I don’t like this chapter.
Voronwë, perhaps you can tell us when The Fall was written relative to other pieces of the Sil? I have the impression that this was one of the earlier things that Tolkien wrote, and that it was connected later at both ends in revision.
The reason I think this way about it ... at one point on TORC someone posted a link to the Kalavela in English and I read goodly chunk of it. That was, if you all recall, one of the earliest pieces of epic lit that Tolkien translated. I was struck how much of it found its way into the Sil, albeit with elvish props, and I was also somewhat disappointed to discover this.
Chapter 13 reads to me as if it were lifted in its entirety from Norse myth.
There’s just too much skein of doom, with this relentless Morgothian malice pitted against an indifferent Valinor, while elves and men are pawns in a battle whose scale they can’t comprehend. If there is one thing
missing from this chapter, it is a notion of
estel. Not one single good deed goes unpunished.
I don’t consider this tale at all representative of where Tolkien ultimately took his stories, and I speculate within myself whether he did not effectively transcribe lots of Norse myth just to see how it would ‘set’ in English. And I don’t think he can have been very happy with the doom of Beleriand because the providence which stands by while the Halls of Mandos fill with dead elves is very different from the providence that aids Frodo.
Can you imagine, for example, Frodo killing Sam while under the mad influence of the ring? We can hardly entertain Tolkien writing something like this into LotR, not just because of the snares it would create but because the providential perspective of LotR does not entertain acts of this nature that would inevitably lead to despair. When it comes time for Frodo to ‘fail,’ the quest itself does not in fact fail because providence has brought a whole community’s history of mercy to bear on this moment in favor of The Good. (I think I’ve talked about this notion before.)
In the Sil, by contrast, in spite of best elvish intentions and remorse for evil deeds done, and being caught between loyalty to kin and the memory of Valinor (not to mention the Edain who are drawn into this fate like small fishes oblivious to the net), every single hero in the Sil fails. Everyone fails. Everyone dies. Everyone despairs.
There is only this clue that from one pocket of survivors of Beleriand may come hope in the future .... but we know this only in retrospect. If one knew nothing of Eärendil, the prospect of these survivors would be utterly desperate.
And even in the fate of Eärendil I see a re-echoing of Norse fatalism. You will not wrest
anything from the gods - not one minute of life, not one minute of reprieve from a rash and regretted oath, not one Silmaril, not one drop of light from the trees, nothing. There is the world of the gods and the world of everyone else, and whimsy toward everyone else is the prerogative of the gods. Nothing that they claim as ‘theirs’ will you be allowed to keep.
I think there is a lot to be said about Fëanor’s choice (to withhold the Silmarils) and the free will of the oath-takers, but Fëanor is a sort of elvish mirror of the Valar themselves. He is jealous of his own creation and beside himself, so to speak, when it is destroyed. He not more immovable in his oath than Mandos is in his Doom. Given the fact that they are gods, the Valar don’t come off very well in this tale. They are selfish, petulant, moribund, vengeful toward those weaker than themselves, cowardly toward those stronger .... in short, very far from the view of god that Christianity holds (and Judaism).
The Valar do not change their essence in LotR, but there is a sense that Eru is no longer content with their indifference either and intervenes directly, as in the restoration of Olórin. The perspective which the storyteller gives to the reader has now changed and is more consistent with what we know Tolkien’s own beliefs to have been.
I’m not a big fan of Norse myth, personally, and I think that the Sil’s heavy leaning on Doom has been one of the things that has always made it a difficult read for me. As I read these middle chapters, where one hero after another is destroyed by wildest coincidence or by rashest action I feel like saying, “Pullllllease, get a grip.” The iteration of disasters is just so ... implausible. Either only the tragic endings are being told, or the original author’s pessimistic world view has been compressed into one horrifically tragic tale, but it does not resemble in essence the view offered in LotR.
Jn
.
)
(and, I believe, really must be at the heart of any serious discussion of the Silmarillion). I myself go back and forth (like a small sapling waving in the wind) between the two concepts.
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