Appendix A, Part I
There’s no easy way to encompass Appendix A, which I’m breaking into two parts, and even with that, is far, far too dense with material. In this Appendix, Tolkien attempts desperately to graft as much as he can of the Silmarillion material his publishers have shown zero interest in onto the body of The Lord of the Rings. The relevance of this material ranges from mildly relevant (it’s nice to have some context for what the heck Numenor is) to really useless (we did not need a list of the names of every Steward of Gondor and I’d bet money not even Stephen Colbert could name them all) to so vital that it’s almost criminal it wasn’t integrated into the novel proper (Aragorn and Arwen’s story is SO short-changed by the novel itself, and so beautifully rendered here). I’ll give it my best brief shot, but I have to say, if you’re someone who’s always skipped this material, definitely you should dive into it. Skip any lists of names and death dates but let the stories wash over you.
The section on Numenor -- which is here beautifully illustrated with a painting by Felix Sotomayor http://tolkiengateway.net/w/images/b/bc/Felix_Sotomayor_-_Numenor.jpg -- is really fascinating. You ought to give it a read just to orient yourself to the Amazon Prime series that’s coming our way -- I have low hopes for the series, but they claim they’re interested in the Second Age and in Numenor, and if so, they’re going to have to find a way to make this incredibly tragic arc about hubris and civil war into a popcornable/bingeable narrative experience. I am deeply skeptical, and I lament that Amazon would rather throw hundreds of millions at this instead of doing a really sick anthology series where they give us Beren and Luthien, say, and then the next season Earendil and Elwing, etc. Anyway, I think the thing that’s most fascinating here is the way it ties together so many of the characters we know -- there’s a direct line between Elrond and Faramir here, even though that’s not really evident in the novel we’ve just read. But Elrond and Elros make separate choices -- and Elros’s choice of mortality and human life means that he and his kindred lead the people of Numenor. And that people comes to resent the choice, envying the immortality of the Elves and wanting it for themselves. That leads in the short term (and by short term I’m talking a couple of millennia) to the fall of Numenor, but I think it undeniably leads in the long run to the waning Numenorean descendants in Gondor having an obsession with death and the possibility of survival, which is exactly what Faramir is alienated by (and which he complains about in Book IV). Kind of fascinating.
In the long histories of Arnor and Gondor, there’s some fun tidbits and some boring stretches. In general I’m more taken with the stuff about Arnor -- it’s really helpful to have some context for where the Shire fits into all of this, and I am super interested in the history of places like the Barrow-downs. I also, as an already admitted Glorfindel-stan, am a big, big fan of getting to see Glorfindel in his wrath stare down the Witch-king of Angmar. There’s a little more interest for me, too, in the tragedy of folks like Arvedui. But I think from the novel’s perspective, it’s hard to argue that anything here is more important than the details we get of Gondor in the last couple of centuries -- the relationship to Rohan and to Mordor, the tales of Thorongil (Aragorn in disguise -- I’ve already told a part of this story in an earlier post) and his rivalry with Denethor II, the backstory on Boromir and Faramir’s mother and their own relationship as brothers. Tolkien spent a lot of time thinking about this imagined world of his, and it really pays off here for a reader who wants to dig deeper. Too, if you’re someone who enjoys pursuing your own creative things -- fanfic-ing your way into the gaps in a story, leading a role-playing session set in Middle-earth, sketching or painting or whatever -- I think there’s a ton of wonderfully tantalizing stuff here, where Tolkien’s given you some bullet points but there’s a wide-open space around each fragment just begging you to imagine your way into it a little. In another 25-30 years, when this material hits the public domain, I hope I’m still around to enjoy people exploring these possibilities freely.
The thing I have to emphasize about the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen is that it is required reading and if you’ve never dug far enough into Appendix A to read it, you haven’t read the whole story. I mean, it is richly detailed and full of character insights in a way that most of the Appendices aren’t, just for a start. But then it’s specifically about two centrally important characters -- one of whom, Arwen, literally speaks two lines of dialogue in the whole novel, leaving us mostly unaware of her hopes and fears. It’s all here, too -- Aragorn’s relationship to his parents, and in particular his incredibly close relationship to Elrond (which the Jackson films do not adequately account for, I think), is super foundational to his character. The mismatch between him and Arwen is clearer here, since he’s a boy of 20 when he meets her and her several thousand year stare. She likes him immediately, but there’s also a distance between them. Sure, he goes off to Rohan and Gondor and points east and south in part to prepare himself to seek the thrones of Gondor and Arnor and prove himself worthy of her in Elrond’s eyes. But I think he also goes to develop his wisdom and experience sufficiently that he will prove a worthy companion for her in her own eyes, and in his. The story does a good job, too, of depicting the weight of mortality -- death is called “the Gift of Men” and I think Tolkien genuinely wants us to understand that in Middle-earth, the idea of a life that ends (and then another life beyond it) is actually a gift. But he also wants to explore how painful it is, even if we see it as a gift. Arwen’s comment to her dying husband -- a man dying freely rather than seeing himself become decrepit with age (death with dignity?) -- is that, if it is a gift, it is “bitter to receive”. Isn’t it, though? Tolkien’s way with words is really evident here again, as he turns some phrases that are really beautiful and moving: one of my favorite sentences in the whole novel is “And long there he lay, an image of the splendour of the Kings of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of the world.” But let’s not miss that, in the sentence immediately following, Arwen becomes “cold and grey as nightfall in winter that comes without a star”. It’s no accident that Jackson, Walsh and Boyens lift both of those lines and put them in Hugo Weaving’s incredibly expressive voice as Elrond in The Two Towers -- and it’s no accident that this scene, where Elrond confronts Arwen, is one of my absolute favorites in the film series.
That part of the tale ends so sadly: this is what it means to be the Fourth Age, though. Arwen wanders lonely in woods that are empty, since the last of her kindred have all fled to the West, and even if she were permitted to take a boat from the Havens, they aren’t there. The narrator here informs us that when Arwen dies, there’s no more elanor or niphredil blooming in Eriador. That means that Samwise’s daughter Elanor (assuming she’s anywhere close to as long-lived as Bilbo, and with both her grandfathers, the Gaffer and Tom Cotton, living a century or so, she well might have lived that long) may well have outlived the flowers that gave her her name. Sweet but melancholy, isn’t it?
Well, I have the rest of Appendix A ahead of me (not to mention the other Appendices), so keep checking back into these last few posts, if you like! And certainly, again, if you’ve never read the Appendices but you love this book, go grab your copy of The Return of the King and find the Aragorn and Arwen section. It’s only a few pages and I’m sure you won’t regret it!