Power and Desire: The Silmarils vs The One Ring by StarSpray

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Fanwork Notes

This was begun in a fit of pique over seeing one too many takes in fandom that flatten the Silmarils and the Ring into interchangeable & destructive objects, and finished for the Analysing Arda challenge for the 2023 Jubilee amnesty.

Fanwork Information

Summary:

What do the Silmarils and the Ring have in common? They are both the titular objects of their respective books around which the major plot turns, it is true. They are both made by powerful individuals, and are desired by many different people, and when they are lost and/or stolen their makers are desperate to retrieve them. Characters die for them, and kill for them. At this extremely surface level reading they do, indeed, seem very similar. But the deeper you look at each object the more glaring differences show themselves, until you realize that they do not parallel, but rather oppose each other.

Major Characters:

Major Relationships:

Genre: Nonfiction/Meta

Challenges: Analysing Arda, Jubilee

Rating: General

Warnings:

Chapters: 1 Word Count: 4, 391
Posted on 22 January 2023 Updated on 24 January 2023

This fanwork is complete.

Table of Contents

Power and Desire: The Silmarils vs The One Ring

Comments

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A convincing and interesting enumeration of the contrast between the One Ring and the Silmarils from canon.

Fanfics have offered other interpretations of the effect or power of the Silmarils, of course, but it is probably wisest to look upon those as coming from AUs straying into fanon. 

Thank you!

Honestly, it's the takes and fanworks that treat the Silmarils as Ring-like as a kind of widespread fanon is what I'm hoping/trying to push back against with this essay. People can fandom how they want but they all seem to be coming at it from the perspective that characters becoming addicted to the Silmaril like it's the One Ring is canon, or at least canon-compliant, and it's just not.

....one reason that the "addictive Silmaril" trope is so pervasive is that it allows people to forgive or justify as external:

  • the actions of Fëanáro hiding their light instead of sharing;*
  • him not agreeing to give them to Yavanna to repair the trees;* 
  • Thingol keeping it from the Fëanorians;*
  • the dwarves of Nogrod then killing him for it;*
  • Dior keeping it when the Fëanorians asked;* and
  • Elwing then keeping it when the Fëanorians asked.* 

* [because he/they/she are addicted] 

I agree that this isn't a valid canon interpretation! 

I'm glad someone has written on the distinction between these two literary devices. The SIlmarillion is replete with almost explicitly gnostic themes; a parallel of the demiurge who twists creation and claims thereby to have 'made' it and to thus be owner and ruler of it. Shards of the light of heaven trapped by artifice and stolen by the demiurge. A millenia long conflict to liberate the light. Sauron's ring is largely a magical token whereby all other magic is nullified and shackled. It's representative a  long list of other modern and post modern ills as well.

The SIlmarillion was meant to be the Ur Text, so the ills flowing from the imperfection of efforts to 'free the light' from Melkor carry on quite naturally into LotR.