THE DIALECTIC
I suggested that the star in I Vene Kemen is the key to the harmonization of the two shipwrecked lovers. As such it lies where the heart lies in Eeriness, at the Door. The star is the door at the “world’s edge”. In the Timaeus the demiurge: “assigned each soul to a star […] Any soul which made good use of its allotted time would return to dwell once more on the star with which it had been paired” (T&C 31) which echoes the Egyptian Book of the Dead. We can regard this journey from the star and back to it as the most fundamental journey of all, as “There and Back Again”. We refer back to the NCP at this point, to Lowdham’s “butterfly theory” and the “cracked mirror”:
“The Star in mind do you hold?’
‘The Star? Yes, I saw it, high and far,
at the parting of the ways,
a light on the edge of the Outer Night
like silver set ablaze,
where the round world plunges steeply down,
but on the old road goes,
as an unseen bridge that on arches runs
to coasts than no man knows’” (SD 298).
The Star harmonizes Tree and Cloud in this tripartite framing. I have long maintained it is a dialectic: A and B bridged by C. I independently arrived at the same planar dialectical understanding as Mark Hennelley in his groundbreaking but overlooked 1982 essay “The Road and the Ring: Solid Geometry in Tolkien’s Middle-earth” in which he describes Tolkien as “Tolkien the geometrician” (Hennelley 4). The triangle as the most basic component is created in the Music of the Ainur, consisting of 3 planes, B, A and C. Each corresponds to the left, right and both hands of Ilúvatar. B is created first as the eldest female outer ring of the Soul. The Cloud symbolizes the Mountain, the oak (“cloud”: “Old English clud “mass of rock, hill”“), the Tree symbolizes the birch, reiterating my point about the World as Tree and Mountain. Melkor is described “as a mountain that wades in the sea” (Sil. 23). His attempt to create discord between Palúrien and Aulë is later echoed in the quarrel between Aulë and Yavanna over the trees, and the dwarves who are made from stone. (Sil. 2.49-53).
Again, the pairing of Tree and Mountain can be seen in the first Hobbit riddle (Hobbit 5.67). Roberts notes that the first letter, “A”, in the Alvismæl acrostic in the first riddle is mountain shaped (Roberts 4.84). The pairing of Tree and Mountain is repeated in Tolkien’s image “Celbaros” (Early Noldorin Fragments 96). Given the elvish words in the image can be translated as “together again” (96) I propose that the two interlinked rings in the image represent Tolkien and Edith’s two wedding rings: “The linked rings suggest this refers to Tolkien’s reunion with Edith Bratt on January 8, 1913. After a separation of three years” (97). We’re told that “GL”, (Gnomish Lexicon) gives “back, again” (96), which is a clear reference to “There and Back Again”. These two rings are the two rings of the World Soul, and arranged thus represent a third substance, C, which is entangled as a “union of opposites” (“happy war”), also visible in Three Dragons as a lemniscate (Pictures 40). These rings incarnate as the two rings of trees in Cerin Amroth and given the centrality of the fountain, this image further supports the assertion that the two circles are the two contrary spirals in the plan of Minas Tirith with its court of the fountain and the White Tree. The dialectical harmonization “star in mind” from the NCP poem can be seen in Tolkien’s illustration Thought (A&I 39) where the middle way C lies between two stars A and B either side of the figure. This is repeated in his image of Cortirion (Early Noldorin Fragments 96) which pairs two stars with two trees and the Sun and presumably the Moon. Hennelley identifies a fundamental abstraction: “The most recurring, but profoundly complicated pattern is the analogous dialectic between the Road and the Ring, or linear progress and circular stasis” (Hennelley 4).
This identification can be found in Tolkien’s own words: “all lines must be either curved or straight” (OFS 66).
We see further evidence in the scene we briefly visited in the entrance to the Golden Hall, where we encountered “lath” and the lattice. Tolkien lays out the dialectic in the two laths A and B and the “third”, C, in Gríma and Gandalf’s exchange. In naming Gandalf (Tolkien) “láthspell”, Tolkien is linking their exchange to this dialectic. Having laid the hint of the intertwined devices and branching runes at the entrance, Tolkien then in Gríma’s words, links this to the dialectical triad ABC of the lattice in “láthspell”, via the three occurrences of the word “ill”. Gríma says: “Master Stormcrow? Láthspell I name you, Ill-news; and ill news is an ill guest they say'” (LotR 3.IV.513). Tolkien then links Gandalf with the third (C) explicitly (“third kind”) and implicitly by the repetition of the crow imagery linking it to the triad of instances of “ill”:
“‘You are held wise, my friend Wormtongue, and are doubtless a great support to your master,’ answered Gandalf in a soft voice. ‘Yet in two ways may a man come with evil tidings. He may be a worker of evil; or he may be such as leaves well alone, and comes only to bring aid in time of need.’
