The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien

I.

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” -- Douglas Adams

In 1755, an earthquake almost completely destroyed the city of Lisbon. Thousands of people were killed in the span of a few seconds by collapsing buildings, and thousands more died in the ensuing tsunami and fires. Aghast at the scale of the suffering, many intellectuals asked themselves: why did this have to happen?

In most human belief systems throughout history, this kind of question is easy to answer: someone pissed off the gods. This conveniently moves the conversation on to more manageable ground. The gods may have caused the earthquake, but it’s a human’s fault. Someone violated a taboo, failed to participate correctly in a communal ritual, or otherwise did something we don’t like and we’ll hold them responsible.

Many of us today hold our gods to higher standards. Whoever is responsible for the intricate reality around us must also bear responsibility for the suffering that takes place here, whether that's the God of Abraham or the designer of a simulation. The fancy theological word for this is "theodicy".

Ah, you may be saying, I don't believe in a bearded old man in the clouds or the geeky simulation hypothesis. The world just is, and that's that. Fair enough, but what of parents? They aren't responsible for the world, but when people choose to become parents they bring a new person into this world, a person who will certainly suffer during their life.

That brings us to J.R.R. Tolkien. He's famous as a novelist, not as a theologian or philosopher. Or to put it another way, he’s famous for writing The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and is most definitely not famous for writing The Silmarillion, a difficult book that immerses the reader in Tolkien’s world unmediated by the modernist perspective of Hobbits. It variously reads like the Bible, an encyclopedia, and a short story collection. It’s fiction, but it’s definitely not a novel.

For reasons that can’t detain us here, readers today almost exclusively consume written fiction in novel form, so it’s only worth going on this limb if you fall into one of three categories:

You loved reading Lord of the Rings and you want to read more about the world of Middle-Earth no matter how dry the material. This is the largest category by far, but if you’re in it, then statistically speaking, you have already read The Silmarillion, so this review won’t further address you except to try to unpack something about the text you likely didn’t dwell on while reading it.
You love reading ancient mythological texts and appreciate their depth of thought and archaic prose despite their textual contradictions, frustrating lacunae, and so on. This review may help explain why The Silmarillion, despite being an imitation ancient text, is nevertheless worth your time, but honestly it won’t really do justice to what might appeal to you. Given the paucity of imitation ancient texts, you probably owe it to yourself to try it regardless.
You wonder why God would allow bad things to happen to good people, how a smart theist could possibly worship a God who permits suffering, or similar questions. Or maybe I have you wondering what a bunch of silly stories about Elves could possibly say about this subject. In that case, read on.

II.

The fascinating textual history of the Silmarillion is probably known to a substantial minority of readers and would bore most of the remainder, so it will suffice to say that although Tolkien was already writing parts of it in 1914 at age 22, he worked on it off and on for his entire life and it remained not just unfinished but in a state of disrepair when he died in 1973 at age 81. It can be a frustrating read because the amount of detail varies wildly. Sometimes events or concepts are related in the barest summary, others are given the sort of blow-by-blow narrative one would expect from reading Lord of the Rings. The style likewise varies, but Tolkien most often attempts to mimic an archaic prose style, a style which, though familiar to him from his day job as a professor of Anglo-Saxon, is strange and alienating to many readers.

The text that is likely the most difficult for a modern reader to enjoy is the opening chapter, which describes the creation of the world by God and the fall of the mightiest of his angels into evil. I suspect many readers end up skimming this because of its fusty, quasi-Biblical tone. "Ugh, Tolkien was a conservative Catholic so I guess he thought this was necessary," some have probably said, turning the pages faster to find something more interesting.

Tolkien being so evidently conservative, it’s easy to pass by too quickly and not recognize just how radical this chapter is. When Tolkien's friend C.S. Lewis wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, he took the standard Anglican theology of his day and just extended it into the world of Narnia. Aslan wasn't a metaphor for Jesus, he was Jesus, talking and behaving exactly as Jesus would (in Lewis' estimation).

Because it involves no characters from anything like our time, it's easy to forget Tolkien's conceit is that his Middle-Earth is our Earth, just in the past. His vision of the transcendent creator god, Eru Iluvator, isn't the god of another place, nor is it a Lewisian move where God takes a different form in a different land. It's merely the God of Abraham’s name in the language that happened to be spoken in one part of the world in the ancient past.

