#which certainly recalls Eärendil and the Silmaril to me

[warrioreowynofrohan]

The Lord of the Rings as a Sequel to the Silmarillion (Part 4): The Tales That Really Mattered

Fourth and last part of this series!

So, if The Lord of the Rings is a sequel to The Silmarillion, which parts does it directly act as a sequel to? Which parts does it openly reference? Large parts of the Silm recieve little or no mention in The Lord of the Rings. Not a single word about any of the sons of Fëanor. Nothing about Fingolfin or Fingon. A fleeting mention of Nargothrond and Gondolin. One mention of Túrin. A couple mentions if Fëanor, but, as far as I recall, nothing about him being the creator of the Silmarils! Nothing about the Flight of the Noldor (apart from a distant reference to exile in Galadriel’s translated song), or the burning of the Teleri swan-ships, or the Kinslayings. In fact, very little at all about the sons and grandsons of Finwë.

The two stories in The Silmarillion that have any prominence in The Lord of the Rings are those of Lúthien and Beren and Eärendil and Elwing. The former is recounted by Aragorn at Weathertop, the latter sung by Bilbo in Rivendell and, crucially, both come into the story at Cirith Ungol, the point in The Lord of the Rings that most actively and deliberately references The Silmarillion.

“Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that’s a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it - and the Silmaril went on and came to Eärendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We’ve got - you’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?

And later on, when Sam rescues Frodo from the Tower of Cirith Ungol, it is a very strong reference to Lúthien rescuing Beren from Tol-in-Gaurhoth, to the point of Sam (apparently) defeating an entire tower full of enemies, to his discovering Frodo by mutual singing. And when they at last escape the Tower’s watchers, it is Eärendil that Frodo calls on, with Aiya elenion ancalima!

So why is it these two stories? Well, in the first place, they - and not the battles - are the key to the victory in the Silmarillion; a quest for the sake of love and a journey for the sake of mercy that together bring about the intervention of the Valar and the destruction of the great Evil of the First Age. And, taken together, the two roughly mirror the directions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - as Frodo puts it early on, one a journey to gain a treasure and return, the other to lose one and never return. And there is, of course, their relationship to the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, as the stories of the Peredhil that are the source of both lineages.

And there is also something Sam says, just before the previous quote:

“The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folks seem to have been just landed in them, usually - their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t.

The Flight of the Noldor strikes me, to an extent, as connecting to Sam’s earlier idea of stories - even before the Darkening, a major impetus to Fëanor’s push to return to Middle-earth was, essentially, “because it was exciting and life was a bit dull”, and that kind of desire - not just for vengeance, not just to fight Morgoth, but to get to be heroes and rulers and legends - was a part of what struck such fire from the Noldor that they chose to follow him. It is very much an active choice, not ‘falling into’ a story, and Fëanor’s urgency that leads him to attack Alqualondë is the need to bring the host to depart before any of them cool down and think things through.

(It’s hard not to think that Tolkien put at least a little of the atmosphere surrounding young men at the start of World War I into this - the giddy confidence that it would all be over soon, the desire not to miss out on the great adventure of their Age. And if so, well, no wonder that the ‘great adventure’ in fact starts immediately with Kinslaying.)

The stories of Lúthien and Beren and of Eärendil and Elwing, in contrast, are the kind that they ‘fell into’; they didn’t go looking for them, but were placed in positions where their choices were to accept danger and trouble and suffering or to lose what they loved dearest. Beren and Lúthien went for love of each other. Eärendil went for love of the people of Middle-earth, for whom his desperate quest for Valinor was the only remaining chance of survival. Elwing chose to share his perils for love of him. And Eärendil and Elwing’s journey, more than any other, mirrors Frodo’s: It must often be so, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them. In the Third Age and the First, Middle-earth is saved, but those who save it lose it; lose home and family for a stranger fate.