I’ve commented before on the Nietzschean, Dionysian aspect to Feänor’s character. I’m re-reading Dante’s Divine Comedy at the moment and it occurs to me that the Florentine poet’s inventive depiction of Ulysses/Odysseus might be another noteworthy literary antecedent and parallel, if not outright influence. We learn something of Tolkien’s familiarity with and attitude toward Dante in a letter reviewing an interview in which he had said that Dante “doesn’t attract me. He’s full of spite and malice. I don’t care for his petty relations with petty people in petty cities.” In his review of the interview, Tolkien retracts his remarks, writing that his
reference to Dante was outrageous. I do not seriously dream of being measured against Dante, a supreme poet. At one time Lewis and I used to read him to one another. I was for a while a member of the Oxford Dante Society (I think at the proposal of Lewis, who overestimated greatly my scholarship in Dante or Italian generally). It remains true that I found the ‘pettiness’ that I spoke of a sad blemish in places.
One character who receives an ignoble if not exactly “petty” end at Dante’s hands, yet in a way that anticipates an important message in Tolkien’s fiction, is the Greek hero Ulysses, whom Dante places in the eighth circle of his Hell where the perpetrators of “simple” fraud are imprisoned, and in the eighth malebolgia (“evil pocket”) in particular, in which those guilty of deception, fraudulent advice, or “evil counsel” are punished. Not knowing Greek, Dante did not have a first-hand knowledge of Homer’s epics, and so was presumably unaware of the eventual fate of Odysseus as Homer foreshadows it. The Ithacan King, as we learn in the Odyssey, is told that, even after arriving home after a 20 year absence, must undertake one final journey (over land) to plant an oar in homage to and appeasement of Poseidon. Only then will he at last be allowed to settle down and live to the end of his days in relative peace.
In Dante’s recasting of his character, “Ulysses” is made instead into an incurable adventurer who apparently never makes it home at all, as he persuades his men to sail with him beyond the Straights of Gibraltar, going (as Captain Kirk so memorably put it) where no man has ever gone before. As Ulysses explains to Dante the pilgrim,
not sweetness of a son, not reverence / for an aging father, not the debt of love / I owed Penelope to make her happy, / could quench deep in myself the burning wish / to know the world and have experience / of all man’s vices, of all human worth. (Inferno 26.94-99, Musa trans.)
Ulysses goes on to recount the speech by which he persuaded his men to join him on his ludicrous journey, the speech, we are led to believe, that is also responsible for his present place in Hell:
‘Brothers,’ I said, ‘who through a hundred thousand / perils have made your way to reach the West, / during this so brief vigil of our senses / that is still reserved for us, do not deny / yourself experience of what there is beyond, / behind the sun, in the world they call unpeopled. / Consider what you came from: you are Greeks! / You were not born to live like mindless brutes / but to follow paths of excellence and knowledge. / With this brief exhortation I made my crew / so anxious for the way that lay ahead, / that then I hardly could have held them back… (26.112-120)
As Ulysses explains the end of their “mad flight,” they sailed to the southernmost end of the Earth where they were just able to espy the shores and towering height of Mount Purgatory itself (atop of which Eden or Paradise lies) before, in an act of divine judgment (“as pleased Another’s will”–26.141), their ship was spun around three times and sunk into the sea with all her crew.
Thus, in exchange for Homer’s Odysseus, the “great tactician,” man of great cunning and “many turns” (polymetis) who overcomes enormous obstacles, including gods, giants, monsters, and suitors, Dante gives us a Ulysses whose lasting legacy is the deception he perpetrated, not on his enemies, but on his own men. In Dante’s hands, the story of Ulysses is a cautionary tale about the hubris, curiosity, and autonomy or independence that seeks knowledge, experience, and perhaps even power that lies beyond man’s proper boundaries, as well as the destructive interpersonal and social consequences of the kind of eloquence and demagoguery that deceives others for one’s own benefit.
While Tolkien reserves Ulysses and his men’s specific fate of drowning by divine intervention for the Númenóreans–themselves a cautionary tale warning man not transgress his appointed boundaries, to aspire to determine his own destiny, and to seize paradise by his own power–the theme of deceptively and self-interestedly playing to the prejudices and sense of superiority of one’s subordinates in persuading them to distinguish themselves through the pursuit of new lands and experiences is very much at the heart of Fëanor’s story. In The Silmarillion, after Melkor’s theft of the Silmarils, Fëanor, a “master of words” whose “tongue had great power over hearts when he would use it,” makes to his fellow Noldorin Elves a speech
which they ever remembered. Fierce and few were his words, and filled with anger and pride; and hearing them the Noldor were stirred to madness…. Long he spoke, and ever he urged the Noldor to follow him and by their own prowess to win freedom and great realms in the lands of the East… ‘Fair shall the end be,’ he cried, though long and hard shall be the road! Say farewell to bondage! But say farewell also to ease! Say farewell to the weak! Say farewell to your treasures! More still shall we make. Journey light: but bring with you your swords! For we will go further than Oromë, endure longer than Tulkas: we will never turn back from pursuit. After Morgoth to the ends of the Earth!… But when we have conquered and have regained the Silmarils, then we and we alone shall be lords of the unsullied Light, and masters of the bliss and beauty of Arda. No other race shall oust us!’
