How Tolkien Presents Ordinary People in "The Silmarillion" by Dawn Felagund  

How Tolkien Presents Ordinary People in "The Silmarillion"

"... without the simple and ordinary the noble and heroic is meaningless."

~ Letter 131 to Milton Waldman

J.R.R. Tolkien described the arc of his three great tales—The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and finally The Lord of the Rings (LotR)—as descending from the high mythic mode to a more vulgar, earthly narrative. This occurred not just through plot but was a key theme of The Lord of the Rings as well: no less than the ability of the humble and powerless to change the world. It was not princes with their lengthy lineages and storied weapons who would overthrow Sauron but two Hobbits, one of the working class. In the same letter to Waldman, Tolkien described this theme as follows:

But as the earliest Tales are seen through Elvish eyes, as it were, this last great Tale, coming down from myth and legend to the earth, is seen mainly through the eyes of Hobbits: it thus becomes in fact anthropocentric. But through Hobbits, not Men so-called, because the last Tale is to exemplify most clearly a recurrent theme: the place in ‘world politics’ of the unforeseen and unforeseeable acts of will, and deeds of virtue of the apparently small, ungreat, forgotten in the places of the Wise and Great (good as well as evil).

But, as Tolkien himself states, if LotR depicts "the ennoblement … of the humble," then The Silmarillion is the opposite (Letter 181 to Michael Straight). The Silmarillion Writers' Guild's Everyman challenge sought to elevate ordinary people, who are often obscured in the text. As the moderator who developed the prompt list for that challenge, I reread The Silmarillion, looking for the "small, ungreat, and forgotten" amid the bold speechification and sweeping swords of Tolkien's pre-Ring War heroes. (Perhaps the high mortality rate of those heroes—even the immortal ones—hint at the later ascendency of those whom we would assume are easily quashed.) The prompt collection didn't include every mention—and one particular quandary arose again and again that I will discuss below—but it included a lot and meant that, in the space of a few days, my brain was peppered with all of the different ways that "everyman" characters move, barely seen, through the text.

All the same, this is a very preliminary analysis of the topic. When I study "instances of x in The Silmarillion" for a more finished presentation or publication, I read one or two chapters per day, closely and carefully. In compiling the challenge prompts, I breezed through the entire book in a few days, skipping sections where I knew the story didn't even allude to the lowly. This essay is based on my work on the challenge, using the prompt collection I generated as the raw materials for my conclusions, so there are going to be gaps and omissions that a closer read will find.

Textual Ghosts, Revisited

Dwimordene's 2008 term "textual ghost"—actualized by Elleth into the Textual Ghosts Project—has become a well-known term in the Silmarillion fandom. It refers to "the women who litter the Tolkien histories as textual ghosts, artifacts deduced by the presence of offspring or perhaps a name." Elleth notes that "the lives and presences of the 'common people' are not often recorded or explored in detail," accounting for a lack of women outside of the noble ranks, an observation I recently corroborated in a paper currently in-press, which found that women permitted to speak in The Silmarillion are not only generally noble but divine.

The same concept underlying textual ghosts can be applied to common folk in The Silmarillion. There are many points in the text where people must have existed but go unnamed at best, left entirely to inference, or as I will discuss below in the "Taking Credit" section, their labor and skill subsumed by the whim of a named noble.

The word servant(s) is used sixty times in the pages of The Silmarillion. Only once is it used singularly to refer to a specific person (the "old servant" who tells Túrin that Morwen has fled), and only once does it refer to a named person (Sauron relative to Melkor). Aredhel once refers to herself not as a servant of her brother Turgon. Servant is a fitting example because it implies a hierarchy, but ordinary folk populate the text, gathered within nouns that can evade our notice:

• 130 times: host(s)
• 60 times: servant(s)
• 45 times: folk
• 40 times: messenger(s)
• 26 times: company/companies
• 24 times: mariner(s)
• 22 times: spy/spies
• 14 times: smith(s)
• 2 times: masons
• 1 time: workers

Nor are these unnamed folks always ordinary. In some cases, they are people who play pivotal roles in the history before the Ring War and likely should be named in a historical text: the messengers who delivered word of Finwë's death; the companions of Finrod and Beren, eaten alive by wolves; the mariners from Gondolin who perished, sent by their king to reach Valinor.

