Is the Everlasting Darkness Even a Thing?
Crossposted from Tumblr, where I received an anon ask: Do you think after Maedhros dies his spirit goes to Mandos or does he face the eternal darkness for “breaking” his oath? I love the character and I often think about what his ultimate fate is because he had an end like no other elf that I can think of.
I'm trying to do better about posting fannish stuff here, so here is my answer!
I don’t think the Everlasting Darkness is a thing. I think Maedhros goes to Mandos (if he chooses) or remains a spirit in Middle-earth (if he chooses not to go).
(Personally I think that he-they all-choose to go to Mandos.)
His seven sons leaped straightway to his side and took the selfsame vow together, each with drawn sword. They swore an oath which none shall break, and none should take, by the name of the Allfather, calling the Everlasting Dark upon them, if they kept it not; and Manwe they named in witness, and Varda, and the Holy Mount, vowing to pursue with vengeance and hatred to the ends of the world Vala, Demon, Elf, or Man as yet unborn, or any creature great or small, good or evil, that time should bring forth unto the end of days, whoso should hold or take or keep a Silmaril from their possession.
This is the first mention of the Everlasting Darkness in the oath, in the Quenta began in the late 1930s and published in The Lost Road. The oath itself is old: It is first mentioned in the outline of the later chapters found in the Book of Lost Tales 1. So the concept of the Everlasting Darkness is old, the significance of which I’ll return to in a moment.
It’s not clear what Fëanor and his sons expect will happen should they fail in their oath. Clearly, they do think something will happen; Maglor brings it up in “Of the Voyage of Eärendil” in The Silmarillion. Again, this idea first appears in the Quenta, although it is Maedhros who brings it up there, so it is an old idea. However, this concept of an “Everlasting Darkness” is mentioned nowhere else in The Silmarillion or in any of the multiple texts dealing with eschatology. The closest equivalent is Melkor’s banishment to the Void, which is depicted more as a physical removal by the Valar into a place in the universe apart from Arda:
But Morgoth himself the Valar thrust through the
Door of Night beyond the Walls of the World, into the Timeless Void; and a
guard is set for ever on those walls, and Eärendil keeps watch upon the
ramparts of the sky. (”Of the Voyage of
Eärendil”)
This doesn’t seem to be what the Fëanorians are calling upon themselves and what they fear will happen. Rather, it seems to me that they fear an utter annihilation of their feär, contrary to their essential enduring natures as Elves. Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth (among other sources) makes abundantly clear that the feär of Elves are bound to Arda, and the feär of Mortals leave the Circles of the World. Countermanding this is a Big Deal: This is why the choice granted to Lúthien and her descendants is so extraordinary. It is beyond even the power of the Valar to grant and requires the special intervention of Eru, who is generally a hands-off kind of god.
Therefore, the power to annihilate their own feär cannot belong to the Fëanorians. It’s simply a power they do not-and cannot-have. It undermines the entire metaphysical basis of Arda if people are simply able to will their souls into anything but their appointed existences.
The question then becomes: Would Eru send their souls, in defiance of their appointed natures, to this Everlasting Darkness? I don’t think so for a couple of reasons. Firstly, as noted above, Eru is hands-off as deities go. Eru intervenes only a handful of times in the entire Silmarillion. Are we to believe that damning Fëanorian souls is of equivalent importance to Lúthien’s case or the reshaping of the world? I don’t think this case can be made convincingly.
There is also the fact that the Fëanorians were carrying out Eru’s plan because everything-good and bad-is part of Eru’s plan. There is Eru’s line from the Ainulindalë that I find brutally and darkly honest:
“And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be
played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in
my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the
devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.”
In “The Statute of Finwë and Míriel,” Manwë repeats this idea:
“[Hope] cometh not only from the yearning for the Will of Ilúvatar the Begetter (which by itself may lead those within Time to no more than regret), but also from trust in Eru the Lord everlasting, that he is good, and that his works shall all end in good.” (emphasis mine)
Essentially, everything that happens is part of The Plan and leads to good, i.e., the return to Arda Unmarred.
(And isn’t Eru just like any author in this regard? All the awful things we do to our characters because a story isn’t compelling without conflict, and it is only suffering through that conflict that makes the eventual resolution worthwhile. I always think it is abundantly clear that Eru is a god created by an author.)
We can see this in the bloody, horrible tale of the Fëanorians, which left a swath of death and destruction in its wake but also brought into position those characters needed for the various battles against evil throughout the ages. Remember, without the Fëanorians, you do not have Gondolin and therefore Eärendil; you do not have Galadriel and her aid to the Fellowship. You perhaps have an Elrond who, not fostered by Maglor and Maedhros, becomes a very different character, less suited for his work in the Last Alliance and his assistance to the Fellowship. Would the forces of good have won out without the intervention of these characters? You can see exactly what Eru promised at work here: evil deeds producing good ends with the same inevitability as a ball rolling down a hill.