In theory, The Silmarillion is still compatible with our book of Genesis. The first generations of humans are not described, so the Garden of Eden and the original sin of Adam and Eve can be assumed to happen concurrently with the Elves fighting their hopeless war to recover the Silmarils. But despite the fact that the Garden of Eden fits into the gaps of his own timeline, Tolkien's creation account differs sharply from that implied by Genesis and accepted by most Christians.

The Genesis account goes something like this: God created the world, and it was good, probably perfect. Then, in the Garden of Eden, humans listened to a literal lying snake and then sinned by eating a forbidden fruit. God was pretty upset about this and cursed men, women, the world around us, and even the snake.

So if you experience a devastating earthquake, why did it happen? Yep, someone pissed off God, but it’s not your neighbor who skipped church last Sunday. It’s no one alive, in fact. It turns out it was your extremely ancient ancestor who pissed off God, and no, God is still not over it.

Okay, it’s not quite that simple. Many Christians read this part of Genesis metaphorically and in any case theologians have all sorts of different takes on this, but the point is that God created a good world, and later doctrine became very convinced that God could not possibly create evil. So most Christian theodicy involves maneuvers where God gave us free will, which was really good, but to be truly free, it had to be possible for us to choose evil, so therefore it’s all our fault and none of His that our wrongdoing forced him to curse creation into occasionally killing us for no reason. What’s that? Why was there a lying snake in a perfect paradise? There’s very little in the Bible itself about this, but for example the Fourth Lateran Council decreed “the Devil and the other demons were created by God good in their nature but they by themselves have made themselves evil”. The snake chose to lie, in other words, and hey, that’s on the snake.

Back to Tolkien. In his creation story, God first creates angelic spirits who are later going to look suspiciously like a polytheist pantheon but who for now are there to assist him in creation. Rather than God speaking the world into existence, the world is sung into existence by this choir of angels, elaborating on a theme given to them by God. Alas, the greatest angel is proud and wants to sing a theme completely of his own devising. A minority of angels take up his countervailing song and the result seems like a dissonant clash:

“And it seemed at last that there were two musics progressing at one time before the seat of Iluvatar, and they were utterly at variance. The one was deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came. The other had now achieved a unity of its own; but it was loud, and vain, and endlessly repeated; and it had little harmony, but rather a clamorous unison as of many trumpets braying upon a few notes. And it essayed to drown the other music by the violence of its voice, but it seemed that its most triumphant notes were taken by the other and woven into its own solemn pattern.”

Then God makes a strong claim to Melkor (Satan):

“And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.”

I think most people zoom past this, but God is giving us a very hot take: “I created everything, even evil. I did it because evil is good, and it’s going to make the world is better than it would be without it.”

III.

In 1710, Gottfried Leibnitz took a break from his feud with Isaac Newton and coined the term “best of all possible worlds” while writing about the problem of evil. Leibnitz was a genius polymath, but his theodicy is mainly remembered now for how hilariously Voltaire dunked on it with the “Professor Pangloss” character in Candide. Pangloss keeps insisting this is the best possible world while he’s reduced to poverty by war, loses an eye and an ear to a syphilis treatment, witnesses a friend drown during a shipwreck, sees Lisbon destroyed by, yes, the calamitous 1755 earthquake, and is tortured and sentenced to death by the Inquisition.

It’s not that no one has taken the “best of all possible worlds” stance since, but typically it’s accompanied by handwaving to distract from the pointless suffering of the world (often prompting aggressive atheists to go around rubbing theist noses in the world’s horrors). This handwaving is something that an author like Tolkien is well-positioned to do. Tastes have grown darker as of late, but lots of traditional fantasy stories involve some excitement and moments of seeming danger, but then everything works out.

J.R.R. Tolkien fought in the trenches in World War I, and though he survived the destruction of his unit though extreme good fortune, all but one of his close friends from school died. He was also the sort of declinist conservative who has an unshakeable belief that the changes in the world around him are making it worse and worse. So no, he didn’t believe that everything would just work out. Not only does he not wave aside suffering, he focuses on it, steel-manning the case against his theodicy even as he makes it. He has God announce that evil will make the world better in the first few pages of the Silmarillion and then, lest you think he wasn’t being serious, the stories that follow are absolutely filled with suffering caused by evil.

IV.

Consider Melkor, greatest of angels, who thinks to rebel against the theme of God’s creation. What’s his next move? Does he sidle up to an Elf in animal form, politely suggest they violate an arbitrary rule, and then basically disappear from the rest of the story?

