A Long Expected Podcast

An Introduction! West of Valinor's Inaugural Episode introduces fans of Middle Earth to just exactly how The Hobbit was written (and when. and why.) It goes through where Tolkien got some of his earliest inspirations, and the mythic histories of Dwarves and of Wizards.

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Episode 1
1. Introduction:

Some time around 1930 - he and his sons disagreed later about the exact date - Professor Tolkien was sitting in his study grading papers. And apparently he found the task as distasteful as I do, because he turned around and, on the back of a term paper, wrote down the line “In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.” According to the story, that’s all he wrote at that point, but that line ended up having a profound impact on the literature of the 20th century. To avoid grading papers, I am recording a podcast. Tolkien invented Middle Earth.

Hi, I’m Stephen Westbrook, and you’re listening to West of Valinor.

What I Plan to Do:

I don’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know The Hobbit. As early as 1st or 2nd grade the 1977 Rankin/Bass Hobbit was in regular rotation for movie night. Indeed, as many times as I have read the books and watched the various movies, and listened to the various audio-books, I still hear the songs from the Hobbit in the melodies from the 1977 animated film.

I didn’t know that the Hobbit was a book, however, until I was in 4th grade and saw another student at Clifton Elementary School reading it. I immediately told my parents that that was what I wanted for my birthday, and, of course, that’s what they got me. When the options are to get your child a video game or a movie or a book, parents generally go for the thing that seems the most educational.

I read the Hobbit at least a couple of times in 4th grade, and then in 5th grade I asked for more Tolkien. My parents went to the book store and asked about the Lord of the Rings, but the clerk at the store told them that the Lord of the Rings was too long and difficult for a 5th grader, and sold them The Silmarillion instead, as though that was somehow easier. I got the Silmarillion for Christmas in 5th grade from my parents, and by noon that day I hated it. Luckily, christmas night my aunt and uncle gave me a beautiful hard-back version of The Lord of the Rings, and we were off to the races.

I lugged that giant, 1000 page book everywhere. I remember spending hours pouring over Alan Lee’s paintings. Reading and rereading my favorite chapters - for the record, The Tower of Cirith Ungol.

I’ve never tried to learn one of Tolkien’s invented languages, and I didn’t end up naming any of my own children after Tolkien characters. But the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings are books that I come back to every year. And I mean that literally - every year I read or listen to an audiobook of either The Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings. Or I’ll indulge my nerdier side and read John Rateliff’s History of the Hobbit, or Christopher Tolkien’s History of Middle Earth series. A couple of times I’ve even gone back and finished The Silmarillion, although that piece does not have the same place in my heart as the other two novels. A map of Middle Earth hangs on the bulletin board in my classroom, and Gildor’s admonition on giving advice hangs on the wall beside my desk.

Tolkien himself probably would dislike that I am doing this podcast, by the way. He didn’t like his works being mined for information or deconstructed to see how they were made. He even cautioned against doing so within the stories themselves. When Sauroman reveals that he is no longer the white wizard, he tells Gandalf that white is only a beginning. Gandalf is speaking, telling the council

“I looked then and saw that his robes, which had seemed white, were not so, but were woven of all colours. and if he moved they shimmered and changed hue so that the eye was bewildered.

' "I liked white better," I said.

' "White! " he sneered. "It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken."

' "In which case it is no longer white," said I. "And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom."

He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom. Tolkien didn’t want people breaking down his stories to see how they were made. It was trendy right after Lord of the Rings was published to read it as an allegory for World War II - makes sense, right? But Tolkien wrote in the forward to the second edition that he “cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.” The Lord of the Rings isn’t World War II, Gandalf isn’t Jesus (and neither is Aragorn, and neither is Frodo). Smaug is not the dragon from Beowulf, nor is he Fafnir. Tolkien didn’t want us deconstructing his work, he wanted us to enjoy it.

And so, it is with apologies to Tolkien and his estate, that I will be deconstructing his work.

For me, deconstruction brings more joy, not less. It doesn’t detract from the story to know that Tolkien is retelling versions of the Poetic Edda, or that Numenor rings of Atlantis, or that the opening of the Silmarillion screams Genesis, or that Hobbiton resembles the villages of Tolkien’s own childhood. It makes it more special. It makes it part of the greater tree of tales.

