Manwë

Manwë is an Ainu, one of the deathless spirits brought forth from the thought of Ilúvatar before the making of the World, and among those who took part in the Great Music he stands as chief. When the Ainur who chose to enter Eä descended into it to labour at its shaping, he came among the first, and of that company he alone is said to hold Ilúvatar's purposes in the clearest understanding. His origin is bound to Melkor's, for the two arose as kindred in that same thought — a kinship of source rather than of body — and of the two Melkor received the larger portion of might and of the gifts distributed among their fellows. Governance of Arda nevertheless fell to Manwë, and he holds it as a deputy under Ilúvatar rather than as an owner, which is why the Eldar reckon him first among the Powers without reckoning him greatest in raw strength.

His proper element is air. Winds and the moving regions of the sky answer to him, from the high clear places down to the airs that stir over the sea, and swift-flying birds are counted among the creatures dear to him; the great eagles were made his messengers. When he assumes visible shape he appears robed in blue, with a blue fire in his glance, and he carries a sceptre of sapphire that the Noldor fashioned for him. The texts describe a temperament to match this office: he takes no thought for his own honour, is not jealous of the authority he holds, and orders what lies under him toward peace. Because nothing in him is stained, his judgement of malice is imperfect, since he cannot fully conceive of a mind unlike his own.

In Quenya his full name is given as Manwë Súlimo, the second element belonging to the vocabulary of wind and breath and rendered into English as Lord of the Breath of Arda. Beside this stand the titles by which he is more often named in narrative: the Elder King, King of Arda, and Lord of the Valar, the first of these carrying the sense of precedence in age and rank rather than of mere seniority. Both syllables of Manwë are pronounced, since a final ë in the Elvish languages is always sounded as a separate vowel and never left mute, a convention Tolkien sets out expressly for readers of the appendices.

Manwë's recorded acts begin before the shaping of the lands, in the long labour of the Valar within Eä. When Melkor's malice repeatedly undid the work of the others, it was Manwë who summoned the spirits of the air and the sea to his aid, and at his call came Ulmo and Aulë and their fellows to build again what had been overthrown. The decisive turn of that first age of the world came not through him but through Tulkas, who entered Eä last and drove Melkor out beyond the confines of Arda; yet the shape of the world that followed — the Spring of Arda, the raising of the Two Lamps by Aulë at Yavanna's asking — was ordered under Manwë's rule. At the wedding feast of Tulkas and Nessa the Valar were at their most careless, and Melkor returned and cast down the Lamps, so that the symmetry of the earth was broken.

After that ruin the Valar withdrew into Aman, and Manwë set his halls upon the summit of Taniquetil above the plain of Valinor, where his sight reached further than any other's over Middle-earth. From this seat he ordered the affairs of the Blessed Realm through the long ages of the Two Trees. When Oromë brought word of the awakening of the Elves by the waters of Cuiviénen, Manwë withdrew into thought and took counsel of Ilúvatar, and thereafter resolved that the Valar should give battle to Melkor for the sake of the Quendi; the war that followed broke the fortress of Utumno and brought Melkor bound to Valinor for three ages. The summoning of the Elves to Aman, a decision of debated wisdom in the later reckoning of the Eldar, was likewise his, and it was he who received the three ambassadors and set the pattern of the Great Journey.

Melkor's pardon after his three ages of confinement stands as the clearest instance of the flaw the loremasters ascribe to Manwë: judging by his own uncorrupted nature, he read repentance where there was only calculation, and released him. The consequences ran through the whole history of the Noldor — the lies sown in Tirion, the strife of Fëanor and Fingolfin, and at length the theft of the Silmarils and the slaying of Finwë at Formenos. Manwë had already answered the first outbreak by summoning Fëanor to judgement at the Ring of Doom and sentencing him to twelve years' exile from Tirion, and afterwards he pardoned him and called him to the festival at which the Trees were destroyed. When Yavanna asked for the Silmarils to rekindle them, it was Manwë who put the request and abided by Fëanor's refusal rather than compelling him.

Against the rebellion that followed he acted chiefly by word. His herald met the host of the Noldor upon the road north and delivered the Doom of Mandos, a warning and a curse which Manwë neither revoked nor enforced by arms, and thereafter the Valar shut Valinor to the exiles and left Beleriand to its own wars. He did, however, order the world that the exiles had abandoned: the Moon and the Sun were set upon their courses by his ordinance after the Trees had failed, and the Valar raised the Enchanted Isles in the shadowy seas to bar the westward roads. When at last Eärendil came to Aman bearing a Silmaril and pleading for both kindreds, the pardon and the host that sailed to the War of Wrath were granted under Manwë's judgement, and he decreed the fate of Eärendil and Elwing and the choice of their sons. Morgoth, cast out through the Door of Night, was set beyond the world rather than slain.

In the Second Age Manwë's hand appears in the raising of Númenor as a gift to the Edain and in the Ban that forbade them to sail west out of sight of their own shores. The Valar sent messengers to the Númenóreans in their disquiet over death, and later, when the fleets of Ar-Pharazôn broke the Ban and came armed into Aman, Manwë laid down his government and called upon Ilúvatar, who alone changed the fashion of the world, drowned Númenor and removed Aman from the circles of the earth. This is the one point in the recorded history at which the Elder King is said to have set aside the authority committed to him, and it marks the limit of what a deputy may do.

In the Third Age his intervention is indirect. The choosing and sending of the Istari to Middle-earth proceeded from a council of the Valar in which Manwë presided, and Olórin was named to that errand at his word. Within the narrative of the later ages he is scarcely named, and his presence is felt mainly through the eagles of the Misty Mountains and of the Encircling Mountains, whose arrivals at Gondolin, at the Battle of Five Armies, at Orthanc and above the Morannon carry the mark of that older service. The Elves of Rivendell still invoked Varda beside him in song, and Tolkien's account of the Third Age preserves the memory of the Elder King without bringing him again into the world's affairs.