Given this, I’m not sure that I can believe that Eru would find such a punishment fitting or, again, worth the effort of intervention. But, some will say, they swore an oath! Eru is just giving them what they asked for! Again, though, incarnate characters cannot hold that kind of power in this universe, nor can there be a force to compel them to the Everlasting Darkness greater than Eru. We return to the earlier point that this simply is not and cannot be within their power.
We also have evidence that Fëanor went to Mandos, and if he evaded this Everlasting Darkness, there is no reason his sons should not. Mandos himself predicted Fëanor’s imminent arrival in his halls: “To me shall Fëanor come soon” (Silmarillion, “Of the Sun and the Moon). Furthermore, again from The Lost Road, in the Second Prophecy of Mandos it is Fëanor who returns from Mandos to break the Silmarils and restores the Two Trees.
Finally, I mentioned earlier that the Everlasting Darkness appeared relatively early in the textual history of the Silmarillion: before Tolkien began work on The Lord of the Rings. I think this is important. For one, that it is an old idea means that Tolkien had ample opportunity to integrate the concept of an Everlasting Darkness into his extensive eschatological work that would follow. He did not. Also, because it was part of his older work, it carries a more distinctly Northern flavor than his later work. He was, at this point in his career, still interested in writing a mythology of England. The oath passage from the Quenta above refers to Eru as the Allfather-a nod to Odin and Woden of Norse and Anglo-Saxon mythology, respectively-and the ineluctability of the oath calls to mind those Germanic cultures as well. As he aged (and, I believe, as his work achieved a level of fame-and therefore audience-that he never expected), he tended away from these early Germanic ideas and seems, to me, to have become more conscious of the ideas in his work that aligned with Christian values. Playing with pagan ideas was all well and good when his audience were the Inklings; it was quite different when, intended or not, people would be taking moral instruction from his stories.
I have seen both fiction and meta over the years make the compelling case that the Everlasting Darkness is in fact psychological state. This I think is a compelling idea. Essentially-and there are many different twists on this idea-the Fëanorians’ failure brings the realization of what they have destroyed in order to gain exactly nothing. The pursuit of the Silmarils and vengeance-which were just causes in a Noldorin cultural context-became so singleminded as to wreak a level of injustice and harm to where they became de facto servants of the enemy they came to defeat. The Everlasting Darkness is having to live with that. This, I think, is a real thing; the Everlasting Darkness as an eschatological state I do not.
This post was originally posted on Dreamwidth and, using my Felagundish Elf magic, crossposted to LiveJournal. You can comment here or there!
https://dawn-felagund.dreamwidth.org/435475.html
I'm trying to do better about posting fannish stuff here, so here is my answer!
I don’t think the Everlasting Darkness is a thing. I think Maedhros goes to Mandos (if he chooses) or remains a spirit in Middle-earth (if he chooses not to go).
(Personally I think that he-they all-choose to go to Mandos.)
His seven sons leaped straightway to his side and took the selfsame vow together, each with drawn sword. They swore an oath which none shall break, and none should take, by the name of the Allfather, calling the Everlasting Dark upon them, if they kept it not; and Manwe they named in witness, and Varda, and the Holy Mount, vowing to pursue with vengeance and hatred to the ends of the world Vala, Demon, Elf, or Man as yet unborn, or any creature great or small, good or evil, that time should bring forth unto the end of days, whoso should hold or take or keep a Silmaril from their possession.
This is the first mention of the Everlasting Darkness in the oath, in the Quenta began in the late 1930s and published in The Lost Road. The oath itself is old: It is first mentioned in the outline of the later chapters found in the Book of Lost Tales 1. So the concept of the Everlasting Darkness is old, the significance of which I’ll return to in a moment.
It’s not clear what Fëanor and his sons expect will happen should they fail in their oath. Clearly, they do think something will happen; Maglor brings it up in “Of the Voyage of Eärendil” in The Silmarillion. Again, this idea first appears in the Quenta, although it is Maedhros who brings it up there, so it is an old idea. However, this concept of an “Everlasting Darkness” is mentioned nowhere else in The Silmarillion or in any of the multiple texts dealing with eschatology. The closest equivalent is Melkor’s banishment to the Void, which is depicted more as a physical removal by the Valar into a place in the universe apart from Arda:
But Morgoth himself the Valar thrust through the
Door of Night beyond the Walls of the World, into the Timeless Void; and a
guard is set for ever on those walls, and Eärendil keeps watch upon the
ramparts of the sky. (”Of the Voyage of
Eärendil”)
This doesn’t seem to be what the Fëanorians are calling upon themselves and what they fear will happen. Rather, it seems to me that they fear an utter annihilation of their feär, contrary to their essential enduring natures as Elves. Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth (among other sources) makes abundantly clear that the feär of Elves are bound to Arda, and the feär of Mortals leave the Circles of the World. Countermanding this is a Big Deal: This is why the choice granted to Lúthien and her descendants is so extraordinary. It is beyond even the power of the Valar to grant and requires the special intervention of Eru, who is generally a hands-off kind of god.
