Elves!...which one of us haven't ever been alured by the wonderful elven cosmogony created by the all time aclaimed author J R R Tolkien ?... I wasn't able to prevent myself to share with you an excerpt of such interesting post from my Blogger friend ashsilverlock who carries a cute site called "Fabulous Realms", on which explores the origins and source of such magical beings. (All rights reserved by the author).
The Elves of Middle Earth, also known as the Eldar, the Quendi and
the Firstborn, stand at the absolute heart of Tolkien’s legendarium.
Even though the word ‘Elf’ existed long before anyone heard of The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings,
today the Elf is a very different creature because of Tolkien’s
writings. The oldest and wisest people of Middle Earth, the Elves
possess great nobility and power. They do not age, nor do they die,
unless wounds, grief or some artifice of the Enemy takes hold of them
and ends their existence. To other peoples they seem at once aged and
ageless, possessing the lore and wisdom of experience, together with the
joyful nature of youth. But above all, they are the only race never to
have willingly served the Shadow. For they revel in the wonders of
nature, the beauty of songs and tales, the glimmer of the stars, and the
voice of the waters. But in their hearts, they also possess great
sadness, knowing that all things pass, and that they cannot preserve
them. It is this melancholic aspect of the Elves which makes them so
central to Tolkien’s mythology, for they seem to encapsulate one of the
major themes of his writing – the passing of ‘The Elder Days’, of a more
enlightened and spiritual age, and the loss of its ideals in the face
of the relentless rise of man and modernity. But this characteristic
also links them with the Elves of folklore who, as depicted in fairy
tales like The Elves and the Shoemaker, at first appear very
different from Tolkien’s firstborn – smaller and more frivolous in every
way. However, it is possible, however unlikely, to link the two
conceptions of Elves, if one takes into account Tolkien’s explanation
for their literal and metaphorical ‘dwindling’ – an explanation which
involves them fighting the inevitable extinction of their species,
better known as the ‘Long Defeat’.
For this, however, we must go back to
the very beginning, and Tolkien’s earliest inspirations for the
children of Varda.
Tolkien’s Elves are derived in some part from an entirely novel
solution to an old mythological problem. There was no doubt that a
belief in Elves was widespread in European antiquity, however the words
used about them seemed curiously contradictory. The Icelander Snorri
Sturluson seemed aware of both ‘Light Elves’ (liosalfar) and ‘Dark Elves’ (dokkalfar), but he also recognised ‘Swart Elves’ (svartalfar),
though the place they lived, Svartalfheim, was also the home of the
Dwarves. Meanwhile Old English uses words like ‘Wood Elf’ (wuduaelf) and ‘Water Elf’ (woeteraelf).
How are all these fragments to be reconciled? Are ‘Swart Elves’ the
same as ‘Dark Elves’, and both perhaps the same as Dwarves? Tolkien,
however, distinguishes the two species from each other perfectly
clearly: the Dwarves are associated with mining, smith craft and a world
underground, the Elves with beauty, allure, dancing and the woodland.
The various types of Elf, meanwhile, are not separated merely by colour
but by history. The ‘Light Elves’ are those who have seen the light of
the Two Trees which preceded the sun and the moon, in Aman, or Valinor,
the Undying Land in the West. The ‘Dark Elves’ are those who refused the
journey and remained in Middle Earth, to which many of the Light Elves
eventually returned, as exiles or as outcasts. The Dark Elves who
remained in the woods of Beleriand are also, of course, naturally
described as Wood Elves. Whilst it would only be natural, as time went
by and memory became blurred, for men to be unsure whether such a
character was once an Elf or a Dwarf, a main aim in Tolkien’s creations
was always to ‘save the evidence’ i.e. to rescue his ancient sources
from hasty modern accusations of vagueness or folly. Saving the
evidence, moreover, generated story, which was a rather handy side
effect!