No, he charges down to Middle-Earth and is so energetic in attempting to ruin creation that the world is preserved only through the efforts of a host of good angels. Multiple wars are fought and ultimately Melkor is captured and imprisoned for a time. After a while, the good angels release him since he claims to have learned his lesson. Needless to say, he has not.

By this point, there are no humans yet, but many Elves are now living side by side with angels in the “blessed lands” in the extreme west. The world is lit not by the sun and moon, which have not yet been created, but by the light from two beautiful shining trees. An Elf prince named Fëanor, the greatest craftsmen who ever lived, captures the light from these trees in three magnificent jewels called Silmarils. Unfortunately, the supremely gifted Fëanor is also proud and possessive of his creations. The supposedly reformed Melkor deceives Fëanor into distrusting his brother, Fingolfin. When Fëanor threatens Fingolfin with violence, the good angels finally realize Melkor remains evil. Fëanor is exiled and the angels pursue Melkor, but they fail to capture him.

So far, this feels like it could be a more elaborate version of Genesis’ lying snake.

But Fëanor’s exile isn’t permanent. The angels try to patch things up with a big celebration and Fëanor is uneasily reconciled with his brother. During the party, Melkor sneaks into paradise and poisons the two trees that light the world. The only way to restore them is to break apart the Silmarils, but Fëanor refuses to allow his creations to be destroyed even though he knows it’s the only way to repair the only natural sources of light the Elves have ever known. Then it’s discovered that on his way back out of paradise, Melkor stole the Silmarils and killed Fëanor’s father.

This makes Fëanor, as one might expect, extremely angry. He blames the good angels for allowing this to happen on their watch, but as angry as he is at them, he knows the real culprit is Melkor himself. So he and his sons swear a terrible oath to use violence to recover the Silmarils from anyone who won’t return them. Since that’s currently Melkor, Fëanor calls on all his people to leave paradise and sail to the central continent of Middle-Earth where they will fight a war against Melkor to get the Silmarils back. Fëanor leads his most radical followers to the coast of paradise and demands the sea Elves there give up their ships. When they won’t, Fëanor and his followers take them by force, killing all who stand in their way.

V.

Obviously this is a story in close conversation with the Garden of Eden story in the Bible. But as with the creation story, this is not Narnian equivalence where the names are changed but the ideas are the same. Nor is it simple elaboration:

Melkor doesn’t just tell a single lie, he apparently tells lots of lies, and when they don’t prove sufficient, he wounds the world and kills Fëanor’s father.
Fëanor doesn’t get cursed and thrown out of paradise on a technicality or a momentary bad decision. He experiences loss and grief that, whatever his faults, he certainly didn’t deserve. He demands that angels act to fix the evil in the world, and when they don’t, he forges weapons, declares war on Satan, and personally leads an army out of paradise.
From Tolkien’s perspective, Fëanor’s principal sin is pride: it’s not his role to fix the evil in the world and not even remotely in his power. But pride is being kind of an abstract sort of sin, Fëanor almost immediately--but believably--commits the obviously unacceptable sin of murder, whereas in Genesis it’s not until Adam and Eve’s son Cain that someone does something indisputably evil and sheds blood.
There’s no room for fuzzy interpretations, like hey, Adam was duped by Eve and maybe women are the real villains here! Although some Elves are born later, since they don’t age, most important characters in the rest of The Silmarillion are already alive and willingly choose to follow Fëanor.
But not every Elf does! Some Elves, including some of Fëanor’s people, do in fact realize this is a very bad idea and stay in paradise. This demonstrates the contingency of the choice made by Fëanor and the other rebelling Elves.

From all this, it seems clear to me that rather than transpose the Garden of Eden into a fantasy world, Tolkien sets out to improve upon it. Most of all, Tolkien’s version foregrounds the problem of evil in a way that Genesis never does. Fëanor’s crimes would never have happened if not for Melkor.

Who’s fault is Melkor? The dominant Christian explanation (that God gave Melkor free will and, good golly, God definitely didn’t want him to go and murder Fëanor’s father, perish the thought) might actually apply, but only to the angels. They free Melkor from his imprisonment, restoring his agency, and then are dismayed when he uses his freedom for evil. But The Silmarillion is clear that although the angels are greater in every way than humans or Elves and know something of the future, they don’t know all or even most of what will happen and they make mistakes. The narrative (ostensibly drawn from Elvish sources) is very respectful of the angels and doesn’t actually say that freeing Melkor is a mistake, but then again it doesn’t deny the obvious conclusion that it was. The only defense seems to be that these good angels are just so good they can’t help but err on the side of mercy and they can’t really understand evil.

