December 2027 Modules

"Aldarion and Erendis" is the longest sustained narrative in Unfinished Tales, and one of the strangest things Tolkien ever wrote: a domestic tragedy set against the founding centuries of Númenor, in which a king's marriage collapses not through betrayal or villainy but through two people wanting incompatible lives. Aldarion's sea-longing and Erendis's growing hatred of the ships that take him are never resolved into who is to blame; the text lets both positions stand, and lets us watch a woman construct an entire alternative household at Emerië in response to a husband who cannot stop leaving.

This course reads the tale slowly and in full, treating its incompleteness not as a deficiency but as a genuine interpretive problem: what does it mean that Tolkien's most searching account of a marriage's failure was left, quite literally, unfinished?

Across four weeks we will trace the story from Aldarion's restless youth through Erendis's withdrawal, and the wreck of the marriage to its long echo in their daughter Ancalimë, whose own life becomes a kind of inherited argument between her parents. Sessions will pay close attention to the tale's rhetorical set-pieces - Erendis's speech on the nature of Númenórean men, Núneth's counsel, Gil-galad's letter to Meneldur - and to the way domestic and political registers keep bleeding into each other, so that a quarrel about a husband's absences turns out to be inseparable from questions of succession law, colonial expansion, and the slow drift toward the Downfall.

Students should expect discussion-driven sessions grounded in close textual work; the aim is to arrive, by the final week, at a considered collective view of what this fragment is actually doing, and why Tolkien could neither finish it nor let it go.

The module will follow an 8-session structure as shown below:

Outline	8-Session Structure
Week 1	Session 1: An Unfinished Thing: This opening session establishes the textual status of “Aldarion and Erendis” before any close argument begins: what kind of object we are reading, and what its incompleteness asks of us as readers.
	Session 2: The Sea-Longing: Having established the tale’s frame, this session turns to Aldarion himself: the founding of the Guild of Venturers, his refusal of a fixed household, and the widening rift with Meneldur over trees, timber, and the uses of Middle-earth.
Week 2	Session 3: "The Bough of Return: This session introduces Erendis and examines the tale’s habit of conducting courtship through objects — the bough of oiolairë, a diamond, a jewel — rather than through declared feeling.
	Session 4 Two Years, Then No More: This session follows the long betrothal through its central negotiation on the path up the Meneltarma — the exchange of tree and jewel — and asks what kind of promise each party believes they are making.
Week 3	Session 5: Emerië: With the marriage established, this session examines Erendis’s withdrawal to Emerië and the household she builds there — a counter-kingdom of women, sheep, and silence.
	Session 6: “Men in Númenor are half-Elves”: This session is built around the tale’s two great pieces of sustained rhetoric: Erendis’s speech to Ancalimë on the nature of Númenórean men, and Gil-galad’s letter to Meneldur on the nature of a gathering shadow.
Week 4	Session 7: Emerwen Aranel: The final week turns to Ancalimë as the inheritor of her parents’ unresolved conflict: her flight into disguise, her courtship by Hallacar, and the legal reform Aldarion enacts in direct response to his own failed marriage.
	Session 8 What the Fragment Refuses: The closing session steps back from close reading to synthesis.