In fact, as I was collecting quotes to use as prompts for the Everyman challenge, I encountered a conundrum on multiple occasions that led, in part, to me wanting to write about this topic. I have probably read The Silmarillion two hundred times by now: not two hundred deep, immersive readings-for-enjoyment but gone through the text that many times for various research purposes. Point being, I know the book well, and when I started collecting prompts for the challenge, I knew places where "everymen" would be located and anticipated adding those whom I thought might provide particularly interesting perspectives.

Except that I found that, when I reached of those passages, the common people were often so ancillary to a named, noble character that the sentence or passage became hard to justify as a prompt because it seemed that the prompt was inviting fanworks about the named character. While we don't "check work" on the SWG challenges and keep things loose and would not have disbarred such a work, it still felt like it didn't set creators up for success—or did set them up for confusion.

Take this sentence, which was one that I was eager to include—until I read it, that is: "Maedhros was ambushed, and all his company were slain; but he himself was taken alive by the command of Morgoth, and brought to Angband" ("Of the Return of the Noldor"). "All his company," who did not return home to their loved ones that night, are buried in a sentence that is about Maedhros. Syntactically, they are rendered as an aside. Even the ambush is directed toward Maedhros alone, even though everyone present bore the brunt of it.

Taking Credit

Along similar lines is a common structure in The Silmarillion, where a named, noble character "causes" something to be built that in fact would have required the skill and labor of hundreds if not thousands of engineers, craftspeople, and laborers (and probably resulted in the injury and death of at least some of them). Yet credit for the achievement is located entirely upon the noble character whose primary contribution seems to have been thinking a thought and then giving an order. An example:

But Sauron caused to be built upon the hill in the midst of the city of the Númenóreans, Armenelos the Golden, a mighty temple; and it was in the form of a circle at the base, and there the walls were fifty feet in thickness, and the width of the base was five hundred feet across the centre, and the walls rose from the ground five hundred feet, and they were crowned with a mighty dome. (Akallabêth)

This passage is particularly apt because it negates the possible counterargument that those dozens/hundreds/thousands of workers would take up too many words, given the lush description of Armenolos that follow. The gold appointments matter more than the minds and hands that devised them.

And lest one claim that we should expect nothing less of Sauron, who of course doesn't see his workers as contributors to his glory, even saintly Finrod Felagund is credited similarly: "And after three days’ journeying they came to Amon Ethir, the Hill of Spies, that long ago Felagund had caused to be raised with great labour, a league before the doors of Nargothrond" ("Of Túrin Turambar"). Thingol, Turgon, and the kings of Gondor also claim credit for, respectively, the house of Lúthien, the sealing of Gondolin, and Minas Anor using the "caused to" construction.

Subject-Object

Common people in The Silmarillion are frequently identified in the genitive case: the watchers of Morgoth, the people of Celegorm, the mariners of Círdan (among many, many others). Like the word servant, this construction emphasizes a hierarchy where a single person is permitted at the top, with a vast, unnamed rabble of subjects underneath.

In other instances, the unnamed people belonging to a leader are discussed using language that portrays them as … well, belongings or objects that can be used and manipulated as needed. "[Thingol] gave [Finrod] guides to lead him to that place of which few yet knew," we are told, as Finrod seeks to establish his own Menegrothesque realm ("Of the Return of the Noldor"). In the Akallabêth, "[Amandil] took with him three servants, dear to his heart, and never again were they heard of by word or sign in this world, nor is there any tale or guess of their fate."

It is possible that the people in these passages being "given" and "taken" had some choice as to their fates, but the use of verbs that serve equally well when describing the handling of objects reinforces the power differential between he who uproots and the one who is uprooted.

A Murmuration of Servants

In my presentation for Oxonmoot 2024, Death, Grief, and the Other in the Quenta Silmarillion, I noticed a tendency in The Silmarillion for Orcs to be described as moving in herd-like, driven masses:

In scenes involving Orcs or other enemies, they are often driven to their deaths, again evoking a brutish mob incapable of individual action or resistance. This also positions the driver as superior to the driven: a person effortlessly shepherding a horde of the enemy unto death. Note also that these scenes often involve the enemy being driven into an environment that is hostile to life, such as a desert or a river. This negates even the drama of battle, implied in other scenes where characters aligned with the forces of good are driven forth from their homes, and simply sends these Orcs en masse, in a terrified clamor before a superior foe, to be quietly gulped up by the landscape.