Therefore, the power to annihilate their own feär cannot belong to the Fëanorians. It’s simply a power they do not-and cannot-have. It undermines the entire metaphysical basis of Arda if people are simply able to will their souls into anything but their appointed existences.
The question then becomes: Would Eru send their souls, in defiance of their appointed natures, to this Everlasting Darkness? I don’t think so for a couple of reasons. Firstly, as noted above, Eru is hands-off as deities go. Eru intervenes only a handful of times in the entire Silmarillion. Are we to believe that damning Fëanorian souls is of equivalent importance to Lúthien’s case or the reshaping of the world? I don’t think this case can be made convincingly.
There is also the fact that the Fëanorians were carrying out Eru’s plan because everything-good and bad-is part of Eru’s plan. There is Eru’s line from the Ainulindalë that I find brutally and darkly honest:
“And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be
played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in
my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the
devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.”
In “The Statute of Finwë and Míriel,” Manwë repeats this idea:
“[Hope] cometh not only from the yearning for the Will of Ilúvatar the Begetter (which by itself may lead those within Time to no more than regret), but also from trust in Eru the Lord everlasting, that he is good, and that his works shall all end in good.” (emphasis mine)
Essentially, everything that happens is part of The Plan and leads to good, i.e., the return to Arda Unmarred.
(And isn’t Eru just like any author in this regard? All the awful things we do to our characters because a story isn’t compelling without conflict, and it is only suffering through that conflict that makes the eventual resolution worthwhile. I always think it is abundantly clear that Eru is a god created by an author.)
We can see this in the bloody, horrible tale of the Fëanorians, which left a swath of death and destruction in its wake but also brought into position those characters needed for the various battles against evil throughout the ages. Remember, without the Fëanorians, you do not have Gondolin and therefore Eärendil; you do not have Galadriel and her aid to the Fellowship. You perhaps have an Elrond who, not fostered by Maglor and Maedhros, becomes a very different character, less suited for his work in the Last Alliance and his assistance to the Fellowship. Would the forces of good have won out without the intervention of these characters? You can see exactly what Eru promised at work here: evil deeds producing good ends with the same inevitability as a ball rolling down a hill.
Given this, I’m not sure that I can believe that Eru would find such a punishment fitting or, again, worth the effort of intervention. But, some will say, they swore an oath! Eru is just giving them what they asked for! Again, though, incarnate characters cannot hold that kind of power in this universe, nor can there be a force to compel them to the Everlasting Darkness greater than Eru. We return to the earlier point that this simply is not and cannot be within their power.
We also have evidence that Fëanor went to Mandos, and if he evaded this Everlasting Darkness, there is no reason his sons should not. Mandos himself predicted Fëanor’s imminent arrival in his halls: “To me shall Fëanor come soon” (Silmarillion, “Of the Sun and the Moon). Furthermore, again from The Lost Road, in the Second Prophecy of Mandos it is Fëanor who returns from Mandos to break the Silmarils and restores the Two Trees.
Finally, I mentioned earlier that the Everlasting Darkness appeared relatively early in the textual history of the Silmarillion: before Tolkien began work on The Lord of the Rings. I think this is important. For one, that it is an old idea means that Tolkien had ample opportunity to integrate the concept of an Everlasting Darkness into his extensive eschatological work that would follow. He did not. Also, because it was part of his older work, it carries a more distinctly Northern flavor than his later work. He was, at this point in his career, still interested in writing a mythology of England. The oath passage from the Quenta above refers to Eru as the Allfather-a nod to Odin and Woden of Norse and Anglo-Saxon mythology, respectively-and the ineluctability of the oath calls to mind those Germanic cultures as well. As he aged (and, I believe, as his work achieved a level of fame-and therefore audience-that he never expected), he tended away from these early Germanic ideas and seems, to me, to have become more conscious of the ideas in his work that aligned with Christian values. Playing with pagan ideas was all well and good when his audience were the Inklings; it was quite different when, intended or not, people would be taking moral instruction from his stories.
I have seen both fiction and meta over the years make the compelling case that the Everlasting Darkness is in fact psychological state. This I think is a compelling idea. Essentially-and there are many different twists on this idea-the Fëanorians’ failure brings the realization of what they have destroyed in order to gain exactly nothing. The pursuit of the Silmarils and vengeance-which were just causes in a Noldorin cultural context-became so singleminded as to wreak a level of injustice and harm to where they became de facto servants of the enemy they came to defeat. The Everlasting Darkness is having to live with that. This, I think, is a real thing; the Everlasting Darkness as an eschatological state I do not.
This post was originally posted on Dreamwidth and, using my Felagundish Elf magic, crossposted to LiveJournal. You can comment here or there!
https://dawn-felagund.dreamwidth.org/435475.html