The Silmarillion, or to give it it's full name: I Quenta Silmarillion. A book that collects the material J.R.R Tolkien left unfinished, into a semblance of a story. It's not an easy read, but it's an important one if you want to understand Tolkien's mythos. Most people who read The Lord of the Rings are left hungry for more, drawn into the stories because these stories speak about the troubles we all face. And despite it's grand scale and disappointing lack of detail on occasion, the Silmarillion also contains stories that speak to us. Few moreso than the story of Fingolfin.
Finwe was one of the first elves, those who were not born but who awoke under the stars at Cuivenen. He accepted the invitation to Valinor from the Vala called Orome. The Valar are kind of like a cross between the Judaic idea of angels, and the ancient Norse idea of gods. Valinor is their homeland. Finwe followed the Vala alongside Ingwe and Elwe, on a long journey westward. At it's end was Valinor, lit by the magical trees Laureling and Tyelperion. Finwe, Ingwe and Elwe returned to the elves at Cuivenen, and persuaded them to take the long journey to Valinor. It took the elves centuries to make the journey, but they do not die of old age and so did not rush. The people of Elwe did not finish the journey, tarrying in villages and forests or taking to the sea but landing on the islands. The elves who dwelt on the islands would become known as the Teleri, and those who lived in Middle Earth would be known as the Sindar. Finwe and Ingwe finished the journey with their people, and set up homes in the lands of Valinor. Finwe married a woman named Miriel, and had a son with her: Curufinwe, nicknamed "Feanaro" or Feanor. After bearing him, Miriel wasted away and went to the House of Mandos. This is what elves do instead of dying, their souls are bound to the world and so the house of the Vala Mandos is a peaceful resting place for them. Finwe married again to Indis from the tribe of Ingwe, and had two more sons: Ngolofinwe and Arafinwe. Ngolofinwe would eventually become known as Fingolfin. Some said Feanor caused Miriel's weakness, they said he had stolen her strength.
But that was only the first of the troubles Feanor caused. He made three gems in which he had trapped the light of Laureling and Tyelperion. They were beautiful, the most beautiful things ever made by elvish hands: so everyone agreed. So beautiful that Melkor, one of the Valar [also secretly evil], wanted them. He turned Feanor against the other Valar, making him believe that they didn't truly care about the elves but only their usefulness as servants. He wanted to get Feanor away from the protection of Finwe, Finarfin, and others. Then he destroyed the Two Trees. Feanor's Silmarils were the only pieces of them left: but Feanor would not part with the jewels. For this, Feanor was exiled. Angry, Feanor went to Alqualonde and stole ships from the Teleri elves there, killing some of them in the process. The Kinslaying. Though Fingolfin went with Feanor and participated in the Kinslaying, Feanor was too much in a rush and abandoned his brother. Fingolfin might have turned around and begged forgiveness of the Valar. But he did not.
Fingolfin chose to look on his brother with different eyes. So, he chose to lead the people who followed him across the Helcaraxe: the bridge of ice that connected Middle Earth to Valinor in those days. Meanwhile, Manwe had caught wind of Feanor's actions and cursed Feanor's family. Fingolfin was thus cursed, though less strongly than his brother. He had no desire in his heart to own the Silmarils, it was enough for him to admire his brother's creations and be proud of his connection to someone so skilled. He simply understood something that Manwe did not: it is never right to wrong someone just because they have wronged you. That simply escalates the conflict: it does nothing to solve the problem. As Feanor's brother, it was Fingolfin's duty to support him. Just because Feanor abandoned him, didn't mean he should abandon Feanor. He decided to instead use their exile as an opportunity to defy evil directly.
