Tolkien, Creator of a Mythology
Some have noted that Tolkien was able to recreate an entire mythological universe with the rigour and creativity that an entire cultural tradition might have brought to bear. Tolkien’s work presents a vast world of supernatural beings in which a drama unfolds as an echo of the remote past, possessing the creative rigour of legend and the symbolic vitality of myth. Like a set of Russian dolls, the stories form a complex intertextual web in which each tale speaks of another. Nevertheless, despite this rich complexity, it is undeniable that we are dealing with the laborious work of a single writer, since it is even possible to trace the literary antecedents of his work.
During the period of European Romanticism there was a revival of literature from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries. The poems of the Irish-Scottish cycle of Ossian (compiled and somewhat retouched by Macpherson) enjoyed the admiration of figures such as Goethe, Schiller, Coleridge and Byron. The same was true of the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, which recounts the adventures of a Scandinavian hero in Denmark. Around that same time, Wagner was creating the tetralogy of "The Ring of the Nibelungs", inspired by ancient Germanic legends.
Those narratives of epic and elegiac tone—about glorious knightly enterprises and tragic love stories set against a backdrop of deep and dramatic landscape—became the favourites of the intellectuals of the age. It was the moment of a movement that struck out against the utilitarianism and materialism of a way of life.
Then history continued its course, arriving at a world dominated by automation and a neo-rationalism barely distinguishable from scepticism. Against that backdrop, works such as "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Silmarillion" by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien appeared. Regarding them, Pablo Capanna aptly noted that in the Tolkienian universe there coexist distinct elements that recall the mythological universe of northern Europe.
Now, "The Lord of the Rings" is nonetheless an adventure novel in which an archetypal struggle between good and evil is clearly represented, especially when compared with "The Silmarillion", where the cosmos of Middle-earth is presented in its full dimension. The Silmarillion is therefore the background against which the tale of the last alliance between Elves and mortals is set.
Middle-earth is the heart of the Tolkienian world. Within it move Men, Elves, Dwarves and a number of evil creatures:
Trolls, Dragons, Balrogs, Orcs, Warg-riders... There is also Valinor, the Land of the Powers, where the rulers of the World dwelt, which rose to the west of Endor, Middle-earth. And there is also an Evil that first dwelt in the frozen wastes of the North and later in the dark lands of the East. Depending on the moment in the stories, there exists or existed one further land: Númenor, where the First Men enjoyed the blessing of the Powers and which was later lost.
Likewise, in the "Eddas" (a collection of Scandinavian poems on Germanic myths, customs and traditions, compiled by Snorri Sturluson) we have the "Gylfaginning" ("The Deluding of Gylfi"), written mainly in prose with interspersed poems, in which the protagonist encounters the god Odin, who reveals to him
all the truths of the Universe. The world is described as divided into three parts:
Asgard (the Enclosure of the Æsir, or Gods);
Midgard (the Enclosure of the Middle, which was peopled by Men) and the wild regions of
Jötunheim, to the North, and
Járnviðr, to the East, lands peopled by Giants. Among the latter there is a class known as Trolls.
The account continues and speaks of the Light Elves and the Dark Elves, the former benevolent and the latter malevolent (Tolkien retains that distinction in his work, but with a different meaning, since his Elves are intrinsically enemies of Evil). The genealogy of the Dwarves is set out, in which names appear that also feature in "The Hobbit" and in "The Lord...", and the divinities are enumerated one by one.
On the other hand, the "Kalevala" (the Finnish epic poem compiled around 1830 by Elias Lönnrot) narrates the struggle waged by Finnish champions against the Evil of the North, represented by Louhi, a witch of Lapland. The struggle arises over possession of the Sampo, a device that produces material and spiritual riches.
In turn, the Welsh "Mabinogion" bears a certain parallel with "The Silmarillion" in being written in prose and possessing a
similar structure. The mabinogi are more or less interrelated tales that branch out like the boughs of a tree and share with
Germano-Scandinavian literature the peculiarity of offering curious shifts in verb tense throughout their development, as well as thulas: lists of names that are apparently endless and generally alliterative (that is, words in which the same syllable and stress are repeated, as in the case of "Fingon, son of Fingolfin, son of Finwë").
In "The Silmarillion", the first branch is "The Music of the Ainur". In the beginning...; with that phrase of biblical resonance, Tolkien presents a creation in which the generative power of music and words refers immediately to the "Kalevala" or to the "Eddas", where ritual songs are often more effective than deeds.
