Трандуилье :)

[Волвера]

Не помню, было или нет, но красотища же))

 

[Хенвен]

Было, не помню только здесь или в Кондитерской, еще есть похожий с раной от дракона.

[Волвера]

И такое было?

[Хенвен]

Кажется я приносила.

[Хенвен]

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Что с Леголасом не очень понимаю, заснул что ли пока папка книжку читал.

[Niolle]

Сообщение от Хенвен

Что с Леголасом не очень понимаю, заснул что ли пока папка книжку читал.

 

Похоже, что он зевает

[dlees]

Да и папка какой-то скучный. Сдается мне, не сказку они читают, а какую-нибудь нудятину из программы Лихолесской младшей школы.

[Niolle]

Да, точно похоже! Папа с Листиком уроки делает, но самому уже осточертело

[Хенвен]

Я бы посмотрела, как папка с Листиком задачки решает

! У тебя было пять орков и 4 паука. 2 орка ушли за хворостом, одного орка я убил,а 1 паук убежал за гномами, сколь всего осталось нечисти!

[dlees]

- Восемнадцать.
- Чего восемнадцать?
- Нечисти.
- Почему восемнадцать? Эру!! Почему восемнадцать-то?!
- Еще 13 гномов же.
*папа страдальчески закатывает глаза*

[wanre]

Сообщение от Хенвен

Я бы посмотрела, как папка с Листиком задачки решает

! У тебя было пять орков и 4 паука. 2 орка ушли за хворостом, одного орка я убил,а 1 паук убежал за гномами, сколь всего осталось нечисти!

Будете смеяться, но у меня ребенок такие задачи с удовольствием решает Если не идет школьная задача, нужно перевести ее на эльфов, орков и стрелы - очень помогает
Извините за офф.

[Гиллуин]

Как я понимаю ребенка! Конечно, задачи про эльфов много интереснее!
А эльфийскую числительную сказку все читали? Как я понимаю, она именно обучающая.

[dlees]

Я не читала.

[Гиллуин]

Это сказка про пробуждение. Сначала просыпается эльф по имени Первый и будет свою жену по имени Первая, потом Второй, потом они находят себе спутников, число которых имеет свои закономерности... Как называется, я, конечно, забыла. История для того, чтобы маленькие эльфики осваивали числа.

[Niolle]

Сообщение от dlees

- Восемнадцать.
- Чего восемнадцать?
- Нечисти.
- Почему восемнадцать? Эру!! Почему восемнадцать-то?!
- Еще 13 гномов же.
*папа страдальчески закатывает глаза*

Это Листик еще только сложение проходит. Вот как умножение и деление пойдет, Трандуил совсем погрустнеет

Про Мирквуд, из Истории Хоббита (History of Hobbit):

In this chapter, Tolkien depicts Mirkwood in ways that conjure up not just one but
two archetypes: The Dark Wood and The Enchanted Forest. The realistic description
of a desperate journey through primal woodlands, struggling against starvation
and thirst, exhaustion and despair, dominates the first half of the chapter and represents
yet another tour de force as Tolkien uses sensory details to build up a claustrophobic
impression of a nightmarish journey in darkness and near-darkness that
never seems to end. Tolkien’s other journeys into darkness are relatively brief in
duration: Bilbo’s journey under the Misty Mountains, the Fellowship’s trek through
Moria, the Grey Company’s passage of the Paths of the Dead, and Frodo and Sam’s
disastrous trip through Shelob’s Lair all take a few days at most, in some cases only
hours. By contrast, Bilbo and the dwarves’ trip through Mirkwood lasts for weeks if
not months; in some outlines Tolkien projected that as much as an entire year might
pass while they remained lost or captive within the forest. For more on Mirkwood,
or Taur-na-Fuin as it was sometimes called, as it had appeared in Tolkien’s earlier
works in the Silmarillion tradition, see the commentary on The Pryftan Fragment, p.
20.
The second half of the chapter shifts the descriptions to highlight the eerie aspects
of the endless woods, dim rather than pitch-dark but full of disturbing features: the
alluring sounds and smells and sights that lure the travellers off the path into disaster,
the uncanny appearance and disappearance of the feasters, the spell of sleep
that falls first upon the hobbit and then the chief dwarf. For more on this enchanted
forest theme, see ‘The Vanishing People’ following Chapter IX.
 

