Death, Grief, and the Other in the "Quenta Silmarillion" by Dawn Walls-Thumma

Death, Grief, and the Other in the "Quenta Silmarillion"

Find the presentation slideshow here.

View a video of the presentation here (YouTube).

The legendarium of J.R.R. Tolkien is often recognized by fans and scholars as a linguistic playground where Tolkien, a career philologist, could not just invent languages but use them within the context of an imagined world with its own history, watching how they unfold and change over time. Less acknowledged but no less present is how Tolkien's legendarium functions as historiography. Tolkien was very intentional in his pseudohistorical constructions, inventing narrators and alluding to layers of oral and textual traditions underneath whatever text you might be reading at the time. At multiple points in his letters, he spoke of the artistic appeal of such an approach, describing the appeal of "unattainable vistas" available only as a glimpse on a mist-shrouded horizon.1 As a literary technique, these "unattainable vistas" function similarly to the edges of a map or the margins of a page, inviting us to imagine what we cannot see but know must lie beyond what has been made available to us. New discoveries, in turn, open new vistas, creating a world that can never be fully known. (Tolkien blamed the constant discovery of—and imaginatively traipsing into—new vistas for his difficulty in finishing The Lord of the Rings.2)

In some instances, the historiographical features of the texts of the legendarium are blatant and easily detected. In some of the texts that formed the published Silmarillion, published in The History of Middle-earth, Tolkien includes elaborate preambles that identify not just the narrator but the process of transmission. In most cases, though—and especially in the published Silmarillion—Tolkien's historiographical devices are far subtler, a fact produced partly by Christopher Tolkien's editorial decision to remove all attributions to the narrators.3 As I've researched the narrators of The Silmarillion over the better part of a decade now, I frequently encounter scholars who assert that The Silmarillion is written from an omniscient point of view.

This is not only false but a misunderstanding with important consequences. If Arda is a land of unattainable vistas, an omniscient narrator plops a painted backdrop in the middle of the living, boundless landscape. Instead of allowing for the possibility that every person we encounter hastens off to his or her own story, with his or her own vistas, what we see simply is with no allowance for other points of view. There is no assembling of glimpses through the mist, no imagining the unseen, at least in terms of point of view.

This is true of the cultures of Arda as well. What The Silmarillion tells us simply is. Dwarves are stoic. Avari are wild. Orcs are evil.

But if the narrator of The Silmarillion is not omniscient, that calculus changes. None of those things have to be true, and there are as many "Silmarillions" as there are people within it. Furthermore, if we can identify the narrator or narrators of The Silmarillion, we can analyze and even challenge some of those assumptions. As a history teacher myself, I urge my students to consider how we know what we know about the past and who is telling the story. If we apply similar ways of reading to the legendarium, we discover that the gaps and fabrications tend to fall where we'd expect them to, based on the narrator telling the story. It is subtle but marks Tolkien's brilliance not just as a philologist but a historiographer.

Today, I want to apply this approach to reading The Silmarillion as history to the concept of the Other. By definition, the Other is different from the dominant group in key, noticeable ways. The Other doesn't have to be an outsider or a minority—but can be. In many cases, the Other is viewed as inferior, even subhuman.

So who is the Other in The Silmarillion? First, we must identify the point of view from which The Silmarillion is told—the narrator. As the historian E.H. Carr observed in a 1961 lecture given at the University of Cambridge, "when we take up a work of history, our first concern should be not with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it."4 That person, within the legendarium, who "wrote" the "Silmarillion" defines who we, as readers, come to see as the Other. For today's purposes, I am going to focus only on the Quenta Silmarillion, the third and longest "book" of the published text, which contains the history of the First Age. So who wrote the Quenta Silmarillion? Thanks to Christopher Tolkien's effort to publish much of the material that informed the published Silmarillion, we are able to answer that question with a fair degree of confidence.

