Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical | Races: Valar, Part 3

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Black, white, and dark blue striped header image with the text Lord of the Rings: The Animated Musical, Races: Valar, Part 3

This week is my third and final installment about Valar, the archangels or major gods of Tolkien’s Legendarium, along with my last blog post before my winter break. In the first post of this mini-series, I covered five of the most powerful Valar, also known as Aratar: Manwë, Varda, Ulmo, Yavanna, and Aulë. In the second post, I reviewed the three final Aratar and their spouses: Mandos, Vairë, Nienna, Oromë, and Vána. This week has no Aratar, but that does not make these Valar any less fun. This quintet represents dreams, health, wrestling, dancing, and chaos. Just as during the last two installments, each of these characteristics appeared in pagan pantheons of the Western world along with religions across the globe and even modern pop culture.

On the left stand a sickly pale man, a woman wearing a pink dress, and dancing woman with a green dress as a man in a red tunic crouches in front. To the right, a man smudged with dirt stands behind smoke and against a black background.

Lórien

Also known as Irmo, Lórien was the younger brother of Mandos and Nienna and the “master of visions and dreams” (The Silmarillion, 28) His land was like a spa for the Valar and their friends. The dreamlike country in Middle-earth ruled by the elf-lady Galadriel called Lórien or Lothlorien must have been named for this Vala. For an interesting linguistic note, Sam Gamgee occasionally used the minced oath “Lor”, while Merry Brandybuck exclaimed “Lawks!” upon realizing his naughty younger cousin Pippin Took had flooded a bathroom. Both of these terms were “translated” into Cockney English, which would be understood as abbreviations of “Lord”, referring to the Christian God, but in Westron might have been a replacement for the similarly sounding Lórien. The words seemed to have been divorced from their original meaning.

A sickly pale man wears purple pajamas and matching bathrobe with flowers around the hem of the pants. He looks up into the starry sky. In the background on his right is a fountain.

While receiving information in a dream is a common motif found in mythologies around the world with over a hundred references in Thompson’s Motif Index, dream deities are comparatively rarer, although “dream demons” receive their own motif (F471). In Ancient Mesopotamia, only the goddess Mamu or Mamud controlled dreams, while Germanic-Norse mythology had no dream gods, only Nótt the personification of night, who was Thor’s grandfather on his mother’s side.

In contrast, Greco-Roman mythology had multiple gods for sleep and dreaming. According to Theogony by Hesiod, Nyx was the goddess of night born from Chaos. She had many children, including Thanatos the personification of death and Hypnos the personification of sleep, called Somnus in Metamorphoses by Ovid, a Roman poet from the late 1st century BC and early 1st century AD. Book 11 of Metamorphoses marked the first mention of Morpheus the son of Somnus and the god of dream. In more recent times, variations of the character have appeared in movie-and-videogame franchise The Matrix led by the Wachowskis, and in the comic book series The Sandman written by Neil Gaiman; all three cited Tolkien’s work as influential on their own style.

Outside the West, Ratri is the personification of night in Vedic Hinduism, while her sister Usas is the dawn. In Mesoamerica, both Maya and Aztecs worshiped Bolon tik u, literally meaning “nine of them”, and also called the Lords of the Underworld or Lords of the Night. As an aside, the best source I could find was a French-language text from the early 20th century on pre-Columbian America. Here, the names of the gods were reported as Yohualtecuhtin for “Mexicains”, meaning Aztecs or Mexica, and translated to French as « Seigneurs de la nuit ».

Estë

Preferring to wear grey and work at night, Estë was the Valar of healing and the wife of Lórien. Valinor residents could drink from her healing fountains (Silmarillion, 28), which fit with a long list of motifs including “Cleansing fountain in heaven” (A661.0.4), “Magic fountain” (D925), “Magic healing fountain” (D1500.1.1), “Magic healing water” (D1500.1.18), “Magic fountain in otherworld” (F162.8), and “Extraordinary fountain” (F716). Additionally, Estë matched several tropes as a “God of healing” (A454) or “Goddess of healing (A454.1) and “Origin of medicine (healing)” (A1438).

A woman wearing a pink dress creates a curving stream of magic. She stands in a field covered in white athelas flowers. A flower is in the background to the left against a starry sky.

