Grey Havens

In J. R. R. Tolkien's writings, Elves are the first fictional race to appear in Middle-earth. Unlike Men and Dwarves, Elves are immortal. They feature in ''The Hobbit'' and ''The Lord of the Rings''. Their history is described in detail in ''The Silmarillion''.

Tolkien derived his Elves from mentions in the ancient poetry and languages of Northern Europe, especially Old English. These suggested to him that Elves were large, dangerous, beautiful, lived in wild natural places, and practised archery. He invented languages for the Elves, including Sindarin and Quenya.

Tolkien-style Elves have become a staple of fantasy literature. They have appeared, too, in film and role-playing game adaptations of Tolkien's works.

Origins

Germanic word

The modern English word ''elf'' derives from the Old English word '' ælf'' (which has cognates in all other Germanic languages). Numerous types of elves appear in Germanic mythology; the West Germanic concept appears to have come to differ from the Scandinavian notion in the early Middle Ages, and the Anglo-Saxon concept diverged even further, possibly under Celtic influence. J. R. R. Tolkien made it clear in a letter that his Elves differed from those "of the better known lore" of Scandinavian mythology.

Halfway beings

The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey notes that one Middle English source which he presumes Tolkien must have read, the '' South English Legendary'' from c. 1250, describes elves much as Tolkien does:

Some of Tolkien's Elves are in the "undying lands" of Valinor, home of the godlike Valar, while others are in Middle-earth. The Elf-queen Galadriel indeed has been expelled from Valinor, much like the fallen Melkor, though she is clearly good, and much like an angel. Similarly, some of the ''Legendary''s ''Eluene'' are on Earth, others in the " Earthly Paradise". So, did they have souls, Shippey asks? Since they could not leave the world, the answer was no; but given that they didn't disappear completely on death, the answer had to have been yes. In Shippey's view, the ''Silmarillion'' resolved the Middle English puzzle, letting Elves go not to Heaven but to the halfway house of the Halls of Mandos on Valinor.

Elf or fairy

By the late 19th century, the term 'fairy' had been taken up as a utopian theme, and was used to critique social and religious values, a tradition which Tolkien and T. H. White continued. One of the last of the Victorian Fairy-paintings, ''The Piper of Dreams'' by Estella Canziani, sold 250,000 copies and was well known within the trenches of World War I where Tolkien saw active service. Illustrated posters of Robert Louis Stevenson's poem ''Land of Nod'' had been sent out by a philanthropist to brighten servicemen's quarters, and Faery was used in other contexts as an image of " Old England" to inspire patriotism. By 1915, when Tolkien was writing his first elven poems, the words'' elf'', ''fairy'' and ''gnome'' had many divergent and contradictory associations. Tolkien had been gently warned against the term 'fairy', which John Garth supposes may have been due to its growing association with homosexuality, but Tolkien continued to use it. According to Marjorie Burns, Tolkien eventually but hesitantly chose the term ''elf'' over ''fairy''. In his 1939 essay '' On Fairy-Stories'', Tolkien wrote that "English words such as ''elf'' have long been influenced by French (from which ''fay'' and ''faërie'', ''fairy'' are derived); but in later times, through their use in translation, ''fairy'' and ''elf'' have acquired much of the atmosphere of German, Scandinavian, and Celtic tales, and many characteristics of the '' huldu-fólk'', the '' daoine-sithe'', and the '' tylwyth-teg''."

Reconciling multiple traditions

Shippey notes that Tolkien, a philologist, knew of the many seemingly contradictory traditions about elves. The Old English '' Beowulf''-poet spoke of the strange '' eotenas ond ylfe ond orcnéas'', " ettens iantsand elves and demon-corpses", a grouping which Shippey calls "a very stern view of all non-human and un-Christian species". The Middle English ''Sir Gawain'' meets a green axe-wielding giant, an ''aluisch mon'' ("elvish man", translated by Shippey as "uncanny creature"). Christian sources from Iceland knew and disapproved of the tradition of offering sacrifices to the elves, ''álfa-blót''.

