Tolkien's Elves: Dark Seas, Bright Gems
Part Two: How the gleam of hope re-awoke the ancient dream of fantasy
J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elves are obsessed with light. Which is another way of saying Tolkien was obsessed with light. All kinds of light. Starlight, at dusk and sparkling through dark clouds. Moonlight, on a sea of grass as the Rohirrim on their horses ride through the land. Firelight, when the Ring of Power shows its hidden fiery runes. Sunlight, shining on Bilbo’s face as he looks out from a treetop across Mirkwood to the east. Dragon light, beaming through the eyes of Smaug the Golden. Holy light, in a phial when all other lights go out.
It makes one wonder, why was Tolkien so sensitive to light? Was it because he was born at a time when tungsten light bulbs were just starting to pop up across urban landscapes? Was it because he spent many of his earliest years in the countryside, whether it was in Africa or England? Was it the flash of lightning or the flash of artillery fire and airborne shells exploding, and shell-shocking the mind? Or maybe it’s just an elemental part of the universe that he wisely mined?
That core of nature he delved deeply to unlock. So did his dwarves. And his hobbits, especially Gollum, who kept on digging and crawling until he holed himself up in the guts of the mountains, hiding next to his lacuna — as in a little lake, a gap of space in knowledge. Of course, Tolkien was not Gollum, and his sensitivity to light was not such that he avoided it. Quite the contrary.
It is the contrast of darkness and light that he was attracted to, I believe. And if there is a biological thread, perhaps it was the shock of moving from bright Africa to cool England, the absence of a father who died when he was three, and then his mother when he was 12. One can say in a way that many lights in his life had gone out. As his biographer Humphrey Carpenter emphasized, his mother’s death, not surprisingly, utterly altered his relationship with the world. And as Susana Polo rightly notes in one of her essays for Polygon’s excellent Year of the Ring project, her death made him prone to big emotional swings.
Humphrey writes, and she cites: “Her death made him a pessimist; or rather, it made him capable of violent shifts of emotion. Once he had lost her, there was no security, and his natural optimism was balanced by deep uncertainty.”
For anyone who has ever suffered a great personal loss or tragedy, especially early in their formation, it is easy to relate to Tolkien, though perhaps more difficult to fully appreciate. That’s because it’s hard to cope with things like death, and in its place is a hole, a gap, a lacuna, a shadow. Since this happens to a lot of people, if not maybe to all in some capacity, Tolkien’s sensitivity to tragic death and loss is certainly a big part of the appeal of his richly detailed mythology. Through his poetic language and concepts, he elevated life’s deep uncertainties into images that were universal in their mythic potency.
We wrote last time about his dark seas image and how it gave his Elves a deeper purpose — setting them in a dreamtime without sun or moon. Here we’re turning to the other end of that spectrum in Elven consciousness: the light they first saw and how they harnessed it in their own creativity and history. As we noted last time, the first Elves woke by a lake called Cuiviénen that was starlit. Looking skyward, they saw stars and were filled with wonder. It’s a powerful image, because one, most every person is enchanted by the stars, and two, Tolkien proposes the idea here of experiencing starlight as a primary light source.
Astro-physically, when it comes to planets, this is on its face a fallacy. How can you have an earthly asteroid without a sun at the center of its solar system? But intuitively, we also instinctively accept it as true, because it speaks to a deeper archetypal experience — not only our own time in our mothers’ wombs, but nightly cycles of sleep, when our minds “go dark” yet still wander inside the mysterious dream-space of our so-called unconscious. There, we sometimes experience flashes of lightning in the electrical storms of our brains. These conjurations can be delightful, nonsensical, and even frightening.
If we step into myth-space, where dimensions can bend and even switch, Tolkien’s poetic image of celestial persistence (there is no antonym for circadian I can find) rings true because if we were to step outside the Earth, or more accurately, “off world,” and head into outer space, generally speaking, if one were to drift far enough from the sun, the stars would be our brightest and main light source. Cosmic design, lest we forget, is core to Tolkien, starting with his Genesis.
I know we’re getting pretty “far out” there, but to my mind, this is in part why Tolkien’s mythology resonates so deeply in our modern times. Astronomy was expanding in its understanding of the cosmos, in leaps and bounds, during his lifetime, and the Space Age would dawn in his golden years. I am not saying that he intentionally or consciously was making a direct connection of his Elven starlit consciousness with our own awakening to the heavens in terms of landing on the Moon and so forth, but that he was mining our spiritual condition so deeply, that he uncovered mythic images that could cross space and time to different ends of the universe — and he wisely did this by leaning into the stark interplay of light and shadow, and eventually night and day, and yes, to his credit despite the howling of his critics (most of them never war combatants) — good and evil.
