The Fall of Númenor Read online

The foregoing comments were a preface to his attempt at providing an outline of the events recorded in his complex legendarium, and which take place in the long Age preceding the one chronicled in the present volume.

  ‘The cycles begin,’ he wrote, ‘with a cosmogonical myth: the Music of the Ainur. God and the Valar… are revealed. These latter are, as we should say, angelic powers, whose function is to exercise delegated authority in their spheres… They are “divine”, that is, were originally “outside” and existed “before” the making of the world.’

  Following the creation story, the narrative of The Silmarillion continues as Tolkien outlined in his letter:

  It moves then swiftly to the History of the Elves, or the Silmarillion proper; to the world as we perceive it, but of course transfigured in a still half-mythical mode: that is it deals with rational incarnate creatures of more or less comparable stature with our own. 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.

  As I say, the legendary Silmarillion is peculiar, and differs from all similar things that I know… Its centre of view and interest is not Men but ‘Elves’. Men come in inevitably: after all the author is a man, and if he has an audience they will be Men and Men must come in to our tales, as such, and not merely transfigured or partially represented as Elves, Dwarfs, Hobbits, etc. But they remain peripheral – late comers, and however growingly important, not principals.

  The main body of the tale, the Silmarillion proper, is about the fall of the most gifted kindred of the Elves, their exile from Valinor (a kind of Paradise, the home of the Gods) in the furthest West, their re-entry into Middle-earth, the land of their birth but long under the rule of the Enemy, and their strife with him, the power of Evil still visibly incarnate. It receives its name because the events are all threaded upon the fate and significance of the Silmarilli (‘radiance of pure light’) or Primeval Jewels… but the Silmarilli were more than just beautiful things as such. There was Light. There was the Light of Valinor made visible in the Two Trees of Silver and Gold.2 These were slain by the Enemy out of malice, and Valinor was darkened, though from them, ere they died utterly, were derived the lights of Sun and Moon. (A marked difference here between these legends and most others is that the Sun is not a divine symbol, but a second-best thing, and the ‘light of the Sun’ (the world under the sun) become terms for a fallen world, and a dislocated imperfect vision).3

  But the chief artificer of the Elves (Fëanor) had imprisoned the Light of Valinor in the three supreme jewels, the Silmarilli, before the Trees were sullied or slain. This Light thus lived thereafter only in these gems. The fall of the Elves comes about through the possessive attitude of Fëanor and his seven sons to these gems. They are captured by the Enemy, set in his Iron Crown, and guarded in his impenetrable stronghold. The sons of Fëanor take a terrible and blasphemous oath of enmity and vengeance against all or any, even of the gods, who dares to claim any part or right in the Silmarilli. They pervert the greater part of their kindred, who rebel against the gods, and depart from paradise, and go to make hopeless war upon the Enemy. The first fruit of their fall is war in Paradise, the slaying of Elves by Elves, and this and their evil oath dogs all their later heroism, generating treacheries and undoing all victories. The Silmarillion is the history of the War of the Exiled Elves against the Enemy, which all takes place in the North-west of the world (Middle-earth). Several tales of victory and tragedy are caught up in it; but it ends with catastrophe, and the passing of the Ancient World, the world of the long First Age. The jewels are recovered (by the final intervention of the gods) only to be lost for ever to the Elves, one in the sea, one in the deeps of earth, and one as a star of heaven. This legendarium ends with a vision of the end of the world, its breaking and remaking, and the recovery of the Silmarilli and the ‘light before the Sun’…

  As the stories become less mythical, and more like stories and romances, Men are interwoven. For the most part these are ‘good Men’ – families and their chiefs who rejecting the service of Evil, and hearing rumours of the Gods of the West and the High Elves, flee westward and come into contact with the Exiled Elves in the midst of their war. The Men who appear are mainly those of the Three Houses of the Fathers of Men, whose chieftains become allies of the Elflords. The contact of Men and Elves already foreshadows the history of the later Ages, and a recurrent theme is the idea that in Men (as they now are) there is a strand of ‘blood’ and inheritance, derived from the Elves, and that the art and poetry of Men is largely dependent on it, or modified by it.4 There are thus two marriages of mortal and elf – both later coalescing in the kindred of Eärendil, represented by Elrond the Half-elven who appears in all the stories, even The Hobbit. The chief of the stories of The Silmarillion, and the one most fully treated is the Story of Beren and Lúthien the Elfmaiden. Here we meet, among other things, the first example of the motive (to become dominant in Hobbits) that the great policies of world history, ‘the wheels of the world’, are often turned not by the Lords and Governors, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak – owing to the secret life in creation, and the part unknowable to all wisdom but One, that resides in the intrusions of the Children of God into the Drama. It is Beren the outlawed mortal who succeeds (with the help of Lúthien, a mere maiden even if an elf of royalty) where all the armies and warriors have failed: he penetrates the stronghold of the Enemy and wrests one of the Silmarilli from the Iron Crown. Thus he wins the hand of Lúthien and the first marriage of mortal and immortal is achieved.

