[ Daily Tolkien ] Have you been to Valinor lately?

Suite 101 ^ | September 29, 2000 | Michael Martinez

[JameRetief]

Have you been to Valinor lately?

I thought I would depart from the intensive Lord of the Rings scrutiny I've engaged in lately and look at parts of the mythology which have crept into some of Tolkien's other works.

Traditionally we assign the Valinorean mythology to The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, The Road Goes Ever On, and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (although the only real aspect of it in the latter is the poem "The Last Ship", about a mortal woman who is invited to sail over sea by some Elves). The Valinor mythology, or myth, is the cycle of half-told tales which tells the "Biblical" portion of Tolkien's grand mythology. But Valinor in some ways stands on its own.

The realm of the Valinor is a magical land, far beyond the western seas, where Elves and angels dwell. It is not heaven, not for humankind, and really not for Elven kind. It is simply a paradise which has been denied to Men (although another paradise was set up for Men). Heaven is where God dwells, Iluvatar, Eru, the One, the All-father. In the end we may all meet up there, Elves, Men, Dwarves, and Angels. Or we may not. We don't really know for sure.

While part of the physical world we call Ambar (or Imbar), Valinor was merely another continent out of several. It could be reached by mortal Men, and was, but it was forbidden to them. As for the Elves, Valinor lay beyond the reach of many of them, too, except by death. The mythology of Valinor therefore includes the story of where Elves go when they die. It is not so much an Elf heaven as the final abode for Elven spirits (while Time lasts, that is). That they may be re-embodied there is insubstantial. If an Elf of Middle-earth dies, his or her spirit may pass westward to the Halls of Mandos.

Valinor, however, is also the abode of the rightful guardians of the world, the spiritual powers who are charged with watching over it. Iluvatar may intervene in the world's affairs, as he does more than once, but it is the responsibility of the guardians to at least know what is going on in the world. So even after Iluvatar took Valinor away from this physical world (and that is not to say he didn't make it a separate physical world -- it clearly remained a physical place where living beings could travel to, even if only Elves), the Valar were deeply concerned with events which occurred in the remaining world.

Middle-earth is thus a matter of grave concern to Valinor. Valinor is the "home" of the Valar but the Valar, and their servants the Maiar, must still watch and perhaps occasionally take action (at Iluvatar's direction) in Middle-earth. The mythology thus includes a purpose for Valinor beyond its own existence and the fate of the Elves. Middle-earth has a purpose beyond its own existence, but that purpose is of a different nature: it is the home of Men (and of those Elves who have elected to remain in Middle-earth).

But if Valinor is concerned with Middle-earth it is not permitted to interact directly with Middle-earth. The Valar represent primordial powers, the very essence of Nature's strength. When they undertake action mountains move, seas heave, and lands are crushed and broken, or rise up. It's a very delicate task to work with Middle-earth's history and not disrupt it, derailing Iluvatar's plans. So as Time progresses the Valar become more a part of distant memory and eventually mythology and less a part of the affairs of Middle-earth.

We can glimpse the mythical Valinor in stories like Smith of Wootton Major, where Smith wanders into Faery:

 

In Faery at first he walked for the most part quietly among the lesser folk and the gentler creatures in the woods and meads of fair valleys, and by the bright waters in which at night strange stars shone and at dawn the gleaming peaks of far mountains were mirrored.

The stars of Faery are not the stars of Earth, Middle-earth. Faery has been far removed from that part of the universe we have come to know. Smith discovers that Faery itself is just a small part of a larger world:

 

When he first began to walk far without a guide he thought he would discover the further bounds of the land; but great mountains rose before him, and going by long ways round about them he came at last to a desolate shore. He stood beside the Sea of Windless Storm where the blue waves like snowclad hills roll silently out of Unlight to the long strand, bearing the white ships that return from Battles on the Dark Marches of which men know nothing. He saw a great ship cast high upon the land, and the waters fell back in foam without a sound. The elven mariners were tall and terrible; their swords shone and their spears glinted and a piercing light was in their eyes. Suddenly they lifted up their voices in a song of triumph and his heart was shaken with fear, and he fell upon his face, and they passed over him and went away into the echoing hills.

What should the Dark Marches be that the Elves of Faery must venture out in their white ships upon the Sea of Windless Storm? The battles they wage there are unknown to men, undocumented and uncelebrated, except in brief glimpses in stories like "Smith".