Elves were directly dangerous, too: the medical condition "elf-shot", described in the spell ''Gif hors ofscoten sie'', "if a horse is elf-shot", meaning some kind of internal injury, was associated both with neolithic flint arrowheads and the temptations of the devil. Tolkien takes "elf-shot" as a hint to make his elves skilful in archery. Another danger was ''wæterælfádl'', "water-elf disease", perhaps meaning dropsy, while a third condition was ''ælfsogoða'', "elf-pain", glossed by Shippey as "lunacy". All the same, an Icelandic woman could be ''frið sem álfkona'', "fair as an elf-woman", while the Anglo-Saxons might call a very fair woman ''ælfscýne'', "elf-beautiful". Some aspects can readily be reconciled, Shippey writes, since "Beauty is itself dangerous". But there is more: Tolkien brought in the Old English usage of descriptions like ''wuduælfen'' "wood-elf, dryad", ''wæterælfen'' "water-elf", and ''sǣælfen'' "sea-elf, naiad", giving his elves strong links with wild nature. Yet another strand of legend holds that Elfland, as in ''Elvehøj'' ("Elf Hill") and other traditional stories, is dangerous to mortals because time there is distorted, as in Tolkien's Lothlórien. Shippey comments that it is a strength of Tolkien's "re-creations", his imagined worlds, that they incorporate all the available evidence to create a many-layered impression of depth, making use of "both good and bad sides of popular story; the sense of inquiry, prejudice, hearsay and conflicting opinion".

Shippey suggests that the "fusion or kindling-point" of Tolkien's thinking about elves came from the Middle English lay ''Sir Orfeo'', which transposes the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice into a wild and wooded Elfland, and makes the quest successful. In Tolkien's translation the elves appear and disappear: "the king of Faerie with his rout / came hunting in the woods about / with blowing far and crying dim, and barking hounds that were with him; yet never a beast they took nor slew, and where they went he never knew". Shippey comments that Tolkien took many suggestions from this passage, including the horns and the hunt of the Elves in Mirkwood; the proud but honourable Elf-king; and the placing of his elves in wild nature. Tolkien might only have had broken fragments to work on, but, Shippey writes, the more one explores how Tolkien used the ancient texts, the more one sees "how easy it was for him to feel that a consistency and a sense lay beneath the chaotic ruin of the old poetry of the North".

Shippey further explains that Tolkien's Sundering of the Elves allowed him to explain the existence of Norse mythology's Light Elves, who live in ''Alfheim'' ("Elfhome") and correspond to his Calaquendi, and Dark Elves, who live underground in ''Svartalfheim'' ("Black Elfhome") and whom he "rehabilitates" as his Moriquendi, the Elves who never went to see the light of the Two Trees of Valinor.

Development

Tolkien developed his conception of elves over the years, from his earliest writings through to ''The Hobbit'', ''The Silmarillion'', and ''The Lord of the Rings''.

Early writings

Traditional Victorian dancing fairies and elves appear in much of Tolkien's early poetry, and have influence upon his later works in part due to the influence of a production of J. M. Barrie's ''Peter Pan'' in Birmingham in 1910 and his familiarity with the work of Catholic mystic poet, Francis Thompson which Tolkien had acquired in 1914.

''The Book of Lost Tales'' (c. 1917–1927)

In his ''The Book of Lost Tales'', Tolkien develops a theme that the diminutive fairy-like race of Elves had once been a great and mighty people, and that as Men took over the world, these Elves had "diminished" themselves. This theme was influenced especially by the god-like and human-sized '' Ljósálfar'' of Norse mythology, and medieval works such as ''Sir Orfeo'', the Welsh '' Mabinogion'', Arthurian romances and the legends of the ''Tuatha Dé Danann''.
Some of the stories Tolkien wrote as elven history have been seen to be directly influenced by Celtic mythology. For example, "Flight of The Noldoli" is based on the ''Tuatha Dé Danann'' and ''Lebor Gabála Érenn'', and their migratory nature comes from early Irish/Celtic history. John Garth states that with the underground enslavement of the Noldoli to Melkor, Tolkien was essentially rewriting Irish myth regarding the Tuatha Dé Danann into a Christian eschatology.

The name ''Inwe'' or ''Ingwë'' (in the first draft '' Ing''), given by Tolkien to the eldest of the elves and his clan, is similar to the name found in Norse mythology as that of the god Ingwi-Freyr, a god who is gifted the elf-world Álfheimr. Terry Gunnell finds the relationship between beautiful ships and the Elves reminiscent of the god Njörðr and the god Freyr's ship Skíðblaðnir. He also retains the usage of the French derived term "fairy" for the same creatures.

The larger Elves are inspired by Tolkien's personal Catholic theology, representing the state of Men in Eden who have not yet fallen, like humans but fairer and wiser, with greater spiritual powers, keener senses, and a closer empathy with nature. Tolkien wrote of them: "They are made by man in his own image and likeness; but freed from those limitations which he feels most to press upon him. They are immortal, and their will is directly effective for the achievement of imagination and desire."

In ''The Book of Lost Tales'', Tolkien includes both more serious "medieval" elves such as Fëanor and Turgon alongside frivolous, Jacobean elves such as the Solosimpi and Tinúviel.
Alongside the idea of the greater Elves, Tolkien toyed with the idea of children visiting Valinor, the island-homeland of the Elves in their sleep. Elves would also visit children at night and comfort them if they had been chided or were upset. This was abandoned in Tolkien's later writing.