Healing gods were fairly popular across the world and took on a range of forms. The lion-headed Egyptian goddess Sekhmet represented healing along with war, striking a balance between these opposites. Greco-Roman mythology had many gods of health, healing and medicine, but my favorite was Asclepius. He was mortal on his mother’s side, but his father was another healing god, Apollo, so when Asclepius was killed by a thunderbolt via Zeus for daring to raise the dead, his spirit became a god. Asclepius was associated with the goddess of health, Hygeia, who was either his wife or daughter depending on the version of the story. While she is called Valetudo and Salus in Latin, she is best remembered in English for the word “hygiene”, which came from French in the 1670s.

To the East, Daoism or Chinese traditional religion had many gods of health, some of them based on real-life historical figures. Hua Tua was a doctor from the Eastern Han dynasty during the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries who was instrumental in the creation of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). He performed advanced surgeries and discovered how to combine wine and cannabis or hemp to create anesthesia. In Hinduism, the Ashvins or twin gods of medicine appeared in the Rig-veda with the ability not just to heal people but to bring them back to life, earning them the epithet dasra bhisajau or “miracle-working physicians”. Across the water, Aztecs had Ixtilton or “Little Dark Brother” as the god of healing who used traditional medicines and magic. Unlike most of the angry blood gods, Ixtlilton gave peaceful sleep to children.

Ending with Christianity, while Jesus is an obvious choice as a healer, as seen in miracles throughout the Gospels, a motif that I have not yet mentioned was “Angel of healing (Raphael)” (A454.0.1), which cites the Catholic archangel Raphael mentioned in the books of Tobit and Enoch. These apocryphal works were not included in the modern Protestant Bible but would have been known and studied by Tolkien. Raphael was a major character in the story of Tobit, as it was his job to heal Tobit from blindness, guarantee that Tobit’s son Tobias could marry his bride-to-be Sarah, and prevent the demon Asmodeus from killing Tobias as he did with Sarah’s last seven potential husbands.

A sickly pale man wearing pajamas is on the left and a woman wearing a pink dress is on the right. They stand in a field of white athelas flowers and in front of a starry night sky. In the background between them is a fountain.

Tulkas

As a break from the sad Valar, Tulkas was a cheery fellow who was always laughing and loved to run. His description was similar to the Norse-Germanic god Thor, as “His hair and beard are golden, and his flesh ruddy” (Silmarillion, 29). The word “ruddy” is antiquated and came from Old English rudig meaning “rosy, healthily red”. It appeared in the King James Bible to describe young David son of Jesse who became the second king of Israel, first when the prophet Samuel anointed him during 1 Samuel 16:12, “Now he was ruddy, and withal of a beautiful countenance, and goodly to look to” and later when he slew the giant Goliath in 1 Samuel 17:42, “And when the Philistine looked about, and saw David, he disdained him: for he was but a youth, and ruddy, and of a fair countenance.”

A muscular blond man wearing a red tunic crouches in an outdoor wrestling ring.

Besides being happy and pretty, Tulkas received the epithets of “the Strong” (Silmarillion, 35) and “champion of the Valar” (Silmarillion, 51) for his deed of wrestling Melkor into the chain Angainor created by Aulë, and then casting Melkor into a pit. Even after Melkor died, his spirit was still held by the magic chain. This was a variation of the motifs “Fettering of underground monster” (A107.1), especially a “Fettered monster in human form” (A1072.1) who will “escape at [the] end of [the] world” (A1070), and “Giants wrestle with each other” (F531.6.8.3.3). While Melkor had more magical ability than Tulkas, he was no match in hand-to-hand combat.

Wrestling was a favorite past time around the Ancient Mediterranean. In the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, the titular hero wrestled the wild man Enkidu and found they were an equal match, prompting them to become best friends. A tale of wrestling in Greco-Roman mythology was less pleasant. The hero Herakles or Hercules wrestled the giant Antaeus who took his strength from his mother, the earth goddess Gaea. Referenced in Book 9 of Metamorphoses, no mortal could kill Antaeus as long as he touched the earth, so Herakles held him up and squeezed him to death. Tales of wrestling even appeared in the Old Testament, as Jacob son of Isaac wrestled with God in the form of a man (Genesis 32:22-32). His new name, Israel, has been interpreted to mean “wrestles with God” in Ancient Hebrew.