‘That is so,’ said Wormtongue; ‘but there is a third kind: pickers of bones, meddlers in other men’s sorrows, carrion-fowl that grow fat on war” (LotR 3.IV.513).
Also note Tolkien’s subtle hint of his use of the word “friend”, which we can now understand in the context of the triangle “Friend” in Foxrook which I’ve argued is the same triangle in Eeriness consisting of ABC, with the wizard on the path of C. Moreover, “crow” also hints at “rook”: “German hruoh “crow”“.
In Eeriness the wizard is on the path C, between A and B. Therefore we can understand the dialectic to be laid out on the geometric (planar) principles of the Demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus who constructs the World from triangles. This would explain Tolkien’s many curious statements, often of an analytical nature, relating to “planes”, and his interest in J.W. Dunne’s work revealed in Flieger’s A Question of Time, especially Tolkien’s sketch “Figure 3” (Flieger 4.105) which suggests a triangle. One such statement concerning Tolkien’s thoughts on Man’s exile from Eden reads:
“with the thought of its loss. We shall never recover it, for that is not the way of repentance, which works spirally and not in a closed circle; we may recover something like it, but on a higher plane” (Letters 159, #96).
I stated that Eden lies at the top of the Mountain, which is at the centre where the Door lies in Eeriness. The curved lines represent suggestions of these spirals. Tolkien’s statement bears a remarkable resemblance to the Rosicrucian belief that the passage of the soul, referred to in the The Secret Doctrine of the Rosicrucians as the “Pilgrims travel” (Incognito, XIII.V.238), ascends through planes along a spiral course:
“each going ’round” process travels on a little higher plane, or a more advanced position. And this is just what exists in the Cosmos—a Cosmic Spiral Process, onward and upward, in advancing and rising circles” (238).
This echoes my argument that the soul is a butterfly which passes through the Door, depicted in Eeriness. The wizard who is on this path in Eeriness becomes Gandalf who’s name means “grey pilgrim”.
If the wizard in Eeriness is the philologist Tolkien, by going down the Straight road he is going back to the roots of the World, of language, just as we find in the NCP, to Eden at the top of the Mountain. This journey is the manifestation of the “higher dimension”, that is, not A or B, but C in the dialectic, which we noted was suggested as a method in his language construction, by both “el” representing phonetic “l” and his word “Arthurian”. In visual terms this is a transformation of the flat perspective on the page (x and y axes) of the path the wizard is on in Eeriness, into the third dimension of “up” off the page (z axis), a transformation which includes his hidden imagery transforming the triangular road that the wizard is on in two dimensions to a mountain with its third “higher” dimension “off” the page. This translates as the symbolic geography of the Arthurian landscape. Shippey sums it up well:
“The same article makes it clear that he thought both ‘linguistic’ and ‘literary’ approaches too narrow for a full response to works of art, especially early works of art, and that furthermore what was needed was not some tame compromise between them (which is all most Schools of English usually manage to provide), but something as it were at right angles to both. This third dimension was the ‘philological’ one: it was from this that he trained himself to see things, from this too that he wrote his works of fiction. ‘Philology’ is indeed the only proper guide to a view of Middle-earth ‘of the sort which its author may be supposed to have desired’”(TRtMe pp.8-9).
This scheme of spirals also reminds us of the Spindle of Necessity from Plato’s myth of Er in The Republic (TR) which describes the journey of Er’s soul. It describes the World in part to be like a “trireme” (373), suggesting a ship like I Vene Kemen and the Ship of Fools, with a piercing central spindle which “was driven right through” (374), “which causes the circular motion of all the separate rotations” (374). The suggestion of a mast is obvious. The spindle is surrounded by “whorls” (373). “Whorl”: ““the small flywheel of a spindle,” perhaps an alteration of whirl“. We encountered “whirl” in Ei Uchnem. In an echo of the dialectic of the hands of Ilúvatar we read:
“the moral ones to take the right-hand route which went up and through the sky, and gave them tokens to wear on their fronts to show what behaviour they’d been assessed for, but told the immoral ones to take the left-hand, downward route” (TR 371).