Then "The History of the Valar" sets out the various divinities who, for Tolkien, are personifications of the elements of Nature in the service of a single Creator, describing their tasks and powers, in the same manner as the already-cited "Gylfaginning". In that regard, it is worth noting that in both cases the ruling entities of the Sun and the Moon are respectively feminine and masculine (even for Germans today, Sonne is feminine and Mond is masculine), in contrast to the Mediterranean conception. This is a fairly rare fact from an
anthropological point of view, but not unique; the same occurs in Japanese mythology and in Guaraní mythology.
The core of the work, the "Quenta Silmarillion" ("The History of the Silmarils"), is directly related to the "Kalevala": the struggle for an object that is a symbol of power.
After the creation of the world, some of the Ainur (the Holy Ones) come to it as Valar (Powers), awaiting the appearance of the Children of Eru, the One: the Elves and Men. But Melkor also came, the fallen angel who would later be called the Enemy, who rebelled against the Father of All and desires the Earth for himself.
He therefore destroys everything the Valar build, and just as in the Finnish poem "the heights are levelled and the valleys become mountains," representing a long cycle of time or of catastrophes. He also destroys the lamps that illuminated the world, and the Powers are compelled to create the two trees of Valinor, whose resplendent light fulfils the same function.
At that moment the Elves arise, the Firstborn. The Valar bring them to their realm, where they know blessedness. But Morgoth, the
Dark Enemy, lay in wait, and together with the arachnoid Ungoliant, forerunner of Shelob, he mortally wounded the two trees.
But Fëanor, the noblest and most skilled of the Elves, had enclosed part of that radiance in three gems called the Silmarils. And Morgoth stole them. And the War of the Silmarils began. And as in the story of Cain and Abel, one tribe of Elves attacks another and brings a curse down upon itself.
The war then moves to Middle-earth and the Powers shut themselves away in Valinor.
In this part of the work various stories interweave like a Celtic design. One of them, the romantic tale "Of Beren and Lúthien", is widely known to readers of Tolkien because
in it the author recreated the difficulties that he and his wife had to face before they could marry, on account of religious differences, pressure from their guardians and the First World War. Indeed, the central core of the story is that of a romance between an Elf and a mortal.
There also appears the tale of Túrin Turambar, in which traces of the Arthurian cycle and of the already-mentioned Kalevala can be found; more precisely, of the stories of Balin, the knight of the two swords, and of Kullervo. All three characters are pursued by inexorable fate. Arthur’s knight ends up killing his brother and is killed by him, each failing to recognise the other. The ill-fated Finn suffers misfortune after
misfortune, only to end by violating a maiden who turns out to be his sister, which leads him to take his own life with his own sword. Identical is the fate of Túrin, Master of Doom, upon discovering that he has committed incest with his sister, not long after accidentally killing his closest friend: the Elvish archer Beleg. Yet he is not an evil character: although he is pursued by Fate like Oedipus, he lacks neither nobility nor courage, and he even fights against a dragon against overwhelming odds, destroying it just as Beowulf does in his own poem.
Now, the tales of "The Silmarillion" are presented as if they were traditions of the Elves. Men appear in the background,
but just as the Hobbits do in "The Lord...", it is ultimately they who manage to set things partially right. Beren, Túrin and Eärendil—three mortals—make victory possible through their sufferings.
And, as in the Kalevala, everything concludes with a partial defeat of the forces of Evil and with the definitive loss of the object that was the origin of the conflict. It is, in a certain sense, a reworking of the biblical story of the Fall: the impossibility of continuing to hold on to something that belonged exclusively to a period of natural innocence.
Next comes the text known as "Akallabêth", which narrates the fall of Númenor, that land to the west of Middle-earth where the First Men dwelt after the victory over Morgoth. But Morgoth had had a servant, Sauron, who later became a prisoner of the Men of Númenor, whom he eventually corrupted. As punishment, the island was swallowed by the waters of the ocean. Akallabêth means "The Downfallen" and in another dialect of the Elves it was known as Atalantë, which, together with the argument of the story, inevitably calls to mind the Platonic myth.
Finally, there is also a brief summary of the War of the Ring, relating it to the First and Second Ages of
Middle-earth. After that, the Elves departed from this Earth and no more is heard of them.