Children of Ilúvatar

The collective name belongs to two kindreds, Elves and Men, and it defines them by their origin rather than by any trait they share. The creation account in the Silmarillion places their beginning in the third theme of the Great Music, which Ilúvatar introduced alone after the discord of Melkor. None of the Ainur had any part in conceiving them, and so the Valar and their lesser kin never fully understood them. When the Ainur were shown the Vision of the world, they saw the Children only as something that would come to dwell there, strange and free, and they grew to love them for that strangeness. The designation therefore marks a line of descent that runs directly from Ilúvatar, without any angelic intermediary.1

The Quenya form of the name, Eruhíni, means the Children of Eru and reflects the same idea in Elvish speech. Within this pairing the Elves are the Firstborn, since they awoke first in Middle-earth. They named themselves Quendi, meaning those who speak with voices, and the Vala Oromë later gave the name Eldar to those he found and summoned westward. The Valar's own conduct shows how firmly the category was defined. When Aulë made the Dwarves out of impatience, Ilúvatar did not count them among his Children, even though he granted them a life of their own. The Dwarves were to sleep until after the Firstborn had awoken.2

Men awoke later, in the East, at the first rising of the Sun, and Elvish usage gave them a range of names. The Eldar called them Atani, the Second People, and Hildor, the Followers. The latter name supplies the second half of the familiar pairing. Other Elvish names were less neutral. Some described Men as the Afterborn or as Mortals, while others reflected wariness, such as Usurpers, Strangers, or the Inscrutable. Taken together, these names record how the elder kindred saw the younger: as fellow heirs of the same origin who were nonetheless hard for them to understand.3

The recorded history of the Children begins with the Elves, who woke beside the mere of Cuiviénen in the far east of Middle-earth while the world still lay under starlight. Melkor's servants soon found them and preyed on them, and some of the earliest Elves vanished into his dominion. Oromë came upon them while hunting, and the Valar resolved to go to war on their behalf. They assailed Melkor's fortress of Utumno, overthrew it, and led him captive to Valinor, where he was held for three ages. The Valar then summoned the Elves westward. This summons began the first great division among the Firstborn, because those who refused the journey, the Avari, stayed behind in the East and passed out of the chronicles of the West.1

The westward march divided the Eldar further. The Vanyar and the Noldor crossed the sea to Aman, and a large part of the Teleri followed them later. Some of the Teleri abandoned the march before the mountains and became the Nandor. Others stayed in Beleriand with Elwë, who was lost for many years in the woods of Nan Elmoth with the Maia Melian, and his people grew into the Sindar. After Melkor was released, he destroyed the Two Trees and stole the Silmarils. Fëanor and most of the Noldor then rebelled against the Valar, shed kindred blood at Alqualondë, and returned to Middle-earth as exiles bound by an oath. The long war against Morgoth that followed, fought from the Noldorin kingdoms of Beleriand, took up the rest of the First Age.2

Men had already woken far to the east by then, and Morgoth went among them early. Only some of them later travelled west. Those who crossed the Blue Mountains into Beleriand met the Eldar there, beginning with Finrod's meeting with Bëor and his followers. Three houses of these Men, the Edain, took service with the Elvish lords and fought beside them against Angband. Easterling peoples who arrived afterwards were less steady allies, and the betrayal by some of them at the Nirnaeth Arnoediad broke the power of the Noldor. Over this period the two kindreds became closely bound together, most strikingly through the marriage of Beren and Lúthien. Their line led to Eärendil, whose voyage to Aman won the intervention of the Valar. In the War of Wrath Morgoth was overthrown, and most of Beleriand sank beneath the sea.3

In the Second Age the histories of the two kindreds separated again. The Edain received the island of Númenor as their reward. Many of the Eldar went back into the West, while others remained in Middle-earth under Gil-galad in Lindon or settled in Eregion. There the smiths of Celebrimbor worked with Sauron in disguise to forge the Rings of Power, until he revealed himself by making the One Ring. Over the centuries Númenor grew resentful of the Ban of the Valar and of its own mortality. Ar-Pharazôn finally led an armada against Aman, and the island was drowned when the world was changed. Elendil and his sons, who had stayed loyal, escaped to found realms in exile, and in the Last Alliance they fought beside Gil-galad to overthrow Sauron at the close of the age.4

The Third Age saw the Elves in Middle-earth slowly diminish. Their remaining strongholds were Rivendell, Lothlórien, the Grey Havens and the realm in Mirkwood, and ships sailed steadily from the Havens into the West. The Dúnedain kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor passed through division, plague and war, and the northern line survived only as a hidden house of chieftains. After the One Ring was destroyed, the Three Rings lost their power. The Ring-bearers departed over the sea, and the Fourth Age was reckoned as the age in which Men held dominion. Aragorn's marriage to Arwen, who chose a mortal life, was the last union of Elf and Man in the chronicles, and with it the history of the Children in Middle-earth passed into the keeping of the younger kindred.5

What the two kindreds share is less a manner of life than a set of gifts, and the Silmarillion describes those gifts as deliberately different. The Elves were made to be the fairest of earthly creatures and to imagine and make a greater share of beauty than any other creature in the world. Their joy and their art are therefore turned towards Arda itself. Men received something harder to name: a freedom to shape their lives amid the powers and chances of the world, reaching beyond the Music of the Ainur, which binds all other things as to a fate. The account admits that this freedom brings risk, since Men can misuse it and seldom achieve the harmony that the Elves reach. Craft, song and speech flourished among both kindreds, but the Elves were the older masters of them, and the younger people learned much from them wherever the two met in friendship.1

