It is possible that Tom Hillman and Verlyn Flieger herself have provided a key to unlocking the mystery of Emyn Beraid...

To the question of how to think of the Palantiri and the Red Book of Westmarch (of which the latter and one of the former are associated with Emyn Beraid, or the Tower Hills) in terms of the thesis of her first book, Splintered Light, Verlyn suggested that the stone and the book are not splinterings but gatherings, the one of light, the other of words (memories, history).

A brief note on context: the thesis of Splintered Light is that the unfolding of time in the Silmarillion follows the process whereby light and words each begin as an undivided whole and are then continually divided and splintered. A key result of this process (which derives from the ideas of Owen Barfield) is the gradual separation of metaphor from concrete reality (so the original language of the Elves is, as it were, literally poetic - 'seeing the light' [of Valinor], e.g., is a real event). However, 'gathering' is not a prominent theme in Splintered Light; indeed, I am not sure the word is used at all (whether Verlyn writes about it elsewhere I do not know).

Now, on the idea of 'gathering', Tom Hillman suggests that here "we may have a clue to the operation of magic, which often operates through songs and spells, gatherings of words. They counteract splintering/fragmentation, or impose some order on that which had been splintered/fragmented."

And he adds: "the Ring verse is a spell of gathering. And much of Sauron's power is gathered into the Ring, so that when it is destroyed he will never be able to put himself back together again."

I think this an extremely fruitful thought.

Three further thoughts of my own:

  1. Surely "gathering" is another name for what Tolkien called elsewhere 'sub-creation'. For sub-creation is not creation ex nihilo but rather a bringing together of already existing material/ideas/light (so, the making of the Silmarilli was, says Tolkien somewhere, an Elvish act of sub-creation - it involved a gathering of some of the light of Valinor).

  2. The term 'gatherings' initially struck me as odd because its chief association in my mind is with the 'Scouring of the Shire' - the gatherings:

It’s all these 'gatherers' and 'sharers', I reckon, going round counting and measuring and taking off to storage. They do more gathering than sharing, and we never see most of the stuff again.’

But when we recognize that magic in the Third Age is possessed by both the Elves and the Enemy, with the magic of the latter a counterfeit of the former, although more given to mechanical contrivance (all this is set out in the Wiki notes on magic), then the destructive 'gathering' of Sauruman in the Shire can indeed appear as a sort of corroded and evil magic.

  1. In some basic way the story of LoTR is set in an age when the Elves are nearly faded and the age of Men is arising - and, as such, the world of magic is coming to an end. Hence, even the Palantiri are in a sense a fragment of an older more comprehensive magic. This relates to the statement in the Silmarillion quoted on the Wiki page on Swift Sight:

And some have said that the vision ceased ere the fulfilment of the Dominion of Men and the fading of the Firstborn; wherefore, though the Music is over all, the Valar have not seen as with sight the Later Ages or the ending of the World.

In other words, the ability for far-sight (be it by means of the Palantiri, the mirror of Galadriel, or in dreams), while it still exists at the end of the Third Age, is nevertheless fading and already fragmented. At most we have small gatherings, little sub-creations, that retain the magic of a passing age.

And perhaps the same applies also to the Red Book, which preserves in the language of a later age gathered memories of the last days of magic, preserving in written form stories that men, who are mortal, would otherwise forget, but in a language that cannot possibly retain the magical words of an Elvish story of an earlier age, told by an immortal teller of tales who witnessed the events that he described.