Which brings us to Fëanor, and gems, and not just any gems, but Elven gems. So that here in The Book of Lost Tales, in The History of Middle-Earth (THOME), and The Coming of the Elves and the Making of Kôr, Tolkien reveals one of his greatest mythic images. Like the dark seas, his mythic gems represent a kind of infinite wonder and reflect something much more than what we assume at first glance. There are many facets to his gems, just as there are many waves to his seas.
We first hear about Elven gems in the context of Aulë, the smith-god of the Valar, the angelic lords of Tolkien’s world. We are told in The Music of the Ainur: “From his teaching, whereto the Eldar brought ever their own great beauty of mind and heart and imagining, did they attain to the invention and making of gems...” But it’s here in The Coming of the Elves and the Making of Kôr, that Tolkien first reveals that his Elves are cunning and skillful and bright. They are not just physically strong, but also mentally strong, and spiritually acute as well.
It comes in the second half of the chapter in the “Making of Kôr” section, after the Elves have migrated to the land of the Gods — Valinor — and are filling its coasts with their own formidable culture, building towers, swan-ships and ports. There is something beautifully synergistic about the imagery of the sea and land, and how the Elves live at its juncture in Eldamar, on the coast of Aman, the continent that contains Valinor. There, near those dynamic waves of physical and cultural change, Tolkien envisions the invention of gems that capture an energy…
“Behold there is a low place in that ring of mountains that guards Valinor, and there the shining of the Trees steals through from the plain beyond and gilds the dark waters of the bay of Arvalin, but a great beach of finest sand, golden in the blaze of Laurelin, white in the light of Silpion, runs inland there, where in the trouble of the ancient seas a shadowy arm of water had groped in toward Valinor, but now there is only a slender water fringed with white. At the head of this long creek there stands a lonely hill which gazes at the loftier mountains. Now all the walls of that inlet of the seas are luxuriant with a marvelous vigor of fair trees, but the hill is covered only with a deep turf, and harebells grow atop of it ringing softly in the gentle breath of Súlimo….and the Gods named that hill Kôr by reason of its roundness and its smoothness.”
These Trees are the Two Trees of Laurelin and Silpion that captured the holy viscous light of Creation (you can read more on the Trees and their special role in Tolkien’s mythology here). The mixture of their golden and silver rays, a mingling that happens twice for an hour each time every six hours in twelve hour cycles — which constitutes a “day” in the Count of Time that begins with the Years of the Trees — we are told is exceedingly wondrous. It is essentially a perfect balance of two alternating states on the wave of existence, Tolkien’s spiritualistic version of electromagnetic radiation and energy, one could say.
The bay of Arvalin is the Bay of Eldamar, also called the Bay of Faëry, where the Elves who have come to Valinor — Tolkien would later name these three tribes of Elves collectively the Calaquendi, the “Elves of the Light” — have anchored their civilization at the confluence of these great landmarks near a gorge later called the Calacirya, the “light-cleft,” where a “long creek” runs from the city of the gods to the cities of the Calaquendi, which include Kôr (later called Tirion), Alqualondë, the “Swanhaven” of sea-faring elves, and Avallónë, which in later versions of the legendarium replaces “Kortirion” on the island of Tol Eressëa.
Súlimo is another name for Manwë, the king of the gods, hence alternately Manwë Súlimo. That’s a lot of names, but like facets of gems scintillating with different colors and rays of light as one turns them, etymologically they hold extra clues: “Súlimo” means “breather,” for Manwë is the god of air and wind; “Eldamar” means “Elvenhome”; “Avallónë” means “outer island,” is a bit reminiscent of “abalone,” and is inspired by the Avalon of Arthurian legend.
This convergence of geological and fantastical images gives the impression of great energy. The divine and natural splendor Tolkien captures in his description of what he would later call “Faerie,” is both a concept and a mythic place, drawing a line from our popular perception of the words and practice of “fairy tales” to the misty mystic notion of his own elvish devising, one that as we push on through his Book of Lost Tales and as we roll to the end of this chapter in particular, becomes as clear as a bright gem. For “Faerie” is an early English term for “realm of the fays,” based on Old French concepts of spirits and magic, evolving from the romantic “faie” and evolving through cultural transference to English “fay.”* Importantly, the French etymology goes back to the folk Latin “fata.”
