Imin

The name Imin belongs to the earliest reach of Elvish tradition, to the period before any record kept in Middle-earth or Aman could have been written down, and it is worth saying plainly at the outset that the works published in Tolkien's lifetime and the posthumously edited narratives do not carry it. What those works do supply is the setting into which such a figure would fall. The Elves are the Firstborn of the Children of Ilúvatar, conceived in the Music before the world was made and appointed to enter it before Men; their awakening was set beside the water called Cuiviénen, in the eastward parts of Middle-earth, under stars alone, before the Sun and Moon were devised. The first sound they are said to have made was speech, and from that they took for themselves the name Quendi, the ones who speak aloud with voices — a self-given name that already fixes speech, rather than descent, as the mark by which the earliest Elves knew themselves.

The division of that people into three kindreds is likewise given in the published account, but reckoned from a later point than any first fathers. When Oromë found the Quendi and named them Eldar, the People of the Stars, and when the summons westward was made, three of their number were chosen to go ahead as envoys to Valinor: Ingwë, Finwë and Elwë. It is from these three that the published tradition names the hosts of the Great Journey — the Vanyar who followed Ingwë, the Noldor who followed Finwë, and the Teleri who followed Elwë, the last and most numerous of the three. In this telling the threefold shape of the Elvish peoples is a matter of allegiance to living leaders, not of inherited paternity, and no earlier ancestor stands behind them.

The place that Imin occupies — a first father from whom the first kindred is descended, bearing a name that is simply a numeral — has therefore no counterpart in the published corpus, and neither the numerical names of the three kindreds nor the legend that explains them can be documented from it. That material belongs to Tolkien's later linguistic and historical essays on the Elvish peoples, and it is set out under drafts and variants below, together with the standing this legend was given among the Elves who preserved it. Read against the published account, its interest lies less in supplying a genealogy than in showing how the Eldar themselves might have explained a division whose origin their own histories had left unaccounted for.

Any attempt to set the events of this period in order must begin with the admission that the published narratives supply no year-count for them. The Sun and Moon were not yet made, and the reckoning of the Valian ages that stands behind the tale was not carried over into the finished text; what remains is a sequence, not a chronology. That sequence opens before the Quendi themselves. Varda, foreseeing that the Firstborn would come, took the dews of Telperion and set new and brighter stars in the heavens, and it was beneath these that the Elves opened their eyes and looked first upon the sky. Their earliest deeds recorded are acts of naming: they gave names to the waters, to the stars, and to what they saw about them, and made words for the things they had wrought.

Their peace by the mere was not long unbroken. Melkor, whose realm of Utumno lay to the north, learned of the awakening before the Valar did, and set shadows and evil spirits about the dwellings of the Quendi. Elves who strayed alone were seized and did not return, and the tale is preserved that a dark rider on horseback hunted the wanderers — a rumour that later turned the Quendi to flight from Oromë himself, whose horse and hunting horn they mistook for that terror. It is held among the wise, though it was hidden from the Elves of that time, that those taken captive were brought to Utumno and there marred and enslaved, and that from them the race of Orcs was bred. This is the first calamity that the published tradition assigns to the Elvish people, and it falls before any division into kindreds is spoken of.

The Valar, once informed, took counsel and went to war for the sake of the Quendi. The assault upon Melkor's northern strongholds shook and broke the shape of Middle-earth, but the Elves had no part in it and knew almost nothing of it, save that the earth trembled and the waters were moved; the war was fought far from Cuiviénen. Utumno was cast down and its pits laid open, Melkor was bound with the chain Angainor that Aulë had made, and he was brought to Valinor and held in the halls of Mandos for three ages. Not all his servants were found, and the deeper vaults were left unsearched, a failure whose consequences fall outside this period. Afterwards the Valar debated whether to summon the Elves to Aman, and the summons was made.

The summons divided the Quendi permanently: those who accepted it and set out are the Eldar, while those who refused, holding the starlight and the lands of their waking dearer than any rumour of the West, are named the Avari, the Unwilling. The march westward was made in three hosts, and the first, smallest and most willing was the host of Ingwë, which never turned aside and never lingered. The Misty Mountains, reared up by Melkor in earlier days against the riding of Oromë, were the chief barrier; there a great company under Lenwë abandoned the journey and went south down the great river, and these became the Nandor, who did not see the sea. When at last the shores were reached, Ulmo drew up an island and bore the first two hosts across the sea to the Bay of Eldamar; the third came only afterward, and part of it never came at all.

In Aman the two hosts dwelt together for a time in Tirion upon the green hill of Túna, where the tower called the Mindon Eldaliéva was raised, and its silver lamp shone far out over the shadowy sea. But the first kindred came to love the unmixed light of the Two Trees and the company of the Valar above all else, and in time they forsook the city, dwelling thereafter upon the mountain of Manwë and in the plains and woods of Valinor. Ingwë was accounted High King of all the Elves, and he did not descend from Taniquetil again. This removal has a lasting consequence for the record: when the second kindred rebelled after the Darkening and went into exile, the first had no part in that departure, and so almost none of the history of Beleriand touches them.

Their one recorded return eastward comes at the very end of the age, when the plea of Eärendil was heard and a host went out from Aman under the banner of Eönwë. The first kindred marched in that host, together with those of the second who had never left the West; the third would not fight against the Noldor for old wrong's sake, but gave their ships and their mariners to carry the army over the sea. The war that followed broke Thangorodrim and ended with Morgoth thrust out beyond the confines of the world, and with it the First Age closed; the survivors of the host returned to Valinor. No published source assigns a date, a deed, or a lifespan to any first father of a kindred, and the material that names such a figure is treated below.