Smith wanders through Faery and has encounter after encounter. The land is enchanted but it is natural and not so much mysterious as simply different. He finds the Inner Mountains and eventually the Vale of Evermorn, the heart of Faery, where the land is richer and more vibrant than anything in mortal experience. There he dances with the Queen of Faery, who years later tells him, when he recalls the little figure on the cake for the Feast of Twenty-four which was meant to represent her, "Better a little doll, maybe, than no memory of Faery at all."

That is the way Faery, or Valinor, is remembered. As Frodo sails toward Tol Eressea he sees "white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise". Resembling the dream he had had in Bombadil's house, the vision is the only glimpse of far Aman, the Blessed Land, in The Lord of the Rings. But it's not the only glimpse for readers of Tolkien.

Besides Smith of Wootton Major there is also Roverandom. Roverandom is a small metal dog who is given life by a wizard. The story is based on a toy one of Tolkien's sons lost, but it follows the author's purest flights of fancy as he wanders to the moon and back in a fashion that even the Elves would envy. In his merry (and some not-so-merry) adventures the enchanted dog finds himself visiting the Mer-folk under the sea. Roverandom is befriended by another enchanted dog, Rover, and together they go traveling with an ancient whale, old Uin. One day, Uin takes them farther than ever before:

 

Another time he took them to the other side (or as near as he dared), and that was a still longer and more exciting journey, the most marvellous of all Roverandom's travels, as he realised later, when he was grown to be an older and a wiser dog. It would take the whole of another story, at least, to tell you of all their adventures in Uncharted Waters and of their glimpses of lands unknown to geography, before they passed the Shadowy Seas and reached the great Bay of Fairyland (as we call it) beyond the Magic Isles; and saw far off in the last West the Mountains of Elvenhome and the light of Faery upon the waves. Roverandom thought he caught a glimpse of the city of the Elves on the green hill beneath the Mountains, a glint of white far away; but Uin dived again so suddenly that he could not be sure. If he was right, he was one of very few creatures, on two legs or four, who can walk about our own lands and say they have glimpsed that other land, however far away.

Roverandom is, unfortunately, an undeveloped text. Written and completed in 1925, it was set aside for many years and Tolkien never returned to it. Had he done so he undoubtedly would have written more about the ill-tempered wizards, the man in the moon, the Mer-folk, and perhaps even the Elves of Elvenhome (whose city on the hill in the mountains still stands after millennia, though Tirion upon Tuna is said to have been destroyed in "Akallabeth").

The mythology of Valinor is glimpsed when old Uin turns away. He has dared the forbidden, bringing creatures from the Outer Lands to view the enchanted shores of the forbidden realm. Valinor is a land of which we may dream, but we may never live there. Nor should we think of visiting.

It is the myth of Valinor itself which persuades men to seek for it. An immortal land where immortals dwell, can a man perhaps himself find immortality there? Or, if not immortality, will he at least find a memory which lives within him brighter than all other memories? The myth is a dangerous one best forgotten, or only remembered in the form of a small doll, which poses no threat, wakes no imagination, rouses no desire.

In The Road to Middle-earth Professor Tom Shippey, like so many critics, dwells upon the odious literary qualities of the stories. Rather than appreciate the tales for tales in themselves, he absolves himself of guilt by pointing out for the reader that he was once warned by Professor Tolkien not to look too deeply beneath the covers of the book, and being so warned he is well able to avoid the pitfalls inherently bound up with seeking sources...or so he hopes.

But the pitfalls of seeking sources cannot be avoided, because in order to seek the sources of a story one must dissect the story, and "he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom". The "path of wisdom" is itself a treacherous thing. The Wise often fall from the path, or stumble. The wise Eldar rebelled against the Valar and left Valinor, and in Middle-earth they found a terrible doom, even one much worse than the inevitable defeat at the hands of Melkor. For if Valinor is denied to Men, Middle-earth is ultimately denied to Elves, who must fade and be forgotten, except perhaps as dolls atop special cakes.

