Silvan Elves

In the stories Tolkien published during his lifetime, this people is known above all as the Wood-elves. That is the name Bilbo's narrative uses for the folk of the Elvenking's halls in eastern Mirkwood. The narrator explains that they differ from the Elves who made the journey into the West: their forebears never went over the Sea and stayed behind in the dimmer light of Middle-earth. The narrator treats them as a kindred apart, wary and often suspicious, yet closer in temper to the land they lived in. In The Lord of the Rings the woodland folk of Lothlórien appear under a more local name, the Galadhrim, which marks them as the people of the trees in which they made their dwellings.1

The fullest account of their origin appears in Tolkien's later writings, edited after his death. There the Silvan Elves are said to be Teleri by descent. Their ancestors belonged to the host of the Great Journey, but they lost heart before the Misty Mountains and settled in the valley of the Anduin instead of crossing into the far West. The Sindarin-speaking Elves called them Tawarwaith, a name formed on the word for forest, so that it describes them simply as the people of the woods. The same account holds them to be nearer in kinship to the Nandor than to any other group. The Nandor were another Telerin company that had broken away from the march. This makes the Silvan Elves relatives of the Nandor, not a branch of them.2

This origin explains why the Silvan Elves long remained a people distinct from the lords who later came to govern them. The Silmarillion recounts how the Teleri split on the westward road, with some companies turning aside along the Great River and never reaching Beleriand. The woodland Elves of the Anduin are the descendants of such lingerers. When Elves of Sindarin descent afterwards settled among them, the newcomers took up leadership. The Silvan folk, however, stayed recognisably themselves in custom and in their attachment to the forests. According to Tolkien's later account, their own tongue gave way only gradually to Sindarin in Lórien and in the northern woodland realm.3

For long ages the Silvan Elves had no written history and no lords of their own. While the greater part of the Teleri went on into Beleriand, the lingerers in the valley of the Great River spread out through the woodlands on either side of it. They lived in scattered communities under the trees and took no part in the wars against Morgoth that shaped the First Age in the West. That changed after the fall of Doriath and the ruin of Beleriand. Elves who had dwelt in Lindon crossed the Blue Mountains into the interior during the Second Age. Many of them were Sindar and Green-elves who still felt the pull of the sea, and they made realms among the woodland folk. This gave the Silvan Elves rulers of another kindred.1

Two such realms are recorded. In the Greenwood a Sinda named Oropher became king, and his folk first lived in the south of the forest. In the later Second Age he withdrew northward beyond the Gladden Fields. In the woods of Lórien another Sindarin prince, Amdír, ruled the Silvan people. Both kings answered the summons of the Last Alliance and led their people against Sauron. Their hosts were brave but lightly armed and slow to accept the command of Gil-galad. In the first assault on Mordor Oropher pressed forward before the signal was given and was killed. Amdír and many of his followers were cut off and driven into the marshes. Only about a third of the Greenwood host came home with Oropher's son Thranduil. The drowned faces that travellers later glimpsed in the Dead Marshes are remembered as a trace of that battle.2

In the Third Age a darkness gathered in the southern Greenwood, and the forest came to be called Mirkwood. Thranduil's people drew back into the north-east of the wood. There they lived in a great cave-hall beside a river, as The Hobbit describes. In that account the Wood-elves are hunters and feasters, jealous of their borders and quick to take strangers captive. They also traded by river with the Men of Esgaroth. After the death of the dragon Thranduil marched with his host towards the Lonely Mountain. When goblins and wolves attacked, his Elves fought beside Men and Dwarves in the Battle of Five Armies. Many years later his guards were given charge of Gollum, who escaped from them shortly before the Council of Elrond.3

Lórien suffered a heavier loss. When the Dwarves of Moria woke a Balrog in the deep places of their realm, fear spread to the neighbouring wood. Many of the Silvan Elves of Lórien fled south, and their lord Amroth and the elf-maiden Nimrodel were lost. From then on the Galadrim lived under the rule of Galadriel and Celeborn. They guarded the Golden Wood with growing watchfulness and admitted few outsiders. Through the power that dwelt among them, their land remained untouched by the long decline of the lands around it. It was this people who received the Fellowship of the Ring on its way south.4

