I really can't adequately describe how much I enjoy reading The Silmarillion.
It's one of those texts that always reminds of The Far Side cartoon with the two gorillas sitting in the trees eating bananas. The one gorilla says, "I know we all like bananas...but I really like bananas."
I guess the best word for it is "pleasure."
It is just a pleasure to read these stories. They aren't all happy stories either. Some of them are horrible stories--horrible like the ancient Greek myths that Western culture just can't seem to get out of its imagination.
Tolkien must have fallen in love with the stories, too, which might help explain why he was so anxious to make them plausible (at least from a Catholic perspective). He wanted to make them as close to possible as possible--he wanted stories that could have been even if they weren't.
When describing the supernatural beings he calls the Valar, he writes in his book proposal: "On the side of mere narrative device, this is, of course, meant to provide beings of the same order of beauty, majesty as the 'gods' of higher mythology, which can be accepted--well, shall we say baldly, by a mind that believes in the Blessed Trinity."
On the one hand, I think it's arguable that part of Tolkien's concern might be practical. He doesn't want to write some whacky neo-pagan story that's going to land him on some kind of Vatican list of banned books. But I think he's also tapping into real anxieties of a Christian if not Catholic audience. How often is the illusion of fantasy broken by our own religious beliefs? By building a fictional supernatural world that was compatible with the actual supernatural world (if such a concept is philosophically valid to describe), Tolkien makes it easier to suspend one's disbelief (I might even say he makes it too easy to suspend one's disbelief).
I'd say he's pretty true to his word as well. For instance, I was just re-reading the tale of Beren and Luthien. My take on this story is that its conclusion essentially rewrites the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to have a happy ending (one of the few happy endings in all of The Silmarillion). When the human warrior Beren falls his elf-wife Luthien eventually passes into the Halls of Mandos, where Beren's soul has been put in a kind of limbo. Luthien sings a song that convinces Mandos to show mercy--and he gets permission to allow Beren and Luthien to return to life. But Tolkien takes great pains to explain that Beren's soul isn't really under the jurisdiction of the Valar:
"But Mandos had no power to withhold the spirits of Men that were dead within the confines of the world, after their time of waiting; nor could he change the fates of the Children of Iluvatar...it was not permitted to the Valar to withhold Death from him, which is the gift of Iluvatar to Men."
Now, a non-Christian reader can read this and just see it as a set of mythological rules of engagement. A Christian, I would argue, reads it and inserts Christian doctrine in-between the lines.
Beren has to go to Heaven or Hell...that's the way it works. It's not even as though he describes them being reincarnated in the sense of being reborn. They seem much more like Lazarus figures, which, of course, would have biblical precedence, and the Halls of Mandos, as a place of waiting, seem like the Limbo of the Fathers or possibly even purgatory.
Comments