This blog post is an expanded version of a piece posted on Tumblr in April of 2022.
Fans and scholars can always debate (and have!) in what manner or to what degree The Hobbit, in those years before The Lord of the Rings was written, really engaged with or belonged to the wider mythology of Tolkien’s Legendarium. In his The History of the Hobbit, John D. Rateliff makes a strong case for First Age Beleriand as the assumed setting of early drafts of the story, with what readers know as Mirkwood being Taur-nu-Fuin sometime after the conclusion of Beren and Luthien’s story1. Whether this is merely “set dressing”—Tolkien drawing on his own mythos to flesh out a sense of place and time without expecting the connection to go the other way—and whether “set dressing” counts as a form of “setting” could be debated. I now tend to view The Hobbit (pre-LotR) as taking place in a kind of “storybook AU” of the Legendarium. But for all the “Arkenstone Was a Silmaril” conspiracy theories out there, it’s another reference to jewels and light that I find most interesting for how it engages with the Primary World, the wider Legendarium, and the lingering enchantment from my own childhood.
In stanzas three and four of “Thorin’s Song” in The Hobbit we read:
For ancient king and elvish lord
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
There many a gleaming golden hoard
They shaped and wrought, and light they caught
To hide in gems on hilt of sword.
On silver necklaces they strung
The flowering stars, on crowns they hung
The dragon-fire, in twisted wire
They meshed the light of moon and sun.
These stanzas are identical between the first extant draft (Rateliff identifies this as “the Bladorthin manuscript” due to the use of the name “Bladorthin” for the character we will come to know as Gandalf) and the published version2. They speak of jewel-smithing, gold-smithing, silver-smithing; more importantly they speak in terms of the capture, taming, and manipulation of light. I was always in love with this imagery; even before I read the rest of the story this poem sits in, I read this poem and loved it—and over the years I think I’ve come to better understand why.
To Sink Inside a Stone
My parents spent many years before I was born buying and restoring antiques, and among the curios and knick-knacks that filled my childhood home like the refuse of a memory palace was a set of old salt and pepper shakers made of a deep cobalt glass. I don’t know how old they were, but when the light shown through them they produced one of the most exquisite colors I’ve ever seen and one I’ve only seen approached in dark, deep sapphires. It was an enveloping blue, comforting and mysterious—not so purple as the rim of the night sky just before it fades to a black center, and not so green as a deep, deep, clear sea. It was some blue that doesn’t appear frequently in nature, tucked away in the rarest places: in dots of rare fungus like Terana caerulea or hidden inside minerals, its color only unlockable at 1200 degrees.
I was a gemstone-feral child (and teen and 20-something). Precious and semi-precious, faceted or not, rhinestones, paste gems (oh, the lead I didn’t know I was handling!), plastic: it didn’t matter. I gathered sparkly stones from the earth and the fringes of gravel driveways like a magpie. On lazy days I would lay on my bed, hold a jewel (real or not) or bit of glass to my eye, and stare through it at the overhead light fixture. From that perspective, with a sensation so like looking through the eyepiece of a microscope or telescope, the space inside that fraction of an inch became fantastically distorted. It could be the interior of a cell all full of organelles, a cavernous hall, or the expanse between planets. Falling inside that liquid color, brought to life by the light passing through it, seemed to take me out of space and time, like it was a little window into the imagination.
After her death I learned my mother-in-law had once felt something similar about stained glass. She worked with glass frequently in her life, both as a fine artist making glass sculpture, wall hangings, and jewelry and in the commercial sector helping to maintain color consistency in architectural glass products. In an interview she said that as a child she had wanted to “live inside a stained glass window.”
I sometimes wonder if Tolkien, as a child or young man, ever thought some of the same things. Did he ever hold a bit of colored glass to his eye and watch the blooming world unfolding inside of it, a tiny little universe shining in his fingers. Every once in a while, when I forget the pretense of adulthood, I still do.
Wrighting Light
All of that to express some of the reasons why why it is, I think, that the imagery of “Thorin’s Song” resonates with me: the implication of hiding something massive and primeval in a tiny space, fitting a universe back into an egg. But it is also an appreciation of the idea of fashioning light, an intangible thing moving as fast as time can move. To shape (to wright) light implies making with it, building with it, altering it, taming it (even imposing your will on it to some degree), splitting and recombining it. To catch light implies containing or holding it and by extension, stopping its forward motion, limiting it to bouncing around in its crystal cage. And there is what follows that thought somewhat naturally: the sense that to stop light is to stop time.
In sum, these lines from “Thorin’s Song” may well describe what might be considered the central, multi-faceted visual metaphor of much of Tolkien’s work, encompassing the many literal and figurative uses of gems and light and their interactions in the Legendarium.
