The Silmarils

The name is a Quenya formation built on the element sil-, which denotes a white or silver shining, the light proper to stars and to the silver Tree; the same root stands behind a number of Elvish names of light and whiteness recorded in the Elvish name-elements appended to the published Silmarillion. More immediately the jewels are named for silima, the crystalline substance devised for their making, whose composition their maker never disclosed to anyone; the stones are, in effect, called after their own matter. The regular Quenya plural is Silmarilli, and it is this form that gives the title of the compilation in which their story is told; English usage has long preferred the anglicised Silmarils. Within the narrative they are referred to more often by epithet than by name — the Great Jewels, the Three Jewels, or simply the Jewels of Fëanor — and it is characteristic of the tradition that the maker's name and the objects' should be so nearly inseparable.

The maker was Fëanor, eldest son of Finwë and the most gifted of the Noldor in craft and in lore, and the making is placed at the height of his powers in Valinor during the Years of the Trees, after his earlier and lesser works. The account gives no year and no assistants: the labour is his alone, unrepeatable, and never attempted a second time. Into the three stones he gathered and locked the blended radiance of Telperion and Laurelin, so that the jewels burned with an inward fire of their own and shone even in darkness. The outer substance was said to be harder than any other made thing, unbreakable by any force within the world, yet transparent to that inner light. Varda hallowed them, so that no unclean hand or evil flesh might touch them without being scorched and withered; Mandos, seeing further, declared that the fates of Arda lay locked within them.

The making is presented as an act of preservation rather than mere ornament, and it is Yavanna who states the price of it: the light held in the stones was the light of the Trees themselves, and once that light had passed from the world it could be sought nowhere else. Tolkien's own gloss on his mythology treats the jewels as the pivot on which the earlier legends turn, and reads Fëanor's possessiveness toward his own work — the refusal to yield up what he had made, even to remake what was lost — as the fault that gives the whole cycle its shape. That reading also explains the weight the texts place on the craftsman's name: the stones are less an artefact in the story than a measure of the maker, and the epithets attached to them keep his name in view long after he has ceased to hold them.

The stones themselves are described with unusual restraint. No size is given, no shape, no setting and no account of how they were cut; what the text records is how they behaved in the presence of light. They shone of their own accord, so that darkness did not quench them, and any light that reached them, however weak, they gathered in and gave back changed, in shifting hues finer than what had entered. The fire within is spoken of as though it were something living rather than a property of the crystal, but the comparison is left where it stands and never developed. Fëanor kept them shut away in his treasury at Tirion and brought them out rarely, at high feasts, and the narrative treats that caution less as prudence than as the first sign of a grudging love for his own work — a possessiveness that grew until he half forgot that the light he guarded had never been his to begin with.

The single active property the texts record is the burning that followed Varda's hallowing, and the cases in which it operates are consistent enough to be read together. Morgoth's hands were blackened when he took the jewels, and the pain of that touch never afterwards left him; the wolf that swallowed one was consumed from within until it was cut out of him; yet Beren, a mortal man, bore the same stone out of Angband and came to no harm by it, and at the close of the age the two surviving sons of the maker found the jewels unbearable in their hands. What the fire answers to is therefore the condition and right of the bearer rather than any distinction of race or kind, though no text sets out the rule in so many words. Beyond shining and burning the jewels are credited with nothing: no strength, no long life, no counsel or foresight, no dominion over others. They are not instruments that can be wielded, and the harm attached to them in the story is entirely the harm done by those who want them.

Of all these attributes, only the light passes into the work Tolkien published in his lifetime. In the song sung at Rivendell the jewel is named and bound upon the mariner's brow, and it is as a light carried across the sky that it enters the later story; the gift Galadriel makes at the parting from Lórien is a phial holding a gleam of that same star, caught in the water of her fountain. Nothing is said in either place of the substance, the hallowing, or the burning. The properties set out above belong to the posthumously edited compilation, and a reader of the earlier book would know the Silmaril only as a source of light strong enough to be borrowed, divided, and carried in the hand.

The published compilation gives no years for any of this, and the sequence must be read as a chain of consequences rather than a dated chronicle. It begins in Valinor, where Yavanna asked for the stones so that the Trees might be rekindled from the light stored in them, and Fëanor refused; while he still weighed the answer, word came that his father had been slain and the treasury at Formenos broken open. Morgoth, with Ungoliant beside him and the Unlight about them both, had already taken the jewels and passed north out of Aman. What followed came less from the theft than from the response to it: Fëanor and his seven sons swore an oath, binding themselves before Ilúvatar to pursue with hatred anyone who withheld a Silmaril from them, and on that oath the Noldor left Valinor, shed the blood of their own kindred at Alqualondë, and came under the Doom pronounced upon them. Morgoth set the three stones in an iron crown and from that time did not leave Angband again in his own person.

For the greater part of the age the jewels stayed where Morgoth had put them, and the wars of Beleriand were fought without touching them. The one recovery came from outside the reckoning of armies. Thingol, unwilling to give his daughter to a mortal man, named a Silmaril as the bride-price for Lúthien, expecting the demand to end the matter; Beren took it up, was captured and freed, and came at last with Lúthien to the pits of Angband, where her singing laid Morgoth and all his court asleep. Beren cut one stone from the fallen crown with the Dwarf-knife Angrist, and when he tried for a second the blade snapped and the sleepers began to stir. At the gate Carcharoth, the wolf bred to guard it, bit through Beren's right hand and swallowed hand and jewel together; maddened by what he carried, he broke into Doriath, and in the hunt that followed he was killed and Beren mortally hurt, and Mablung took the stone from the wolf's body and set it in Beren's remaining hand.