By the early 1930s, the first texts emerged that, when held next to the published volume, are easily recognizable as "Silmarillion" texts. Some of these texts were written as historical annals, and the first set of these attribute a narrator called Pengolod the Wise, identifying him as an Elf of Gondolin who, after its fall, ended up at Sirion's Haven and later returned west to Tol Eressëa.5 Thirty years later, Tolkien would expand Pengolodh's biography in a text called Quendi and Eldar, to add that he was of mixed Sindarin-Noldorin ancestry and spent part of the Second Age in Khazad-dûm.6 In those thirty years, Tolkien's vision of how the history of the First Age and earlier eventually arrived in Bilbo's hands in Rivendell took shape. Rúmil—the same Noldo who invented writing—penned the Aman materials, which Pengolodh took up, adding to it the history of Beleriand.7 The exception to this was the material about Túrin Turambar: This material was authored by Dírhaval of the Havens, a Mortal poet who collected material from disparate sources at the Havens, authoring from it The Children of Húrin.8 Note, however, that Pengolodh and Dírhaval's paths collide at the Havens of Sirion, where the traditions of the three narrators experience an overlap. The common denominator of all three—the character who both survived and ventured forth to carry what he learned beyond the First Age—is Pengolodh. The map below—which is not geographically precise, as it attempts to meld the geographies of three ages into one—shows the three narrators. Rúmil and Dírhaval stay put, but Pengolodh encounters their work and carries it far and wide. From this central hub at the Havens at Sirion, Pengolodh also encounters Elros—whose founding of Númenor brings his people into contact with the Elves of Tol Eressëa, which will eventually include Pengolodh—and Elrond, who establishes Imladris. Imladris has a famed library, and the Númenóreans who escape their island's inundation will come to found Minas Tirith, with its own library. From these sources come the Hobbits' Red Book of Westmarch—and so Pengolodh's thread is present throughout the transmission of the histories of Middle-earth.

The Other, then, from the point of view of Pengolodh, includes not just groups outside the Noldor and Sindar but even members of those groups who would have been unfamiliar to a narrator who lived most of his life hemmed inside the isolationist realm of Gondolin. Pengolodh's ignorances and biases as a narrator manifest in many forms across the "Silmarillion," again illustrating the subtle touch with which Tolkien presented his legendarium as historiography. One area where Pengolodh's point of view reveals itself is in how he presents death, grief, and mourning in the Quenta Silmarillion.

If you've read the Quenta Silmarillion, you know that it is a fruitful orchard of death. In just over 100,000 words, eighty-eight named characters die ninety deaths—Beren and Lúthien each die twice—in addition to the uncountable thousands of unnamed characters who perish in its pages. Back in April, I presented at the Tolkien at UVM Conference about historical bias, death, and grief in the Quenta Silmarillion,9 observing that, for all the death it contains, the Quenta Silmarillion is rather short on grief and mourning. Only 27% of named characters were grieved, and only 19% received some kind of mourning ritual: a funeral, monument, or memorial song. That makes these noteworthy events, and looking closer at who is grieved and mourned shows that almost all are characters who would have been favored by a narrator with Pengolodh's background. Characters whose existences had little bearing on the history Pengolodh deemed important—the vast majority of Mortals, for instance—go unmourned, their deaths noted in just a few words. Characters who Pengolodh would have viewed negatively, on the other hand, receive lengthier, even lavish, death scenes devoid of emotion or any mention of mourning: There is no suggestion that they were people worth grieving.

Grief and mourning, in other words, serve as a shorthand in The Silmarillion for Pengolodh's regard for certain characters. We can use death scenes, therefore, to analyze how Tolkien presented the Other through the point of view of Pengolodh.

Dwarves occupy an unusual status as the Other from Pengolodh's point of view. We know from the Elf-centric histories of The Silmarillion that Elves and Dwarves are often depicted at odds with each other. While they sometimes formed productive trade relations and military alliances, those allegiances are rarely depicted as warm. The Silmarillion describes the Dwarves as extremely skilled but difficult to get along with and tempted by greed. From this, we'd assume an Elf of "mixed Noldorin and Sindarin ancestry," like Pengolodh, who lived in Gondolin, a realm betrayed by Maeglin, one of the few Elves to form a warm relationship with the Dwarves, would not be inclined to humanize the Dwarves by accompanying their death scenes with grief and mourning, evidence that they were loved and missed by others around them after their deaths.

Recall, however, that Quendi and Eldar adds the important fact that Pengolodh spent time in Khazad-dûm in the Second Age. After the inundation of Beleriand, Tolkien describes the rise of the Noldorin realm of Eregion, in collaboration with Khazad-dûm, as a time where "friendship arose between Dwarves and Elves, such as has never elsewhere been, to the enrichment of both those peoples."10 Presumably, Pengolodh was a part of this allegiance and reaped the benefit of thawed relations between Elves and Dwarves to access Dwarven histories and perspectives.

