promin-blog:

Here’s one totally crazy theory, but please bear with me.

It has always seemed strange to me that not even Aule, the master smith himself, who knows everything about the substances of which the Earth is made, doesn’t know what material was used in the crafting of the Silmarils. Because the text does say:

“But not until the End, when Fëanor shall return who perished ere the Sun was made, and sits now in the Halls of Awaiting and comes no more among his kin; not until the Sun passes and the Moon falls, shall it be known of what substance they were made.” (Silm)

And, even though, it doesn’t say: ‘Not even Aule knew.’, we can conclude that not even he knew, because not even Melkor knew (he actually lied that he had a hand in making them, and later stole them – if that doesn’t spell out impotent jealousy…), and Melkor was ‘very similar in mind to Aule’, right?

How’s that possible? How’s it possible that neither Melkor nor Aule knew? Doesn’t it lead you to the conclusion that perhaps Silmarils weren’t made, not only of any known substance, but perhaps not of any substance (meaning matter)? What if, similar to Melkor, who cannot control light, Aule’s field of expertise also includes just matter, but not light, and this is the reason of his ignorance?

What if the process of making the Silmarils is actually the reverse of what we usually think it is? What if the flame (light) that emanates from inside them was the first thing, and then what seems to us a crystal that contains the flame (light), is actually an emanation of the flame?

Because, diamonds actually do appear in candle flame (visible in the whiteness of it) albeit for a very short time – “a burning candle flame creates diamond nanoparticles at a rate of 1.5 million per second”. This was proved by Wuzong Zhou, and hinted by M. F. in his own moment of inspired observation.  
You can read a post about that here http://sciencesoup.tumblr.com/post/41822117390/a-diamond-in-the-flame-the-candle-was-invented.
Well, when I’ve read that (and at that time, I was just searching for stuff about M. Faraday), Feanor and the Silmarils immediately jumped to my mind. Why was that? Well, who knows. But a more developed idea occurred to me today, this idea.

Because, it kind of fits also with the whole Flame Imperishable thing. The Flame is what makes Arda real, Flame is the Reality, Arda is just a shape.

And who says that Feanor’s work wasn’t also imbued by his philosophy? Well, of course, that’s could be put to debate, but I find these words rather insinuating:

“But not until the End (…)” (Silm)

The End is also when the illusion of shape of Arda will be broken, together with the illusion of the shape of the Silmarils. Silmarils were perhaps meant to represent little Ardas.

Of course, there are a number of things that could be objected to this theory – for example, were the Elves sufficiently advanced, technologically, to make it possible for Feanor to pull this off? Was he able to ensure (or make) all the conditions and tools to make this, by working alone? It is fairly clear that this kind of work would be impossible to pull off in a traditional forge.  

However, perhaps even the ordinary crystals the Elves were making (which were made by “skill”, and were not just modified versions of crystals found in nature) could not be so easily made in a traditional forge, especially if they were engineered to have special properties, such as some kind of light manipulation.

There is also the problem of stabilization of light, so that the Silmarils permanently remain in their shape; and of heat.

Of course, lastly you might say, well, there is just no way Tolkien could have known this. And you’re right, there isn’t – but I do believe (perhaps not only falsely, but also stupidly) – that we instinctively know much more about the world than we know consciously, and I do believe that sometimes these truths, to which we usually have no means to come step by step, can nonetheless be glimpsed by our mind in a moment of inspiration. This is how M. Faraday saw the diamond in the candle flame, and this is how Tolkien wrote that Silmarils were not made of any known substance. It is usually those moments of inspiration that we deconstruct and call our discoveries.