Mandos

But Feanor stole them anyway, and the Noldor went north through the unmeasured dark with Telerin blood on their hands.

Then we get the dark figure on the rock above the shore, Mandos, speaking the doom of the Noldor, and that's where we'll start.

"'Tears unnumbered ye shall shed, and the Valar will fence Valinor against you and shut you out, so that not even the echo of your lamentation shall pass over the mountains.' On the house of Feanor the wrath of the Valar lieth from the west unto the uttermost east, and upon all that will follow them it shall be laid also.

Their oath shall drive them, and yet betray them, and ever snatch away the very treasures that they have sworn to pursue.

Ye have spilled the blood of your kindred unrighteously, and have stained the land of Ammon.

For blood ye shall render blood, and beyond Ammon ye shall dwell in death's shadow.

For though Eru appointed to you to die not in Ea, and no sickness may assail you, yet slain ye may be, and slain ye shall be, by weapon, and by torment, and by grief." and your houseless spirits shall come then to Mandos.

There long shall ye abide and yearn for your bodies, and find little pity, though all whom ye have slain should entreat for you.

Right? We talked about his name way back in week 69.

His name means the judge, and his house is Mandos.

So when Mandos stands on that rock on Saturday and pronounces the doom of the Noldor, he's not cursing them.

He's just sentencing them.

And listen to what Fëanor does with the word in reply.

It goes a little bit further than that, too.

The mountain wall of Aman is the Pelori, which we did back in week 91, the fencing heights.

And look what Mandos actually says this coming Saturday.

Almost like how...

I'm not going to remember which Valor it is that does the writing in the Halls of Mandos, but... almost like that but in like pictorial form yeah

yeah yeah that'd be pretty cool that would be pretty cool and i would imagine especially in a place like valinor there's artwork everywhere all the buildings are probably painted the walls are probably painted i mean you could you could even focus on that why do paintings when you could just paint like entire scenes on walls for people as they walk through the city center or that sort of thing

Yeah.

But then you also have statements like, when Manwe, and especially Manwe and Varda, were standing at the top of Tenequatel, they could see all distances and hear all things, that sort of thing.

So I would imagine that they would sometimes bring others up there too, in order to say like, Hey, look over there, check that out.

You know, like maybe that's a thing, but also if you're, if you and Mandos are hanging out in the halls of Mandos and these souls keep showing up, I'm sure they're telling you their stories.

Yeah.

There they beheld suddenly a dark figure standing high upon a rock that looked down upon the shore.

Some say that it was Mandos himself, and no lesser herald of Manwe.

And they heard a loud voice, solemn and terrible, that bade them stand and give ear.

Then all halted and stood still.

Yeah.

And that's where... which is the Valar is it Mandros right or Mandos

keep

forgetting maybe Mandos yeah he comes and curses them that you know you'll go off to Valinor you're on your own we will not help you and pretty much what was the oath of the house of Fëanor has become its curse and then yeah as you said they all get transported kind of like part way to the middle earth you can say And then, as he said, Feynord and his host, smaller host, you know, go.

And then he's in front of Finn Goldfinch's much larger host.

He just burns the ship.

There's no conflict in the history of Tolkien's lore on Arda that matches.

It is supposed to, like, if you take the strength, it's supposed to say hundreds of thousands of elves, dwarves, and Edain, the host of great eagles, all the Valar.

If you think about all the tales that people know of in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and even in The Silmarillion, there are very few examples of justice being meted out in any sort of legal way or any authoritative way.

There's the first in The Silmarillion that occurs that I remember anyway is The Doom of Mandos, where he judges the...

the valor and tells them what's going to happen if they continue on their path and what what his judgment will be and of course it does happen because the fianor and the noldor are too uh too self-centered to turn aside from their two two on fire um to turn aside so and we actually see in this chapter a reflection of i say mandos's doom in the beginning But it's very interesting to me because one of the questions that keeps coming up for our discussion is how culpable is Turin for his actions? How much of his actions are due to this curse of Morgoth that lies upon him like a shadow and influences his actions? And how much is he responsible? Um, the obvious two, um, bipolar options are not it, you know, he's not, it's not like the curse of Morgoth has no effect on him and he's just a, a twisted character, an Eric of Melnibone from, um, Stormbringer Chronicles or something, some antihero sort of character, um, or even a character on the, that, that is the source of his own, um, in one way downfall like Hamlet.

Um, It's not all him, but it's also not that he's a puppet of Morgoth.

This is why I always die with... like royal family oriented fiction because it's this idea of like this one guy has a obsession and therefore the entire country must bend to this insane bullshit it makes sense and it's very real but it doesn't make me happy no exactly um and that brings us to the punishment

of the noldor fuck Otherwise known as the Doom of Mandos.

So if you remember Mandos, the judgment, effectively the Hades, god of the dead, of this setting.

The exiled Noldor aboard all of their stolen ships had scarcely left the shores of Valinor before they were halted by a lone figure standing before the ships.

Huge figure.

It was Lord Mandos.

um the valor the doomsman of the valor had come not with an army not with weapons but with prophecy his words became known as the doom of mandos perhaps the most famous prophecy in tolkien's legendarium um Among saying, tears unnumbered ye shall shed, he declared that the Valar would close Valinor forever against the exiled Noldor.

They were never to return, no matter what happened.

And but, you know, here's, here's what's interesting from a judgment perspective, um, and we'll, I'll talk more about this, uh, next, next time too.

But, uh, it says, uh, after Saeros is dead, his, he's broken upon the rocks below, uh, Tolkien writes, "So he ended his life in Doriath," that's Saeros, "and long would Mandos hold him."

Right.

So in other words, the judgment of the Valar is brought in here, and Mandos, for those that don't recall, is one of the great, um, one of the greatest of the Valar.

He's one of the top seven, um, of the great Valar.

[laughs]

Yes, right

... greater and seven lesser, and then there's Morgoth, or Melkor as he was.