Hail Earendel, Most Distant of Stars

 

One of the earliest appearing characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s sweeping mythology of Middle-earth is the celestial mariner Eärendil. A 1914 poem originally entitled “The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star” describes how he sails into the sunset “Tracking the Sun in his galleon” and into the “starless void,” chased by the ship of the moon.

As I have described elsewhere, Tolkien’s descriptions of Venus’s apparent motion in the sky along the ecliptic (both in this poem and elsewhere) are fairly accurate (Larsen 2011; “Cynewulf” 2021). Éarendel (later spelled Eärendel and finally Eärendil) eventually evolved into one of the famous Half-elven (born of a human father and elvish mother) and the father of Elrond of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings fame. His brilliance is explained as the light emitted by one of the Silmaril jewels that he bore into the heavens; some of this light is captured in the phial of Galadriel, used by Frodo and Sam in Shelob’s lair. Frodo cries out in Elvish "aiya Eärendil elenion ancalima!" – "hail Eärendil, brightest of stars!" – while brandishing the Elvish flashlight.

Tolkien’s inspiration for the character is well-known, thanks to a lengthy 1967 letter draft. As a college student Tolkien read the Crist of Cynewulf in the Exeter Book, and one couplet in particular resonated with him:

 

Hail Éarendel brightest of angels,

over middle-earth sent unto men.

 

Tolkien notes that the reference is “Often supposed to refer to Christ (or Mary), but comparison with Bl[ickling] Hom[ilies] suggests that it refers to [John] the Baptist” (Letters 385). 

Tolkien was particularly struck by the beauty of the word Eärendel and felt that the Anglo-Saxon references suggested that it was “a star that presaged the dawn” in other words “what we now call Venus” (Letters 385).

Fast-forward a century, and another college student, Brian Welch, a PhD candidate in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Johns Hopkins University, has discovered the light from a different star that has likewise “presaged the dawn,” in this case the dawn of the earliest stars in our universe. How appropriate that he has named it Earendel after what he describes in the peer-reviewed scientific paper that recently appeared in the august journal Nature as “the Old English word meaning ‘morning star,’ or ‘rising light’” (Welch et al. 816). According to an article on the slightly less highbrow Washington Post website, Welch more casually notes that the name “sounds cool” and acknowledged that “‘Earendil’ is the name of a character in J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘The Silmarillion,’ which also inspired the name” (Achenbach).

It should be noted that this is certainly not the first time that a celestial object (or fish species or fossil species for that matter) was named in homage to Tolkien’s created universe (Larsen 2007; “Adapting” 2021). For example, mountains on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, are named after mountains in Middle-earth, while other features are named for characters such as Gandalf, Arwen, and Faramir.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia20024-mountains-of-titan-map-2016-update 

The discovery of the highly-magnified starlight that has traveled across the known universe to reach us nearly 13 billion years after it was emitted is truly a worthy namesake of a Silmaril. But rather than the light from the Two Trees of Valinor, this Earendel bears primordial light of a different sort – if not a member of the original generation of stars in our universe then perhaps only one generation removed. As such, it has much to teach us about how stars formed in our universe.

For those of you who are not astrophysicists, I will explain how Earendel was discovered. According to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity (the foundation of our understanding of black holes, for example), gravity is the bending of the 4-dimensional fabric of the universe (called space-time) by the presence of matter and energy. A galaxy has a high mass (a trillion times the mass of our sun or more); a cluster of galaxies has an even higher mass. When the light from a more distant object (a galaxy for example) passes through a foreground galaxy cluster the gravity of the cluster warps space-time, resulting in us here on earth seeing a distorted image of the background galaxy (like using a funhouse mirror). This is called gravitational lensing. Often the image of the more distant galaxy is stretched out into an elongated arc.

At the center of this ESA/NASAphoto above is a cluster of galaxies that is “only” 4.6 billion light years away. The arcs of light in the upper right corner are the distorted images of a far more distant (11 billion light years away) galaxy called the Sunburst Arc galaxy.

In the case of Earendel, a foreground galaxy cluster named WHL0137-08 “lenses” the light from a background galaxy WHL0137-zD1 nicknamed the Sunrise Arc.

But due to the geometrical alignment of both the background galaxy and the foreground cluster, one particular star was lensed more than average, like cranking up the magnification in your telescope to look at the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. This is Earendel (designated with the arrow in the photo above). While the light is too dim for the Hubble Space Telescope to tell us much about the star, the newly launched James Webb Telescope should give us a better idea which stellar generation Earendel belongs to. With a bit of luck, we will learn more about the Song of the Ainur, or at the very least, about Varda’s kindling of the stars.

 

Achenbach, Joel (2022) “Hubble Telescope Detects Most Distant Star Ever Seen, Near Cosmic Dawn.” Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2022/03/30/most-distant-star/

Larsen, Kristine (2007) "SAURON, Mount Doom, and Elvish Moths: The Influence of Tolkien on Modern Science." Tolkien Studies 4: 223-33.

Larsen, Kristine (2011) "Sea Birds and Morning Stars: Ceyx, Alcyone, and the Many Metamorphoses of Eärendil and Elwing." Tolkien and the Study of His Sources: Critical Essays, edited by Jason Fisher. McFarland Publishers, 69-83.

Larsen, Kristine (2021) “Adapting Tolkien Beyond Arda, or, How to Navigate the Political Minefield of the International Astronomical Union in Order to Name Features on Titan, Pluto, and Charon after Middle-earth.” Adapting Tolkien, Proceedings of the Tolkien Society Seminar 2020, edited by Will Sherwood, The Tolkien Society, 127-46.

Larsen, Kristine (2021) “Cynewulf, Copernicus, and Conjunctions: The Problems of Cytherean Motions in Tolkien’s Cosmology.” Journal of Tolkien Research 13(1), article 2. https://scholar.valpo.edu/journaloftolkienresearch/vol13/iss1/2/

Larsen, Kristine (2021) “Can You Tell Me How to Get, How to Get to Watling Street? [The Milky Way in the Works of Tolkien]” Mallorn: Journal of the Tolkien Society No. 62: 41-4.

STSI (2022) “Record Broken: Hubble Spots Farthest Star Ever Seen.” Hubblesite, https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2022/news-2022-003

Tolkien, J.R.R. (1981) The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter.  Houghton Mifflin.

Welch, Brian, et al. (2022) “A Highly Magnified Star at Redshift 6.2.” Nature 603: 815-8.