It’s a linguistic trick you might say, or a cunning flip, that Tolkien went with “elf” in the end over “fairy,” for “elf” comes from German folk and Norse mythological traditions, though some of these fantastical concepts did admix with Old French tales and historical migrations across northern Europe, from Norman conquests to the medieval works of Chrétien de Troyes. My main point in diving into all of this linguistic ping-pong is to highlight Tolkien’s creative process and the ambitious synthesis he was undertaking by harmonizing these elements.
In much the same way, this fusion of ideas, words and images is reflected in the migratory evolution of the Elves. And the Bay of Faëry is where Tolkien locates this “melting pot” of fantasy, if I daresay, what he would call in his famous essay On Fairy-Stories, the “Cauldron of Story.” Yet it’s not soup-making that Tolkien prioritizes for his Elves. It is the cutting of crystal light into bright gems.
The other reason I wanted to try connecting some dots in terms of Middle-earth’s geographical features with the word base of Tolkien’s medieval source texts, and then back to some of the possible philosophical and artistic concepts at play, is to give his character Fëanor some needed context. When we come to him at the end of The Coming of the Elves and the Making of Kôr, he is not introduced with any backstory. He is simply defined by his main contribution to Middle-earth.
But I believe Tolkien was intentional in the name “Fëanor.” As we noted in one of our earlier journal entries on THOME, “Fëa” is a root word to the name for the Valar associated with spirits, the Fëanturi — the “spirit masters” Mandos and Lórien. “Fëa” is also Quenya (“Elvish Latin”) for “spirit,” combined with the Sindarin (“Common Elvish”) “naur” or “nor,” meaning “fire.” Hence, Fëanor translates to “Spirit of Fire.”
There are a couple linguistic riddles in his name that are worth bearing out here. For one, “Anor” also appears in The Lord of the Rings with Minas Anor, the original name of Minas Tirith. It also appears when Gandalf faces the Balrog, warning that he is a “servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the Flame of Anor” — in this context, the common reading is that “Flame of Anor” means the sun. But the “Secret Fire” is the Flame Imperishable, literally the Power of Creation.
That spiritual fire is a key aspect of The Music of the Ainur, in which Eru Illúvatar, the godhead of Tolkien’s universe, sends it into the heart of the World — to power its reality and being. Which brings us back to Faërie, faie and fay. It is my opinion that “fay” is the creative source of “fëa” and hence when combined with “Anor” and the Secret Fire, we get “Fëanor,” meaning the “Spirit of Creation,” and the character Fëanor, who is the chief alchemist of The Silmarillion, embodies the synthesis of Tolkien’s neo-fantastical vision, of the low with the high.
So the myth itself is a gem, both in terms of artifact and meta-image. The Elven bright gem is the story. For we learn that Aulë teaches the Noldoli (later called the Noldor) — one of the three tribes of the Calaquendi — the art of gem-cutting. The greatest Noldorin elf and lapidary, Tolkien tells us, is Fëanor. He is also the brightest of the Elves in terms of intellect. He is our Prometheus in this Promethean story of spiritual light.**
Coming in the last few pages of The Coming of the Elves and the Making of Kôr, Tolkien builds this moment into a crescendo. He weaves and dives, casting gems of imagery as he goes, describing the grottos and luminescent creeks all along the coasts of Eldamar and on the sandy shores of Tol Eressëa; the “slender silver tower shooting skyward like a needle, and a white lamp of piercing ray was set therein that shone upon the shadows of the bay”; of sweet musics and “threads of sound whispered by waters in caverns or by wave-tops brushed by gentle winds”; white and pink shells strewn above and below the “magic waters,” with pearls shimmering among the sea-beds, of a “pure and starry luster.”
“These pearls were their model, and the lore of Aulë and the magic of the Valar were their tools, and all the most lovely things of the substance of the Earth the matters of their craft — and therefrom did the Noldoli with great labor invent and fashion the first gems. Crystals did they make of the waters of the springs shot with the lights of Silpion; amber and chrysoprase and topaz glowed beneath their hands, and garnets and rubies they wrought…”
And yet still, these countless gems that they amass in great piles and “blazed in the light like beds of brilliant flowers” do not satisfy their hunger for beauty. Into each “they gave a heart of fire.” Pushing their craft further, they create opals from pearls and the other jewels, with “gleams like echoes of all the other stones.” And of diamonds, the Noldoli, Finwë’s people, combine “starlight and the purest water-drops,” and the “thinnest air.”
