Avari

Avari is a name given from the outside. It is the Quenya word the Elves of the West used for their kin who stayed behind, and in English it is usually rendered as the Unwilling or the Refusers. The name does not describe a lineage, a homeland or a trait of body or craft. It records a single decision: these Quendi declined the invitation the Valar sent to them in the early days of the stars. Because of that, the word only makes sense beside its counterpart. Oromë had first called the Elves the Eldar, the People of the Stars, and applied the name to all of them. In later usage that name narrowed to those who took the road westward. The Avari are therefore defined by what they did not do, and they are named in the tongue of the people who left them.1

By descent they are simply Quendi, sprung from the same Elves who woke beside the waters of Cuiviénen as their western kin. Their separation began when Oromë led three ambassadors to Valinor: Ingwë, Finwë and Elwë. On their return, these three urged their people to accept the summons. The account says the followers of Ingwë, together with the greater part of the peoples of Finwë and Elwë, were persuaded. The remainder would not go. According to the account, they preferred the starlit, open country of Middle-earth to distant reports of the Trees. The fear Melkor had already spread among the Quendi also weighed on the choice. This parting is counted as the first sundering of the Elves, and the Avari are the part of the people that stayed where it began.2

In the wider scheme of names, the Avari belong to the Moriquendi, the Elves of the Darkness. That group takes in every Elf who never came to Aman and never saw the light of Telperion and Laurelin. The Avari differ from the other Moriquendi in how they came to be counted there. The Úmanyar set out on the Great Journey and fell away along the road, but the Avari never started it. For this reason the Avari stand outside the division between Calaquendi and Úmanyar that sorts the Eldar. The Silmarillion does not record the names the Avari used for themselves.3

The history of the Avari begins at the moment the rest of the Quendi left them. When the hosts of the Eldar gathered and set out westward under Oromë's guidance, the Avari stayed in the lands around the Waters of Awakening, in the far east of Middle-earth. The Silmarillion states that from that time they were divided from the kindreds who departed, and that the two did not meet again until many ages had gone by. The Great Journey was a long and slow migration, and several parts of the Eldar later fell away from it. The Avari took no part in any of these stages and followed no road that the later accounts describe.1

Once the Eldar are gone, the published narrative follows them and does not return to the East. The Silmarillion recounts the crossing of the great mountains, the halts on the way, the arrival in Beleriand and the passage over the Sea, but it gives no parallel account of the kindred who stayed behind. No kings of the Avari are named, and no realms, cities or wars of theirs are described. There is no record of how they fared through the long years of starlight, while Melkor was held captive in Valinor and later after his return to Middle-earth. For that period the Avari appear only by implication, as the part of the Elven people that the tale leaves behind.2

The Elves who never went west come back into view with the awakening of Men. The chapter on the coming of Men says that, as the first Men spread out from their place of waking in the East, they met Dark Elves. These Elves treated them with friendship, and in the earliest days of their kind Men became their companions and learned from them. The text identifies these teachers as wandering Elves who had never taken the paths toward the West. By the Silmarillion's own definitions, that description fits the Avari rather than the Nandor or any other group that set out and later turned aside. The account does not give a name for the particular folk involved.3

A trace of that early teaching reached Beleriand in the First Age. When Finrod Felagund came upon the people of Bëor east of Ossiriand, he found that he could learn their speech without difficulty. The Silmarillion accounts for this by saying that these Men had long been in contact with Dark Elves beyond the mountains, and had taken over much of their language from them. Here again the Elves are not named as Avari. Even so, the passage shows that Elves of the East had lived alongside Men for a long time before the Edain crossed into the West. Most of what the Silmarillion reveals about the Avari in this period is indirect, carried in the language of the Edain.4

The published works do not record a decline or an end for the Avari. They play no part in the wars of Beleriand, the Second Age or the War of the Ring, and The Lord of the Rings does not name them. Whether they endured in the eastern lands, and in what numbers, is not stated in the narrative canon. Their history therefore has a clear beginning in the refusal at Cuiviénen, a brief reappearance as friends and teachers of Men, and no recorded conclusion. Anything more is found only in Tolkien's later linguistic writings, which fall outside this section.5

Almost nothing in the narrative works describes how the Avari lived, and much of what can be said follows from the choice that defines them. They kept to the starlit lands and open country they had known since their waking, and they never came under the Light of the Trees. They also stayed out of reach of the teaching the Valar gave in Aman. The Noldor learned their skill in stone and metal from Aulë in Eldamar. The Elves who reached Beleriand learned from Melian and later from the Dwarves. The Avari had none of these teachers. The Silmarillion names no craft, art or work of theirs, and it would be unsound to fill that gap by borrowing from the better-documented kindreds of the West.1

