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Ellen Brundige
Dr. Christine Downing
Approaches to the Study of Myth MS 620
Fall Quarter 2004
Freud on Tolkien: the Rape of Jewels
Recent hype surrounding the works of J.R.R. Tolkien has obscured
the fact that he was a philologist who spent a lifetime exploring
creatively what he studied professionally: mythology.
Central to
Tolkien’s myth cycle is the tragedy of Beren and Lúthien.
This tale,
recounted many times both in prose and epic verse, was a personal myth
for the author, to the extent that the gravestones of him and his wife
bear the epithets "Beren" and "Lúthien".
The image of their epitaphs,
circulated around the internet and reported as a legend among fans,
suggests that Tolkien did indeed manage to tap into the level of the
subconscious upon which mythology operates.
The tale, much abridged, runs as follows:
Long ago in the First Age of the world, Morgoth, a fallen god,
held well-nigh all Middle-earth under his dominion. Few escaped his
monstrous servants, but for a time, Barahir and his son Beren and
eleven kinsmen hid in the forest and harried their foes, until they
were betrayed and slain. Beren alone escaped and lived to wreck
vengeance, recovering his father’s hand, which had been severed as a
trophy. Beren took his father’s ring from it and became a vagabond,
forsaking from that time the eating of meat. Thereafter he had aid
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from forest creatures.
Fleeing enemies, he stumbled at last into the hidden forestkingdom of the Elves, whose magics kept evil at bay. In a forest glade
he saw dancing Lúthien, daughter of King Thingol, fairest maid that
ever lived. Beren fell instantly in love, hailing her Tinúviel,
nightingale. Lúthien fled him, but after he had chased her for a turn
of seasons, she came and set her hand in his. Then Lúthien brought
Beren before her father, where Beren boldly proclaimed that he would
“possess” her, Thingol’s dearest treasure. Enraged, the king set as
the bride-price a Silmaril from Morgoth’s crown, one of three ElfJewels which he had stolen.
by
Beren’s bold words were divinely inspired
Thingol’s goddess-wife Melian, who had originally seduced Thingol
in a doublet of the meeting of Beren and Lúthien.
So the hero’s quest began. Lúthien followed after escaping her
father, who had confined her within a cabin high in a tree.
She used
her mother’s enchantments to bewitch guards and foes. Lúthien
delivered Beren from imprisonment in the dungeons of one of Morgoth’s
minions, where captives were tormented by a werewolf devouring one of
them each night. Donning the skin of a Wolf, Beren sought Morgoth’s
stronghold with his beloved. There Lúthien cast sleep-enchantments on
the monstrous Wolf doorward and enthralled Morgoth with her dancing,
until the Dark Lord himself fell asleep. Then Beren, hiding beneath
Morgoth’s throne as a wolf, cut a Jewel from the crown. He could not
resist attempting to seize the other two Silmarils, but his knife
snapped, a chip struck Morgoth, and the lovers fled.
At the gates,
Beren was forced to sacrifice his hand and Jewel in the mouth of the
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Wolf guardian, Carcaroth (“Red Maw”). Thus Beren lost his bride-price.
Yet when they returned, the hearts of the Elves were softened by
Beren’s courage, after he displayed his stump and answered the king’s
demand with, “Even now a Silmaril is in my hand.”
There was no time to celebrate the couple’s union, for Carcaroth,
driven mad by the Silmaril’s holy fire, rampaged through the forest.
Beren was slain on the hunt. When Carcaroth was cut open, Beren’s
unblemished hand was found within still clutching the Jewel. Lúthien,
although immortal, died of grief for her lover and pleaded with the
gods for his life. Moved by her song, they granted her boon, on the
condition she, too, become mortal. After a brief time together again
in the forest,
they passed away. The Elves forever mourn the fairest,
who is lost— the only Elf who has died, for Elves who are slain return
to Utter West where the gods dwell, whereas the fate of mortals is a
mystery.
Turning to Freud, I believe that the incest impulse is hinted at
in Thingol’s powerful refusal to yield up his daughter. Possession of her
is at stake, and when she expresses a desire to prefer lover over
father, he imprisons her in a ladderless room at the top of a tree. I
am wary of seeing cigars in the wrong place, but womb and penis
imagery fit the charged circumstances. Freud’s Oedipus thesis partly
falls flat, for Melian is helper not rival to her daughter.
Yet
Beren’s mother is conspicuously absent, and the Melian steps in as his
surrogate mother, while her daughter, a Kore-archetype, displays her
mother’s ambivalently seductive power.
