Vanyar

The name Vanyar is Quenya and rests on the adjective vanya, which the glossary of name-elements appended to The Silmarillion renders as fair. The sense covers both colouring and form: pale, bright and beautiful at once. English accounts therefore call them the Fair Elves. The singular is Vanya, and the same element is used for the people's language and customs. The name seems to have been chosen for the most visible trait of this kindred, whose golden hair set them apart from the dark-haired Noldor. It does not appear to be a title that others gave them in scorn or distinction.1

Like all the Quendi, the ancestors of the Vanyar awoke beside the waters of Cuiviénen in the far east of Middle-earth. When the Valar resolved to summon the Elves into the West, three of the Quendi went to Valinor as ambassadors to see the land before their people agreed to the journey. Ingwë was one of them, and on his return he urged his following to accept the summons. Those who went with him formed the first and smallest host of the march. They are the people later known as the Vanyar. Their identity as a kindred thus begins with that choice, not with any separate awakening or descent.2

Within the wider naming of the Elves, the Vanyar belong to the Eldar, the name Oromë gave to those who took the westward road. They are also counted among the Calaquendi, the Elves of the Light, because they came to Aman and saw the radiance of the Two Trees. Through Ingwë, whom the tradition calls high king of all the Elves, they also held a kind of precedence among the kindreds. It was a rank of honour and seniority rather than of rule over the others. The later names attached to them in Aman therefore mark their nearness to the Valar more than any change in their nature.3

The Vanyar led the Great Journey from its first stage. Eager to reach the land their lord had described, they moved ahead of the slower hosts behind them, and they did not linger in the lands on the way as some of the Teleri later did. When the march reached the coast of the Great Sea, Ulmo came to carry the Eldar over the water. He uprooted an island that stood in the sea and used it as a vessel, and on it the Vanyar and the Noldor were ferried together to the shores of Aman. The Teleri had not yet come to the shore, and they stayed behind. Of the three kindreds, the Vanyar were therefore among the first to set foot in the Blessed Realm, and the earliest to feel the lasting pull of the Valar.1

In Aman the Valar opened a pass in the mountains, the Calacirya, so that the Eldar could dwell in the light of the Two Trees and still look out on the starlit sea. On the green hill of Túna within that pass the city of Tirion was raised. At first the Vanyar and the Noldor lived there as one people, and the tower of Ingwë stood highest above its walls. In this early age the two kindreds shared a single city and a single allegiance, and nothing yet divided their paths.2

The shared life in Tirion did not last. The Vanyar came to prefer the wide lands of the Valar and the undimmed light of the Trees to the city in the pass. In time they left Tirion and settled on the heights of Taniquetil or on the plain of Valinor, and so they grew apart from the Noldor. Ingwë thereafter dwelt near Manwë, and his people were bound to the Elder King and to Varda more closely than any other Elves. From Manwë the Vanyar are said to have learned song and poetry. The Noldor stayed in Tirion and turned toward the crafts of Aulë. This parting was quiet and without strife, but it shaped the whole later history of the Eldar in the West.3

One tie between the two kindreds endured. Finwë, king of the Noldor, lost his first wife Míriel after the birth of Fëanor, and he then took Indis, a Vanya of Ingwë's close kin, as his second wife. The strife between Fëanor and his half-brothers, which later troubled Tirion, therefore also involved the kin of the Vanyarin royal house. Yet the Vanyar themselves took no part in that quarrel. When Melkor and Ungoliant destroyed the Trees, the Eldar and the Valar were keeping a festival on Taniquetil. After the Darkening, the Noldor rebelled and departed for Middle-earth, but the Vanyar did not follow them. They stayed in the West, and no Vanyarin host shared in the Kinslaying at Alqualondë or in the long wars in Beleriand.4

Their single recorded return to Middle-earth came at the end of the First Age. When the Valar at last sent a host against Morgoth, the Vanyar marched under the banner of Ingwion, son of Ingwë. With them went those Noldor who had never left Valinor, led by Finarfin. The Teleri would not go to war, but they manned the ships that carried the host east. In the War of Wrath that followed, Morgoth's power was broken and he was overthrown, though Beleriand itself was ruined in the struggle. The victorious host then went back over the sea. Many of the Eldar of Middle-earth sailed into the West in the same period.5

After this campaign the Vanyar pass out of the recorded history of Middle-earth. The narratives of the Second and Third Ages never mention them there, and the accounts of Aman treat them as a people who stayed near Manwë and did not seek a realm of their own. Their story thus has no decline and no division into lesser realms, and nothing in the texts tells of their end. As long as the tradition follows them, the Vanyar remain in Valinor under Ingwë.6

Among the three kindreds of the Eldar in the West, the Vanyar are set apart less by what they made than by what they loved. The tradition gives each kindred a characteristic pursuit and a characteristic patron. The Noldor sought out knowledge and skill of hand under Aulë, and the Teleri gave themselves to the sea and to the building of ships. The Vanyar turned instead to the art of words set to music, which is counted Manwë's own delight. The sources record no great work of craft, no gem, no forge and no fleet that is Vanyarin. Their excellence is described as one of devotion and of song, not of making.1