No deed, office or faculty is ascribed in the published corpus to any first father of a kindred, and the question of what such a figure could have done must therefore be answered from what those texts say an Elf of the first ages was. Their strength is consistently rendered as skill rather than as sorcery: mastery of tongue and lore, of song, of craft in stone, metal and gem. The extreme case is Fëanor, greatest in word and handiwork of all the Noldor, who devised the letters that bear his name, wrought jewels surpassing those made before, and imprisoned in the Silmarils the light of the Two Trees — an achievement of art, not of command over others. Tolkien himself, writing of his own work, described the so-called magic of the Elves as art of that kind, freed of some of the constraints that hamper the same labour in mortal hands.

The limits set upon that people are stated as plainly as the gifts. Their lives are measured by the life of Arda and cannot outrun it; they are deathless only in the sense that age does not consume them, for they may be slain by weapon or waste away under grief, and their spirits are then summoned to the halls of Mandos, whence in time they may be released. They cannot pass beyond the confines of the world as Men do. Nor does their pre-eminence extend to dominion: a king among them holds authority over those who follow him willingly, and no lordship in the published narratives compels obedience by blood. The Quendi beside the waters of their waking could neither defend their own kin from the shadows that hunted them nor learn where the taken had gone, and their deliverance was the work of powers wholly other than themselves.

Where inherited power does appear among the Elves, the texts trace it to the Ainur and not to Elvish descent. Melian was of the Maiar before she came to Middle-earth, and the enchantment she laid about the woodland realm of her husband turned aside all who came without leave; her daughter Lúthien could still the will of Sauron's servants with singing and lay the court of Morgoth himself in sleep. Nothing comparable is claimed for any line reckoned from an Elvish forefather. Whatever role belongs to Imin, therefore, is genealogical and explanatory rather than active: he accounts for a division and for the names attached to it, and confers upon those said to descend from him no attribute that the published histories recognise.

No wife, child, sibling or follower is named for Imin in the works published in Tolkien's lifetime or in the edited narratives, and an account of his relationships must therefore proceed from the bonds those texts do assign to the first kindred. The strongest of them is not a bond of blood at all. The Vanyar are set out as the people dearest to Manwë and Varda, and their withdrawal from the city of the Noldor is explained by that attachment rather than by any quarrel or any claim of ancestry; what holds them together is love of the light and of the Powers, and loyalty to a king they followed willingly. Kinship as an organising principle scarcely enters the published description of them at all: they are known by whom they loved and whom they obeyed.

Where the first kindred does enter the wider history, it enters by marriage. After Míriel forsook her body and would not return from the halls of Mandos, Finwë took as his second wife Indis, a close kinswoman of the Vanyarin king, and their sons Fingolfin and Finarfin carried that descent into the ruling house of the Noldor. The consequence recorded is not unity but division: Fëanor held himself apart from his father's second household, and the estrangement between the half-brothers is the seed from which the later sundering of their people grew. A quieter instance points the other way. Amarië of the Vanyar, whom Finrod loved, was not permitted to leave Valinor with the exiles, and the parting stood. In both cases the tie between kindreds is made by a marriage and measured by what it costs.

The pattern behind these particulars is consistent. In the published histories the Elves are grouped by allegiance and by wedlock, not by descent from a forefather: those who accepted the westward summons and those who refused it were separated by their own choice, and the third host was broken again when Elwë was lost and his brother Olwë led the remainder over the sea. A first father has no place to stand in such a scheme, because the relationships that matter in it are all contracted rather than inherited. The tradition that gives Imin peers, a household and a share in the making of a people belongs to the later essays discussed below, and it is there, not here, that his kin can be described at all.

The single text that names Imin is a late linguistic-historical essay, Quendi and Eldar, assigned by its editor to the closing years of the 1950s and printed in The War of the Jewels; the legend itself stands in an appendix to that essay, carrying the Quenya title Cuivienyarna, the tale of the awakening. It relates that the Quendi woke from sleep in pairs, already full-grown, and that Imin and his wife Iminyë opened their eyes before any others, with Tata and Tatië second and Enel and Enelyë third. Walking on together, the three couples came upon further sleepers in companies of six pairs, then nine, then twelve, and Imin, as eldest, was accorded the first choice; each time he took the smallest company, so that his following remained the least of the three. From this the tale derives its totals: fourteen of the first kindred, fifty-six of the second, eighty-four of the third, and one hundred and forty-four Elves in all — a reckoning that answers to the twelve-based cast of Elvish numerals, which the story presents as devised in the very act of counting the newly woken.

Tolkien did not offer this as grave history. His own comment on it treats the piece as a fireside or nursery tale of Noldorin making, its formulaic repetitions and tidy arithmetic marking the kind of story it is rather than the record it preserves. The serious argument of the surrounding essay leans instead on the threefold classification itself: Minyar, Tatyar and Nelyar are used there as the primary division of the Quendi, and the Avari are traced to the second and third of them, since none of the first kindred is held to have refused the westward summons. Nothing corresponding to the three fathers appears in the earlier phases of the mythology, where the kindreds are reckoned from the three who went as envoys to the West; Imin belongs wholly to this late layer, and stands beside that older scheme rather than replacing it.