‘mortal’ valences of Tolkien’s own world-view. In 1967 Tolkien drafted a lengthy account of his reaction to Cynewulf’s lines (and the role they played in sparking his own imaginative creativity). He wrote this as a letter to be sent to a man called Rang who had contacted Tolkien with queries about his invented nomenclature; although in the event the letter was never sent. In the letter he describes the Eärendil name as having an important connection with his own creative imagination. He notes how greatly he was struck, when studying Anglo-Saxon before the First World War, by ‘the great beauty of this word (or name)’. It was consonant with conventional Anglo-Saxon, but also struck Tolkien’s ear, he says, with unusual sweetness and euphony. In the letter he goes on to elaborate his theory that ‘
éarendel
’, the OE original, is a name rather than a word, and that it referred to ‘what we now call
Venus
: the morning star’. 5 His argument spills into a footnote, as Tolkien develops a thesis about Cynewulf’s semantic signification:
éarendel
meaning ‘ray of light’ is etymologically connected with ‘aurora’, and also appears in the
Bickling Homilies
(a tenth-century collectionof religious writing whose author or authors are unknown to us). Tolkien seems sure that Cynewulf’s lines ‘refer to a herald, a divine messenger’, the morning star as ‘herald of the rise of the true Sun in Christ’. Finally, and with a rather beautifully deflating final turn, he adds that this notion was ‘completely alien to my use’ in writing
The Hobbit
and
the Lord of the Rings
.
In adapting and re-appropriating, as he very often did, Old English words and names, Tolkien nonetheless insists ‘the borrowing when it occurs’ is ‘simply that of sounds, that are then integrated into a new construction; and only in the one case of Eärendil will reference to its source cast any light on the legends or their “meaning”.’ The use of what we now call scare-quotes around ‘meaning’ in that quotation is revealing. The casting of light, on a name that
means
light, in a mythology whose deep past is about the holiness of light, may explain why Eärendil is excepted in this way from all the other names Tolkien coined. ‘Light’, he noted in 1951, ‘is such a primeval symbol in the nature of the Universe, that it can hardly be analysed’, although he makes the effort at least as far as his own invented mythology goes:
The Light of Valinor (derived from light before any fall) is the light of art undivorced from reason, that sees things both scientifically (or philosophically) and imaginatively (or subcreatively) and ‘says that they are good’—as beautiful. 6
Tolkien hardly needs to make specific allusion to the opening of Genesis to make his point. ‘Let there be light!’ is, in one sense, behind the whole of Tolkien’s imaginative enterprise. And a yearning to heal the breach between reason and imagination, between the auroral beauty of spiritual life and the practical necessity of the mundane, is exactly the role a figure such as Eärendil embodies. That God permits such a division to enter into existence—that he divided the light from the darkness before even creating human beings and giving them the power to choose the one or the other—is itself a very deep riddle. 7 Tolkien’s appropriation of Eärendil’s name to his made-up Elvish linguistic world, and his styling of his creation as specifically a
mariner
, takes us back, as it were, before the Genesis
fiat lux
to the primal waters of the deep. As he explains in his unsent letter to Rang, characteristically enclosing the word
poem
within the quotation marks of (I suppose) distancing modesty: ‘before 1914I wrote a “poem” upon Earendil who launched his ship like a bright spark from the havens of the Sun.’ He notes that he adopted him into his personal mythology as ‘a prime figure’: a sailor, a guiding star and a ‘sign’ of
éarendel
’, the OE original, is a name rather than a word, and that it referred to ‘what we now call
Venus
: the morning star’. 5 His argument spills into a footnote, as Tolkien develops a thesis about Cynewulf’s semantic signification:
éarendel
meaning ‘ray of light’ is etymologically connected with ‘aurora’, and also appears in the
Bickling Homilies
(a tenth-century collectionof religious writing whose author or authors are unknown to us). Tolkien seems sure that Cynewulf’s lines ‘refer to a herald, a divine messenger’, the morning star as ‘herald of the rise of the true Sun in Christ’. Finally, and with a rather beautifully deflating final turn, he adds that this notion was ‘completely alien to my use’ in writing
The Hobbit
and
the Lord of the Rings
.
In adapting and re-appropriating, as he very often did, Old English words and names, Tolkien nonetheless insists ‘the borrowing when it occurs’ is ‘simply that of sounds, that are then integrated into a new construction; and only in the one case of Eärendil will reference to its source cast any light on the legends or their “meaning”.’ The use of what we now call scare-quotes around ‘meaning’ in that quotation is revealing. The casting of light, on a name that
means
light, in a mythology whose deep past is about the holiness of light, may explain why Eärendil is excepted in this way from all the other names Tolkien coined. ‘Light’, he noted in 1951, ‘is such a primeval symbol in the nature of the Universe, that it can hardly be analysed’, although he makes the effort at least as far as his own invented mythology goes:
The Light of Valinor (derived from light before any fall) is the light of art undivorced from reason, that sees things both scientifically (or philosophically) and imaginatively (or subcreatively) and ‘says that they are good’—as beautiful. 6
Tolkien hardly needs to make specific allusion to the opening of Genesis to make his point. ‘Let there be light!’ is, in one sense, behind the whole of Tolkien’s imaginative enterprise. And a yearning to heal the breach between reason and imagination, between the auroral beauty of spiritual life and the practical necessity of the mundane, is exactly the role a figure such as Eärendil embodies. That God permits such a division to enter into existence—that he divided the light from the darkness before even creating human beings and giving them the power to choose the one or the other—is itself a very deep riddle. 7 Tolkien’s appropriation of Eärendil’s name to his made-up Elvish linguistic world, and his styling of his creation as specifically a
mariner
, takes us back, as it were, before the Genesis
fiat lux
to the primal waters of the deep. As he explains in his unsent letter to Rang, characteristically enclosing the word
poem
within the quotation marks of (I suppose) distancing modesty: ‘before 1914I wrote a “poem” upon Earendil who launched his ship like a bright spark from the havens of the Sun.’ He notes that he adopted him into his personal mythology as ‘a prime figure’: a sailor, a guiding star and a ‘sign’ of
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