They Shaped and Wrought, and Light They Caught

Last month our closest big city had its annual Rock and Gem Show. It’s always a risk putting me in a room with a wide variety of pretty stones (husband says I get kind of feral), but I exercised restraint and only bought a few, my favorite being this stunning fluorite. The photos really don’t do justice to the gorgeous viridian bands next to the sky blue, sea green, and lavender.

In the last several years, as I’ve spent more time diving deeper into Tolkien, I’ve come to an appreciation of the above quoted portion of Thorin’s Song that I never really understood, even as an equally gemstone-feral child and teen and 20-something. That is, partly, an appreciations of the image of fashioning light—an intangible thing, a thing moving so fast, as fast as time can move. To catch light implies containing or holding it and by extension, stopping it. To shape (to wright) light implies altering it, taming it (imposing your will on it, to some degree or in some way), splitting and recombining it as it bounces around in its crystal cage.

This line also describes what might be considered the central visual metaphor or much of Tolkien’s work, encompassing the many literal and figurative uses of gems and light and their interactions in Tolkien’s Legendarium. It describes the function of The Silmarils, capturing and holding and giving forth forever some of the light of the Two Trees (which, in the later “round world” mythos, will themselves be hallowed by the pure, Eru-given light carried by Varda and Varda alone). It describes the splintering of light in Gandalf’s warning words to Saruman, in Tolkien’s own lamentation of the splintering of Art and Science as human endeavors, as well as in the image’s most prominent and powerful use: as the description of the shared and ever-continuing act of subcreation in Mythopoeia.

I sometimes wonder if Tolkien, as a child or young man, liked to sit and hold crystals and glass and gems (if he could find them) up close to his eye and watch the blooming world of color unfolding inside them, a tiny little universe shining in his fingers. I know I did (and, admittedly, still do).