And I really do plan on jumping around a lot.
1. My day job - until this podcast takes off and I can just live off of the royalties - (by the way, help this podcast take off so that I can just live off the royalties… take a minute and leave a comment on iTunes or on Spotify. Click like, click subscribe, give me 4.5 stars… whatever. Do it now. I’ll pause for a minute to let you. <pause> Thanks!
2. Anyway, my day job is to teach Literature, so I’m going to be looking at some of this as a literature teacher - analyzing theme, identifying literary origins, maybe even dissecting some of Tolkien’s worse similes (and that man was really, really bad at simile).
3. But I also worked in ministry for years and years, so I’m going to be looking at some of this with religious applicability in mind. The eucatastrophe, the breaking of bread together, the theme of the fall and of the resurrection. The search for repentance and salvation.
4. I’m not a historian, but, as Dan Carlin is fond of saying, I’m a fan of history. And so sometimes I’m going to be looking at some of this through a historical lens - sometimes to the Late Victorian Era and Edwardian era of Tolkien’s youth; sometimes to World War I or maybe even, if I’m feeling a little crazy, World War II; sometimes to the kingdoms of Mercia and the Anglo Saxons.
5. But mostly, I’m just a fan of these books. And a lot of the time I’m just going to want to curl up inside a chapter, or inside a paragraph, or inside a conversation, and just riff on how much it brings me joy.
All that said, if, at any point, you find yourself listening to this podcast and realize that my deconstruction and nerdiness are taking away from your enjoyment of Tolkien’s stories, please, turn this off, skip that episode, and just go back and read or re-read the originals and take pleasure from a tale teller trying his hand at a really great tale.