Manwë's office is best described as a vicegerency: authority delegated within a created order, exercised over the Valar and the lands of Arda but never over the making of the world itself. The Valaquenta distinguishes carefully between rank and might, numbering him among the small company of the Aratar who are said to be of equal majesty and beyond comparison with the other Powers, while reserving to him alone the right of governance. In practice that governance is conciliar rather than absolute. Matters of weight are brought before the assembled Valar in the Ring of Doom, and even the pronouncements of Mandos, who alone knows the appointed fates, are uttered only when Manwë bids him speak.

His instruments are perception and service rather than force. Where his own faculty reaches furthest by sight, Varda's reaches furthest by hearing, and the texts present the two as complementary: seated together upon Taniquetil neither vision nor sound escapes them, which is why they are named together in invocation. Under him serve Maiar of considerable power, chief among them his herald Eönwë, whose skill in arms is said to be unequalled in all of Arda. It is characteristic that this strength appears in the narrative as an embassy and a summons before it ever appears as a battle line, and that Manwë's ordinary means of acting upon Middle-earth are messengers, winds, and counsel.

The limits are as clearly drawn as the powers. The Valar are bound within Eä until its ending and cannot step outside the world they entered; their strength, fully exerted, breaks the lands, and the Silmarillion attributes their long restraint against Melkor precisely to the fear of ruining the dwelling prepared for the Children of Ilúvatar. Neither can Manwë overrule a free will: he may judge, exile, pardon or forbid, but the decisive refusals in the history — Fëanor's, and Númenor's — stand unbroken by him. Even his perception fails where malice has thickened, as when the Unlight brought by Ungoliant covered Valinor and could not be pierced from the mountain. Beyond these bounds lies only appeal to Ilúvatar, which he made once.

The bond that defines Manwë most sharply is the one he cannot resolve. Melkor is named his brother in the thought of Ilúvatar, and the Valaquenta treats that kinship as a fact of origin with lasting consequence: what Manwë understands of Ilúvatar's purposes, Melkor once understood also, and the two remain intelligible to one another in a way no other pairing among the Powers can match. Yet the relation is asymmetrical. Manwë is described as unable to comprehend a malice that has no share in his own nature, and his dealings with his brother accordingly move between summons, judgement and pardon rather than enmity properly so called. He disclaims any lordship over evil, which places the two outside the ordinary pattern of rival kings; the antagonism belongs to Melkor alone, and Manwë's part in it is that of a keeper obliged to answer.

Against that solitary opposition stands the marriage that the texts treat as a single seat of authority. Varda is named as his spouse from the earliest ordering of the world, and the tradition records that Melkor feared and hated her above all others of the Valar, having desired her and been refused before the making of Arda. She is invoked with him in the songs of the Elves, and their perceptions are said to complete one another rather than duplicate one another. Among his own household the most conspicuous figure is Eönwë, his herald, whose errands carry the Elder King's voice into places his person does not go; and Olórin is remembered as one who frequented the halls of Manwë and Varda in Valinor before he was sent east, a detail that makes the later Grey Pilgrim in some measure Manwë's pupil.

Toward the Children of Ilúvatar his relation is protective and at a distance. The Eldar are said to be dearest to him of the Valar's charges, and it is to him that the Vanyar remain nearest, dwelling upon and about his mountain; the Noldor gave him a sceptre and afterwards defied him, and he neither pursued nor abandoned them. With his fellow Powers he governs by consultation, not command, and the record preserves disagreement — Ulmo, who kept his own counsel concerning Middle-earth, and Yavanna, whose pleas he answered with the request rather than the compulsion of Fëanor. Ilúvatar remains the one relation above him, addressed in silence upon Taniquetil and, at the last need of Númenor, appealed to outright.

Manwë belongs to the small group of names that came through from the earliest layer of the mythology almost unaltered. He is already Manwë Súlimo in The Book of Lost Tales, though there the Valar are still called Gods and are drawn in broader, more anthropomorphic strokes than in the later writing, and Christopher Tolkien's account of the early nomenclature associates the name with a Qenya root carrying the sense of blessedness or freedom from taint, and Súlimo with the vocabulary of wind. The Lost Tales already seat him upon Taniquetil beside Varda and already give him the birds of the upper air: his eagle-servant appears in that stratum as Sorontur, King of Eagles, the form from which the later Thorondor descends. The prose versions of the following two decades — the Sketch of the Mythology, the Quenta Noldorinwa and the successive Annals — kept his office and his element steady while the cosmology around him was rebuilt more than once, and the Ambarkanta of the same period supplied a layered scheme of the airs, Vista, Ilmen and Vaiya, giving a physical frame to the region assigned to him.

The largest change concerns his household. In the Lost Tales, and for long afterwards, the Valar had offspring, and Manwë and Varda were given a son, Fionwë Úrion, together with a daughter; the early material even attaches to Fionwë a love for Urwendi, the maiden who steers the Sun. Fionwë keeps his parentage through the Quenta and the Annals of Valinor, where he leads the host of the West in the Great Battle against Morgoth. After The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien withdrew the idea that the Valar begot children at all, and the figure was recast under the name Eönwë as a spirit of Manwë's following rather than his son, in which shape he entered the published Valaquenta. The narrative acts survive the revision unchanged — the same herald, the same summons, the same captaincy in the last war — while the family life that the first conception had allowed the Powers disappears from the legendarium.