Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical

This is my second week talking about Valar, the archangels or major gods of the Legendarium. In this post, I will cover the final three Aratar or most powerful Valar along with their spouses: Mandos, Vairë, Nienna, Oromë, and Vána. This quintet of Valar is less happy than the set from last week. While the previous five represented kings, queens, the sea, nature, and smithing, this new group personified death, fate, grief, hunting, and more nature. Each of these characteristics were found across Western pantheons in the years before the Christianization of Europe, and many occur in religions outside the West. The popularity of these somber deities showed how people from any walk of life must face its grim realities: everyone will eventually die.

From left to right, a woman wearing a pastel skirt and top, a man wearing robes of black and seated on a throne, a woman in a grey habit and standing behind the throne, a woman sitting on the ground weaving on a backstrap loom, and a man shooting an arrow with a simple recurve bow

Mandos

As the Vala who kept the Houses of the Dead, Mandos or Namo was Aratar #6. His “family” was larger than most Valar, since he had a younger sister Nienna and a younger brother Lorien. The brothers even had a special name: Fëanturi or “Spirit-Masters” (The Silmarillion, 28) Death deities are hugely popular and appear in most pantheons, including a listing in Thompson’s Motif Index as “god of death” (A487).

A man wearing black robes with a thick, black beard sits on a black throne.

The Canaanite god of the dead was Mot, the sworn enemy of cattle god and king Baal-Hadad. Every year, Mot killed Baal, then Baal’s sister Anath killed Mot and resurrected Baal, but Mot eventually self-resurrected. Someone should have checked if he had a magic ring tying him to the physical world. Elsewhere in Mesopotamia, the Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian Empires worshipped Ereshkigal or Mammitum as the Queen of the Underworld, and her fourth husband Nergal as its king.

Egypt famously divided its death god tasks between a handful of deities. The most powerful were Anubis, the Judge of the Dead, and Osiris, the King of the Underworld. While Osiris ruled over the dead, Anubis weighed souls to see if they were made heavy with sin. If the soul was lighter than the white feather of truth, then the soul would have a happy afterlife. In older versions of the myth from the Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom periods, Anubis worked alone. However, in newer versions of the myth, he was the son of siblings-but-not-spouses Osiris and Nephthys who cheated on their actual sibling-spouses, Isis and Seth, provoking Seth to kill Osiris. Anubis had the head of a jackal, a wild dog known for scavenging its food and associated with death. One epitaph for Anubis was “First of the Westerners”, since Ancient Egyptians believe the afterlife was in an unreachable land to the west where the sun set. This is remarkably similar to Aman in the Legendarium, the undying lands of Valar, Maiar, and Elves.

In the northern Mediterranean, Greco-Roman mythology had Hades or Pluto as ruler of the dead, while the Finnish national epic The Kalevala had Tuoni or Mana, ruler of their underworld Tuonela or Manala. While Hades mostly sat on his throne with an occasional kidnapping, Tuoni was more active as a creator of broadswords and father of three daughters. The hero sage Wainamoinen or Väinämöinen, last mentioned in “Perspectives on the Sea” used his song magic to visit Tuonela in a failed attempt to learn the secrets of the dead.

Germanic-Norse mythology took a different approach with three potential destinations for the afterlife. According to Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson, those dying on the battlefield went to Odin/Woten and his land of Valhalla or the hall of the slain. The unattributed poem “Grímnismál” in Poetic Edda has a slightly different story, as half of the battle dead went to Freyja and her land of Folkvangr or the field of the people. Anyone who did not die in battle went to Hel and her land of… Hel. This was indeed where modern English received its word for the Christian concept of the afterlife, appearing in the King James Bible as the replacement for the Hebrew Sheol, Greek Hades, and Aramaic Gehenna, all of which were technically different concepts.

Before scooting off across the globe for more death deities, I have to mention the Grim Reaper, among the most popular personifications of death in Western pop culture. The character appeared in 14^th century Europe during the Black Death, a pandemic where twenty to seventy-five percent of the global population died from Bubonic Plague. The Reaper combined medieval symbols of death including a skeleton, a priestly funerary robe, and a scythe for harvesting crops, literally cutting them from the life-giving earth. While modern versions of the Reaper are at times more lighthearted, the figure is still pretty popular around Halloween as a means of scaring children.

In Yoruba folk religion found in modern day Nigeria, along with other western and southern African people including Igbo and Basotho, the “migration” of a soul between the living world or ilé ayé and the spirit world, typically viewed as a forest or igbó, is facilitated by ikú, meaning “death”. Yoruba traditionally believe that some people are stuck in a cycle with ikú, fated to repeatedly die young and reincarnate as a baby to the same mother. These children are known as àbíkú and may receive special names to protect them from ikú, such as Kúmápayí meaning “Death, do not kill this one” or Dúrójayé meaning “Stay and enjoy life”. Another approach was to make ikú and evil spirits lose interest in the baby by giving it an insulting name such as Ajá, Ekòló, or Àpáta, meaning “dog”, “worm”, and “rock” respectively. While the “rustic” hobbits of Middle-earth with their names like Hamfast (homebody) and Samwise (halfwit) do not have strong resemblance to these cultures, this may have been the original impetus for their insult names.