Characters you may need to know
1. By the way - this podcast, for this episode and going forward, will assume that you have a brief familiarity with the source material, whether you have read it or not. If you have no idea who J.R.R.Tolkien is, thanks for listening, I appreciate you, but you may end up a little lost. Maybe. That said, this podcast is not going to assume at all that you are as big a nerd as I am. So I’m going to try to, early in each episode, introduce you to some of the more obscure characters from the Appendices or the Silmarillion or the genealogies that I am going to talk about. In this episode, I talk about Durin, Aule, and Iluvatar. Durin, according to both the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, is the father of the main line of dwarves. He is the first dwarf, the eldest. We never meet Durin, but he is often referenced and revered. Illuvatar, in the Silmarillion, is the God character. God with a big G. He is the creator, the all powerful, he more or less exists outside of time and space. Aule is one of the Valar, the demi-gods or maybe angels, depending on your theology. He was created by Illuvatar but he is also a God figure. If Illuvatar is the Judeo-Christian God, Aule is equivalent to the Greek Hephestus or the Roman Vulcan. Now you know enough to go on.
The Plan
1. So, the plan is to go through Tolkien chapter by chapter, starting with The Hobbit and then moving into The Lord of the Rings. But, of course, I am really really bad at sticking to plans, so that plan may never come to fruition. But I don’t want to start there. We’ll get to Chapter 1 of the Hobbit in the next episode. I want to talk about the construction of the Hobbit before I really get into it.
Is This Really Middle Earth?
1. Now, again, Tolkien wrote that famous line down, “In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit” some time around 1930, but The Hobbit was just the next story of a great storyteller, a prodigious story, a lifelong storyteller. Tolkien was writing down and telling myths and stories as early as his college days at Oxford. Tolkien loved languages and invented several languages of his own - Quenya and Sindarin and Khuzdul - and then he realized that wanted somebody to actually speak his languages, so he had to make up this mythology, he invented the elves and Middle Earth (except this was more Beleriand…) and by 1914 when war broke out, he was already writing pieces of mythology that he would spend the rest of his life working on and never actually publish (The Silmarillion was edited and posthumously published by his son Christopher Tolkien.) In 1916 he wrote The Fall of Gondolin after the Battle of the Somme. Tolkien was in the Battle of the Somme for nearly the entire battle. The Battle of the Somme lasted from early July through mid-November 1916, and Tolkien’s unit was there in early June and he was sent home after contracting trench fever in October. And he was probably lucky, because nearly his entire unit was wiped out. And after that horrific and months long bombardment that we call a battle, Tolkien wrote The Fall of Gondolin, the sacking of the greatest hidden city of the elves by goblins and dragons and Balrogs and something that looked very much like tanks in the first iteration of the story - obviously, the Battle of the Somme was the first time that tanks saw widespread use in modern warfare, or, i suppose, in any warfare. So this mythology that Tolkien spent his life sketching together existed well before The Hobbit was ever a twinkle in his mind.
2. But it wasn’t just myths and stories of Middle Earth and made up languages that Tolkien was a storyteller of. Tolkien was a storyteller for his own children as well - that’s what most storytellers do, they tell stories to their kids. And it was a regular thing for Tolkien to tell children’s stories to his children. In 1925, or maybe just before, the Tolkien family took a vacation to the beach and Michael Tolkien, Tolkien’s second son, lost his toy dog - a little lead dog - in the rocks at the beach and they couldn’t find it. To console his distraught son over the loss of his favorite toy, his father, Professor Tolkien, wrote a story called Roverandom wherein a dog (Rover) angers a wizard named Artaxerxes (named after a Persian king) who turns him into a toy dog and causes his to get lost. And Rover has all sorts of adventures up and down Britain and he goes up to the moon and down under the ocean having adventures trying to get home. The story is not a Middle Earth story. It is not a story of elves and Balrogs and the Valar. It’s a children’s story and it’s set in the real world.
3. Every year Tolkien wrote a letter that he had “mailed” by which I mean he placed it in his own mailbox, but it had an address and a stamp ornately drawn on it, and it was sent from Father Christmas (or Father Christmas’s secretary). And they came to be the Father Christmas Letters. And Tolkien wrote these every year from, I believe 1920 until like 1942, and every year his children would receive a letter from Santa Claus - Father Christmas - about all of the trouble he was having. About his bumbling sidekick the North Polar Bear, or about his troubles with the gnomes and the goblins, and how much trouble they were. And again, these were not Middle Earth stories, they were stories set in the real world in the modern day - they were set the year they were written, not in some mythic past. They just happened to have some sort of Faerie elements to them.
4. And I am convinced that The Hobbit started off as one of those: a story about Earth, a story set in our Earth with just a little more magic in it - with wizards like Roverandom or with goblins like the Father Christmas Letters.
5. Now, Tolkien always maintained, later in life, that Middle Earth was our Earth. Middle Earth is not set in some parallel dimension or some other planet or some Star Wars galaxy far far away. Middle Earth is this earth, just set eons and eons ago in some mythic past. But Earth is still Earth, the Sun and the Moon are still our sun and our moon, people are people, Tuesday and Saturday are still Tuesday and Saturday. It’s just an ancient version of it; a mythic past, not a recent past. Ancient.
6. Tolkien himself said as much - that he, at the outset, did not intend for the Hobbit to have anything to do with his stories of elves, with the Silmarillion - but we really don’t need him to be the one to tell us. First off, all of these letters and interviews he gave he gave decades later. I can sometimes not remember what I intended to do three days after the fact, so we shouldn’t always always trust Tolkien about his intentions for his stories when he is discussing them decades after the fact. But even if we could trust Tolkien’s recall 100%, we honestly don’t need to.
Let me tell you why I think so. When we talk about the Hobbit, there are really four versions that we can talk about. Obviously the Hobbit was first published in 1937, so there is that version of the Hobbit that we can talk about. The Hobbit was then re-published in 1951 with some fairly extensive changes to try to bring it in line with the Lord of the Rings, especially to the Riddles in the Dark chapter. Chances are that if you have read The Hobbit, that that is the version that you have read. This, by the way, caused me some major confusion when I was a kid. In the Fellowship of the Ring, at the Council of Elrond, Bilbo gets up to tell his story (The Hobbit), and he prefaces his tale by saying “But I will now tell the true story, and if some here have heard me tell it otherwise' - he looked sidelong at Glóin - `I ask them to forget it and forgive me. I only wished to claim the treasure as my very own in those days, and to be rid of the name of thief that was put on me.” This confused the bejesus out of me, because I knew what story he was telling, and his version in the Lord of the Rings matched the version I knew in the Hobbit perfectly, so what “other version” is he talking about? Well, my confusion was that I had read the 1951 Hobbit, not the original 1937.
So we have the 1937 Hobbit, the 1951 Hobbit, and then we have two fragments that never really got off the ground. We have a version written in 1960 wherein Tolkien set out to rewrite the entire Hobbit in the style of the Lord of the Rings - with far more power and majesty for Gandalf, and references to things that readers of the LOTR would understand but that Bilbo certainly didn’t. And then we have a version that was sketched out in 1931 or 1932 - after Tolkien had written down that famous first line, but before he really knew where the story was going. The Hobbit became story time for the Tolkien children, and after an oral telling of each step of the story, Tolkien would make notes, or write down what he remembered having just told. In fact Christopher Tolkien wrote in the introduction to the 50th Anniversary printing of the Hobbit how his older brother Michael remembered that I (Christopher) (then between four and five years old) was greatly concerned with petty consistency as the story unfolded, and that on one occasion I interrupted: ‘Last time, you said Bilbo’s front door was blue, and you said Thorin had a gold tassel on his hood, but you’ve just said that Bilbo’s front door was green, and the tassel on Thorin’s hood was silver’; at which point my father muttered ‘Damn the boy,’ and then ‘strode across the room’ to his desk to make a note.” Which is a great story. Christopher Tolkien, by the way, was born in 1924, so if Michael was correct that Christopher was 4 or 5, this would actually predate the recorded origin of the story. But, like I said, take memories with a grain of salt. But in this original sketch of the story - just a few handwritten pages - written in, I guess somewhere between 1928 and 1932, a lot of the elements of what would become An Unexpected Party were already there. But they weren’t all there. Some of the names were radically different. The name of the Dragon was not Smaug, but rather Pryftan. The character who would become Gandalf was not called Gandalf but rather Bladorthin. The name Gandalf was actually applied to the character who would become Thorin. Now, the rest of the characters were still them - Gloin was still Gloin, Bilbo Baggins was still Bilbo Baggins.
Anyway, there’s a scene in chapter 1 of the Hobbit where Gloin has been accusing Bilbo of being more of a grocer than a burglar, and Bilbo has been trying to defend his honor. When his is trying to defend his abilities iIn the Original Sketch, Bilbo, when defending his abilities to the dwarves, says “Tell me what you wish me to do, and I will try it - If I have to walk from her to Hindu Kush, to the great desert of Gobi and fight the Wild Wire worms of the Chinese.”
1. China
2. Gobi Desert
3. Hindu Kush
4. Golf
  1. as old as 1300, but called colf [Dutch for “club”] until the 1500s
5. Tobacco
  1. rebranded as “pipeweed” in LotR
  2. a new-world crop not available in England until the late 1500s
  3. Seeing Fellowship in college and the entire theatre laughs when Bilbo says “Finest Weed in the South Farthing.”
6. Tea
  1. “It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that almost nobody in Britain drank tea at the beginning of the eighteenth century,and nearly everybody did by the end of it.” --Tom Standage. Tea is mentioned frequently in the Hobbit, and in Ch 1-3 of LotR, but not after that point.
  2. Tea and Tobacco are both ancient plants, but not in the form or celebrated traditions that Bilbo uses them.
7. Elements of Middle Earth
  1. Fingolfin
    1. Original sketch only
  2. Gondolin
    1. As early as chapter 3
  3. Withered Heath where the dragons are (probably Ard-Galen and Dorthonian)
Names
1. Dwarves Names
  1. Then sought the gods | their assembly-seats,

