#The Voyage of Earendel the Evening Star

[arda-marred]

‘And he died with the Dawn in his eyes’

On the eve of war, Tolkien encounters ‘Earendel’

Exeter College, Oxford, 1914. 

Note: By the end of 1914, most of Tolkien’s Oxford friends and fellow TCBS members had enlisted. But as an orphan who had always struggled to stay out of poverty, and being by then engaged to his beloved Edith, Tolkien could not afford to abandon his studies, which were crucial to his future chances of an academic career. And so, despite immense pressure from his extended relations and intense societal scorn, he deferred his enlistment until after finishing his final exams the following summer.  

“ Back before war broke out, at the end of the university term, Tolkien had borrowed from the college library Grein and Wülcker’s Bibliotek der angelsächsischen Poesie. This massive work was one of those monuments of German scholarship that had shaped the study of Old English, and it meant Tolkien had the core poetic corpus at hand throughout the long summer vacation. He waded through Crist, by the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf, but found it ‘a lamentable bore’, as he wrote later: ‘lamentable, because it is a matter for tears that a man (or men) with talent in word-spinning, who must have heard (or read) so much that is now lost, should spend their time composing such uninspired stuff.’ Boredom could have a paradoxical effect on Tolkien: it set his imagination roaming. Furthermore, the thought of stories lost beyond recall always tantalized him. In the midst of Cynewulf’s pious homily, he encountered the words ‘Eala Earendel! engla beorhtast / ofer middangeard monnum sended, ‘Hail Earendel, brightest of angels, above the middle-earth, sent unto men!’ The name Earendel (or Éarendel) struck him in an extraordinary way. Tolkien later expressed his own reaction […]: ‘ I felt a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English….I don’t think it any irreverence to say that it might derive its curiously moving quality from some older world.’ But whose name was Éarendel? The question sparked a lifelong answer.

Cynewulf’s lines were about an angelic messenger or herald of Christ. The dictionary suggested it meant ray of light, or the illumination of dawn. Tolkien felt that it must be a survival from before Anglo-Saxon, even from before Christianity. (Cognate names such as Aurvandil and Orendil in other ancient records bear this out. According to the rules of comparative philology, they probably descended from a single name before Germanic split into its offspring languages. But the literal and metaphorical meanings of this name are obscure.) Drawing on the dictionary definitions and Cynwulf’s reference to Éarendel as being above our world, Tolkien was inspired with the idea that Éarendel could be none other than the steersman of Venus, the planet that presages the dawn. At Phoenix Farm [his widowed aunt’s residence in Nottinghamshire], on 24 September 1914, he began, with startling éclat:

Éarendel sprang up from the Ocean’s cup  In the gloom of the mid-world’s rim;  From the door of Night as a ray of light  Leapt over the twilight brim,  And launching his bark like a silver spark  From the golden-fading sand;  Down the sunlit breath of Day’s fiery Death  He sped from Westerland.

Tolkien embellished ‘The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star’ with a favourite phrase from Beowulf, Ofer ýpa ful, ‘over the cup of the ocean’, ‘over the ocean’s goblet’. A further characteristic of Éarendel may have been suggested to Tolkien by the similarity of his name to the Old English ēar ‘sea’: though his element is the sky, he is a mariner. But these were mere beginnings. He sketched out a character and a cosmology in forty-eight lines of verse that are by turn sublime, vivacious, and sombre. All the heavenly bodies are ships that sail daily through the gates at the East and the West. The action is simple: Éarendel launches his vessel from the sunset Westerland at the world’s rim, skitters past the stars sailing their fixed courses, and escapes the hunting Moon, but dies in the light of the rising Sun.

And Éarendel fled from that Shipman dread  Beyond the dark earth’s pale.  Back under the rim of the Ocean dim,  And behind the world set sail;  And he heard the mirth of the folk of earth  And hearkened to their tears,  As the world dropped back in a cloudy wrack  On its journey down the years. 

Then he glimmering passed to the starless vast  As an isléd lamp at sea,  And beyond the ken of mortal men  Set his lonely errantry,  Tracking the Sun in his galleon  And voyaging the skies  Till his splendor was shorn by the birth of Morn  And he died with the Dawn in his eyes. 

It is the kind of myth an ancient people might make to explain celestial phenomena. Tolkien gave the title in Old English too (Scipfæreld Earendeles Æfensteorran), as if the whole poem were a translation. He was imagining the story Cynewulf might have heard, as if a rival Anglo-Saxon poet had troubled to record it.

