The Book of Lost Tales Part I: A Readthrough

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by Orphalesion

Declaring them to be basically the same character seems to me a gross exaggeration.

I never posted that. I posted only that “otherwise they are almost the same character” and later withdrew it as overspeaking.

Neil Gaiman's Death and Despair have no relevance to the discussion, a completely different mythology, a completely different writer. I know you wanted to make the point "Spirit of Death does not necessarily equal Spirit of Despair" but in this case Fui Nienna is both the Goddess of Despair and the judge of dead mortals.

They have as much relevance as Hel, Ereshkigal, and Elli. I wished to point out the differences of Despair and Death in a different mythology. So, point out where Tolkien actually calls Fui Nienna the “Goddess of Despair”. Fui Nienna sets many of her mortal prisoners free to dwell in Arvalin to the sound of their guitars to await the Great End. A smaller number she turns over to Nornorë, to dwell with the Valar until the Great End. So Fui Nienna is not only a Goddess of Despair. Blackening Fui Nienna by ignoring what Tolkien does say about her and exaggerating what he does not say is unconvincing.

And on a similar note, can you imagine Gandalf learning wisdom and compassion from a hag like Fui?

Gandalf took on the earthly form of an old man. Why should it matter if his teacher had the fana of an old woman? Tolkien makes no comments, so far as I am aware, on what appearance Fui Nienna or Nienna took?

Especially the comparison Inanna=Vana does not work. Inanna/Ishtar was the goddess of love and war, a self-indulgent, petty Goddess of Sex who most likely served as inspiration for Aphrodite.

Yes Ishtar/Inanna corresponds to the Greek Aphrodite, the Latin Venus, and the Norse Freyja, more or less. Tolkien naturally removes the self-indulgent and petty and adulterous qualities from his Vána. The name itself may reflect theories that the Norse Vanir were etymologically related to the Latin goddess Venus. In short, I thank Inanna/Ishtar/Aphrodite/Venus/Freyja=Vána works better than other comparisons with real mythological figures that I can think of. Inanna is the cloest counterpart to Tolkien Vána in Sumerian mythology. Most of Tolkien’s Valar are based mainly on divine figures from real mythologies, but modified to his own tastes.

I admit that jumping from Vana being the goddess of youth and Fui "breeding winter" to the conclusion that Fui is "a crone" was a bit of interpretation.

It is an interpretation not indicated by anything that Tolkien wrote.

Rather than Hell or Elli I was also thinking of Annis the Celtic crone goddess, I know Celtic mythology was not a primary inspiration of Tolkien, still the crone had by that time become part of our collective well of stories.

Stories of Annis are not part of my collective well of stories. You posted our. See http://www.merciangathering.com/black_annis.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Annis for what is available on the web, mostly a folktale and disputed theories.

You are splitting hairs with that, a opposite to a female character does not necessarily have to be a male (Fui Nienna and Vana were opposites in the primitive mythology after all)

Fui Nienna and Vána were sisters, not opposites necessarily. Many mythologies have characters that are in part opposites, but not complete opposites. Do not use a term that you have to struggle so hard to defend,

For example, Tom Bombadil is closer to a complete opposite of Fui Nienna than Nienna. I cannot really imagine a complete opposite of any of Tolkien’s characters. You can quite easily demonstrate that Fui Nienna and Nienna are different, without such a troublesome idea as complete opposite. You say that two characters could be further apart from each other than Fui Nienna from the BOLT and Nienna from the Silmarillion. This puts you in the absurd position have having to prove that Treebeard is not so far apart from Fui Nienna as is Nienna, or that Saruman is somehow closer to Gandalf than Fui Nienna to Nienna.

Any similarity that is undeniable you try to avoid by calling superficial. You have defined a position with which I mostly agree, but wrapped it in an envelope which makes it impossible for me to accept your whole package.

[Orphalesion]

Originally Posted by jallanite

They have as much relevance as Hel, Ereshkigal, and Elli. I wished to point out the differences of Despair and Death in a different mythology. So, point out where Tolkien actually calls Fui Nienna the “Goddess of Despair”. Fui Nienna sets many of her mortal prisoners free to dwell in Arvalin to the sound of their guitars to await the Great End. A smaller number she turns over to Nornorë, to dwell with the Valar until the Great End. So Fui Nienna is not only a Goddess of Despair. Blackening Fui Nienna by ignoring what Tolkien does say about her and exaggerating what he does not say is unconvincing.

of course she does, I corrected myself to say sinister instead of evil. I just wanted to point out that she is also the bringer/creator of despair.

