Tolkien: Parallel Stories

“There flying Elwing came to him, / and flame was in the darkness lit; / more bright than light of diamond / the fire upon her carcanet.” 1

The narrative of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is interspersed with poems. These poems tend to merge into the story, often serving world-building or characterization purposes: to flesh out his Middle-earth legendarium with cultural and ‘historical’ references, to establish a tone or a setting, or to memorialize a character. None of these seem to apply, however, to “The Song of Eärendil”, the longest poem in the Fellowship of the Ring (and possibly in the trilogy), running to one-hundred-and-twenty-four lines. It stands out for its length as well as its apparent lack of connection with the rest of the trilogy. 

The poem is found in the chapter “Many Meetings,” when the hobbits are staying in Rivendell while Frodo recovers from a near-fatal wound2. After dinner, the elves gather in a big hall to play music, sing, and recite poetry. Bilbo Baggins, Frodo’s uncle, stands up and recites “The Song of Eärendil”. The poem tells the story of Eärendil, a half-elf who ruled the region of Arvenien in the First Age of Middle-Earth history. The poem starts as Eärendil arms himself in the “panoply of ancient kings” and prepares to sail to Valinor, a land open only to immortal spirits: the Valar and the elves3. He endures many hardships on the journey, but since he is mortal, he fails to find Valinor and is driven home by tempests. As he sails back to Arvernien, his wife Elwing, changed into a bird, flies to him with a powerful jewel called the Silmaril. Having the Silmaril with him, Eärendil becomes courageous enough to make another attempt at finding Valinor. This time he is successful. He is received by the immortals, who teach him and take him into their council. The Valar grants him immortal status and gives his ship the power of flight so that he can perform his task: to sail through the sky, bearing the Silmaril as a star. Thus Eärendil remains at Valinor and performs his task daily. He is doomed to never set foot again in Middle-Earth4. 

So far, the story of the poem seems to be unrelated to the plot of the Fellowship or any of the characters. Granted, Eärendil is Elrond’s father, but this fact, though no doubt important in terms of the entire legendarium, is of very little weight in terms of the trilogy. Did Tolkien include the poem to introduce Eärendil as a character? No, because Eärendil is hardly ever mentioned again in the entire trilogy and plays no part in the plot. Did the poem serve world-building or character-building purposes, to flesh out the elves by explaining a central part of their history? Perhaps, but if that was Tolkien’s intention, why did he not include another short elvish poem, like “Gil-galad was an Elven king”? 

There is almost a purposeful reticence about “The Song of Eärendil”: its language is so oblique at times that it is difficult to glean any clear historical or even cultural information, and its insertion is not justified by commentary or connections to the Fellowship. Readers unfamiliar with Eärendil’s story would not be able to reconstruct it by examining the poem alone. Tolkien offers one or two hints that connect the poem to Elrond and Aragorn, but like the poem itself, they would be lost on the average reader; even if they are appreciated, they are of marginal value to the narrative. One could argue that Tolkien simply included the poem for aesthetic purposes, but a hundred-line poem on a vague topic hardly adds to the beauty of the Fellowship or its themes—in fact, its length and irrelevance punctures the flow of the narrative. 

But is it indeed irrelevant? Could it have been a mistake on Tolkien’s part to include the poem? 

No, he made no mistake. A closer reading of both the poem and the trilogy reveals uncanny similarities between the two characters central to each story: Eärendil and Frodo. The inclusion of the story of Eärendil enabled Tolkien to draw key parallels between Eärendil’s and Frodo’s lives that foreshadow and outline Frodo’s story in the rest of the trilogy.

The most evident parallel lies in the Silmaril, one of three precious jewels created by the elf Fëanor from the light of the Two Trees of Valinor. When Morgoth, the predecessor of Sauron, steals the Silmarils, Fëanor and his seven sons, who were living in Valinor, swore an oath to go to Middle-Earth and fight anyone who stands between them and the gems5. They carry out this oath to the letter; and since the Silmarils change hands many times, countless casualties result from the conflicts between the sons of Fëanor, Morgoth, and other seekers of the Silmarils. In one of these exchanges, one Silmaril comes into the possession of Elwing, wife of Eärendil. When two of Morgoth’s sons attack Arvenien in an attempt to take it from her, she refuses to surrender and jumps into the sea with the Silmaril. Ulmo, the Valar of the waters, gave Elwing “the likeness of a great white bird”6, in which guise she flew to her husband. Thus Eärendil became the bearer of the Silmaril, as Frodo would become the bearer of the phial of Galadriel, which contained the Silmaril’s light: “In this phial… is caught the light of Eärendil’s star”7. The Silmaril’s light is no ordinary light; it is the light from the Two Trees, a light that instills courage in the good and fear in the evil. When the “flame” of the Silmaril “was in the darkness lit”—the darkness of the seas Eärendil sailed, or the darkness of Shelob’s lair, where Frodo struggled to escape—courage came to both Eärendil and Frodo. Unable to find Valinor, Eärendil admitted his defeat and turned back, but as soon as Elwing gave him the Silmaril, “dauntless then with burning brow / he turned his prow”8. This tribute to the Silmaril’s power is echoed thousands of years later, when, holding the phial of the Silmaril’s light, “Frodo’s heart flamed within him” while the eyes of the monstrous Shelob “wavered… dimmed, and slowly… drew back” from the brightness9.

