"Elves (and Hobbits) always refer to the Sun as She": Some Notes on a Note in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings

In Chapter Nine of the first book of The Fellowship of the Ring, "At the Sign of the Prancing Pony," Frodo sings a song recounting the Man of the Moon's adventures at an inn, what T. A. Shippey might refer to as an asterisk-song,¹ a reconstructed original of which the English nursery rhyme The Cat and the Fiddle² is a surviving fragment.³ In the last stanza of Frodo's song the Sun is referred to as female, and Tolkien provides a note of explanation: "Elves (and Hobbits) always refer to the Sun as She" (FR, I, ix, 172).⁴ This note tells us something about Elvish (and Hobbitish) practice, but it also reveals much more, functioning as a key to Tolkien's creative process, his sources, and the way philology informs his myth-making.

The note is necessary, of course, because the reference to the sun as female is surprising, at least to the modern reader. In the western world the sun is usually conceived of as masculine—it is the moon that is more commonly seen as feminine, and this association goes back a long way. The Romans associated Apollo with the sun and his sister Diana (Artemis in the Greek pantheon) with the moon, and in the classical tradition the other deities associated with sun and moon similarly fall along gender lines: the male gods Helios and Sol with the sun; the female goddesses Luna and Selene with the moon. The association of sun with male and moon with female is a strong one in the western tradition.

Tolkien was well aware of this tradition and his subversion of it, hinted at in FR, is given a larger explanation in The Silmarillion. Chapter Eleven of the Quenta Silmarillion, "Of the Sun and Moon and the Hiding of Valinor," explains how the sun and moon were created after the destruction of the Two Trees. In response to Yavanna's singing, Telperion bore one final flower of silver and Laurelin one last fruit of gold before they died, and for these Aulë fashioned vessels to be guided by two Maiar: a maiden Arien for the Sun and the youth Tilion for the Moon. Arien, a spirit of fire, had tended the gardens of golden flowers and Tilion had been a hunter with a silver bow (S 98-102).

The switch of gender in these guardians of the sun and moon is all the more noticeable because otherwise Tolkien keeps to familiar tradition—Tilion is a hunter associated with the bow just as is Diana/Artemis, and the supremacy of the sun is clear. While Arien is chosen by the Valar, Tilion must beg for the task of guiding the moon, and "Arien the maiden was mightier than he" (100); Morgoth assails Tilion but dares not attack Arien (101). Tilion is not only weaker but has other qualities normally associated with the "feminine" moon, particularly changeableness; further he is drawn towards Arien: "But Tilion was wayward and uncertain in speed, and held not to his appointed path; and he sought to come near to Arien, being drawn by her splendour . . . Tilion went with uncertain pace, as yet he goes, and was still drawn towards Arien, as he shall ever be" (100, 101). Thus Tolkien maintains the essential qualities familiar from classical western tradition: the guardian of the moon is a hunter, lesser and more wayward than the guardian of the sun, being drawn towards the sun; the guardian of the sun is fiery and strong: "she was as a naked flame, terrible in the fullness of her splendour" (100). The main associations of sun and moon, largely a function of the innate characteristics of the astronomical bodies themselves (the brightness of the sun, the phases of the moon, etc.), remain intact but the traditional gender binary opposition is reversed.⁵

But Tolkien is working not only with a mythological tradition, he is working with a philological one, and as is so often the case with Tolkien...