The jewel so delivered fulfilled the bride-price and stayed in Doriath, where Thingol had it set into the Nauglamír, the Dwarf-made necklace brought out of Nargothrond. He quarrelled with the smiths of Nogrod who had done the work, each side claiming the ornament, and they killed him in his own halls; Melian left Middle-earth, and with her went the girdle that had kept Doriath enclosed. A Dwarf-host sacked Menegroth and was waylaid at the ford of Sarn Athrad by Beren and the Green-elves of Ossiriand, who took the necklace back — the last deed recorded of him. Lúthien wore it for the remainder of her second and mortal life, and after the two of them had died the necklace was carried to Menegroth and given to their son Dior, then king in Doriath. Word that a Silmaril was worn openly in Doriath reached the sons of Fëanor, who sent a demand, received no answer, and came against Menegroth in arms. Dior fell there, and his daughter Elwing was brought away with the jewel to the mouths of Sirion.

At Sirion the remnant of Doriath joined the survivors of Gondolin, and Elwing married Eärendil, who was building ships and seeking a way west. The oath drove the surviving sons of Fëanor a third time against their own kindred, and as the havens burned Elwing went into the sea with the stone rather than surrender it. Ulmo bore her up in the form of a great bird, and she came to Eärendil at sea with the jewel; carried on his prow it opened the way to Valinor that had been shut against every earlier voyage. He was heard as the spokesman of Elves and Men, and the pardon he asked was granted, but neither he nor Elwing was permitted to return to mortal lands. His ship was hallowed and set to sail the airs with the Silmaril bound upon his brow, and it is in that station, as a star and not as a jewel, that the stone entered the memory of later ages.

The other two were recovered at the end of the War of Wrath, when Morgoth was overthrown and his crown was beaten into a collar for his neck. Eönwë held the stones for the Valar, and Maedhros and Maglor, the last of the seven, sent to claim them and were told that the right had been forfeited by the deeds done in pursuit of the oath, and that they must return to Aman for judgement. They stole into the camp instead, killed the guards, and each took one; each found what he held intolerable to hold, as has been noted above. Maedhros cast himself with his stone into a fissure of fire in the earth, and Maglor threw his into the sea and afterwards wandered the shores singing. So the three ended apart and beyond recovery — one in the sky, one in the depths of the earth, one in the water — and nothing in the later record says that any of them was seen again.

Structurally the jewels do most of their work by being absent. For the greater part of the age they lie in a crown inside a fortress no army reaches, and the story goes on being about them regardless; what moves the characters is not the stones but the words sworn over them, which convert a theft into an obligation and an obligation into a claim enforceable against kinsmen and allies. The compilation is organised accordingly, as a chain of custody rather than around a single life. Episodes with no other connection to one another — the exile of a people, a mortal man's courtship, the ruin of a woodland realm, the last stand at the river-mouths — are bound into one narrative because a single object passes through them, and characters who never meet are made parties to the same quarrel.

Thematically the stones function as a test put to everyone who comes near them, and the answers sort consistently. Those who assert a right to the jewels are destroyed by the assertion: the maker who would not lend his work back to those who had given him the light, the king who set one as a price and then would not part with the ornament that held it, the brothers who came in arms to take what they called theirs and could not endure it when they had it. Those who make no claim fare otherwise; the stone is carried as errand, burden, or gift, and passes on. The texts nowhere state this as a rule, but the pattern is staged often enough, and the ending — the three set beyond any hand, in sky, earth, and sea — reads as the narrative's verdict on the making rather than on the makers alone.

In the book published in Tolkien's lifetime the jewels survive as story more than as object. What the later characters possess is the tale: Aragorn's account of Beren and Tinúviel on Weathertop supplies the hobbits with their first measure of the elder days, and on the stairs above Minas Morgul Sam, wondering whether the errand he is on is the kind that gets told, takes the theft from the iron crown as his standard of comparison and concludes that the great tales are one continuous thing which the present company has not left. The Silmaril thus enters the later work as precedent, a fixed point by which small people locate themselves in a long history. That is the use the narrative finally makes of it: an object that ruined everyone who owned it becomes serviceable only once it has stopped being anyone's property.

The essential shape of the story was present from the earliest phase of the mythology, though almost every name attached to it has since changed. In the Lost Tales the thief is Melko and his ally in the darkening of Valinor is Ungweliantë the Gloomweaver, and the jewels pass into the iron crown much as they later do. The bride-price is already demanded in the earliest telling of the Beren story, but by Tinwelint, the first form of Thingol, and it is demanded of an Elf: Beren in that version is one of the Noldoli, not a mortal man, and the whole weight the later texts place on the meeting of the two kindreds is absent. Nor is the cutting of the stone a matter of dwarf-craft — Beren frees it with a knife carried out of the kitchens of Tevildo, Prince of Cats, where he had been set to menial work, and the wolf that then takes hand and jewel together is Karkaras. The necklace into which the stone was afterwards set appears under the earlier name Nauglafring, and its tale involves a Gnome, Ufedhin, who has no counterpart in the published account.

The verse retelling begun in the later 1920s brought the episode close to its final form: Beren is there a man, the captor is the necromancer Thû rather than a lord of cats, and the knife that severs the jewel is the named dwarf-work Angrist, which breaks at the second attempt. A more substantial divergence survives in the prose compilations of the same period and the decade following, which close the history with a prophecy of the last battle: the three stones would be recovered from air, earth and sea, and their light released so that the Two Trees might be kindled again. On that view the making was reversible after all, and the refusal recorded in the narrative was postponed rather than final. The prophecy was not carried into the published compilation, which leaves the jewels where they fell.