Gandalf took on the earthly form of an old man. Why should it matter if his teacher had the fana of an old woman? Tolkien makes no comments, so far as I am aware, on what appearance Fui Nienna or Nienna took?

Sorry I wrote that bad. I mean here that Fui Nienna had "only cold feelings" for other beings and spent much of her time creating sorrow and despair, so she would have been not as good a teacher as Gandals as Silmarillion Nienna who is pure compassion. I did not mean to comment on Fui Nienna's appearance here, but on her character/modus operandi (both of which we only get the vaguest clues of in the BOLT, I'm actually surprised how much prominence Nienna gained later in comparison to Fui Nienna)

Yes Ishtar/Inanna corresponds to the Greek Aphrodite, the Latin Venus, and the Norse Freyja, more or less. Tolkien naturally removes the self-indulgent and petty and adulterous qualities from his Vána. The name itself may reflect theories that the Norse Vanir were etymologically related to the Latin goddess Venus. In short, I thank Inanna/Ishtar/Aphrodite/Venus/Freyja=Vána works better than other comparisons with real mythological figures that I can think of. Inanna is the cloest counterpart to Tolkien Vána in Sumerian mythology. Most of Tolkien’s Valar are based mainly on divine figures from real mythologies, but modified to his own tastes.

No, no I meant the theories that the cult of Aphrodite (not Venus who has a very different history) entered Greece through the Phoenicians and that she originally was Innana/Ishtar and that both goddesses had a very capricious character.
About Frejya I think we don't know enough to really reconstruct her character most of what we know about the Germanic deities comes after all from either Latin or already Christianized (and thus Roman influenced) sources.
I would place Vana closer to spring/youth goddesses like Flora and Idun, though Vana from the primitive mythology does have a certain childishness/self-indulgence which she displays during the hiding of Valinor before she redeemed herself by sacrificing her hair for the creation of the sun ship.

It is an interpretation not indicated by anything that Tolkien wrote.

Stories of Annis are not part of my collective well of stories. You posted our. See http://www.merciangathering.com/black_annis.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Annis for what is available on the web, mostly a folktale and disputed theories.

That's why I admitted the interpretation and repented.

The crone is part of folktales, and to me folktales are part of the collective well of stories, and since Tolkien adapted so much of Germanic mythology I made the mistake of translating too literal.

Fui Nienna and Vána were sisters, not opposites necessarily. Many mythologies have characters that are in part opposites, but not complete opposites. Do not use a term that you have to struggle so hard to defend,

They are in many ways opposites and you can be sisters and opposites.
Mistress of Life -Mistress of Death
Bringer of Joy - Bringer of Sorrow
Bringer of Spring -Bringer of Winter

For example, Tom Bombadil is closer to a complete opposite of Fui Nienna than Nienna. I cannot really imagine a complete opposite of any of Tolkien’s characters. You can quite easily demonstrate that Fui Nienna and Nienna are different, without such a troublesome idea as complete opposite. You say that two characters could be further apart from each other than Fui Nienna from the BOLT and Nienna from the Silmarillion. This puts you in the absurd position have having to prove that Treebeard is not so far apart from Fui Nienna as is Nienna, or that Saruman is somehow closer to Gandalf than Fui Nienna to Nienna.

Any similarity that is undeniable you try to avoid by calling superficial. You have defined a position with which I mostly agree, but wrapped it in an envelope which makes it impossible for me to accept your whole package.

Complete opposite was strong.
But you understand that I want to express that they have almost opposite roles in their relation to suffering? Inflicter and healer.
The idea of a being that has no compassion whatsoever and one that is compassion incarnate are very far from each other. In that aspect, which is however the whole being of Nienna in the Silmarillion, they are opposites, that's what I meant and phased it very unlucky.

[jallanite]

A post which solves the main difference between Orphalesion and myself.

The term complete opposite, when used in describing characters in fiction, is normally use to compare normal mortals and is really a short form for diametric opposite in many ways. Since Orphalesion was describing what could be described as two different versions in subsequent texts of the same character, an immortal who might be ascribed many characteristics not attributable to morals at all, I took the phrase complete opposite more literally than Orphalesion intended.

Orphalesion was not, I believe, even thinking of comparing beings like Varda, Manwë, Ulmo, Vána, Tom Bombadil, or Gandalf with either Fui Nienna or Nienna. Yet such comparisons immediately sprang to my mind. The number of beings comparable in some sense to both Fui Nienna and Nienna is far greater in Tolkien’s legendarium than would be so in most novels, in which characters comparable to Fui Nienna or Nienna don’t exist at all.

