Elves

The English word Elves is a rendering of convenience rather than a native term. In the note on languages appended to the account of the War of the Ring, Tolkien explains that he used it to translate two words of the Elves' own speech, Quendi and Eldar, and acknowledged that the English word had drifted in later centuries toward associations of smallness and frivolity that the peoples it names do not deserve. In the Westron of the later Third Age they were known by cognate terms, and hobbits and Men of Gondor also spoke of them as the Fair Folk. The distinction between Quendi, which covered the whole kindred, and Eldar, which came to be reserved for those who answered the summons of the Valar and set out on the westward march, survived into that late usage: the exiles who dwelt in Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age reckoned themselves Eldar, and their loremasters kept the older, wider word for the race entire.

The origin of both names is given in the chronicles of the Elder Days. The first Elves woke beside the water of Cuiviénen in the far east of Middle-earth, under starlight, in the years before the Sun and Moon; the stars were the first thing they beheld, and song and speech the first things they made. From that making they took their own name, Quendi, understood as those who speak with voices, since they knew of no other creatures able to do so. The second name came from outside: when the Vala Oromë found them at their waters he called them Eldar, the people of the stars, and the word passed to those who followed him westward, while those who refused the journey were afterwards called the Avari, the unwilling.

Their descent is not from any of the Valar but directly from Ilúvatar, who alone set them in the world, and their coming was foreseen in the Music before Arda was made. Because they awoke before the second kindred, they are titled the Elder Children of Ilúvatar and the Firstborn, and the race of Men who came after them are the Followers or the Younger Children. The Elves themselves held that the hour of their waking was appointed, and that the first sound they heard was the water running beside them; the collective term for the whole people in their own high speech was Eldalië, the Elven-folk.

The recorded history of the people begins with the summons that followed their discovery in the east. Oromë carried word of the new-woken kindred to the Valar, and in time three ambassadors — Ingwë, Finwë and Elwë — were brought over Sea and returned persuaded that their folk should remove westward into the light of Aman. The march that followed was long and repeatedly broken. Of the three hosts that set out, the Vanyar and the Noldor came at last to the shores and were ferried across, while the third and largest host, the Teleri, lagged behind; a part of them under Lenwë abandoned the road altogether at the Misty Mountains and went south along the great river as the Nandor. Elwë himself was lost in the woods of Beleriand and did not sail, and the many who stayed searching for him became the Sindar of that country, joined on the coasts by the shipwrights of Círdan; behind them all, in the far east, remained the Avari, who had never accepted the summons at all. From this single journey came the divisions of kindred, speech and allegiance that shaped everything after.

In Aman the Noldor grew most swiftly in craft and lore, and there Fëanor made the three jewels that held the light of the Two Trees. Melkor, released from long imprisonment, worked among them with counsel and rumour until suspicion divided the princes; he then slew Finwë, took the Silmarils and fled, and the Trees were destroyed. Fëanor bound himself and his seven sons by an irrevocable oath to pursue the jewels, and led the greater part of his people out of Valinor in pursuit. The exile was purchased with the first kin-slaughter: at Alqualondë the Noldor took the ships of the Teleri by force, and afterwards Fëanor burned those ships on the far shore, leaving the host of Fingolfin to make the crossing on foot over the grinding ice of the north. The judgement pronounced against them as they departed set the terms of their whole history in Middle-earth — that their oath would turn against them, and that treason and failure would attend their works.

The centuries in Beleriand that followed were a single long war against Morgoth, punctuated by victories that could not be pressed. After early successes the Noldor and their Sindarin allies established a leaguer about Angband that held for some four hundred years, until it was broken by a sudden onslaught of fire and the northern realms were overrun. The attempt to recover the initiative ended in the fifth battle, a defeat so complete that it left the enemy free to reduce the remaining strongholds one by one: Nargothrond was sacked, hidden Gondolin found and destroyed, and Doriath fell not to Morgoth but to the sons of Fëanor, who twice more turned their swords on their own kindred over the recovered Silmaril. Only the errand of Eärendil to the West brought relief, and the host that came out of Aman broke Morgoth's power utterly — at the cost of Beleriand itself, which was ruined and drowned in the tumult. Pardon was extended to the survivors of the exiles, and many took ship for Aman; those who would not, among them Gil-galad, Círdan and Galadriel, remained east of the Sea.