Everyday people in groups in The Silmarillion aren't as blatantly dehumanized—nor would we expect them to be—but they do have a singularness, a herd-like aspect, moving in concert with each other like birds in murmuration. Decisions seem to be arrived at unanimously and without dispute. The verb debate is used only once where it might imply disagreement among a group of ordinary people: "Therefore Fëanor halted and the Noldor debated what course they should now take" ("Of the Flight of the Noldor"). Debate and argu* are otherwise used only for disagreements among named characters; discuss does not occur in the text at all.

Perhaps no passage illustrates this better than the scene where the people of Nargothrond banish Celegorm and Curufin: "Therefore the hearts of the people of Nargothrond were released from their dominion, and turned again to the house of Finarfin; and they obeyed Orodreth" ("Of Beren and Luthien"). As one, they were swayed by the brothers to abandon their king. Now, like a wheeling flock of starlings, they are "released" en masse and "turned again" to their previous overlords. There is a lot of motion in this sentence, which does indeed wheel and flow like a murmuration; there is no (in the entire arc of this episode) discussion or debate among these people who seemingly move as a single entity.

Views contrary to those of the named authority are represented in the text almost always as murmurs or whispers. The words cried out never refer to groups of characters, and the words protest, outcr*, and complain do not appear. Again, we have a monolithic group of people who muster, at most, a murmur or whisper conveying forbidden information that rarely ends to their glory. These murmurs and whispers, we understand, show the folly of the common person compared to the wise authority. It hints at their power—these murmurs and whispers have the power to overthrow the wisest of kings—but that power is understood to be undermining, conniving, and often foolish.

We know that the systems of government in The Silmarillion are authoritarian with varying degrees of benevolence. The actions permitted to ordinary people underscores the deep lack of democratization, not just in governance but in the history of pre-Ring War peoples. Democracy is loud, messy, and contentious. In not allowing the voices of the peoples of Arda to rise above a whisper, the text indicates that they don't have much that's worth saying.

Conclusion

None of this is a critique of Tolkien. I can hear the critics now—who have attacked other "woke" scholars for writing about gender and race and disability and sexuality—using words like "man of his times" and "21st century ideals" and clutching their pearls that I think Tolkien has done something wrong and that I will somehow rewrite the texts to banish his Christian white guy sentiments. (I don't and I won't.)

In reality, I do this work because I think it shows a few important things. First, whenever I do textual analysis and close reading, I am blown away by the subtlety in Tolkien's work: grand ideas communicated at the word level or syntactically. This makes sense given his profession, but it still never ceases to amaze me to watch the layers of meaning emerge. He clearly had the larger arc in mind: a microcosm of the movement of our own history through monarchy and into democracy—the doomed king Fingolfin through to the democratically elected gardener-mayor Samwise Gamgee. Yet that overarching idea, traversing three books, is fractalized, the "immeasurable vastness" of that three-book arc distilled to "more bitter than a needle," to borrow from the Ainulindalë, into single phrases and words.

As a fanworks creator, of course, it is this sense of the missing or unspoken that makes The Silmarillion such a rich text to create transformative works about. This was the entire point of the Everyman challenge: to draw attention to those unnamed characters subsumed in the tales of noble and famed.

Most importantly is the meaning of the whole arc, which as a Silmarillion fan and scholar, I rarely consider in its entirety. The Silmarillion has its nobility and beauty, but it is the Northern aesthetic, the same beauty found in autumn leaves that pour forth their full splendor in order to die. I could speak of our ability to admire such stories—with their glorification of leaders whose only qualification was being born to the right father in the right order—and the fact that most of us barely notice the everymen of The Silmarillion as our own weaknesses, but that misses the point of the full arc. The Silmarillion is so spectacularly disastrous that it is hard to read it as anything but a critique of its underlying system—where full authority is narrowly bestowed—especially when it is held up alongside the story of Samwise Gamgee.

"... help came from the hands of the weak when the Wise faltered."

~ Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age