Nandor

The Nandor were Eldar of the Telerin kindred, the third and largest of the hosts that set out from Cuiviénen on the Great Journey. They formed part of the following led by Olwë, and it was at the Misty Mountains, which the Elves feared to cross, that Lenwë parted from that march and turned south along the Great River with those willing to follow him. They therefore did not refuse the summons outright, as the Avari did. They took it up and then abandoned it partway. This places them among the Úmanyar, the Eldar who began the westward road but never reached Aman, and so with the Sindar among the Elves who remained in Middle-earth.1

Their name reflects that parting. In the index to the published Silmarillion, Nandor is glossed as those who turn back, which describes their conduct on the journey rather than a trait of their way of life. The name came from their kindred and not from their own choosing. It records how the other Eldar remembered them, as the ones who had left the road. Elsewhere they are called by what they were known for in their new homes. The branch that later settled in Ossiriand, the Land of Seven Rivers, was called the Laiquendi, the Green-elves, because they dressed in green so that they could move unseen among the leaves of their woods.2

Not all of Lenwë's people went on to Beleriand, and the name covers more than the group that followed his son Denethor. Unfinished Tales traces the Silvan Elves of the Third Age, the woodland folk of Lórien and Mirkwood, back to Nandorin Elves who stayed in the vales of Anduin and the forests east of the mountains. By this account the Silvan Elves were Teleri in origin, and their speech was a Nandorin tongue that had drifted far from the language of the Sindar. The Nandor thus stand at the source of two lines: the Green-elves of Ossiriand in the west and the wood-elves of the Great River's lands in the east.3

After Lenwë's following left the westward march, the Silmarillion records no events among them for a long age. Their kin lost all contact with them, and during that time they grew into a separate people, shaped by the river valleys and woodlands where they settled. The account gives no dates and names no dwellings for these years, and it describes no kingdom of the kind the Sindar later built under Thingol. What it does record is the change that set them apart from the other Eldar. They lived close to the living world and came to know its creatures and growing things more closely than any other Elves did. This long separation is the background to everything that followed, because when part of the Nandor finally came west, their kin in Beleriand regarded them as a people who had been lost.1

The western branch came back into the story under Denethor, Lenwë's son. He led a large company over the Blue Mountains into Beleriand while the world was still lit only by the stars, in the years of Thingol's peace. Thingol welcomed them as kinsfolk returned after long absence, and they settled in Ossiriand, between the river Gelion and the mountains. For a while they lived there in quiet. That quiet ended when the creatures of Morgoth began to come into Beleriand. Against that threat the Sindar of Doriath had armed themselves with the help of the Dwarves, but the Nandor had nothing to match them.2

Their first and heaviest loss came in the war that the Silmarillion counts as the First Battle of Beleriand. Denethor went to Thingol's aid, and the two hosts caught an army of Orcs between them in eastern Beleriand. The Nandor were lightly armed against enemies protected by iron, and Denethor was cut off on the hill of Amon Ereb and killed with those around him before help could reach him. The victory went to the Elves, but the Green-elves grieved for their lord ever afterward and never chose another king. From then on they avoided open war. They trusted to secrecy and to their knowledge of the woods, and relied on the rivers of Ossiriand to protect them.3

In the centuries of the Noldor's wars the Green-elves stayed on the margins of events, but they appear at several turning points. When the first Men came over the mountains into the east of Beleriand, the Laiquendi resented the newcomers disturbing their woods. Finrod Felagund passed on their complaint and advised the Edain to settle farther west. Much later, Beren and Lúthien lived among them after their return, on the isle of Tol Galen in the river Adurant. When the Dwarves of Nogrod sacked Menegroth and carried off its treasure, Beren and the Green-elves ambushed them at the ford of Sarn Athrad on Gelion as they made for home. This is the last deed the Silmarillion assigns to the Nandor of Ossiriand as a people.4

At the end of the First Age most of Beleriand sank, but part of Ossiriand survived west of the Blue Mountains under the name Lindon, which the Noldor had once given it for the singing of its people. The eastern Nandor, who had never crossed the mountains, lasted far longer as a distinct population in the vales of Anduin and the great forests. Unfinished Tales describes how they came to be ruled by lords of Sindarin descent. Oropher ruled in Greenwood the Great and Amdír in Lórien, and both led Silvan hosts in the War of the Last Alliance. Both kings died in that war, together with many of their people, and the Silvan realms entered the Third Age with their numbers badly reduced. Their people survived even so, and by the War of the Ring the woodland realms of Thranduil and of Lórien were still held by Elves whose descent went back to Lenwë's people.5

What set the Nandor apart was the kind of knowledge they valued. The other Eldar measured themselves by crafts of metal, stone and writing. Lenwë's people instead became learned in the living world: trees and herbs, birds and beasts. They preferred to settle where water ran, beside streams and falls, and their arts seem to have been those of the woodland rather than the forge. The Silmarillion records no smithcraft of theirs, and their lack of iron weapons shaped their history. The same attachment appears in their quarrel with the first Men in eastern Beleriand. What troubled them was the felling of trees and the hunting of beasts in woods they regarded as their own.1

Their eastern descendants appear in The Hobbit as the Wood-elves of the great forest. The narrator describes them as Elves who never went West, who loved starlight above all other light, and who were less wise and more dangerous than their kin who had crossed the Sea. They were not wicked, but they distrusted strangers. Most of them lived and hunted in the open woods, in dwellings on the ground or in the branches of trees, and they were especially fond of beeches. Their king held court in a great cave and kept a store of treasure there. His folk feasted in the forest glades and bought their wine from the Men of the Lake.2