We recall Thorin took the left-hand route. In a letter in which Tolkien talks about the “Man the storyteller” imitating the Creator, Tolkien describes the reality of the Primary World as the “apparent Anankê […] of our world”. Necessity was the Roman counterpart of the Ancient Greek Ananke:
“For it I coined the word ‘eucatastrophe’: the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back. It perceives – if the story has literary ‘truth’ on the second plane (for which see the essay) – that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest Fairy Story – and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love. Of course I do not mean that the Gospels tell what is only a fairy-story; but I do mean very strongly that they do tell a fairy-story: the greatest. Man the storyteller would have to be redeemed in a manner consonant with his nature: by a moving story. But since the author of it is the supreme Artist and the Author of Reality, this one was also made to Be, to be true on the Primary Plane. So that in the Primary Miracle (the Resurrection) and the lesser Christian miracles too though less, you have not only that sudden glimpse of the truth behind the apparent Anankê […] of our world, but a glimpse that is actually a ray of light through the very chinks of the universe about us” (Letters 142-143, #89).
At the turn, the Door, we are “pierced” and have a sudden glimpse of truth, a ray of light, which recollects Afterwards and its piercing rays of light. At C, Joy (B) and Sorrow (A) are “at one, reconciled”. Sorrow is created by Melkor’s discords whose legacy is “misery and sorrow, terror and wickedness” (BoLT 55). Tolkien says that joy and sorrow are reconciled. “Reconcile”: “re- “again” […] + conciliare “make friendly”“. This again hints at the triangle “Friend” of Foxrook whose line through the right-angle is the piercing letter “l”, spelled phonetically as “el”, the star at (of) the door—the needle at the top of the conical World Mountain. When Gandalf speaks the word for “friend” at the West Gate the doors open. The “major limb out of joint” is the branch of the oak we saw in both Eeriness and Tol Sirion. “Limb” gives: “Old English lim “limb of the body; any part of an animal body, distinct from the head and trunk;” main branch of a tree,”” This moment of “sudden glimpse of truth” is linked to the moment Ilúvatar raises both of his hands at which we read: “piercing as the light of the eye”. This hand grammar is echoed in the dwarf sign language Iglishmêk, the two hands become two fingers raised in the command “listen!” (TCVT 10). The Door pierced with as it were with a piercing light or a needle reminds us of Jesus’s words in Mathew:
“19.23 Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. mt.19.24 And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (THB, mt.19.23-24).
The Moira (Fates), three daughters of Necessity Clotho, Atropos and Lachesis are described as influencing the whorls using their right, left, and both hands respectively (TR 374), again echoed in the Ilúvatar hand grammar and in the narrative of Danuin, Ranuin and Fanuin (BoLT 217). If the souls in the Spindle as previously stated ascend and descend on the right and left hands, and handedness is associated in the passage with the whorls which rotate around the spindle in this way, then it is implied that there is a spiral motion involved—spirals have “handedness”, the possibility to turn left and right in Afterwards which also features two spirals in the lelt and right braziers of its sister image Before. Tolkien alludes to Necessity and the Spindle in Gandalf’s words at the Council of Elrond:
“It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed […] Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must” (LotR 2.II.269).[6]
My proposition is that Tolkien’s World rotates around the axis mundi, the centre point in the “X” identified in Eeriness. The geometry in Eeriness depicts the hour of twilight at which point the World has rotated by 45 degrees. In other words in order to see the geometry as it appears in the day or night, simply rotate the geometry in Eeriness by 45 degrees. This means that ordinarily during the day or night the “straight road” (in the broader sense I suggested, as C in the dialectic) is hidden and not available, except to those exceptional individuals who “know” and who can “see”. During the day and night it is “indicated”, or its existence is suggested, as the diagonal ray of sunlight or moonlight (remember Tolkien told us that the moon only reflects the Sun, so this is still the light of the Sun: “if the Sun were removed there would be no Moon to see” (Letters 476, #250)). The “straight road” naturally becomes available at twilight when the world has rotated by 45 degrees which briefly creates the geometry we see in Eeriness. This ephemeral state soon passes. If A and B are represented by the two hands of Ilúvatar, and C by equal representation of both hands, this would be evidence to argue that the elves’ ability see the Straight Road is linked to their being ambidextrous.