There are plenty of instances in which Eärendil’s journey from Arvenien to Valinor calls to mind Frodo’s journey from Hobbiton to Mordor. Though Tolkien does not detail the ordeals Eärendil has to face (at least not in the version of the story published by Christopher Tolkien), his descriptive phrasing—“enchanted ways”, “gnashing of the “Narrow Ice”, “frozen hills”, “burning waste”—creates imagery that seems to apply to both Eärendil’s and Frodo’s journey10. Caradhras, the snow-covered mountain the Fellowship failed to climb, is a formidable “frozen hill”; months later, Frodo and his servant would find its antithesis as they trudge across the “burning waste” of Mordor. Frodo had his share of “enchanted ways,” from the Barrow-downs to the mines of Moria or Lothlórien. The poem’s description of Valinor—“the timeless halls / where shining fall the countless years, / and endless reigns the Elder King”, with its repeated references to the eternal, is also fitting for Lothlórien, a land of shining immortality under the endless reign of Galadriel11. Lothlórien is a scaled-down, imperfect version of Valinor, the elves’ attempt to recreate “timeless halls” in Middle-Earth, where visions are shown to Frodo in the mirror of Galadriel. In another age, while taking council in Valinor, “words unheard were spoken then / of folk of Men and Elven-kin / beyond the world were visions showed” to Eärendil12. “Words unheard” but concerning the fate of the peoples of Middle-Earth were also exchanged in the Rivendell of Frodo's day, a pale reflection of Lothlórien and hence of Valinor.

Eärendil’s fate, or his role in the overall scheme of things, is also markedly similar to Frodo’s. Eärendil, bearer of the Silmaril, goes on his journey to Valinor—not a pleasure trip, but a mission fraught with the dangers of nature and danger from the immortals. After all, Eärendil the mortal has dared to set foot in immortal Valinor. Fearing that punishment awaits him, he tells his wife and companions that he would go to meet the Valar alone, so that whatever peril there is he will “take on [himself] alone, for the sake of the Two Kindreds”13. These two kindreds are what the poem calls “folk of Men and Elven-kin”, for whom Eärendil shoulders the burden of his mission: to return the Silmaril to Valinor, and to seek council from the immortal spirits. Frodo likewise is given council—first by Gandalf in Hobbiton, then in Rivendell, and later in Lothlórien—which would aid him in his mission: to return the Ring to its forge. Frodo undertakes his burden for the sake of men and elves, but also for “the other Free Peoples of the World”14. Frodo’s journey is more dangerous than Eärendil’s—the Valar cannot compete with Sauron in the workings of evil — but like the Silmaril-bearer, the Ring-bearer is reluctant to expose his friends to the dangers he knows he must face. He leaves the Fellowship secretly at Parth Galen, and had not his servant followed him, he would have journeyed on to Mordor alone15. For Eärendil’s services, the Valar bestowed immortality on him: he would remain in Valinor and “tarry never more / on Hither Shores where Mortals are”16. Frodo, too, eventually sails to Valinor and stays there for the rest of his life. 

For readers who know something about the history of the Silmarils, “The Song of Eärendil” would have struck them as a warning: perhaps the Ring has the potential to wreak as much havoc in the Middle-Earth of Sauron’s day as the Silmarils in Morgoth’s, if not more? But the poem, as a microcosm of the trilogy which foreshadows the events and concepts that would become central to Frodo’s story, is also a sign of hope: if Eärendil succeeded in his mission, then Frodo might succeed too. As Frodo sails away from the Grey Havens, he is perhaps looking forward to meeting Eärendil, his spiritual predecessor, the only other mortal who, thousands of years before him, had seen “the Mountain silent rise / where twilight lies upon the knees / of Valinor… beheld afar beyond the seas”17.