Iminyë

Iminyë belonged to the first generation of the Quendi, the Elves who came to consciousness beside the water called Cuiviénen in the far east of Middle-earth, in an age when neither Sun nor Moon had risen and the only light of the world was that of the stars which Varda had newly kindled. The Quenta Silmarillion records that the Elves were the Firstborn among the Children of Ilúvatar, awakened by him alone and unlooked-for by the Valar, and that the first thing they perceived was the sound of flowing water, the first sight the light overhead. Iminyë therefore stands at the very beginning of Elvish history, before any of the divisions of kindred that later shaped it: at her waking there were as yet no Eldar and no Avari, only the Quendi, and the name Quendi itself — those who speak with voices — was the earliest name the people gave themselves, chosen because they had found no other creature that could answer them in speech.

Her name is Quenya in form, and it is plainly the feminine counterpart of Imin's, built upon the same element with the ending customary in women's names in that tongue. Such a pairing is unusual among the Eldar: husband and wife ordinarily bore names of independent formation, as with Finwë and Míriel or Fëanor and Nerdanel, and the echoing of one spouse's name in the other's is not the general habit of Elvish naming. The published Quenta Silmarillion does not name any of the first Elves at all, telling of the awakening without individual figures, so Iminyë's name is not to be sought there; the tradition that preserves it lies outside that text, and belongs to material discussed under drafts and variants.

Of her nature nothing can be said that does not hold for the earliest Quendi generally. They were an unageing people, deathless as the world is deathless, whose strength of body and mind belonged to a beginning that later generations did not equal, and they made language for themselves before any of the Valar had spoken with them, giving names to everything they perceived. Iminyë's origin is thus wholly of Middle-earth and wholly of the starlit years, and her place in the record is that of a first Elf rather than of a figure with a history behind her.

The published tradition gives no personal chronicle of Iminyë, and what can be told of her course through time is the history of the generation to which she belonged. That history begins with a long, unmeasured period beside Cuiviénen, the bay of the inland Sea of Helcar in the east of Middle-earth where the Quendi remained after their waking. The Quenta Silmarillion describes those years as few in event and long in duration: the people multiplied slowly, wandered along the shores and under the trees, and had as yet no dealings with any power beyond themselves. No year-count is attached to this age in the published narrative, which reckons only that it was long, and that the Elves themselves kept no annals of it.

The first recorded turn against the Quendi came from Melkor, who learned of their awakening before the other Valar were aware of it and set watch upon them from his northern stronghold. Dark shapes were said to haunt the lands about the water, and a rumour grew among the Elves of a rider on horseback who hunted those who strayed far from their kin; any who went alone into the wild too often did not come back. The Silmarillion reports as a belief of the Eldar, held with sorrow rather than certainty, that those taken in this manner were brought to Utumno and there so ruined in body and mind that the race of Orcs descended from them. Iminyë belonged to the people upon whom this shadow fell, and the fear it bred is the earliest circumstance the published texts allow to be spoken of as part of her life.

The turning point of the age was the arrival of Oromë, who while hunting in the eastern lands came unlooked-for upon the Elves at Cuiviénen. Some fled at the sight of him, for Melkor's lies had taught them to dread a rider; those who remained and looked on him without fear he loved thereafter, and he gave the people the name Eldar, the folk of the stars. He dwelt with them for a time, then rode back over the mountains to Valinor to bring word to the Valar of what he had found. From that report followed the assault upon Melkor's fortress in the north, the war which broke and reshaped the northern lands, ended in the ruin of Utumno, and left Melkor bound in the chain Angainor and carried to Valinor for judgement, though his servant Sauron escaped the sack and the pits were never wholly emptied.

With Melkor chained, the Valar debated what should be done with the Firstborn, and resolved to summon them out of Middle-earth to dwell in the light of Valinor. The summons divided the people as nothing before had done. Many were unwilling to leave the waters and the woods they knew, and Oromë therefore took three of their number to Valinor as ambassadors, Ingwë, Finwë and Elwë, who returned as advocates of the westward journey and became kings of the three hosts that followed it. Those who accepted the summons and set out were counted the Eldar; those who refused it were named the Avari, the unwilling, and remained in the east. This is the division that the chronicles of later ages take as the first great sundering of the Elvish people, and it is the last event of the awakening years in which every Elf then living, Iminyë among them, must have had some part.

The march westward that followed was slow and repeatedly broken. The Vanyar under Ingwë went first, the Noldor under Finwë after them, and the numerous and more reluctant Teleri came last under Elwë and his brother Olwë, halting often and lingering by rivers on the way. At the Misty Mountains a great part of the third host lost heart and turned aside southward down the great river under a leader named Lenwë, and these became the Nandor, who never saw the sea. Further separations came at the coasts and in Beleriand, so that by the end of the journey the single people of Cuiviénen had become several kindreds with different tongues and histories.

Where Iminyë stood in these events the published narrative does not say. It does not record whether she went west or remained, nor place her in any of the three hosts, nor give her a death or a departure to Mandos; her name occurs nowhere in the finished Quenta Silmarillion, which treats the awakening as the act of a people and names no individual of the first generation. The account that does give her a course of action, and connects her to a moment in the first days at Cuiviénen, belongs to a separate and unfinished body of writing on the origins of the Elvish tongues, and is set out under drafts and variants. Within the canonical histories proper, therefore, her chronology is exactly that of the anonymous Firstborn: a waking in starlight, a long quiet by the water, a shadow, a summons, and a road west taken or refused.

