Q: Are There Any Unexplained Mysteries in Middle-earth?
ANSWER: Assuming the asker is not referring to things not mentioned at all (such as the names of Vidugavia’s ancestors or Bard’s parents), I interpret the question to mean, “Of the things named in books like The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, are there any such that Tolkien did NOT write down some note or essay that attempted to explain it in some detail?”
In Letter No. 174 J.R.R. Tolkien wrote:
I do not think that anything is referred to in The L. of the R. which does not actually exist in
legends written before it was begun, or at least belonging to an earlier period — except only the ‘cats of Queen Berúthiel’. But I am afraid that all the matter of the First and Second Ages is very ‘high-mythical’ or Elvish and heroic, and there is no ‘hobbitry’ at all: an ingredient that seems to have made the present mixture more generally palatable.
Christopher Tolkien cited a similar passage from Letter No. 180 in Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth when he pointed out that his father did eventually write something about the cats of Queen Berúthiel. In that citation JRRT also mentioned the 2 (then unnamed) wizards, whom we eventually learned were given two (alternate/incompatible) histories.
So the casual reader is certainly justified in wondering if Tolkien left anything undeveloped, except for a mere statement or reference somewhere in a story. To such a question I can only say, “I am not sure of anything.” For example, there are some place-names in Gondor about which Tolkien wrote in a secondary essay that they appeared to be of pre-Numenorean (non-Eldarin, non-Edainic) origin. Does that suffice for an unexplained mystery?
We could point to the mysterious King Bladorthin mentioned in The Hobbit but some people have worked hard to find an explanation for him (and his named was recycled, being originally the name of the wizard-character who evolved into Gandalf the Grey). Is Bladorthin’s “mystery” therefore resolved or not? I think Qui-Gon Jinn might say it is “from a certain point of view”.
It’s an interesting question but one that leaves me wondering, “Is that all there is? Is there nothing more?”
I think that, as a story-teller, it was Tolkien’s responsibility to NOT leave inexplicable things lying around, as it were. That is, even if the readers knowledge of something must remain incomplete, the reader must have some context for the not-fully-explained thing. Hence, we know that Vidugavia’s ancestors were Edainic chieftains, perhaps even distantly related to Marach and Beor (but we don’t have to know if they were). We know that Girion of Dale was the ancestor of a line of proud kings starting with Bard, but we don’t know if Girion was the first or the last of his dynasty — or if he shared any kinship with Vidugavia. Nonetheless, we know that he was a Northman like Vidugavia — or at least bore a Northman’s name, and therefpre we reasonably assume that he was a Northman even though Tolkien doesn’t really say, “Girion of Dale was a Northman just like Vidugavia”.
One could ask whom the ancestors of the evil men of Rhudaur and Angmar might have been, but we already know that there were many men who lived in and passed through Eriador during the First Age and that many Easterlings who had served Morgoth fled back eastwards after Morgoth was overthrown. That does not mean that those fleeing Easterlings were the ancestors of the hill-folk and Angmarians, but we have enough information to infer that they could have been — but also to know that the ancestors of all Men came from the east. (For that matter, they could have been descended from Beorians and/or Marachians — after all, most Numenoreans fell into evil by the end of the Third Age.)
So while these little mysteries exist, there are no texts which speak of the ancestors of these peoples. They simply enter into various tales without a history and that history is not significant to the tales (whereas pre-Numenorean place-names like Erech are significant to the geography of the main narrative of The Lord of the Rings). In other words, the mere existence of a thing in the world that Tolkien invented for his fiction implies other things must have existed, but since Tolkien did not refer to those other things he felt no need (as story-teller) to explain them. He stopped at the edge of the map, so to speak, and went no further.
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