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Lonely Wanderers and the Tales That Almost Were - Page 5

© Michael Martinez

Even the Ents have a possible origin in Earendil's early voyages. In a cryptic outline which mentions Ungweliante (Ungoliant) there are previous references to "Dark regions", "Fire mountains", "Tree-men", and "Pygmies"; also mentioned are "Sarqindi or cannibal-ogres". Earendil is believed by some people to have slain Ungoliant, although that is not stated in The Silmarillion. A full telling of his adventures would have to carry him to the far southern reaches of Middle-earth where Earendil would have to encounter the great spider and slay her. But would he still encounter the Tree-men, pygmies, and cannibal-ogres? Bilbo's song in Rivendell, said in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil to be a more serious treatment of the legend of Earendil than the poem "Errantry", only mentions the "nether heats and burning waste" of the south in passing; neither Ungoliant nor the Tower of Pearl are named. Earendil's adventures are thus left unresolved, and the reader must infer that many deeds awaited him when he set sail in Vingelote. But some of those deeds, at least, may be inferred from the scraps and bits Tolkien played with in his early desire to produce a grand adventure of a mariner cruising the oceans of the world. We now return to the story of Imrazor and Mithrellas with the precedent of Earendil's fragmented history in hand. By examining other stories and the recorded events of their times, we can construct a framework which may provide the context for many of the stories. That is, we cannot deduce with certainty what happened, but we can look at where the tales would have conveniently touched upon each other. And perhaps in the timing of events there would have been sufficient motivation to explain Mithrellas' actions. The story of Imrazor and Mithrellas dates to the early 1950s, to the years when Tolkien was working on the appendices, but prior to the book's acceptance by Allen & Unwin. At this point in the tale's development, the Silvan (Wood) Elves are the eastern Elves. There are no Avari, and Celeborn is not a descendant of Elmo the younger brother of Elwe and Olwe, but is instead himself a Silvan Elf. In one note associated with the story of Imrazor, Celeborn is the brother of Amroth. This phase of Middle-earth's development is thus quite simple and unsophisticated when compared to the Middle-earth which began to emerge more than ten years later with the Second Edition of The Lord of the Rings and the Third Edition of The Hobbit. Nonetheless, Tolkien has established that The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion are "interdependent and indivisible".

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