THE NATURE OF MIDDLE-EARTH
Late Writings on the Lands, Inhabitants, and Metaphysics of Middle-earth
J.R.R. Tolkien
Edited by Carl F. Hostetter
Copyright
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Source ISBN: 9780008387921
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Version: 2021-08-17
Dedication
Enyalien
CHRISTOPHER REUEL TOLKIEN
21 Nov. 1924 – 16 Jan. 2020
and for
Alex, Aidan, Collin, and Caylee
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
Editorial Practices
Abbreviations & Conventions
PART ONE: TIME AND AGEING
Introduction
I The Valian Year
II Valinorian Time-Divisions
III Of Time in Arda
IV Time-scales
V Natural Youth and Growth of the Quendi
VI The Awaking of the Quendi
VII The March of the Quendi
VIII Eldarin Traditions Concerning the “Awakening”
IX Time-scales and Rates of Growth
X Difficulties in Chronology
XI Ageing of Elves
XII Concerning the Quendi in their Mode of Life and Growth
XIII Key Dates
XIV Calculation of the Increase of the Quendi
XV A Generational Scheme
XVI Note on the Youth and Growth of the Quendi
XVII Generational Schemes
XVIII Elvish Ages & Númenórean
XIX Elvish Life-cycles
XX Time and its Perception
XXI Notes on Elvish Time-reference
XXII A Fragment from The Annals of Aman
XXIII A Fragment from The Grey Annals
PART TWO: BODY, MIND AND SPIRIT
Introduction
I Beauty and Goodness
II Gender and Sex
III Eldarin Hands, Fingers, and Numerals
IV Hair
V Beards
VI Descriptions of Characters
VII Mind-Pictures
VIII Knowledge and Memory
IX Ósanwe-kenta
X Notes on Órë
XI Fate and Free Will
XII The Knowledge of the Valar
XIII Spirit
XIV The Visible Forms of the Valar and Maiar
XV Elvish Reincarnation
XVI From The Statute of Finwë and Míriel
XVII Death
PART THREE: THE WORLD, ITS LANDS, AND ITS INHABITANTS
Introduction
I Dark and Light
II The Primal Impulse
III Powers of the Valar
IV The Making of Lembas
V Note on Elvish Economy
VI Dwellings in Middle-earth
VII The Founding of Nargothrond
VIII Manwë’s Ban
IX Elvish Journeys on Horseback
X Rider to “The White Rider”
XI Lives of the Númenóreans
XII The Ageing of Númenóreans
XIII Of the Land and Beasts of Númenor
XIV Note on the Consumption of Mushrooms
XV The Númenórean Catastrophe & End of “Physical” Aman
XVI Galadriel and Celeborn
XVII Silvan Elves and Silvan Elvish
XVIII Note on the Delay of Gil-galad and the Númenóreans
XIX Note on Dwarvish Voices
XX Note on the Dwarf Road
XXI From The Hunt for the Ring
XXII The Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor
APPENDICES
I Metaphysical and Theological Themes
II Glossary and Index of Quenya Terms
Footnotes
Notes
Index
Works by J.R.R. Tolkien
About the Publisher
FOREWORD
In his own foreword to Morgoth’s Ring (vol. X of The History of Middle-earth), Christopher Tolkien writes of his father that, at the end of the 1950s, and following the publication of The Lord of the Rings:
Meditating long on the world that he had brought into being and was now in part unveiled, he had become absorbed in analytic speculation concerning its underlying postulates. Before he could prepare a new and final Silmarillion he must satisfy the requirements of a coherent theological and metaphysical system, rendered now more complex in its presentation by the supposition of obscure and conflicting elements in its roots and its tradition.
Among the chief “structural” conceptions of the mythology that he pondered in those years were the myth of Light; the nature of Aman; the immortality (and death) of the Elves; the mode of their reincarnation; the Fall of Men and the length of their early history; the origin of the Orcs; and above all, the power and significance of Melkor-Morgoth, which was enlarged to become the ground and source of the corruption of Arda.
Christopher published a sizeable selection of and from Tolkien’s long meditation on his sub-created world in Morgoth’s Ring and the subsequent two volumes of The History of Middle-earth, but by no means all. The texts in this volume constitute a significant part and a fuller record of his “analytic speculation concerning its underlying postulates”. They comprise the “writings about Middle-earth and Aman that are of a primarily philosophic or speculative nature” that were not included in the latter volumes of The History of Middle-earth; as well as those of a descriptive and/or historical nature, chiefly concerning the lands and peoples of Númenor and Middle-earth, that were not included in Unfinished Tales. These texts and this book are very much of a piece with significant portions of the aforementioned volumes, and will be of greatest interest to those who take particular interest in them.
