Elemmírë

Elemmírë is a Quenya name, and both of its parts belong to the small stock of elements that the published Silmarillion glosses for its readers. The first is el, elen, 'star', the element that recurs across a wide range of Eldarin names for persons, places and the heavens; the second is mírë, 'jewel', a word used of wrought and precious things rather than of raw stone. Taken together the name says something close to 'star-jewel', a compound in which the two halves reinforce one another, since the stars themselves are repeatedly described in the tradition as gems set in the sky. No alternative form, translated by-name or Sindarin equivalent is recorded, and no epessë or mother-name is given; the entry rests on this single Quenya form.

The same name occurs elsewhere in the legendarium as the name of a star. Among the works ascribed to Varda in the ages before the awakening of the Elves stands a group of named lights — Carnil and Luinil, Nénar and Lumbar, Alcarinquë among them — and Elemmírë is counted in that company. The narrative draws no link between the star and the person who bears the name, and offers no explanation of the coincidence; it is best treated as a homonym of the kind that occurs more than once in Quenya nomenclature, where a well-formed compound may be applied to more than one thing. That the name should be given to a star is at least consistent with its meaning.

Of the person, the tradition fixes only kindred. Elemmírë is named as one of the Vanyar, the first and smallest of the three kindreds of the Eldar, who followed Ingwë westward, dwelt closest to the Valar upon and about Taniquetil, and were held dearest by Manwë and Varda. Beyond that affiliation nothing is preserved: no parentage, no house, no office, no place of birth, and no indication whether the birth fell in Cuiviénen or in Aman. The name survives attached to a single work, the lament called the Aldudénië — a title itself built on the element alda, 'tree' — and it is through that attribution, rather than through any genealogy, that Elemmírë entered the record at all.

No year is attached to any part of Elemmírë's life. The published narrative dates almost nothing in the Years of the Trees, and for this figure it supplies neither birth nor death nor any interval between them; what can be placed in sequence are the events of the kindred, into which the one recorded act falls at a fixed point. The Vanyar belong to the earliest layer of Eldarin history: they were the first of the three kindreds to answer the summons of the Valar, the first to set out upon the westward road from the shores of the inland sea where the Elves had awoken, and the first to be borne over the Great Sea to Aman. Whether Elemmírë was among that company or was born after its arrival the tradition does not say, and the silence is not accidental, since the name enters the record only in connection with a single later work.

The generations that follow the crossing are described almost entirely in terms of the kindred rather than of persons. The Vanyar first dwelt with the Noldor in the city built upon the green hill within the pass of the mountains, and afterwards withdrew from it, drawn to the light of the Trees and to the mountain of Manwë, so that they were thereafter seldom seen in the streets they had helped to raise. Their pursuits, as the narrative characterises them, ran to song and to verse rather than to the crafts in which the Noldor were pre-eminent, and they had little share in the making of gems or in the quarrels that grew out of it. Nothing in the record places Elemmírë within any household, court or company of this period; the setting is given, the biography is not.

The event that anchors the entry is the destruction of the Two Trees. Melkor, released from his long confinement in Mandos and afterwards fleeing the judgement of the Valar, returned to Valinor in company with Ungoliant at an hour chosen with care: a high festival had been appointed by Manwë, the offering of first fruits, and to it both the Vanyar and the Noldor had been called up to the heights, where the estrangement within the house of Finwë was for a moment set aside. While that assembly stood upon the mountain, the Trees were pierced and drained, their light failed, and a darkness came over Valinor that was more than the mere absence of light. The narrative is explicit that the grief of this hour exceeded what the Eldar had known before, and it is at exactly this juncture that Elemmírë is named.

The lament called the Aldudénië was made in the aftermath of that loss, and its making is the single deed the tradition assigns to Elemmírë. The Quenta names it as the composition in which the sorrow of the Darkening found its lasting form, and reports that it passed into the common memory of every branch of the Eldar rather than remaining the possession of the kindred that produced it — a wider currency than most works named within the legendarium are granted. No line of it is quoted and no description of its form, length or manner of performance is preserved; the reader is told that it exists, who made it, and what it is about. The gesture is unusual in the Quenta, which rarely pauses to attribute a source, and the effect is to preserve a name that the narrative has no other occasion to mention.

After the Darkening the histories turn eastward with the Noldor, and Elemmírë's kindred largely leaves the narrative with them. The Vanyar took no part in the oath sworn in Tirion, in the kinslaying at the havens of the Teleri, or in the departure over the ice and the sea; they remained in Aman while the Noldor went into exile, and the record of the Elder Days that follows is not theirs. Elemmírë is not mentioned again in any of it, and no death, departure or later work is recorded. The one occasion on which the Vanyar re-enter the account is the war at the end of the First Age, when the host that sailed from the West marched beneath their white banners, together with those Noldor who had never left Valinor; whether Elemmírë stood among them the narrative does not say, and after that host returned westward the kindred passes out of the story altogether.

