Eärendil

SECTION: A New Star Shall Arise: Huor's Prophecy and Ulmo's Plan

Today we're following one man from a prophecy spoken over a dying soldier all the way up into the sky, and then back down again, into a hobbit's hand.

Start back in the year 472 of the First Age, to the last hours of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears. The Elves and Men of the north have been broken. Turgon, king of the hidden city of Gondolin, is getting his army off the field, and two brothers, Húrin and Huor, are defending at the Fen of Serech so he can escape. Huor knows he isn't leaving. And with what Tolkien calls "the eyes of death," he says this to Turgon:

"though we part here for ever, and I shall not look on your white walls again, from you and from me a new star shall arise. Farewell!"

Huor died that day with an arrow in his eye. His wife Rían was pregnant. Their son Tuor was born that winter, and Huor never had the chance to meet him.

So the star Huor speaks of has a name before it has a body. And Huor wasn't the first to be told. Years earlier, Ulmo, the Vala of the waters, had told Turgon to remember one thing: "the last hope of the Noldor cometh from the Sea." Turgon built Gondolin, sealed the gates, and waited.

In 495, on the shore at Vinyamar, Ulmo rose out of a storm and spoke to Tuor directly. It's the great speech in Unfinished Tales, and it gives us a glimpse into the future. Ulmo tells Tuor that "in the armour of Fate there is ever a rift, and in the walls of Doom a breach." And then he says why he picked him: "it is not for thy valour only that I send thee, but to bring into the world a hope beyond thy sight, and a light that shall pierce the darkness."

Tuor was being sent to Gondolin to father a child, and neither he nor Turgon knew it. Ulmo did.

Tuor got to Gondolin, married the king's daughter Idril in 502, and in the spring of 503 the child was born. Tolkien gives us the exact year, which he almost never does in The Silmarillion. Here is his description of the baby:

"Of surpassing beauty was Eärendil, for a light was in his face as the light of heaven, and he had the beauty and the wisdom of the Eldar and the strength and hardihood of the Men of old; and the Sea spoke ever in his ear and heart, even as it had in Tuor his father."

Tolkien is already writing the star into the infant. And Idril, as Elven mothers do, gave him a second name that was a prophecy: Ardamírë, Jewel of the World.

Eärendil was seven when Gondolin fell. In 510 Maeglin, Idril's own cousin, sold the city to Morgoth, and during the attack he tried to take Idril and the boy. Tuor fought Maeglin on the walls and threw him off. Then Idril, who'd foreseen all of this, led the survivors out through a tunnel she'd dug in secret, up into the mountains, over the Eagles' Cleft, where Glorfindel died fighting a Balrog so the column could get past.

The survivors came down into Nan-tathren, the Land of Willows, where the river Sirion runs slow among the trees. Ulmo's power runs in that water. And there, Tolkien says, the sea-longing woke in Tuor and in his son at the same time.

By the age of seven the child had done everything the prophecies needed him to do, just by surviving. The rest of his story, he'd have to choose.

SECTION: Vingilot and the Search for Tuor and Idril

Let's jump ahead to the year 525. The refugees from Gondolin have settled at the Mouths of Sirion, alongside the survivors of Doriath, and Tuor is getting old. Tolkien writes: "In those days Tuor felt old age creep upon him, and ever a longing for the deep sea grew stronger in his heart." So he built a ship. He named it Eärrámë, Sea-wing, and with Idril he "set sail into the sunset and the West, and came no more into any tale or song."

Did they make it? Tolkien never tells us. The book adds that "in after days it was sung that Tuor alone of mortal Men was numbered among the elder race," and Tolkien wrote in a letter years later that this was basically a rumor. Never confirmed.

Eärendil was twenty-two. That same year he married Elwing, the granddaughter of Beren and Lúthien. He became lord of the people at the Havens. Seven years later their twin sons were born, Elrond and Elros. Eärendil had a wife, two children, a people, and a Silmaril in the house. You could say he had everything anybody could ask for. But he couldn't sit still.

Tolkien describes it like this:

"Yet Eärendil could not rest, and his voyages about the shores of the Hither Lands eased not his unquiet. Two purposes grew in his heart, blended as one in longing for the wide Sea: he sought to sail thereon, seeking after Tuor and Idril who returned not; and he thought to find perhaps the last shore, and bring ere he died the message of Elves and Men to the Valar in the West."

Two purposes, and the one Tolkien names first is the private one. He wanted his mother and father back. The embassy to the Valar is the second thought, and Tolkien hedges it with a "perhaps." It's crazy to think about, given what he ends up becoming, but the Eärendil of the text is first of all just a son looking for his parents.