Like The Lord of the Rings, this book has been long in the making. I have in a sense been working on this book – though for long I had no awareness or notion that I was doing so – for nearly 25 years. In 1997, in my capacity as one of the authorized editors of his father’s linguistic papers, I received from Christopher Tolkien a bundle of photocopies of various manuscript and typescript materials, which he referred to collectively as “late philological essays”. As this designation rightly implies, all of the materials in this bund
le are concerned to some degree with linguistic matters; but as is often the case in Tolkien’s post-Lord of the Rings non-narrative writings, the linguistic matters that occasioned each essay led Tolkien into long (seeming) digressions, either because they explain the historical, cultural, mythological and/or metaphysical situations that various words and phrases reflect; or simply because Tolkien wished to pursue some idea or point that occurred to him at that time. I edited and published three essays from this bundle in the journal Vinyar Tengwar first, “Ósanwe-kenta”, a far-ranging essay on thought-communication, in VT 39 in July 1998; “Notes on Órë”, a consideration of the inner warning and advising faculty of Incarnates, in VT 41 in July 2000; and “The Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor”, a lengthy discussion of the names and characteristics of those geographic features, in VT 42 in July 2001. (Christopher had in fact prepared an edition of the latter text for inclusion in The Peoples of Middle-earth, but it was cut for lack of space.) A fourth long essay from this bundle, supplemented with related materials found in Tolkien’s linguistic papers, was edited by Patrick Wynne and published in three parts as “Eldarin Hands, Fingers, and Numerals” in VT 46–49 from February 2005 to June 2007. (The first three texts are published here as chapters IX and X of part two, and chapter XXII of part three, respectively. The fourth, in considerably reduced form, is published as chapter III of part two.)
Following the publication of my editions of “Ósanwe-kenta” and “The Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor”, and knowing of my great interest in these and similar philosophical, historical, and descriptive writings by Tolkien, even apart from their linguistic elements, Christopher asked me to assist French scholar Michaël Devaux in preparing an edition of the (mostly) unpublished materials concerning Elvish reincarnation that Christopher alludes to in several places in both Morgoth’s Ring and The Peoples of Middle-earth, and which he had sent to Devaux. This edition, together with Devaux’s French translation and commentary, was eventually published in the journal La Feuille de la Compagnie vol. 3 in 2014. (These writings, in my own edition, are published here as chapter XV of part two and chapter XV of part three.)
This interest also explains why, beginning in the late summer of 2008, Christopher began sending me successive batches of photocopies of a large bundle of late (chiefly) manuscript writings, which had been collected together under the title “Time and Ageing”, for my consideration and thoughts on their possible disposition. As will be seen, many of these writings are quite unlike the vast bulk of Tolkien’s writings, featuring inter alia long tables and calculations regarding the maturation rate and population growth of the Eldar from the time of their awaking, to the time of the Great March, and through their arrival in Beleriand and beyond. Despite this technical and undeniably dry accounting, they nonetheless contain many interesting details of historical and cultural significance – e.g. the fact that Tolkien considered having not only the Vala Oromë instruct and guard the Elves at Cuiviénen, but also the Maia Melian, and those of her fellow Maiar that would later, in incarnate form, come (again?) to Middle-earth in the Third Age as the Istari, the Five Wizards that were sent by the Valar to encourage resistance to Sauron. These materials as a whole also exemplify not only Tolkien’s unsuspected (at least by me) mathematical skills and precision (in a time well before electronic calculators became affordable), but also his great concern for coherence and verisimilitude, as seen throughout his later writings.
After long study and pondering of the “Time and Ageing” materials, and thinking of the writings in the “late philological essays” (both published and unpublished), and further of certain likewise philosophical and cultural passages (again both published and unpublished) in Tolkien’s linguistic papers, similarly arising from etymological considerations – e.g. the essay I had edited and published as “Fate and Free Will” in Tolkien Studies 6 in 2009 (chapter XI of part two), and a long discussion of the nature of spirits according to Elvish thought that was edited and published by Christopher Gilson in issue 17 of his journal Parma Eldalamberon in 2007 (see chapter XIII of part two) – I began to discern how all this material might be organized together into a coherent book. This would allow me not only to publish such a substantial amount of material, which could not be accommodated in a journal, but also to bring it all to the wider audience I feel it deserves. Having come to this conclusion, I quickly chose to call this projected book The Nature of Middle-earth, as succinctly unifying these materials under the two main senses of the word “nature”: both the visible and sensible phenomena of the physical world, including its lands, flora, and fauna; and the metaphysical, innate, and essential qualities and character of the world and its inhabitants.