The Second Age opened with the survivors settled in Lindon under Gil-galad, and with a new foundation east of the mountains at Eregion, where the smiths under Celebrimbor kept unusually close friendship with the Dwarves of Khazad-dûm. There Sauron, in fair guise and under an assumed name, offered his instruction, and the Rings of Power were made; the Three were Celebrimbor's own work and were never touched by him, but the making of the One revealed the deceit. The war that followed destroyed Eregion, drove Elrond north to found the refuge of Imladris, and was only turned by a fleet out of Númenor. The remainder of the Age was for the Elves a slow retrenchment behind guarded borders, ending in the alliance of their people with the Men of the West and the seven-year siege of Mordor; Sauron was overthrown, but Gil-galad fell with Elendil in the act, and no High King of the Noldor ruled in Middle-earth thereafter.

Through the Third Age the pattern is one of shrinking and departure rather than expansion. No new kingdoms were founded; what endured were Rivendell, the wood of Lothlórien, the northern realm in Greenwood the Great, and the havens on the Gulf of Lhûn from which ships passed west. The keepers of the Three used them to preserve and to resist weariness rather than to build, and their bearers stayed hidden while the shadow gathered again at Dol Guldur and the great wood darkened and was renamed. Contact with other peoples became occasional and often reluctant, though the wood-elves of the north turned out in force at the battle before the Lonely Mountain in the year the dragon Smaug was killed. Meanwhile a steady traffic of small companies moved down the old roads toward the Sea, and the settlements they left behind were not refilled.

The War of the Ring touched the elven realms directly: Lórien was assaulted three times from Dol Guldur and the northern woodland kingdom was invaded, and when the fighting in the south was decided the defenders crossed the river, threw down the tower, and divided the cleansed forest between them. Victory, however, confirmed the decline rather than reversing it, since the unmaking of the One drained the Three of their power to hold things unchanged. Within two years Elrond and Galadriel went down to the havens with Círdan and the Ring-bearers and passed over Sea, and Elrond's house at Rivendell was left in the keeping of his sons. Some stayed longer — a company out of Greenwood settled with Legolas in Ithilien and worked there through the early reign of the reunited kingdoms, and Celeborn dwelt on in Lórien and afterwards at Rivendell before he too departed — but after the passing of Aragorn a grey ship went down Anduin, and the tradition of the north held that with it the Eldar of Middle-earth came to their end.

Two related tongues stand behind almost everything the Elves left in speech and writing. The high language brought back from Aman had, by the close of the Third Age, ceased to be anyone's daily speech and survived as a tongue of ceremony, lore and formal address, learned rather than inherited; the grey-elven speech of Beleriand took its place in ordinary use among the western kindreds and was studied besides by the Men of Gondor and Arnor, whose names and place-names are largely drawn from it. Letters came in two traditions. The flowing script devised in Aman spread wherever the Noldor settled and proved supple enough to be fitted to other languages, including the common tongue of the later Age, while the older angular runes shaped for carving in Doriath were taken up and much enlarged by the Dwarves. Craft followed the same pattern of long refinement: the small stores given to the Company that left Lothlórien — grey cloaks that took the colour of their surroundings, a rope of unusual lightness and strength, a waybread that kept its virtue for weeks — were treated by their makers as ordinary provision rather than as marvels.

What most sharply divides them from the second kindred is the manner of their tenure. Elves do not sicken and are not worn down by years; their lives are measured by the life of Arda itself, and while the world lasts they cannot pass beyond it. They can be killed by violence or waste away under grief, but the spirit so released is not lost: it is summoned to the halls of Mandos in the West, where it waits, and may in time be restored to life among its own people. Men, by contrast, are held to leave the circles of the world altogether at death, and where that departure leads was hidden even from the Valar — a difference the Elves themselves regarded as the deeper mystery, and one they could not envy without misunderstanding it. Their own long endurance carries its own weight, since memory accumulates without relief and the years bring a slow weariness that no vigour of body prevents.

