Aulë

Aulë belongs to the Valar, the greatest of the Ainur who entered Arda at its beginning, and among the eight chief Powers he is counted with the Aratar. Like all his kindred he came into being as a thought of Ilúvatar before the Music, and his particular delight lay in the substances of which the world is made: stone, metal, and all the arts of shaping them. He is named the Smith, and his lordship extends over the fabric of the earth itself rather than over any single region of it, for the materials he loves are found everywhere in Arda. His works are said to be countless, and much of what the Children of Ilúvatar learned of craft and building descends from his teaching, though he takes no pride in mastery for its own sake and gives freely to any who ask. Yavanna, the giver of fruits, is his spouse, and their concerns stand deliberately near to one another: the substance of the world on his side, the growing things upon it on hers.

In the tongue of the Elves the name Aulë is what he is commonly called, and it belongs to the Valarin-derived nomenclature that the Eldar rendered into Quenya after their own fashion. The Dwarves, however, know him by another name entirely: they call him Mahal, which in their speech signifies the maker, and they hold that he wrought them and that they shall return to him. This double naming is itself a record of his history, for the two peoples who name him came to him by wholly different paths — the Noldor as pupils who sought him out, the Dwarves as a work of his own hands. Among the Noldor his instruction was received most eagerly, and Fëanor, the most skilled of that people in craft, learned much from him, though what Fëanor made afterwards was his own.

His nature is set out chiefly by contrast with Melkor, who was likewise drawn to the making of things and who had at first the same desires. The difference lies in what each wished his making to be: Aulë is content that his works should be other than himself and subject to Ilúvatar, and he does not grudge that they escape his governance, whereas Melkor wished to possess and to be called lord of what he shaped. For this reason Aulë remained faithful, and his skill, unlike Melkor's, did not turn to envy. Something of his temper also passed to those of the Maiar who served him, among them Curumo, whom the Elves later called Curunír, and Sauron, who was of Aulë's people before he was corrupted.

Aulë's earliest recorded labours belong to the ages before the Sun and Moon, when the Valar first sought to order Arda. He wrought the vessels of the Two Lamps, Illuin and Ormal, which Varda filled and Manwë hallowed, and they were set upon great pillars in the north and south of the earth so that the first light might fall upon Middle-earth. In that light the Valar dwelt upon the isle of Almaren, but Melkor cast down the Lamps, and their fall broke the symmetry of the lands and marred the springtime of Arda. Afterwards the Valar withdrew over the Sea to Aman, and there Aulë laboured again: the mountain-wall of the Pelóri, the halls of Valmar, and the mansions of the Valar were of his making, and Yavanna's Two Trees grew upon a green mound of the same new-founded land.

In the long years of the Sleep of Yavanna, while Middle-earth lay under Melkor's dominion and no Child of Ilúvatar had yet appeared, Aulë grew impatient in his desire for pupils to whom he might teach his crafts. In secret, in a hall beneath the mountains of Middle-earth, he fashioned the Seven Fathers of the Dwarves, giving them a hardness and endurance suited to the harsh world he foresaw. Ilúvatar rebuked him, for the beings he had made had no life save what he lent them and could not act apart from his own thought. Aulë did not defend himself but took up a hammer to destroy his work, and when the Dwarves shrank away from the blow Ilúvatar took pity, accepted them as his own, and gave them being. They were laid to sleep, however, until after the Elves should awake, so that the Firstborn might indeed be first.

The making of the Dwarves had a consequence Aulë had not weighed. When Yavanna learned of it she foresaw that the kelvar and the olvar she loved would be hewn and devoured by beings unable to hear them, and she brought her grievance to Manwë. Out of that debate came the Shepherds of the Trees, the Ents, granted as guardians of the growing things, and Aulë afterwards warned his children that the trees would not be defenceless. The episode is the clearest instance in the accounts of the two spouses' domains coming into open conflict, and it was resolved not by Aulë's craft but by the counsel of Manwë and the mind of Ilúvatar.

After the Elves awoke at Cuiviénen and the Valar made war upon Melkor for their sake, Aulë's part in the fighting is recorded chiefly by its effects: in that assault the shape of Middle-earth was broken and remade, and Melkor was bound with the chain Angainor, which Aulë had forged. He fashioned also the great chain a second time when Morgoth was taken at the end of the Elder Days. During the years of the Trees, when the Eldar dwelt in Aman, his teaching bore its fullest fruit among the Noldor, who surpassed all others in the working of gem and metal; from him they had the beginning of that lore, though the greatest of their works were their own. When Melkor sowed discord among them and the Noldor departed, Aulë's craft had already passed out of his keeping and into hands he could not govern — a thing he had always been willing to allow.

In the later ages Aulë appears less as an actor than as a source. He is named among the Valar who took counsel when the question of Middle-earth's peril was raised in the Third Age, and it was Curumo, of his people, whom he put forward for the errand of the Istari; Curumo went at Aulë's wish, and the choice proved ill in the end, for Saruman turned to the study of the devices of the Enemy and to a desire for mastery that his master had never held. Sauron likewise had been of Aulë's household in the beginning, and the arts he later turned to ruin — the forging of rings and the building of towers — were learned in that service. The Dwarves, meanwhile, kept their maker in memory across all the ages, holding that Mahal set them in the deep places and that they return to his halls, and the Fathers of their kindreds are counted from the seven he made.

No date in the reckoning of years is given for Aulë's own beginning or ending, for he entered Arda before the counting of time and remains bound to it while it endures. The chronologies that touch him are those of his works: the raising and fall of the Lamps in the days before the Trees, the making of the Dwarves in the Sleep of Yavanna, and the waking of Durin the Deathless in Middle-earth after the Elves. Of the Seven Fathers, Durin was the eldest, and the Longbeards of Khazad-dûm reckoned their line from him; his name and the endurance of his house are among the few threads of Aulë's secret labour that run into the histories of the later ages as they are told by the Dwarves themselves.

