Abby Epplett, Historian

Humans become bewildered when given too much ambiguous information in an illogical order. Unfortunately, this is how the text of The Lord of the Rings operates. Between its myriad of perspectives, thousands of years of in-universe history, multiple languages and cultures, and an entire planet of locations, the material seems muddled even to experienced readers. The overwhelming effect of Tolkien’s Legendarium is part of the experience; the reader does not have to know the entire story to feel immersed in the fantasy world but studying both the constructs of Middle-earth and the real-world history upon which it was based enables the reader to understand the complex motivations of the characters. While I am all for embarking on in-depth research, most readers do not have the time or energy for such study. Additionally, trying to remember all this material takes up a lot of headspace. In user experience research, the amount of stress while using available headspace is known as “c...

In this week’s essay, my loves of historic house tours and The Lord of the Rings combine for the first time as I present my map of Bag End, also spelled Bag-End by the older generations of Hobbits. Since Tolkien was a philologist, it is fitting to take a brief break to explain the naming scheme around the property, along with the clan name of the family who built it. Tolkien studies expert Tom Shippey noted in The Road to Middle-earth that “bag-end” is a literal translation of “cul-de-sac”, which was further elaborated upon by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull in Reader’s Companion . The current meaning of a road terminating at a house or collection of houses dates from 1819.

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.

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. 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 na...

I previously created illustrations for some Maiar, who act as a combination of angels and minor gods in the Legendarium. This week and for the next two weeks, I will talk about Valar, similar to archangels and major gods. This is a slight deviation from what I originally mentioned at the end of “Appendix F, II On Translation” but between the essays getting a bit too long of late, the end-of-year holiday season in full swing, and having an actual job plus side business, I thought a more relaxed pace would be a decent course of action. While only a few members of this race were mentioned in The Lord of the Rings , much information on Valar comes from “Valaquenta” in The Silmarillion . Some groups of Valar considered themselves siblings, perhaps because they were made by Ilúvatar at the same time or with a similar appearance. Spouses apparently did not consider themselves siblings, unlike Greco-Roman gods who had no issue with incest. The top eight Valar were called the Arata...

At last, I have arrived at the final appendix! Appendix F is divided into two parts with the first covering the languages spoken by the many peoples of Middle-earth during the Third Age, and the second covering Tolkien’s method of “translation” for those languages. Even to the end, Tolkien maintained his character as a typical early to mid-20 th century translator. Elvish and Mannish languages in Arda evolved along similar paths as real-world Indo-European languages with the development of a common speech, pidgins and creoles from the merger of two or more languages, categorization of languages as high or low based on the social status of the speakers, codeswitching and reappropriation of slurs, and languages falling out of use to become lost.

This week, I introduce the rest of the Maiar, each of whom represents part of the environment or a craft. This was no different than deities in real-world religions and mythologies, where ancient people believed that the sun, moon, and sea were sentient, while agriculture was controlled by a god, and smithing was taught to humans by a higher power. Many polytheist cultures have multiple gods with overlapping areas of rule. I have chosen to focus on those who appear to be the most popular and most powerful based on scholarly research. Many academic articles are written by researchers from outside the culture that they describe and accordingly may contain errors, which are passed along to me. Additionally, cultures with large populations and cultures from the West are overrepresented, meaning that I can easily find high quality research on these gods but not gods from smaller and non-Western religions. I have done my best to include a variety of religions in this essay but do con...

During this week and next week, I am taking a brief break from the appendixes to create more illustrations for the people of Middle-earth. I will focus on Maiar, a Race of angel-like or god-like beings who traveled as invisible spirits or took a wide range of physical forms. While this term did not appear in The Lord of the Rings , many Maiar appeared in the text, and explanations of Maiar and their powers were given in The Silmarillion . Wizards and balrogs will appear this week, while Maiar symbolizing the environment and crafts will appear next week.

For the second part of Appendix E, Tolkien focused on the writing systems used for Middle-earth languages. Real-world languages use a wide range of systems that can be grouped into “families”, including those descended from Egyptian hieroglyphs, such as variations on the Latin alphabet; East Asian systems based on Chinese characters; Indian and Southeast Asia systems based on the ancient Brahmi script; pre-Columbian languages from Mexico and Central America; and writing systems created by Indigenous Americans to preserve their own languages after European colonization.

While Appendix D is named for the Shire Calendar, this section actually covers calendars from multiple Middle-earth cultures spanning thousands of years. The construction of these calendars presented an unresolved mystery: why were they so similar to modern Western calendars? A real-world explanation was that Tolkien was most familiar with the Gregorian calendar, but a Middle-earth explanation was more complex.