Eru Ilúvatar

Not one of the Ainur

Eru Ilúvatar stands outside every classification in this atlas. He is placed under the Ainur here only because that is where a reader will look for him; he is not an Ainu and not a Vala, but the One who made the Ainur out of his own thought before anything else existed. The Elves called him Eru, the One, and Ilúvatar, the Father of All, and they were careful to use these names sparingly. Where the Valar are powers within the World, Eru is the source of the World and remains beyond it, in the Timeless Halls where the Ainur first sang. Everything that any Ainu can do is a delegated share of Eru's power, and the two things no Ainu can do, the creation of life and the granting of free will, belong to him alone. The Elves named this gift the Flame Imperishable, or the Secret Fire, which Melkor sought in the Void and never found, because it is with Eru and not a thing that can be taken.

The Music of the Ainur

The first recorded act of Eru is the making of the Ainur, whom he taught music, and the proposing to them of a mighty theme from which they were to make the Great Music. When Melkor introduced discord, Eru did not silence him; he raised a second theme, and then a third, weaving the rebellion into a design that Melkor could not disrupt, and at last stopped the Music with a single chord. He then rebuked Melkor, telling him that no theme could be played that did not have its source in Eru, and that whoever tried would prove in the end only to be an instrument of things more wonderful than he had imagined. This is the principle on which the whole history of Arda rests: evil is real and does real harm, but it cannot finally escape the design.

Eru then showed the Ainur a Vision of the World their song had shaped, and in it the Ainur saw the coming of the Elves and Men, whom Eru had devised alone in the third theme and whom the Ainur had not foreseen. Because they were of Eru's making and not the Ainur's, they were called the Children of Ilúvatar, and the Ainur loved them at once. Eru withdrew the Vision before its end, so that the Ainur do not know the completion of the story, and then he spoke the word Eä, let it be, and the Vision became a real World with the Flame Imperishable at its heart. He allowed those Ainur who wished to enter it, on condition that they remain bound to it until its end.

Interventions in Arda

Within the World Eru is almost always silent. The Valar govern in his name, and their appeal to him is treated as a last resort. But a handful of direct interventions are recorded, and each is a turning point.

The first is the adoption of the Dwarves. Aulë, impatient for the Children, made the Seven Fathers in secret, but they could only move as his thought moved them. Eru spoke to Aulë, who in grief and repentance raised his hammer to destroy them, and Eru stayed his hand: he had accepted the Dwarves and given them life and will of their own, on the condition that they sleep until the Elves had awakened.

The second is the granting of the Ents. When Yavanna feared for her trees, Manwë sought Eru's mind and returned with the promise that spirits would come to dwell among the growing things and protect them.

The third, and the greatest in scale, is the Downfall of Númenor. When Ar-Pharazôn landed his fleet on the shores of Aman in S.A. 3319, the Valar laid down their guardianship of the World and called on Eru. He opened a chasm in the sea that swallowed the fleet, buried the king and his army beneath falling hills, drowned Númenor entirely, and removed Aman and Tol Eressëa from the circles of the World, bending the seas so that ships sailing west now return to their starting point. Only the Elves' Straight Road still leads to the Blessed Realm. This is the one occasion in the histories when Eru acts by his own hand in the physical World, and it changes the shape of the Earth.

A fourth intervention is implied rather than stated. When Gandalf died on the peak of Zirakzigil after slaying the Balrog and was sent back with greater power, he said only that he had been sent back, without naming the sender. The Valar had sent him the first time; the return from death is treated as something beyond their authority, and Gandalf's phrasing suggests that the decision came from Eru himself. Similarly, Gandalf told Frodo that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker, hinting at a will above Sauron and above the Valar.

The Gift of Men

Eru's most disputed act is the fate he gave to Men. The Elves are bound to the World, and if slain their spirits go to the Halls of Mandos and may in time return. Men die and leave the World entirely, and even the Valar do not know where they go. Eru gave Men this mortality together with a freedom the Elves lack: they are not bound by the Music, and can shape their lives beyond it. The Elves called death the Gift of Ilúvatar to Men, and understood that Melkor had turned it into fear. The desire to escape the Gift, fed by Sauron, was what destroyed Númenor.

After the End

The Elves believed that at the end of Arda a Second Music would be sung before Eru, greater than the first, in which the Ainur and the Children would join, and in which the themes of Ilúvatar would at last be played rightly by all. They did not know what part Men would have in it, save that it would be a great one, and Tolkien left that hope, like much else concerning Eru, deliberately unexplained.

Eru has no fate; he is eternal and beyond the World, and the Elves believed that at the end of Arda he would preside over a Second Music greater than the first.