Earindil Poem Perspective

[Sporozc09]

I was just listening to class 120, and during the discussion of the fact that the poem is from a mortal perspective, I couldn't help but thinking about the context of the poem being composed and recited in the House of Elrond. The poem ending with an emphasis of Earindil's doom and his inability to return to the northern shores seems to me like it might be a compassionate perspective to take given that that's where his sons Elrond and Elros, who probably miss him a great deal and might even resent his absence, are. In a sense, Bilbo could be saying to Elrond, "Your dad went away on this great quest and never returned, but he wanted to return. He just couldn't because of this mighty doom laid on him."

 

[Jim Deutch]

Not worth starting a new topic for this comment, but I wanted to say something and this seems like an ok place to jump in with it:

Corey maintained in ep. 120 that we do not get enough information in the Eärendil poem to conclude that Eärendil+Silmaril+flying ship = Venus, the morning/evening star. He may well be right about that. Nevertheless, I am completely certain that I did in fact make that conclusion some 45 years ago with nothing to go on but the text. It may not have been in my first reading; I was a bit of a poem-skipper at first. But I probably read the book five times in the first year or so after I discovered it and I am sure this equation occurred to me during that early reading period. Of course, I was quite the science and astronomy nerd, so that helped. I remember this insight as one of the coolest things about the poem (along with the intricate construction of it, which I was not at all able to analyze at the time, just be amazed by).

This explanation in tLotR for the origin of Venus was the only "just so story" in the whole book that I could recognize from only the book. It was much, much later that I learned of the other aspects of explanatory myth in Tolkien's writings.