Shippey finds clear semblance between the characters of Smith and Tolkien's own profession of philology, identifying even Smith himself with Tolkien:

 

If the old Cook is a philologist-figure, and Nokes a critic-figure, the suspicion must be that Smith is a Tolkien-figure. Smith himself never becomes Cook, never bakes a Great Cake. It is perhaps fair to remark that Tolkien never produced a major full-length work on medieval literature. Against that Smith's life is one of useful activity: pots, pans, bars, bolts, hinges, fire-dogs -- or, one might say, lectures, tutorials, scripts, pupils. Furthermore Smith has the ability to pass into Fairie, and the mark of his strangeness if not only on his brow but in his song: he brings back visions for others. These visions furthermore expand. The doll 'on one foot like a snow-maiden dancing', the maiden 'with flowing hair and kilted skirt' who drags Smith into the dance, the Queen 'in her majesty and her glory' -- all three are avatars of the Queen of Faerie, representing successively the tawdry images of former fantasy which are all the modern world has left, Tolkien's own first attempts to produce something truer and better, his final awareness that what he had attempted had grown under his hand, from Hobbit to Silmarillion. The image of Smith apologising for his people, and being forgiven -- 'Better a little doll, maybe, than no memory of Faery at all. For some the only glimpse. For some the awaking' -- might be taken without too much strain as Tolkien forgiving himself for 'Goblin Feet'. But still one is left with Alf.

Well, Alf is not so important as the fact that literary criticism, even the extraordinary kind which whips back the covers and reveals all the pages as Shippey's is able to do in one fashion or another, misses the enchantment of Valinor. The Valinor myth is not an allegory or an expression of wistfulness. It's the fulfillment of Tolkien's search for an explanation of what men have sought before him. That is, it's the land to which magic fled, the world where all the faeries and angels settled to watch us from afar, knowing more of our destiny than we do, but forbidden to share that knowledge with us. If we visit the forbidden land we cannot stay and we must quickly hide our memories in little cherished trinkets which have greater symbolic value than anything else.

The Valinor myth is the stumbling stone in the path of everyone who seeks to explain Tolkien's world. He had more than one world, he possessed a universe and was a dweller amid many worlds. But all those worlds were touched by the same myth. Tolkien never produced a great work on medieval literature because he was too busy producing a great work on something more important, something only he could define. Valinor is hinted at in medieval literature, and perhaps in more ancient traditions. But the literary criticism fails to see it, and the unfolding pages are always too quickly flipped back, leaving two or more swept together.

Leave it to a literary critic, one might say, to miss the whole point of a story. The story is meant to entertain and to elucidate. It may also illuminate, but illumination is a gift from afar that an author may not even be aware of, and the reader doesn't fully taste. It is the star within the cake, the gift of Faerie to mortal lands.

In the twilight of our dreams we glimpse afar a place where Tolkien walked and danced and watched immortal warriors march to and from ancient wars no one here remembers. If another author were to set pen to paper Valinor would become a dry and dusty place, filled with modern fears and shadows, bereft of magic and distilled from glittery explanations of every detail. The Outer Mountains would be named, the Inner Mountains would be geographically mapped, the distance from Here to There would be calculated, the Uncharted Waters would be mapped, and the singing would fail.

The savage burdens of the Elves would become subsumed by petty mortal angst and ambition. Every motive would rival the source of cheap thrillers. Every action would become a reflection of trite and formulaic fiction. Why? Because Tolkien didn't dwell on what the thing was, he dwelt on the thing itself. He didn't wonder after the sources of the myth but cherished the myth and passed it on.

The Valinor myth is not a statement on our own failures and desires. It is simply an explanation of what we have sought through the long ages, and have come close to grasping. A few of us have glimpsed it, but either out of fear -- or a realization that we didn't belong -- those favored few did not settle there. Instead they returned to us and passed on the star, and every now and then some old Nokes comes along and tries to figure out what the star is.

He doesn't realize that Alf is sitting there, the King of Faery, watching, smiling, and waiting for the next generation to grow up. The cake is there for us to eat it. The star is there for us to wear on our brows. But we'll lose the magic if we try to define it, if we peak beneath the covers. If we break the thing to see what it is, we'll leave the path of wisdom, and we'll miss out on Valinor.

Author: Michael Martinez
Published on: September 29, 2000
Michael Martinez is the author of Visualizing Middle-earth

[JameRetief]

The Daily Tolkien articles by various authors	The Tolkien Virgin articles by Mark-Edmond
ARTICLES 01-10	ARTICLES 01-10
ARTICLES 11-20	ARTICLES 11-20
ARTICLES 21-30	ARTICLES 21-30
ARTICLES 31-40	31) The Hobbit - Chapter 8
ARTICLES 41-50
ARTICLES 51-60
ARTICLES 61-70
71) The Division of Arnor
72) Have you been to Valinor lately?

[JameRetief]

Your Daily Tolkien Ping!

Coming from many sources, these articles cover many aspects of Tolkien and his literary works. If anyone would like for me to ping them directly when I post articles such as this let me know. Enjoy!

[ecurbh]

Ring Ping!!