Authorial Detachment or "The Vanishing Harper"

[Anguirel]

Consider these three (sort of) ends:

Originally Posted by Of Beren and Luthien

And it is told that in that time Daeron the minstrel of Thingol strayed from the land, and was seen no more...he wandered upon strange paths, and came into the East of Middle-earth, where for many ages he made lament beside dark waters...

Originally Posted by Of the Voyage of Earendil

...thereafter he wandered ever upon the shores, singing in pain and regret beside the waves. For Maglor was mighty among the singers of old, named only after Daeron of Doriath; but he never came back among the people of the Elves.

Originally Posted by Book of Lost Tales 2

But none could say where Salgant was, nor can they now. Mayhap he was whelmed by fire upon his bed; yet some have it say that he was taken captive to the halls of Melko and made his buffoon - and this is an ill fate for a noble of the good race of the Gnomes.

So pass three minstrels; and the linking of their fates are surely not coincidental. Each are quite deliberately separated from their own people, alienated from their race, set apart and lost. Maglor's end is clearly supposed to recall the eerie similarity of Daeron's, with Daeron mentioned in the same clause.

Salgant, Lord of Harps at Gondolin, a rather less celebrated musician, meets a less ethereal and fey fate; the rumour of his survival as Morgoth's fool is well suited to his description of a fat and craven courtier. He is a comic character, a clown who makes young Earendil smile; as such this burlesque harper's end is not tragedy, but black comedy. But it is equally distinctive and mysterious!

What have we proved so far? That if you're an Elf, playing an instrument isn't that great an idea after all? I would suggest that this them can be applied a little wider. Maglor's Noldolante and Daeron's paeans to the beauty of Luthien are almost certainly major sources for the eventual Silmarillion, which some take as Bilbo's "Translations from the Elvish" (though I think a lot of it is rather dark for the old chap...perhaps we should give Elrond, Erestor and Lindir some credit for the legacy...) Salgant, to a lesser extent, may have left some record in song of Gondolin's glory. Yet the chroniclers of the Elves are all exiled from among the Elves.

Any other chroniclers separated from their race? Well, I thought of the Hobbits at once. Bilbo, Frodo, and even Sam eventually go over Sea to Valinor, choosing to die among Elves, not Shirefolk. Really, it seems that working on one's book has a certain inevitable result. (Does this mean that Maglor, Daeron and Salgant are hanging out in the Shire? Whoa, I'm slipping into fanfiction again...)

At last it struck home. All these assorted bards and scribblers seem to me to be one, huge, fascinating authorial metaphor. From here stems the apparently omniscient perspective. All characters in the Legendarium are, of course, extensions of Tolkien; but these sub-authors occupy a middle ground, a twilight world. They have to depart to obscurity to represent the distance the author must, in the end, maintain between himself and his creation. Even Tolkien has never walked the streets of Minas Tirith, or wondered at the glades of Doriath. Regretful he might be, but Maglor cannot come back among the people of the Elves-he has his story to tell, to lament in song, and must remain detached. Likewise the others.

Even the varying styles Tolkien indulged in are reflected in these "mediums", these guides, these historians, these lost wanderers. Salgant and Bilbo, I am sure, would happily cooperate on many a comic scene; Maglor and Frodo would be "high, purged of the gross"; while love scenes and tender romance falls to Daeron's flute...

So listen to the note of the harp or the squeaking of a quill. Their importance is paramount. Eru has bestowed the power of creation upon them; they preserve with more eficacy than any Elven ring; but in the end, they must always elude both author and subject.

What do you think?

Thanks to the "Not all those who wander are lost" thread, and to this story at the Henneth-Annun archive, which brought the connection to me in a flash: Quo Vadis?

[davem]

Not enough time to add properly to this thread at the moment, but couldn't we include Smith in this - he was a human who wandered in Faery, but he was also a singer, & sang as he worked. In the end he also had to give up Faery & pass into the human world forever. If, as some have suggested, Smith is the most 'autobiographical' of Tolkien's works, maybe this adds to your argument - maybe not.

Of course, the difference between Smith & the 'exiles' you name is that Smith returned to his own people in the end, rather than being eternally seperated from them, yet he has in common with them the fact that he is eternally sundered from Faery. But his is a willing, though sad, exile, enabling another to follow in his footsteps. The last words of the published Sil, in Of the Rings of Power, refer to the end 'of story & of song', which seems to sum up the whole of Tolkien's writings - right from the beginning in BoLt we have a mood of loss pervading the writings. It seems this mood is embodied in numerous characters, & specifically in the ones you mention.

[Mithalwen]

quite deliberately separated from their own people, alienated ....., set apart .

Cannot help thinking of another musician this could be applied to.... Edith Tolkien....

[Anguirel]

davem, I must admit that I've read Giles but not Smith. He sounds like a worthy addition to this select band of lost narrators, though, and I appreciate your points. Your mention of the ending of the Silmarillion proper is also helpful. I know that, personally, it was the sense of loss that attracted me in largest measure to Tolkien; the fading of the Elves and Legolas' sea-longing were one of the most beautiful aspects of LOTR, and I think perhaps the reason I love the Silmarillion and some Unfinished Tales like the Narn still more is that loss pours out of them at every point.

