The beloved Mars helicopter Ingenuity took its final flight in January, bringing its mission to an end after a historic three-year run on Mars. The helicopter was the first to fly on a planet other than Earth, and it racked up many other accolades before succumbing to rotor damage that prevented future flights, thus grounding the chopper. NASA has named the Martian airfield that serves as the Ingenuity’s final resting place “Valinor Hills,” after a location in the fictional Middle-Earth, from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings fantasy trilogy.
NASA took inspiration from Tolkien after the Perseverance rover photographed the Ingenuity at the location where it last landed. To be honest, the location has a decidedly Lord Of The Rings feel, albeit one closer to Mordor than Valinor.
Valinor makes up part of the “Undying Lands” in the novels, but I’ll let the lovely geeks at Space explain what these represent in the lore of J.R.R. Tolkien, the famous WWI vet and University of Oxford professor who happened to write the Lord of the Rings and its prequel, The Hobbit. Per Space:
Tolkien (1892-1973), an Anglo-Saxon scholar at the University of Oxford, is best known for his fantasy works that include “Lord of the Rings” (LOTR), “The Hobbit” and “The Silmarillion.”
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Valinor was a part of the Undying Lands, a location cited often in Tolkien’s mythology. The most-cited reference to those islands comes at the end of LOTR. The elves granted some of the main characters refuge there, after the invitees played key roles in a quest to destroy a powerful finger-ring threatening the universe.
The islands of the Undying Lands were the home of the elves and also the Valar, the latter referring to beings who played a role in creating the world, according to a 2009 paper in the peer-reviewed journal “Mythlore “ led by Keith Kelly, of Pennsylvania’s Kutztown University. While not quite equivalent to the Judeo-Christian concepts of heaven, according to Tolkien’s letters cited in the paper, the Undying Lands are a point of eternal refuge and rest.
Tolkien also wrote The Silmarillion, which is a collection of stories that serves as a loose prequel to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. There are many more works that add to the lore of Middle-Earth, too. And now, thanks to NASA, Tolkien’s influence is interplanetary, having reached the surface of Mars.
To add to the Tolkien theme behind NASA’s inspired naming of “Valinor Hills,” it would be fitting to bid the Ingenuity helicopter a final farewell with a song from Peter Jackson’s LOTR: The Return of the King (2003), the extended version of which features Howard Shore’s song, “The Houses of Healing.”
According to Genius annotators, the song contains a poem written in Sindarin, the Elven language (and one of many) Tolkien invented to enrich his novels. The song mentions not being “bound to the circles of the world,” which is a reference to sailing into the West — to Valinor and the Undying Lands.
Howard Shore’s song features the London Voices choir and Liv Tyler, whose words are a good send off for the Ingenuity chopper: “And the trees are now turning from green to gold. And the sun is now fading. [We] wish [we] could hold you closer.” Goodbye, Ingenuity. And godspeed onto the West.