There’s no corresponding ambiguity in the story when it comes to God. Although Melkor thinks he’s acting of his own accord, God was very clear in the first pages that because he created Melkor, everything Melkor does is what God desired to happen and the world is better for it. There’s no free will, no mistakes of judgment, no erring on the side of mercy...the buck stops with God. He made this happen and he did it because it’s good.

That brings us back to Voltaire’s objection: how can this possibly be? The world is now covered in darkness, the sacred soil of paradise is stained by the blood of murdered Elves, and despite Fëanor’s amazing talents, defeating Melkor is greatly beyond the ability of any Elf or human, and Fëanor’s war will only cause even more suffering.

VI.

“Out of life’s school of war -- What does not kill me makes me stronger.” -- Friedrich Nietzsche

Maybe suffering, although not itself good, produces a good outcome by building character and teaching us valuable lessons. Nietzsche’s formulation has an important qualifier that he needs to survive the lesson, but Christians who believe in an afterlife sometimes stretch this to include death as well.

Unlike Voltaire, Tolkien usually doesn’t have characters give direct voice to philosophical arguments, but he offers an indirect answer to this point in the story of Túrin Turambar. This is one of the most detailed stories in the Silmarillion, and there was enough extant material that Christopher Tolkien eventually published a slightly different version as a separate (though very short) book. A lot of what happens to Túrin is taken from mythic precedents that most English-speaking readers aren’t very familiar with (the Icelandic Völsunga saga and the Finnish Kalevala), but basically Túrin is a tragic hero like Oedipus, someone who does some great deeds but through divine meddling ends up both doing and experiencing really terrible things.

Tolkien’s name for this story was “The Tale of the Children of Húrin”, Húrin being Túrin’s father, because it has an unusual frame which, as far as I know, has no mythic precedent. Húrin is a great human warrior who becomes a key ally of a secret city of Elves who are carrying on the war against Melkor even though Fëanor is long dead. Amid a surprise attack by Melkor’s forces that routs the Elves and results in massive casualties, Húrin and his men end up fighting a heroic rear-guard action. Their efforts allow their Elvish allies to escape, but all of Húrin’s men are killed and he himself is, at length, taken alive. Melkor wants to learn where the secret Elvish city is and he knows that Húrin knows, but Húrin won’t say and resists even torture.

But Melkor is determined, and he is still the greatest of the angels. He puts a curse on Húrin’s children, chains Húrin to a chair on a mountain, and uses magic to enable Húrin to watch for the next twenty-eight years as the curse turns everything his son and daughter do into suffering and they eventually die.

Does watching his children suffer make Húrin more noble? As usual, Tolkien’s uncompromising narrative avoids the usual traps of trying to apply fiction to philosophy. For many of our heroes, suffering takes a form like: “Your own father cuts off your hand, which is quite painful, and you have no choice left but suicide”. That’s pretty bad! But then it’s followed by: “Your suicide isn’t successful thanks to a well-ventilated television antenna, and doctors give you an artificial hand that’s apparently just as good as a real one”. For Húrin, suffering means he watches helplessly as his beloved son and daughter’s lives are ruined and they die in despair. There’s no fixing this.

And, it turns out, there’s no fixing Húrin. After his children are dead, Melkor simply lets him go, and Húrin spends the rest of his life as a bitter wanderer, taking some petty revenge but along the way unintentionally laying the seeds for the destruction of the secret Elvish city he’d sacrificed his men’s lives and resisted torture to protect. In case that wasn’t enough, his actions also begin a process that will destroy yet another Elvish kingdom, one that wasn’t even involved in Fëanor’s rebellion and will be the last that stands against Melkor.

Now admittedly, Tolkien gives Húrin just a bit of an out here: it seems Húrin’s understanding of his children’s life weren’t wholly true, seeing as his sole source was Satan News, and so when he’s freed he has an overly negative interpretation of their lives and especially the actions of Elves toward them. Had I been Tolkien’s editor I would have told him this really isn’t necessary, Húrin’s children’s lives are extremely bad already without any deception, but whatever. The very understandable bitterness Húrin feels after being released is called “a madness” by the narrative, but after he does all sorts of damage to the free peoples of Middle-Earth, Húrin is finally “cured” by a Gandalf-like angelic being. So he’s fixed? Well, no. Húrin is ashamed of all the trouble he’s caused since being freed and commits suicide.