Lúthien mothers Beren, healing
his wounds, taking him in her arms, and magically curing of him of
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starvation.
When he hears her singing from his prison, he regains
hope, yet is still helpless until Lúthien draws him forth like a baby
from a crib.
Beren’s self-proclaimed possession of Lúthien echoes the infantile
“I want her” impulse. In earlier versions of the tale, he stakes his
claim on her before she reciprocates his love, and even in the latest
versions his initial pursuit of her through the forest is reminiscent
of a rape from classical mythology.
The tale resolves happily insofar
as this wish is fulfilled, for Beren does indeed get her,
and he lives
out his final years together with her in the wild, as indeed they are
for most of the saga.
Their relationship plays out in the forest, on
the earth, in Freud’s “realm of the mothers”.
As for patricide, Beren cannot become Beren until his father is
slain; before that he has the status of a youth. Their forest
brotherhood is oddly reminiscent of Freud’s myth of the primordial
band.
Only after Barahir is killed does Beren woo a mate. The chief
obstacle is a father-figure, Thingol, whose rivalry with Beren, and
the heated words between them, is intensely personal, mediated by
Lúthien and Melian. Significantly, the Jewel is fated to be the doom
of Thingol, and Melian obliquely warns him of this. Yet she refrains
from stopping him, when she has foreseen that both will die.
Which brings us to death wishes and death fears. This story
hinges on death as much as Eros, since it is the union of a mortal and
immortal. Immortals paradoxically represent both stasis (death, in
Freud’s scheme) and unending life. The “Silmarils” made by Elves are
the highest expression of their art and creativity, yet these Jewels’
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magic is to preserve life-force and Light, even after the source of
Light (two divine Trees in the land of the gods) is destroyed by
Morgoth.
Beren must grasp a jewel of immortal light to win an
immortal spouse, but in so doing, dies.
He also shows curious ambivalence during his quest. Several times
Beren attempts to leave Lúthien, ostensibly for her safety. But while
she is with him, he is not autonomous: she is the dominant
Eros, and he the passive partner following her guidance.
force, his
While he is
alone, he is the hero. He is torn between wanting to be cared for, and
wanting to be her protector and possessor.
He is torn between wanting
to abandon the quest to dally with her in the wood, and wanting to win
her by deeds. Their highly poetic meetings are fraught with sexual
imagery— Lúthien casts her arms and her hair around him, they dance,
she puts her hands in his— without, Tolkien insists, consummation. We
seem to be in the realm of postponed and suppressed sexual desire.
Finally, there is the symbol of the red, severed hand grasping at
the Jewel, which Tolkien draws as the emblem of Beren’s heraldry.
Amputation first appears when Beren recovers the hand of his father
and dons its ring, assuming his father’s place.
Circumstances later
require Beren to thrust his hand into the Red Maw’s mouth and sacrifice
it for his lover.
It is a primal image, one of yielding as well as
mastery, a source of uneasiness for the reader somewhat akin to
castration anxiety.
The devouring Wolf is a complicated symbol (of
the subconscious?) which would take another essay to fully explore,
but perhaps in the name of Red Maw there is a vestige of
the fear of
the sexual act, the fear of losing a part of oneself in the body of
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the other.
At the same time, Beren is both grasping and losing what
he grasps by this forceful gesture. His hand, unlike his father’s, is
not empty, but filled.
The preserving power of the Silmaril seems to
trap his hand at the moment of
taking, of becoming.
from this stasis is annihilation of both the Wolf
The only escape
and Beren.
It is disquieting to do violence to this beautiful myth by
putting it through the Freudian wringer.
Freud invites us to examine
conflicting impulses, and one of the strongest is reluctance to use
his lens on that which is loved. A Freudian approach, used by any
thinking critic, must always leave doubt whether one has uncovered the
light within a Jewel, or killed it...
Tolkien, J.R.R. “Of Beren and Lúthien.” The Silmarillion.
Christopher Tolkien. New York: Ballantine Books, 1977. 195-228.
Ed.
Tolkien, J.R.R. “The Tale of Tinúviel.” The Book of Lost Tales 2. Ed.
Christopher Tolkien. New York: Del Rey, 1984. 1-46.
Tolkien, J.R.R. “The Lay of Leithian: the Gest of Beren and Lúthien.”
Lays of Beleriand. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. New York: Del Rey, 1985.
183-430.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
1954.