This
week we brought out the Kleenex and talked about the depiction of grief and
consolation in Tolkien’s fiction, thinking in particular about the Middle
English poem Pearl.
Our
first port of call was The Silmarillion’s
Nienna, the Goddess who grieves for the sorrows of the world, as Tolkien relates:
"Nienna looked at the pale Moon under the shadow of
her distant halls. She remembered the glory of the Two Trees and all the pain
that Melkor caused by his greed and envy. But in silence she evoked the Music
of The Ainur and how Melkor's actions were present even there, as a terrible
melody in the middle of unfolding mysteries. And as she revived the Music in
her thoughts, her sorrow grew but so did her compassion. For Nienna is the
mighty one who cries for all the unjust and terrible things that happen in the
world, but she is also the one that teaches endurance and wisdom through
adversity. And by her tears, everything is purified and hallowed so that the
mysteries can dance with the Music as it unfolds." (From The Silmarillion)
I asked what Nienna’s role tells us about Tolkien’s
concept of his created world and the role of grief within it, and it was
suggested that Tolkien sees grief as a primary component of Middle-Earth, one
that is interwoven from the beginning. Whilst Greek mythology has a God of love
and a God of war, Tolkien has a Goddess of sorrow. It was thought interesting
that Nienna is assigned to grieve for the world’s sorrows, as if this in some
way means that she will bear grief and cares so that others don’t have this
burden. One member compared Nienna to Christ and Christ’s sorrow for man’s sins
and the sufferings of the world.
From this meditation on Nienna’s grief, we moved on
to study Pearl, using Tolkien’s translation of the Middle English dream-vision
poem. In this poem, the narrator grieves for the death of his young daughter
and weeps over her grave. There, he falls into a dream and comes to a beautiful
land. The land has a cathartic quality that makes him forget his sorrow. He
comes to a river and sees his daughter over the other side, all dressed in white.
To cut a long (but very beautiful) poem short, she shows her father the kingdom
of Heaven, which he has requested to see. But this is not enough for her father
and he tries to cross the river to reach his child. He is forbidden by God,
however, and wakes suddenly to find himself lying on his daughter’s grave once
more.
The group compared the land and its cathartic
quality to Lothlorien. We compared the river in Pearl to the river in
Lothlorien, which cannot be crossed without permission. We thought about the
sorrow the fellowship experienced after Gandalf’s fall and how the Golden Woods
lifted their grief for a while. Such is the way Legolas describes it, when
asked by Celeborn why they did not inform the Elves of Gandalf’s death sooner:
We have not spoken to Haldir of our deeds or our purpose,’ said Legolas. ‘At first we were weary and danger was too close behind; and afterwards we almost forgot our grief for a time, as we walked in gladness on the fair paths of Lorien.’ Frodo’s reply suggests grief can only be suspended for a short time, not forever: ‘yet our grief is great and our loss cannot be mended.’
We thought about how Pearl offers the
narrator consolation, consolation because he knows his daughter has passed into
a new life in Heaven. There is an interesting article, well worth reading, which
discusses Pearl, the Ring and the theme of consolation.[1]
The idea of consolation led us on to Boromir’s death and its promise of
salvation. We considered the notion, put forward by Lynn Forest-Hill, that in The Lord of
the Rings, ‘grief can be a response to change as well as to death, and
while in either case it may express a profound sense of loss, it can also
signal transition of a positive kind’.[2] In
his article, Forest-Hill says:
[Tolkien’s]
treatment of Boromir also marks his
rendering of the
cultural and stylistic
shift from the
Anglo-Saxon “doomed man” to the later fully Christian hero-knight for
whom death is a transition or departure from mortality to salvation – the
redeemed Christian hero whose errors can be forgiven.[3]
We
debated this notion for some time, comparing Boromir’s death to that of Scyld
Scefing in Beowulf, and also
considering the ways in which he might have received forgiveness for his
previous acts towards Frodo. We ended by thinking about consolation and
need for closure through the creation of song, considering not only the 'Lament
for Boromir' but also Frodo’s 'Lament for Gandalf'. For Frodo, being in Lothlorien
stirs in him the desire to compose, and it is said that ‘his thought took shape
in a song that seemed fair to him’; however, when he tried to tell the song to Sam, ‘only snatches remained, faded as a handful of withered leaves’.
Lastly,
taking an very different approach to grief, we considered an article by Brent
D. Johnson which considered Eowyn to be ‘a portrait of many
soldiers’ family members who remained in England during World War I’.[4] We
debated the extent to which we could or, indeed, should read Tolkien’s own experiences of war and grief into his
work and whether or not Eowyn’s experience of grief was something more
universal, not necessarily governed by the aftermath of World War One.
-
Corinne
[1] Noah Koubenec, ‘The Precious and the Pearl:
The Influence of Pearl on the Nature of the Ring’, Mythlore, 29 (2011), 119-131 Note, in particular: ‘The Ring and the Pearl are united in that both prove unable to provide peace or
consolation for their respective admirers. It could be argued that
Pearl contains an ultimately comforting
message of salvation or at least a final note of consolation for the Jeweler that runs counter to the
overwhelmingly negative depiction of the Ring
and its power, yet in both Pearl and Tolkien’s works,
consolation comes only when the object of obsession is abandoned (voluntarily
or otherwise).’ (p. 125)
[2] Lynn
Forest-Hill, ‘Boromir, Byrhtnoth, and Bayard: Finding a Language for Grief in
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings’,
Tolkien Studies, 5 (2008) 73-97 (p.
86).
[3] Ibid., p. 87.
[4] Brent
D. Johnson, ‘Éowyn's grief’, Mythlore,
27 (2009), 117-27 (p. 118).