The one custom the published texts show clearly is their way of dealing with others. The Elves whom the first Men met in the East are called wanderers. That word suggests a life of movement across wide lands rather than one centred on fixed dwellings or kingdoms. They met the newcomers openly and did not keep themselves apart from them. This readiness to share speech and knowledge with a younger people stands out against the caution many of the Eldar later showed toward Men in Beleriand. Their own tongue is not recorded in the Silmarillion. It survives only indirectly, in what it gave to the speech of those they taught.2

On death and time, the Silmarillion makes no distinction between the Avari and the other Quendi. As Elves, they share the fate it describes for the whole kindred. They do not age into death, but they can be slain or can waste away from grief, and their being is bound to the world until its end. Those who are slain go to the halls of Mandos, which lie in the West the Avari refused to seek. The texts do not say how the Avari themselves understood this, or whether their long years in Middle-earth weighed on them as the account suggests they later weighed on the Elves who remained there.3

The narrative canon does not divide the Avari into named kindreds or houses, and it names no lord or chieftain of theirs. The only structure the Silmarillion gives them comes from the way it describes the sundering. It says that Ingwë's kindred followed its lord entirely, while only the greater part of the peoples of Finwë and Elwë did the same. It follows that those who stayed behind were drawn from the latter two peoples, and none from the first. In other words, the Avari were not a separate branch at the root of the Quendi. They were the portion of two existing kindreds that turned down the counsel of their own leaders, and when they parted from those leaders they had no recorded head of their own.1

The familiar kindred names of the Elves (Vanyar, Noldor and Teleri) and the lesser groupings that came later, such as the Nandor and the Sindar, all apply to those who set out on the march or who came from it. They record how the Eldar divided along the road and at its end, so they have nothing to say about the Avari. The Silmarillion likewise calls the eastern Elves whom the first Men met by general terms only, never by the name of a people or a house. Whether the Avari in the East lived as one folk or as several, and who ruled them, the published texts leave open. They should not be read as belonging to any of the western kindreds, even though some of them shared an origin with the Noldor and the Teleri. Any finer divisions among the Avari appear only in Tolkien's later philological papers, which lie outside the canon used here.2

They do not age into death, but they can be slain or can waste away from grief, and their being is bound to the world until its end.

Within the Silmarillion the Avari work less as actors than as a fixed point of reference. The whole elaborate taxonomy of the Elves, with its sorting by journey, by arrival and by light, is measured from the place they never left, so that every later division of the Eldar implicitly counts its distance from them. They are the road not taken, set down once at the start of the tale and then held in reserve. The narrative gains a great deal from this economy: by leaving one people entirely outside the westward story, it makes the western story legible as a choice rather than a destiny that belonged to all Elves.1

That choice is not presented as self-evidently right. The chapter that records the refusal also records that the Valar were not of one mind about summoning the Quendi at all, and that Ulmo in particular favoured leaving them free in the lands where they had woken. The account adds that much sorrow later came of the summons. Against this background the Avari cannot be read simply as the disobedient. They stand for the option the Valar themselves debated, and their staying makes the cost of the western path visible, since the griefs that follow belong to those who went.2

Their silence also reflects the vantage from which the book is told. The Silmarillion is shaped as lore handed down among the Eldar, and its categories of Light and Dark are drawn from that perspective; to be counted among the Elves of the Darkness marks the absence of the Trees' light, not a moral failing. The Avari therefore mark the edge of what the narrators know. When they briefly re-enter the story as companions of the first Men, the book lets its unrecorded East touch its recorded West, and a people it declines to follow turns out to have shaped, unseen, the heroes it does.3

Tolkien's fullest treatment of the Avari is in the late philological essay 'Quendi and Eldar', written around 1959–60 and edited by Christopher Tolkien in The War of the Jewels. There the name is traced to an ancient negative stem, ABA, which conveyed refusal or the expression 'no, do not' rather than a plain denial of fact. Tolkien connects it with a Quenya verb meaning roughly 'I will not'. On this reading the Avari are named after an act of will, and the word itself carries the sense of the answer they gave. The essay treats the name as a coinage of the Eldar. It notes that the Eldar used it for those who stayed and that it did not grow out of the eastern Elves' own speech.1

The same essay goes beyond the published narrative in one respect: it addresses what the Avari called themselves. Tolkien suggests that the Elves who refused the summons went on using forms of the oldest common word for their kind, the word that in Quenya became Quendi. The Eldar, by contrast, adopted Oromë's name for themselves and let the older term fall into learned or formal use. The kindred left in the East thus kept the name the whole people had borne before the sundering, while those who departed took a new one. Tolkien also stresses that the loremasters of the West knew very little about the Avarin tongues. What he says of them is framed as the limited knowledge of Eldarin scholars, not as a full account.2