Sharing Silent Speech

Not super relevant to my post, but I thought this mural near my apartment looked similar to the illustrations of the Silmarils.

“The Palantíri could not themselves survey men’s minds, at unawares or unwilling, for the transference of thoughts depended on the wills of the user on either side, and thought (received as speech) was only transmittable by one stone to another in accord.” (Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, 411)

This is the final paragraph of Tolkien’s chapter on the Palantíri in the Unfinished Tales. The mention of “wills” sparked something in me, especially in relation to the discussion we had in class on Tuesday about whether the Palantíri were good or evil. Rereading this paragraph, I noticed that there was a footnote attached to it. A few pages later, I was reading Footnote 21, an elaboration by Tolkien on the nature of transferring thoughts via the Palantíri. It reads: “Two persons, each using a stone ‘in accord’ with the other, could converse, but not by sound, which the stones did not transmit. Looking one at the other they would exchange ‘thought’ – not their full or true thought, or their intentions, but ‘silent speech,’ the thoughts they wished to transmit (already formalized in linguistic form in their minds or actually spoken aloud), which would be received by their respondents and of course immediately transformed into ‘speech,’ and only reportable as such.” (Unfinished Tales, 415)

This footnote both illuminates the process of transferring thought via the Palantíri and muddies it. Jumping off the page is the oxymoron “silent speech,” which in its description seems more like thought because “silent speech” is not voiced. But Tolkien uses the term “silent speech” to differentiate this kind of communication from sharing thoughts, even writing that “silent speech” might have been spoken aloud before being communicated via the Palantíri. Silent speech is “already formalized in linguistic form in their minds or actually spoken aloud,” and so is differentiated from “full or true thought” which is not “formalized in linguistic form.” This characterizes silent speech as something more intentionally shaped (dare I say created) than thought. Where else do we see speech as a creative act? Well, Genesis.

This differentiation of silent speech from thought suggests that, in his description of the Palantíri, Tolkien figures the mind and its multitude of thoughts as a kind of nothingness out of which somethingness, or speech, arises. The mind, then, mimics the nothingness of the cosmos before creation, which Dorothy Sayers says only became nothingness when God spoke. “What I want to suggest is that Being (simply by being) creates Not-Being, not merely contemporaneously in the world of Space, but also in the whole extent of Time behind it…Or, to use the most familiar of all metaphors, ‘before’ light, there was neither light nor darkness; darkness is not darkness until light has made the concept of darkness possible” (Sayers 101). So thought is the darkness that is only darkness when the light of silent speech comes into being, and the Palantíri are the plain upon which silent speech is expressed. The instrumental role of the wills of each communicator then makes sense. Communicating through the Palantíri is only possible through an act of creation that establishes both being, the “silent speech,” and not-being, thought.

The Seven Palantíri - Art by Peter Pracownik, via tolkiengateway.net

What nags is that this suggests that thought, as a kind of not-being, is evil, or has the potential to become evil. Even the suggestion that thought is a form of not-being bothers me, a frequent woolgatherer. My thoughts feel very much like “being” to me, even if I do not always verbalize them. This reminds me of what Sayers says about writers sharing their creations: “his creation is safe from the interference of other wills only as long as it remains in his head” (Sayers 104). Perhaps my thoughts are neutral objects inside my head, and only by sharing them do they gain the potential for good and evil.

This brings to my mind a quote from Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando regarding the poet’s duty: “We must shape our words till they are the thinnest integument for our thoughts” (173). What a naïve and romantic thought, that a poet should craft their words to most accurately depict their thoughts! Throwing other important aspects of poetics aside, such as rhyme or meter, Woolf’s narrator takes the position that poetry’s value lies in how accurately it expresses thoughts. On the opposing side, we have the Palantíri, which appear as battlegrounds for two wills and what they wish to reveal and conceal (at least when we encounter them in The Lord of the Rings). Even our hardy hero, Aragorn, returns exhausted following his battle of wills with Sauron through the Orthanc stone. Like poetry, “secret speech” is a medium for conveying thoughts, but unlike poetry in Orlando, it seeks to conceal thoughts rather than reveal their full nature. I use the word “conceal” because that is how I envision the interaction between Aragorn and Sauron going. That said, I do not think that the secret speech is meant to conceal thought so much as it is meant to refine it. After all, who would want to reveal the entire messy contents of their mind to another (even if to spare the other person from all that disorganization)?

What increasingly emerges to me is the essential communal nature of secret speech, and the relationship between communality and good and evil. Secret speech is only necessary when one person wants to share something with another. This is also when artistic mediums like painting, writing, or music become necessary. Sayers writes that “we may redeem the Fall by a creative act” (107). In his writings about exchanging thoughts via the Palantíri, the value of the stones is not only in translating one’s disordered thoughts into secret speech, but also in sharing this secret speech with another. Sayers does not emphasize community too much in “Maker of All Things—Maker of Ill Things,” but I think it underlies this statement about the anti-Hamlets: “That is to say, it is possible to take its evil Power and turn it into active good. We can, for example, enjoy a good laugh at David Garrick” (106). Key here is the “we.” Collectively, we can laugh at David Garrick, and this turns the evil into a new form of Good. We can all detest the Amazon adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, but in discussing it with each other, we have made it Good. To further disrupt Amazon’s attempt to profit off Tolkien’s creation, we are doing so in a very low-tech way: in the classroom, and simultaneously persuading anyone who was thinking of watching it to avoid that at all costs. A clever transformation of evil indeed.

-ACB

My edition of Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle Earth is the following: 

Tolkien, J. R. R. Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. Houghton Mifflin, 1980.