#subcreation

I’ve gotten several messages about ‘this bird my soul’ recently, which is wild since I haven’t touched it in at least a year (years?) However, I’m always happy to answer a good question.

Most of what Tolkien has to say about Harad is less about Harad and more about Gondor’s relationship to Umbar---a port city in Near Harad settled by the Númenóreans, and the colony that most strongly resisted Sauron’s influence. (Umbar and Pelargir, Gondor’s main harbor, are considered Middle Earth’s legacy from sea-faring Númenór.) After Númenór falls, though, the Haradrim are painted as following/having fallen to Sauron. They are labeled “Black Númenóreans” in opposition to the early Gondorian kings; Umbar is fought over, a conflict exacerbated by Gondor’s expansion into territory held by the Northmen, Easterlings, and Haradrim. Eventually---and by that I mean two pages later in Appendix A---the Wainriders also make alliances with “men of Khand and Near Harad.”

(That’s another thing: Tolkien doesn’t paint “Harad” as a nation-state on the level of Gondor or Rohan; Near Harad and Far Harad are simply geographic regions where the Haradrim live.)

Umbar doesn’t return to Gondorian control until the Fourth Age, when Aragorn marches through with the reunited armies of Gondor and Arnor and takes it back. Symbolically this is important, since it means Aragorn reunites the Númenórean Empire-in-Exile. You...can interpret that how you want.

Anyway, in terms of how the Haradrim are described: they’re “warlike” with brown skin and black hair, they wear red livery. They carry scimitars, though it’s archers and spearmen who ride into battle on oliphaunts/mûmakil. They dress ornately for battle: “Gold rings in their ears; yes, lots of beautiful gold,” to quote Gollum, and the Haradrim soldier who dies in front of Sam has gold plaited in his hair.

Aaaand......that’s it. Everything else I’ve described about Harad in “this bird my soul” is either borrowed from the Mughal Empire (red sandstone palaces and kathak dance, the zenana, the empire) or something I personally made up.

The closest analogue might not even be the Mughal Empire! Tolkien describes the Haradrim’s spears as being “red tipped”---he could definitely mean the Chinese qiang, with its red horsehair tassel. War elephants always evoke Hannibal of Carthage for me, so maybe the back and forth between Umbar and Gondor is Middle Earth’s equivalent of the Punic Wars. (I strongly suspect their influence, especially considering Númenór’s pseudo-Atlantean origins and Carthage as a Phoenician city turned empire.) The scimitar is of Middle Eastern extraction, but the curved sabre carried by the Hussars is similar---and they were known for their elaborate red uniforms.

Context for and continuation of the previous post: I recently read through portions of the Revised Edition of Jane Chance’s Mythology of Power (which is...OK on the whole, but not quite what I was looking/hoping for). Yesterday I found another couple boxes of my old books, including some of my missing Tolkien collection (still no Morgoth’s Ring though! 🤬). In this box was a heavily underlined and notated copy of the first edition of the same book. I have NO MEMORY of reading this previously, yet obviously I did, and some bits are clearly Tolkien-related things that I have internalized very deeply.

One bit in particular struck me, though the idea that follows from it is neither relevant to Chance’s point in the immediate context of the chapter nor, indeed, does it represent anything particularly new as far as Tolkien scholarship goes: that Tolkien’s first love, language creation (and by extension philology), has imbedded within it the act of ordering The World for both the language creator and all speakers of said language(1), and that this is an expression of sub creative potential most directly associated with Sauron, at least by the time of the publication of The Lord of the Rings(2).

Sauron represents fundamentally good impulses associated with subcreation gone wrong in a manner very distinct from Melkor, and some of those subcreative activities are those closest to Tolkien’s heart.

This ordering is subjective and philosophical (if very real on an individual psychological level) when done by human beings, but when done by an Ainur or even, perhaps, one of the Eldar, may become objective in the sense of literal material restructuring of Arda/Ea.

One among many things that I have been working on in the past couple of weeks...

Alcohol ink, chalk pastels and micron pen on 36x48 pastel paper. Yes it’s big...