Within the ordering of the Valar, Aulë's office is defined by material rather than by dominion. Manwë holds the airs and Ulmo the waters, but Aulë's authority rests in the substances themselves — the rock beneath, the ores within it, and the shaping of both — so that his hand is present in the works of others without displacing them. This makes him the least territorial of the Aratar: he keeps no realm answerable to him alone, and his mansions in Aman are places of labour rather than seats of rule. His characteristic act is therefore fabrication on commission or of his own devising, and the accounts return again and again to the same pattern, in which some need is felt and Aulë supplies the vessel, the wall, or the bond that answers it. Where his power shows most plainly is in the endurance of what he makes, for the things he wrought held against forces that broke the shape of the world around them.

The limits of that power are stated with unusual directness in the texts, and they are limits of kind rather than of degree. Aulë could give his creatures form, hardness, and the likeness of speech, but he could not give them independent being; until Ilúvatar granted it, they moved only as his own thought moved them, and the sub-creator's reach ends precisely at the threshold of another will. Nor is his craft proof against the marring of Arda: the Lamps he set were thrown down, and the labour of remaking fell to him repeatedly rather than once. His skill is likewise morally neutral in its transmission — it can be learned by those who will bend it to domination, and he cannot recall it once given, since the freedom he grants his works and pupils is the same freedom that lets them pass beyond his governance.

A further constraint is jurisdictional. Aulë does not act as arbiter among the Valar; in the matters that concern him most nearly the decisions are referred upward, to Manwë in council or to Ilúvatar directly, and Aulë submits without contest. His response to rebuke is to offer his work for destruction rather than to argue its merit, and in the dispute over the fate of growing things he neither prevails nor resists the remedy imposed. What he retains is counsel and instruction: he warns, he teaches, he forges what is asked of him. The reticence is consistent with the temper attributed to him throughout, since a maker who does not wish to be called lord of his making has correspondingly little claim to rule elsewhere.

The marriage of Aulë and Yavanna is the most consequential of his bonds, and the texts present it less as companionship than as a pairing of two claims upon the same world. Their union is not one of shared labour but of adjacent and sometimes rival interests, and the accounts do not smooth over the friction: what one shapes, the other must live beside. Yavanna's warning to him after the making of his children is spoken as a wife's reproach rather than a formal complaint, and the coolness of that exchange is one of the few glimpses the writings give of any Vala's domestic temper. Their kinship of concern is nonetheless real, for both are makers who love the substance of Arda for its own sake, and both are distinguished from Manwë and Varda, whose thought is set upon the heights.

Toward the Children of Ilúvatar his relations are those of a teacher rather than a lord, and this holds across three peoples in different measure. The Noldor came to him as pupils and remained friends of his house, and among the Eldar it is they who are said to be dearest to him; the friendship was mutual and unforced, and he asked no allegiance for it. The Dwarves stand in a wholly different relation, since they owe him their form and hold him in a reverence no Elf paid him, yet even they he could not command, for the will that answers him was Ilúvatar's gift and not his own. Men appear in his story chiefly at a remove, through the crafts that passed to them by way of the Elves. In each case what he gives is knowledge, and knowledge once given is not recoverable.

His most instructive relationships are those that went wrong, and they went wrong in the same direction twice. Two of the greatest servants of his household, and the Vala to whom he was nearest in temper and gift, all came to desire the mastery of what they made; the writings set this out plainly, observing that the arts of the smith attract those who would possess. That Aulë himself never took that turn is the measure the accounts use for him, and it is drawn not from his loyalty in war but from his willingness to let his works go. He neither disowned Sauron and Curumo nor is recorded as having sought to reclaim them, and this reticence is of a piece with his conduct elsewhere: he grants, he does not hold. Among the Valar he keeps no faction and takes no part in their disputes save where his own hands are concerned, and his standing rests on what others ask of him.

In the earliest stratum of the legendarium, the Lost Tales written from about 1917, Aulë is already present and already the smith of the Valar, but much around him differs. His spouse there bears the name Palúrien, the earth-lady of growth and fruit, and the name Yavanna stands beside it as a title rather than as her ordinary designation; the early name-lists also record for Aulë the Qenya epithet Talka Marda, the smith of the world. His labours in that version are distributed differently. He forged Angaino, the chain by which Melko was bound and led captive to Valinor, an earlier form of the name later spelt Angainor; and when the Valar contrived the vessels that were to carry the last light of the Trees, it was Aulë and his people who wrought them, so that the making of the Sun and Moon as physical ships belongs to his hands in a way that later accounts do not preserve. The Lamps, by contrast, were not then his work at all: their pillars were raised by Melko himself out of ice, in a deceit that ended when the ice melted and the lights fell.

The element most closely associated with him in the published text — the secret making of the Dwarves, the rebuke, and the raised hammer — is a late arrival. In the Lost Tales the Nauglath are simply a people of Middle-earth, avaricious and hostile, with no origin ascribed to any Vala, and the Quenta tradition of the following decades passes over the matter without the narrative of Ilúvatar's reproof. The full episode, together with Yavanna's grievance and the granting of the Shepherds of the Trees, derives from a text composed in the later 1950s and set among the materials of the Later Quenta Silmarillion, from which the second chapter of the published Silmarillion was assembled; it is thus contemporary with the writing of The Lord of the Rings rather than with the older mythology it now introduces. From the same late period comes the philological gloss on his name, which is given a Valarin form that the Eldar adapted to their own tongue.