So when Orphalesion posted, “Sorry, but no..... no two characters could be further apart from each other than Fui Nienna from the BOLT and Nienna from the Silmarillion,” I immediately thought of various figures in Tolkien’s legendarium who were more different from each other than Fui Nienna and Nienna.

Similarly when Orphalesion posted, “Fui Nienna and ‘our’ Nienna are complete opposites!”, I immediately thought of other beings who could also be described as complete opposites of Fui Nienna, if one wished to think in such terms. For example, Vána and Tom Bombadil.

Originally Posted by Orphalesion

I would place Vana closer to spring/youth goddesses like Flora and Idun, though Vana from the primitive mythology does have a certain childishness/self-indulgence which she displays during the hiding of Valinor before she redeemed herself by sacrificing her hair for the creation of the sun ship.

My identification was based on Vána being the chief goddess of what one might call female sexuality among Tolkien’s Valar, not on theories of the origins of the comparable characters. The Sumerian goddess Inanna, for example, is often imagined, I think rightly, to have earlier been mainly a granary goddess. I did not include the Egyptian Hathor because, although identified with Aphrodite and Venus in classical times, she originally seems to have been identified with the Semitic Asherah/Athirat rather than with Ashtarte/Athtart, which makes her originally closer to Hera/Juno.

[Orphalesion]

Originally Posted by jallanite

A post which solves the main difference between Orphalesion and myself.

The term complete opposite, when used in describing characters in fiction, is normally use to compare normal mortals and is really a short form for diametric opposite in many ways. Since Orphalesion was describing what could be described as two different versions in subsequent texts of the same character, an immortal who might be ascribed many characteristics not attributable to morals at all, I took the phrase complete opposite more literally than Orphalesion intended.

Orphalesion was not, I believe, even thinking of comparing beings like Varda, Manwë, Ulmo, Vána, Tom Bombadil, or Gandalf with either Fui Nienna or Nienna. Yet such comparisons immediately sprang to my mind. The number of beings comparable in some sense to both Fui Nienna and Nienna is far greater in Tolkien’s legendarium than would be so in most novels, in which characters comparable to Fui Nienna or Nienna don’t exist at all.

So when Orphalesion posted, “Sorry, but no..... no two characters could be further apart from each other than Fui Nienna from the BOLT and Nienna from the Silmarillion,” I immediately thought of various figures in Tolkien’s legendarium who were more different from each other than Fui Nienna and Nienna.

Similarly when Orphalesion posted, “Fui Nienna and ‘our’ Nienna are complete opposites!”, I immediately thought of other beings who could also be described as complete opposites of Fui Nienna, if one wished to think in such terms. For example, Vána and Tom Bombadil.

Yes, perfectly worded. That was the crux of the discussion

My identification was based on Vána being the chief goddess of what one might call female sexuality among Tolkien’s Valar, not on theories of the origins of the comparable characters. The Sumerian goddess Inanna, for example, is often imagined, I think rightly, to have earlier been mainly a granary goddess. I did not include the Egyptian Hathor because, although identified with Aphrodite and Venus in classical times, she originally seems to have been identified with the Semitic Asherah/Athirat rather than with Ashtarte/Athtart, which makes her originally closer to Hera/Juno.

I don't know enough about Inanna to confirm or deny this, but Venus definitely is often thought to originally have been a goddess of fields and gardens.
Interesting that you would connect (at least primitive) Vana to feminine sexuality. I never saw that and actually always thought that a "Love Goddess" was oddly lacking among the primitive Vala.
Though apparently in an even earlier, now lost phase before the BOLT, (still alluded to in the Gnomish dictionary at the end of the book) Eirinty was the Goddess of "love, beauty and music" and had the role later given to Meril-i-Turinqui. Though Tolkien in that early state seemed fond of mixing the tropes of mythological love and spring goddesses creating Erinti, Vana and Nessa out of basically the same cloth(CT even points out that in the Gnomish dictionary they share some of their epitomes)
However linking Vana to female sexuality (while valid) is as much interpretation as linking Fui Nienna to the archetype of the crone. And in a later phase of the mythology we briefly have Vana the Everyoung, Nessa the Ever-Maid (now not married to Tulkas) and Leah, the Young (temporarily replacing Nessa as Tulkas' wife)
So many goddesses/Valier of youth and associated with flowers and springtime, but never do we get a Valier known simply as "the Beautiful" or, more explicit, "the Lover", probably because Tolkien would have never included a traditional spirit of female sexuality in his work. A Freyja/Inanna/Aprhodite type character would have been as out of place as Makar and Measse and would have disappeared just as quickly (and perhaps has, if Eirinty was supposed to fill that role)

[jallanite]

Originally Posted by Orphalesion

So many goddesses/Valier of youth are associated with flowers and springtime, but never do we get a Valier known simply as "the Beautiful" …

Except for Vána, significantly.