The legendarium assigns Elemmírë a single function, and it is neither political nor martial: to have given a great loss its elegy. In a tradition that identifies its Vanyarin figures chiefly by rank or by marriage — Ingwë, held the high king of the kindred and the eldest in dignity of all the Eldar; Indis, who became the second wife of Finwë; Amarië, who remained in the West when Finrod went into exile — Elemmírë is distinguished instead by a made thing. No office, no following, no household and no lordship is attached to the name; what is attached is a composition. Within the frame of the Quenta this makes the figure a maker rather than an actor, and the distinction holds without exception for the whole of the record.

Song in this legendarium is not everywhere a merely expressive art. The world is made through music, Lúthien's singing moves the judgement of Mandos and wins back what death had taken, and Finrod contends with Sauron in a struggle of chanted power in which songs are weapons. Against that background it is worth stating plainly what is not said of Elemmírë: no efficacy of any kind is ascribed to the lament. It neither restores what was lost nor lightens the darkness nor works upon any hearer beyond grief, and the narrative never places it in the company of songs that alter what happens. The failure of the light was undone by other means altogether, when the last flower and the last fruit of the ruined Trees were set as vessels in the sky; the lament belongs to the record of the loss, not to its remedy.

Set beside the few other makers the Quenta troubles to name — Rúmil of Tirion, credited with the first devising of written characters, or Daeron the minstrel of Doriath, who is said to have wandered eastward composing songs of grief after Lúthien was lost to him — Elemmírë is the barest. No instrument, manner of performance, pupil or later work is described, and no title such as loremaster or keeper of tradition is conferred. What the text does with the name is evidential: it points to the lament as the place where the sorrow of that hour was set down, and so marks its own account as resting on an older composition. Even that is left incomplete, since nothing states that the maker witnessed what the lament describes. The name functions as an attribution and little else, and the capacities proper to it are those of verse — memory, form, and the power to be carried far — none of which the narrative extends into influence upon events.

The tradition gives Elemmírë no relative of any kind. Where a Noldorin figure of the same period is ordinarily placed by father, house or lord, and where the Quenta will trace a descent through three generations to explain a quarrel, Elemmírë is fixed by a kindred-formula alone: the name is given, the people is given, and the identification stops there. No marriage, no child, no fosterage, no companion in the making of the lament and no teacher or pupil is named. The effect is that the figure has a collective attachment and no personal one; the nearest thing to a relationship the record supplies is membership in a people, and membership is not a bond between two persons.

What the text does establish, in place of kin, is a relation to hearers. The lament is reported not as the possession of the Vanyar but as a thing carried beyond them, and the period into which it was released is precisely the one in which the Eldar were coming apart: the Noldor took ship or crossed the ice, the Teleri were left with their dead at the havens, and the Vanyar stayed under the mountain of Manwë. A work current among all of them therefore reaches across divisions that no journey and no embassy crossed for an age. Nothing in the narrative claims this as an intention, and it would be too much to make Elemmírë a reconciler; but the one tie on record runs outward to an audience rather than inward to a family.

The closest counterpart the Quenta offers is Maglor, second son of Fëanor, who made the lament for the fall of his own people and who sang it as one bound by the oath and stained by the kinslaying. The two are set in the same stretch of narrative and answer the same catastrophe from opposite positions: one inside the deeds, mourning what his house had done, the other outside them entirely, with no oath, no journey and no part in the wrong. Melkor and Ungoliant stand behind the grief that produced the lament, but they are not adversaries of Elemmírë in any usable sense — there is no meeting, no naming, no resistance offered. The record leaves a maker with no enemy and no household, joined to the story only by what was lost and by those who afterwards remembered it.

Both applications of the name belong to the later strata of the writing. The roll of stars set by Varda in which Elemmírë stands has its place in the Annals of Aman, the Valinorean text of the 1950s from which the corresponding passage of the published chapter was taken over; none of that nomenclature is present in the earliest account of the star-making. In the Lost Tales the stars named at the kindling are of an altogether different order, among them Morwinyon of the west and Nielluin the blue bee, and they are bound up with a mythological apparatus of spilled silver dust and named constellations that was afterwards set aside. Elemmírë figures in none of it, neither under that name nor under a recognisable predecessor, so that the star-name has no earlier history to trace.

The person emerges with the attribution of the lament, and that attribution is likewise late. The ruin of the Trees had been narrated several times already, in the Lost Tales, in the Quenta Noldorinwa of the early 1930s, and in the Quenta Silmarillion that grew out of it, and in none of those tellings is the sorrow of the hour referred to a named song or to a named maker; the narrator states the loss and passes on. The sentence that names the composition and its author stands with the reworked Valinorean matter of the 1950s, a body of writing in which citation of older sources within the narrative became noticeably more frequent. No draft develops the figure further: there is no variant form of the name, no rejected parentage, no second work assigned, and no commentary of Tolkien's own upon either the maker or the lament. The name enters the tradition already in the condition in which the published text leaves it.