In northern Europe, the book “Gylfaginning” of the Germanic-Norse epic Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson recorded a wrestling match between the thunder god Thor and the old woman Elli. While seemingly an unfair fight, Elli was the personification of old age and defeated Thor, as aging and death come to us all. Centuries later, Geoffrey of Monmouth recorded a tale of Cornish wrestling in Historia Regum Britanniae defeated the giant Gogmagag or Goëmagot by throwing him over a cliff to his death, which filled the waters with blood.

To the east, martial arts in China are connected to the Yellow Emperor, a wise sage also known as Huangdi who is venerated as a god or saint in Daoism. When the government official Chi You invented weapons in an attempt to rebel against the emperor, he was quickly defeated by superior technique. A southwest Indian form of martial arts known as kalarippayattu, literally meaning “place of training exercise”, has been practiced since the 12th century. The training grounds are temples for multiple Hindu gods and people begin practicing around age seven, much like joining the local soccer team or youth group for many Americans.

Across the water in the Americas, some modern lucha libre wrestlers harken back to Aztec mythology. The immersive, bilingual play Lucha Teotl, which debuted at Prism Movement Theater in Dallas, TX, tells the story of a wrestler wearing the mask of Huitzilopochtli the sun god and war god and his rival wearing the mask of Coyolxauhqui the moon goddess. This is a stark deviation from the original myth, where the pair were a brother and sister who preferred bloody butchering to family-friendly wrestling, but I understand the need to make the mythology more approachable for a mainstream audience.

I would be remiss if I did not recount an important part of sports history that I recently witnessed during the 2024 Paris Olympics. Forty-one-year-old Greco-Roman wrestler Mijaín López Núñez of Cuba won his fifth consecutive gold metal competing in the 130kg (287lb) weight class having dominated the sport since 2008. This legendary athlete not only demonstrated significantly more talent than all his competitors but also was the calmest person in the stadium. While Tulkas and López Núñez are neither alike in appearance nor personality, they share the same competitive spirit.

Nessa

A talented dancer who ran as fast as her beloved herd of deer, Nessa was also the wife of Tulkas and sister of Oromë. She appeared more wild than the other nature-based Valar, fitting in with the motif “God of wild beasts” (A443.1) and “Fairies have herds of deer” (F241.5). Her association with Oromë made her similar to hunting goddesses, a fairly rare type of deity.

A small woman with a green dress and spotted hair like a fallow deer dances an arabesque among evergreen trees.

In Greco-Roman mythology, Artemis or Diana was goddess of hunting and nature. Her favorite animals were deer and boar, and she would turn men into deer as a punishment. In Egypt, the lion-headed goddess Pakhet became associated with Artemis, as her cult centered around Speos Artemidos, a temple in a cliff at Wadi Batn el-Baqara. Artemis was famously worshipped at a massive temple in the Greek city-state of Ephesus, as recorded in Acts 19. When the silversmith Demetrius realized the new religion introduced to the Ephesians by the apostle Paul would hurt his business selling Artemis shrines, he started a riot that lasted until the city clerk told everyone to go home. The second “swift-footed huntress” of Greek mythology was Atalanta, who murdered all the boys she beat at races. Not until the young hero Hippomenes or Melanion borrowed three golden apples from Aphrodite and tossed them on the race course as a distraction did Atalanta lose; fortunately, she liked both Hippomenes and the apples enough that there was no more murdering.

Germanic-Norse mythology had Skaði, goddess of bowhunting, skiing, winter, and mountains. She first married the sea god Njörðr, then divorced him because their lifestyles were too different. In some variants, she later married Odin, who was already married to Frigg. Nearby in Finland, The Kalevala featured Mielikki as “The Honey-rich Mother of the Woodlands” along with the mother of Nyrikki the Hunter and wife of Tapio the forest spirit or “Green Man”.

A small woman in a green dress dances to a muscular blond man crouched as if to catch her.

Aranyani, goddess of the wilderness and forests, appeared in the Hindu sacred text Rig-veda. Also known as Lady of the Wood or the Forest Queen, she gently cared for animals and caused fruit to grow but would slay a “murderous enemy”. On the opposite side of the world, Aztec worshipped the migration goddess Chimalman, literally “one who has sat like a shield”, the mother of Quetzalcoatl the king of gods and the wife of Mixcoatl the god of hunting.