So for that he needed a ship, and he went to the best shipwright in Middle-earth. Círdan had escaped the attack on the Falas and was living on the Isle of Balar. With Círdan's help he built Vingilot, the Foam-flower, which Tolkien calls "fairest of the ships of song." Golden oars, white birch timbers from the woods of Nimbrethil, sails "as the argent moon." The voyages began in 534, when Eärendil was about thirty-one, and he sailed with three companions the text names once and never again: Falathar, Erellont and Aerandir.

He carried one more thing, and it ties this story to Aragorn. In Unfinished Tales Tolkien wrote that before Idril sailed, she gave her son a green jewel called the Elessar, a stone made in Gondolin that healed whatever it touched. She told him, "The Elessar I leave with thee, for there are grievous hurts to Middle-earth which thou maybe shalt heal. But to none other shalt thou deliver it." He wore it on his chest on every voyage, and the reason Tolkien gives is pretty heartbreaking: "his first memory of Middle-earth was the green stone above her breast, as she sang above his cradle while Gondolin was still in flower." And that's why, two Ages later, Aragorn insisted that Bilbo put a green stone into his song about Eärendil.

The voyages failed. Tolkien tells us Eärendil never came on that journey to the shores of Valinor, defeated by shadows and enchantment, driven by repelling winds. And then, in 538, with a sudden sense of dread on him, worrying for Elwing and the Havens, he turned for home. He was too late.

While he was at sea, the sons of Fëanor came for the Silmaril. Maedhros and Maglor took the Havens, and Círdan and Gil-galad sailed to help and arrived after the fires were out. And when Eärendil came home, Tolkien gives him the saddest sentence in the chapter:

"Elwing was gone, and her sons."

SECTION: Why Was Tirion Empty When Eärendil Arrived?

Elwing's side of what happened next has its own episode on this channel, so let's pick it up from Eärendil's side of the ship. On a night at sea, Eärendil saw something coming toward the ship "as a white cloud exceeding swift beneath the moon, as a star over the sea moving in strange courses, a pale flame on wings of storm." It fell onto the deck in a swoon, close to death. And in the morning "he beheld his wife in her own form beside him with her hair upon his face, and she slept." She had a Silmaril.

Eärendil didn't know his sons were alive, and Tolkien says he "saw now no hope left in the lands of Middle-earth." So he didn't go home. He bound the Silmaril to his forehead and turned Vingilot west one last time.

And this time the barriers gave way. Tolkien is careful about why: "the wise have said that it was by reason of the power of that holy jewel." Past the Enchanted Isles, past the Shadowy Seas, past Tol Eressëa without stopping. And in the year 542 they dropped anchor in the Bay of Eldamar, where the Teleri on the shore stood staring at a glow on the water that Tolkien says "was very great."

Then Eärendil told the three friends who'd sailed every sea with him that they couldn't come.

"Here none but myself shall set foot, lest you fall under the wrath of the Valar. But that peril I will take on myself alone, for the sake of the Two Kindreds."

And to Elwing:

"Await me here; for one only may bring the message that it is my fate to bear."

Why wouldn't he let them come? Because there was a ban.

After the Noldor left Valinor in rebellion, the Valar shut the door: no exile could return, and no mortal could ever set foot there at all. Eärendil was walking into a capital case. Tolkien called him, in a letter, an "ambassador" for "both Kindreds, Elves and Men," sent to "persuade them to take thought again for the Exiles." He came as a defendant who'd asked for his own hearing.

So he walked up through the Calacirya, the Cleft of Light, alone. And nobody was there.

Tirion, the Noldor's own city on the hill of Túna, was empty. It was a festival, and nearly everyone had gone to Valimar or up onto Taniquetil. And Tolkien adds a comparison on purpose: it was "even as Morgoth and Ungoliant came in ages past." The last time a stranger walked into Valinor during a festival, the Two Trees died. Eärendil climbed the long white stairs with the dust of the streets on his boots, and the dust of Tirion is diamond dust, so he glittered as he went. Tolkien says he "called aloud in many tongues, both of Elves and Men, but there were none to answer him."

So he headed back to the sea.

That's when a voice came from the hill behind him.

"Hail Eärendil, of mariners most renowned, the looked for that cometh at unawares, the longed for that cometh beyond hope!"

It was Eönwë, the herald of Manwë, and the greeting goes on:

"Hail Eärendil, bearer of light before the Sun and Moon! Splendour of the Children of Earth, star in the darkness, jewel in the sunset, radiant in the morning!"

