Morgoth's Ring (65 page)

"breath" or of the "fire", do not think of it as belonging to Men only, but as the life of all living things. As Men have their houses, but beasts also have their dwellings in holes or in nests, so both have a life within that may grow cold or go forth.'

'Then in what way do Men differ from beasts in such lore?' said Finrod. 'How can they claim ever to have had a life indestructible?'

'The Wise have considered this,' said Andreth. 'And among them are some that speak more after the manner of the Eldar. But they speak rather of three things: the earth and the fire and the Dweller.

By which they intend the stuff of which the body is built, which of itself is inert and does not grow or move; and the life which grows and takes to itself increase; and the Indweller who dwells there, and is master both of house and of hearth - or once was.'

'And wishes never to leave them - and once need never do so? It was then the Indweller who suffered the wound?' said Finrod.

'Not so,' said Andreth. 'Clearly not so; but Man, the whole: house, life, and master.'

'But the Master must have been the one that was wronged (as you say), or did wrong (as I guess); for the house might suffer for the folly of the Master, but hardly the Master for the misdeeds of the house! But let that be, for you do not desire to speak of it. Do you yourself hold this belief?'

'It is not a belief,' said Andreth. 'For we do not know enough for any certainty concerning earth or growth or thought, and maybe never shall; for if they were designed by the One, then doubtless they will ever hold for us some mystery inscrutable, however much we learn. But it is a guess that is near, I hold.'

Here this text ends. Finally, there is another isolated slip ('C'), again taken from a document dated 1955, as follows:

Query: Is it not right to make Andreth refuse to discuss any traditions or legends of the 'Fall'? Already it is (if inevitably) too like a parody of Christianity. Any legend of the Fall would make it completely so?

Originally instead of refusal to talk of it Andreth was made (under pressure) to say something of this sort:

It is said that Melkor looked fair in ancient days, and that when he had gained Men's love he blasphemed Eru, denying his existence and claiming that he was the Lord, and Men assented and took him as Lord and God. Thereupon (say some) our spirits having denied their own true nature at once became darkened and weakened; and through this weakness they lost the mastery of their bodies, which fell into unhealth. Others say that Eru Himself spoke in wrath, saying: 'If the Darkness be your god, little shall ye have here of Light

[later > on earth ye shall have little Light], and shall leave it soon and come before Me to learn who lieth: your god or I who made him.' And these are the most afraid of death.

This is very difficult to interpret. My father's initial question must mean (in view of the following sentences): 'It is surely right to make Andreth refuse ...', implying 'as is now the case, as the text stands'.

But he then proceeded to write a passage in which Andreth did not refuse to say something of such traditions, but consented 'under pressure' (I do not know how to interpret the word 'Originally' in

'Originally instead of refusal to talk of it'); and this was evidently where the germ of what would become the 'Tale of Adanel', the legend of the Fall, first appeared. But this sketch of what Andreth said to Finrod about the Fall of Man is very close to, indeed largely the same as, what she said in the draft text A (p. 351); and that draft was itself derived from a previous writing now lost (p. 350). It seems then that that lost writing contained no account of the Fall, and it was presumably to this that my father's question referred: 'Is it not right to make Andreth refuse to discuss any traditions or legends of the

"Fall"?'

The remarks with which text C begins are evidence that he was in some way concerned about these new developments, these new directions, in the underlying 'theology' of Arda, or at any rate their so explicit expression. Certainly, if one looks back to earlier writings of his, one must become aware of a significant shift. In the account written for Milton Waldman in 1951 (Letters no.131, p. 147) he had said:

The Doom (or the Gift) of Men is mortality, freedom from the circles of the world. Since the point of view of the whole cycle is the Elvish, mortality is not explained mythically: it is a mystery of God of which no more is known than that 'what God has purposed for Men is hidden: a grief and an envy to the immortal Elves....

In the cosmogony there is a fall: a fall of Angels we should say.

Though quite different in form, of course, to that of Christian myth.

These tales are 'new', they are not directly derived from other myths and legends, but they must inevitably contain a large measure of ancient wide-spread motives or elements. After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth', and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear. There cannot be any 'story' without a fall - all stories are ultimately about the fall - at least not for human minds as we know them and have them.

So, proceeding, the Elves have a fall, before their 'history' can become storial. (The first fall of Man, for reasons explained, nowhere appears - Men do not come on the stage until all that is long past, and there is only a rumour that for a while they fell under the domination of the Enemy and that some repented.)

'The first fall of Man, for reasons explained, nowhere appears.' What were those reasons? My father must have been referring to the beginning of this letter, where he wrote of the Arthurian legend that

'it is involved in, and explicitly contains the Christian religion', and went on:

For reasons which I will not elaborate, that seems to me fatal. Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary 'real' world.

Some years before the time of that letter, however, in one of the curious 'Sketches' associated with The Drowning of Anadune, he had referred briefly to the original Fall of Men, and there it was accom-panied by a very strange speculation on God's original design for mankind (IX.401):

Men (the Followers or Second Kindred) came second, but it is guessed that in the first design of God they were destined (after tutelage) to take on the governance of all the Earth, and ultimately to become Valar, to 'enrich Heaven', Iluve. But Evil (incarnate in Meleko) seduced them, and they fell.

A little later in the same text (IX.402) he wrote: Though all Men had 'fallen', not all remained enslaved. Some repented, rebelled against Meleko, and made friends of the Eldar, and tried to be loyal to God.