In the letter Tolkien writes that redemption comes with “consonance”, reversing dissonance. The centre is the heart at the Chi-Rho in Eeriness which is pierced before Christ is resurrected. Unity at the centre makes sense if we consider that “the discord of Melkor spread ever wider” (Sil. 16) and his discords become more violent, evident in Ilúvatar’s reactions. This implies the further we go from the centre the more discordant the World becomes and that the music with “no flaws” represents the Ainur moving closer together (in understanding) to the centre. The positions of the two pairs of trees in Eeriness support this interpretation. In other words, discord and unity are functions of the planar proximity of A and B on the lattice. The word “distance” gives: ““discord, strife;” from Old French destance “discord, quarrel” (13c.), […] from Latin distantia “a standing apart,” […] extent of space between two objects or places […] Also “an interval of time”“. If the centre of Eeriness is at the top of the mountain, then when we move away from Eden and God, we descend the Mountain. I believe Wickedness shows the process of the tearing of the veil at Christ’s death (the left-hand curtain shows signs of tearing) before he descends to hell and brings back “the keys of hell and death” (THB, re.1.18). Tolkien is the crowned man “shewing himself through the lattice” and as he told Resnick, he has “the key”.
Each passage through the Door, in this scheme takes us to a higher “rational plane”, up the Mountain to Eden. Consider Tolkien’s words: “if we try to ascend straightaway to a rational plane, and leave behind mere anger” (Letters 82, #49). To quote OFS:
“In such stories when the sudden “turn” comes we get a piercing glimpse of joy, and heart’s desire, that for a moment passes outside the frame, rends indeed the very web of story, and lets a gleam come through. […]
“Seven long years I served for thee,
The glassy hill I clamb for thee,
The bluidy shirt I wrang for thee,
And wilt thou not wauken and turn to me?”
He heard and turned to her” (OFS 76).
The “glassy hill” becomes the seven planes of Minas Tirith with seven turns through seven Doors, after Dante’s tiered Mount of Purgatorio[7] and the labyrinths on the floors of Churches which Christian pilgrims trod. In order to hear her he must “listen!” after Iglishmêk which supports the assertion that the turn at the Door equates to the moment Ilúvatar raises both of his hands. We know that this moment of “piercing light” is the moment the figure passes through the Door in Afterwards where the heart lies in Eeriness, the “hearts desire”. This is the moment the soul “turns” and the moment in the poem he “heard and turned to her”. This Door is at the centre which is also the top of the Mountain. That Mountain is Dante’s Purgatorio at the top of which is the entrance to Paradise.
Again Charles Williams uses the same symbolism,— of souls as butterflies rising towards Truth. In The Place of the Lion, Damaris is writing a thesis, “Pythagorean influences on Abelard” and is seeking publication for her essay “Platonic Tradition at the court of Charlemagne”. Mr.Tighe her father, is an entomologist with an interest in butterflies. Damaris’s words “Religions and butterflies were necessary hobbies” (The Place of the Lion [TPotL] II.18) invite a link between the butterfly and the concept of the soul, a link which does not resonate with Mr.Tighe. “Necessary” alludes to Necessity. They discuss butterflies and Plato. Damaris says: “‘one should rise from the phenomenal to the abstract beauty, and thence to the absolute.’” (II.24), suggesting the Rosicrucian conception. To which Mr. Tighe replies: “[I] had no doubt that Plato was a very great man and could do it. ‘But personally,’ he added, ‘I find that mutton helps butterflies and butterflies mutton” (II.24). In the following chapter they observe a “colossal butterfly”, “It was moving upward in spiral flutterings, upward to a certain point”, surrounded by countless smaller butterflies, their motions described as a “whirl” (III.38) rather like the souls in the Myth of Er. Appropriately this butterfly scene is observed through a gate which echoes our previous observation from Taliessin in the School of Poets “in the court beyond the lattice […] Butterfly fancies hovered”.
