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XPost: rec.arts.books.tolkien
From: Troels@ThisIsFake.invalid
In message
<44ece842-5a7b-4047-8c9b-e454c1f6e2ce@t24g2000yqj.googlegroups.com>
Jerry Friedman spoke these staves:
>
> On Feb 18, 10:58 am, Stan Brown
> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, 16 Feb 2012 22:32:08 -0800 (PST), Jerry Friedman wrote:
>>>
>>> "So it is that Lúthien Tinúviel alone of the Elf-kindred has
>>> died indeed and left the world, and they have lost her whom
>>> they most loved. But from her the lineage of the Elf-lords of
>>> old descended among Men. There live still those of whom Lúthien
>>> was the foremother, and it is said that her line shall never
>>> fail." --"A Knife in the Dark"
>>>
>>> That looks like it's talking about all descendants. Are "those
>>> of whom..." just Men, or Elves too?
>>
>> I would assume it means Men and Elves. If I'm counting right,
>> there are four Elves: Elrond and his three children. And we know
>> of one Man, Aragorn himself, though likely there are others.
I think that this is one of the situations where we should forget what
we know about DNA and other results of the sciences and accept that
Tolkien is occasionally applying Faërie-logic.
No matter how unlikely it may seem to us (and that is, frankly, pretty
darn unlikely), Aragorn was the only descendant of Elros alive at the
end of the Third Age. We need not boggle at a discarnate spirit
carrying a ring out of the destruction of Númenor, and I don't think we
need boggle at this either.
This, of course, doesn't mean that we cannot play with the idea -- some
speculation and hypothesising never hurt anyone ;-)
- For all we know, renouncing your lineage may carry some rather
drastic effects. It is clear that Aragorn's healing powers derive not
from his kingship, but from his descent from Lúthien, and thus the
"line of Lúthien", "race of Lúthien" or "children of Lúthien" may be
only those whose powers are somehow enhanced by this association. It
would not, I suppose, be wholly unbelievable that renouncing the
lineage would also lose you the enhanced powers that came with that
lineage.
- It might have been a part of Ilúvatar's plans -- the lines of all
these other descendants may have quickly petered out, just as the royal
line in Gondor did: 'Childless lords sat in aged halls musing on
heraldry.' E.g. we know that the last descendants of Castamir died when
Telumehtar took Umbar by storm in TA1810.
>>> "When Aragorn, descended in long line from Elros, wedded Arwen
>>> in the third union of Men and Elves, the lines of all the Three
>>> Kings of the High Elves (Eldar),
[...]
>>> were united and *alone preserved* in Middle-earth.
[...]
>>> Note in "The Shibboleth of Feanor". Emphasis added.
>>>
>>> It's too late at night for me to comment on those, but "alone
>>> preserved" seems highly significant.
>>
>> I'm not sure what you think of these, nor why you think they will
>> "unconvince" me. That "alone preserved" may be significant, but
>> I don't understand its significance. :-(
>
> It seems to me that it means Aragorn and Arwen's children were the
> only ones who preserved the "lines" of the three (or four) Elder
> Kings.
Yes, there is little doubt about that. It is also, in my opinion, the
implication of the text of /The Lord of the Rings/ that Aragorn is the
/only/ descendant of Elendil in Middle-earth (and indeed of Elros) by
the time of the War of the Ring.
I think that Stan's idea further up in the thread of 'pinch points' is
highly relevant here. We must never forget that Tolkien's world does
/not/ work only by the scientific principles of the Primary World: in
Tolkien's world (in his Secondary World as well as in the Primary World
as he saw it) there is more than science, and I think we may have to
accept that the "Line of Lúthien" was simply destined to go through
such a series of pinch points. One of these pinch points udoubtedly was
the Drowning of Númenor at which point the Elros branch of the Children
of Lúthien was pinched down to just Elendil, his two sons and his
grandchildren. Yes, it may seem unlikely in terms of modern science
that no other descendants of Elros survived, but I remain convinced
that it was nonetheless so: probably all the others (and Amandil's
family as well) would have been pampered by Sauron so that they were
all either with Ar-Pharazôn's Armada or on Númenor ready to receive
their promised immortality (this is all highly speculative -- merely an
example of how the 'finger of God' may have worked in this particular
case).
> And the first quotation suggests, though it doesn't say
> explicitly, that the "line" is the people whose "foremother"
> Lúthien was.
There was an article in a recent /Beyond Bree/ (December 2011) in which
the author, David Cofield, tries to use modern knowledge of
mitochondrian and Y-line DNA (which follow maternal and paternal lines
respectively), but while the article is both interesting and
entertaining (not least for teaching me something about DNA by using an
example I am reasonably familiar with), I think it ultimately fails
because it doesn't acknowledge that other forces than the laws of
nature are necessarily in place in Arda.
> In that case maybe Aragorn and Arwen are her only descendants
> in Middle-Earth in the Fourth Age, for all that Steve Morrison
> and I argued that it was unlikely.
I do think that such is the case. We may offer some speculations and
hypotheses that can, so to speak, make it easier to swallow this
proposition, but in the end such speculations can, in my view, only be
examples of how providence /might/ work within Arda.
>> The big question, though, is exactly the one we started with:
>> what is her "line"?
It presumably means /all/ descendants of Lúthien.
We know that being of this line means that you have some enhanced
powers against evil -- some healing powers, for instance. It is
/possible/ that you can renounce your line and your powers and thus be
removed from the line of Lúthien, but I am rather uncertain about this.
Another thing we do know is that Lúthien and her descendants became so
important in the early history of Arda that their fate was inextricably
entangled with the fates of the Eldar and the Edain in Middle-earth. It
is thus likely that 'providence' took a greater interest in this line
than in any other line of descent in Middle-earth, ensuring that this
line did not die out, but didn't spread to everybody either.
--
Troels Forchhammer
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