The sharpest division concerns death and time. The Elves do not die of age or sickness. They can be slain, or they can waste away from grief, and even then they do not leave the world. Their spirits pass to the halls of Mandos in Valinor, from which they may in time return, and they remain bound to Arda until it ends. Men are only guests in the world. They die by nature and depart from its circles to a fate that the Elvish histories do not claim to know, and the Silmarillion calls this departure the gift of Ilúvatar. Melkor, however, darkened it in the minds of Men, so that they came to fear it and to confuse it with the darkness he spread. The later history of Númenor turns on exactly this confusion. The Valar's messengers argued there that death was not a penalty imposed on Men, and that the Eldar, for all their long life, had not escaped a burden of their own.2

Tolkien described the Elvish burden himself. In his account, the Elves' longevity made them feel the passing of things as a slow sorrow, and it tempted them to hold the world still and to preserve what they loved against change. He regarded that desire as their characteristic fault, since in it their love of beauty tipped into regret. Men, whose lives are short, face the opposite temptation: to cling to life and to resent their own ending. Seen through these two opposed dangers, the pairing of the kindreds is complementary. The one is rooted in the world and endures, while the other passes through it and leaves.3

Among the Elves, the chronicles separate the Eldar who accepted the summons from those who stayed behind, and they divide the Eldar into three kindreds, each with a named lord. Ingwë led the Vanyar and was held to be high king of all the Elvish peoples. Finwë led the Noldor, and the Teleri, the largest host, followed two brothers, Elwë and Olwë. A second division cuts across these kindreds. Elves who had dwelt in Aman and seen the light of the Trees were called the Calaquendi, the Elves of the Light, and those who never did were counted among the Moriquendi, the Elves of the Darkness. Eldar who set out but never reached Aman were further distinguished as the Úmanyar.1

The Noldor are the kindred whose princely houses the text distinguishes most carefully. Finwë had one son, Fëanor, by his first wife Míriel, and two more, Fingolfin and Finarfin, by his second wife Indis. The rivalry between these half-brothers shaped the later divisions of the exiles. Fëanor's seven sons formed a house of their own, while the descendants of Fingolfin and Finarfin founded separate realms in Beleriand. Finarfin himself remained in Aman, but his children went into exile.2

Men, whose lives are short, face the opposite temptation: to cling to life and to resent their own ending.

Among Men, the chronicles distinguish the three houses of the Edain by their first leaders. The eldest was the people of Bëor. The second was the Haladin, led at first by Haldad and after his death by his daughter Haleth, whose name the house later bore. The third was the people of Marach, the largest of the three, from whom the House of Hador descended. The text also names the chieftains of the later Easterling peoples. Bór and his sons proved faithful to the Eldar, while Ulfang and his sons did not.3

In the creation account the Children are the point at which the cosmic story turns towards history. Having seen the dwelling prepared for them in the Vision, many of the Ainur wished to go down into the world. The labours of the Valar in Arda are therefore framed as preparation for inhabitants whom they had not devised and did not fully comprehend. Melkor's part in the tale is defined against the same horizon, since he envied the gifts promised to Elves and Men and sought to bend both kindreds to his will. The account then closes by looking ahead to a music in which their voices will join those of the Ainur, so that the Children stand at both ends of the story it tells.1

This orientation shapes the structure of the Silmarillion as a whole. Once the Firstborn awake, the Valar recede to the margins, and the narrative follows the choices, oaths and griefs of the Children rather than the deeds of the Powers. Because the chronicle is presented as Elvish lore, the elder kindred act as its tellers as well as its subject. Men enter as latecomers seen from outside. Their earliest days and their destiny after death stay deliberately obscure, and the text records what the Eldar knew or guessed of them rather than what Men knew of themselves.2

Tolkien's own comments explain why the pairing carries so much weight. He described the Elves as an image of the artistic, aesthetic and scientific sides of human nature raised to a higher level, which makes the two kindreds less two separate races than two aspects of a single humanity. Elsewhere he named death, and the longing to escape it, as the real theme of his mythology. Read in this light, the Children are the means by which the legendarium explores that theme, with each kindred giving a different answer to the question of how a created being should love a world it must eventually leave or outlast.3

The idea of Elves and Men as two kindreds sprung directly from the creator is among the oldest parts of the legendarium. It is already present in The Music of the Ainur, the cosmogonic tale Tolkien wrote for The Book of Lost Tales, where the Children stand beside the Ainur much as they do in the later account. The peoples grouped under the name, however, looked quite different. The Elves of the Lost Tales bore names later reassigned or abandoned. The Noldoli, rendered in English as Gnomes, answered to the later Noldor. The name Teleri belonged to the kindred later called the Vanyar, while the people afterwards known as the Teleri appeared as the Solosimpi. These shifts altered the internal divisions of the Firstborn without disturbing the underlying pairing of an elder and a younger kindred.1

In his late writings Tolkien returned to the pairing chiefly to question it philosophically rather than to extend its history. Laws and Customs among the Eldar examines the Elvish nature as a union of spirit and body and asks what their deathlessness within Arda meant in practice. The Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth stages a debate between an Elf-lord and a mortal wise-woman. She reports a tradition among her people that Men were not made to die and that their mortality results from an early fall. Finrod, for his part, arrives at the hope that Eru himself might one day enter the world to heal it. A separate essay, Quendi and Eldar, records a legend of the Elves' awakening in which three first Elves, Imin, Tata and Enel, find the rest of their kind. None of these texts was integrated into a finished narrative, and they remain explorations rather than settled canon.2