Returning to Gandalf and Gríma, “Pick” is from: “Old English *pician “to prick,” (implied by picung “a piercing, pricking,” an 8c. gloss on Latin stigmata)“. Stigmata chimes well with my observations about the Chi-Rho and the “precious stone” at the corner and the Sacred Heart of Jesus pierced on the cross. If we take the left and right hands of Ilúvatar to be B (birch) and A (oak), C represents the moment he raises both hands and creates the third substance after the Timaeus:
“As for its soul, despite its delayed appearance in this account of ours, it was not designed by the god to be younger than the body. How could he have wedded them to each other and then let the older be ruled by the younger? It’s just that the things we say reflect the coincidence and contingency that characterize our lives.* But in fact he made soul prior and senior, in terms of both birth and excellence, since it was to be the mistress—the ruler, with the body as its subject. And now I shall explain how he made soul and what materials he used.
He combined the two kinds of substance—the one indivisible and never changing, and the other the divided and created substance of the physical world—into an intermediate, third kind of substance” (T&C 22-23).
Herein lies the claims to being eldest and indeed Tolkien’s obvious interest in it. The word “meddle” gives: ““to mingle, blend, mix” […] from PIE root *meik- “to mix”“. The third substance is repeatedly described as a mixture: “Then he took these three ingredients and made out of them a single, homogeneous mixture”[8] (T&C 23). The “indivisible” component, is represented by the Music with “no flaws”, B (Sil. 16). The “divided” component is represented by the discords of Melkor, A. The word demon gives: “a devil […] from root *da- “to divide.”” Christoper Tolkien says that:
“Evil is fissiparous. But itself barren. Melkor could not ‘beget’, or have any spouse (though he attempted to ravish Arien, this was to destroy and ‘distain’ […] her, not to beget fiery offspring). Out of the discords of the Music — sc. not directly out of either of the themes,17 Eru’s or Melkor’s, but of their dissonance with regard one to another” (Morgoth’s Ring 405-406).
“Fissiparous” gives: “An adaptation of New Latin fissiparus, from fissus (“split, cleft”) + pariō (“I bring forth”) […] Causing division” (Fissiparous – Wiktionary).
The two musics “utterly at variance” represents C. In the moment Ilúvatar creates the third substance, the plane of the hypotenuse C, his action is described as: “piercing as the light of the Eye of Ilúvatar”. As a “picker of bones” (to “pierce”) we can again relate this to the triangle in Eeriness in that the words “bone” and “leg” were the same at root. “Leg gives”: “Old High German “bone, leg”“, and the opposite and adjacent sides of triangles in geometry parlance were referred to as “legs”. Gandalf is a picker of bones, like a carrion crow, “stormcrow”. In Eeriness the wizard does indeed pierce (pick) between these sides (bones) A and B in his passage through the Door. This would explain Tolkien’s interest in legs in his eighth Hobbit riddle, “no-legs” (Hobbit 5.70). Tolkien’s own riddle is after the famous “Riddle of the Sphinx”.
This is less of a stretch if we consider that the triangular mountain which leads to the Door ends in a needle, which we found in the Foxrook triangle “Friend”. It has three sides which are bones. A needle pierces and Jesus’s words in Matthew relate it to the door to the Afterlife which we see in Before and Afterwards which are replicated in the geometry of Eeriness. As the author has discovered, given the space, we could in fact apply this lattice geometry analytically to the passage in the Golden Hall and the narrative leading to Lothlórien simultaneously supporting the previous statement that “this structure operates at all scales”. The Naith, the “Gore” which lies at the centre of the largest scale narrative “There and Back Again”, located at the spiritual centre of the map of LotR, is easily identifed as both something which pierces and as a triangle from the etymologies given.
“Gore (v)”: ““to pierce, stab,” […] Middle English gore (n.) “spear,” from Old English gar “spear”. (see gar, also gore (n.2)“.
“Gore (n.2)”: “triangular piece of ground,” Old English gara “corner, point of land, cape, promontory,” […] gare “a gore of cloth; a garment,”[…] German gehre “a wedge, a gore”), from PIE *ghaiso- “a stick, spear” […] The connecting sense is “triangularity.” […] “triangular piece of cloth”“.
So we have a “triangle of cloth”. The word “map” is from “cloth”. Latin “mappa mundi” means “map of the world”.
“Map”: “from Latin mappa “napkin, cloth” […] “tablecloth, signal-cloth, flag,” said by Quintilian to be of Punic (Semitic) origin (compare Talmudic Hebrew mappa, contraction of Mishnaic menaphah “a fluttering banner, streaming cloth”). The second element is Latin mundi “of the world,” from mundus “universe, world”“.