As for my illustration, Nessa’s dance pose is called an arabesque, supposedly because it reminded Italian dance instructor Carlo Blasis of Arabic moves as written in his 1820 book Traité élémentaire, théorique, et pratique de l'art de la danse [Elementary, Theoretical, and Practical Treatise on the Art of Dance]. Several dancers appear throughout the Legendarium, so keep an eye out for them in future posts.

A woman in a green dress dances behind a man wearing a green tunic plus archery gear and shooting an arrow with a simple recurve bow.

Melkor

At last, we come to Melkor, the most powerful of all Valar and the older brother of Manwë their king. Melkor was a classic chaos deity renamed to Morgoth or “Black Foe of the World” by the elf king Fëanor after Melkor killed his father, Finwë (Silmarillion, 79). Resistant towards the Vision of Ilúvatar since the beginning of time, Melkor seemingly left destruction in his wake just because he could. This made him greatly different in motivation than his second-in-command, Sauron, the Maia of smithing and logistics, who wanted absolute order and control. In some iterations of the Legendarium was a final battle at the end of time known as Dagor Dagorath, before which Melkor would break free of the chain Angainor to fight the Valar.

A large man smeared in dirt with red glowing eyes stands besides a golden-haired person about half his height. Both are obscured by rising smoke and stand against a black background.

The concepts of “Primeval chaos” (A605) and “Evil spirits born of echo in chaos” (G302.1.2) appear throughout world mythologies. Melkor can also be compared to the Christian concepts of “Demons” (G302), “Devil as marplot at creation” (A63) and the multiple names for the Devil, including “Satan, The Bad Man, Old Nick” and more (G303). Interestingly, the concept of Satan in Judaism is more of an adversary or trickster rather than a source of evil, while in Islam, Shaytan appears throughout the Quran as the enemy of humankind but without much power.

Polytheist religions likewise have chaotic, destructive, and even evil gods. In Egypt, Apep or Apophis was a giant serpent who repeatedly attacked the sun god Ra to prevent sunrise. He hated order and binary in the world and believed that destroying the sun would create unifying darkness. In Norse-Germanic mythology, the trickster god Loki had chaotic tendency, although his only truly evil deed was tricking the blind god Hoder into killing his perfect brother Baldr. To avenge the death of their kin, the other gods turned one of Loki’s sons into a wolf and goaded him into killing the other son. They then use the murdered son’s intestines to tie up Loki in a cave underneath a venomous snake. At Ragnarök, Loki would escape his bonds and destroy the world with his allies.

In Greco-Roman mythology, this type of force was not one of evil but a lack of being. The English word “chaos” comes from Greek and Latin via Old French based on a word meaning “abyss… that which is vast and empty”. The modern meaning of confusion did not appear until the early 17th century. The personification of Chaos first appeared in Hesiod’s Theogony as “primeval emptiness” and the mother of Nyx the night and Erebus the darkness. A similar description appeared in Book 1 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Chaos was “uniformly waste… a rude and undeveloped mass”.

Religions change over time and place, and few more than Hinduism. The concept of an asura meant any spirit in older versions of Hinduism, while over time they have become similar to demons or devils in Abrahamic religions. They may have been the original gods in the area who were replaced by newer gods or Devas. Their leader was listed in the Rig-veda as Vritra, a water asura representing chaos. Indra the king of gods joined forces with Vayu the god of winds and the Maruts the god of storms to force Vritra into sharing his water.

Conclusion

With all the Valar illustrated, I have completed the first phase of design for the hypothetical animated musical. Since beginning this project on January 30 of this year, I have covered the full prologue and appendixes appearing in The Lord of the Rings; studied histories on a range of related topics, including animation, musicals, maps, documentaries, and conlangs; illustrated prototypes of all the Races; and attended a Tolkien-themed conference. I know a lot more than when I started, and the best is yet to come! As promised, I will be moving into the second phase of this project in 2025, revealing how I would frame the story, design characters, and score the musical. I am looking forward to learning more about Middle-earth and comparative histories from the Real World along with improving my skills as a researcher, writer, illustrator, composer, and maybe an animator. And whither then? I cannot say.


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