  As such the story is (I think a beautiful and powerful) heroic-fairy-romance, receivable in itself with only a very general vague knowledge of the background. But it is also a fundamental link in the cycle, deprived of its full significance out of its place therein. For the capture of the Silmaril, a supreme victory, leads to disaster. The oath of the sons of Fëanor becomes operative, and lust for the Silmaril brings all the kingdoms of the Elves to ruin.

  Nevertheless, it was from the union of Beren and Lúthien Tinúviel that came the line of the Half-Elven, later numbering not just Elrond, Master of Rivendell, but also Elros, his twin brother and first King of Númenor and, in a further generation, would be seen in the children from another marriage between Man and Elf in the persons of Aragorn and the Lady Arwen. Tolkien continued:

  ‘There are other stories, almost equally full in treatment, and equally independent and yet linked to the general history. There is the Children of Húrin, the tragic tale of Túrin Turambar and his sister Níniel – of which Túrin is the hero… There is the Fall of Gondolin: the chief Elvish stronghold.5 And the tale, or tales, of Eärendil the Wanderer. He is important as the person who brings the Silmarillion to its end, and as providing in his offspring the main links to and persons in the tales of later Ages. His function, as a representative of both Kindreds, Elves and Men, is to find a sea-passage back to the Land of the Gods, and as ambassador persuade them to take thought again for the Exiles, to pity them, and rescue them from the Enemy. His wife Elwing descends from Lúthien and still possesses the Silmaril. But the curse still works, and Eärendil’s home is destroyed by the sons of Fëanor. But this provides the solution: Elwing casting herself into the Sea to save the Jewel comes to Eärendil, and with the power of the great Gem they pass at last to Valinor, and accomplish their errand – at the cost of never being allowed to return or dwell again with Elves or Men. The gods then move again, and great power comes out of the West, and the Stronghold of the Enemy is destroyed; and he himself [is] thrust out of the World into the Void, never to reappear there in incarnate form again. The remaining two S
ilmarils are regained from the Iron Crown – only to be lost. The last two sons of Fëanor, compelled by their oath, steal them, and are destroyed by them, casting themselves into the sea, and the pits of the earth. The ship of Eärendil adorned with the last Silmaril is set in heaven as the brightest star. So ends The Silmarillion and the tales of the First Age.

  THE TALE OF YEARS

  (Chronology of the Westlands)

  1 – FOUNDATION OF THE GREY HAVENS AND OF LINDON.

  In his 1955 appendices to The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote of the Second Age: ‘These were the dark years for Men of Middle-earth, but the years of the glory of Númenor.’1 In what Christopher Tolkien identified as his father’s first attempt at establishing a ‘Time Scheme’ (later to become ‘The Tale of Years’) the Second Age was described as, ‘the “Black Years” or the age between the Great Battle and defeat of Morgoth, and the Fall of Númenor and the overthrow of Sauron.’2

  These vastly conflicted times and, in particular, the monumental tragedy represented by Númenor – greatness established but then brought low and destroyed – resulted, through the chronicling of the Second Age, in both the shaping of the history of Middle-earth and the physical re-shaping of the whole world: a story that provides a powerful and far-reaching prelude to the great drama of the War of the Ring.

  The story begins in the closing days of Year 587 of the First Age:

  In the Great Battle and the tumults of the fall of Thangorodrim there were mighty convulsions in the earth, and Beleriand was broken and laid waste; and northward and westward many lands sank beneath the waters of the Great Sea. In the east, in Ossiriand, the walls of Ered Luin were broken, and a great gap was made in them towards the south, and a gulf of the sea flowed in. Into that gulf the River Lhûn fell by a new course, and it was called therefore the Gulf of Lhûn. That country had of old been named Lindon by the Noldor [those of the second clan of the Elves] and this name it bore thereafter.3

  At the end of the First Age, the Valar held counsel and the Eldar in Middle-earth were summoned – ‘if not commanded, at least sternly counselled’ – to return to the West and there to be at peace.4

  Those that hearkened to the summons dwelt in the Isle of Eressëa;5 and there is in that land a haven that is named Avallónë,6 for it is of all cities the nearest to Valinor, and the tower of Avallónë is the first sight that the mariner beholds when at last he draws nigh to the Undying Lands over the leagues of the Sea.7

  Not all the Elven-kind answered the Valar’s call but dwelt still in Middle-earth ‘lingering, unwilling yet to forsake Beleriand where they had fought and laboured long’. Gil-galad son of Fingon was their king, and with him was Elrond Half-elven, son of Eärendil the Mariner and brother of Elros first king of Númenor.8

  Commenting on this, in his 1951 letter to Milton Waldman, Tolkien wrote: ‘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* 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 Gil-galad.’

  In the beginning of this age many of the High Elves still remained. Most of these dwelt in Lindon west of the Ered Luin; but before the building of the Barad-dûr many of the Sindar passed eastward, and some established realms in the forests far away, where their people were mostly Silvan Elves. Thranduil, king in the north of Greenwood the Great, was one of these. In Lindon north of the Lune dwelt Gil-galad, last heir of the kings of the Noldor in exile. He was acknowledged as High King of the Elves of the West. In Lindon south of the Lune dwelt for a time Celeborn, kinsman of Thingol; his wife was Galadriel, greatest of Elven women. She was sister of Finrod Felagund, Friend-of-Men, once king of Nargothrond, who gave his life to save Beren son of Barahir.