There is certainly a belief expressed here (whatever weight was to be attached to it - for by whom was it 'guessed'?) that the Fall introduced a change incalculably vast in the nature and destiny of Men, a change brought about by the 'Spirit of Evil', Melkor.

But in 1954 he was saying, in the draft of a long letter to Peter Hastings that was not sent (Letters no.153):

... my legendarium, especially the 'Downfall of Numenor' which lies immediately behind The Lord of the Rings, is based on my view: that Men are essentially mortal and must not try to become

'immortal' in the flesh.

To this he added a footnote:

Since 'mortality' is thus represented as a special gift of God to the Second Race of the Children (the Eruhini, the Children of the One God) and not a punishment for a Fall, you may call that 'bad theology'. So it may be, in the primary world, but it is an imagination capable of elucidating truth, and a legitimate basis of legends.

And again, in another letter of 1954, to Father Robert Murray (Letters no.156, footnote to p. 205) he wrote:

But the view of the myth [of the Downfall of Numenor] is that Death - the mere shortness of human life-span - is not a punishment for the Fall, but a biologically (and therefore also spiritually, since body and spirit are integrated) inherent part of Man's nature.

It seems to me therefore that there are problems in the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth for the interpretation of my father's thought on these matters; but I am unable to resolve them. It is unfortunate that the questionings with which this slip of paper begins are so elliptically expressed, especially the words 'Already it is (if inevitably) too like a parody of Christianity.' Obviously, he was not referring to the legend of the Fall: he was saying clearly that the introduction of such a legend would make 'it' - presumably, the Athrabeth - altogether into 'a parody of Christianity'.

Was he referring then to the astonishing conception in the Athrabeth of 'the Great Hope of Men', as it is called in the draft A (p. 352), 'the Old Hope' as it is called in the final text (p. 321), that Eru himself will enter into Arda to oppose the evil of Melkor? In the Commentary (p. 335) this was further defined: 'Finrod ... probably proceeded to the expectation that "the coming of Eru", if it took place, would be specially and primarily concerned with Men: that is to an imaginative guess or vision that Eru would come incarnated in human form' - though my father noted that 'This does not appear in the Athrabeth'. But this surely is not parody, nor even parallel, but the extension - if only represented as vision, hope, or prophecy - of the

'theology' of Arda into specifically, and of course centrally, Christian belief; and a manifest challenge to my father's view in his letter of 1951 on the necessary limitations of the expression of 'moral and religious truth (or error)' in a 'Secondary World'.

NOTES.

1. Cf. my father's draft letter of September 1954 (Letters no.153, p. 189): 'Elves and Men are evidently in biological terms one race, or they could not breed and produce fertile offspring - even as a rare event', and the following passage.

2. According to the chronology of the Annals of Aman the Elves awoke in the Year of the Trees 1050 (p. 71, $37), 450 of such Years before the rising of the Sun, or something more than 4300

years of our time (for the reckoning see p. 59); see p. 327 note 16.

3. demiurgic labour: the creative work of 'demiurges', in the sense of mighty but limited beings subordinate to God.

4. On Melkor as 'originally the most powerful of the Valar' see p. 65, $2. There are a number of references in the late writings to the supremacy of Melkor's power in the beginning, but see especially the essay Melkor Morgoth given on pp. 390 ff. It is curious that in his letter to Rhona Beare of October 1958 (Letters no.211) my father wrote: 'In the cosmogonic myth Manwe is said to be "brother" of Melkor, that is they were coeval and equipotent in the mind of the Creator.'

5. Cf. Finrod's words in the Athrabeth, p. 319: 'Beyond the End of the World we shall not change; for in memory is our great talent, as shall be seen ever more clearly as the ages of this Arda pass: a heavy burden to be, I fear; but in the Days of which we now speak a great wealth.'

6. The reference is to the Virgin Mary. See the footnote (Letters p. 286) to the draft continuation of the letter referred to in note 4.

7. This analysis does not adhere strictly to the actual course of the Athrabeth, and (as is expressly stated, p. 335) was not intended to do so. Thus it was in fact Finrod who said that 'the disaster to Men was appalling' ('dreadful beyond all other calamities was the change in their state', p. 318); and his recognition that 'the power of Melkor was greater than had been understood' comes much earlier in the debate ('to change the doom of a whole people of the Children, to rob them of their inheritance: if he could do that in Eru's despite, then greater and more terrible is he by far than we guessed', p. 312).

8. 'Aegnor perished soon after this conversation': in fact, 46 years later (see note 9).

9. In the Grey Annals (and in the published Silmarillion) Finrod is clearly represented as ruling his great realm from the stronghold of Nargothrond (founded centuries before) during the Siege of Angband, and at the Battle of Sudden Flame he is said to have been 'hastening from the south' (The Silmarillion p. 152). At the end of the Athrabeth, on the other hand, he tells Andreth that he is leaving for the North, 'to the swords, and the siege, and the walls of defence' (p. 325), and in the present passage it is said that he and his brothers and the People of Beor dwelt in 'the northern realm' and that when the Siege was broken he 'took refuge' in Nargothrond.

The last sentence of the paragraph 'But she would then be a very old woman' was a late addition. Against it my father pencilled 'about 94'; cf. the footnote to the opening sentence of the Athrabeth, p. 307: Andreth was 48 years old at the time of the conversation with Finrod, stated to have taken place about the year 409, and thus 'about 94' in 455, the year of the Battle of Sudden Flame.