The Silmaril on his brow held the glow of the Two Trees, which is older than the Sun. Eönwë summoned him to the Ring of Doom, and Tolkien adds one quiet sentence: he "never again set foot upon the lands of Men."

The Valar gathered. They called Ulmo up from the deep sea to be there. And Eärendil "delivered the errand of the Two Kindreds. Pardon he asked for the Noldor and pity for their great sorrows, and mercy upon Men and Elves and succour in their need. And his prayer was granted."

But then the Powers turned to Eärendil himself, because the law still said he should die. Mandos asked whether a mortal could "step living upon the undying lands, and yet live." Ulmo answered for him: "For this he was born into the world." Then Ulmo asked: is he Tuor's son, of the House of Hador, or Idril's son, of the house of Finwë? Mandos wasn't moved either way. "Equally the Noldor, who went wilfully into exile, may not return hither."

And with that, both halves of Eärendil would be banned, so he was guilty twice over.

SECTION: The Choice Eärendil Didn't Want to Make

Manwë settled it. "In this matter the power of doom is given to me," he said, and every Half-elven fate afterward is written in what he said next.

"The peril that he ventured for love of the Two Kindreds shall not fall upon Eärendil, nor shall it fall upon Elwing his wife, who entered into peril for love of him; but they shall not walk again ever among Elves or Men in the Outer Lands. And this is my decree concerning them: to Eärendil and to Elwing, and to their sons, shall be given leave each to choose freely to which kindred their fates shall be joined, and under which kindred they shall be judged."

So he lives.

But he never goes home.

Then comes the choice, which is tough to read.

"Then Eärendil said to Elwing: 'Choose thou, for now I am weary of the world.' And Elwing chose to be judged among the Firstborn Children of Ilúvatar, because of Lúthien; and for her sake Eärendil chose alike, though his heart was rather with the kindred of Men and the people of his father."

Those are the last words Tolkien ever gives Eärendil.

Elwing chooses the Elves, for her grandmother's sake. And Eärendil goes along with it, for her sake. He'd just saved two races, and he took the immortality he didn't want so he wouldn't be separated from his wife.

In Tolkien's earlier draft of this passage, from the nineteen-thirties, Manwë spells out what the default would have been: "all those who have the blood of mortal Men, in whatever part, great or small, are mortal, unless other doom be granted to them." So any mortal blood at all, and you die. The choice is an exception.

This comes with a cost, though. In Tolkien's first notes, back in nineteen seventeen, Eärendil never comes back past Kôr, "else would he die like other Men, so much of the mortal is in him." Decades later the Akallabêth puts it in one line: "But Eärendil came never back to the lands that he had loved." And Bilbo sings it in Rivendell: "to pass, and tarry never more / on Hither Shores where mortals are."

The decree didn't stop with Eärendil. Elros chose Men, sailed to Númenor, reigned four hundred and ten years and died at five hundred. Elrond chose the Elves and outlived the whole Third Age. Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings calls the choice "irrevocable" and says it passed to Elrond's children too, which is how Arwen, more than six thousand years later, ends up choosing a life of mortality with Aragorn. The choice her grandfather wanted and couldn't take.

The Númenóreans could never get over the decree of mortality. Somewhere around the year twenty-two thirty of the Second Age, King Tar-Atanamir put it to the messengers of the Valar as a grievance. Doesn't Eärendil, my forefather, live? Isn't he in Aman? And the answer he got was a correction:

"he has a fate apart, and was adjudged to the Firstborn who die not; yet this also is his doom that he can never return again to mortal lands."

The king heard a privilege, and the messengers described sort of a sentence.

About a thousand years later, Amandil, Elendil's father, tried to repeat the voyage, "be there ban or no," to plead for Númenor before it drowned. He was never heard from again. Tolkien's narrator says only that "Men could not a second time be saved by any such embassy." It worked once, it cost the ambassador everything, and it was never going to work again.

SECTION: Gil-Estel and the Death of Ancalagon the Black

You might think that a situation like what we described would end with a quiet retirement somewhere in the Blessed Realm. But eternity isn't a slow dance for Eärendil.

"Then the Valar took Vingilot, and hallowed it, and bore it away through Valinor to the uttermost rim of the world; and there it passed through the Door of Night and was lifted up even into the oceans of heaven."

Eärendil sat at the helm, still glittering with the diamond dust of Tirion, the Silmaril still on his brow. He sailed out "even into the starless voids" and came back at dawn and dusk, and to anyone on the ground in Middle-earth, that returning ship was a new star.