The holy ones, | and council held,

To find who should raise | the race of dwarfs

Out of Brimir's blood | and the legs of Blain.

There was Motsognir | the mightiest made

Of all the dwarfs, | and Durin next;

Many a likeness | of men they made,

The dwarfs in the earth, | as Durin said.

Nyi and Nithi, | Northri and Suthri, (north and south)

Austri and Vestri, (east and west) | Althjof (theif), Dvalin,

Nar and Nain, | Niping, Dain,

Bifur, Bofur, | Bombur, Nori,

An and Onar, | Oinn, Mjothvitnir. (Mead-wolf)

Vigg and Gandalf (Magic Elf) | Vindalf (wind elf), Thrain,

Thekk and Thorin, | Thror, Vit and Lit,

Nyr and Nyrath,-- | now have I told--

Regin and Rathsvith-- | the list aright.

Fili, Kili, | Fundin, Nali,

Heptifili, | Hannar, Sviur,

Frar, Hornbori, | Fræg and Loni,

Aurvang, Jari, | Eikinskjaldi (Oak shield).

The race of the dwarfs | in Dvalin's throng

Down to Lofar | the list must I tell;

The rocks they left, | and through wet lands

They sought a home | in the fields of sand.

There were Draupnir | and Dolgthrasir,

Hor, Haugspori, | Hlevang, Gloin,

Dori, Ori, | Duf, Andvari,

Skirfir, Virfir, | Skafith, Ai.

Alf and Yngvi, | Eikinskjaldi,

Fjalar and Frosti, | Fith and Ginnar;

So for all time | the shall the tale be known,

The list of all | the forbears of Lofar.

A great Old English cadence, full of caesura

Balin
Simple, Descriptive, Playful
1. Bilbo
2. The Hill
3. Bywater
4. Great Goblin
5. Lake Town
From Sindarin
1. Gondolin
2. Dorwinan
3. Moria
4. Fingolfin
Latin
1. Belladonna Took - beautiful woman
2. Donnamira Took - Woman Wonderful
Tolkien’s quote on how the Hobbit was not intended to be Middle Earth
The Dichotomy between looking at Tolkien’s writing both backward and forward

Concerning Dwarves
1. Tolkien started with language, and therefore so shall we. The word “dwarf” comes from the old Indo-European word “dhwergwhos” which means “tiny.”
2. Norse Mythology
  1. Dwarves are mentioned in both the Prose and Poetic Edda. But it isn’t actually clear that in these stories that dwarves are in any way different from the svartalfen - the dark elves - or any of the other beings that live in Svartalfheim. We already went over their names, but, and I want to point out how those names are ordered in the Edda. Durin, the father of dwarves in Tolkien, is listed as the second of the dwarves in the Edda. The dwarf who has the most prominent place in the Edda is Dvalin. Not only does Dvalin appear in the Volospa, he also appears in the Fafnismal and the Havamal - two other poems of the Eldar Edda.
  2. Dvalin is mentioned in the Prose Edda as well, in the Prose edda, Dvalin is the maker of cursed sword called Tyrfing, or, in some versions, Dvalin is forced to make a magical sword under duress, and so he places a curse upon it as payback. In general in the Prose Edda, dwarves are described as having “quickened in the earth and under the soil like maggots in flesh… acquiring human understanding and the appearance of men through the decree of the gods… although they lived in the earth and in rocks.”
  3. They are also described as having characteristics later given to Trolls. There is a Norse myth wherein one of the dwarves - Alviss (meaning “all wise”) has a marriage claim on Thor’s daughter. To keep him from marrying her, Thor keeps Alviss talking all night, asking him the names of all things in all languages, and with the sunrise Alviss turned to stone.
  4. In the German poem, das Nibelungenlied, the treasure hoards of the Nibelungs are guarded by the dwarf Alberich, who is said to have the strength of twelve men.
3. Grimm’s Fairy Tales
  1. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
    1. Seven Dwarfs = Seven Rings for the dwarves = 7 dwarf lords made by Aule
    2. Durin means “Sleep” - Durin woke from his sleep, Snow White falls into a deep, deathlike sleep, even the idea that Durin will wake again from his sleep one day, in a very Arthurian way
      1. Arthur - the once and future king who sleeps beneath the mountain until his people need him again
  2. Schneeweisschen und Rosenrot - antagonist
  3. Der Starke Hans - antagonist
  4. Der Mond - Just mentioned an aside
  5. Der Jude im Dorn - Genie, granter of 3 wishes
  6. Das Wasser des Lebens - Giver of gifts, gives the hero a magic wand and loaves of bread

