Earendil the Mariner. Art by Jenny Dolfen. Earendil first appeared as Earendel in a poem written by Tolkien on September 24, 1914, 100 years ago.
Tolkien Week has wonderful special events to celebrate, such as the anniversary of the publication of The Hobbit and Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday. Tolkien Week 2014 adds another very special anniversary to observe: the centenary of Tolkien’s creation of Middle-earth. To be more specific, September 24, 2014, marks 100 years to the day that J. R. R. Tolkien wrote the first lines connected to the world that would become Middle-earth.
John Garth is the author of Tolkien and the Great War and a new booklet about Tolkien’s undergraduate days in Oxford University’s Exeter College, Tolkien at Exeter College: How an Oxford undergraduate created Middle-earth. In a story in The Guardian, Garth tells of the “founding moment” of Middle-earth. As war escalated in Europe, “a young man wrote a poem about a mariner who sails off the earth into the sky.” There were, as yet, no hobbits or elves in the mind of 22-year-old Tolkien, but the mariner of this early poem—Éarendel—is remembered in The Lord of the Rings as Eärendil, father of Elrond and Elros, who sailed into the West to seek the aid of the Valar in the battle against Morgoth.
Tolkien’s original poem was an invented myth for the origin of the evening star. The poem begins:
Éarendel sprang up from the Ocean’s cup
In the gloom of the mid-world’s rim;
From the door of Night as a ray of light
Leapt over the twilight brim,
And launching his bark like a silver spark
From the golden-fading sand;
Down the sunlit breath of Day’s fiery Death
He sped from Westerland.
Christopher Tolkien included the entire 6-stanza early poem in The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, in the chapter “The Tale of Eärendel.”
In the article in The Guardian, John Garth relates how Tolkien came to that moment of writing this myth of the evening star. Garth sees this poem as a truly significant one in Tolkien’s creation of Middle-earth:
That seminal opening line “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” is usually seen as Tolkien’s breakthrough moment. The real honour should go to “Éarendel sprang up from the Ocean’s cup”.
You can read John Garth’s article in The Guardian here, and the Middle-earth News story about the biographical booklet on Tolkien here.
2 Comments