So the Valar gave him three jobs, and the first one started the night he rose.

The people of Middle-earth "beheld it from afar and wondered, and they took it for a sign, and called it Gil-Estel, the Star of High Hope." Estel is a specific word in Tolkien lore. It represents the trust that things will come right even when you can't see how.

Two people in particular looked up at this new star. Maedhros said to his brother: "Surely that is a Silmaril that shines now in the West?" And Maglor answered: "If it be truly the Silmaril which we saw cast into the sea that rises again by the power of the Valar, then let us be glad; for its glory is seen now by many, and is yet secure from all evil." The jewel their oath bound them to recover was now beyond any hand's reach. Maglor was relieved But Tolkien also casts a shadow here:

"Then the Elves looked up, and despaired no longer; but Morgoth was filled with doubt."

The second job took forty-five years to arrive.

In 545 the host of Valinor landed in Beleriand. Tolkien says almost nothing about the war that followed. It went on for decades, and Morgoth's army was too big for the plain of Anfauglith to hold.

At the end, in 587, Morgoth sent out the one thing nobody had seen before: winged dragons, led by Ancalagon the Black, the greatest dragon Morgoth ever bred. The host of the Valar was driven back.

"But Eärendil came, shining with white flame, and about Vingilot were gathered all the great birds of heaven and Thorondor was their captain, and there was battle in the air all the day and through a dark night of doubt. Before the rising of the sun Eärendil slew Ancalagon the Black, the mightiest of the dragon-host, and cast him from the sky; and he fell upon the towers of Thangorodrim, and they were broken in his ruin."

Six and a half thousand years later, Gandalf in Bag End would still use Ancalagon as the measuring stick: no dragon, "not even Ancalagon the Black," could ever have harmed the One Ring. That's the dragon Eärendil killed.

Then the Valar hunted Morgoth down. Morgoth ran into the deepest of his mines, and begged for peace and pardon. The Valar cut his feet from under him, bound him with the chain Angainor, and beat his iron crown into a collar for his neck. Then, in 590, they pushed him out through the Door of Night into the Timeless Void, the same door Vingilot had sailed through forty-eight years before. And then, Tolkien wraps up by describing the third job:

"a guard is set for ever on those walls, and Eärendil keeps watch upon the ramparts of the sky."

There's one more piece, and the copy of The Silmarillion on my shelf doesn't have it. Tolkien's own drafts of this ending, from the nineteen-thirties, ran on to a prophecy from Mandos about the end of the world. Morgoth, "seeing that the guard sleepeth," would break back in through the Door of Night and destroy the Sun and Moon, "but Eärendil shall descend upon him as a white and searing flame and drive him from the airs." After the last battle, Eärendil would come down one final time and "surrender that flame which he hath had in keeping." Christopher Tolkien left that prophecy out of the published book and ended it instead with: "Manwë and Varda may know; but they have not revealed it." So Eärendil is still up there, and whether he ever gets to come down is a question the book doesn't answer.

SECTION: From Númenor to Shelob's Lair: The Light Goes On

The First Age ended with the star already in place, and the next thing it did was give directions.

When the Valar raised Númenor out of the sea for the Men who'd fought Morgoth, the Edain steered there by Eärendil.

"The Star of Eärendil shone bright in the West as a token that all was made ready, and as a guide over the sea."

In the year 32 of the Second Age they "set sail upon the deep waters, following the Star." It was "so bright that even at morning Men could see it glimmering in the West." And they named that land Elenna, which means Starwards. The greatest kingdom Men ever built was named after the direction they'd sailed to reach it, and the direction was Eärendil.

Three thousand years after Númenor went to the bottom of the sea, the star was still doing the same job. But it was performing out of a glass bottle.

In February of the year thirty nineteen of the Third Age, on the bank of the Silverlode, Galadriel handed Frodo a small crystal bottle.

"In this phial is caught the light of Eärendil's star, set amid the waters of my fountain. May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out."

Some have described the whole legendarium as one light being split into smaller and smaller pieces: the Lamps, then the Trees, then the Silmarils, then the star, then a fountain in Lórien, then a glass in a hobbit's pocket. Each piece is weaker than the one before, and each one is still enough.

Sam is the one who works this out, and he does it out loud, on the Stairs of Cirith Ungol. He's thinking about Beren and the Silmaril, and then he stops.

"The Silmaril went on and came to Eärendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We've got, you've got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still! It's going on."

Then, in Shelob's lair, when the dark got so thick the hobbits couldn't see their own hands, Frodo lifted the phial and shouted words he didn't know he knew: Hail Eärendil, brightest of stars.