Almost Dwarvish

Rumpelstiltskin
1. Although the character of Rumpelstiltskin is not described as a Zwerg - dwarf - in the Grimm’s fairy tail, but rather as “ein kleines Männchen” - a little male (note, male, not man).
2. Secret Names and a secret language
3. The magical or almost magical process of spinning gold out of nothing
Rip van Winkle slept beneath the hills for 20 years
1. Rip, up in the Catskill mountains, is approached by a character who “was a short, square-built old fellow, with thick bushy hair, and a grizzled beard. His dress was of the antique Dutch fashion—a cloth jerkin strapped round the waist—several pairs of breeches, the outer one of ample volume, decorated with rows of buttons down the sides and bunches at the knees.” This character takes him to a deep amphitheatre beneath the side of a mountain. “On entering the amphitheatre, new objects of wonder presented themselves. On a level spot in the centre was a company of odd-looking personages playing at nine-pins. They were dressed in quaint outlandish fashion; some wore short doublets, others jerkins, with long knives in their belts, and most of them had enormous breeches, of similar style with that of the guide’s. Their visages, too, were peculiar; one had a large head, broad face, and small piggish eyes; the face of another seemed to consist entirely of nose, and was surmounted by a white sugar-loaf hat, set off with a little red cock’s tail. They all had beards, of various shapes and colors.”

So here we have a couple of traditions traditionally associated with dwarves - mountains, magic, and the long sleep. Even though they aren’t called dwarves, that tradition may be what Washington Irving had in mind. And we bear in mind that these were, except for Rip van Winkle (and even that was based on an older story from the Orkney Isles), these were part of an oral tradition, so names - even races - may have shifted many times in the tellings.

Historically
1. The dwarves being referred to as Longbeards is a reference to the Longobards (meaning “long beard”), one of the Germanic tribes that invaded Rome, and who the Lombardy region is named after. Interestingly enough, the dwarf Alberich from the Nibelungenlied, in another poem called the Ortnit, is said to seduce the queen of Lombardy.
2. Tolkien also intentionally conceived the dwarves as being rather Jewish. In an interview in 1965 Tolkien said “The dwarves of course are quite obviously a -- wouldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? All their words are semitic, obviously; constructed to be Semitic. There’s a tremendous love of the artefact. And of course, the immense warlike passion of the Jews too, which we tend to forget nowadays.”

Now, I have to admit that this one makes me vaguely uncomfortable. I don’t think that Tolkien portrays the dwarves in a way that can be called antisemitic, but any characature of any type makes me nervous. And the dragon-sickness that the dwarves go through - the greed for the Arkenstone - at the end of the book strikes a little too close to home with some of the less-good stereotypes about the Jewish people.

But there are a couple of things that do work about this comparison. First, Tolkien is entirely correct when he characterizes the dwarvish language as Semitic. It is constructed to sound like Hebrew. Secondly, both the dwarves and the Jewish peoples have histories of diaspora - of being driven from their homeland and of yearning to return. This has played out many times in the Torah and the Tanakh - the yearn of the Isrealites to return home from Egypt, from their exile in Assyria, from their exile in Babylon, in Persia. And to this day, diaspora is a uniting force in Judaism, beginning with the spread of Jewish peoples throughout Europe and the New World in the Middle Ages when Islam effectively conquered the Holy Land, and ending in 1948 with the refounding of Israel as a nation. This is seen in the dwarves as well, as they are exiled from Moria, spread around Middle Earth, and yearn to return (Balin in the Lord of the Rings), and are exiled from the Lonely Mountain, spread across Middle Earth, and yearn to get back (The entire plot of The Hobbit.)

On a side note - lest I have inadvertently accused Tolkien of being antisemetic, I want to read you his response to a German publisher in 1938. The publisher wanted to print The Hobbit, and wanted to put a disclaimer at the front of the book declaring Tolkien to be Aryan. He wrote back saying, “Thank you for your letter. .... I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Flindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.”