Feverish now, the fire was burning bright, flashing from Tolkien’s own pen, one can imagine. That may sound hyperbolic, but from here it all cascades into an ever greater vision. Enter Fëanor, who in this moment of sub-creation echoes the Creator in a daring re-creation, if not amplification, of the fire and spirit of Creation, however Promethean and vain his act may be:
“Then arose Fëanor of the Noldoli…and begged a great pearl, and he got moreover an urn full of the most luminous phosphor-light gathered of foam in dark places, and with these he came home, and he took all the other gems and did gather their glint by the light of white lamps and silver candles…and the radiant dew of Silpion, and but a single tiny drop of the light of Laurelin did he let fall therein, and giving all those magic lights a body to dwell in of such perfect glass as he alone could make…and it shone…in the uttermost dark…”
And those jewels he called the Silmarils. As those who have read The Silmarillion may know or recall, it does not go into this kind of detail on the actual “technical” creation of the Great Jewels. It is easy of course to get caught up in the idea of the Silmarils as the apotheosis of beauty, of “light in a thousand scintillations of splintered colors.” But the idea is more important than the thing.***
From here, as I’m sure we’ll learn as we read on in THOME, a great confluence of events will lead to a fight over the Silmarils that will ultimately diminsh paradise and lead to a great schism among the Elves. I think the most important thing we can take forward from here though is that Tolkien was absolutely serious when he said that his Elves and their ornate mythology were created in order to express and live out his linguistic designs. I believe this chapter shows that in great abundance and shows how any other would-be mythologists must go about creating their transformative story worlds to reach the same heights.
Because once you establish an aesthetic that is otherworldly but is then poured back into a “body” with traces of the world we know — then you have something like a gem. Names, as we’ve written before, both in terms of their importance and in terms of Tolkien’s exquisite sensibilities, were absolutely essential in making his fairy tales timeless works of art. Whether we’re talking his dark seas or his bright gems, his Elvish languages or his geological poetry, it all resolves into a magical Interface — to borrow today’s techno parlance — that opens us to something ancient and deep inside us — the divine power of imagination.
It’s a lot of data and fata to download. But once you do, Tolkien rewards those who are willing to see the world from a deeper place. It hits you in waves. I recall years ago, when I was maybe a teenager, reading his Unfinished Tales, and coming to a passage in Of Tuor and His Coming to Gondolin.
A Noldorin Elf named Gelmir is guiding Tuor through an underground river: “And then Gelmir brought forth one of those lamps for which the Noldor were renowned; for they were made of old in Valinor, and neither wind nor water could quench them, and when they were unhooded they sent forth a clear blue light from a flame imprisoned in white crystal.”
I was stunned by the image. It ignited my imagination so much so that I felt like I was there in that tunnel with them. And then there was an endnote I had to read:
“The blue-shining lamps of the Noldorin Elves are referred to elsewhere, though they do not appear in the published text of The Silmarillion…In a note on the story of Gwindor they are called ‘Fëanorian lamps’, of which the Noldor themselves did not know the secret; and they are there described as ‘crystals hung in a fine chain net, the crystals being ever shining with an inner blue radiance’.”
Amazing. Here is a world behind a world. The rhythm and consistency is stunning, spanning thousands of years back across time and the Great Sea to Kôr and Valinor. Tolkien’s son Christopher is diligently uncovering layer after layer of his father’s imaginative gem-cutting. Every facet reflects something new. Turning it just so, reveals a new truth. This passage through the Annon-in-Gelydh — the Gate of the Noldor — echoes back through the years, both in our world in terms of decades, and countless centuries in terms of Middle-earth, back to Fëanor by his silver candles, shaping the Silmaril and his blue Fëanorian lamps.
The shadow of Fëanor is long: in the history of Tolkien’s Elves, his Silmarils kick off ages of struggle and sorrow; but they are also bright, and they fire so much of the imaginative brilliance that was yet to come, and the heroism Tolkien captured in his books. But it’s one thing to light the way with bright ideas or gems; it’s quite another if we don’t have at least some sense of where we’re going or the courage to break free. Which brings us to a turning — I have one more linguistic koan that I think we should keep in the back of our minds as we continue this journey into THOME to uncover the magic of Myth with a capital M.
Like Fëa — and I believe it’s a conscious or unconscious tie to Fay and Faërie — Tolkien used another Quenya name root in these early drafts of his legendarium. In the third chapter of The Book of Lost Tales, we learned various details about the Fëanturi: Mandos and Lórien we mentioned above, but there is also their sister Nienna. Tolkien originally called her Fui, and she is the goddess of grief and courage. Originally however, the three were called the Fántur. Lórien was alternatively Olofántur, and Mandos was alternatively Vefántur.