Whatever you make of the overcomplicated end of Húrin’s life, I think the main takeaway is that when times were good, Húrin became a noble hero. Even when times stopped being so good, he sacrificed his life for others and resisted physical torture. But in the end, his prolonged suffering did not make him stronger, nor did he learn Important Life Lessons. Instead he was badly diminished and no longer capable of enjoying life even when it finally stopped being so bad. The Elvish pharmaceutical industry that produced such enviable products as lembas and athelas had no answer to his resulting mental health problems, and though he was eventually fortunate enough to be treated by a literal angel, her intervention fails and results in the loss of her patient.

All of this illustrates Tolkien’s agreement with most people’s common sense belief that while pain and suffering can sometimes help us learn, clearly it can also leaves us far worse off than we were before.

VII.

Perhaps suffering really is bad, but maybe it’s part of a larger plan. We have all done unpleasant things in service to a larger goal, and since God rules the entire universe, he may have some plan to take apparently meaningless suffering and cause something good to happen. The person suffering may not be the recipient of the good thing, and indeed may die never knowing that any good has come of it. But if the overall world benefits from our suffering, that would be considerable consolation! And certainly good does come of suffering...sometimes.

Tolkien endorses a rather different version of this in Lord of the Rings, namely that great good can come of small good. The small mercy of Frodo toward Gollum, for instance, ends up saving the world from darkness in a way that Frodo never could have expected. So God sometimes uses small good to produce great good. Based on that, what do you suppose is produced from small suffering?

In case you can’t guess, Húrin’s story provides the answer. To the tragic hero Turin and his sister, most of the bad things that happen to them seemed like inexplicable bad luck. But Húrin (and we) are aware that all of this is actually part of a larger, supernatural plan operating in the world. Unfortunately, this isn’t God’s plan to turn all things to the good, it’s Melkor’s plan to turn the immense but ultimately individual-scale suffering of Turin and his sister into civilization-scale suffering. Even Húrin, after watching this play out in his children’s lives, fails to understand his own part in Melkor’s design and ends up doing the most to further it.

No one--Elves, humans, dwarves, or angels--can offer any genuine consolation for Húrin. What happened to him and his children was very bad and nothing can make that right. When angelic intervention allows Húrin the nearly unique opportunity to clearly understand the consequences of the suffering in his life and the lives of his children, his response is to completely despair and commit suicide. This is not endorsed by the text; Tolkien is always completely against despair. This means that Húrin’s suicide is yet another way his suffering has diminished his heroism.

VIII.

If suffering isn’t a teacher and it’s not part of a sovereign plan that will bring a greater good, why must Tolkien’s characters suffer the way they do?

Here the story of Fëanor’s brother Fingolfin is instructive. From the beginning, the narrative wants us to think Fingolfin is a good person and it does everything possible to distance him from Fëanor: the two brothers don’t get along, Fingolfin tries honestly to reconcile but Fëanor is reluctant, and most importantly, Fingolfin isn’t in the vanguard who resort to murder in order to steal ships. Although he’s younger and seems to have none of Fëanor’s artistic gifts, Fingolfin has far more followers because most Elves can tell he’s the nicer guy. Beyond all that, Tolkien either didn’t know or more likely just didn’t care about writing aphorisms like “show not tell” so he’s willing to straight up say that Fingolfin is noble and good.

After sailing away from paradise with his relatively small group of supporters, Fëanor is too proud to want any help and burns his stolen ships rather than sending them back for Fingolfin’s much larger force. This gives noble and good Fingolfin a perfect excuse to take an off ramp from this fiasco and stay in paradise like he should. But his people were fired up by Fëanor’s speech, so rather than tell his people to do the right thing, he leads his army north and crosses the ocean over polar ice in a world that still is shrouded in unrelenting darkness, losing many of his followers to cold and crevasses. It’s an impressive feat and one with a real element of nobility: where his brother harmed innocent people, Fingolfin and his people take the suffering on to themselves. Yet they are still doing this in support of Fëanor’s war and so will suffer the consequences.