It describes the function of The Silmarils, capturing and holding and giving forth forever (imperishable and unending) some of the unsullied light of the Two Trees: a light associated with a lost past, with nostalgia, with a yearning for a younger world. It describes the splintering of light in Gandalf’s warning words to Saruman3, in Tolkien’s own lamentation of the splintering of Art and Science as human endeavors4, as well as in the image’s most prominent and powerful (and positive) use: as the description of the shared and ever-continuing act of subcreation in Tolkien’s Mythopoeia.5
Most recently, The Rings of Power appears to have made (or has attempted to make) a similar kind of connection between gems and light and time, treating “the light of Valinor” as something contained also within mithril and capable of halting Elvish “fading” in Middle-earth through physical contact. It is a muddled and unsubtle attempt at best, in my estimation (and also my least favorite thing about the show), but seeing a connection between crystalline structures, light, and time in the context of Tolkien’s Legendarium isn’t fundamentally out of left field.
One other interesting point, to me, is how in the descriptions of “Thorin’s Song,” the light, while not the “pure” light of the Silmarils (and hence already “sullied” or “splintered”) is still described in ways that make it sound potentially imperishable. Light is “hidden” in gems in what sounds like a singular moment during their crafting, yet the same gems presumably continue to give off this light indefinitely, as if its volume was unlimited, or as if the light itself was its own source, in much the same way as the Silmarils. Likewise, the poetic reference to stringing flowering stars on silver necklaces implies a gem that does not refract but instead generates its own light. Yes, this is all poetry. Yes, these are likely figurative uses of language. But I can’t help but notice how these descriptions link these gems (and even moreso the Silmarils) to the Flame Imperishable, the power that dwells both with Illuvatar but also at the center of Arda, granting it Being from an endless well of fire and light. And this is where I want to make my last connection, one to the Primary World.
Grosseteste and the Flame Imperishable
In her essay “The Development of Tolkien’s Legendarium,” Christina Scull notes that by the time Tolkien was working on “The Sketch of the Mythology” in 1926, he was already increasing the narrative, metaphysical, and theological importance of the Silmarils and the light they contain, part of a process of moving them from merely the greatest example of Gnomish (Noldorin) art to objects integral to the fate of Arda, itself. The earliest drafts of The Hobbit would be written down only a few years after this development and it’s tempting to wonder whether some of those thoughts about light and its metaphysical potency were creeping into The Hobbit as well.
The Primary World connection I mentioned involves a man named Robert Grosseteste. Grosseteste is a fascinating fellow with a fascinating brain. He was born in the 12th century, taught at Oxford, and became Bishop of Lincoln. He was the first Latin Western thinker to propose that there could be various sizes of infinities, and he is considered important to the beginnings of modern scientific inquiry at Oxford.6 For our current purposes though, he is important for his treatise De Luce (“On Light”) in which he proposes that light is what gives matter its substance, extending it into the three-dimensional world, and allowing for the conditions which produce the “world machine” (his cosmogonical take on the Aristotelian universe).7 Well! That sounds an awful lot like two things to me. First, it makes photons sound rather like Higgs bosons, (the Higgs field being what provides mass to particles). Second, it sounds rather like the Flame Imperishable, providing Primary Being to potential, to visions, to ideas.
I have no idea to what degree Tolkien was familiar with Grosseteste. I am not a Medievalist; I know very little about Tolkien’s knowledge of thinkers from Groesseteste’s time. There may well be scholarship showing a familiarity and link between the two men, but I am not aware of it if so, and it isn’t my current area of study. Regardless, I find the connection fascinating!
If we accept for a moment the possibility that light, itself, might be fundamental to matter in Eä, then perhaps “wrighting” light is the most fundamental form of subcreation. That would track nicely with both Feanor’s greatest work and his choice of heraldic device.
Appendix: A Fluorite
In March of last year we attended a rock and gem show in Indianapolis. It’s always a risk putting me in a room with a wide variety of pretty stones, but I exercised restraint and only bought a few, my favorite being this stunning fluorite. The photos really don’t do justice to the gorgeous viridian bands next to the sky blue, sea green, and lavender. Less impressive than a Silmaril? Sure. But no less beautiful to me!
Notes
- Rateliff, John D.. The History of the Hobbit: Mr. Baggins and Return to Bag End. Kindle ed. HarperCollins, 2011.
- Tolkien, J.R.R.. The Hobbit: 75th Anniversary Edition. Kindle ed. Mariner books, 2012.
- ‘“‘’White!’ he sneered. ‘It serves as a beginning. White cloth may be dyed. The white page can be overwritten; and the white light can be broken.’ “‘In which case it is no longer white,’” said I. “‘And he that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.’”’ — The Lord of the Rings, “The Council of Elrond”
- “As far as all this has symbolical or allegorical significance, Light is such a primeval symbol in the nature of the Universe, that it can hardly be analysed. The Light of Valinor (derived from light before any fall) is the light of art undivorced from reason, that sees things both scientifically (or philosophically) and imaginatively (or subcreatively) and says that they are good’ – as beautiful.” — Letter 131.
- “Disgraced he may be, yet is not dethroned, / and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned, / his world-dominion by creative act: / not his to worship the great Artefact, / man, sub-creator, the refracted light / through whom is splintered from a single White / to many hues, and endlessly combined / in living shapes that move from mind to mind.” — Mythopoeia
- Detailed primer on Grosseteste for the interested: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/grosseteste
- This is a fun (I mean, depending on one’s definition of “fun”, I guess?) seminar from 2014 on this very topic:
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