Fingolfin chose to challenge Melkor to single combat, knowing he would lose. Now, Ngolofinwe means "Wise Finwe" in Quenya, so we must investigate this action. On the face of it, it seems stupid. He's the King, and he's going to ride to certain death in front of his people who have no home in this new land. What? Ah, but all is not as it first appears. Feanor's masterwork has been turned into a curse. Now Fingolfin's masterwork will turn the curse into blessings. He cannot keep Manwe's curse from taking effect: Fingolfin does not have the divine power of the Valar. What he can do, is modulate his own behavior. Manwe has cursed the creations of the Noldor to fade, be lost or destroyed. Fingolfin is going to turn that curse into the source of their strength. The strength they will need to oppose evil and defeat it, the strength to do the job the Valar are unwilling to do. Fingolfin is challenging Melkor, but he is also challenging Manwe. His actions are an indictment of the Valar and their self-centered ideology. This is necessary, because the Noldor have every reason to be angry with the Valar and Manwe in particular: even though they have done something very wrong, and which they know is very wrong. If this is not addressed, then the Noldor will be vulnerable to the manipulations of Melkor. But that is not all. He is also showing them the proper course of action in the face of suffering.
Indeed he was showing the proper course of action in the face of suffering not just to elves, but also to the Valar themselves. Elves have no reason to fear death, they go to Mandos when their bodies are destroyed to live peacefully in the blessed lands. But that does not mean they will necessarily oppose evil, or that they cannot be tempted into evil. Indeed, it means there is also no end to their suffering. That is the tragedy of elves which gives them their aura of mystery: they, like the Valar, are bound to the world forever. They must heal or go mad, and Melkor can easily hijack the process of healing from grief. He has every reason to do so. See, a mad elf is an orc. They are abused so much that they dissociate: the memories of their former elvish personalities locked behind a wall of rage and self-hatred. Orcs aren't evil because they are ugly, their bodily ugliness is the remains of the torture which turned them evil. Tolkien was intimately familiar with the ways that unhealed trauma could twist a person psychically or even physically: he'd seen his compatriots from the war destroy themselves with drink, obsessions and psychotic behavior. He furiously self-medicated with his art: and indeed that is probably the reason why his mythos seems so vivid. It was born from pain: not really constructed, but in fact begotten. And this leads me back to Fingolfin, through a concept that Tolkien called estel.
Take a deep breath, because we're about to dive into the linguistic deep end here. The stories that we know from the Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion are the mere tip of the iceberg when it comes to Tolkien. To him, they were secondary. To Tolkien, the whole point of the works were the languages. In particular, Quenya and Sindarin: the elvish tongues. Many thanks to the übernerd Helge K. Fauskanger and to the rogue of words Thorsten Renk. Thanks to their websites Ardalambion and Parma Tyelpellassiva I've been able to learn a lot about linguistics, through Elvish, and was able to work out this derivation. We start with a Base, a skeleton from which to form a word. Our word estel is Sindarin, but it seems to be a rare example of a borrowing from Quenya: which narratively makes sense, since this concept is connected to the Valar and Valinor. It would have started it's evolution as the Base SED, a proto-word that suggested the idea of "rest" or "calm" to the elves. But this base would only suggest a momentary phenomenon, and a fairly minor feeling of mere calm (for example, it also gave us the Sindarin words sidh, meaning "peace" with the digraph "dh" indicating the sound "th" as in "the"). It would simply suggest a period of little activity. We need a strong word representing an enduring phenomenon, not suggesting a lack of activity but rather an attitude of obstinate serenity that seems to defy logic. We need ESEDE: with the stem vowel reduplicated twice, both prefixed and suffixed. And we need a noun, while this base could represent any part of speech. There are several nominal suffixes, but the one we need is "-la", a suffix denoting a tangible thing: because we are talking about an attitude that can be spread to other people, not an emotion. Now we have a word: êsedela. The middle vowel in a word like this usually drops out: giving us esdela. Finally, short vowels at the ends of words had a tendency to drop out in Elvish, so we get esdel. In Noldorin Quenya, the cluster "sd" turned into "st", the "t" being influenced by the voiceless "s" giving estel. In Vanyarin Quenya the opposite happened, and so the word turns out as ezdel: with the "s" being influenced by the voiced "d".
