#dooooooooooom

[Note: tumblr ate 80% of the first version of this post.  If you saw that for the five seconds it was up, this is the correct one.]

The copy of The Silmarillion I bought two years ago comes with a letter from Tolkien to his friend Milton Waldman, written in 1951.  In it, Tolkien tries to explain to his friend what his ‘imaginary world’ is all about.

The actual letter is 7k+ words, and while I know tumblr has no character limit, a large chunk of that is just Tolkien summarizing the plot of the Silmarillion, which wiki will do for you more succinctly and with less self-effacement.  So I’m just going to post the bits I found particularly interesting or insightful.

On the genesis of Arda and the importance of internal coherency:

“In order of time, growth and composition, this stuff began with me – though I do not suppose that that is of much interest to anyone but myself.  I mean, I do not remember a time when I was not building it.  Many children make up, or begin to make up, imaginary languages.  I have been at it since I could write.  But I have never stopped, and of course, as a professional philologist (especially interested in linguistic aesthetics), I have changed in taste, improved in theory, and probably in craft.  Behind my stories is now a nexus of languages (mostly only structurally sketched).  But to those creatures which in English I call misleadingly Elves are assigned two related languages more nearly completed, whose history is written, and whose forms (representing two different sides of my own linguistic taste) are deduced scientifically from a common origin.  Out of these languages are made nearly all the names that appear in my legends.  This gives a certain character (a cohesion, a consistency of linguistic style, and an illusion of historicity) to the nomenclature, or so I believe, that is markedly lacking in other comparable things. Not all will feel this as important as I do, since I am cursed by acute sensibility in such matters.”

On the necessity of Allegory to the construction of myth, and of the differences (or similarities) between Magic and Machine:

“I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.  (And, of course, the more ‘life’ a story has the more readily will it be susceptible of allegorical interpretations: while the better a deliberate allegory is made the more nearly will it be acceptable just as a story.) Anyway all this stuff (footnote: It is, I suppose, fundamentally concerned with the problem of the relation of Art [and Sub-creation] and Primary Reality.) is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine.  With Fall inevitably, and that motive occurs in several modes.  With Mortality, especially as it affects art and the creative (or as I should say, sub-creative) desire which seems to have no biological function, and to be apart from the satisfactions of plain ordinary biological life, with which, in our world, it is indeed usually at strife. This desire it at once wedded to a passionate love of the real primary world, and hence filled with the sense of mortality, and yet unsatisfied by it.  It has various opportunities of ‘Fall’.  It may become possessive, clinging to the things made as its own, the sub-creator wishes to be the Lord and God of his private creation.  He will rebel against the laws of the Creator – especially against mortality.  Both of these (alone or together) will lead to the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective, - and so to the Machine (or Magic).  By the last I intend all use of external plans or devices (apparatus) instead of developments of the inherent inner powers or talents – or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bull-dozing the real world, or coercing other wills.  The Machine is our more obvious modern form though more closely related to Magic than is usually recognised.”

On Elves and Men:

“The Children of God are thus primevally related and akin, and primevally different.  Since also they are something wholly ‘other’ to the gods, in the making of which the gods played no part, they are the object of the special desire and love of the gods.  These are the First-born, the Elves; and the Followers Men.  The doom of the Elves is to be immortal, to love the beauty of the world, to bring it to full flower with their gifts of delicacy and perfection, to last while it lasts, never leaving it even when ‘slain’, but returning – and yet, when the Followers come, to teach them, and make way for them, to ‘fade’ as the Followers grow and absorb the life from which both proceed.  The Doom (or the Gift) of Men is mortality, freedom from the circles of the world.  Since the point of view of the whole cycle is the Elvish, mortality is not explained mythically: it is a mystery of God which no more is known than that ‘what God has purposed for Men is hidden’: a grief and an envy to the immortal Elves.”

On the Doom of the Elves and their Fall:

“…we see a sort of second fall or at least ‘error’ of the Elves.  There was nothing wrong essentially in their lingering against counsel, still sadly with (footnote: [Some of the words of the original manuscript were omitted by the typist in this sentence.[) the mortal lands of their old heroic deeds.  But they wanted to have their cake without eating it.  They wanted the peace and bliss and perfect memory of ‘The West’, and yet to remain on the ordinary earth where their prestige as the highest people, above wild Elves, dwarves, and Men, was greater than at the bottom of the hierarchy of Valinor.  They thus became obsessed with ‘fading’, the mode in which the changes of time (the law of the world under the sun) was perceived by them.  They became sad, and their art (shall we say) antiquarian, and their efforts all really a kind of embalming – even though they also retained the old motive of their kind, the adornment of earth, and the healing of its hurts.  We hear of a lingering kingdom, in the extreme North-west more or less in what was left in the old lands of The Silmarillion, under Gilgalad; and of other settlements, such as Imladris (Rivendell) near Elrond; and a great one at Eregion at the Western feet of the Misty Mountains, adjacent to the Mines of Moria, the major realm of the Dwarves in the Second Age.  There arose a friendship between the usually hostile folk (of Elves and Dwarves) for the first and only time, and smithcraft reached its highest development.  But many of the Elves listened to Sauron.  He was still fair in that early time, and his motives and those of the Elves seemed to go partly together: the healing of the desolate lands.  Sauron found their weak point in suggesting that, helping one another, they could make Western Middle-earth as beautiful as Valinor.  It was really a veiled attack on the gods, an incitement to try and make a separate independent paradise.  Gilgalad repulsed all such overtures, as also did Elrond.  But at Eregion great work began – and the Elves came their nearest to falling to ‘magic’ and machinery.  With the aid of Sauron’s lore they made Rings of Power (‘power’ is an ominous and sinister word in all these tales, except as applied to the gods).”

On the Doom of Men and their Fall:

“The Downfall is partly the result of an inner weakness in Men – consequent, if you will, upon the first Fall (unrecorded in these tales), repented but not finally healed.  Reward on earth is more dangerous for men than punishment!  The Fall is achieved by the cunning of Sauron in exploiting this weakness.  Its central theme is (inevitably, I think, in a story of Men) a Ban, or Prohibition.

“The Númenóreans dwell within far sight of the easternmost ‘immortal’ land, Eressëa; and as the only men to speak an Elvish tongue (learned in the days of their Alliance) they are in constant communication with their ancient friends and allies, either in the bliss of Eressëa, or in the kingdom of Gilgalad upon the shores of Middle-earth.  They became thus in appearance, and even in powers of mind, hardly distinguishable from the Elves – but they remained mortal, even though rewarded by a triple, or more than a triple, span of years.  Their reward is their undoing – tor the means of their temptation.  Their long life aids their achievements in art and wisdom, but breeds a possessive attitude to these things, and desire awakes for more time for their enjoyment.”

On the Enemy:

“The Enemy in successive forms is always ‘naturally’ concerned with sheer Domination, and so the Lord of magic and machines; but the problem: that this frightful evil can and does arise from an apparently good root, the desire to benefit the world and others (footnote: Not in the Beginner of Evil: his was a sub-creative Fall, and hence the Elves [the representatives of sub-creation par excellence] were peculiarly his enemies, and the special object of his desire and hate – and open to his deceits.  Their Fall is into possessiveness and [to a less degree] into perversion of their art to power.) – speedily and according to the benefactor’s own plans – is a recurrent motive.”

She had to think for a good while. The Robonoids didn’t really mean all that much, and she hardly thought losing a few of the larger Plug variants counted. Frustrating to lose them, yes, but they were ultimately replaceable.