As he wrote, French and German armies clashed fiercely in the town of Albert, in the region named for the River Somme, which flows through it. But Éarendel’s is a solitary species of daring, driven by an unexplained desire. He is not (as in Cynewulf) monnum sended, ‘sent unto men’ as a messenger or herald; nor is he a warrior. If [this early version of] Éarendel embodies heroism at all, it is the maverick, elemental heroism of individuals such as Sir Ernest Shackleton, who that summer had sailed off on his voyage to traverse the Antarctic continent.

If the shadow of war touches Tolkien’s poem at all, it is in a very oblique way. Though he flies from the mundane world, he listens to its weeping, and while his ship speeds off on its own wayward course, the fixed stars take their appointed places on ‘the gathering tide of darkness’. It is impossible to say whether Tolkien meant this to equate in any way with his own situation at the time of writing; but it is interesting that, while he was under intense pressure to fight for King and Country, and while others were burnishing their martial couplets, he eulogized a ‘wandering spirit’ at odds with the majority course, a fugitive in a lonely pursuit of some elusive ideal.

What is this ideal? Disregarding the later development of his story, we know little more about the Éarendel of this poem than we do the stick figure stepping into space in Tolkien’s drawing The End of the World. Still less do we know what Éarendel is thinking, despite his evident daring, eccentricity, and uncontainable curiosity. We might almost conclude that this is truly ‘an endless quest’ not just without conclusion, but without purpose. If Tolkien had wanted to analyze the heart and mind of his mariner, he might have instead turned to the great Old English meditations on exile, The Wanderer and The Seafarer. Instead he turned to Romance, the quest’s native mode, in which motivation is either self-evident (love, ambition, greed) or supernatural. Éarendel’s motivation is both: after all, he is both a man and a celestial object. Supernaturally, this is an astronomy myth explaining planetary motions, but on a human scale it is also a paean to imagination. ‘His heart afire with bright desire’, Éarendel is like Francis Thompson (in Tolkien’s Stapeldon Society paper), filled with ‘a burning enthusiasm for the ethereally fair’. It is tempting to see analogies with Tolkien the writer bursting into creativity. The mariner’s quest is that of the Romantic individual who has ‘too much imagination’, who is not content with the Enlightenment project of examining the known world in ever greater detail. Éarendel overleaps all conventional barriers in a search for self-realization in the face of the natural sublime. In an unspoken religious sense, he seeks to see the face of God. ”  

— John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth

[middle-earth-mythopoeia]

Hail Eärendil, brightest of stars!

They found him! They found Eärendil!

From The Guardian:

The most distant star ever seen has been captured by the Hubble space telescope in images that appear to give a remarkable glimpse into the ancient universe.

Light from the star, named Earendel, has travelled an estimated 12.9bn years to reach the Earth – a huge leap from the previous most distant star, which dates to nine billion years. The observations were possible thanks to a rare cosmic alignment, meaning that Earendel may be the only individual star from this epoch that we will ever see.

Scientists estimate that Earendel, whose name means “morning star” in Old English, is at least 50 times the mass of the Sun and millions of times as bright, placing it among the most massive stars known. But even such a brilliant star would not normally be detectable. At such vast distances, even an entire galaxy is just a smudge of light.

It was only thanks to natural magnification by a huge galaxy cluster, WHL0137-08, which sits between us and Earendel, that astronomers were able to make the detection. The cluster’s gravitational pull is so intense that light bends around it, creating a powerful cosmic magnifying glass that amplifies light from distant objects lying behind it.

THIS IS SO AMAZING! And I love that they named the star Earendel! In 1914, Tolkien wrote a poem called “The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star”, which Christopher Tolkien considered to be “the first of the mythology.” The poem had in turn been inspired by two lines from Cynewulf:

Éalá Éarendel, engla beorhtast, ofer middangeard monnum sended.

Hail Éarendel, brightest of angels, above Middle-earth sent unto Men.

It gives me chills to imagine how a poem that Tolkien wrote all the way back in 1914 was the beginning of the mythology he would spend his whole life creating, and Éarendel would become Eärendil the Mariner in The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion! And this poem was also the origin behind Frodo’s cry in Shelob’s Lair,

Aiya Eärendil elenion ancalima!

Hail Eärendil, brightest of stars!

AND NOW WE GET TO SEE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Surely that is a Silmaril that shines now in the West?