Either way, we have a word that is not readily translatable at least into modern English. The Greek word αποκαλυψε (apocalypse) comes close. Calypso is a verb meaning "to turn", and "apo" means "upwards". The upwards direction then as now was associated with goodness and hopefulness. But this word is burdened with many connotations by modern associations: estel is pure, being newly invented. This concept of estel is what Fingolfin understands which Melkor, and Manwe and virtually everyone else in the world, does not. It is not a momentary phenomenon, a place of quiet where rest can be easily found. It is instead the ability to look at bad situations and see them as opportunities to do good: not reacting out of fear, dismay or anger, but instead reacting with grace and love. Fingolfin didn't simply understand the concept of estel: his death exemplifies it.
His valiant death is an example of someone acting out of estel when confronted with evil. Melkor's overwhelming power is not a source of fear for Fingolfin: it is instead an opportunity to turn Manwe's curse into a blessing, and to show others how to turn Manwe's curse into a blessing. If the creations of the Noldor are doomed to be consumed by the passage of time: then let them be consumed for the purpose of opposing evil. If the Noldor are doomed to suffer anyway: then they might as well do something that would inevitably entail suffering, like oppose evil. Manwe's curse, through the application of estel, can become the thing which makes the Noldor into an unstoppable force for good in the world. In the end, in fact, Fingolfin will force Manwe's hand: Finwe and Finarfin upon hearing of Fingolfin's death along with Eärendil will petition the Valar to put an end to Melkor. He will also inspire some among the Maiar (that is, the lesser angels who are servants to the Valar) to come to Middle-Earth and help the creatures there to face evil directly: these would become known as the Istari, or the wizards. Manwe's curse is indeed great, and it was made from Feanor's abuse of the Valar's blessings. Yet in Fingolfin's hands, the curse becomes a source of blessings: for the Noldor and for those who chose to stand with them. And when the final members of the Noldor leave Middle Earth, they leave Estel behind: quite literally. In order to hide his true identity, Elrond gave Aragorn the name "Estel". Aragorn represents estel for Gondor: turning that city's curse, it's location close to Mordor, into a blessing instead of a problem. Gondor's location makes it vulnerable to the forces of Sauron, true: but only if it's leader lacks the strength to oppose those forces. But if Gondor's leader has the will to oppose evil: then it is well placed to lead the fight against the orcs.
Most beautifully of all, this mythos was and is estel for our world. Tolkien saw the demise of the horse as a draft animal, and the introduction of the gasoline engine: and he didn't like any of this one bit. But far from simply being a curmudgeon, Tolkien was prescient: his criticisms of modernism are not those of a romantic apologist, they are rather the same ones that postmodernists would make later on. He didn't hate everything new reflexively, nor did he have any rose-tinted glasses about the recent past. His criticisms can be boiled down into three things: 1) environmental degradation, 2) lack of attention to quality, 3) cultural insensitivity. But far from despairing and giving in to depression: Tolkien saw an opportunity to effect change.
He is directly responsible for the paradigm shift of the 1960s, when inventors abruptly shifted from developing labor-saving devices to developing communications technology. Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring was published in 1954. It fired the imaginations of young people instantly: speaking to the deep-seated problems that they had with their parents' attitudes. They were not rebels without a cause: they were rebels with a very real cause, even if they could not put their cause into words. Tolkien and the Beatles don't seem like they could possibly have anything in common: but they were driven by the same deep-seated dissatisfaction with modernism, and this same idea of estel. Nothing ever written in the English language exemplifies the concept of estel better than the song "Here Comes the Sun". The puzzling line "and baby I say, it's alright" seems to even hint that this indeed what they were trying to convey. Why would the speaker need to assure his significant other that the sunrise was a good thing? because s/he views the sunrise as simply the prelude to more pointless pain. When Lennon sings "and baby I say, it's alright" he is saying that the sunrise will indeed bring pain, but the pain is something you can use. It is not just a thing that you must endure: you can turn it into something good through your actions. That is estel: the divine wisdom of Fingolfin.