From that condition follows the characteristic bent of their works. Tolkien himself described the besetting fault of the Elves as a wish to arrest change rather than accept it — to keep what they loved unspoiled and unaltered, and to treat the world as something to be preserved rather than let go — and much of their labour in Middle-earth answers to that description. It shows also in smaller habits noted by those who travelled with them: rest taken without true sleep, the eyes open and the mind walking elsewhere; sight and hearing far beyond the human range; a lightness of tread that leaves little mark on deep snow. Song serves them as record as much as pleasure, and their histories were carried in verse long before they were written. Set against the shorter-lived peoples they appear unhurried to the point of coldness, but the reluctance is less indifference than the knowledge that whatever they build they will outlast.

Two crossing distinctions order the whole people in the older lore. The first is one of light: those who dwelt in Aman and beheld the Trees were the Calaquendi, and all who never left the starlit east were the Moriquendi, with a third term, the Úmanyar, for such of the Eldar as set out on the march but never reached the western shore. The second is the division of the Eldar into three kindreds, each with its own lord and its own bent. The Vanyar were the smallest and the first to depart, and none of them ever came back east; their lord Ingwë was reckoned the high king of the whole race, though he ruled from beneath the mountain of the Valar. The Noldor of Finwë were named for their skill in knowledge and making. The Teleri, last and most numerous, were also the most broken: those who crossed under Olwë became the mariners of the Aman coasts, while their eastern remnants took separate names — the grey-elven folk of Beleriand, the shore-dwellers of the Falas, the wandering Nandor, and a part of these who at length crossed the mountains into Ossiriand and were called the Green-elves for the manner of their dwelling.

Within the Noldor the succession split at the three sons of Finwë and never closed again. Fëanor, his eldest and the only child of his first marriage, stood at the head of a house apart, he and his seven sons bound to one another by the oath they swore in common; from his second marriage came Fingolfin and Finarfin, and their children — Fingon, Turgon and Aredhel of the one line, Finrod, Angrod, Aegnor and Galadriel of the other — held between them the greater realms of the exile in the north and the south. Rank, precedence and old grievance among these houses, rather than any difference of speech or custom, decide most of what the Noldor do in Beleriand. Beside them stood an authority of a different kind: the house of Elwë in Doriath, whose queen was one of the Maiar, and whose only child married a mortal man and so began the line of the Half-elven.

By the end of the Third Age these distinctions survive in a simplified form. The account appended to the Red Book divides the race into West-elves and East-elves, and reckons most of the folk of Mirkwood and of Lórien among the latter, whose own tongues left almost no trace in the histories of the West. The surviving exiles of the Noldor, called High Elves, were by then few and gathered chiefly about Rivendell and the western havens; a company of them met on the road in the Shire named itself plainly, as exiles of the house of Finrod, and greeted a hobbit in the high speech. That any wandering party could still identify itself by house at the end of the Age is itself the point: the kindreds had thinned almost to nothing, but the reckoning of descent had not.

In the books the Elves are the device by which the narrative signals that the world is older and wider than the vantage it begins from, and they are introduced in deliberately mixed keys. The first company a reader meets in the earlier tale is a household in a hidden valley whose singing is arch to the point of silliness, presided over by a master who quietly supplies the one piece of knowledge — the letters visible only by a certain moon — on which the whole errand turns; the second is a suspicious woodland king who throws the travellers into cells, releases none of them willingly, and afterwards presses a hard claim on the hoard under the mountain. Placed side by side these establish early that elvishness carries no moral guarantee. The pattern holds when Frodo falls in with a wandering company on the road out of the Shire: they feed and shelter him and turn aside a pursuer, but decline to tell him plainly what to do, on the ground that counsel is a dangerous thing to give.

Across the longer narrative their function is to host, to remember, and to equip, rather than to act. The council in the eastern valley works because the people gathered there include witnesses who were present at the events under discussion, so that the history of the Ring can be assembled from speech instead of narration; the sojourn in the golden wood supplies rest, a test of nerve at the basin of water, and the provisions and boats that carry the Company on. Both hosts also mark the limits of what such help can be. The lord of the valley will name no one to the errand and lays no command on the walkers, the lady of the wood is offered the Ring outright and refuses it, and the whole elven contribution to the fellowship in the field is one archer sent as a representative of his people. The decisive burden stays with hobbits and Men; the Elves furnish the frame around them.

