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ancamnarvienn · 6 days ago

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Aredhel, the White lady of the Noldor

Aredhel, "Noble Lady", the White Lady of the Noldor, is also the one "who loved much to ride and hunt in the forests". Her white garments must be speckled with blood.

"Ar-Feniel she was called, the White Lady of the Noldor, for she was pale, though her hair was dark, and she was never arrayed but in silver and white."

White and pale, signifiers of purity, she was "often in the company of the sons of Fëanor, her kin ; but to none was her heart's love given".

This is a pattern, for Aredhel : always looking after the "wrong" male relatives, always for the "wrong" reasons. She is "often" with the sons of Fëanor when in Aman, the least obvious choice of companions - yes, her slightly rebellious older brother, Fingon, is at one point friend with Maedhros, but it doesn't last and her more respectable brother, Turgon, is instead friend with the sons of Finarfin.

And it's not even out of love, an acceptable motive for transcending family feuds, that she seeks the company of her least respectable cousins. It's because she enjoys being with them, and the freedom they allow her. In an Elven society where her options are limited, Aredhel is not the one who is going to bridge the gap between the House of Fëanor and the House of Fingolfin by conveniently falling in love with one of her cousins. One assumes she is having too much fun for that. One can imagine the slightly disapproving looks in that sentence "but to none was her heart's love given". And doesn't her Quenya name mean "Desirable Lady" ?

Is Aredhel even Fingolfin's daughter ? They are never mentioned together - Aredhel is always either with her cousins, going from one brother to the other, always seeking an escape, never, it seems, submitting to a paternal authority that is eventually delegated to her brother Turgon (she is "under his protection"). She goes into exile with her family, but unlike Galadriel, we are given no motive for that, and she isn't even mentioned at all during the flight of the Noldor. But she leaves Aman, like Galadriel, who has been moved by Fëanor's words, like her sister-in-law, Elenwë, who follows her husband, and unlike her mother, Anairë, who stays behind. She crosses the Ice. She makes it to Middle-earth. Was she, like the other Noldor, yearning for freedom there ?

Aredhel is a character that is defined by her rebellion, and her desire to be free. In alternative versions of her story, Tolkien imagined that "Isfin", as she was called, "strays - refusing to be married in Gondolin", as her brother had planned for her, or is forced to marry and then escapes - or refuses outright to be "immured" in Gondolin, and escapes "soon after Turgon compelled her to enter". Or, she is born in Middle-Earth and refuses to go to Aman, escaping at the last minute to stay behind with her lover Eöl.

In the published version of the Silm, no mention of planned marriages or of having been forced to enter Gondolin is made, but she leaves the city, at her forceful insistence, threatening to leave alone, unprotected, unaccompanied, like no woman should, and against her brother's advice :"I am your sister", she says, "and not your servant, and beyond your bounds I will go as seems good to me. And if you begrudge me an escort, then I will go alone".

She leaves under the pretence to go and visit her brother Fingon (not her father), but is instead planning to go and visit her bad cousins : "Turn now south", she instructs her escort once out of sight from Gondolin, "for I will ride to Hithlum ; my heart desires rather to find the sons of Fëanor, my friends of old". Her heart, it seems, is not in the right place. This is no dutiful daughter or even sister.

So instead of going to Fingon, she seeks "the dangerous road " (of course, she would) "between the haunted valleys of Ered Gorgoroth and the north fences of Doriath", where she loses her escort in the shadows "and was lost". But she is made of sterner stuff and finds her way to Himlad, to her cousins, who are not home. She waits for them, but gets "restless" again, "and took to riding alone ever further abroad", all the way to Nan Elmoth.

Nan Elmoth, where once Thingol and Melian fell in love. It was a good story. She was standing in the centre of a starlit clearing, filled with song of her birds ; he was going to visit a friend, when he happened upon her, and he came strolling in her direction, charmed by the song of the nightingales, "an enchantment" upon him that made him forget all purpose but finding her. "Filled with love", he "took her hand", "and straightaway a spell was laid on him". They stood there "long years" together, after which he came back changed to his people, became king of Beleriand, had a very special daughter.

Of course, Aredhel and Eöl's story is not a good story. She escaped the guard and protection of her male relatives out of wilfulness. She is no Thingol, allowed to visit her friend. She is the one who comes to Nan Elmoth, she is the one assuming the "active", mobile role, normally the preserve of men, when she should be waiting in the clearing, while Eöl is the one lying in wait in his woods. It's no longer a love story, but a story of "desire" (never a good sign), of a beautiful, white lady, full of light, being attracted by enchantments to a Dark Elf's lair, like a a firefly being ensnared by a spider. Aredhel and Eöl are the dark, subversive doubles of Thingol and Melian. A magical meeting, but where the magic is bad, even though the vocabulary used to describe both meetings it is strikingly similar.

"It is not said that Aredhel was wholly unwilling", is often interpreted as describing a barely consensual union, but what if that weird sentence with too many negations was the narrator's way of barely coping with the fact that she was, indeed, willing to enter that subversive marriage ? That Aredhel, cooped up in Gondolin for 200 years, passed from one male relative to another, did indeed chose to marry that "Dark Elf", that declared enemy of her people, who saw her and "desired" her, Irissë, the "Desirable Lady", and who promised her a life wandering free in the dark woods of Nan Elmoth ? What if she desired him back, the "tall Elf of a high kin of the Teleri, noble though grim of face" clad, "whenever he went abroad", in galvorn, a metal of his invention, black and shining like jet, "hard as the steel of the Dwarves", "resistant to all blades and darts", that turns his entire body into an alien, erotic object, black to her white ?