If Tolkien’s world is made from triangles it would be fitting if the heart of that world map could be described as a “triangular piece of cloth”. When the spear pierces the centre, the heart, the “Light of the World”, Christ, shines through just as we see in Afterwards. Tolkien’s own etymologies are instructive. We can directly link the triangular mountains such as Taniquetil with a triangle and something which pierces- the mountain rises to a point at the centre and ends in a needle as we’ve observed.
“SNAS-, SNAT- ? Q nasta spear-head, point, gore, triangle (cf. NAS); Dan. snæ̂s. N naith (natsai pl. ?) gore. [Cf. the Naith of Lothlórien. The question-mark is followed by a drawing of an arrow-head.]”(Lost Road 387).
The images Eeriness, Before, Afterwards, etc, share the same underlying symbolic geometry which is described as the “whole field of Arda […] the foundation of a pillar ” and “cone”, “whose summit were more bitter than a needle”(). We can understand that the triangle representing the mountain in Eeriness with its implied “needle” is the same triangle we see as the corridoor in Before. The Naith points as a spearhead directly as a spear head. We know from his etymolgies that a “spear-head”, “point”, “gore”, “arrow-head” is also a “triangle”, just like the triangle in these images. The piercing light in Afterwards is the same piercing light of the “eye of Ilúvatar”.
We can source the final element in “Taniquetil” from The Lost Road where we find “triangle” again and something which pierces,—a “horn”:
“TIL- point, horn. Q tilde point, horn; cf. Ta-niqe-til (g.sg. tilden); N tild, till horn. Q Tilion ‘the Horned’, name of the man in the Moon; N Tilion. Q neltil (neltildi), N nelthil triangle (see NEL). [Cf. QS §75: marginal note by Ælfwine to the name Tilion: ‘hyrned’ (Old English, ‘horned’). It is strange that Tilion is here ‘the man in the Moon’: in QS (as in Q, IV. 97) he was ‘a young hunter of the company of Oromë’. Is the implication that in later ages the myth of Tilion became the story of the Man in the Moon?”(Lost Road 393).
The horned moon, the crescent moon hunts triangular butterflies through the Door in Roverandom. We’ve equated the Dragon Smaug with the crescent moon because they both hunt butterflies, which are stars. That links Smaug to the White Dragon. At the Door in Afterwards we find the piercing light of the eye of Ilúvatar, the rays of light flooding through, and the horned moon wrestles over a star on the sail of the World Soul which, given it is a ship and has a butterfly on its sail, can be linked to the description of the Last Ship which is “sailing like a butterfly” on “wings like stars”. This also agrees with the details in Bilbo’s “Last Song” as we saw.
Regardless of changes in the mythology, we can explain the association of the young hunter in the company of Oromë with The Man in the Moon because the dialectic always reduces the characters to the same formula of archetypes created in the Ainulindalë as incarnations of Tolkien and Edith (and ultimately to just Tolkien as the demiurge, the conductor of a symphonic Faërian Drama), as variations of the theme of Ilúvatar, the Music, the hands of Ilúvatar: A,B,C. In this way we can see both the White Dragon and Smaug as instances of a fundamental archetype.
And given we have a duality of Tree and Mountain we can link the notion of a triangle to the “Tree”.
“NEL- three. NÉL-ED- three: Q nelde; N neledh later neled (after canad four). Prefix nel- tri-. nelthil triangle (neltildi) [TIL]. Doriathrin neldor beech. Cf. Neldoreth name of a forest in Doriath, properly name of Hirilorn the great beech of Thingol with three trunks = neld-orn? [see ÓR-NI]. The N name is brethel, pl. brethil (cf. Forest of Brethil); see BERÉTH [where brethil is given as the singular]. The proper Dor. name was galdbreth > galbreth [GALAD]. (Lost Road 376).
We know that Tolkien in his early mythologies used the word “Arthurian” for Doriath which again supports the interpretation of his world as a symbolic landscape. He also used “Garthurian” which suggests a link between the triangular tree to the word “gar” which relates to “gore”. Both Lórien and Doriath were hidden forests and centres of the Highest powers of good in the World at the time.