  Later some of the Noldor went to Eregion, upon the west of the Misty Mountains, and near to the West-gate of Moria. This they did because they learned that mithril had been discovered in Moria. The Noldor were great craftsmen and less unfriendly to the Dwarves than the Sindar; but the friendship that grew up between the people of Durin and the Elven-smiths of Eregion was the closest that there has ever been between the two races. Celebrimbor was Lord of Eregion and the greatest of their craftsmen; he was descended from Fëanor.9

  [Galadriel] did not go West at the Downfall of Melkor [Morgoth], but crossed Ered Lindon with Celeborn and came into Eriador. When they entered that region there were many Noldor in their following, together with Grey-elves and Green-elves; and for a while they dwelt in the country about Lake Nenuial (Evendim, north of the Shire). Celeborn and Galadriel came to be regarded as Lord and Lady of the Eldar in Eriador, including the wandering companies of Nandorin origin who had never passed west over Ered Lindon and come down into Ossiriand.10

  [Of Galadriel it is said that she] was strong of body, mind, and will, a match for both the loremasters and the athletes of the Eldar in the days of their youth. Even among the Eldar she was accounted beautiful and her [golden] hair was held a marvel unmatched… and the Eldar said that the light of the Two Trees, Laurelin and Telperion, had been snared in her tresses… From her earliest years she had a marvellous gift of insight into the minds of others, but judged them with mercy and understanding…11

  In the account of the visit of the Fellowship of the Ring to Caras Galadhon in the February of year TA 3019, we have a description of Celeborn and Galadriel:

  The chamber was filled with a soft light; its walls were green and silver and its roof of gold. Many Elves were seated there. On two chairs beneath the bole of the tree and canopied by a living bough there sat, side by side, Celeborn and Galadriel. They stood up to greet their guests, after the manner of Elves, even those who were accounted mighty kings. Very tall they were, and the Lady no less tall than the Lord; and they were grave and beautiful. They were clad wholly in white; and the hair of the Lady was of deep gold, and the hair of the Lord Celeborn was of silver long and bright; but no sign of age was upon them, unless it were in the depths of their eyes; for these were keen as lances in the starlight, and yet profound, the wells of deep memory.12

  Writing in Unfinished Tales, Christopher Tolkien opined: ‘There is no part of the history of Middle-earth more full of problems than the story of Galadriel and Celeborn’, and readers wishing for a better understanding of that story should consult ‘The History of Galadriel and Celeborn’, Christopher’s lengthy essay on the subject, which is included in Part Two of that work.13

  Upon the shores of the Gulf of Lhûn the Elves built their havens, and named them Mithlond; and there they held many ships, for the harbourage was good. From the Grey Havens the Eldar ever and anon set sail, fleeing from the darkness of the days of Earth; for by the mercy of the Valar the Firstborn could still follow the Straight Road and return, if they would, to their kindred in Eressëa and Valinor beyond the encircling seas.14

  At the end of the First Age, while the Eldar were summoned to take ship for the West, a different fate was presented to Elros and Elrond, the sons of Eärendil, who were descended from a union between the Eldar and Man-kind and known as the Peredhil, or Half-elven. To them the Valar gave ‘an irrevocable choice to which kindred they would belong.’15

  Elrond chose to be of Elven-kind, and became a master of wisdom. To him therefore was granted the same grace as to th
ose of the High Elves that still lingered in Middle-earth: that when weary at last of the mortal lands they could take ship from the Grey Havens and pass into the Uttermost West; and this grace continued after the change of the world. But to the children of Elrond a choice was also appointed: to pass with him from the circles of the world; or if they remained to become mortal and die in Middle-earth. For Elrond, therefore, all chances of the War of the Ring were fraught with sorrow.

  Elros chose to be of Man-kind and remain with the Edain; but a great lifespan was granted to him many times that of lesser men.16

  32 – THE EDAIN REACH NÚMENOR.1

  The Valar, the ‘Guardians of the World’ who had been delegated by Eru Ilúvatar the All-Powerful transcendent creator, to shape and rule the world, also took thought for the fate of the race of Men, or Edain as they were called in the Sindarin language of the Elves. The tribes of Men who had become friends and noble allies of the Elves, fighting alongside them in the struggles against Morgoth, were of three Houses: the House of Bëor, known as the First House of the Edain; the House of Haleth was the Second House, known by among other names as the Folk of Haleth, the Haladin; and the Third House was the Folk of Marach, later best known as the House of Hador. The history of their lives and deeds during the First Age is told in The Silmarillion.2

  The Valar, having taken council, determined to offer the Edain a means of being removed ‘from the dangers of Middle-earth’.3 The Valar, aided by Maiar who were primordial spirit beings ‘of the same order as the Valar but of less degree… their servants and helpers’4, brought into existence the island of Númenor.