Valar

The Valar ( ; ) are characters in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth writings. They are "angelic powers" or "gods" subordinate to the one God (Eru Ilúvatar). The Ainulindalë describes how some of the Ainur choose to enter the world (Arda) to complete its material development, after its form is determined by the Music of the Ainur. The mightiest of these are called the Valar, or "the Powers of the World", and the lesser spirits are called the Maiar. The Valar are mentioned briefly in The Lord of the Rings, but Tolkien had developed them earlier, in material published posthumously in The Silmarillion, especially the "Valaquenta" (Quenya: "Account of the Valar"), The History of Middle-earth, and Unfinished Tales. Scholars have noted that the Valar resemble angels in Christianity but that Tolkien presented them rather more like pagan gods. They play a role in providing what the characters in Middle-earth experience as luck or providence.

The Valar ( ; ) are characters in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth writings. They are "angelic powers" or "gods" subordinate to the one God (Eru Ilúvatar). The Ainulindalë describes how some of the Ainur choose to enter the world (Arda) to complete its material development, after its form is determined by the Music of the Ainur. The mightiest of these are called the Valar, or "the Powers of the World", and the lesser spirits are called the Maiar. The Valar are mentioned briefly in The Lord of the Rings, but Tolkien had developed them earlier, in material published posthumously in The Silmarillion, especially the "Valaquenta" (Quenya: "Account of the Valar"), The History of Middle-earth, and Unfinished Tales. Scholars have noted that the Valar resemble angels in Christianity but that Tolkien presented them rather more like pagan gods. They play a role in providing what the characters in Middle-earth experience as luck or providence. , the strong and combative Norse gods of Asgard. Painting by Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, 1817.|alt=Painting of the pantheon of Norse gods]] Scholars such as John Garth have noted that the Valar resemble the Æsir, the Norse gods of Asgard. Thor, for example, physically the strongest of the gods, can be seen both in Oromë, who fights the monsters of Melkor, and in Tulkas, the strongest of the Valar. Manwë, the head of the Valar, has some similarities to Odin, the "Allfather", while the wizard Gandalf, one of the Maiar, resembles Odin the wanderer. s, intermediaries between the creator and the created world. Painting by Lorenzo Lippi, c. 1645|alt=Painting with a Christian angel]] The theologian Ralph C. Wood describes the Valar and Maiar as being what Christians "would call angels", intermediaries between the creator, Eru Ilúvatar, and the created cosmos. Like angels, they have free will and can therefore rebel against him. Matthew Dickerson, writing in the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, calls the Valar the "Powers of Middle-earth", noting that they are not incarnated and quoting the Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger's description of their original role as "to shape and light the world". Dickerson writes that while Tolkien presents the Valar like pagan gods, he imagined them more like angels and notes that scholars have compared the devotion of Tolkien's Elves to Elbereth, an epithet of Varda, as resembling the Roman Catholic veneration of Mary the mother of Jesus. Dickerson states that the key point is that the Valar were "not to be worshipped". He argues that as a result, the Valar's knowledge and power had to be limited, and they could make mistakes and moral errors. Their bringing of the Elves to Valinor meant that the Elves were "gathered at their knee", a moral error as it suggested something close to worship. The scholar of literature Marjorie Burns notes that Tolkien wrote that to be acceptable to modern readers, mythology had to be brought up to "our grade of assessment". In her view, between his early work, The Book of Lost Tales, and the published Silmarillion, the Valar had greatly changed, "civilized and modernized", and this had made the Valar "slowly and slightly" more Christian. For example, the Valar now had "spouses" rather than "wives", and their unions were spiritual, not physical. All the same, she writes, readers still perceive the Valar "as a pantheon", serving as gods. File:Raffaello, concilio degli dei 02.jpg|Tolkien's Valar behave as a group, so that readers perceive them as a pantheon like the Olympian gods of the Greeks. Elizabeth Whittingham comments that the Valar are unique to Tolkien, "somewhere between gods and angels". In her view, they mostly lack the rough brutality of the Norse gods; they have the angels' "sense of moral rightness" but disagree with each other; and their statements most closely resemble those of Homer's Greek gods, who can express their frustration with mortal men, as Zeus does in the Odyssey In a letter to Milton Waldman, Tolkien states directly that the Valar are "'divine', that is, were originally 'outside' and existed 'before' the making of the world. Their power and wisdom is derived from their Knowledge of the cosmogonical drama". He explains that he intends them to be "of the same order of beauty, power, and majesty as the 'gods' of higher mythology". Whittingham notes further that Tolkien likens lesser spirits, wizards, who are Maiar not Valar, to guardian angels; and that when describing the Maiar he "vacillates between 'gods' and 'angels' because both terms are close but neither is exactly right". Tolkien states in another letter that the Valar "entered the world after its making, and that the name is properly applied only to the great among them, who take the imaginative but not the theological place of 'gods'." Whittingham comments that the "thoughtful and carefully developed explanations" that Tolkien gives in these letters are markedly unlike his depictions of the Valar in his "earliest stories". ===Luck or providence=== The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey discusses the connection between the Valar and "luck" on Middle-earth, writing that as in real life, "People ... do in sober reality recognise a strongly patterning force in the world around them" but that while this may be due to "Providence or the Valar", the force "does not affect free will and cannot be distinguished from the ordinary operations of nature" nor reduce the necessity of "heroic endeavour". He states that this exactly matches the Old English view of luck and personal courage, as Beowulf s "wyrd often spares the man who isn't doomed, as long as his courage holds." The scholar of humanities Paul H. Kocher similarly discusses the role of providence, in the form of the intentions of the Valar or of the creator, in Bilbo's finding of the One Ring and Frodo's bearing of it; as Gandalf says, they were "meant" to have it, though it remained their choice to co-operate with this purpose. Rutledge writes that in The Lord of the Rings, and especially at moments like Gandalf's explanation to Frodo in "The Shadow of the Past", there are clear hints of a higher power at work in events in Middle-earth: Rutledge notes that in this way, Tolkien repeatedly hints at a higher power "that controls even the Ring itself, even the maker of the Ring himself [her italics]", and asks who or what that power might be. Her reply is that at the surface level, it means the Valar, "a race of created beings (analogous to the late-biblical angels)"; at a deeper level, it means "the One", Eru Ilúvatar, or in Christian terms, divine Providence.

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