This book is divided into three broad categorical parts. Part one, “Time and Ageing”, is almost entirely composed of materials from the collection of the same name described above, though it is here and there supplemented with material from Tolkien’s linguistic papers. Part two, “Body, Mind, and Spirit”, and part three, “The World, Its Lands, and Its Inhabitants”, are composed of materials from three chief sources: a) the bundle of “late philological essays” sent to me in 1997; b) material drawn from Tolkien’s linguistic papers; and c) particularly in part three, material collected by me over the years from the two principal archives of Tolkien manuscripts at the Bodleian in Oxford and at Marquette University in Milwaukee. I have re-edited those materials that have been previously published in specialist journals to make them more accessible to a general audience, chiefly by removing or minimizing passages and commentary that are principally concerned with linguistic details. There is of course inevitably some overlap within particular texts among these three broad categories, but the distribution of texts among them, and the ordering of texts within each part, are what seem most sensible to me.
It is a pleasure to gratefully acknowledge the assistance of many people in the compilation and completion of this book. Catherine McIlwaine, the Tolkien Archivist at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, and William Fliss, Archivist of the Special Collections and University Archives at the Raynor Memorial Libraries of Marquette University in Milwaukee, have been extremely helpful and enthusiastic supporters of this book. I am also extremely grateful to Cathleen Blackburn and all the Tolkien Estate, and to Chris Smith, Tolkien editor for HarperCollins, for making publication of this book possible. I am, like all Tolkien scholars and researchers, indebted to Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull for their exacting and exhaustive research and reference works, in particular the indispensable three-volume J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide. I was fortunate to be able to avail myself of John Garth’s extensive knowledge of Tolkien’s military experience, and his thoughtful assistance in locating certain texts in the Bodleian archives, in particular the Númenórean material in this book. Arden Smith and Charles Noad have both applied their formidable proofreading and fact-checking skills to the text (though of course any errors that remain are due solely to me). I am also grateful for the support, friendship, and encouragement of numerous Tolkien scholars and friends from around the world who have heard me read from some of the materials in this book over the years, including: David Bratman, Marjorie Burns, Michelle Markey Butler, Janice Coulter, Chip Crane, Jason Fisher, Matt Fisher, Verlyn Flieger, Christopher Gilson, Melody Green, Peter Grybauskas, Wayne Hammond, Yoko Hemmi, Gary Hunnewell, John Rateliff, Christina Scull, Eleanor Simpson, Arden Smith, Valah Steffen-Wittwer, Paul Thomas, Patrick Wynne, and the late, much-missed Vaughn Howland and Richard West.
Finally, my greatest gratitude is of course to Christopher Tolkien, who directly supplied me with most of the materials that have gone into this book and supported my idea to publish them in this manner. He was able to see and approve my book proposal, with a representative selection of my treatment and presentation of the texts, and my plan for the book as a whole, in the year before his passing. I am above all thankful for the kindness, encouragement, and sympathy he expressed to me in the course of our decades-long correspondence. I had the gre
at good fortune to count him as a friend, and I dedicate this book to his memory.
EDITORIAL PRACTICES
In order to make these texts as readable as possible, with minimal editorial intrusion, I have often silently: expanded abbreviations where their meaning is in no doubt; supplied punctuation, conjunctions, and other minor connecting words where Tolkien writing in greater haste has omitted them; and regularized capitalization and other spelling conventions, where such alterations are insignificant to the text or its meaning. I have however tended not to regularize spelling or, save where necessary for clarity, supplied punctuation or other additions to texts cited in the editorial notes. I have also made no attempt to either note or record where Tolkien has both made and subsequently corrected a mathematical error.
With the exception of more or less brief introductions, describing the manuscript or typescript of each text and providing a date (as nearly as possible) and other relevant context, all editorial commentary – chiefly detailing authorial and/or editorial alterations of any significance, citing significant differences among variant versions of a text, and cross-references to Tolkien’s other writings – has been placed in numbered end-notes to each text (or group of related texts), and need not be consulted by those not interested in such textual matters. Where editorial comments must be made within Tolkien’s own texts, they are distinguished as such by being set in a smaller type and indented from the textual margins.
Tolkien is inconsistent throughout in his use of single-quotes (inverted commas) and double-quotes. I have adopted the practice of using double-quotes for all quotations and phrases (except for quotes and phrases within quotes, for which single-quotes are used), and single-quotes for all glosses (actual or apparent): e.g. fëa ‘spirit’, hröa ‘body’.
Wherever practicable I have given Tolkien’s own footnotes and interpolated notes (frequent in his later writings) as footnotes on the page of the note’s referent. Where it is necessary to provide editorial end-notes to these footnotes (which my text editor does not permit) I place the end-note mark in square brackets next to the footnote mark: e.g., and indicate in the end-note upon which word or passage or matter in the footnote I am commenting.