Elves in Middle-earth

• 1. Introduction

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  Elves are the first race to appear in Middle-earth, and yet the idea of what an Elf actually is took Tolkien decades to work out. How do you reconcile an Old English medical curse called "elf-shot" with a phrase meaning "fair as an elf-woman"? How do you turn the terrifying, pestilent creatures of Anglo-Saxon poetry into the tall, grey-eyed, immortal people of Lothlórien and Rivendell? Tolkien spent his life answering those questions, and the answers turned out to need an entirely invented history, two fully constructed languages, and a mythology stretching from the awakening of the first Elves beneath a starlit sky to the last ships sailing west from the Grey Havens. The questions this documentary will follow are the ones that drove Tolkien himself: where did his Elves come from, what made him choose that word over all the others available to him, and what kind of people did they finally become on the page?

• 2. Ancient Sources, Dangerous Creatures

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  The Old English poem Beowulf groups elves with giants and demon-corpses, in the phrase eotenas ond ylfe ond orcnéas, which Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey calls "a very stern view of all non-human and un-Christian species". The Middle English romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight describes the Green Knight as an aluisch mon, meaning an elvish man or uncanny creature. Neither portrait is remotely charming. Elves in Anglo-Saxon tradition could also shoot you. A medical spell called Gif hors ofscoten sie, "if a horse is elf-shot", described some kind of internal injury associated both with Neolithic flint arrowheads and with the temptations of the devil. Tolkien read that spell as a clue and made his Elves skilled archers. A condition called wæterælfádl meant "water-elf disease", possibly describing dropsy. Another, ælfsogoða, glossed by Shippey as "lunacy", rounded out a picture of Elves as a source of sickness and misfortune. Yet the same tradition produced the phrase ælfscýne, meaning elf-beautiful, used to describe an exceptionally fair woman. As Shippey writes, beauty is itself dangerous, and that tension is exactly what Tolkien preserved in his own conception.

• 3. The Word Tolkien Almost Did Not Use

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  By the late 19th century, the word fairy had drifted far from its medieval roots. One of the last of the Victorian Fairy-paintings, The Piper of Dreams by Estella Canziani, sold 250,000 copies and circulated widely inside the trenches of World War I, where Tolkien saw active service. Faery imagery was used in other contexts as a symbol of "Old England" to inspire patriotism, and illustrated posters of Robert Louis Stevenson's poem Land of Nod were sent out to servicemen's quarters. By 1915, when Tolkien was writing his first elven poems, the words elf, fairy, and gnome had accumulated 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. Tolkien continued to use it anyway, but according to Marjorie Burns he eventually and hesitantly chose elf as the primary term. In his 1939 essay On Fairy-Stories he noted that English words such as elf had been influenced by French and had also acquired the atmosphere of German, Scandinavian, and Celtic tales. The decision was never entirely clean; traces of the fairy tradition survive throughout his work, including in his continued use of the French-derived term in The Book of Lost Tales.

• 4. The Philologist's Method

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  Shippey identifies the Middle English lay Sir Orfeo as what he calls the "fusion or kindling-point" of Tolkien's thinking about Elves. The poem transposes the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice into a wild, wooded Elfland, and makes the rescue succeed. In Tolkien's own 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 notes that Tolkien drew from this passage 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. Old English gave Tolkien additional vocabulary for that wildness: wuduælfen meaning wood-elf or dryad, wæterælfen meaning water-elf, and sǣælfen meaning sea-elf or naiad. The Scandinavian ballad Elvehøj, or Elf Hill, contributed the idea that time in Elfland is distorted for mortals, a quality Tolkien gave to Lothlórien. Norse mythology supplied the division between Light Elves in Alfheim and Dark Elves underground in Svartalfheim, which Tolkien mapped onto his own Calaquendi and Moriquendi. The scholar Haukur Þorgeirsson traces another strand of detail to Jón Árnason's introduction to his collection Íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri, which surveyed Icelandic elf-lore from the 17th century onwards and noted that elves were considered the firstborn race.

