page 131).
(ii)
The Three Kindreds of the Elves
Just as Tolkien’s depiction of the elves in The Hobbit draws both on traditional medieval
elf-lore and his own legendarium, so too do his larger groupings encompass
both the old division between the lios-alfar and the svart-alfar, the light elves and
the dark elves of Scandinavian myth, on the one hand27 and his own myth of the
threefold division of the Eldar into the Light-elves, the Deep-elves, and the Seaelves
(or, as they are known in The Silmarillion, the Vanyar, the Noldor, and the
Teleri – Silm.53) on the other. Both these divisions underlie the passage from the
manuscript on p. 315 already briefly discussed in Text Note 40 to Chapter VIII:
. . . most of [the wood-elves] are descended from the ancient elves who never
went to the great FairyLand of the west, where the Light-elves, and the Deepelves
(or Gnomes) and the Sea-elves lived, and grew fair, and learned and invented
their magic and their cunning craft and the making of beautiful and
marvelous things.
This passage was greatly expanded in the First Typescript:
Are the wood-elves wicked? Well, not particularly, or indeed not at all, though
they have their faults, and they don’t like strangers. It is quite true that they are
rather different from other elves; for most of them, as well as the few elves that
live in hills and mountains, are descended from those of the ancient tribes of
the elves of old who never went to the great Fairyland of the West, where the
Light-elves and the Deep-elves (or Gnomes) and the Sea-elves lived for ages
and grew fair and wise and learned and invented their magic and their cunning
craft in the making of beautiful and marvellous things, before they came back
into the Wide World. Here the wood-elves lingered in the twilight before the
raising of the Sun and Moon, and afterwards they wandered in the forests that
grew beneath the sunrise. They loved best the edges of the woods from which
they could escape at times to hunt or to ride and run over the open lands by sun
or moon or star; though after the coming of Men they took ever more and more
to the gloaming and the dusk.
—1/1/30:3–4, rejected ending to the First Typescript.28
There are two hierarchies of division here: first between those elves who went to
Faerie (or Elvenhome, as Tolkien elsewhere calls it) and those who stayed behind,
then a threefold division among those elves who set out on that great journey. But
the actual situation is much more complicated than this, with many subdivisions and
ever-evolving names. For example, the third group Tolkien mentions in The Hobbit,
the Sea-elves, became divided between those who actually crossed the sea and
reached Elvenhome (the Teleri) and those who remained behind in Beleriand with
Thingol (the Sindar or Grey Elves); this latter group became the wood-elves of our
story – cf. the reference in the first sketchy outline to the dwarves’ ‘capture by the
Sea elves’ (p. 229), meaning the wood-elves of Mirkwood.29 Similarly, the term
‘Dark Elf’ was sometimes applied to those who refused the summons (the Dark
Elves of Palisor; cf. BLT I.232–7 & 244) and sometimes to also include those who
set out but fell by the wayside along the way (e.g., the Green Elves of Ossiriand), the
Ilkorindi (i.e., ‘Not of Kôr’, the great elven city in Elvenhome known in later stages
of the mythology as Tirion upon Túna); cf. page 112 of The Silmarillion, where Caranthir
son of Fëanor refers (insultingly) to Thingol, the Lord of Beleriand, as ‘this
Dark Elf in his caves’.30
The interrelationship between the various groups of elves was one of the most
complex elements in Tolkien’s work, especially since each of these divisions had
linguistic ramifications (cf. The Lhammas or ‘Account of Tongues’ [circa 1937],
HME V.167–98). Philologist that he was, Tolkien was deeply interested in this aspect
of elven history and returned to it over and over throughout his long years of
work on the legendarium. Its essentials – the aforementioned twofold division of the
elves – remained unchanged, but the names of the various groups were subject to
constant change, along with other individual elements within that pattern. For example,
