë at birth, he is later renamed Fëanor, meaning “Spirit of Fire.” He is considered the greatest of all the Eldar in gifts of the mind, body, and spirit.
To some degree, Fëanor is comparable to the supernatural smith Ilmarinen in the Finnish epic the Kalevala. In that tale Ilmarinen forges the artifact known as the Sampo that could bring great wealth and good fortune to its possessor. In The Silmarillion Fëanor, likewise, creates three Elven gemstones filled with the light of the Trees of the Valar. Both artifacts excite greed and envy. See the entries on the Sampo and Silmarils for more on the connections between these magical artifacts. It is possible to draw parallels between Fëanor and other consummate craftsmen in the world’s mythologies. The Greek craftsman-hero Daedalus, whose name means “cunningly wrought,” also created artifacts that ultimately bring death and grief, most famously the wax wings that lead to his son Icarus’s death when he flies too close to the sun. Ultimately, all such stories are warnings about the dangers of human—or indeed Elven—hubris.
Fastitocalon. It is likely that this story from Hobbit lore—that Men built their camps on its back but when they lit their fires, the beast dived beneath the sea—is in fact an allegory of the Downfall of Númenóreans, as told in the Akallabêth.
FENRIR In Norse mythology the monstrous wolf that will slay Odin, the king of the gods, in the battle of Ragnarök, which brings an end to the world. He is the son of Loki, the trickster god, and is himself father of Sköll and Hati Hróthvitnisson, the two wolves that pursue the sun and the moon. In one of the best-known Norse myths concerning Fenrir, the gods, knowing the trouble he is destined to cause, attempt to bind him. The tasks proves impossible until Tyr, the brave god of war and law, sacrifices his right hand by placing it in the jaws of the wolf as a pledge of the gods’ supposed good faith.
In Tolkien’s legendarium we have a comparable monster in Carcharoth, meaning “red maw,” the mightiest Wolf on Middle-earth. Sired by Draugluin, the Father of Werewolves, Carcharoth is the unsleeping guardian at the gates of the dark, subterranean kingdom of Angband. It is in that role of guardian of the gates in the Quest for the Silmaril that Carcharoth bites off the hand of Beren Erchamion (meaning “one-handed”) in an episode redolent of the “Binding of the Wolf” myth.
FIELD OF CELEBRANT The site of one of the most critical battles in the history of Gondor. In 2050 TA in the Battle of the Field of Celebrant, the forces of Gondor were about to be overrun by barbarian Easterling invaders known as the Balchoth. At a critical moment, the tide of battle was turned by the sudden appearance of the Éothéod cavalry of Eorl the Young that crushed and destroyed the Easterling forces, driving them back to their own lands.
The Battle of the Field of Celebrant has a historic precedence in AD 451, when the Visigoth cavalry carried out a dramatic rescue of the Roman Empire in the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields. This proved to be one of the most critical battles in European history, as the invader was Attila the Hun (c. AD 406–53), leader of the most formidable barbarian force the Romans had ever faced.
After the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields and the retreat of the invading Huns, as reward for their military service, the Visigoths became the main inheritors of the lands devastated by the barbarian wars and plagues. Similarly, after the Battle of the Field of Celebrant and the retreat of the Balchoth, as reward for their military service the Éothéod became the main inheritors of the lands devastated by those same factors. This was the fief of Gondor previously called Calenardhon, which now became known as Rohan, “Land of the Horse Lords.” In these lands, the Horse Lords of Rohan were able to live as free men under their own kings and laws, though always in alliance with Gondor.
The leader of the Visigoths in the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields was King Theodoric I (c. AD 390–451). His service inspired Tolkien’s account not only of the Battle of the Field of Celebrant led by Eorl, the first king of Rohan, but also the cavalry charge in the Battle of Pelennor Fields led by Théoden, the seventeenth king of Rohan, a thousand years later. Not only were the kings’ names almost identical but also their victories came at the cost of their own lives, with both kings crushed beneath their fallen steeds.
FINNISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE While an undergraduate at Oxford, Tolkien discovered a Finnish grammar, which fascinated him: “It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me.” It was a fascination that proved to be influential in the invention of his High Elvish language, Quenya, though only a few words can be shown to be directly derived from Finnish.