Both woodland realms were attacked in the War of the Ring. Lórien was assaulted three times from Dol Guldur and held on each occasion. In northern Mirkwood Thranduil's people fought a long battle beneath the trees and drove the invaders back. After Sauron fell, Celeborn led the host of Lórien across the Anduin and took Dol Guldur, and Galadriel threw down its walls. Celeborn and Thranduil then met in the forest and gave it a new name, Eryn Lasgalen, the wood of green leaves. They divided the forest between them. Thranduil kept the north as far as the mountains, and the south below the narrow waist of the forest became East Lórien. The lands between were left to the Beornings and the Woodmen.5

The Fourth Age brought both new settlement and fading. Legolas had promised to bring folk of his own people south, and Elves from the Greenwood came to dwell in Ithilien. Their presence there made that country fair again for a time. They lived there until he built a ship and passed over the Sea. After Galadriel left Middle-earth, Celeborn went to live with the sons of Elrond. The Golden Wood gradually fell silent, and when Arwen came there at the end of her life she found it deserted. How long Thranduil's realm endured in the north is not recorded.6

The Hobbit portrays the woodland folk of the north as a people who lived mostly in the open forest, not in their king's stronghold. Their dwellings were houses and huts on the ground or high in the branches, and the cavern of the king served chiefly as fortress, treasury and hall of state. The narrator judges them less learned than the Elves who had dwelt in the West and for that reason more perilous to strangers. He also credits them with a love of pale gems and silver and with a taste for the wine of distant lands. Their work was practical: they floated empty casks downriver lashed into rafts and kept a watchful eye on every road through their woods. In Lothlórien the same arboreal habit takes a more settled form. Its people build platforms among the boughs of the great trees and sleep aloft. Their craft shows in the grey cloaks, the waybread, the light boats and the thin, strong rope that they give the Company at parting.1

Few of the woodland Elves knew the Common Speech. In Lórien Haldir and his brothers are singled out as unusual for having learned it, because they sometimes went abroad as messengers. The Appendices add a finer point: by the end of the Third Age the folk of Lórien spoke Sindarin, but with an accent inherited from their Silvan origin, and this puzzled Frodo when he listened to them. They mourned Gandalf in songs of their own making, which the hobbits could not follow. Suspicion of outsiders ran deep. The Wood-elves of the north nursed an old grievance against Dwarves, and the Galadhrim admitted Gimli only blindfolded. Legolas later remarks that time in the Golden Wood seemed to move differently from time outside it, which unsettled the mortal members of the Company.2

The later writings suggest that the Silvan manner of life shaped its rulers more than the rulers reshaped it. The Sindarin princes who came east wished to leave behind the lore and pride of Beleriand. They meant to live as the woodland folk did, close to the simple condition of the Elves before the summons of the Valar, and in time they became Silvan in all but descent. The memory of the sea persisted all the same among the newcomers of Telerin blood. For such Elves the longing could lie dormant through long years in the forest and still wake at the cry of a gull.3

The Hobbit draws its main line of division between peoples, not within one. It sets the Wood-elves apart from three western kindreds, which it names the Light-elves, the Deep-elves and the Sea-elves. These are the Elves who went into the far West and dwelt there for ages, while the woodland folk stayed behind. Among the Elvenking's own people the tale names only members of his household. Galion is his butler, and an unnamed chief of the guards keeps the keys of the dungeons. The Lord of the Rings adds the king's son Legolas, who comes to Rivendell as his father's messenger. In Lórien the wardens who meet the Company are three brothers, Haldir, Rúmil and Orophin, who watch the northern marches of the wood.1

The later writings describe the woodland realms as having two layers. The main population was Silvan, and the ruling houses above it were Sindarin. In the Greenwood the royal line runs from Oropher to Thranduil and then to Legolas. In Lórien, Amdír was succeeded by his son Amroth. Nimrodel stands on the other side of this divide. She was of Silvan birth, kept to her own tongue instead of Sindarin, and mistrusted the newcomers from the West. The sources disagree about Amroth's parentage. One account makes him the son of Amdír. Another, which Tolkien did not carry through, makes him a son of Galadriel and Celeborn.2

Their work was practical: they floated empty casks downriver lashed into rafts and kept a watchful eye on every road through their woods.