In the published Silmarillion, in the Index of Names, Christopher Tolkien notes under the entry Vanyar: “The name (singular Vanya) means ‘the fair’, referring to the golden hair of the Vanyar ….”

In the Book of Lost Tales, Part One, he states in the “Appendix: Names in the Lost Tales – Part 1” under the entry Vána (bolding by me):

   A derivative of the QL root vᴀɴᴀ, together with vanë ‘fair’, vanessë ‘beauty’, vanima ‘proper, right, fair’, úvanimo ‘monster’ (ú-=‘not’), etc. Here also are given Vanar and Vani=Valar, Vali, with the note: ‘cf. Gnomish Ban-’. See Valar.
   Vána’s name in Gnomish was Gwân or Gwani (changed later to Gwann or Gwannuin); gwant, gwandra ‘beautiful’, gwanthi ‘beauty’.

Both the Norse Vanir and the goddess Venus are by some believed to derive from PIE root wan/wen* ‘beautiful’. The Norse goddess Freyja is called Vanadís in the Skjáldskaparmál, meaning ‘dís of the Vanir’.

Nessa I consider to be derived by Tolkien from Artemis, Nessa being sister of the archer god, connected with deer, and as you point out, at one later stage in Morgoth’s Ring is distinguished from the wife of Tulkas and called “the ever-maid”. She remains quite distinct from Vána, save in being young and beautiful.

Erinti/Ilmarë, daughter to Manwë and Varda, I see as derived from both the Greek Hebe, daughter of Zeus by Hera, and her Latin counterpart, Juventas, the goddess of youth, daughter of Jupiter by Juno.

But it is part of Tolkien’s game, as you point out, that none of Tolkien’s Valar exactly correspond to any deity taken from a real mythology.

[Orphalesion]

Originally Posted by jallanite

Except for Vána, significantly.

In the published Silmarillion, in the Index of Names, Christopher Tolkien notes under the entry Vanyar: “The name (singular Vanya) means ‘the fair’, referring to the golden hair of the Vanyar ….”

In the Book of Lost Tales, Part One, he states in the “Appendix: Names in the Lost Tales – Part 1” under the entry Vána (bolding by me):

   A derivative of the QL root vᴀɴᴀ, together with vanë ‘fair’, vanessë ‘beauty’, vanima ‘proper, right, fair’, úvanimo ‘monster’ (ú-=‘not’), etc. Here also are given Vanar and Vani=Valar, Vali, with the note: ‘cf. Gnomish Ban-’. See Valar.
   Vána’s name in Gnomish was Gwân or Gwani (changed later to Gwann or Gwannuin); gwant, gwandra ‘beautiful’, gwanthi ‘beauty’.

Both the Norse Vanir and the goddess Venus are by some believed to derive from PIE root wan/wen* ‘beautiful’. The Norse goddess Freyja is called Vanadís in the Skjáldskaparmál, meaning ‘dís of the Vanir’.

I meant in the epithet, and going by that it is: Vana the Everyoung, not Vana the Beautiful. From the translation of the name, you are of course correct.

However I can never remember if the word used for the Vanyar had "blonde/pale coloured" as its primary meaning and beauty as its second or the other way around. I remember that Tolkien explained it was equivalent to the English word "fair" but that one of those words had beauty as its primary meaning and blonde/paleness as secondary meaning and the while the other had the primary and secondary meaning reversed.
But considering that Aragorm calls Arwen vanimelda I assume the Elvish one had beauty as its primary meaning (or at least had acquired it by the Third Age), since Arwen is very beautiful, but not blonde.
So much for that fanon theory (which I personally always disagreed with) that Celegorm had blonde hair only because he was "the Fair"

Of course Nessa's name seems to be Quenya for "the Young" so we have if we translate completely:

"The Fair", the Ever-Youg and "The Young", the Dancer.

