Letter 211

This letter is to Rhona Beare who wanted to know, among other things, how was Ar-Pharazôn able to defeat Sauron when Sauron had the Ring and what happened to the Blue Wizards. He admits he does not know all the answers, but he does give some detailed information.

He said Ar-Pharazôn conquered those under Sauron, not the Dark Lord himself. “Sauron’s personal ‘surrender’ was voluntary and cunning: he got free transport to Númenor! He naturally had the One Ring, and so very soon dominated the minds and will of most of the Númenóreans.”

Tolkien does not think the king knew anything about the Ring’s existence since it was a closely held secret by the Elves and the man was not in communication with them. However, the terrible effect of the Lord of that Ring had already begun to be felt in the Land of Gift almost 1500 years previously. Evidence of that is seen through the switch of Elven names for kings to strictly Númenórean ones. “After Tar Atanamir (an Elvish name), the next name is Ar-Adûnakhôr an Númenórean name...

"The change of names went with a complete rejection of the Elf friendship, and of the ‘theological’ teaching the Númenórean had received from them.”

When Númenor is destroyed as a result of Sauron’s seduction of Ar-Pharazôn which culminated in the king’s invasion of the Undying Lands, “Sauron was first defeated by a ‘miracle’: a direct action of God the Creator, changing the fashion of the world, when appealed to by Manwë... Though reduced to ‘a spirit of hatred borne on a dark wind’” the Dark Lord is still able to carry off the Ring. When he is again defeated by Gil-galad and Elendil, he had not yet completed his re domination over men or finished fashioning a new body for himself after his other was destroyed in the cataclysm that was the downfall of Númenor.

Regarding the Blue Wizards, the Professor says he does not know for sure, but gives a frightening hypothesis: “I think they went as emissaries to distant regions, East and South, far out of Númenórean range: missionaries to ‘enemy occupied’ lands, as it were. What success they had I do not know; but I fear that they failed, as Saruman did, though doubtless in different ways; and I suspect they were founders or beginners of secret cults and ‘magic’ traditions that outlasted the fall of Sauron.” This is another example of why I love Tolkien as a kindred spirit, because even he doesn’t know the truth of all the mysteries contained within Middle-earth. Any writer knows that they are only showing, in most cases, a slice of the lives of the people they write of. Those people had lives before they were discovered by the author and they had lives that continued on afterwards that are not known.

Tolkien also makes note of the Standing Silence, or ‘Grace before Meat’ as he calls it here: “This is indeed mainly as it were a commemoration of the Departed, and theology is reduced to ‘that which is beyond Elvenhome and ever will be’, sc. is beyond the mortal lands, beyond the memory of unfallen Bliss, beyond the physical world.”

It is also in this letter that Tolkien is clear that Middle-earth is our earth and notes that the gap of time between the War of the Ring and our own age is about 6000 years. He guesses that we are either now at the end of the Sixth Age, or at the beginning of the Seventh.

In a separate draft to Beare that he did not send, he returns to speaking of the Valar, the creation of the world, the love of the Valar for Elves and Men, mortality as the ‘Gift of Ilúvatar’, Aulë’s sub creation of the dwarves, God finding out about it and Aule asking for pardon but God giving the dwarves independent life instead. Also that once the Valar fashioned scenes/melodies from the Music that they could watch as one would a movie, God gave it true reality that they could actually step into and become part of. What they had sung into sub existence using the blueprint that God had shown them would be akin to when an author/artist/filmmaker/composer sub creates a work that is real to him, and if he does it right, also to others who experience it but in which everyone still remains physically outside. The Valar actually entered into their sub creation once it was given independent reality, just as Niggle sees his tree given true life after his death. This would happen to us also if we could enter truly into the Shire or Lothlórien or wherever we wanted to go, with our mind, body and soul, not just with the heart.

The good Valar loved the Children of God: the Elves and Men who were independent from their own thought and sub creation, coming directly from God, just as they had themselves but with lesser power. The evil Ainur hated and envied the Children and saw them only as “ideal material for subjects and slaves, to whom they could become masters and ‘gods’...”

Also covered is that Elves could be slain by having their bodies destroyed or so mutilated that they could not sustain life. “But this did not lead naturally to ‘death’: they were rehabilitated and reborn and eventually recovered memory of all their past: they remained ‘identical’. But Miriel [Feanor’s mum] wished to abandon being, and refused rebirth.” This led to the Fall of the High Elves.

“It was also the Elvish (and uncorrupted Númenórean) view that a ‘good’ Man would or should die voluntarily by surrender with trust before being compelled (as did Aragorn). This may have been the nature of unfallen Man; though compulsion would not threaten him: he would desire and ask to be allowed to ‘go on’ to a higher state. The Assumption of Mary, the only unfallen person, may be regarded as in some ways a simple regaining of unfallen grace and liberty: she asked to be received, and was, having no further function on Earth.”