No chieftain of the Silvan Elves themselves is remembered from the time of the Great Journey. Their neighbours the Nandor are different in this respect. The Silmarillion names Lenwë as the leader who led that company away from the march down the Great River, and it names his son Denethor as the one who later brought part of them over the Blue Mountains to Ossiriand.3

In The Hobbit the Wood-elves occupy a deliberately uneasy place. After the refuge of Rivendell, the reader meets Elves who are neither guides nor enemies, and whose hall becomes a prison once the Dwarves refuse to explain their errand. The episode shifts the balance of the tale. With Gandalf gone and Thorin's company held captive, it is Bilbo, unseen, who contrives their release, and from then on the Dwarves begin to rely on him. The Elvenking also widens the story beyond a treasure hunt, because his interest in the hoard and his support for the Lake-men raise questions of claim and redress. Since he parts from the hobbit in friendship, the portrait never hardens into villainy.1

In The Lord of the Rings the woodland folk of Lórien serve almost the opposite purpose. After the disaster in Moria, their forest gives the Company a pause in which grief can be voiced and the road ahead reconsidered, and the story briefly stops moving. Yet the Silvan wardens are not simply benevolent. Their reluctance to admit a Dwarf echoes, in a milder key, the estrangement already seen in the earlier book. The tension is eased by the rulers of the wood and by Gimli's devotion to its Lady, not by any change in the wardens' own custom.2

Through Legolas the northern realm gains a voice within the Fellowship, where he is the only member of Elvish kind. His companionship with Gimli begins in coolness and grows into a friendship that answers the grudges displayed in both books, so the tale presents an inherited quarrel between peoples as something individuals can lay aside. Taken together, the Silvan Elves give Tolkien's published stories Elves seen at close range: territorial, fallible and bound to particular woods, in contrast to the remote high kindreds of legend.3

In Tolkien's mythology as it stood in the 1930s, the Elves who never reached Valinor did not yet form a Telerin people of their own. The Quenta of that period divides the Elves who took the westward road into Light-elves, Deep-elves and Sea-elves. These are the same three kindreds that The Hobbit later sets against its Wood-elves. Those who stayed behind in Middle-earth are grouped together as Dark-elves, and none of the texts gives a separate history to the forest-dwellers east of the mountains. When Bilbo's narrator explains that the Elvenking's folk were kin to the western Elves but had never gone over the Sea, he is drawing on this earlier and broader division. The more exact genealogy found in the late writings was not yet available to him.1

The Lhammas, the account of the Elvish tongues written around 1937, takes a first step towards a narrower origin. In it the Danas, the company that broke away from the march before the mountains, split into groups that went different ways. The branch that stayed east of the mountains is linked to the woodland Elves of the Anduin region. The later derivation of the Silvan Elves from Telerin lingerers was worked out only in the writings that Christopher Tolkien drew on for Unfinished Tales. The Lhammas is an earlier stage of that idea. It already connects them with the kindred later called the Nandor, but it has not yet separated them clearly from it.2

In the adaptations of The Lord of the Rings, the woodland people are represented mostly through Legolas, the Elvenking's son. Anthony Daniels voices him in Ralph Bakshi's animated film, which also gives him the ride to Rivendell that the book assigns to Glorfindel. In the BBC radio dramatisation the part is played by David Collings. Peter Jackson's trilogy casts Orlando Bloom and gives the Galadhrim a much larger share of the action than the book does. In the novel the folk of Lórien stay within their own borders and fight only in its defence. The film of The Two Towers instead sends a company of Lórien Elves under Haldir, played by Craig Parker, to Helm's Deep, where they fight beside the Rohirrim and Haldir is killed. None of this appears in Tolkien's account, in which no Elves take part in that battle. The addition is among the most frequently discussed departures in the trilogy.1

In the Rankin/Bass television film of The Hobbit, the director Otto Preminger voices the Elvenking. Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy casts Lee Pace as Thranduil and expands the Wood-elves' role well beyond the novel. Legolas, who is absent from the book, returns with Orlando Bloom in the part. Beside him the films introduce Tauriel, played by Evangeline Lilly, a captain of the king's guard conceived as a Silvan Elf. She has no counterpart anywhere in Tolkien's writings. The trilogy also gives Thranduil a personal motive for the march on the Lonely Mountain: a claim to white gems held in the Dwarves' hoard. In the novel his claim rests on his people's share in the dragon's treasure and on the aid he brought to the Lake-men. The escape in barrels changes as well. In the book it goes unnoticed, while in the films it becomes a running fight in which Wood-elves and Orcs pursue the Dwarves down the river.2