“Gar”: “Middle English gare, gore “a spear,” from Old English gar “spear,” from Proto-Germanic *gaisa- “spear” (source also of Old Norse geirr “spear; point of an anvil,” […] German Ger “spear”), from PIE *ghaiso- “a stick, spear“. This in turn suggests a link to the Spear of Longinus, the “Spear of Destiny” because the Holy Lance appears in the Arthurian legends. If Christ’s heart is at the centre,— the Sacred Heart of Jesus, then we can see that this piercing has a subtext which relates to the spear of Longinus used to stab the heart of Jesus on the cross. And as a hint Tolkien describes the landform of Mirrormere in a symbolic geographical manner as a “spear-head”:
“Less than a mile away, and a little below them, for they still stood high up on the west side of the dale, there lay a mere. It was long and oval, shaped like a great spear-head thrust deep into the northern glen”(LotR 2.VI.333).
This is interesting given that Frodo, who according to Shippey is a “Christ figure”, was attacked in the Chamber of Mazarbul with a spear. Further evidence of this link can be found if we consider “gar” as “point of an anvil” and Frodo’s words to the astonished Aragorn:
“That spear-thrust would have skewered a wild boar!’ ‘Well, it did not skewer me, I am glad to say,’ said Frodo; ‘though I feel as if I had been caught between a hammer and an anvil’. He said no more”(LotR 2.V.pp.327-328).
Therefore the appearance of the anvil on the West Gate and in Gimli’s chant further links the description of Mirromere to the geography itself, again implying a symbolic landscape. Gandalf’s sacrifice and “resurrection” clearly support this “spear” interpretation. Exactly why the spear of Mirrormere differs from the Naith and points instead in the opposite direction at the Misty Mountains can be explained elsewhere.
This structure applies at all scales and can be used to understand for example, the young hunter in Oromë’s company. The planar dialectic would also explain the observation of the “pair phenomenon” (A and B) in the following essays: Sherryln Branchaw’s Elladan and Elrohir: The Dioscuri in The Lord of the Rings[9], Kristine Larsen’s Seeing Double: Tolkien and the Indo-European Divine Twins[10], Miryam Libran Moreno’s Parallel Lives: The Sons of Denethor and the Sons of Telamon[11]. Furthermore it would explain the “bridge” mentioned by Andrew Higgins in his essay Tolkien on Holiday[12]. Higgins indirectly identifies the dialectic in his observations on the two sides of Tolkien’s mind (AB) which are linked by a “bridge” (C). Lothlórien is the “centre”, “inside a song” (LotR 2.VI.351), the Earthly Paradise located at the heart in Eeriness, at the top of the Mountain, where both sides exist simultaneously in unity (inside as opposed to outside). Lothlórien is described as a “timeless land that did not fade or change or fall into forgetfulness. When he had gone and passed again into the outer world”(LotR 2.VI.351). Lothlórien is the “inner world” which remembers a time when there was no division, indeed no such thing as inner and outer, “one” and “the other”. It is an earthly echo of the Music with “no flaws” before the discords of Melkor and echoes the Cottage of Lost Play which is also at the centre. As an echo Lothlórien is also imperfect, evidenced in its necessary isolation and the blindfolding of Gimli and summed up in the exchange about “stiff necks” of both dwarves and elves, but it is the one place which remembers the perfection, the “centre”:
“`Alas for the folly of these days! ‘ said Legolas. ‘Here all are enemies of the one Enemy, and yet I must walk blind, while the sun is merry in the woodland under leaves of gold! ‘
`Folly it may seem,’ said Haldir. ‘Indeed in nothing is the power of the Dark Lord more clearly shown than in the estrangement that divides all those who still oppose him. Yet so little faith and trust do we find now in the world beyond Lothlórien, unless maybe in Rivendell, that we dare not by our own trust endanger our land”(LotR 2.VI.348).
Lothlórien is an island beleagured by a sea of troubles: “We live now upon an island amid many perils”(348). The Fellowship and their Quest bring about a return to the perfection that Lothlórien remembers and enshrines.
If Lothlórien is at the centre of Eeriness at the top of the mountain, then we can visualize the wash of blue in the surrounding three triangles to represent this sea, or of course the blue firmament. These observations agree with Tolkien’s Rosicrucian spiral path of the “pilgrim” soul back to Eden in Letter #96, since the path of the “Grey pilgrim” Gandalf in Eeriness leads to the centre,— and we know that the spirals in Before lead to the same place. Appendix III discusses the “World centre” and relates the Music of the Ainur to the Falls of the Free Peoples, and the Fall of Sauron.