There are only six named Dwarves in the Quenta Silmarillion, and three of them die, in addition to countless unnamed Dwarves, most of whom perish in the strife between the Dwarven city of Nogrod and Thingol's Elven realm of Doriath. These are some of the most poignant scenes of grief in the Quenta Silmarillion.

As noted early, expressions of grief and especially memorial rituals are rare in the Quenta Silmarillion. Two of the three named Dwarves who die receive both grief and some form of memorial action, and grief is a part—indeed a motive—for the attack on Doriath by the Dwarves of Nogrod. Azaghâl, the Lord of Belegost, dies driving the dragon Glaurung from the field during the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, at which point, "the Dwarves raised up the body of Azaghâl and bore it away; and with slow steps they walked behind singing a dirge in deep voices, as it were a funeral pomp in their country, and gave no heed more to their foes; and none dared to stay them."11

This moment is one of the most memorable in Pengolodh's telling of the Battle of Unnumbered Tears. Azaghâl and the Dwarves are described as possessing great dignity, and the power of their loss is suggested to be so powerful that they withhold the war around them long enough to exit the field. At the same time, there is an otherness to this scene. Pengolodh is careful to note that it is like "a funeral pomp in their country," marking them as outsiders and foreigners. The strangeness of the ritual is alluded to as at least part of the reason for its success in removing the Dwarves from battle: that "none dared stay them" suggests that the friends and foes alike around them were intimidated by the bold stoicism of the Dwarves in this scene—and this reinforces the stereotype of the Dwarves as stubborn and hardy beyond other groups.

Other death scenes involving Dwarves involve more typical displays of grief—but again, they involve grief, and in a text almost devoid of this most human of expressions, that is notable. When Mîm finds his son Khîm slain by an arrow shot by one of Túrin's band of outlaws, "he tore his beard, and wailed, crying one name unceasingly."12 His grief is so profound that he not only earns an apology from Túrin but the only example of weregild in the Quenta Silmarillion. When the Dwarves who set the Silmaril in the Nauglamír are slain on their way home, the grief of those in Nogrod is described in similar terms of wailing and tearing at beards.13

There is, in short, no doubt that the Dwarves feel powerful loss. They are Other, but they are humanized through their grief. This is important, given how grief and mourning are wielded by Pengolodh in other instances. Characters who Pengolodh would have viewed negatively—Fëanor and his sons, Eöl, and Maeglin—are given death scenes where grief, mourning, and any emotion associated with loss is conspicuously absent, creating an emotional vacuum around them that suggests their deeds leave them unworthy of love.

Dwarven characters receive the opposite treatment. Pengolodh seems to take pains to show Dwarven death alongside emotion. Even Mîm, who as the last of his kind did not have anyone left to grieve him, shows fear and begs for mercy when facing his death. This scene parallels the creation of the Dwarves, where Aulë also intends to slay them but is moved to pity by their fear and obvious humanity; in contrast, Húrin's decision to kill Mîm despite his pleas does not come across as entirely just.14 When showing the battle between Nogrod and Doriath, Pengolodh shows both sides sympathetically—perhaps a nod to the fact that he had sources among both the Dwarves and Doriathrim. He does not do this with other Elven characters and groups—the Fëanorians chief among them, who also attack Doriath over a Silmaril—making this sympathy noteworthy. It suggests that time in the company of the Other humanizes them for Pengolodh and shapes how he writes history involving them.

Another group positioned as the Other throughout the "Silmarillion" receives more mixed treatment: the Moriquendi, or Elves of the Darkness. Tolkien had a lot of terms for the varying groups of Elves, and these are difficult to untangle. The Avari, who refused the journey to Aman, are distinct from the Úmanyar who began the journey but failed to complete it for any number of reasons. Distinct within the Úmanyar are the Sindar or Grey-elves, so named because they never intended to abandon the journey and are seen as occupying a (pardon the pun) gray area between the light of Aman and the darkness of Middle-earth. All are classified as Moriquendi, a term that seems to suggest inferiority to at least some of the Noldor, given that it is used pejoratively by them.

The Moriquendi, save the Sindar, appear to occupy a gap in Pengolodh's knowledge, and he says very little about them. Only two named non-Sindarin Moriquendi die in the published text, and the difference in how these scenes are presented illustrate another important point in how Tolkien, through the point of view of mostly Pengolodh, presents the Other.