Their speech followed their fortunes. Unfinished Tales notes that the Silvan Elves came under lords of Sindarin descent. Over time they adopted the Sindarin tongue of their rulers, and in Lórien especially the old Silvan speech gave way almost entirely. Little of it survived except in some names of places and persons, whose form cannot always be explained from Sindarin. The change came through living together, and no conquest is recorded behind it. It was also never complete, since the Sindarin of these realms kept marks of the older speech of their people.3

The Silmarillion treats Lenwë's following as one people at the moment of parting, but it does not keep them together afterwards. In its chapter on the Sindar it describes how they scattered once they had turned south. Some stayed for ages in the woods along the vale of the Great River. Others kept going downstream until they reached its mouths and settled by the Sea. A third group passed the White Mountains, turned north again and entered the empty lands of Eriador. None of these groups is given a separate name or a lord of its own. The text distinguishes them only by where they went.1

The only line of leaders the Silmarillion records among the Nandor is that of Lenwë and his son. Denethor's company did not stay a single body after his fall. Some of the survivors went back to the woods of Ossiriand, and it was from them that the Green-elves took their lasting fear of open war. Others went into Doriath and joined Thingol's people there, so part of Lenwë's line of followers merged into the Sindar. Ossiriand itself had no ruling house from then on. The text names no lord of the Green-elves after Denethor, and it presents their later dealings with Men and with Beren as those of a people without a king.2

The Elves most readers meet first, in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, are mostly not the exiled Noldor of the older tales but woodland folk of this lineage.

In the east, Unfinished Tales separates the woodland people from the lords who ruled them. The Silvan folk were Nandorin by descent, but the royal houses that ruled them in later ages were Sindarin: Oropher and then his son Thranduil in the northern forest, and Amdír and then his son Amroth in Lórien. The same account counts Nimrodel, whom Amroth loved, among the Silvan Elves proper. This shows that the difference between rulers and ruled was still recognized in the Third Age. In the great forest, the Wood-elves whom Thranduil's son Legolas later represented were of the old stock, while their king's house had come from the west.3

In the Silmarillion the Nandor serve mainly as a counterweight to the story the book is built around. The chronicle follows the Noldor, the Silmarils and the wars that grew out of them, and it measures most peoples by how they answered the summons into the West. The Nandor give a third answer beside refusal and fulfilment. They set out and then stopped, and the narrative treats that hesitation as an ordinary choice rather than a failing, with no fall or curse attached. Their history is told almost entirely in asides. They enter the main account only when the concerns of others reach their borders, and they leave it again as quietly. Through them the book shows that Middle-earth held Elves whose lives had little to do with the Silmarils, and whose losses came from being caught up in other people's wars.1

Their larger role in the legendarium comes through their descendants. The Elves most readers meet first, in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, are mostly not the exiled Noldor of the older tales but woodland folk of this lineage. That choice shapes how the later books present Elvenkind. In The Hobbit the Wood-elves are the first Elves to stand against the travellers, when they take the Dwarves captive. The episode makes the point early that Elves are neither simply benevolent nor remote. In The Lord of the Rings the Company's guides in Lórien are woodland Elves wary of outsiders, and the Elf of the Fellowship comes from the northern forest realm. The reader's picture of the Elves in the War of the Ring is therefore largely a woodland one: close to trees and rivers, suspicious of strangers, and loyal to its own lands before the wider world.2

The Nandor took shape in Tolkien's writings of the 1930s under a different name. In the Lhammas, the account of the Elvish tongues printed in The Lost Road, the leader who abandoned the westward march is not yet Lenwë but Dan, and his people are the Danas, named after him and not after their conduct on the journey. The same text treats their speech as a distinct branch, the Danian tongues, of which the language of the Green-elves in Ossiriand is one form. This early scheme already contains the essential outline of the later account: a following that left the march, a long separation, and a western remnant settled in the Land of Seven Rivers. What changed afterwards was mainly the naming and the framework around it.1

In the post-Lord of the Rings revision of the Beleriand annals, the leader's name became Lenwë, and Denethor is presented as his son, the form carried into the published Silmarillion. The later linguistic essay Quendi and Eldar takes up the name Nandor itself and derives it from a stem meaning back or backward, so that the name describes the parting on the road and no longer points to a founding lord. The Danas thus survive as an earlier stage, one in which the people was identified by its leader rather than by its choice.2

No film or radio version presents the Nandor under that name, and none dramatises Lenwë's parting from the march or the Green-elves of Ossiriand. Their descendants appear on screen as the Wood-elves of the northern forest. The Rankin/Bass television film of 1977 keeps the Elvenking as a minor figure, voiced by the director Otto Preminger, and like the novel gives him no personal name. Peter Jackson's trilogy of 2012–2014 names him Thranduil and casts Lee Pace in the role. It enlarges the woodland realm well beyond the book's episode of captivity and escape. It also brings Legolas, played by Orlando Bloom, into a story in which he has no part. The largest departure is Tauriel, a captain of the king's guard played by Evangeline Lilly. She is a character invented for the films, and much of the added material concerning the Wood-elves is built around her.1

In adaptations of The Lord of the Rings the woodland lineage appears mainly through Legolas. He is voiced by Anthony Daniels in Ralph Bakshi's animated film of 1978 and by David Collings in the BBC radio dramatisation of 1981, and Orlando Bloom plays him in Jackson's trilogy of 2001–2003. Jackson's films also contain the most discussed deviation involving these Elves. In the second film a company of Elves from Lórien, led by Haldir and played by Craig Parker, comes to Helm's Deep and fights beside the Rohirrim, and Haldir is killed there. The novel sends no Elvish force to that battle. There the Elves of Lórien stay in their own land and defend it against attacks from the east.2