Makar and Measse

[redline2200]

Does anyone have any theories about why Tolkien took out Makar and Measse (sp-don't have the book with me)? I personally enjoyed reading about them, and when I read farther and found out that they didn't exist, I was a little let down. Does anyone feel the same way?

 

[Inderjit S]

They just didn't fit in with Tolkien's latter conceptions of the Ainur as opposed tthe more primitive Lost Tales.

 

[jallan]

In the notes at the end of “The Coming of the Valar” in The Book of Lost Tales I (HoME 1), Christopher Tolkien wrote about his father’s later conceptions:

... and of course the hall of Makar and Meássë (where the life described owes something to the myths of the Unending Battle in ancient Scandinavia) disappeared with the disappearance of those divinities – a ‘Melko-faction’ in Valinor that was bound to prove an embarrassment.

Tolkien was probably looking on war as at best a necessary evil, and perhaps felt a god and goddess of war really didn’t fit.

However, it is not impossible that Tolkien just demoted them to what would later be called Maiar, possibly in the service of Tulkas.

Since Tolkien gives us no very full picture of the Valar and their followers after the Lost Tales period, one really can’t prove they were altogether gone.