The glass "kindled to a silver flame, a minute heart of dazzling light, as though Eärendil had himself come down from the high sunset paths with the last Silmaril upon his brow." And then Shelob's eyes. She was the last child of Ungoliant, who'd drunk the Two Trees dry. Her eyes had been safe underground for thousands of years, "but now a star had descended into the very earth." Shelob knew that cry from ages ago. And she backed off.

The phial only ever failed once, on the slopes of Mount Doom, inside Sauron's own power. Everywhere else it held.

There's one more star we hear about in Mordor, but Tolkien doesn't name it. One night, Sam looks up through a gap in the cloud over the mountains and sees a single white star. Tolkien writes that "the beauty of it smote his heart" and that "the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach." Most readers likely take it to be Eärendil's, and so do I, but Tolkien never says so.

A final great place the name turns up in The Lord of the Rings is back in Rivendell, in October of thirty eighteen, when Bilbo stood up in the Hall of Fire and recited a long poem about Eärendil. In Elrond's house. Elrond is Eärendil's son. Bilbo admits afterward that it was "rather cheek." The poem ends with the mariner "for ever still a herald on / an errand that should never rest / to bear his shining lamp afar, / the Flammifer of Westernesse." Flammifer is a made-up Latin word, flame-bearer, a hobbit's name for the figure Eönwë had hailed as the bearer of light before the Sun and Moon. And Frodo, the other hobbit, shouting Eärendil's name in the dark, was quoting a line he'd never heard.

SECTION: Éarendel: The Old English Word That Started Tolkien's Mythology

Now let's go back to nineteen thirteen, to Oxford, in our world, where a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate named John Ronald Reuel Tolkien had just switched from Classics to English and was reading an Old English poem called Crist, attributed to a poet named Cynewulf. Two lines in it made him pause.

Hail Earendel, brightest of angels, over middle-earth sent to men.

The second line is where Tolkien got the phrase "Middle-earth." The first line did something to him. Thirty years later Tolkien gave the memory to a character in an unfinished novel:

"I felt a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English."

Fifty years later, in a letter, Tolkien told us that he worked out that Earendel had to be the morning star, Venus. And he called those two lines the words "from which ultimately sprang the whole of my mythology."

Valinor, the Silmarils, Beren and Lúthien, Gondolin, hobbits. All of it is the result of a line in poem that sparked Tolkien's curiosity.

On the twenty-fourth of September, nineteen fourteen, a few weeks into the First World War, Tolkien was staying at his aunt Jane's farm in Nottinghamshire. There he wrote a poem called "The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star." A mariner "launched his bark like a silver spark from the last and lonely sand," sailed over the edge of the world, and became a star. That November he shared it with the college essay club, and afterward his friend G.B. Smith asked him the obvious question: what's it actually about? And Tolkien said something that I always remember:

"I don't know. I'll try to find out."

He spent the next sixty years finding out.

Scholars have made an inventory of what the mariner in that nineteen fourteen poem lacks. He has no motive for the voyage. He has no history. He has no Silmaril, and no Elvish name. There's no Valinor for him to sail to; the first poem to name Valinor is from July nineteen fifteen.

Everything in the entire legendarium was built afterward to give this mariner a reason to leave and somewhere to go. Tolkien built the mythology around Eärendil, and everything else came second.

The first version of the story Tolkien built was a failure. In the outlines from around nineteen seventeen, Eärendel reaches the Elvish city and finds it empty because the Elves have already marched to war without him. His errand was pointless. He had no Silmaril. His brightness was the diamond dust of the streets on his clothes, and grief. Elwing drowned, and he sailed the sky looking for her. When Tolkien finally rewrote the story so that the voyage succeeded, he kept the empty city, and he kept the dust of diamonds. That's why the savior of the world walks through a silent Tirion with glittering shoes: the scene is a relic of a version where he'd failed.

Now think about this for a moment.

If you want to know where the book came from, Frodo's cry in the dark is the most important line there is. Hail Eärendil, brightest of stars. A hymn for Advent, sung in England twelve hundred years ago, became a hobbit's shout in a spider's tunnel, written by the student who'd promised his friend he'd find out what the word meant.

In March of twenty twenty-two an astronomer using the Hubble telescope announced the most distant single star anyone had ever seen, its light nearly thirteen billion years old. He named it Earendel, the morning star.

Let's wrap things on that thought. The oldest star we've ever looked at carried a name that a student wrote into a poem on his aunt's farm. He couldn't get that one word out of his head.