The first death scene involves Denethor, the king of the Green-elves of Ossiriand. Denethor receives the rare provision of grief from his people—but he died supporting the Sindar militarily, and their king, Thingol, is shown in a heroic light in this scene, as he bitterly avenges Denethor's death.15 This makes Denethor not just heroic in his own people's histories but in Sindarin history as well and likely accounts for the attention Pengolodh pays him here.

Eöl is technically a Sinda but, through his rejection of Doriath and his title "Dark Elf," is more closely aligned to the non-Sindarin Moriquendi. Eöl is the father of Maeglin, whose betrayal would later lead to the fall of Gondolin, Pengolodh's home. Eöl's death scene illustrates the profound lack of sympathy Pengolodh has for him. Unlike the death scenes of the Dwarves and Denethor, there is no grief or sorrow or any emotion at all beyond Eöl's apparent anger at his son Maeglin. Maeglin himself is emotionally barren, experiencing neither sadness nor grief nor anger as he becomes an orphan at the hands of the state. Note the language: Eöl literally "ends" according to Pengolodh, a term that denies Eöl's humanity so far that he is not even acknowledged as a living being (much less a human!) who has just died.16

The Dwarves, Denethor, and Eöl reveal an important tendency in Pengolodh when writing the Other: His own biases and experiences deeply influence how these characters are written, and grief and mourning are one way in which he extends humanity to some characters or groups over others.

Finally, there is the ultimate Other in The Silmarillion: the Orcs and other "servants of Melkor" who are depicted as unilaterally opposed to … well, everyone else. There is no "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" at play here; Pengolodh detests the Fëanorians and Eöl, and they all detest the servants of Melkor. Pengolodh uses death scenes involving the enemy to deprive them of humanity so that we understand that their deaths in the war are an indisputable good.

First, aside from a few high-ranking enemies who put up a considerable fight, none of the enemy characters are named. The closest an Orc in the Quenta Silmarillion comes to being depicted as an individual is the nameless Orc captain who brags about killing Barahir and is subsequently slain by Beren.17 Otherwise, Orcs exist in nameless, faceless hordes less like individual people and more like herds or swarms of animals, where the will of any individual is entirely subsumed by the intention of the group.

Naturally, there is no acknowledgement of grief or mourning among the servants of Melkor in the Quenta Silmarillion. There is no Orc-father sobbing over the body of his fallen son; there are no Orc-people who change their system of governance to memorialize a fallen leader. There is not even a mention of a revenge motive; instead, scenes of Orc-death show them as too overwhelmed by fear to act in anyone's interest but their own, becoming so terrified that they become a hysterical hive mind that is easily slain as a single unit. Apparently (in Pengolodh's view), they lack the kinds of emotional bonds that inspire revenge.

Tolkien, writing from Pengolodh's point of view, chooses language in death scenes involving the enemy, especially Orcs, that negates any humanity the reader might assume they possess. The first is the use of the word drive. In the Quenta Silmarillion, Tolkien uses several meanings of the word drive, and it often appears in death scenes, especially involving large numbers of unnamed Orcs. (See Appendix 1 for all uses of the word drive in death scenes in the Quenta Silmarillion.)

The word drive, as used in these scenes, is a word that removes the agency of its object. A person driven by another lacks autonomy and control. Furthermore, this usage brings to mind connotations to do with animals—such as driving cattle or other herds of tractable, witless beasts—or enslavement, as in a slave driver. Enslavement is a condition requiring dehumanization: a person reduced to a beast or to chattel.

In scenes involving Orcs or other enemies, they are often driven to their deaths, again evoking a brutish mob incapable of individual action or resistance. This also positions the driver as superior to the driven: a person effortlessly shepherding a horde of the enemy unto death. Note also that these scenes often involve the enemy being driven into an environment that is hostile to life, such as a desert or a river. This negates even the drama of battle, implied in other scenes where characters aligned with the forces of good are driven forth from their homes, and simply sends these Orcs en masse, in a terrified clamor before a superior foe, to be quietly gulped up by the landscape.

These death scenes also contain metaphors that compare Orcs to vegetation. Twice, Orcs are referred to as leaves, and once they are compared to "straw in a great fire."18 Again, these metaphors are dehumanizing and reinforce the idea of Orcs as lacking individuality and existing only as parts of a larger entity. Consider the metaphor of the leaves, used twice. Leaves from the same tree are indistinguishable from each other. They exist to provide—to serve, if you will—the larger organism from which they grow. They cannot survive independently. It is furthermore part of the life cycle of all leaves to perish, even if the plant from which they grow continues to survive. Barring disease or distress, the loss of leaves is not generally tragic for a tree; nor, we are given to understand, is the loss of Orcs a matter of sorrow or grief.

