Tolkien on 9/11

My son Peter got me thinking about disasters and tragedies in Tolkien in relationship to today's tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on our nation, and that they are always linked to perseverance and hope in spite of fear.  This runs throughout Tolkien's work and is especially strong in The Silmarillion, which I've been teaching in my Tolkien class these early weeks of the semester.

If any book could be called a "real downer" it is The Silmarillion.  The collection of tales from the First Age of Middle-earth seems on the surface to be a relentless catalog of failure and defeat that follows in the wake of Feanor's creation of the Silmarils in Valinor and their theft by Morgoth, the first Dark Lord. Tolkien has re-created in the Elvish War against Morgoth to regain the Silmarils the epitome of the Norse saga:  that the battle must go on even when it is completely hopeless.

But that isn't the whole story, and there are Silmaril-bright points of hope scattered across this dark narrative cloth.  Many could be cited, and I want to do some blogging about these in the days and weeks ahead, but for today in particular I am thinking of those scenes of self-sacrifice throughout The Silmarillion which occur most often in battle, as in the account of the rescue of the elvish king Finrod Felagund by one of the captains of men, Barahir, during the Dagor Bragollach, the Battle of Sudden Flame:

But Barahir the brother of Bregolas was in the fighting further westward, near to the Pass of Sirion,  There King Finrod Felagund, hastening from the south, was cut off from his people and surrounded with small company in the Fen or Serech; and he would have been slain or taken, but Barahir came up with the bravest of his men and rescued him, and made a wall of spears about him; and they cut their way out of the battle with great loss.

Barahir's act of bravery will be repaid in the next chapter when Finrod sacrifices his own life to save Barahir's son Beren in the dungeons of Morgoth's lieutenant, Sauron, leading to one of the central sequences of perseverance and hope in the entire Silmarillion: the capture of a Silmaril from the crown of Morgoth by Beren and Luthien.

The hope that springs from oaths of friendship and bonds of love in Tolkien's Silmarillion are a powerful counter-force to the fear, hatred, and seeming hopelessness that characterizes the War of the Jewels.