Soon after his discovery of the Finnish grammar, Tolkien read the Kalevala, a collection of Finnish tales and poems put together by the philologist Elias Lönnrot (1802–84), which became the national epic of Finland. It revealed a mythology that would be hugely influential on the composition of The Silmarillion. Many years later, in a letter to the poet W. H. Auden, Tolkien acknowledged the importance of the Kalevala in his creative life: “… the beginning of the legendarium … was in an attempt to reorganize some of the Kalevala, especially the tale of Kullervo the hapless, into a form of my own.” The tale of Kullervo the hapless, one of the key figures in the epic, eventually appeared in Tolkien’s writing in the tragic figure of Túrin Turambar (ironically meaning “Turin the Master of Doom”). Other characters and themes of the Kalevala may be discovered in Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. To some degree, Fëanor the Elven-smith who forges the Silmarils is comparable to the supernatural smith Ilmarinen who forges the mysterious, magical artifact known as the Sampo.
The degree of Tolkien’s engagement with Finnish literature became fully apparent in 2015 with the publication of his own 1914 prose version of The Story of Kullervo, edited by Verlyn Flieger and illustrated by Alan Lee.
See also: QUENYA
FINWË The first King of the Noldor who undertakes the Great Journey out of the wilderness of the eastern mortal lands of Middle-earth and leads his people across the sea to the promised land of Eldamar, the immortal “Elven-home” in the Undying Lands of Aman. There, after the death of his first wife, Miriel (who willingly chooses to die after giving birth to Fëanor) he decides to remarry. This decision has disastrous consequences, as Melkor is able to exploit Fëanor’s feelings of enmity toward his half-brothers.
Like Ingwë, king of the Vanyar, he is something of a Moses figure. However, in other ways Finwë is like the biblical Adam. In some Jewish traditions the first man has two wives, first Lilith and then Eve, and it is Adam’s fateful choice, when tempted by Eve in the Garden of Eden, that dooms humankind to sin. Finwë becomes the first victim in the War of the Jewels, as he is slain by Melkor/Morgoth, the Dark Enemy, before the gates of the Noldor fortress of Formenos where the Silmarils are hidden.
FLYING DUTCHMAN The name of a ghost ship that can never make port and is doomed to sail the oceans forever. Sightings of this phantom ship, glowing with a spectral light, were made starting in the eighteenth century. In 1843, this legend became the focus of Richard Wagner’s early opera Der fliegende Holländer, in which the curse that kept the Flying Dutchman and its captain forever at sea is ultimately lifted by the love of a virtuous maiden.
Tolkien’s tale of another lonely mariner, Eärendil, takes some of its inspiration from the legend. However, he entirely inverts the story by making his mariner not cursed and aimless but blessed and purposeful. Eärendil, in his wanderings on his ship Vingilótë through an endless maze of shadowy seas and enchanted isles, is acting as emissary of the Elves and Edain of Beleriand.
The comparison tightens, however, in the motif of the leaping lover. In Wagner’s opera, the heroine Senta, in an act of selfsacrifice and love, throws herself from a cliff into the sea, and so lifts the curse on the soul of the captain of the Flying Dutchman. In Tolkien’s tale, Eärendil’s wife, Elwing the White, also leaps to a seemingly certain death from a high cliff into the sea. However, unlike Senta, Elwing is transformed into a seabird. In this form, she seeks out Eärendil, carrying the Silmaril, the holy jewel of living light, in her beak.
Flies of Mordor. These gray, black, and brown blood-sucking insects are marked, as Orcs are marked, with a red eye-shape upon their backs.
FOUR-FARTHING STONE
See: THREE-FARTHING STONE
FREYA/FREJA One of the preeminent goddesses in Norse mythology, Freya is the goddess of love and war and sister of Freyr. She may be in origin identical with another goddess, Frigg, wife of Odin, and queen of both the Aer and Vanir gods. As a fertility goddess, she has something in common with Tolkien’s Yavanna Kementári, whose character, however, is far removed from the often scandalous tales associated with Freya. Curiously enough, one of Freya’s typically adulterous adventures, involving the acquisition of the Brísingamen, the “Necklace of the Dwarves,” was undoubtedly the inspiration for Tolkien’s somewhat less salacious (although equally disastrous) tale of the Nauglamír, the “Necklace of the Dwarves.”
FREYR The Norse god of the sun and rain. Like his sister Freya, the goddess of love and war, Freyr is one of the Vanir, a tribe of fertility gods who united with the Aesir gods of war to form a single pantheon under Odin. Just as his sister Freya’s name means “the Lady,” so Freyr’s name means “the Lord.” Tolkien observed that this golden-haired god was also known as “Yngvi-freyr” or “Ingwe-the-Lord” of the Vanir and imaginatively linked this god to his own golden-haired lord Ingwe of the Vanyar, the High Elven King of Eldamar.