Mithalwen, I must confess that I don't know what you're referring to; I'm hazy on Tolkien's life, though I read a book about the influence of World War One on him...the only bells that faintly ring are the facts of Edith's long separation from Tolkien when they were engaged, but I feel I'm barking up completely the wrong tree-do tell...

[Mithalwen]

Edith Tolkien was an extremely gifted pianist. Her marriage to Tolkien not only put paid to a professional career but stymied an amateur outlet for her talents since he insisted on her conversion to Catholicism. Edith had played the music for services in her own Anglican church. From the biography it seems that Edith led quite an isolated life since she didn't really fit in with the academic wives and Oxford was a very male environment. I am not saying Tolkien didn't love her but to a modern woman - this one anyway - it seems an unnecessarily limited life....

[Anguirel]

Thanks for the clarification Mithalwen. I find Nancy Mitford the best source for the hell of don's wives...if not particularly borne out in my experience. Interesting, of course, that Luthien was a musician of note, though a vocalist, not an instrumentalist. We do not know if she continues to sing in wedded bliss. Are the gravestone carvings Tolkien's tribute to a wife's sacrifice of tradition (Anglicanism; read here Elves?) and music?

Racking my brains for more musicians, I find only Tinfang, about whom I know practically nothing. I've a vague idea that he is of the Vanyar and as such does zilch...but I could be misremembering.

[Mithalwen]

Hmm not sure if that is likely .... but a debate for elsewhere.

Arwen sings (rather poignantly) a song of Valinor in the court of the fountain at Minas Tirith.

From his name we might assume that Lindir in the Hall of Fire is a musician. Elrond carries a harp as he leaves Middle Earth. I always half assumed that music was something that all elves did at least competently and that the few named were remarkable even by their standards.

[Anguirel]

You'd expect Elrond, as Maglor's foster-son, to be a harper with a higher standard than most...I'd forgotten his harp. Well picked up.

We could even include, at a stretch, Gimli; his song of Durin was a kind of recording, I seem to remember he recovered the Book of Mazarbul, and he was as sundered from his folk at death as Dwarves can get...

But perhaps we should attempt to draw more conclusions from the solid examples we've got rather than contort other characters to fit the pattern. Though I do think Gimli just about makes it.

Another harper, Finrod Felagund, has a harp on his coat of arms and is renowned for his "song of staying" against Sauron, but...ouch...does not die apart from his people at all; quite the reverse. From this I deduce that he was more a doer of deeds in his art than a recorder of them...maybe...

[Mithalwen]

Originally Posted by Anguirel

Another harper, Finrod Felagund, has a harp on his coat of arms and is renowned for his "song of staying" against Sauron, but...ouch...does not die apart from his people at all; quite the reverse. From this I deduce that he was more a doer of deeds in his art than a recorder of them...maybe...

Is this a good moment to plug my old htread "Music and Magic in Middle Earth"?

[Child of the 7th Age]

At last it struck home. All these assorted bards and scribblers seem to me to be one, huge, fascinating authorial metaphor. From here stems the apparently omniscient perspective. All characters in the Legendarium are, of course, extensions of Tolkien; but these sub-authors occupy a middle ground, a twilight world. They have to depart to obscurity to represent the distance the author must, in the end, maintain between himself and his creation. Even Tolkien has never walked the streets of Minas Tirith, or wondered at the glades of Doriath. Regretful he might be, but Maglor cannot come back among the people of the Elves-he has his story to tell, to lament in song, and must remain detached. Likewise the others.

Strange, but when I read this, the first person I thought of was Frodo. Surely this applies to him. Also to Bilbo, although perhaps not in such a poignant way. The two are both tellers and singers. For a while, Frodo is also a doer, but that comes to an end. Bereft of doing, cast into the role of a teller, Frodo is no longer able to hang on to the world that he knew and loved. The old order fades, and those who bore the telling of it to the new must also fade. Yet the music and the tale do continue.

All of us have but a brief moment when we are part of the story. In that sense, we are not just doers but tellers of a finite story. At its end, we must all depart. Perhaps Tolkien is underlining this point in its widest sense. Why else do we mourn so for Frodo at the end of the story? We are mourning both for him and for ourselves. It would not be so sad to me if a teller like Frodo had departed out of anger. Yet, despite all he had been through, the pain inside and out, the scene of the final departure is filled with mystery and longing. It is clear that he still loves the Shire and that his attachment to Sam has not lessened. But in the end those of us still on the shore are left without knowing where the tellers have gone. It is the not knowing that hurts. The only thing we have left is their tale.....

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Anguirel

At last it struck home. All these assorted bards and scribblers seem to me to be one, huge, fascinating authorial metaphor. From here stems the apparently omniscient perspective. All characters in the Legendarium are, of course, extensions of Tolkien; but these sub-authors occupy a middle ground, a twilight world. They have to depart to obscurity to represent the distance the author must, in the end, maintain between himself and his creation. Even Tolkien has never walked the streets of Minas Tirith, or wondered at the glades of Doriath. Regretful he might be, but Maglor cannot come back among the people of the Elves-he has his story to tell, to lament in song, and must remain detached. Likewise the others.

