Although he is perhaps best known to many for his time on Comedy Central and his current late-night hosting, Stephen Colbert’s fierce fan base for all things The Lord of the Rings and Tolkein is well documented. On a recent episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the comedian was doing a segment on recent space news (including, of course, Stranger Things), which included the revelation that the Hubble telescope had recorded the most distant star ever, a star that might be like that. It is somewhere between 50 and 500 times larger than our Sun and “millions of times brighter.” But the real cherry on top is the name they gave them “Erndel”. Of course Colbert thought a lot about this.
“The lead author of the paper describing the discovery of the star named it ‘Erndel’, which means ‘morning star’ in Old English,” Colbert said. Well, but more importantly he inspired the name of Tolkien’s great navigator, Erendel, son of Thor and Princess Idril, daughter of Turgon, and father of Elrus and Elrond, who had traveled to Valinor, pleaded Valar on behalf of the children of Ilúvatar, and condemned them to eternal death to carry Silmaril tied to his forehead as a star And sailing across the sky in his big ship Vingilótë until the end of days in Dagor Dagorath! NASA, answer my calls!” Watch the rant for yourself below at about 3:00.
“Erndel has been around for so long that it probably didn’t contain the same raw materials as the stars around us today,” astronomer Brian Welch said when the discovery was announced. “Earendel’s study will be a window into an era of the universe that we weren’t even aware of, but that led to everything we know. It’s as if we were reading a really interesting book, but we’re starting with chapter two, and now we’ll have a chance to see how it all began.”
As for Colbert and Tolkein-geekdom, there is no better evidence of his stature than The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit director Peter Jackson himself, who once said digital spy: “I have never met a greater Tolkien expert in my life…Philippa Boyens is our resident Tolkien expert, and when Stephen came to visit the group, we put him face to face with Philippa in a Tolkien contest—and Stephen triumphed, I must say, his encyclopedic knowledge of Tolkien is amazing, and notes to a deprived childhood in some respects.”
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