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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 Brundige 2 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 Brundige 3 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 Brundige 4 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’ Brundige 5 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 Brundige 6 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.