It’s entirely possible that I am extra sensitive about this because dwarves have been historically portrayed as negative Jewish stereotypes, most famously, again, the dwarf Alberich as used in Wager in his Ring cycle operas.

The Silmarillion
1. Again, we are trying to look at Tolkien’s writing both backwards and forwards in time. Looking forward in time - the order in which Tolkien’s stories were written, not in the order they are set today, Tolkien had already included dwarves in his mythology before he ever began writing The Hobbit. Dwarves show up in the story of The Nauglafring and are mentioned in the tale of Tinuviel and of Turin.
  1. These portrayals of dwarves are NOT favorable. We could blame this on the fact that the Silmarillion is styled as the mythology of the elves BY the elves, so dwarves would be negatively portrayed because there is a feud between the two races.
  2. But that stylization of the Silmarillion is, I think, a late addition. When Tolkien was originally writing the stories, he was just writing stories. And the dwarves were the bad guys. They were greedy and vindictive. They were often the allies of goblins, and fought with Morgoth, not against him.
2. The section of The Silmarillion wherein Aule makes the dwarves was not written until 1937 - after the writing of The Hobbit.
3. Looking backward through time - the way the Silmarillion is read (not written), the first look at Dwarves is their creation, and they are far more sympathetic. Aule made the seven dwarves - they don’t come from Illuvatar - he formed them from the rock or from the clay. (Recalling Genesis and Prometheus)
  1. It is told that in their beginning the Dwarves were made by Aulë in the darkness of Middle-earth; for so greatly did Aulë desire the coming of the Children, to have learners to whom he could teach his lore and his crafts, that he was unwilling to await the fulfilment of the designs of Ilúvatar. And Aulë made the Dwarves even as they still are, because the forms of the Children who were to come were unclear to his mind, and because the power of Melkor was yet over the Earth; and he wished therefore that they should be strong and unyielding. But fearing that the other Valar might blame his work, he wrought in secret: and he made first the Seven Fathers of the Dwarves in a hall under the mountains in Middle-earth.

Now Ilúvatar knew what was done, and in the very hour that Aulë's work was complete, and he was pleased, and began to instruct the Dwarves in the speech that he had devised for them, Ilúvatar spoke to him; and Aulë heard his voice and was silent. And the voice of Ilúvatar said to him: 'Why hast thou done this? Why dost thou attempt a thing which thou knowest is beyond thy power and thy authority? For thou hast from me as a gift thy own bring only, and no more; and therefore the creatures of thy hand and mind can live only by that being, moving when thou thinkest to move them, and if thy thought be elsewhere, standing idle. Is that thy desire?'

Then Aulë answered: 'I did not desire such lordship. I desired things other than I am, to love and to teach them, so that they too might perceive the beauty of Eä, which thou hast caused to be. For it seemed to me that there is great room in Arda for many things that might rejoice in it, yet it is for the most part empty still, and dumb. And in my impatience I have fallen into folly. Yet the making of thing is in my heart from my own making by thee; and the child of little understanding that makes a play of the deeds of his father may do so without thought of mockery, but because he is the son of his father. But what shall I do now, so that thou be not angry with me for ever? As a child to his father, I offer to thee these things, the work of the hands which thou hast made. Do with them what thou wilt. But should I not rather destroy the work of my presumption?

Then Aulë took up a great hammer to smite the Dwarves; and he wept. But Ilúvatar had compassion upon Aulë and his desire, because of his humility; and the Dwarves shrank from the hammer and wore afraid, and they bowed down their heads and begged for mercy. And the voice of Ilúvatar said to Aulë: 'Thy offer I accepted even as it was made. Dost thou not see that these things have now a life of their own, and speak with their own voices? Else they would not have flinched from thy blow, nor from any command of thy will.' Then Aulë cast down his hammer and was glad, and he gave thanks to Ilúvatar, saying: 'May Eru bless my work and amend it!'

But Ilúvatar spoke again and said: 'Even as I gave being to the thoughts of the Ainur at the beginning of the World, so now I have taken up thy desire and given to it a place therein; but in no other way will I amend thy handiwork, and as thou hast made it, so shall it be. But I will not suffer this: that these should come before the Firstborn of my design, nor that thy impatience should be rewarded. They shall sleep now in the darkness under stone, and shall not come forth until the Firstborn have awakened upon Earth; and until that time thou and they shall wait, though long it seem. But when the time comes I will awaken them, and they shall be to thee as children; and often strife shall arise between thine and mine, the children of my adoption and the children of my choice.'

Then Aulë took the Seven Fathers of the Dwarves, and laid them to rest in far-sundered places; and he returned to Valinor, and waited while the long years lengthened.

As I mentioned earlier, the names of all of the dwarves in The Hobbit are from the Elder Edda. This is NOT the case with the dwarves from the Silmarillion, who have Gnomish names - a language invented by Tolkien himself. The exception to this is the dwarf, Mim.

