Ainur, Symphony, and Agency: Some Thoughts on The Silmarillion

Because it's my favorite book and I've been thinking about it a lot recently.

Picture of my copy of the Silmarillion, First American Edition!

The Silmarillion was published in 1977, four years after the death of it's author John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. Curated from a large library of notes by his son, Christopher, The Silmarillion is both a history and mythology that accompanied Tolkien's previous Middle Earth works.

The Silmarillion itself is comprised of five sections: Ainulindalë, Valaquenta, Quenta* Silmarillion, Akallabeth, and Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age. Today, we will be focusing on the first two sections, which serve to outline the realm of Myths, the "gods" of this world. Tolkien was a Roman Catholic so I find the easiest real world comparison to be Christianity as it is most likely what he was going for.

We start with Eru Ilúvatar, who is basically like the most powerful Being; he "founds" this world on song, creating beings called the Ainur, who are basically the Choir for his songs. The Ainur are basically the general body of "Angels" who are tasked with turning Eru's songs into Great Symphonies. One Ainur in particular, Melkor, who is the parallel of Lucifer breaks from this and tries to take control of the Symphony but is stopped when Eru reveals the world to them, and plays the entirety of history, which then Tolkien writes:

"for to none but himself has Ilúvatar revealed all that he has in store, and in every age there come forth things that are new and have no foretelling, for they do not proceed from the past." (Ainulindalë, pg 18)

There is a lot to note about that passage because it raises a few question. Throughout the rest of the book, there are a lot of actions, both "good" and "bad" that are taken, but which ones of those are "written" in the way that Eru can see them unfold. Is it only the Children of Ilúvatar (Elves, Men) that are controlled by this prewritten destiny or are the Ainur also bound to it? Melkor's meddling in the future theoretically should throw off this "destiny" unless he was made to "fall" to corruption. I guess it brings the question of how much agency is there in this world, but then you can argue that as they are characters in a book, they inherently have no agency as they are dictated by an author.

Within the context of limited actions that fit a "story" or a "destiny" lets turn back to Melkor, who is characterized as a being of pure evil. Driven by the shame of being foiled by Eru, he turns towards the want to create things of his own, a sentiment that is shared by many of the Ainur, Aulë created the Dwarves in secret, Yavanna had the Ents to watch her gardens. Textually, this is because he wants to "replace" Eru as the Father of All Things, so his creation starts as destruction and twisting things that are "natural." This is an interesting notion that loops into how Tolkien's work can be read as subsequent to his WWI experience, or at least shaped and influenced by it, as well as the growing Industrial world, though Tolkien himself had a general dislike for allegory and the idea that his stories had parallels to life at the time. Another important note is the influence of adaptations on the preception of his work, Peter Jackson's movies leaned heavy into the Industrial aspect as with the sets.

This still doesn't really answer anything about Melkor or destiny, because I don't have the answers to that, maybe it'll be revealed during my next reread, or maybe it is the eye of the beholder, I guess we'll never know.

*You may recognize this word from the name of this blog, Quenta roughly means "story" in the fictional language of Quenya, or the language of the Elves that reached Valinor