For religions originating in Asia, Hinduism and Buddhism recognize Yama as the god of the dead. In the Vedas, a collection of poems written in archaic Sanskrit around 1500 to 1200 BC, Yama was the son of the personification of daylight, Vivasvân, and the first mortal man to die. In Chinese folk religion, this deity took on the name King Yan or Yanluo Wang. He ruled over an incredibly complicated bureaucratic system in charge of the afterlife, mirroring the Chinese government at the time. The top ten kings of the underworld or diya, literally meaning “earth prison”, are called Shiwang, and they hold court to judge the lives of the recently deceased, determine who can be reborn, and punish those not respecting the dead.

In Polynesia, Māori have a death goddess, Hine-nui-te-pō. Her name was originally Hine-tītama, and she fled to the underworld upon realizing that her older husband Tāne, mentioned last week as the god of forests, was also her father. The spouse-as-parent realization was a shockingly common occurrence for people in mythology. To describe an important aspect of her story, I must take a brief tangent. Bible readers are well aware of a passage in John 3:1 21 when Jesus taught a wise Pharisee named Nicodemus about the concept of being “born again”. Nicodemus understandably replied, “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!” The trickster hero Māui also took this concept literally and transformed into a lizard in an attempt to enter the womb of Hine-nui-te-pō and receive eternal life. Instead, Hine-nui-te-pō crushed him to death, and that was finally the end of Māui.

Since our final stop is the deities of Aztec and Maya religions, the situation does not get any calmer. Aztec had an array of death gods, but the rulers were husband-and-wife team Mictlantecuhtli and Mictecacihuatl, and their underworld was called Mictlán. A version of Mictlantecuhtli appeared in Maya culture as Yum Cimil, Kisin, Ah Puch, or by other names, and is called “God A” by archaeologists. The only people who avoided Mictlán were those with violent deaths. Like the Grim Reaper, these gods were portrayed as skeletons, and they became associated with Satan after Catholicism was introduced by Spanish colonists.

Vairë

Despite her importance as the creator of fate who “weaves all things that have ever been in Time into her storied webs” (Silmarillion, 28), Vairë was not an Aratar. She did fall into several motif categories, including “Goddess of weaving and spinning” (A451.3.1), “God of fate” (A463), “The Fates” (A463.1), “The Fates weave” (A463.1.1), and “Luck and fate personified” (N111). The best known Fates of the English language are from Greco-Roman mythology; in fact, this trio of goddess has been renamed “the Fates”, although they were originally called Moirai in Greek and Parcae in Latin. Klotho the spinner created a thread for each life, Lachesis the apportioner measured the thread, while Atropos the inflexible picked the cause of death and snipped the thread.

A woman with long dark hair sitting on the ground and weaving on a Maya backstrap loom

Similar to the Fates were the Norns, a collection of female beings with more power than the gods. They were referenced in “Fáfnismál” of Poetic Edda, where the young hero Sigurth, later called Siegfried in Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, killed the dragon Fafnir and learned the dragon’s wisdom as it died. Here, Norns were numerous and came from many racial backgrounds, including Elves and Dwarves. However, in “Völuspá” of Poetic Edda, three Norns appeared as Urd the past, Verdandi the present, and Skuld the future, nearly identical to the Fates.

Not to be forgotten are the trio of witches or “weird sisters” in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. They began the play in Act 1, Scene 1, appeared throughout to give prophecies, spoke their most Tolkien-relevant lines in Act 4, Scene 1 — “Who can impress the forest, bid the tree / Unfix his earth-bound root?” and “laugh to scorn / The power of man, for none of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth” — and then disappeared for good. Unlike the other goddess of fate trios, they seemed to predict fate rather than affect it.

Very few fate deities appear to exist outside of Western pantheons. In traditional Yoruba religion, people believe in ori, which literally means “head” and figuratively means “destiny”. Fate is worshiped like an orisha or god, although it does not seem to be personified to the extent found in Western pantheons. Additionally, ori is part of a person along with their ara or body and emi or spirit; in this framework, it is similar to the concept of a soul found in Abrahamic religions. Yoruba believe in total predestination, meaning that anything a person does is a “fulfillment of preordained history” set in place by a Supreme Being.