Thematically they carry the book's argument about time. Writing to a publisher about the shape of his legends, Tolkien set the deathlessness of the Elves against the mortality of Men as the matter the whole cycle turns on, and described elvish enchantment as art directed at making rather than at dominion — a distinction the narrative keeps insisting upon whenever elven work is mistaken by others for sorcery. The consequence for the plot is that the Elves supply its elegiac weight: the outcome that saves everyone else is also what ends their tenure, and they know it before the fighting begins. This is why the story does not close with the crowning or with the restored country, but at a harbour, with a ship going out and two hobbits watching from the shore — the victory reckoned, at the last, in terms of what it cost the people who had least to gain from it.

The people took shape slowly, and under names that would later be reassigned or discarded. In the earliest cycle of tales the word habitually used of them in English is fairies, and their history ends in a literal waning: as the race of Men spreads they dwindle and grow thin and faint, an idea only gradually transmuted into the fading and departure of the finished legendarium. The place of the awakening was there called Koivië-néni, the Waters of Awakening, and the city built by the Elves in the West was Kôr upon its hill, a name afterwards divided between the hill Túna and the city Tirion. The three kindreds bore names that later shifted their referents entirely: the first host were the Teleri, the second the Noldoli, and the third the Solosimpi, the pipers of the shore. Through the intervening decades the second kindred were regularly rendered in English as Gnomes, a term Tolkien intended in its learned sense of knowledge and abandoned only after long use, while the first kindred passed through the name Lindar before Vanyar was settled on.

The late writings move in the opposite direction, elaborating rather than renaming. A philological essay of Tolkien's last decades reconstructs the primitive forms behind Quendi, Eldar and Avari and sets out how each kindred and sundered group named itself and its neighbours; appended to it is a legend of the awakening in which the first Elves are the three fathers Imin, Tata and Enel with their wives, and the whole company that woke at the water numbers a hundred and forty-four. Elsewhere Tolkien worked at the mechanics of elvish death and return, and grew dissatisfied with the older doctrine by which a slain Elf was reborn as a child to its own kindred, moving toward a restoration of the same body by the Valar. A separate late piece turns on a point of pronunciation, the change of an older sound to s in the high speech, which Fëanor refused on his mother's account; from this small dispute Tolkien derived a share of the ill feeling among the princes of the Noldor.

The Elves reached the screen first in the Rankin/Bass television film of the shorter novel, where Elrond was voiced by Cyril Ritchard and the wood-elves of the forest keep their part in the story, though the compression to roughly ninety minutes leaves them little room. Ralph Bakshi's animated film of the following year gave Legolas to Anthony Daniels, Elrond to André Morell and Galadriel to Annette Crosbie; because the film breaks off after the fighting at Helm's Deep, the elven strand of the narrative is reduced to the council, the passage through the golden wood and the gifts that follow, and Glorfindel's part at the flight to the Ford is transferred to Legolas. The same studio's later television film of the last volume keeps the Elves largely to a framing scene in Rivendell. The most faithful of the older versions is the BBC radio dramatisation in twenty-six parts, with Hugh Dickson as Elrond, David Collings as Legolas and Marian Diamond as Galadriel; its length allows the elven episodes, including the meeting with the wandering company on the road out of the Shire, to be played out at something near their proper weight.

Peter Jackson's trilogy cast Hugo Weaving as Elrond, Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, Orlando Bloom as Legolas, Liv Tyler as Arwen, Marton Csokas as Celeborn and Craig Parker as Haldir, and made two changes that are regularly noted: Glorfindel is cut and his rescue of the wounded hobbit given to Arwen, whose role is enlarged throughout into a continuous subplot, and a company of elven archers under Haldir is sent to fight at Helm's Deep, an invention with no basis in the book. The later trilogy drawn from the shorter novel goes further, returning Bloom to a story in which his character does not appear, naming the woodland king Thranduil and casting Lee Pace in the part, and adding an elf-captain, Tauriel, played by Evangeline Lilly, who has no source in Tolkien at all and is given a romance with one of the dwarves.