And indeed, black Eöl and white Aredhel "wandered far together under the stars or by the light of the sickle moon", and she is also free to "fare alone as she would, save that Eöl forbade her to seek the sons of Fëanor, or any other of the Noldor."

Aredhel was not "wholly unwilling" to marry Dark Eöl, that Elf that manages to be at once a bad Noldo, while not a Noldo - he is given all of the bad, negative traits associated with blacksmith in fairy tales and mythology (darkness, creepiness, a general air of evil, lust and greed), of which the Noldor smith are exempt - and a bad Sinda - he has Thingol's pride and anger, his contempt and hatred for the Exiles, but none of his redeeming qualities and he chooses to leave Doriath-, who hates her relatives and forbids her from seeing her family again. But wasn't she fleeing from her family in the first place, and if Eöl forbids her from leaving Nan Elmoth, wasn't she used to living under stifling male authority at home ?

In spite of the interdiction to see her kin, Curufin is not surprised in the least to hear Eöl claim her as his wife. It's a subversive, out-of-the-rules marriage, "without leave". Very Aredhel. Do not "pursue those who love you no more", advises Curufin to Eöl. He should know : he once had a wife, too. Did she stop loving him too ?

Aredhel, of course, is not a good wife. How could she be, rebellious as she is ? Aredhel is a mother before being a wife. She commits the ultimate, most subversive transgression imaginable to medieval society : she allies herself with her son against her husband, against his father, to topple his authority. The "good women" of the Legendarium are wives before they are mothers : their ultimate loyalty is to their husband, at a push to their father, not to their children. Idril, Elwing, Lúthien, Melian, even Miríel are first and foremost wives. Only the ones with a "tainted marriage" are accused of putting their children first, because of the lacking quality of the marriage bond : Nerdanel, Indis.

And even out of these, Aredhel is the only one to have her child choose her over his father. Nerdanel's children follow their father in his rebellion. Fingolfin leaves too, to avenge his father and claim his legacy, leaving his mother behind. Maeglin calls his mother "Lady", and offers "You shall be my guide, and I will be your guard !" That "ill-begotten son", as Eöl calls him, chooses his mother, and her mother's people, over his father. He wants to go to Gondolin because he knows "of Turgon, and that he had no heir".

Aredhel is a bad wife : she does not change House on marrying, but remains, at heart, a Noldor. She gives a secret, Quenya name to her child. She remains an enemy at heart to her husband. Her son dreams of being part of a family where her brother would be a surrogate father, and him his heir.

But Aredhel is, as we've seen, not a good sister either. She introduces into Gondolin the seeds of its destruction, the son "of a sinister character", as Tolkien describes him, that will betray it and cause its destruction. She doesn't know this, of course, but as she flees to Gondolin, Eöl follows her, finds the secret city, spits out his hatred at the face of her brother, and, eventually, aiming for his son, after having given up his rights to her ("in Aredhel your sister you have some claim", says the husband to the brother - to the end, Aredhel cannot escape being male property it seems), kills her with a poisoned javelin. What more fitting death for Aredhel than to be killed by a poisonous, phallic object, thrown at her by her estranged husband, the poison killing her a fitting parallel to the poisonous seed that gave birth to Maeglin ?

Aredhel, Irissë, the White Lady of the Noldor, is a naughty, rebellious girl, a bad daughter, a bad sister, a bad wife. There is blood on her white dress.

@silmarillionwritersguild.

#Tolkien universe #Silmarillion #meta #brilliant

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ancamnarvienn · 8 days ago

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you guys are so annoying. why do i have to see discourse every year that's like "was tolkien really a woke king or was he your conservative uncle?" the guy was a devout catholic and a genteel misogynist who maintained lifelong friendships with queer people and women, and this isn't even paradoxical because that was part of the upper-class oxford culture he was immersed in. tolkien told the nazis to fuck off (and in doing so demonstrated a real understanding of what racism is and why it's harmful, beyond simply "these guys are bad news because they're who my country is at war with right now") but his inner life was marked by internalized racism that is deeply and inextricably woven into the art that he made. he foolishly described himself as an anarcho-monarchist, and it's kind of crazy to see people on this website passionately arguing that he likely never meaningfully engaged with anarchist theory, because...yeah, no shit, of course he didn't. tolkien didn't have to engage with most sociopolitical theory because as an upper-class englishman of his position, he was never affected by any of the issues that this theory is concerned with. what is plainly obvious from reading both his fiction and letters is that tolkien's ideal political system was that the divinely ordained god-king would rise up and rule in perfect justice and humility; he didn't want a government, he wanted a king arthur, even though (obviously) he was aware that outcome was impossible. why is it so hard for people to accept that he was just some guy! his letters aren't a code you have to crack. no amount of arguing or tumblr-level analysis is going to one day reveal a rhetorically airtight internally consistent worldview spanning jrrt's fiction, academic work, and personal writings, thereby "solving" the question of whether he was a woke king or your conservative uncle. his ideology was extremely inconsistent because, at the end of the day, he was just some guy.

#JRR Tolkien #preach #textpost #you don't have to approve of the author's personal views to find their work meaningful and true #in fact you don't need to know shit about the author to enjoy their creation #Roland Barthes anyone

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