What Is Possible within the Confines of Tolkien’s World?

Q: What Is Possible within the Confines of Tolkien’s World?

One of the most unusual science fiction books I’ve ever read was King David’s Spaceship by Jerry Pournelle. That link opens into a new browser tab, by the way. KDS is set in Pournelle’s militaristic science fiction CoDominium universe. It’s a fairly short novel that follows a mix of civilian and military adventurers on a mission from a world about to be colonized by Pournelle’s Second Empire of Man to another world that is too primitive to be colonized – all because of an electronic book that a drunken off-duty imperial spacer left in a bar.

When KDS was published in 1991, hacking was still mostly a thing done by bored computer science students and government spies. The story is pretty much all about hacking in the classic sense. That is, people were breaking into systems in order to take advantage of system vulnerabilities. And I’m not talking just about computer systems. The plot of the book is about hacking a futuristic, superior political system. Imagine people from the middle 20th century taking on a star-faring civilization by traveling to Middle-earth in search of the secrets of the Rings of Power. That pretty much sums up King David’s Spaceship.

A reader sent the following questions in February of 2021:

According to Tolkien’s later writings it would seem the Ithryn Luin were crucial to Sauron’s downfall. If you don’t mind I have two questions:

– How do you think they could have gone about this? Raising rebellion, founding cults, and/or helping to build nations and alliances?
– Bearing in mind the centrality of Anglo-Saxon mythology and Catholic theology, Tolkien references that the Far East is Asia, Japan and China, and Harad is Africa, the ‘hot countries’. Is there any chance that tribes aligned against Sauron could be inspired by such cultures?

Then, two questions on possible different beings:
– From your perspective, could there be tribes similar to Beorn, aligned against the Shadow, but associated with other beasts? Hobbit verse mentions the pards of the Wild Wood for example, inspired by medieval bestiaries.
– Were-worms of the Last Desert, perhaps mythical. Not withstanding the negative connotation that ‘were’ has, given orcs and trolls were made in mockery of elves and ents, could European-esque dragons not have been made in mockery of benevolent creatures akin to Asian dragons?

I ask these questions to get a sense of what is ‘possible’ within the confines of Tolkien’s world.

People have asked me about the Blue Wizards so many times, so many ways. And I can never provide a good answer because J.R.R. Tolkien himself didn’t have a good answer. He was inventing sub-plots and rewriting details about “the Legendarium” almost to the day he died.

Christopher Tolkien once said his father would have felt bound by anything that had already appeared in print. And that was the problem for J.R.R. Tolkien. So many ideas had already appeared in print that when he wanted to change things, he did so with a guilty conscience. Hence, we’re entreated to narrative explanations about Bilbo’s lies and so forth.

The Narrator is a major character in The Hobbit. That’s not my interpretation, by the way – many a literary critic and scholar has said as much. Fewer of them acknowledge that the Narrator is a minor character in The Lord of the Rings. But he’s there in the Shire chapters for sure. If you dig deep enough, you can feel him in Sam’s battle with Shelob.

The Narrator of the story is unseen, unnamed, and rarely credited with being in the story. But J.R.R. Tolkien occasionally injected his Narrator persona into the story. And we must acknowledge that fact when looking at the deeper question my blog reader asked: “What is possible within the confines of Tolkien’s world?”

Well, to borrow a term from Frank Herbert, if you dig too deep, look too closely, you’ll find wheels within wheels in Tolkien’s fiction. Those inner wheels make up much of what commentators call “depth” in Middle-earth. There are fictional stories even in The Hobbit, as the above reference to Bilbo’s were-worms confirms.

I don’t think Were-worms were supposed to be part of the fictional landscape of Middle-earth. They were an embellishment the Narrator put into Bilbo’s mouth for the sake of Tolkien’s child audience.

On the other hand, there are myths and legends scattered throughout the stories – sort of “what if tales” that are used to explain the traditions and lore of the various peoples. The reader isn’t expected to take these things as established fact – but we’re allowed to do so, if we wish to.

The mysterious origin of Orcs is a good example. Are they corrupted Elves or something else? Tolkien laid the seed of that idea in writings that Christopher Tolkien used to compose The Silmarillion. But in The Lord of the Rings Treebeard tells Merry and Pippin that the Dark Power (Morgoth) “made” Orcs in mockery of Elves and Trolls in mockery of Ents.

And that in-story explanation forced Tolkien to fictionalize Treebeard’s wisdom in Letter no. 153 (to Peter Hastings), where he writes:

…Treebeard does not say that the Dark Lord ‘created’ Trolls and Ores. He says he ‘made’ them in counterfeit of certain creatures pre-existing. There is, to me, a wide gulf between the two statements, so wide that Treebeard’s statement could (in my world) have possibly been true. It is not true actually of the Orcs – who are fundamentally a race of ‘rational incarnate’ creatures, though horribly corrupted, if no more so than many Men to be met today. Treebeard is a character in my story, not me; and though he has a great memory and some earthy wisdom, he is not one of the Wise, and there is quite a lot he does not know or understand. He does not know what ‘wizards’ are, or whence they came (though I do, even if exercising my subcreator’s right I have thought it best in this Tale to leave the question a ‘mystery’, not without pointers to the solution).

Others have taken the author to task for this semantic fiddle-fuddery, but my point is that even when expanding upon and rewriting what he had already written, Tolkien attempts to stay true to what he previously wrote.

He didn’t always do that, as the 1961 Hobbit rewrite proved. He also changed some “established facts” (as established in the 1st Edition of The Lord of the Rings) when he rewrote portions of the appendices in the 2nd Edition. Celeborn – clearly once a Silvan Elf – became a Sindarin Elf (who thought of himself as a Silvan Elf, I suppose). The same is true of Legolas.

