Was the Tale the “Aldudénië” Ever Told?

Q: Was the Tale the “Aldudénië” Ever Told?

ANSWER: To the best of my knowledge, Tolkien never composed a text intended to represent this sad tale. The poem or song was composed by Elemmírë, a Vanyarin elf, but it was so beautiful or sad or well-composed that it became known to all the Eldar. Tolkien provides no details on Elemmírë or how long it took to compose “Aldudénië” (translated as “[lament of] the Two Trees”) after Melkor and Ungoliant slew Telperion and Laurelin.

The reader who submitted this question added: “I assume the tale of the “Aldudénië” was certainly in the Red Book of Westmarch but we never [get] an index to see what stories were in that book.”

This leads me to a point that is often overlooked or misunderstood by many of Tolkien’s fans: The Lord of the Rings is NOT the Red Book of Westmarch. The Lord of the Rings is J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictionalized account of the historical details provided in the (fictional) Red Book of Westmarch. LoTR is Tolkien’s idea of what a prose epic story might look like, had someone written a great book filled with history and personal anecdotes. You could, I suppose, collect all the Old English texts such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Gildas and Bede’s (Celtic and Old English) books, and write a novel that sort of follows them and that would be a bit like what Tolkien was pretending to do.

The thing is, we never get to see what the full scope of the Red Book was supposed to be in terms of its contents. In my 2002 essay “Middle-earth Revised, Again”, I wrote:

It is much to suppose that J.R.R. Tolkien intended to create, at the end of his life, a companion volume to The Lord of the Rings. And yet, one easily gets the impression that is what he was working toward, with or without clear intention. The works Christopher associates with this project were “Cirion and Eorl”, “The Disaster of the Gladden Fields”, the essay on the Druedain (only part of which was published in Unfinished Tales), “and the philological essays excerpted in ‘The History of Galadriel and Celeborn'”.

To put it more plainly, I believe (based on evidence I cited in that essay) that J.R.R. Tolkien fully intended to encapsulate his “legendarium” in four books:

1. A completely revised, adultated edition of The Hobbit (the unfinished 1961 edition)
2. A final revision of The Lord of the Rings (never fully realized)
3. A finished Silmarillion (never completed)
4. A “companion volume” to The Lord of the Rings

From these four books, presumably, it would be possible to extrapolate what materials would have been included in the Red Book of Westmarch and Bilbo’s three volumes of “Translations from the Elvish”; and yet, I doubt he meant for Bilbo’s “translations” to include all the poems and linguistic essays that he went on to produce. Many (perhaps most, now) of those essays and poems have now been published for linguistic scholars in Vinyar Tengwar or Parma Eldalamberon. These works don’t include anything like “Aldudénië”. Maybe Tolkien would have tried to compose that and other supposed great works of the Eldar, but I’m not convinced that was his intention.

Imagine, if you will, there was at one time a book about the great Greek heroes and the Trojan War, and that (across a period of about 200 years) several generations of Epic Poets (culminating with Homer) composed poems based on that (now lost) book. And now let us further suppose that some modern scholar has found all the Epic poetry (much of which has been lost to posterity, although we still have “Iliad” and a couple of other pieces). This modern scholar (let’s call him John the Translator) writes a lengthy novel about the Greek heroes and the Trojan War, and his sources are those epic poems.

That is the effect J.R.R. Tolkien sought to achieve. In other words, the Red Book of Westmarch and the Translations from the Elvish (the only four books that Tolkien supposedly had to work from), were themselves derivative works based on older, lost writings. Those lost writings would probably include the great Elvish poems like “Aldudénië”. The Red Book and/or the Translations might only contain references to it.

If my supposition is correct, then that would mean Tolkien never intended to compose these great works of poetry and literature. They would have required too much time and thought. We have learned from The History of Middle-earth that Tolkien attempted to write great tales from supposed “lost literature” more than once, starting with The Book of Lost Tales but moving on to the great lays (“Lay of Leithian” and “Narn i Hin Hurin”). He never completed those two epic poems. Nor did he ever finish rewriting “The Fall of Gondolin”, which is the third of the three Great Tales of Middle-earth.

There is simply no room in Tolkien’s career for these other great poems and stories that are briefly mentioned in the stories. These are “set dressings” on the great stage of Middle-earthian literature, only intended to exist in the background, never revealing themselves as anything more than echoes from a dim and ancient past which the reader can never know.

In my essay “What Does an Elf Do In Aman?” (included in Parma Endorion: Essays on Middle-earth), I shared my ideas of what the Elves of Aman might accomplish. Tolkien doesn’t write much about their deeds or civilizations because in his stories most of the knowledge of the civilization(s) of Aman either perished in the ancient wars, drowned when Numenor was destroyed, or passed over Sea when the Elves left Middle-earth. There’ just no memory left of those ancient, ancient things.

But the Elves of Aman must have (in Tolkien’s imagination) have achieved truly great and remarkable things: great works of art, great cities, magnificent literature, and even scientific advances the like of which we can only imagine. He was but a single man who could not possibly fill in all the gaps, but his Elves were incredibly intelligent and in Aman they were tutored in all things by the angelic beings who had shaped the universe. I doubt Aman would have been a boring, parochial, unsophisticated backwater. But we can only speculate about what kind of cultures and civilizations would exist in Aman after 11,000 years.

To achieve his multi-generational literary effect of writing a story based on a translation of stories that were derived from older stories, Tolkien had to construct fictional references that could never be fully fleshed out. I’m afraid “Aldudénië” and Elemmírë (whose gender we don’t know) were just such background details. Although Tolkien often added random notes and wrote lengthy essays explaining many seemingly obscure details in Middle-earth, they usually provided only enough depth to satisfy some curiosity. And while we can all agree we’re immensely curious about ancient Aman and how the Noldor, Vanyar, and Teleri lived there, Tolkien only found time to write “The Shibboleth of Fëanor”.

One might not expect to find such a story buried in Tolkien’s notes, from having read only The Silmarillion. But the “Shibboleth” explores the complicated relationships between the Noldorin princes, and substantiates their motivations for distrusting and disliking each other. It justifies the primary narrative concerning the division between the sons of Finwë. A tale like “Aldudénië”, unfortunately, adds nothing to the primary historical narrative. It is part of a different path that Tolkien did not follow. He merely glimpsed something there and paid no further heed to it.

And that is why I don’t think there would have been a place for “Aldudénië” in the Red Book of Westmarch. But we are all free to imagine what seems most logical to us. And, who knows? Maybe one day someone will stumble across a fragment of a poem written in Vanyarin. That would be interesting, but I’m not holding out much hope.

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