Yeah Vanadis is my favorite name of Freyja, I always found it be a very beautiful name in its sound as well as its written form. I did not know that Vanir was thought to derive from an ancient word for beautiful, thanks

Nessa I consider to be derived by Tolkien from Artemis, Nessa being sister of the archer god, connected with deer, and as you point out, at one later stage in Morgoth’s Ring is distinguished from the wife of Tulkas and called “the ever-maid”. She remains quite distinct from Vána, save in being young and beautiful.

Good catch! Didn't see the Artemis connection in the ever-maid. She is very much the Helenised Artemis when her primeval aspects had been lost and she became this eternal, youthful maiden goddess who wandered the woods in her short tunic.

Erinti/Ilmarë, daughter to Manwë and Varda, I see as derived from both the Greek Hebe, daughter of Zeus by Hera, and her Latin counterpart, Juventas, the goddess of youth, daughter of Jupiter by Juno.

But it is part of Tolkien’s game, as you point out, that none of Tolkien’s Valar exactly correspond to any deity taken from a real mythology.

See I would link Vana to Hebe, Juventas and Flora and Eirinti with Aphrodite, but I of course see that Tolkien mixed and matched here and Eirinti was a non-entity anyway. Ilmare however is again very different, from her name she doesn't seem to be associated with love and music like Eirinti was.

To Ilmare I have a question that has bugged me for a while now. In the "Complete Guide to Middle Earth" (I know) David Day makes a reference to her "throwing spears of light from the night sky" is that based on anything in Tolkien's writing at all, or did Mr. Day just make things up? I mean the edition I have (from 2001) also claims the "Age of Starlight" (Awakening of the Elves - Death of the Two Trees) lasted ten millennia and that seems to be contradicted by the HoME....

This actually quite nicely parallels the Norse goddesses in the Edda who all seem vaguely, to different degrees to be associated with fertility "seiðr" (magic, precognition) to the point that there are still theories on how many goddesses really existed in the pagan Norse and Germanic believe systems and how many just were alternate names of the same deity.

[jallanite]

[quote=Orphalesion;695632]

Originally Posted by Orphalesion

However I can never remember if the word used for the Vanyar had "blonde/pale coloured" as its primary meaning and beauty as its second or the other way around. I remember that Tolkien explained it was equivalent to the English word "fair" but that one of those words had beauty as its primary meaning and blonde/paleness as secondary meaning and the while the other had the primary and secondary meaning reversed.

From Tolkien’s The War of the Jewels, page 383:

Vanyar thus comes from an adjectival derivative *wanjā from the stem *wᴀɴ. Its primary sense seems to have been very similar to English (modern) use of ‘fair’ with reference to hair and complexion; although its actual development was the reverse of the English: it meant ‘pale, light-coloured, not brown or dark’, and its implication of beauty was secondary. In English the meaning ‘beautiful’ is primary. From the stem was derived the name given in Quenya to the Valie Vána wife of Orome.

Of course Tolkien might have thought beauty to be the primary meaning of *wanjā when he wrote the Book of Lost Tales, or not.

So much for that fanon theory (which I personally always disagreed with) that Celegorm had blonde hair only because he was "the Fair".

The name is translated into Old English by Tolkien as Cynegrim Fægerfeax in The Shaping of Middle-earth (HoME 4). Fægerfeax in modern English is ‘Fairfax’, that is ‘Blond-hair’. Tolkien may have imagined Celegorm to have a rather dark blond hair, to be an ash blond, that is to possess hair-color which might count as fair among the dark-haired Noldor. Tolkien may rather have later changed his mind on Celegorm’s hair-color when he came to consider Noldorin genetics. On the other hand he may have thought that Celegorm merely had particularly beautiful hair. Perhaps Fægerfeax should be translated as ‘Gleaming hair’.

To Ilmare I have a question that has bugged me for a while now. In the "Complete Guide to Middle Earth" (I know) David Day makes a reference to her "throwing spears of light from the night sky" is that based on anything in Tolkien's writing at all, or did Mr. Day just make things up? I mean the edition I have (from 2001) also claims the "Age of Starlight" (Awakening of the Elves - Death of the Two Trees) lasted ten millennia and that seems to be contradicted by the HoME....

I think these are two of the inventions for which David Day is notorious. See the discussion of Ilmarë at http://valarguild.org/varda/Tolkien/...are/Ilmare.htm . See the comments on David Day by Steuard Jensen at http://tolkien.slimy.com/essays/DayBooks.html . See also the general discussion of David Day at http://www.lotrplaza.com/archives/in...0Age&TID=83477 .