Tolkien was also inspired by Freyr’s heroic last stand during Ragnarök, the last battle in the war of the gods and the giants. Standing on Bifrost—the Rainbow Bridge between Middle-earth and Asgard—Freyr fights Surt the Fire Giant the Lord of Muspelheim who is armed with a great sword of flame. This duel is mirrored in Tolkien’s Battle on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm between Gandalf the Wizard and the Balrog of Moria with his fiery sword and whips of flame. Surt and Freya are entirely destroyed in their last battle, while the Balrog and Wizard continue their struggle until the Balrog is slain, but at the cost of life of Gandalf in his bodily form as the Grey Wizard.
FRIGG In Norse mythology, a goddess of wisdom and foresight, and the wife of Odin. She is commonly identified with Freya, and there is a certain overlap in the stories told about the two goddesses. Her position in the Norse pantheon makes her comparable with Tolkien’s Queen Varda Elentári, the “Lady of the Stars,” who is spouse of Manwë, the king of the Valar. However, while Frigg can seem a rather shadowy goddess, best known for the tale in which she attempts to make her doomed son Baldr invulnerable, Varda is one of the most characterful figures in Tolkien’s pantheon.
FRODA The name of several legendary Danish kings and the source for the name of Tolkien’s Hobbit hero Frodo Baggins. In the Old English epic of Beowulf there is Froda, the powerful king of the Heathobards, who attempts to make peace between the Danes and Bards. Likewise, the medieval Icelandic poet and historian Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241) recorded that another King Froda was a contemporary of the Roman Emperor Augustus and that his reign was conspicuous for peacefulness. In Icelandic texts, indeed, we find the expression Frotha-frith, meaning “Frotha’s peace,” referring to just such a golden age of peace and wealth.
All this is in tune with Frodo’s compassion and attempts to avoid bloodshed in all his adventures. After the carnage of the war, Frodo the Wise becomes a respected counselor and peacemaker throughout Middle-earth. Certainly, within the Shire, Hobbits experience the equivalent of the Norse legend of Frotha-frith with Frodo’s Peace, the year after the Battle of Bywater, in the time of the First Blossoming of the Golden Tree of Hobbiton. The war-ravaged Shire is transformed and filled with Elvish enchantment. In that year, many children born to Hobbits are golden-haired and beautiful, and everything prospers in the Shire. This is the Great Year of Plenty that marks the beginning of a golden age of the Shire, the Age of Peace and Wealth.
FRODO BAGGINS The cousin, adopted “nephew,” and heir to Tolkien’s original Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins of Bag End. Tolkien’s acknowledgment that “names always generate a story in my mind” reveals a great deal about Hobbits in general, and Bilbo and Frodo Baggins in particular. In Frodo’s case there is a linguistic chain of logic: Frodo’s name in the original Hobbitish is Froda, and, as Tolkien knew well enough, fród in Old English meant “wise”; while its Norse equivalent Frothi was a name meaning “wise one.” Frodo, as well as being peace-loving, is depicted throughout The Lord of the Rings as thoughtful and measured, contrasting with the “half-wise” Sam Gamgee and the foolish Peregrin Took. At the end of the book he is celebrated as “Frodo the Wise” and “Frodo the Peacemaker.”
Deeper historical and mythical associations also contributed to the character and the destiny of the Ring-bearer. In Old English literature and Scandinavian mythology, the name Frodo (or Froda, Frothi, Frotha) is often connected with figures associated with peace.
FURIES In Greco-Roman mythology, the female chthonic deities who avenge crimes. Perhaps the best-known myth associated with the Furies—or the Erinyes—concerns the Greek hero Orestes who, after murdering his mother, Clytemnestra, is ruthlessly pursued by the goddesses. So great was the fear of their wrath that the Furies were often spoken of as the Eumenides (ironically meaning “the kindly ones”). These terrible avengers were variously described as having snakes for hair, coal-black bodies, bats’ wings, and blood-red eyes; they attacked their victims with blazing torches and many-thonged brass-studded whips.
In some respects, the Furies are comparable to Morgoth’s servants the terrifying Valaraukar (“cruel demons”), better known under their Sindarin name the Balrogs (“demons of might”). These spirits upon Middle-earth took the form of man-shaped giants shrouded in darkness with manes of fire, eyes that glowed like burning coals, and nostrils that breathed flame. Balrogs wielded many-thonged whips of fire in combination with a mace or flaming sword.