Lots more happens at that point, but suffice to say Fëanor dies, the angels create the sun and moon to give light, and Fingolfin ends up leading his dead brother’s war. He lays siege to Melkor’s stronghold for hundreds of years until, in a sudden attack, Melkor’s forces break the siege and inflict a grievous defeat on the Elves. It’s truly a catastrophe, but Fingolfin mistakenly believes the war has been completely and permanently lost. He gets on his horse and rides alone to Melkor’s fortress where he bangs on the gate, challenges Melkor to a duel, and calls him a coward. Melkor finds himself unexpectedly forced to come out to avoid losing face in front of his forces. Although Melkor’s evil has by this point greatly diminished him, he’s still an angelic power, and however valiant, Fingolfin is just an Elf. After a long struggle, Melkor kills Fingolfin. Then a giant eagle who serves the good angels swoops down, scars Melkor’s face with talons to distract him, and then carries off Fingolfin’s body so it can be buried with honor.

The Silmarillion relates all this only in brief, so many read it without stopping to think: why didn’t the eagle come and save Fingolfin’s life rather than just his corpse?

This question echoes the most common complaint about the story of Lord of the Rings: “Why didn’t they just put Frodo on one of those huge eagles and have it fly him straight to the mountain?” There are actually some pretty good reasons to think this wouldn’t have been a good idea: Sauron has something of an air force, he’s avidly looking for the One Ring and if he sees it coming on a huge eagle he will come out and go to the mountain himself to get it, etc.

But none of these objections apply to Fingolfin’s case. If Melkor could have prevented the eagle from coming, he definitely would have done so and kept his face from getting scarred! Moreover, in the past when Melkor has behaved badly, the good angels always go rushing out and then come back saying they can’t find him. Yet here he is, outside his impenetrable fortress, fighting a long duel with Fingolfin. The angels must know he’s there because they sent the eagle! Don’t just send a bird, come yourselves and get him!

Why don’t they? Why must Fingolfin be painfully killed? Why must his children grieve the loss of their father? Why is Melkor permitted to trudge back into his fortress to continue the endless war?

The answer is that it’s a better story this way.

The despairing Fingolfin riding in wrath to the gates of Satan’s fortress to challenge the devil himself to battle is a powerful moment, but most of its power comes from the fact that Fingolfin’s charge is clearly hopeless. Again, for Tolkien, despair is always a mistake, and Fingolfin shouldn’t have done this. Yet it’s an extremely understandable mistake, and if the source of all the world’s evil and suffering was sitting personified in an impenetrable arctic fortress, why, I myself would be tempted to--well, who am I kidding, I would hide under the couch, but if someone else strode forth to issue a hopeless challenge I would applaud their heroic spirit.

But the power of the moment depends on this being a hopeless, doomed action on Fingolfin’s part. If an eagle saves him from suffering the consequences, instead of a courageous last stand we have a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode that safely resets at the end with no harm done. Fingolfin dying is a much better story than it would be if Fingolfin was saved. It’s a better story than it would be if Melkor was permanently imprisoned by the angels and Fëanor spent his time figuring out how to make even more spectacularly glowing rocks in paradise. It’s a better story than it would be if Melkor never fell and the world was nothing but sweetness and light.

The Silmarillion is a strange and deeply idiosyncratic work of fiction, but this is actually the most conventional aspect of it. Nearly all of our fiction involves some form of violence, danger, grief, loss, or death. This is because fiction that doesn’t, that just depicts people chilling out and having good times, is--dare we say it--not as good.

Wait a minute. Was Tolkien’s God correct to say that evil is good? And if so, was Voltaire wrong, and our earthquake-ridden, syphilitic world really might be the best of all possible worlds?

IX.

Counterpoint: Elves aren’t real. Fingolfin didn’t truly suffer, because Fingolfin is made up. His name sounds goofy, not melodious like most of Tolkien’s names, but regardless, he’s fake. The suffering of fake people has no moral valence.

X.

Why is it we are so immediately sure that fake people’s suffering doesn’t count?

In modern philosophy, there’s a debate surrounding the “paradox of fiction” that asks why we have emotional responses to fictional characters even though we know they don’t exist. There’s no consensus answer, but the most common response seems to be something along the lines of: rationally, a human shouldn’t feel emotion as we read about Fingolfin’s desperate, doomed battle, but many people do, because humans are dumb (perhaps being coldly unmoved by even the most powerfully constructed fiction should be a new target for the rationalist quest for unbiased thinking).

This is common sense, but why? Well, Fingolfin is just a character in a book. He has no face, no voice, no thoughts.

Suppose we create a Silmarillion MMORPG and it has a Fingolfin non-player character who stands around Mithrim with an exclamation mark hovering over his head. The player can converse with Fingolfin using branching dialogue trees, and Fingolfin offers some otherwise unprompted remarks about gestures, fighting, or other events within a certain distance of the character. This version of Fingolfin has a face and a voice actor provides him with a voice. It’s debatable what relationship dialogue trees and some scripted reactions have with “thinking” but certainly no one will get charged with murder when the game company goes out of business and shuts down the servers.