This makes the use of leaf metaphors to describe Orcs notable, especially given that trees generally represent positive concepts in the legendarium. Here, they represent something living, yes, but subsidiary to a larger organism, lacking individuality, unable to survive without it, and ultimately expendable. The fallen leaves and burning straw of these metaphors of Orc death again melt into the landscape without fanfare, leaving nothing behind worth grieving or memorializing.

Historically, in the Primary World, propaganda often reduces the enemy similarly to a horde composed not of individuals but of physically indistinguishable parts subservient to a larger (and sinister) cause. These hordes are described as going uncomplainingly to death, so long as it serves the larger cause, something foreign and frightening to a people who see and value the individuality of each person. Part of the terror—and therefore the effectiveness of the propaganda—is the implication of the erasure of one's sense of self. Victory of the enemy, we are given to understand, is death for all who are conquered. Even if the physical body survives, one's identity and being shall not. Pengolodh, through his choice of language, leverages a similar effect over both his in-universe audience and us, as readers. Elsewhere, Pengolodh shows characters in fear of their imminent deaths, like Mîm, or able to bravely face death, an act that we understand to be heroic. The deaths of Orcs, in their herd-like masses, we understand not as heroic but inevitable, like a drift of fading leaves in the autumn that will be gone by spring. Should the enemy win, says his message to his audience, we will be similarly subsumed.

Of course, people don't see themselves this way. They don't see themselves as merely meaningless parts that exist only to serve something grander than they are. Likewise, when characters or groups are presented this way in the Quenta Silmarillion, it is not because they see themselves as merely nameless "servants of Melkor," much less that this accurately describes them. It is the narrator's bias we are seeing and his use of death and expressions of grief and mourning to exculpate the violent actions of some characters by making meaningless the deaths of their victims.

Pengolodh, therefore, takes multiple approaches to how he writes the Other, and all are guided by his experiences and biases. When he is writing about characters with whom he has connected personally, such as the Dwarves, he depicts them sympathetically, showing them as capable of grief and mourning. When he cannot connect personally to a character or group, he follows the political biases of those around him, depicting Denethor of the Green-elves, for example, as a character worthy of veneration while presenting a character like Eöl in emotionally barren terms. Finally, there are characters and groups of characters, namely the Orcs, who are entirely dehumanized when he writes their deaths. Nameless and existing only as a mass subservient to Melkor, their deaths are written in the same terms as one would write about discarding an object. In all cases, though, these are Pengolodh's perspectives and biases. Once we become aware of this perspective and its limitations, other perspectives become possible: other vistas that expand the story infinitely beyond the words Tolkien left us on the page.

Notes

1. See Letters 151 to Hugh Brogan, 160 to Rayner Unwin, 214 to A.C. Nunn (draft), 241 to Jane Neave, and 247 to Colonel Worskett. Letter 96 to Christopher Tolkien expresses the same concept of the appeal of "untold stories."
2. Letter 241 to Jane Neave.
3. Douglas Charles Kane, Arda Reconstructed: The Creation of the Published Silmarillion (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2009), 253-54.
4. Carr, E.H. What Is History? The George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge January-March 1961, 2nd Edition, ed. R.W. Davies (Victoria: Penguin, 2008), 22.
5. From The Earliest Annals of Valinor (History of Middle-earth, Volume IV: The Shaping of Middle-earth), written around 1930: "​​These and the Annals of Beleriand were written by Pengolod the Wise of Gondolin, before its fall, and after at Sirion's Haven, and at Tavrobel in Tol Eressëa after his return unto the West, and there seen and translated by Eriol of Leithien, that is Ælfwine of the Angelcynn."
6. From Quendi and Eldar (History of Middle-earth, Volume XI: The War of the Jewels), written 1959-60:            
   "Of the School [of the Lambengolmor or "Loremasters of Tongues"] the most eminent member after the founder [Fëanor] was, or still is, Pengolodh, an Elf of mixed Sindarin and Ñoldorin ancestry, born in Nevrast, who lived in Gondolin from its foundation. He wrote both in Sindarin and in Quenya. He was one of the survivors of the destruction of Gondolin, from which he rescued a few ancient writings, and some of his own copies, compilations, and commentaries. It is due to this, and to his prodigious memory, that much of the knowledge of the Elder Days was preserved.            
   