''The Hobbit'' (c. 1930–1937)

Douglas Anderson shows that in ''The Hobbit'', Tolkien again includes both the more serious 'medieval' type of elves, such as Elrond and the wood-elf king, Thranduil, and frivolous elves, such as the elvish guards at Rivendell.

''The Quenta Silmarillion'' (c. 1937)

In 1937, having had his manuscript for ''The Silmarillion'' rejected by a publisher who disparaged all the "eye-splitting Celtic names" that Tolkien had given his Elves, Tolkien denied the names had a Celtic origin:

Dimitra Fimi proposes that these comments are a product of his Anglophilia rather than a commentary on the texts themselves or their actual influence on his writing, and cites evidence to this effect in her essay "'Mad' Elves and 'elusive beauty': some Celtic strands of Tolkien's mythology".

''The Lord of the Rings'' (c. 1937–1949)

In ''The Lord of the Rings'' Tolkien pretends to be merely the translator of Bilbo and Frodo's memoirs, collectively known as the '' Red Book of Westmarch''. He says that those names and terms that appear in English are meant to be his purported translations from the Common Speech.

According to Tom Shippey, the theme of diminishment from semi-divine Elf to diminutive Fairy resurfaces in ''The Lord of the Rings'' in the dialogue of Galadriel. "Yet if you succeed, then our power is diminished, and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten." book 2, ch. 7 "The Mirror of Galadriel"

Writing in 1954, part way through proofreading ''The Lord of the Rings'', Tolkien claimed that the Elvish language Sindarin had a character very like British-Welsh "because it seems to fit the rather 'Celtic' type of legends and stories told of its speakers". In the same letter, Tolkien goes on to say that the elves had very little in common with elves or fairies of Europe, and that they really represent men with greater artistic ability, beauty and a longer life span. In his writings, an Elven bloodline was the only real claim to 'nobility' that the Men of Middle-earth could have. Tolkien wrote that the elves are primarily to blame for many of the ills of Middle-earth in ''The Lord of the Rings'', having independently created the Three Rings to stop their domains in mortal-lands from ' fading' and attempting to prevent inevitable change and new growth.

Fictional history

Awakening

The first Elves were awakened by Eru Ilúvatar near the bay of Cuiviénen during the Years of the Trees (before the First Age). They awoke under the starlit sky, as the Sun and Moon had yet to be created. The first Elves to awaken were three pairs: Imin ("First") and his wife Iminyë, Tata ("Second") and Tatië, and Enel ("Third") and Enelyë. They walked through the forests, finding other pairs of Elves, who became their folk. They lived by the rivers, and invented poetry and music in Middle-earth. Journeying further, they came across tall and dark-haired elves, the fathers of most of the Noldor. They invented many new words. Continuing their journey, they found elves singing without language, the ancestors of most of the Teleri. The elves were discovered by the Vala Oromë, who brought the news of their awakening to Valinor., ch. 3 "Of the Coming of the Elves and the Captivity of Melkor"

Sundering

The Valar decided to summon the Elves to Valinor rather than leaving them where they were first awakened, near the Cuiviénen lake in the eastern extremity of Middle-earth. They sent Oromë, who took Ingwë, Finwë and Elwë as ambassadors to Valinor. Returning to Middle-earth, Ingwë, Finwë and Elwë convinced many of the Elves to take the Great Journey (also called the Great March) to Valinor. Those who did not accept the summons became known as the Avari, ''The Unwilling''. The others were called Eldar, ''the People of the Stars'' by Oromë, and they took Ingwë, Finwë and Elwë as their leaders, and became respectively the Vanyar, Noldor and Teleri (who spoke Vanyarin Quenya, Noldorin Quenya, and Telerin, respectively). On their journey, some of the Teleri feared the Misty Mountains and dared not cross them. They turned back and stayed in the vales of the Anduin, and, led by Lenwë, became the Nandor, who spoke Nandorin. Oromë led the others over the Misty Mountains and Ered Lindon into Beleriand. There Elwë became lost, and the Teleri stayed behind looking for him. The Vanyar and the Noldor moved onto a floating island, Tol Eressëa, that was moved by Ulmo to Valinor. After years, Ulmo returned to Beleriand to seek out the remaining Teleri. Without Elwë, many of the Teleri took his brother Olwë as their leader and were ferried to Valinor. Some Teleri stayed behind though, still looking for Elwë, and others stayed on the shores, being called by Ossë. They took Círdan as their leader and became the Falathrim. The Teleri who stayed in Beleriand later became known as the Sindar.

Matthew Dickerson

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