Concerning Wizards
1. The word Wizard comes from the Middle English word “wys” meaning “wise”. And whereas dwarves have a fairly narrow history in folklore - pretty much German and Norse - wizards show up in every culture and throughout recorded history.
  1. Historically, wizards were just wise men. They were philosophers, sages, and alchemists. Until the mid 1500s, there was no real requirement that they be particularly magical to be a wizard. Nicholas Flamel, who is a plot point in the first Harry Potter book, was not just a product of JK Rowling’s imagination. He was a 13th century wise man (wizard) who, in the introduction to one of his books, mentioned that he had created the Philosopher’s Stone, the alchemical stone that could turn lead into gold. Stories about wizards go back as far as Ancient Egypt - i.e. the origin of writing - and are found in almost every society since, including ancient Japan and the 1001 Arabian Nights. Wizards are even Biblical: In the New Testament, the terms Wise Men and Magi are used interchangeably to describe the men who read the birth of Christ in the stars and came to do him homage. The term Magi, by the way, comes from Persian “magush” which means magician.
2. The Role of the Mentor
  1. Greek - Tiresias - Greek Prophet in several myths, including Oedipus Rex and Antigone
  2. Messopetamian - Utnapishtim - Sage and mentor from the Epic of Gilgamesh, who both advises and counsels him, and directs him towards a magical plant that grants eternal youth.
  3. English - Merlin
    1. Traditionally created by Geoffrey of Monmouth in his 1136 book Historia Regum Britanniae, Merlin is supposed to be a combination of half-a-dozen historical or legendary figures from post-Roman / pre-Battle of Hastings British History. Merlin is the counselor of Arthur, or in some versions of the Arthurian Legend, the architect of Arthur’s ascension. The depiction of Merlin as a Wizard, though, is a late addition to the tale - usually around the time of Mallory’s Morte d’Arthur. Certainly magic had been in the Arthur stories before that point, but it was usually reserved for Morgan Le Fey in stories like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In the original iterations of the Arthur legend, Merlin was clearly druidic. And thus the druids of pre-Roman England are an antecedent for Wizards.
  4. Norse - Mimir and Odin - Neil Gaiman tells the Norse myth of Mimir and Odin the following way:
    1. In Jotunheim, the home of the giants, is Mimir’s well. It bubbles up from deep in the ground, and it feeds Yggdrasil, the world-tree. Mimir, the wise one, the guardian of memory, knows many things. His well is wisdom, and when the world was young he would drink every morning from the well, by dipping the horn known as the Gjallerhorn into the water and draining it.

Long, long ago, when the worlds were young, Odin put on his long cloak and his hat, and in the guise of a wanderer he traveled through the land of the giants, risking his life to get to Mimir, to seek wisdom.

“One drink from the water of your well, Uncle Mimir,” said Odin. “That is all I ask for.”

Mimir shook his head. Nobody drank from the well but Mimir himself. He said nothing: seldom do those who are silent make mistakes.

“I am your nephew,” said Odin. “My mother, Bestla, was your sister.”

“That is not enough,” said Mimir.

“One drink. With a drink from your well, Mimir, I will be wise. Name your price.”

“Your eye is my price,” said Mimir. “Your eye in the pool.”

Odin did not ask if he was joking. The journey through giant country to get to Mimir’s well had been long and dangerous. Odin had been willing to risk his life to get there. He was willing to do more than that for the wisdom he sought. Odin’s face was set.

“Give me a knife,” was all he said.

After he had done what was needful, he placed his eye carefully in the pool. It stared up at him through the water. Odin filled the Gjallerhorn with water from Mimir’s pool, and he lifted it to his lips. The water was cold. He drained it down. Wisdom flooded into him. He saw farther and more clearly with his one eye than he ever had with two.

Thereafter Odin was given other names: Blindr, they called him, the blind god, and Hoarr, the one-eyed, and Baleyg, the flaming-eyed one.

Odin’s eye remains in Mimir’s well, preserved by the waters that feed the world tree, seeing nothing, seeing everything.

Time passed. When the war between the Aesir and the Vanir was ending and they were exchanging warriors and chiefs, Odin sent Mimir to the Vanir as an adviser to the Aesir god Hoenir, who would be the new chief of the Vanir.

Hoenir was tall and good-looking, and he looked like a king. When Mimir was with him to advise him, Hoenir also spoke like a king and made wise decisions. But when Mimir was not with him, Hoenir seemed unable to come to a decision, and the Vanir soon tired of this. They took their revenge, not on Hoenir but on Mimir: they cut off Mimir’s head and sent it to Odin.

Odin was not angry. He rubbed Mimir’s head with certain herbs to prevent it from rotting, and he chanted charms and incantations over it, for he did not wish Mimir’s knowledge to be lost. Soon enough Mimir opened his eyes and spoke to him. Mimir’s advice was good, as it was always good.