the Three Kindreds, the People of the Great Journey (LotR.1171) here called
the Light-elves, Deep-elves, and Sea-elves were known in The Book of Lost Tales
[1917–1920] as the Teleri, the Noldoli (or Gnomes), and the Solosimpi (or Shoreland
Pipers), respectively (BLT I.115, 119). By the time of the 1926 ‘Sketch of the
Mythology,’ these had become the Quendi or Light-elves, the Nodoli or Deep-elves
(also known as Gnomes on account of their wisdom),31 and the Teleri or Sea-elves
(known in Valinor as the Solosimpi) (HME IV. 13). This same terminology carried
over into the form of the Silmarillion that was most current when Tolkien wrote The
Hobbit, the 1930 Quenta (HME IV.85), and he was clearly thinking of the passage in
either the ‘Sketch’ or the 1930 Quenta when drafting this line in The Hobbit, since
those names had already been superceded by the time of the book’s publication –
in the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion the Three Kindreds are the Lindar (the High Elves,
no longer the ‘Light-elves’ of The Hobbit), the Noldor (the Deep Elves, also still
known as the Gnomes), and the Teleri (the Sea Elves, here called the Soloneldi in
Valinor) (HME V.214–5).32
By contrast, those elves who were lost along the road were originally known as
the Lost Elves or the Shadow Folk (BLT I.119) and later as the Ilkorindi (1926
‘Sketch’, 1930 Quenta) or the Dark Elves (1930 Quenta). By the time of the 1937
Quenta Silmarillion, those lost along the way are known as the Lembi (‘the Lingerers’).
Finally, the detail of the woodland king’s golden hair, which only enters in
with the typescript, is interesting, given Tolkien’s later statements that of the three
kindreds of the elves it was the First Kindred or Vanyar (the Light-elves of p.
315) who are golden-haired, not the Third Kindred or Teleri (the Sea-elves); see
Douglas Anderson’s commentary in The Annotated Hobbit (DAA.206) and Christopher
Tolkien’s commentary in The Peoples of Middle-earth (HME XII.77 & 82).
It is not known, however, at what point Tolkien made that decision, and there is
some evidence that he originally conceived of the Second Kindred or Noldor (the
Deep-elves) as golden-haired: in the genealogies meant to accompany the ‘(Earliest)
Annals of Beleriand’ [early 1930s] they are referred to as Kuluqendi or ‘Goldenelves’
(HME V.[403]); the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion includes ‘the Golden’ as one
of their many descriptors (HME V.215) and Christopher Tolkien notes (BLT I.43–4,
HME XII.77) that the passage in Appendix F of the first edition of The Lord of the
Rings describing the Eldar (the Three Kindreds of the High Elves) as dark-haired,
‘save in the golden house of Finrod’ (i.e., the character known as Finarfin in the published
Silmarillion and more recent editions of The Lord of Rings [cf. LotR.1171]:
Galadriel’s father not her brother, some of whose children were golden-haired because
of his Vanyar mother), was written as a description of the Noldor (the Second
Kindred) before being applied to the Eldar as a whole. It’s possible the final
determination that only the Vanyar (the First Kindred) were golden-haired actually
postdates The Lord of the Rings: the earliest example cited by Christopher Tolkien
dates from 1951, after The Lord of the Rings was finished but before its publication.
This still does not explain why the Elvenking, who is clearly neither one of the
Light-elves (Vanyar) nor the Deep-elves (Noldor) but of the Sea-elves (the Sindar,
or Teleri of Middle-earth) should be golden-haired. However, there is already precedent
for golden-haired Sindar in Tolkien’s earlier writings: in the A-text of ‘The
Lay of Leithian’, written in August 1925, Lúthien herself is described as goldenhaired
(lines 10–16, HME III.157; see ibid. page 150 for the date). It is only in retrospect,
then, after Tolkien had decided to restrict golden hair to a specific branch
of the Eldar, that the problem of accounting for individual elves with gold hair
who were not members of that specific group arose. Therefore we need not concern
ourselves over the apparent violation of a rule or restriction that did not exist at the
time this passage was written.