• 5. Two Languages, One History

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  Tolkien said plainly that his stories were made to create a world for the languages, not the other way around. The languages were the first things he invented for his mythos, starting with what he originally called "Elfin" or "Qenya", a spelling he later settled as Quenya, or High-elven. Quenya and Sindarin became the most complete of his constructed languages, and the Elves are also credited in his fiction with inventing the Tengwar script, attributed to Fëanor, and the Cirth script, attributed to Daeron. Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey argues that the "real root" of The Silmarillion lay in the linguistic relationship between those two tongues, complete with sound-changes and differences in semantics. Matthew Dickerson notes the complicated migrations in Tolkien's fictional history and observes that the Sundering of the Elves gave the philologist in Tolkien a reason to develop Quenya for the Eldar and Sindarin for the Sindar, two languages that are distinct but related. Writing in 1954 while proofreading The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien described Sindarin as having a character very like British-Welsh because it seemed to fit the "Celtic" type of legends told of its speakers. In 1937, when a publisher rejected his Silmarillion manuscript and disparaged all the "eye-splitting Celtic names", Tolkien denied any Celtic origin entirely. The scholar Dimitra Fimi argues those denials reflect his Anglophilia rather than the actual sources, and identifies the "Flight of The Noldoli" as directly influenced by the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Lebor Gabála Érenn.

• 6. Immortality and Its Costs

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  Tolkien's Elves do not die of disease or old age, and they recover from wounds that would kill a Man. When they are killed in battle, their souls travel to the Halls of Mandos in Valinor. After a period of rest that functions as a kind of cleansing, their spirits are clothed again in bodies identical to their old ones. Tolkien described his larger Elves as representing men in Eden who have not yet fallen, writing of them: "They are immortal, and their will is directly effective for the achievement of imagination and desire." That freedom carries a price. Tolkien wrote that the Elves are primarily to blame for many of the ills of Middle-earth, having independently created the Three Rings to stop their domains from fading and attempting to block inevitable change. Galadriel's words in The Lord of the Rings make this plain: "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." After the destruction of the One Ring, the Three Rings lost their power and most Elves sailed west. Elladan and Elrohir, the twin sons of Elrond, did not join their father on the White Ship; they stayed behind in Lindon. Legolas founded an Elf colony in Ithilien and helped rebuild Gondor before eventually sailing west himself, and all the Elves of Ithilien followed him after the death of King Elessar.

• 7. Life Among Elves

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  Tolkien described Elves as tall, fair of skin, and grey-eyed, though their hair was typically dark; he noted the exception of the golden house of Finarfin, and the Vanyar, called "The Fair" for their golden hair. Maeglin is described specifically as tall and black-haired with white skin. Puberty and full height arrive between the fiftieth and one hundredth year, after which Elves stop aging physically. A pregnancy lasts about a year, and by the age of one an Elf child can already speak, walk, and dance. Elves marry freely, once only, and for love; adultery is not merely frowned upon but described as essentially unthinkable. Betrothal involves an exchange of rings that lasts at least a year and can be broken by returning the rings, though this is rare. The wedding ceremony consists of words spoken by bride and groom, including the name of Eru Ilúvatar, followed by a feast; wedding rings are worn on the index fingers, and the bride's mother gives the groom a jewel. Elves have few children, with long intervals between them, and Tolkien explained this by writing that their sexual drive fades after children are born, their attention turning to the arts. Among those arts, particularly for the Noldor, smithwork and sculpture were central; males and females were considered equal, though females often specialized in healing while males typically went to war, because Tolkien's Elves believed that taking life interferes with the ability to preserve it.

• 8. Beyond Tolkien

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  Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film trilogy, released between 2001 and 2003, showed Elves as physically superior to Men in eyesight, balance, and aim, but Fimi notes that their superiority in other respects was "never really made clear". Jackson's conceptual designer Alan Lee had drawn on the 1911 painting The Riders of the Sidhe by John Duncan when developing the visual language of the Elves, and Lee had used that same painting in the 1978 book Faeries. Fimi argues that where Tolkien's Elves are rooted in Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, and Norse tradition, Jackson's are Celtic in the romanticised sense of the Celtic Revival. The 1977 Rankin-Bass animated version of The Hobbit took a different direction entirely. Austin Gilkeson describes its wood-elves as resembling "Troll dolls that have been left out in the rain too long", with grey skin, pug faces, and blond hair, bearing no resemblance even to that film's own depiction of Elrond. In the wider fantasy genre, the Tolkien model spread quickly after the 1960s. Elves speaking constructed elvish languages became standard non-human characters in high fantasy fiction and in role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons, typically portrayed as sharp-minded, nature-loving, skilled with a bow, and gifted in magic. That template stretches in an unbroken line back to Tolkien's reading of Sir Orfeo and the spell Gif hors ofscoten sie, and to his decision, hesitant as it was, to call these creatures Elves.