But suppose the game company doesn’t go out of business, and it upgrades Fingolfin with the latest in gaming technology: now instead of simple dialogue trees, his dialogue and actions are determined by a neural network that has been trained on data that greatly elaborates on the minimal personal history Tolkien writes for Fingolfin in The Silmarillion. Does harming this version of Fingolfin have moral valence? I think the average person off the street would still say no, but most people reading this will review will probably frown and start asking questions about what sort of neural network it is, how many simulated neurons there are, and so forth. In other words, at some point we think Fingolfin stops being a mindless puppet and becomes a real person whose experience has moral weight.

This happens when Fingolfin acquires enough attributes that he becomes, roughly, the same thing as we are. There’s lots of disagreement over the exact line (e.g. which side are chickens on?) but that seems like the line we’re drawing. Until then, he’s just a representation of a person, not a real person. An image, you might say.

XI.

“So God created mankind in His own image…” -- Genesis 1:27

Compared to the entity that created the universe we see all around us, which version of Fingolfin are we most like? The AI that runs cognitive processes of roughly the same complexity, just in a different medium? The dumb puppet that mechanically follows its script and has no faculties that could allow it to understand what it really is and why it does the things it does? Or the fictional character who has no independent existence at all except in the mind of his observer?

XII.

But I should say, if asked, the tale is not really about Power and Dominion: that only sets the wheels going; it is about Death and the desire for deathlessness. Which is hardly more than to say it is a tale written by a Man! -- J.R.R. Tolkien

Tolkien wrote this about Lord of the Rings, and encountering the quote as a teenager I was nonplussed. Lord of the Rings seemed like it was about, well, not power and dominion, but maybe courage and faith and friendship. But death? Deathlessness?

It’s possible to work this out with just the text of Lord of the Rings, but The Silmarillion makes it much easier to understand. To readers of Lord of the Rings (and certainly to those watching the movies), it’s easy to come away with the impression that Tolkien was trying to say that the Elves were better than humans, that humans of the past were better than humans of the present, that in fact the past is better than the present in every way, and that it’s bad that, say, the beauty of Lothlorien is ended when the One Ring is destroyed.

People get this impression because it really is close to Tolkien’s own feelings. He really did feel like the world was getting worse all the time and he shared the Elves’ love of the natural world. But the wise Elves of Lord of the Rings are nevertheless people who rebelled against paradise (Galadriel followed Fingolfin across the ice, while Elrond is on one side a descendent of Fingolfin himself), and impressive as Rivendell and Lothlorien seem, they’re actually the pitiful remnants of the great war Fëanor launched.

In other words, Tolkien couldn’t help agreeing with the Elves, but he nevertheless wrote that the viewpoint he and they shared was wrong. The Elvish rings might not have been tainted by Sauron, but in holding back decay, they hold back God’s intended plan for the world. When the Elvish rings fail and their bearers finally sail into the west, it’s their final admission of futility. Melkor was banished from the world, but only through the intervention of angelic powers, and although the Elves that remain helped to defeat his lieutenant Sauron, the world remains permanently afflicted with evil and everything they tried so hard to preserve has been lost. “We have fought the long defeat,” is how Galadriel sums up her extremely long life to Frodo.

In college, I tried to explain to a friend Tolkien’s admiration for “northern courage” (so-called because Tolkien associated it with Scandanavian culture), the act of fighting on even though the cause is hopeless. “Fighting when you’re sure to lose sounds stupid to me,” my friend said, and unfortuantely it was only hours later that I realized what I should have said in response: our lives are a long defeat! Death is inevitable, yet we urge each other to struggle onward in the face of suffering, grief, and loss.

XIII.

In Genesis, death is a curse, part of God’s punishment for humans eating the forbidden fruit. But in another of his radical revisions to Christian doctrine, Tolkien recasts death as a gift given by God to humans. Alone among all the different kinds of beings in the world, when humans die their souls leave the world. Where humans go after this is completely unknown, but everyone else in the world--Elves, dwarves, ents, eagles, even the angelic powers--are “bound” to it until it ends. So although Elves can be killed, they don’t age, or perhaps more accurately, they age at the same rate as the world does. For example, Galadriel in Lord of the Rings is approximately seven thousand years old and since she eventually sails west, it’s reasonable to expect she will continue living until the end of the world.