If you look very closely at the two trees at the centre of Eeriness you can see that Tolkien has suggested that the birch’s hand is on the outside of the oak’s just like the elder, female, outer ring of the World Soul which was created: “with one of the rings inside the other; the outer revolution he named the revolution of identity, and the inner one the revolution of difference” (T&C 24). In addition the two rings move in contrary directions much like we observed previously with the oars, spirals, etc: “He made identity move around towards the right, as if along a side, and difference towards the left, as if along a diagonal, and he gave sovereignty to the revolution of identity and constancy” (24).
Tolkien makes reference to “shapes” in the Cottage poem: “And all the paths were full of shapes” and likewise in Lothlórien Sam remarks:
“All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever. […] In winter here no heart could mourn” (351).
Higgins writes:
“An interesting mixture of the two conceptual spaces of home and holiday (both sides of the mind perhaps) occurs in a passage in The Lord of the Rings when Sam Gamgee in the Elvish realm of Lothlórien curiously describes his experience there as, ‘it’s like being home and on a holiday at the same time” (Higgins 21).
In the poem the Cottage is homely but the children also “rollicked in the fairy sand And gathered pearls and shells in pails” (BoLT I.28) reminiscent of his drawing Two Boys at the Seaside (A&I 11), children on holiday at the beach. Higgins continues— here we encounter the “corner” we noted previously identified with the centre in Eeriness:
“Lothlórien for Sam is a place that is both familiar and strange; a physical and conceptual place, in a sense, that bridges both sides of the mind that Tolkien described in his talk on the Kalevala. Indeed, in another part of his Kalevala talk Tolkien described his discovery as crossing a gulf between Indo-European speaking peoples of Europe into this smaller realm of those who cling in queer corners to the forgotten tongues and memories of an elder day” (Higgins 21).
The “Naith” echoes the repeating planar dialectical concept of the “Angle between the waters”, in one instance representing the England of Ælfwine from the early conceptions of his mythology, back in time. Eeriness then becomes the road to “The Land of the Angles” presuming a pun on geometry angles, as previously identified, the “straight”, “right-angle” and “ishness” inferring “angle-ishness”, “Englishness”. Shippey writes:
“With Pearl in mind, one might easily conclude that the stretch between the two rivers is a sort of ‘earthly Paradise’ for Frodo and the others, though one still capable of violation and invasion from the outside world. The ‘Naith’ of Lórien, though, across the second river, is Heaven; the company undergoes a kind of death in getting there” (TRtMe 6.246).
We’ve already identified Eden to be at the top of the Mountain at the centre location of the heart in Eeriness. Shippey supports our identification of the “angle” as the location of the heart in Eeriness when in Author of the Century he elaborates:
“We would say neither ‘naith’ nor ‘gore’, but Haldir tries a third word with similar meaning when he says they can walk free till they come nearer the heart of the kingdom, ‘in the Angle between the waters’. The names ‘England’ and ‘English’ come from the word ‘angle’, and the old now-German homeland of the English was the Angle, or corner of land, between the Flensburg Fjord and the River Schlei – just as that of the hobbits was the Angle between the rivers Hoarwell and Loudwater. Frodo feels that he is ‘walking in a world that was no more’, that he has ‘stepped over a bridge of time’. And perhaps, like the dreamer in Pearl” (AotC IV.199).
Again we encounter the notion of the “bridge”. Finally we can further establish that Lóthlorien is an echo of the same phenomenon we found in The Cottage of Lost Play, both places occupying the same location in the planar grammar, that of the heart at the centre in the geometry in Eeriness.
“`Here is the heart of Elvendom on earth,’ he said, `and here my heart dwells ever, unless there be a light beyond the dark roads that we still must tread, you and I. Come with me! ‘ And taking Frodo’s hand in his, he left the hill of Cerin Amroth and came there never again as living man”(LotR 2.VI.352).
We can directly equate Lothlorien with the centre and the trinagle of the mountain rising to the top, the centre, via the needle which pierces which we know is in hiw traingle “Friend”- the piercing light of the eye of iluvatar.
Lóthlorien and The Cottage of Lost Play are two manifestations of the centre, of being “inside a song”. Tolkien and Edith as “You and I” and “You and me” in the cottage poems reappear as Aragorn and Frodo in the two concentric rings of trees in Cerin Amroth. The symbolism of the two rings of the World Soul is evident in both manifest the hands arrangement of the two trees at the centre in Eeriness, one being outside the other.