The first of Tolkien’s published works in which the Elves are glimpsed is The Hobbit,
although he had, as we now know, been creating an Elvish mythology for
more than 20 years before then (in the string of tales which were to
become The Silmarillion). In his 1937 novel, though, Tolkien
used Elves sparingly, mentioning them only with reference to Elrond in
chapter 3 (‘one of those people whose fathers came into the strange
stories before the beginning of History’) and then in the long paragraph
discussing the Wood Elves, High Elves, Light Elves, Deep Elves and Sea
Elves in chapter 8. It is the Wood Elves who play the most prominent
part in The Hobbit, of course, and Tolkien drew his immediate inspiration for them from a single passage in the Middle English romance Sir Orfeo.
This contains a famous section in which Orfeo, wandering alone and
crazy in the wilderness after his wife has been abducted by the King of
Faerie, sees the fairies riding by to hunt, their horns blowing and
their hounds barking. Similarly, the first sign Thorin and company have
of the Elves in chapter 8 of The Hobbit is when they become
aware of the dim blowing of horns in the wood and the sound of dogs
baying far off. The basic idea is the same in both places: that of a
mighty king pursuing his kingly activities in a world forever out of
reach of strangers and trespassers in his domain. This is a common
device in Tolkien’s fiction – he often took fragments of ancient
literature, expanded on their intensely suggestive hints of further
meaning, and made them into a coherent and consistent narrative (usually
enhancing them with ideas both from his own mythology and from
traditional fairy tale).
We encounter Wood Elves of a quite different sort in the Lothlorien chapter of Lord of the Rings.
As with the realm of the Mirkwood Elves, the ‘magic’ of Lorien has many
roots, but there is one thing about it which is highly traditional,
while also in a way a strong re-interpretation and rationalization of
tradition. There are many references to Elves in Old English and Old
Norse, as well as modern English (belief in them seems to have lasted
longer than is the case with any of the other non-human races of early
native mythology), but one story which remains strongly consistent is
that of the mortal going into Elfland – best known, perhaps, from the
ballads of Thomas the Rhymer. The mortal enters, spends what seems to be
a night, or three nights, in music and dancing. But when he comes out
and returns home he is a stranger, everyone he once knew is dead and
there is only a dim memory of the man lost underhill. Elvish time, it
seems, flows far slower than human time. Similarly, the Fellowship
‘remained some days in Lothlorien, as far as they could tell or
remember’. But when they come out Sam looks up at the moon and concludes
that it is: ‘as if we had never stayed no time in the Elvish country’.
Frodo agrees with him, and suggests that in Lothlorien they had entered a
world beyond time. Legolas the Elf, however, offers a deeper
explanation. For the Elves, he says: ‘the world moves, and it moves both
very swift and very slow… The passing seasons are but ripples ever
repeated in the long long stream’.
The interlude in Lothlorien brings to light another trait of
Tolkien’s Elves – many if not most of them envisage defeat as a
long-term prospect. Galadriel says ‘Through ages of the world we have
fought the long defeat’. Elrond agrees, saying ‘I have seen three ages
in the West of the world, and many defeats and many fruitless
victories’. Although he later questions his own adjective ‘fruitless’,
he still repeats that the victory long ago in which Sauron was
overthrown but not destroyed ‘did not achieve its end’. In this he is
perhaps justified, for if the entire, long history of Middle Earth shows
us anything it is that good is attained only at vast expense, while
evil recuperates almost at will. It is made abundantly clear that even
the destruction of the One Ring and the final overthrow of Sauron will
conform to the general pattern of ‘fruitlessness’. The Ring’s
destruction, says Galadriel, will mean that her ring (and Gandalf’s and
Elrond’s) will all lose their power, so that Lothlorien ‘fades’ and the
Elves ‘dwindle’, to be replaced by modernity and the dominion of men. By
‘dwindle’ Galadriel may mean that the Elves will physically shrink in
size (perhaps to become the tiny creatures of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and popular imagination). Or they may ‘dwindle’ in number – or something else altogether may happen to them.
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