   "All that has here been said concerning the Elvish names and their origins, and concerning the views of the older loremasters, is derived directly or indirectly from Pengolodh. For before the overthrow of Morgoth and the ruin of Beleriand, he collected much material among the survivors of the wars at Sirion's Mouth concerning languages and gesture-systems with which, owing to the isolation of Gondolin, he had not before had any direct acquaintance. Pengolodh is said to have remained in Middle-earth until far on into the Second Age for the furtherance of his enquiries, and for a while to have dwelt among the Dwarves of Cassarondo (Khazad-dûm). But when the shadow of Sauron fell upon Eriador, he left Middle-earth, the last of the Lambengolmor, and sailed to Eressëa, where maybe he still abides."            
   
   Key to note here is that everything stays the same from the biographical preamble to The Earliest Annals of Valinor; Tolkien has added details. Whether they emerged with this writing or were in place long before, it is of course impossible to know.
7. Rúmil is attributed authorship to numerous texts: the first Quenta Silmarillion, Ainulindalë, The Annals of Aman, and The Later Quenta Silmarillion (both phases).
8. History of Middle-earth, Volume XI: The War of the Jewels, "Ælfwine and Dírhaval."
9. Dawn Walls-Thumma, "Grief, Grieving, and Permission to Mourn in the Quenta Silmarillion." Presented at the Tolkien at UVM Conference, Burlington, VT, on 13 April 2024.
10. The Silmarillion, Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age.
11. The Silmarillion, "Of the Fifth Battle: Nirnaeth Arnoediad."
12. The Silmarillion, "Of Túrin Turambar." I want to note here that this is the text written by Dírhaval; however, Dírhaval's text was poetry, and this chapter is clearly prose. I need to do more research on the various iterations of Túrin's story (and their narrators) to see if I can determine to what extent Pengolodh may have been involved in this chapter. It seems like he may have put the poem into prose form, but I do not have solid evidence for that yet.
13. The Silmarillion, "Of the Ruin of Doriath."
14. Compare the two scenes:            
    "[T]he Dwarves shrank from the hammer and were afraid, and they bowed down their heads and begged for mercy." The Silmarillion, "Of Aulë and Yavanna."            
    "Then Mîm in great fear besought Húrin to take what he would, but to spare his life; but Húrin gave no heed to his prayer, and slew him there before the doors of Nargothrond." The Silmarillion, "Of the Ruin of Doriath."
15. "... Denethor was cut off and surrounded upon the hill of Amon Ereb. There he fell and all his nearest kin about him, before the host of Thingol could come to his aid. Bitterly though his fall was avenged, when Thingol came upon the rear of the Orcs and slew them in heaps, his people lamented him ever after and took no king again." The Silmarillion, "Of the Sindar." 
16. "Therefore when Eöl was brought before Turgon he found no mercy; and they led him forth to the Caragdûr, a precipice of black rock upon the north side of the hill of Gondolin, there to cast him down from the sheer walls of the city. And Maeglin stood by and said nothing; but at the last Eöl cried out: ‘So you forsake your father and his kin, ill-gotten son! Here shall you fail of all your hopes, and here may you yet die the same death as I.’ Then they cast Eöl over the Caragdûr, and so he ended, and to all in Gondolin it seemed just …." The Silmarillion, "Of Maeglin."
17. The Silmarillion, "Of Beren and Lúthien."
18. The two passages with vegetation metaphors are as follows; note that the second compares Orcs to both leaves and straw:            
    "Ten days that battle lasted, and from it returned of all the hosts that he had prepared for the conquest of Beleriand no more than a handful of leaves." The Silmarillion, "Of the Return of the Noldor."            
    "The Balrogs were destroyed, save some few that fled and hid themselves in caverns inaccessible at the roots of the earth; and the uncounted legions of the Orcs perished like straw in a great fire, or were swept like shrivelled leaves before a burning wind." The Silmarillion, "Of the Voyage of Eärendil and the War of Wrath."

Appendix 1: Uses of the Word Drive in Death Scenes in the Quenta Silmarillion

* The original narrator is Rúmil of Tirion.

** The original narrator of this text is Dírhaval of the Havens.