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 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. The author 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 Cloud symbolizes the Mountain, the oak (“cloud”: “Old English clud “mass of rock, hill”“), the Tree symbolizes the birch. 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). 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 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) 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 the third substance of entanglement, also visible in Three Dragons as a lemniscate (Pictures 40). These rings become 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 very 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).
This 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 scheme 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, 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). “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. When Gandalf speaks the word for “friend” at the West Gate the doors open. This is linked to the moment Ilúvatar raises both of his hands at which we read: “piercing as the light of the eye”- as previously stated “el” is the element “ilu” in Ilúvatar. 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 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”. 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 identified in Eeriness. 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.
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”“. 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”. 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.
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 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”. 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).
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 where both sides exist simultaneously in unity (inside as opposed to outside). This 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. This observation agrees 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.
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, 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).
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 see the “bridge”. We can clearly see the planar dialectic incorporated into Tolkien’s analysis of Gawain in which the “passing world of values” and “code of honour” are designated as A and B which intersect at the centre C in Eeriness:
“We have in fact reached the point of intersection of two different planes: of a real and permanent, and an unreal and passing world of values: morals on the one hand, and on the other a code of honour, or a game with rules. The personal code of most people was, and of many still is, like that of Sir Gawain made up of a close blend of the two; and breaches at any point in that personal code have a very similar emotional flavour. Only a crisis, or serious thought without a crisis (which is rare) will serve to disentangle the elements; and the process may be painful, as Gawain discovered” (The Monsters and the Critics [TMatC] 89).
It reappears in his comments on “Allegory” and “Story”, A and B which “start out from opposite ends” and converge on “Truth” at C:
“Of course, Allegory and Story converge, meeting somewhere in Truth. So that the only perfectly consistent allegory is a real life; and the only fully intelligible story is an allegory. And one finds, even in imperfect human ‘literature’, that the better and more consistent an allegory is the more easily can it be read ‘just as a story’; and the better and more closely woven a story is the more easily can those so minded find allegory in it. But the two start out from opposite ends” (Letters 174, #109).
In both instances we see a reference to the “X” of the two trees entangled in “disentangle” and “closely woven”. The word “crisis” gives: “decisive point in the progress of a disease,” […] point at which change must come, for better or worse,” from […] Greek krisis “turning point in a disease, that change which indicates recovery or death“. The “point” is the top, the “naith”, the “queer corner”, the triangle at the Door, the “turning point”. Tréowine accompanied Ælfwine on his voyage. The last thing Tréowine saw was the Straight Road: “the old road goes, as an unseen bridge”. His name “true friend” (SD 293) references both “Truth” and the triangle “Friend” of Foxrook.
[6] This illustrates one of Tolkien’s riddling methods. No explicit link between “necessity” and the hands and wheels metaphor is given, but the hint lies in the proximity of the two on the page, much like the blue mountains next to the hat of Gandalf in the riddle of the Rivendell hidden imagery. We observed the same allusory technique in The Place of the Lion.
[7] Tolkien said that Minas Tirith “is at about the latitude of Florence” (Letters 528, #294). In Domenico di Michelino’s painting Dante Before the City of Florence, Dante appears holding his Divine Comedy outside the walls of Florence, with the Mount of Purgatory, depicting his exile. In LotR Elrond withholds the heirlooms and the hand of his daughter Arwen from Aragorn much like Tolkien was exiled to his own purgatory when Friar Francis forbid contact with Edith until he was twenty one. Tolkien used this motif in the Beren and Lúthien story. We know that Beren and Lúthien are Tolkien and Edith. Beren mistakes Arwen for Lúthien in Cerin Amroth (LotR Appendix A.V.1058). Paradise is at the top of Mount Purgatory implying Tolkien’s escape from his own purgatory and apprehension of paradise with Edith-Arwen.
[8] Tolkien refers to “Lit” (A) as “she” in his poem “Lit’ and Lang'” (J.R.R. Tolkien, E.V. Gordon & others 25). The reconciliation of this with my hypothesis which in its current simplified form states that the oak (A) is Tolkien and the birch (B) is Edith, requires a discussion of the “third substance” in the World Soul which is a mixture of A and B, “male” and “female” (though not strictly genders). This substance is the World “that is”. In the geometry of Eeriness there are two butterflies, A and B, but each butterfly has two wings (two triangles), each also A and B. In Before we can see that the wings of the hidden figure equate to the two left and right triangles and the two spirals. Each character has an oak and a birch side. As a couple Tolkien and Edith are two halves of one whole consisting of ABBA. Each wing is a half of the Door. Thus in order for the Door to function, to proceed through the Door (to the heart), both male and female must be present in the Music, in harmony. Unity is created from shared harmony, by incorporation of the other half, as opposed to the “unity of its own” of Melkor’s discords. These interrelations reverse during the course of a narrative because Tolkien’s world is based on the duality of mirror reflections. Only Eru is “One”.
[9] Branchaw, Sherrylyn. “Elladan and Elrohir: The Dioscuri in The Lord of the Rings.” Available at: https://doi.org/10.1353/tks.0.0081.
[10] Larsen, Kristine (2022) “Seeing Double: Tolkien and the Indo-European Divine Twins” Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol40/iss2/10.
[11] Libran Moreno, Miryam. “Parallel Lives: The Sons of Denethor and the Sons of Telamon.” Available at: https://doi.org/10.1353/tks.2005.0024.
[12] Higgins, A. “Tolkien on Holiday”. Available at: https://journals.tolkiensociety.org/mallorn/article/view/181.