You may see it too, but “fánt” in these names evokes “fantasy,” “phantasms” and “phantoms.” We’ve contemplated this similarity before. Faint as it may be, Tolkien was playing with the very words that signified his own journey into darkness and light, dream and fantasy. The symmetry feels too strong to be a coincidence, like “fay” and “Fëanor.”
What I think this shows us, and I think one would have to have dimmed the lights considerably to miss it, is a deliberate and determined mission to imbue Fairy Tale with a capital F and T with spirituality. And the same for Fantasy. To make Mythology soulful, in a word.
This of course is obvious on one level. But it’s easy to forget its audacity in our secular modern world filled with scientific jargon, Silicon Valley algorithms and self-conscious marketing speak. Literary generalists have dubbed Tolkien’s work “High Fantasy,” a label that first came into fashion in the 1970s. It denotes epic fantasy and speculative stories with a detailed alternative setting. Multi-verses have of course only raised the stakes, perhaps to Mega Fantasy?
I jest, but the more I think about it, and after reading this latest chapter of THOME, I don’t think “High” is quite right. I don’t think Tolkien’s work belongs to any genre. If anything, it should be called Spiritual Fantasy.**** By which I mean it can’t really be defined or put in a box. He took myth, and expanded it by making his fairy tales prismatic. That is, he left the world brighter than he found it by letting it in. And so, looking into his gems, we refract as much as we reflect.
Tolkien had reeled from loss and reached through space and time to re-anchor to life’s deepest certainties in the violent interplay of poetic imagery. From Fëanor’s lamps to Gelmir’s hands, the shock of the past shines through us out to the future. For blessed are those who get to perceive the gleam behind the gleam.
*Perhaps most famously, King Arthur’s older sister Morgan Le Fay bares this heritage of “faie” and “fee” from the Old French romances, of which Sir Thomas Malory was greatly influenced by, when he was crafting his Middle English versions of the Arthurian legends in Le Morte D’Arthur.
**It’s a fairly common concept, but it bears repeating: Prometheus is a Titan from ancient Greek mythology who steals fire from the gods and gives it to humanity, which becomes a source of civilization, art and science. It is “secret knowledge,” so to speak, and Zeus punishes him by having an eagle peck at his liver over and over, each day the liver growing back only to be eaten again.
Also, it is worth noting here that Tolkien also used “Gnome” to denote his Noldoli. This of course conjures the image of garden gnomes. But like “fairy” and “elf,” it has a very interesting etymology: gnome is usually believed to be derived from the Renaissance era Latin “gnomus,” meaning it is assumed to be a mistake and really rooted in the Latin gēnomus, which is a reference to the Greek word for “earth-dweller”; but I think it’s worth considering that the mistake may have also been an intentional play on gnosis, the Greek word for knowledge. And “Know” actually derives from the same Proto-Indo-European root of “gno-.”
***Tolkien’s use of “phosphor-light” is striking. The word is associated with the morning star and phosphorus, a chemical substance that was used heavily in England for matches and in World War I as a component of grenades and in flares. Tolkien was a Signals Officer in WWI, so it’s intriguing to think that phosphor and phosphorus were on his mind at this time.
****I realize this potentially takes us into an area of extreme pretensions. My rumination on the often inscrutable power of Tolkien’s mythology is a bit like raving at the moon. We’re digging through the land of archetypes here for the fossils and bones of modern myth. Inevitably, it was going to take us to an ever more spiritual place. Not religious. But a poetic consciousness that pushes against conventions and peers beyond words. With your blessing, let’s lean into the spirit of fantasy as we journey onward.
Our History of Middle Earth Journal Index - The Book of Lost Tales, Part One:
The Cottage of Lost Play / Opening the Heart of Modern Myth
The Music of the Ainur / Tolkien’s Creation and the Creator
The Coming of the Valar / The Valar, Gods of Wisdom and Wonder, Part One
The Building of Valinor / The Valar, Gods of Wisdom and Wonder, Part Two
The Chaining of Melko / Who the Hell is Tinfang Warble?
The Chaining of Melko / The Convolution of Evil in Middle-earth
The Coming of the Elves / Tolkien’s Elves: Dark Seas, Bright Gems, Part One
The Making of Kôr / Tolkien’s Elves: Dark Seas, Bright Gems, Part Two