To most reading this, it will sound like Elves got the better end of the deal. But unlike us, Tolkien was deeply committed to a declinist worldview. The world isn’t as good as it used to be, it’s getting worse, and the Elves are trapped in it. For Elves, even death isn’t an escape from their prison sentence: Tolkien never worked out the details, but he decided that when killed, Elves must eventually reincarnate and continue to share the fate of the world.

So death is an escape from the prison of an ever-shoddier universe, and the only reason humans fear this mighty gift is because Melkor lied to them and fooled them into desiring the “immortality” of being trapped in the world. This is why, in Lord of the Rings, the evil One Ring extends life, and this property is considered bad even by someone like Bilbo who benefits from it.

That is what The Silmarillion says explicitly about human death, but this same idea is present in the negative portrayal of Fëanor’s desire to preserve his Silmarils. He doesn’t want to let go of the beauty he personally made in the world, but the Silmarils are taken from him anyway. The Elves he leads away from paradise do everything they can to recreate what they liked about the paradise they left, but it’s always just a pale echo of the real thing, and eventually even their lesser recreations are destroyed by Melkor and his servants. The entire war against Melkor, a war that goes progressively worse the longer it goes, is yet another instance of this theme.

Most readers probably won’t share Tolkien’s deep conviction that the world is getting worse, but when applied to the human body it cannot be denied. No matter who you are or what your particular health situation is, each moment is bringing you closer to decline and death. Whatever hopes some might have that in the next few decades technology may begin to change the human relationship with aging, at least we can agree that for the entire time humans have lived up to the present, the inevitability of death has been a central part of the human condition.

This is why Tolkien implies he can’t help but write a story about death and the pursuit of deathlessness. He insisted his work was not allegory but “applicable”, and certainly nearly everything he wrote about--the decay of the world of Middle-Earth, the Elves and their doomed war, the humans afraid of the “gift” God has given them--is readily applied to the human condition.

Why do Tolkien’s characters suffer? Because they are part of The Silmarillion, a haunting work that, as its beginning promises, is “deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came”. His characters suffer because we suffer, and their lives are meant to relate to ours.

But if Tolkien’s stories are applicable to the human condition, is his stories’ theodicy applicable to our own universe? Decline and death is the human condition, but humans are just one species out of millions, living on one planet that orbits one unassuming star out of uncountable billions. Even if we accept Tolkien’s analogy that God is a writer, isn’t it presumptuous to assume we’re central to the divine narrative?

Before answering this question, a last point to emphasize about The Silmarillion: Tolkien chose music as a metaphor for creation because of the way different notes harmonize together, and accordingly his theme of death and the pursuit of deathlessness resounds in every part of his world, not just in the experience of his fictional humans.

XIV.

When I was young, I read in a children’s astronomy book that the universe is expanding but that astronomers aren’t sure of its eventual fate. Maybe it will collapse back on itself in a “big crunch” that could in turn result in an endless cycle of big bangs and crunches, the book said, or maybe it will expand forever. For years, I felt extremely confident that it would collapse back on itself. It just seemed so much more elegant and tidy for the universe to exist in an eternally recurrent cycle.

One hesitates to make firm pronouncements on cosmology from our humble, one-planet civilization, but today the evidence seems very strong that the universe’s expansion is accelerating and on an inescapable course to some variation of grim “heat death” where all matter and energy are frozen into permanent stasis. When I first learned this, I was mildly annoyed the universe was failing to align with what I personally thought was the preferable aesthetic outcome.

Having thought about this now and then since, heat death has started to seem much more harmonious than I first realized. After all, for all their inconceivable size, stars and even galaxies get old and die. And though inconceivably small, atoms and even particles eventually decay and die as well.

You might object here that the word “death” is being used too metaphorically, and that what happens to humans doesn’t really have anything in common with the ends of atoms and stars. Maybe. But even so, it seems to me that “decay” is harder to argue. Entropy always increases. Tolkien was hopefully wrong about human society getting continually worse, but in a long enough run he was right about the world. The universe is decaying, and though we may have space-traveling descendents who build some science fiction equivalent of the Elvish rings that hold back decay, it may be that the best fate we can hope for humanity is the fate of the Elves, bound to the decaying universe until the end.

In such a universe, are we so sure that Tolkien’s theme of death is just a parochial human idea? Are we so sure that the grief and loss you and I will suffer in this life isn’t part of a harmony sung by the entire universe, from the tiniest particle to the largest galaxies?