Does Gandalf Know the Sun is a ball of fusing hydrogen?

Back in June, I asked whether Gandalf knows about atoms. Today’s question is a simpler one. The Sun, as you may be aware, is a huge ball of mainly hydrogen burning in a fusion reaction caused by the Sun’s own gravity squishing its atoms together, more or less.

Alternatively, the sun is the last firey fruit of the golden tree Laurelin, rescued from its dying branches after it was murdered by Morgoth and the big-arse spider Ungoliant. The fruit was placed in a vessel and given to a demi-god who steers the burning fruit through the sky. The kind of fruit isn’t stated but it wasn’t a banana because that is technically a berry. Yet, even if it was a durian, that is quite a size difference.

No, I’m not trying to pick plot holes in Tolkein’s brilliant myth-making and unlike the previous discussion, this is not about the fundamental matter of middle-earth but about the role of realism in the story. It is something that is partly bugging me about the Rings of Power adaptation.

Tolkien implies that middle-earth is our Earth and by the Third Age, a lot has happened that makes the world less “mythic” and more legendary. Tolkien wasn’t trying to crudely create his own version of the Old Testament but there is a transition in the OT where we go from settings in which cosmic things happen to ones that become more clearly set in recognisable historical periods. In Tolkien’s lore we get a creation, then the first age in which cosmic events (such as the creation of the sun and moon) still occur and whose end is marked by the creation of a star – specifically the evening star is Eärendil with the last Silmaril on his brow.

The second age doesn’t add anything to the solar system but the fall of Numenor involves some further work on the geography and the implication that the Earth is now curved. That’s all good. As we progress through the ages, the physical world gets less one that is defined by stories about individual acts and more one that operates as great big chunks of rock.

Having said all that, unlike the Bible, in Tolkien’s sequence of events, these things happen within living memory – at least for some characters. Galadriel is in Lord of the Rings and she was an adult when the Sun was first created. Elrond is younger but the planet Venus is literally his dad sailing a magic ship with a glowing stone on his head.

I don’t think that is a huge problem for a live-action film adaptation of Lord of the Rings, for the central characters, these stories are legends. Yes, Gandalf is also a demi-god of the same class of being as the being who steers the sun across the sky but we don’t really get to see the world through Gandalf’s eyes nor is Gandalf wandering about as Silmarillion-literalist insisting that everything that happened in the legends is a stone-cold fact. Nobody asks Gandalf or Galadriel to describe exactly what kind of fruit the sun is, nor does anybody press Elrond to explain why, if Venus is his dad, who all the other visible planets are. Given everything we know about Tolkien and his faith, I’ve no reason to believe he was a biblical literalist either and he would have been intentionally using this gradient where all of the lore and stories are explanations of events as personal stories about love & death but which become more grounded over time in a reality that is recognisably our own.

I’ve said before, that what I’d really love to see is an animated adaptation of The Silmarillion as an anthology series, with different parts animated by different studios in different styles (with some continuity of character design). A live-action adaptation would undermine the mythic aspect of it.

That puts The Rings of Power’s second age setting in an odd place. Firstly, Elrond and Galadriel are central characters and secondly, at least one cosmic change is still yet to happen (the Earth is still sort of flat). Even if we assume the fruit-sun evolves over time to become a less-magical and more materialist ball-of-gas sun, during the Second Age it presumably is still small enough to be ORBITING a flat world. THAT IS FINE as a story! It just gets a bit weird in a live-action adaptation where part of the conceit is to imbue a story with a degree of physical realism. The Rings of Power feels like the world of the Lord of the Rings but cosmically and NARRATIVELY they are not. The Second Age is essentially in a setting that is a different genre of a fantasy world than the Third Age, one in which magic is more fundamental, more present and more relevant to how the world works at a physical level.

In the TV show, the character called The Stranger, who arrives on Middle-earth as a falling star is an attempt to add that kind of aspect to the show. The lead Harfoot states that the “stars are strange”, so there is a hint of a world in which the cosmic setting is still magically mutable. There is also a plot point towards the end, where the stranger sets out to THE EAST in an attempt to reach lands where the constellations are different. Observant viewers will know that on our planet, you’d need to head south to get a different bunch of stars. I don’t know if that was just an astronomical error on the writer’s part or them nodding at the cosmic mutability of the setting but I suspect the second.

The point is, the mythic sense (ie. a world in which gods may re-arrange the universe or your planet or do cosmic things) is something the show has to grapple with in a way The Lord of the Rings films do not.

Does Gandalf know the sun is a ball of burning gas? Sure but he also remembers when it was a fluorescent banana (which were still fruit back in his day).