Within the published legendarium Iminyë holds no office, leads no following and performs no recorded deed. Her role is ancestral rather than active: she belongs to the stock from which every later kindred of the Elves descends, and the single particular attached to her is that she was one partner of a founding pair. The finished Quenta Silmarillion places authority among the Firstborn in three men who were taken as ambassadors to the Valar and afterwards became kings of the three hosts, and it grants no comparable station to anyone of the first generation besides them; the women of the Eldar whom that book names and characterises — Melian, Míriel, Galadriel and the rest — belong to later generations and to the histories of Valinor and Beleriand. Nothing in the canonical texts makes Iminyë a ruler, a counsellor or a craftswoman, and no work of hand or mind is credited to her.

Of powers in any narrower sense the texts say nothing whatever about her, and the general capacities of her people are modest by comparison with what later readers often expect. Tolkien himself insisted that what mortals called magic among the Elves was not a separate faculty of spells but their art, an unlaboured making that expressed their nature rather than compelled the world, and that its characteristic temptation was the wish to arrest change and hold what they loved unaltered. The abilities the published narratives allow the first Quendi are accordingly plain ones: bodily strength and endurance, freedom from sickness and from the decay of years, keen sense and memory, and skill in speech and in naming. None of these amounts to might in the sense of dominion, and none of them belonged to Iminyë in any degree the record permits us to measure.

The limits are as firm as the powers are slight. The Eldar were bound to Arda and could not pass out of it while it lasted, their spirits remaining within the world even when their bodies were destroyed, whereas mortal Men departed by a road the Elves did not share and could not follow. They could be slain by violence and could be consumed by grief, and their endurance was therefore a long life rather than an invulnerable one. Against these conditions Iminyë stood exactly as her contemporaries did; the shadow that fell on the people beside the water was not one that any strength of theirs could turn. What she is said to have done at a particular moment in those first days comes from a body of writing outside the finished histories and is treated under drafts and variants; the canonical corpus leaves her a name in a genealogy of the awakening and gives her neither a power nor an act.

Iminyë is remembered as one half of a married pair, and since the finished histories never name her, what they supply is not her marriage but the frame within which any such bond stood. Among the Eldar marriage was held to be single and enduring, so nearly unbreakable that the completed narrative records only one undoing of it: Míriel, the first wife of Finwë, was spent in the bearing of her son and would not return to life, and Finwë's second marriage, to Indis of the Vanyar, was a thing without precedent among the Elves. The Valar deliberated before it was allowed, and the bitterness it left divided Finwë's house and worked upon the whole later course of the Noldor. Measured against that case, a pairing the chronicles pass over in silence is not an absence of matter but the ordinary condition of an Elvish marriage: one that raised no question and therefore left no record.

The other ties available to her are those she held as one of a people rather than as a person. The published narrative treats the earliest Quendi as a single company, with no households set against one another, no chieftains and no rival kindreds; rank, following and lineage become subjects of the record only in generations after hers. What the texts do attribute to all of them alike is a bond of reverence toward Varda, who kindled the stars beneath which they came to themselves, and who is held by the Elves in greater honour than any other of the Valar; they name her Elentári, queen of the stars, and in Middle-earth her name has been called upon in need through ages long after the eastern waters were left behind. For a woman of the first generation, that shared devotion is the nearest thing to a personal allegiance the corpus permits.

Her posterity is collective in the same way. No child is named to her anywhere in the finished corpus, and no house descends from her as the histories trace the descendants of Finwë, Olwë and Elwë through Beleriand and beyond; the Elvish genealogies begin their reckoning many generations after the waking. What she and her contemporaries stand in is a wider kinship instead: every kindred of the Elves, whether it took the westward road or stayed behind, comes of that first company, and beyond the Elves stand Men, named with them the Children of Ilúvatar, awakened by him and by no other power though appointed to a different end. Iminyë's relationships are accordingly those of an ancestor rather than of an agent — a marriage, and a people descended.

The single text that names Iminyë at all is the late essay on the Elvish tongues and the names of the Elvish peoples, whose appendix preserves a legend of the awakening at Cuiviénen quite unlike the anonymous account of the finished histories. There the first Elves wake in pairs and in order: Imin with Iminyë beside him, then Tata with Tatië, then Enel with Enelyë, each man waking first and rousing his wife. The three men's names are simply the ancient numerals one, two and three, and the women's are their feminine forms, so that the founding couples are less persons than the personified beginning of counting; the tale is explicitly framed as the explanation of why the three kindreds were called by names meaning Firsts, Seconds and Thirds, and of why the Elves reckoned in twelves. Its arithmetic is exact where the histories are vague: the Quendi at their waking numbered one hundred and forty-four, of whom fourteen were of the first kindred, fifty-six of the second and seventy-four of the third — Imin having claimed the elder's right of choosing first, and having chosen, each time, the smallest company offered him.

The status of this material is carefully qualified within the manuscript itself. It is presented not as chronicle but as a piece of later Elvish lore of Noldorin making, a story told to children and preserved for the sake of the names and numbers it accounts for, and its comic pattern of Imin repeatedly outwitting himself belongs to that register rather than to the annals. That framing is the likeliest reason nothing of it was carried into the published Quenta Silmarillion, which keeps the older manner of narration. No earlier stratum of the legendarium prepares for it: the first version of the awakening, written some four decades before, tells of the Elves coming to themselves by the waters in the midmost land without naming a single one of them, and no figure answering to Iminyë stands anywhere in the intervening drafts. Her name thus appears once, late, and without antecedent or subsequent revision, which is why the sections above could report a marriage and nothing more.