In making these slight (and not so subtle) changes, Tolkien introduced fictions within his fiction. Legolas’ descent from Doriathrin Sindar isn’t established in the book’s narrative, but it’s understood as “given” by readers who are familiar with the background stories of Thranduil in Unfinished Tales and the (revised) LoTR appendices.

The story about Bandobras “Bullroarer” Took is another, much clearer example of how the Narrator embellishes the story by humorously explaining the absurd origin of the game of golf (which probably emerged in Scotland in the Middle Ages – thousands of years, supposedly, after Bandobras lived). The adult reader should accept the fact that Bullroarer killed a goblin leader by hitting him in the head with a club. Perhaps he really did take the goblin leader’s head off. But the game of golf didn’t originate with the Tooks – that was just a joke.

Subtler examples of fiction within fiction include Bilbo’s song about Eärendil. He made up the song and added his own embellishments, as a story-teller would do. Other songs, like Treebeard’s wistful Elvish song of the Ent and Ent-wife, provide a taste of the fiction within the fiction. The conversation never happened as Treebeard related it. He only shared a fanciful “elvish” song for the Hobbits, to illustrate for them how the legend of the Ents and Ent-wives grew.

Tolkien’s fiction is literally peppered with random comments, songs, bits of poetry, and characters rattling off lore that is imprecise or blatantly incorrect. It’s fictional fiction, used to represent the changefulness of information (which illustrates the changefulness of language).

Some characters lie. They just make up stuff on the spot. And the Narrator lies, too, as when Frodo, Sam, and Pippin meet Merry on the road in Eastfarthing. He does it to create a little suspense.

So, when people ask me to extrapolate about random things like the Blue Wizards, I’m at a loss. I don’t know what is “fact” and what is “fiction” within the fiction. Tolkien himself suggested the Ithryn Luin might have given rise to legends and myths. I don’t know how to navigate that treacherous road, because literally anything is possible within Tolkien’s fiction.

When he was unsatisfied with the legends he populated Middle-earth with, he suggested they might have been distortions by Men – passing down misinformation about things that happened thousands of years before. And yet the Red Book of Westmarch was supposed to be his source of information. How did the Narrator know there were distortions in the histories? How did he know some of the legends were not true?

Things from My Perspective

Could there be other tribes like the Beornings, whose chieftains were “skin-changers”?

Well, if you consider that Tolkien described Beorn as “no doubt a bit of a magician”, then I’d have to say, yes, there would be other tribes like the Beornings – quite possibly in the eastern lands, most likely inspired by the Ithryn Luin. Why? Because why not?

I can easily invoke the Uzi Rule here. Tolkien never said there weren’t other tribes like the Beornings – so there must have been, each cultivated carefully by some greater power for a purpose beyond the knowledge of the Hobbits and Gondorian scholars who compiled the sources of the Red Book. We can deduce that Radagast was probably Beorn’s mentor – Beorn not fully disclosing how he learned to change his skin. But Gandalf knew exactly what Beorn was, and we can generally trust Gandalf’s knowledge about people.

So if Radagast could go off the reservation and teach Men to use “magic”, then why couldn’t the Blue Wizards? And, after all, Tolkien confirmed that Gandalf was the only one of the Istari who remained completely faithful to the mission. So whether the Blue Wizards were sent to Middle-earth in the Second Age or Third Age doesn’t matter. We know they didn’t fully achieve the mission. We know they failed in some way, much like Radagast (or perhaps like Saruman).

As for the dragons, maybe they could have been “made” in mockery of some foreign (unknown to the Elves) creatures that might have inspired other legends. Those legends aren’t included in the Red Book. I can’t definitively say Tolkien would never have expressed such an idea.

That people still believe he got everything from the Anglo-Saxons remains a big stumbling block in the reader imagination. That simply isn’t true. Tolkien used ideas from the Middle East, eastern Europe, and the Americas. Middle-earth really is our world, “the inhabited lands of men [laying] then as it [now] does…round and inescapable.” (Letter No. 151).

Everything that is in the myths and legends of the real, historical Earth is fair game for inclusion in some corner of Tolkien’s Middle-earth. He implied as much every time he said Middle-earth was our world (and there are 4 such separate statements in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien). One need not project or extrapolate to understand that.

But such things were not processed through the lens of the Hobbits. And the Narrator did not introduce them to us, either. About the closest the reader gets to such things is hearing about the strange and foreign lands where different languages were spoken, and different cultures lived.

I think Tolkien laid the seeds of the answers to those questions in the conversation between Shagrat and Gorbag. They were almost rebellious when they discussed going off and setting up on their own. Despite all Sauron’s attempts to control the Orcs – many of whom mindlessly killed themselves when he died a final time – they were still capable of independent thought. Hence, it’s conceivable there were others throughout Sauron’s empire who weren’t yet wholly lost to Sauron’s will. That seems to be the case with the nameless embassies that presented themselves to Aragorn after the War of the Ring ended.

The Blue Wizards should have had someone to work with, somewhere in the distant East. But whatever they accomplished, it did not contribute directly to Sauron’s downfall. At least, not in any book J.R.R. Tolkien published. But if you’re looking for wiggle room, then I’d say the Second Age presents itself. Tolkien decided at one point the Ithryn Luin may have been active in the Second Age. So maybe they were able to undermine Sauron’s influence while he was held prisoner in Numenor. If I were to write fan fiction about them, that is where I would set my stories.

See Also …

Short Questions and Answers: Vol 7

More Questions with Short Answers

Were All Easterlings and Haradrim in Middle-earth Evil People?

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Have you read our other Tolkien and Middle-earth Questions and Answers articles?

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