The Maya goddess Ixchel represented the moon, water, and childbirth along with her occupation of weaving, as weavers were typically women. I drew inspiration from Maya weaving technique and textile design in my illustration of Vairë. She weaves on a traditional Maya backstrap loom, with one end attached up high and the other connected directly to the weaver by a decorated fabric strap. Parallel rods kept the fabric tight while a shuttle assisted the weavers in guiding the thread or weft back and forth through the warp. Vairë’s colorful blouse or huipil uses colors and shapes found in Maya fabric while her skirt or corte is dark like the robes of her husband Mandos and sister-in-law Nienna.

Nienna

Aratar #7 and the sister of Mandos and Lorien, Nienna was not a happy Vala. She was “acquainted with grief, and mourns for every wound that Arda has suffered” (Silmarillion, 28). The phrase “acquainted with grief” is familiar to many readers of the Old Testament, as it appears in Isaiah 53:3 for several English language translations, in addition to being immortalized in the oratorio The Messiah by George Fredric Handel. Olórin often visited the realm of Nienna and from her “learned pity and patience” (Silmarillion, 31). As for her appearance, she wore a “grey hood” (Silmarillion, 79) to symbolize her constant mourning.

Deities of grief and mourning are somewhat rare, and the few that I have found are female. In Egypt, Nephthys was the sister of Osiris the king of the dead, Isis the queen of the gods, and Set the god of chaos, along with the wife of Set. The Greco-Roman mythology, the goddess of grief was Algea daughter of Eris, goddess of strife, and she only appeared in Theogony by Hesiod, , the Boeotian epic poet from the 8^th century BC. She may have been an original character. Another symbol of grief was Acheron, the river or lake of grief that sometimes was a substitute for the Styx, where the boatman Charon would row the dead across to reach the underworld.

Outside the West, Aztecs worshipped Mictecacihuatl or the “Lady of the Dead”, and the traditions surrounding her worship syncretized with Catholicism to become the Day of the Dead. This festival takes place on November 1 and 2, coinciding with the Catholic holidays of All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. Flowers, food, and lit candles are left on graves just as sacrifices were once made to Mictecacihuatl. Outside of this Mexican celebration, Catholics around the world recognize the patron saint of grief as St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, an American nun who founded charitable organizations to support widows and orphans along with advocating for education. Seton Hall University, a Catholic college in New Jersey, was named in her honor. I would be remiss not to mention the Beatitude “Blessed are those who mourn” (Matthew 5:4) from the Sermon on the Mount, which Tolkien likely knew well.

A bearded man with grey robes sits on a dark throne. A woman with long dark hair sits near his feet and weaves on a Maya backstrap loom. In the background is a woman wearing a grey habit and a smaller person holding up a scroll.

Oromë

Aratar #8 was Oromë, the easily angered Vala of hunting. Oromë was actually his name from Elves and Dúnedain, while his epithet was Aldaron in Quenya and Tauron in Sindarin, both meaning “Lord of Forests”. Eorlingas or Rohirrim called him Béma (“Appendix A, II The House of Eorl”; The Return of the King, 380), and they venerated him as a rider and horse breeder, while his original Valar name was Araw. (“Appendix A, I The Númenórean Kings, (ii) The Realms in Exile”; Return, 348). He hunted kine or ancient cattle near the Sea of Rhûn, which later became a sport for people of Gondor. As for family, Oromë had a younger sister, Nessa, who will appear next week.

A man wearing a green tunic and matching shoes shooting an arrow with a simple recurve bow in a pine forest.

Some of this ground was covered in “Oromë and the Wild Hunt: The Development of a Myth” by Tolkien scholar Michael Burgess in Mallorn, the academic journal of the Tolkien Society, all the way back in 1985. However, this article focused primarily on northern Europe, while the “God of hunting” motif (A452) appears in religion and folklore around the world. The Biblical Nimrod, “a mighty hunter before the Lord” (Genesis 10:8-12) is back once again, along with his association with Ninurta — the Mesopotamian god of agriculture, war, and hunting — and the Mesopotamian hero Gish or Gilgamesh.

Burgess mentioned the Germanic-Norse god Odin/Woden who led the Wild Hunt along with his position as king of the gods. He also stressed the connection between the Sindarin name Araw and the Welsh hunting god Arawn who ruled the land of Annwn and led the Wild Hunt before being deposed by Gwyn ap Nudd, king of the “fair folk”. However, he neglected to mention the Finnish hero Nyrikki the Hunter, son of Tapio the forest spirit or “Green Man” and Mielikki the nature goddess, all of whom appear in The Kalevala.

For more modern Western religions, Wicca has the Horned God similar to the Green Man who was likewise devised in the modern era. He is considered “the personification of the masculine side of Nature”, since most nature gods are female. While he does not hunt, his “horns” are typically depicted as deer antlers.