Even the varying styles Tolkien indulged in are reflected in these "mediums", these guides, these historians, these lost wanderers. Salgant and Bilbo, I am sure, would happily cooperate on many a comic scene; Maglor and Frodo would be "high, purged of the gross"; while love scenes and tender romance falls to Daeron's flute...

So listen to the note of the harp or the squeaking of a quill. Their importance is paramount. Eru has bestowed the power of creation upon them; they preserve with more eficacy than any Elven ring; but in the end, they must always elude both author and subject.

I'm not sure I would take these characters, this fate, as a metaphor for the author. There is, first of all, the question of each character's omniscience: do they sing us the full story? And, secondly, it is always tempting to contemplate characters as a reflection of the author--even, as you say, Anguirel, extensions--but much more contemplation would be needed, I think, to justify this. Some writers sometimes throw off distance, some write only with extreme distance, and these conditions vary with character, scene, event. Were they explorations of Tolkien's sense of the writer's and singer's role? Well, we'd need to see more 'in the text' I'd think, to see the subject of the writer and his work, brought out as a topic more prominently.

On the other hand, I think there is something here about the siren call of the road. The road, the song, the quest, requires only one thing of the singer, the teller, of Frodo. And that is the one thing which the singer desires above all else and longs to give: a perfect economy of action and focus. All heart, all mind, all focus, all emotion are devoted solely to that one purpose, the road, the song, the Quest. There is no distraction exception those which challenge the focus, no residue of other commitments, nothing messay with cross purpose. It is perfect in its simplicity.

This perfection of economy does not pertain to others--certainly not to Sam as Mayor of the Shire and definitely not to Frodo upon his return to the Shire. The focus is no longer pure, but splintered through all the colours of messy world. This, too, pertains to readers, for at the close the single-minded focus, the pure pursuit of story, must also be scattered for our thoughts about the story must now find a new discipline in our own scattered thoughts about the road, the Quest, the story. And this is a far harder thing to accomplish.

The loss is of this perfection of action and focus, I think, rather than a necessary detachment or a not knowing. Nothing now is simple.

[Lush]

This also seems to be a commentary on creativity in general, a reminder that the creative process is both bitter and sweet. I can imagine Tolkien at his desk, writing in pleasure and writing in pain, producing characters that act out the sacrifices one must often make for their craft.

Talent equals power equals responsibility; an often heavy burden to carry through life, and nobody else can do it for you. You're out there on your own.

I wonder if Tolkien is associating the creative process with birth and death, and the idea that perhaps we chip away at ourselves when living the creative life, and obscure ourselves through our stories and songs, for better or for worse.

Furthermore, I believe that this could also be another take on the Biblical notion of not loving one's own creations too much. Just like when it comes to the fall of Gondolin.

[littlemanpoet]

I tend to see things the way Bêthberry does. The "lost bard" seems "the right" way to handle the role in myth and legend. Maybe there's more to it than that for Tolkien. Maybe some of us are finding applications he never intended, and some he wouldn't mind.

[Anguirel]

Originally Posted by Of the Ruin of Doriath

It is told that a seer and harp-player of Brethil named Glirhuin made a song, saying that the Stone of the Hapless should not be defiled by Morgoth, nor ever thrown down, not though the sea should drown the land; as after indeed befell...

I came across this most minor of minor characters when researching the Haladin for Silmarillion Survivor. I believe his single over-looked appearance is critical to our question. Glirhuin is a "seer and harp-player", as if these are two elements of the same role; and of course, in parts of folklore and in Tolkien, they are. There has always been an intimate connection between recording the past and recording the future; the harp is the instrument of both. Maglor also perhaps prophecises, in his famous "less evil shall we do in the breaking" speech.

For my folklore sources, I recall firstly the Celtic "priesthood", and the people of Brethil seem to me to be deeply Celtic, if in a Welsh rather than Gaelic sense. Celts wishing to become druids first trained as bards; then, after many years of bardic performance, as itinerant judges called brehons, one of whom, incidentally, I portrayed in Werewolf IV; then finally trained as full druids.

Folklore perhaps rooted in this includes heroes of the Mabinogion like Gwydion and Math, mysterious magicians who exercise their powers through music; the legendary Merlin of the Prophecies, Precepts and Vitae Merlinae; the semi-factual Taliesin, bard to Owain ap Urien, prince of Rheged, and to Maelgwyn of Gwent (I think) whose mystical powers are well documented; and Thomas the Rimer, who predicted accurately the death of Alexander III, King of Scots, who fell from a clifftop.

Furthermore, in Tolkien's world the whole structure of destiny is based, of course, in the Music of the Ainur. It makes sense, therefore, that bards are attuned to it, can to an extent tap its knowledge. (Though this does raise the question: when the Ainur sung, who was playing the harp?) Perhaps the invariably mist-shrouded departures of minstrels and harpers portray them finally going to join the music they have chased, mostly unknowingly, for the whole of their lives.