As I’ve suggested elsewhere, through his character of Fëanor, Tolkien honestly and sympathetically captures something of the tragic and epic greatness and nobility sought after, for example, by Nietzsche in his Dionysian neo-paganism. At the same time, however, a consideration of Fëanor’s Ulyssean aspect serves to remind us of something else I’ve written on previously, which is Tolkien’s Christian (and now Dantean) concern that in the final analysis such assertions of self-will are no ultimate answer to the human destructiveness and banality of nihilism, but are merely a more dramatic and pathetic (in both the etymological and colloquial senses of that word) form of it.
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I have never read Dante (nor read much about Dante and his work), so I may be just parading my ignorance here. Still, the conjunction of ‘deception, fraudulent advice, or “evil counsel”’ gives to me the impression of conscious deception, insincerity also applying to the evil counsel. If that is correct, and Dante’s Ulysses thus was not entirely sincere with his crew, then I would say that this constitutes an important difference as Feänor, I think, believed strongly in his every word: he was convinced (even if foolishly so) that the Noldor would be able to retrieve the Silmarils from the Morgoth and pass on to a glorious life in Middle-earth.
Good question, Troels. I think I agree with what you say about Feanor, but then I think it’s also broadly consistent with what Dante is doing with Ulysses, as it’s not clear that the latter’s deception of his men is entirely self-conscious or malicious either. As with so many of the souls in Dante’s Hell, one of the notable characteristics of their sin is the self-deception that inevitably must attend and justify it. Ulysses is not purposely trying to kill his men, but rather to include (and use) them in his own heroic pursuit of greatness, yet behind it all is a kind of megalomania that leads to their destruction. And I think that’s how I would also characterize Feanor, at least in part. You say that he “believed strongly in his every word.” I would say that this is true, to an extent, but it’s also telling how quickly Feanor’s own argument unravels, even in his own mind. From his initial theft of the Teleri’s ships, followed by the kin-slaying and abandoning his fellow Noldor, to his wanton and wasteful destruction of the Teleri’s ships, to his finally holding his own sons, in his dying breath, to an oath which he knows can’t be accomplished, we see a rapid and systematic narrowing of Feanor’s values to that which he really holds most dear, namely himself and his pride. So do Ulysses and Feanor believe their own words? I think so, and that’s part of their epic greatness, but my purpose in reading Feanor in light of Ulysses is also to suggest that Tolkien, like Dante, is at the same time inviting us to call Feanor’s bluff, and to name his pride for the ignominious thing that it is: “fraud.”
“It remains true that I found the ‘pettiness’ that I spoke of a sad blemish in places.”
## What did Tolkien mean by that ? Dante can be severe, and he often is; but “petty” ? Where ? ISTM a much more plausible complaint against him is, tthat he is too much the “magnanimous man” – which is the very opposite of being petty. He is very severe against pettiness of spirit; in Cantos 2 & 3 of the Inferno in particular.
As to Feanor, maybe it’s simple-minded to say this, but he STM a very nice example of a tragic character. Dante’s Ulisse is not really that – we are given too little news of him, to be able to compare him as Dante presents him, what he was before. The Elves OTOH we know of long before their awakening. And we are told of Feanor’s birth, and of the evil wrought by Melkor among the Noldor. The perspective is different. Feanor had a lot of excuse for his over-mastering hatred of Morgoth – if Ulisse had any excuses, we are not told of them.
A far better target for the criticisms levelled at Feanor would be Achilles. His heroic “wrath” is essentially a gigantic sulk, one which takes a very heavy toll in human lives. But “The Sulk of Achilles” does not sound very heroic. The monstrous egotism of his attitude is driven home by his refusal of the absurdly over-generous compensation offered by Agamemnon in Book 9, & by Achilles’s implacable refusal to listen to the advice of Phoinix – a refusal which leads to the death of Patroklos several books later, & of Achilles later still. Feanor at least had several genuine grievances, and the evil of Melkor had wronged others than he. No-one killed Achilles’ father – not even a god. Achilles, “petty” ? That’s too kind a description.
Kerberos,
I agree in large with what you say about Dante, and that Tolkien obviously doesn’t seem to have read him with a great deal of understanding (though it pains me to say it). However, one can, I think, understand how someone might get the impression of “pettiness” from Dante’s writing. Dante does dwell, after all, at some length and with a great deal of imagination on the gruesomeness of the suffering of those in Hell. Yet his purpose, of course, is not so much to relish in the fate of the damned as it is to illustrate precisely the pettiness and ultimately self-destructiveness of sin.
As for my Ulysses-Feanor comparison, in general I think I would agree that Achilles bears the greater resemblance to Feanor, both for the reasons you mention and for others that come to mind. That said, I think my particular point about Ulysses and Feanor still stands.