Outside of the West, Yoruba people traditionally worshipped the hunting orisha Oshosi. During the African Diaspora, enslaved Yoruba people forcibly relocated to Brazil maintained their worship of Oshosi, along with other orisha. They now identify Oshosi with St. George, the Dragon Slayer. Similar in occupation is Oshosi’s child Logunede, who is a male hunter for six months and a female fisher for six months.

Across the water, Aztecs recognized the cloud serpent Mixcoatl as their deity of hunting, along with the heavens. He was the father of Quetzalcoatl, referenced last week as the king of gods. He predated the Aztec Empire, which lasted between 1345 and 1521, as he was originally a mortal hunter deified by Toltec people between 900 and 1150. During festivals to Mixcoatl, hunters might dress as Mixcoatl, hunt game animals, and hunt humans in deer costumes on top of other human sacrifices.

Vána

Vána was designated as the younger sister of Yavanna and was likewise an agriculture or nature “goddess”, although she was not an Aratar. Her ability to make flowers grow were echoed in other magical female characters, notably Melian, Luthien, and Arwen. Vána’s love for plants was so great that in older versions of the legendarium, found in The Book of Lost Tales, the dying golden tree Laurelin produced one last golden fruit to reciprocate her love. The Maia Arien, also called Urwen, originally worked for Vána and was tasked with carrying the fruit across the sky as the Sun. Vána even cut her golden hair to provide materials to make the sails of the Sun-ship.

A women with curly blonde hair wearing a pink and green skirt with floral appliqué, sky blue belt, and purple blouse.

Due to Tolkien’s love of the environment, he created a disproportionately high number of nature deities. Fortunately, ancient people were likewise fascinated with the various aspects of the environment, leading to the motifs “Nature gods” (A405) and “God of agriculture” (A432) or the equally common “Goddess of agriculture” (A432.1). Some deities even represented a specific plant or crop. The Germanic-Norse goddess Sif had golden hair like Vána, which may have represented wheat or another grain. She was shorn by the trickster god Loki, and while she did not seem too put out by it, her husband Thor insisted that Loki make her a beautiful wig as a replacement.

A woman wearing a pastel outfit stands beside a man shooting an arrow with a simple recurve bow

In Greco-Roman mythology, the goddess Chloris or Flora fit the motif “Goddess (god) of flowers” (A434). She was an unlucky nymph turned immortal by Zephyrus, the west wind, who thought kidnapping was an appropriate way to get a wife. Her story was best recorded in the book Fasti meaning “calendar”, which was written by the Roman poet Ovid. He noted that Chloris liked to change pretty boys into flowers with names that we still use today, including Narcissus, Crocus, and Hyacinthus. A similarly talented collection of Greco-Roman goddesses were the Charites or Graties, translated to “Graces” in English. Our friend Hesiod decided in his Theogony that only three of them existed: shining Aglaea, joyful Euphrosyne, and blossoming Thalia. He even made Aglaea the wife of Hephaestus instead of Aphrodite, a “ship” that I support.

Aztecs had a rare flower god instead of a goddess. In fact, the name Xochipilli literally means “Prince of Flowers”; his other associations included dance, the arts, butterflies, love, and magic mushrooms. Surrounded by gods demanding human sacrifice and blood offerings, Xochipilli was a hippie. Similar in nature was the Maya god Yum Caax who represented nature, hunting, and cacao. However, this god had a vengeful streak, as he caused hunters to accidently shoot themselves if he thought they were not being respectful.

From North America, Catholicism has a pair of saints for gardeners and flower lovers. St. Kateri Tekakwitha, also known as Lily of the Mohawks, was a mid to late 17^th century woman from modern day New York and Quebec. She was actually half Mohawk on her father’s side and half Algonquin on her mother’s side, but the Jesuit missionaries were less concerned about the distinction. In fact, her association with nature seems more related to her Native American heritage than any action she took in life. Rosa de Lima was born Isabel Floresde Oliva to Spanish parents living in Peru during the late 16th and early 17^th centuries. St. Rosa had a much stronger connection to nature, as she loved working in the garden along with caring for people in need. She was the first person born in the Americas to be canonized as a saint in the Catholic Church. Both of these women died young due to their harsh lives: St. Kateri was 23 or 24, and St. Rosa was 31.

A pair of sisters with their arms around each other. Left sister wears a pastel outfit and hair blonde hair. Right sister wears an earth tone outfit and has green hair.

Conclusion

As much as I tried to keep the essay light, this post about Valar was certainly less cheery than the one last week as I covered the universality of death and grieving. Even the references to nature ended on a bitter note. Next week will be happier, as I cover deities of dreams, healing, sports, and even more nature, but unfortunately must also describe malevolent spirits. That will wrap up my three-part installment on Valar and be my final post before my winter holiday break.

Read past installments of Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical

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Abby Epplett, Historian