Odin took Mimir’s head back to the well beneath the world-tree, and he placed it there, beside his eye, in the waters of knowledge of the future and of the past.

The story has a few rings of the Garden of Eden, specifically, the well of knowledge connected with the tree Yggdrasil scans very much as the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
But both Odin and Mimir have overtones over sage, of prophet, of wise man - wysard. Besides which, Tolkien was very clear in his later writings that he always thought of Gandalf as an Odinic Wanderer.
The Role of the Evil Wizard
1. Circe, Medea, Moran le Fay, Baba Yaga, Hecate - who we will come back to when we get to the Lord of the Rings
2. The evil sorcerer from the Aladdin story - who is NOT named Jafar.
3. Dr. Faust
  1. Saruman
The Wizard’s Appearance
1. Pointed hats certainly predate Tolkien. There is a theory that one of the origins of witches is that they were the old brewer wives - cats were always around them because if you have stockpiles of grain you have rats, and the cats deal with the rats. They have large cauldrons because they were brewing beer in them, and they have pointed hats so that when the went to market to sell their beer, they could be seen above the crowds.
2. There is another theory that, artistically, pointed hats were a symbol of other - think the dunce’s cap - and that they were frowned upon by the Catholic church. And if the church didn’t like it, that must mean that witches and wizards did.
3. Certainly the trope was alive and well by 1800, Francisco Goya, in a couple of his paintings depicting witches, gives them conical hats.
Gandalf
1. meaning “Magic Elf”
2. Originally "Bladorthin". According to Faramir, he gave his many names as Mithrandir among the Elves, Tharkûn to the Dwarves; Olórin I was in my youth in the West that is forgotten, in the South Incánus, in the North Gandalf; to the East I go not.'
3. Mithrandir means Gray Wanderer, Olorin means Dreams, Tharkun meaning Staff Man, Incanus from the Latin “In” and “Canto” - In song
  1. Odinic Wanderer
  2. Described by Tolkien in an essay to Pauline Baynes as “a figure strongly built with broad shoulder, though shorter than the average man and now stooped with age, leaning on a thick rough-cut staff as he trudged along. His hat was wide-brimmed with a pointed conical crown, and it was blue; he wore a long grey cloak, but this would not reach much below his knees. It was of an elven silver-grey hue, though tarnished by wear - as is evident from the general use of grey in the book. But his colors were always white, silver-grey, and blue - except for the boots he wore when walking in the wild. Gandalf even bent must have been at least 5’6.”
4. One of the Istari - Maia (angels) incarnate
  1. In his essay on the Istari in Unfinished Tales, Tolkien wrote that there were five wizards (a detail he mined from a seeming throw-away line in the Two Towers. He expanded in the essay that Saruman was the greatest of the wizards, and that Gandalf appeared last and came in form appear to be the weakest, but that Cirdan the Shipwright “divined in him reverence” and so gave Gandalf aid. As to the others, there is Radagast the Brown (mentioned in the Hobbit and seen in flashback in the LotR) and two wizards described as “Blue Wizards” whom Tolkien admits to not knowing anything about other than that they vanished into the East.
  2. The stated reason for the Istar (wizards) coming to Middle Earth at all is blamed on the failings of the Valar. According to Tolkien (within the mythology) the Valar screwed up in the first age, “desiring to amend the errors of old, especially that they had attempted to guard and seclude the Eldar by their own might and glory fully revealed.” I believe, although I am not 100% sure, that Tolkien is referring to the end of the Quenta Silmarillion. In the Quenta Silmarillion, the elves have been fighting the long defeat since they got to Middle Earth. They were attempting to, on their own, take on Morgoth (effectively The Devil), but of course, not being gods themselves, they lost more and more ground at every turn. Now they were on the verge of being wiped out when the Valar (the good gods, or good angels) showed up and joined the battle and defeated Morgoth. I think Tolkien, here, is suggesting that that was a mistake. That by revealing themselves and taking part in the conflicts of Middle Earth, that they had put their fingers on the scale too much. The Istari, therefore, were sent to Middle Earth to help aid and advise and guide mankind (and elven-kind) on how to wisely deal with Sauron, but were never supposed to reveal themselves or to too obviously put their fingers on the scale.
5. However, the character we meet in an Unexpected Party is hardly this great wizard. Mithrandir - Gandalf the Grey, the Maiar, the Istari - when he comes in contact with wolves, he kindles an entire forest with a word and causes arrows to burst into flame mid-flight. Gandalf in the Hobbit lights pinecones on fire and passes them out to the dwarves to use as baseballs while he privately worries that he won’t live out the night.
6. Gandalf, in the Hobbit, is just another fairy-tale wizard. He deals in “dragons and goblins and giants and the rescue of princesses and the unexpected luck of widows' sons”
The Necromancer

West of Valinor

A Long Expected Podcast

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