Eden and the Fall of Man. If directionality is one of the fascinating problems of The East in Tolkien, another is the question of the nature of the birthplace of the Elves and Men in the East, and its relationship to the real-world myth of the Garden of Eden, and the birth of Christ in the East, and whether Man on Middle-earth has yet Fallen to Sin and condemned himself.

In other words, a major difference between the world-views of Tolkien’s Middle-earth, and Medieval Europe, is that Middle-earth sees the East as nothing but evil. The memory of their birth there is less to Elves and Men than their memory of Morgoth’s subsequent attempted seductions and corruption, and their flight to the West. In contrast, Medieval Europe revered the East as the birthplace of Man and God, in Eden and Bethlehem; the medieval map put East at the top as we do the North (hence the term “orienting” your map!).

The critics really wrestle with this one. I like to have died trying to summarize this one. I have a very hard time with this stuff.

Some see all of Middle-earth, or perhaps the Shire, as a kind of Eden-in-being in Tolkien’s tale. But both the Elves (Feanor’s rebellion) and the Men (Numenor) have myths of rebellion and expulsion from Paradises in the West, leading some critics to say the Fall in Tolkien took place in the West, not East. Others say Men have already fallen to Morgoth in the East in pre-history, and have been working off their guilt ever since by helping the Elves. There is a question as to the fate of Men: since God had already promised them an existence beyond death, then their sin and fall under the teaching of Morgoth was self-inflicted and not in response to God’s ban as is the case in the Bible.

A very large part of this debate depends on how seriously you take The Silmarillion. Those who stick to LotR only on this question can come up with radically different answers from those who insist The Silmarillion “overrules” LotR.

Anyway, here are my notes on the critics who tackled this one, and here’s a quick brief of their positions in this debate:

Bonnal: All Middle-earth is a kind of Eden before original sin
Tolkien: Eden was real in our earth; Middle-earth’s Men fell long before Numenor.
Purtill: Tolkien has no Eden, no time without danger, in his mythology.
Wood: The Shire is an Edenic place.
Lobdell: Man has not yet fallen, and M-E is a kind of Eden. Silmarillion not taken into account.
Green: Bilbo’s hole represents an Edenic innocence at the beginning of The Hobbit.
Harvey: Men in Tolkien still need not fear death, since God promises them an unknown fate. Yet they sin, fearing death. Their fall is thus unlike Adam’s.
Evans: Fallen Man is at the core of Tolkien’s mythology to give the reader a perspective on the otherworldly Elves.
Shippey: Man is fallen in Tolkien, but it takes place “off-stage”. Earendil rising in the East brings hope to those in darkness, as precursor to the Sun itself, which has both Christian and pre-Christina meaning.

A. Are you familiar with the “birth of the race in the far East” tales about the Elves and Men from the Silmarillion? How do you think they relate to Lord of the Rings? .

All the lands in The Lord of the Rings are East of Beleriand (the setting on Middle-earth for the tales of the Silmarillion).
B. Do you feel Tolkien satisfactorily reconciles the mythic geomancy of the First Age Elves with that of the Third Age in the War of the Ring? (I’ll take any excuse to use the phrase “mythic geomancy”! Wish I knew what it meant.) .

Tolkien calls the First Fall of Men, which took place long before LotR, “repented but not finally healed”.
C. What are the implications of that? Is he saying only the coming of the Christ can “heal” the Fall? What good is repentance if it doesn’t heal? .

Richard Purtill suggests that Tolkien’s Middle-earth, corrupted by Melkor before Men or Elves were even born, foregoes the traditional “Golden Age” myth in which an innocent Man in an innocent Eden was corrupted by Satan. He concludes that it is probably a more realistic view of things, with (in Tolkien’s terms) “a taste of primary truth”.
D. Has Tolkien improved on The Bible with his mythology here? Was Middle-earth already tainted before its Adam and Eve arrived to screw things up?.

David Harvey seems to suggest something like the opposite: God has not doomed Man to death for sinning in Tolkien’s story. Man’s fate after his early death is unknown to the Elves, but there is no implication that that fate is a punishment, rather the opposite seems to be the case. By this thinking, a Golden Age still obtains in Middle-earth, with every mortal still able to avoid the consequences of sin.
E. Are Harvey and Purtill on opposite sides here? Do you feel Middle-earth is still in a Golden Age in The Lord of the Rings?.

Jared Lobdel argues that the Fall has not yet happened in Middle-earth, since some of the people are so obviously good. I incorporated this into my draft as a way to distinguish Tolkien’s account of his Eden in the East from a medieval Christian worldview. I got my comeuppance from entwife wandlimb during my “peer review” phase. As I wrote to N. E. Brigand afterward,
I tell you, this project really turns over a few rocks. I have since found out that although Lobdell is generally respected, everyone knows he is nuts to think Man has not yet fallen in The Silmarillion - a position, you may remember, that I put into my East article, based on, yes, Lobdell - until the Heavenly Messenger Wanda descended to set me right, back into the Godly, if fallen, arms of T. Shippey and his archangels.
Yes, I found several critical references to Lobdell, taking him severely to task for ignoring The Silmarillion in his analysis of Lord of the Rings.
F. Do you think the cosmology in The Lord of the Rings is robust enough to convey a complete impression of Tolkien’s fictional world-view without The Silmarillion? Is it things like this (whether Man had already fallen in the distant East, what his future fate was) that made Tolkien nuts to get Silmarillion out in conjunction with LotR? .

What Flieger was to me for the East-West divide, Shippey was for the question of Eden and the Fall. He points out that the fates of Man and Elves in Tolkien are complementary, and more modern than traditional medieval Biblical models, putting Tolkien squarely in this century as a writer/philosopher.
G. Do you think Tolkien is a modern writer, as Shippey argues?

I was staggered to find, after reading all these other books by thoughtful, intelligent writers, that Flieger and Shippey, the Manwe and Varda of Tolkien critics, did indeed remain the two strongest, most sophisticated interpreters of Tolkien, even in my very specialized topic.
H. Have I been brainwashed into the “Tolkien school”? Is there a “most correct” way to interpret Tolkien, exemplified by these two fine critics?

When you read enough Tolkien critics you begin to perceive that they’re all “talking” to one another in a continuing, indirect, dialog over the years.
I. How annoying is that? It’s like you can no longer just read one book or two on Tolkien; you have to join the club to get let in on the real stuff. Or is it? .

Final question for my topic of The East:
J. Why the heck did the Encyclopedia not have a topic on The West, its location, history, meaning and symbolism in Tolkien? .

Link to squire’s adventure