This orientation shaped where and how they lived. The Vanyar preferred open country and heights to the walled city of the pass, and they placed their homes as near to the dwellings of the Valar as they could. In the Valaquenta Varda is named the Vala whom the Elves revere most, and her hall shares the summit of Taniquetil with Manwë's. The Vanyar settled on the slopes of that mountain and in the lands below it, so that their daily life stood under both of them. The language they spoke in Aman was the ancient Elvish tongue as it had grown in Valinor, the tongue later called Quenya. The Silmarillion reaches Middle-earth only through the Noldor who carried it east, so the Vanyar's own manner of speaking it is scarcely described there.2

Their relation to time follows from the land they chose. Like all Eldar who dwelt in Aman, the Vanyar did not age as mortal things do, and they lived through the long years of the Trees in unwaning light. Unlike the exiles, they never came to know the slow weariness of the Elves who stayed in Middle-earth under a changing Sun. After the fall of Númenor the Blessed Realm was taken out of the circles of the world, and the Vanyar were then beyond the reach of any mortal voyage. What marks them in the tradition is therefore steadiness rather than striving. They are the kindred whose history ends in contentment, not in grief or longing.3

The published tradition does not divide the Vanyar into tribes, clans or lesser lordships. Among the Noldor it separates the houses of Finwë's sons, and among the Teleri it separates the followers of Olwë from those of Elwë. The Vanyar, by contrast, appear throughout as a single people under a single king. The only lineage the texts name among them is Ingwë's own. They give no second prince, no subordinate lord and no rival branch that might have led a part of the kindred on its own. Their smallness and their undivided loyalty to the Valar may explain why no such distinctions arose. The texts do not say so explicitly, however.1

Within that royal line, only a few persons are named, and each of them appears because of a role outside the kindred itself. Ingwë's son Ingwion is known as the bearer of the Vanyarin banner in the last war. Indis, of Ingwë's close kin, is remembered as a queen among the Noldor. Through her, the two younger houses of Finwë's line descend in part from the house of Ingwë. It is the only point at which the texts join a Vanyarin lineage to another royal house.2

The Teleri would not go to war, but they manned the ships that carried the host east.

Beyond the royal house, two Vanyar are known by name, though neither is said to head a house or following. Elemmírë is credited with the lament for the Two Trees that the Eldar kept in memory after the Darkening. Amarië was loved by Finrod of the Noldor, but she stayed in Valinor when he went into exile. They show that the kindred had individual voices of note. What the sources record of them, however, is their work or their ties to others, not any rank within their people.3

In the narrative of The Silmarillion the Vanyar serve chiefly as a measure against which the other kindreds are read. They made the same journey as the Noldor, received the same summons and dwelt in the same light, yet they never turned against the Valar. Because of them, the revolt of the Noldor appears as a choice made by one people. It is not presented as the common lot of all Elves. The telling seldom rests with the Vanyar for long. They enter mostly at thresholds where the paths of others are being decided, and then the story moves on without them.1

What the Vanyar stand for is an answer to the call of the West that ends in fulfilment and not in tragedy. Much of the book's drama grows out of desire: for jewels, for lands of one's own, for lordship and for freedom from the counsel of the Powers. The Vanyar are defined largely by the absence of such desire, and for that reason they have almost no plot. The texts give them few named persons and fewer deeds, and when their king first returned from Valinor he never looked back toward the lands of his awakening. Their constancy is presented as genuine, but it is a quiet virtue. The narrative's attention and its sympathy go instead to the exiles, whose sorrow carries the book.2

Their brief part at the close of the First Age shows that this restraint is not the same as indifference. When the Valar at last move against Morgoth, the Vanyar go with them, and their return stands for the answer of the West to the plea of Middle-earth. Even here the account gives them little individual voice. The focus stays on the mariner who carried the plea and on the peoples of Beleriand who waited for it. In the structure of the book the Vanyar thus mark one pole of a wider contrast: nearness to the Powers against the long distance of the exiles, and a settled content against the restless longing that drives most of the tales.3

The kindred that became the Vanyar held its place at the head of the Elves from Tolkien's earliest mythology, but its name changed several times. In The Book of Lost Tales the first people to answer the summons of the Valar are called the Teleri, and their king bears the shorter form Inwë. There the Noldor appear as the Noldoli, and the third host, later the Teleri of the published work, is named the Solosimpi. The role of the first kindred was already fixed in these tales: they were the most eager for the West and the closest to the Valar. Only their name and their king's name would later change, while their place in the story stayed the same.1

In the texts of the later 1930s the first kindred appear as the Lindar, the Fair-elves under Ingwë, and the name Teleri has by then passed to the third host. When Tolkien returned to the legendarium after The Lord of the Rings, Lindar gave way to Vanyar. The older name was later applied to the Teleri, who were said to call themselves singers. The late essay Quendi and Eldar adds a deeper layer of invented history. It gives the three original clans of the awakened Elves names meaning the Firsts, the Seconds and the Thirds, and treats Minyar, the Firsts, as the ancient name of Ingwë's people. In this account Vanyar is a later name, taken from the fair colouring of the kindred, not a name that had belonged to them from the beginning.2