The Mighty

We are going through another peculiar convergence in the Tolkien Blogosphere, like the time we all decided to talk about smells.  Though the concept is too subtle for me, it may be another example of co-inherence. This time, we’re all thinking about Éowyn and the Witch-King.  Jerry started us off with a bedtime story for his daughter.  Then Tom picked up on the “Houses of Lamentation” mystery.[1]

I’ve been working from the classic English-teacher’s advice to pick on something that seems odd in a text, follow it, and see where it goes.  Here’s something that sounded odd to me:

But suddenly he too stumbled forward with a cry of bitter pain, and his stroke went wide, driving into the ground. Merry’s sword had stabbed him from behind, shearing through the black mantle, and passing up beneath the hauberk had pierced the sinew behind his mighty knee.

LotR, V, vi

Ask any aging athlete [2]: “mighty” is not the word for a knee. What could JRRT have meant by it?  The dictionary says “mighty” has three definitions: being very strong, being very powerful, or being very large.  None of them seems to fit. Come to think of it, Eärendil was “a mighty mariner”. I assume he was not extraordinarily large. I haven’t done much marining in my life, but I do know that the water is going to do as it wills, and the mariner just has to go along with it, so “strong” seems out of the question, too.  He must have been powerful, therefore.

This sounds like a job for a textual analysis.  What does JRRT use the word to mean?  I used an e-text of LotR and The Silmarillion to search for “mighty”, “mightier”, and “mightiest”, so see what it meant.  The word was used 104 times in LotR and 135 in The Silmarillion (all the parts; not just the Quenta). The frequency of the various meanings are in Figure 1.

Fig 1. Meanings of the word Mighty. Arrows point from Silmarillion to LotR

The usage of the word is fairly consistent between the two books, with two exceptions.  The first is in the sense of “powerful”, which shows a big drop from the Elder Days, and accounts for the total difference between the two books.

The second difference is in the use of “mighty” as an adverb, synonymous with “very”.  Nobody in the Silmarillion talks like that.  In LotR, most of the people who talk like that are hobbits. The complete list of people who say that is: Frodo, Sam, Pippin, Maggot, the Gaffer, Treebeard, and the talking fox. We can assume the fox learned to talk by listening to hobbits, but what’s Treebeard doing in there?  It’s a mystery. (I turned that into a trivia question on Twitter. Congratulations to Emily Austin for solving the puzzle.)

Now, what are people talking about when they call something “mighty”? This shows a major theme of Tolkien’s Legendarium, and it’s in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Things that are mighty. Arrows point from Silmarillion to LotR

The legendarium, in one sense, is about the twilight of the gods, the transfer of power to us little folk, and so it can be seen here.  The Valar drop out of the picture completely. The Maiar are propped up only by Gandalf and Saruman. The Elves drop by 3/4.  The word “mighty” becomes the province of Men, the things they construct, and the natural world. Notably, Men were mighty even in the Elder Days, second only to the Elves, and they increase their share in the Third Age.  The Numenoreans are described as “mighty” more often than any other single entity, in both books.

The Enemy is mighty nine times in each book. The monsters that the Enemy created drop out almost entirely – only Old Man Willow is left, where dragons once walked that page of the dictionary.

So What?

All this has confirmed that Tolkien used the word “mighty” for a reason, but it doesn’t bring us any closer to understanding the Witch-King’s knee than I was before.  Maybe it just looked big, compared to Merry.  Maybe it’s there to make a good iambic trimeter to finish the paragraph.  Eärendil is easier: he’s chosen the Elven kind, and he gets the adjective that the Elves get in the Elder days, and which goes with them when they leave the story.

Another thing to wonder about is the characters who are not mighty.  Among the good guys, the Ents are not mighty, though trees often are.  Among the bad guys, Ungoliant and Shelob are not mighty, whether due to sexism or arachnophobia is beyond me to say. And Bombadil is not mighty either, which is a triumph of style.

[1] It did not occur to me that I was joining a Tom-and-Jerry cartoon until just now.
[2] Also antique acrobats and ancient astronauts.