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Про лесных эльфов (The Vanishing People)

With the wood-elves, we have finally come full circle to what, had this been one
of the Lost Tales, would have been either the starting point or the core of the book.
With the inversion of Tolkien’s invented races we have already discussed back in
the commentary to the conclusion of Chapter I (see pp. 76 & 78), The Hobbit starts
far from the elf-centric core of all Tolkien’s earlier works in the legendarium1 (perhaps
one reason why he was sometimes ambivalent about whether it was or was
not part of the mythology). Bilbo’s story only comes to a sustained treatment of the
elves mid-way through the book, and even then views them only from outside, and
relatively briefly, before passing on. The flighty elves in the trees surrounding the
Last Decent House (Rivendell) had been more like the fairies of Elizabethan and
Victorian tales, a tradition Tolkien was probably first exposed to in Knatchbull-Hugesson’s
Stories for My Children [1870] – see Letters pp. 407 & 453 – and himself
contributed to in ‘Goblin Feet’ [1915], ‘Tinfang Warble’ [1914], and similar early
poems during the era when that tradition reached its lowest ebb in Barrie’s Tinkerbell
[1904] and Conan Doyle’s flower-fairies of the Cottingley Photographs [1920].
By contrast, the wood-elves harken back to a more sinister side of faerie belief, one
dominant throughout the Middle Ages and surviving into at least the nineteenth and
possibly early twentieth century in Ireland and the more isolated parts of Britain.2
Tolkien professed, in his Andrew Lang lecture (revised and expanded as ‘On
Fairy-Stories’), not to be an expert in faerie lore,3 but this is simply typical modesty
on his part, as the essay itself shows; his definition of ‘expert’ required exhaustive,
comprehensive knowledge of all the publications in a field (cf. his Beowulf essay,
which although well-researched includes his disclaimer against having read every
book ever written about his topic). His interest in elves dates back at least to his
undergraduate days4 and possibly much earlier – the wood-elves of Mirkwood display
so many traditional traits ascribed to elves in folklore that it is clear Tolkien
knew and directly drew on those folklore traditions.5 Although he chose not to draw
from modern works such as Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter (published
in 1924, only some seven years earlier, by an author Tolkien admired and who
had heavily influenced his earlier work),6 even a cursory examination of traditional
elf-behavior in folklore as described in Katharine Briggs’ A Dictionary of Fairies
[1976] or in The Vanishing People: Fairy Lore and Legends [1978] shows that
Tolkien had not chosen to call his Eldar ‘elves’ haphazardly but, like the cooks in
his metaphor of the great Cauldron of Story (OFS.31), had picked and chosen from
among the various strands of tradition with a fine, discriminating eye: his woodelves
are recognizably the elves of folk-lore belief.
Consider, for example, the elves of British folk-lore as described by Briggs.
Among their characteristics was their ability to vanish from mortals’ sight in the
blink of an eye (a characteristic Tolkien refers to pointedly early in ‘On Fairy-Stories’;
cf. OFS.11); this feature is in fact one of the reasons Briggs calls her book The
Vanishing People.7 In The Hobbit this is paralleled by the scenes where the elven
feasters thrice disappear when all their lights are suddenly and simultaneously extinguished.
In itself, this looks like a realistic rationalization of how the old legend
might have started (‘Somebody kicked the fire’, p. 306), but an uncanny element remains:
how to explain ‘hundreds of torches and many fires’ which on the one hand
appear so suddenly that they ‘must have been lit . . . by magic’ (‘The Enchanted
Stream’ p. 354), only to have all the lights disappear ‘as if by magic’ (Ch. VIII, pp.
306–7), all simultaneously snuffed out in an instant. These elf-lights seem to have
something of the air of a will-o’-the-wisp about them; we have already been told
that the feast thus illuminated had an ‘enchanting’ aroma (p. 353) that lured the travellers
to stray from their way and meet disaster, and there are hints that the forest
clearings are enchanted spots (e.g., elf-rings or fairy circles) – cf. a passage in the
typescript when the spiders suddenly break off their pursuit of the fleeing dwarves
as soon as the latter enter the fairy-ring:
The dwarves then noticed that they had come to the edge of a ring where elffires
had been. Whether it was one of those they had seen the night before,
they could not tell. But it seemed that some good magic lingered in such spots,
which the spiders did not like . . .
—First Typescript 1/1/58:15; italics mine.
The motif of enchantment falling upon a mortal who steps into a fairy-ring,
as happens to first Bilbo and then Gandalf (Thorin), also derives from traditional
folklore: Briggs gives several examples, most of which involve the mortal joining
briefly in a fairy dance (rather than, as here, a feast)8 only to discover that vast
stretches of time had passed in what seemed mere minutes – cf. Bombur’s dream
of ‘a great feast going on, going on for ever’ (‘The Enchanted Stream’ p. 352; emphasis
mine).9 To have the hobbit or dwarves caught up in a tarantella would hardly
have suited the solemn mood Tolkien had worked so hard to establish for the Mirkwood
chapter; the substitution of enchanted sleep makes a reasonable equivalent but
raises some interesting questions of its own. Bombur’s dream of enjoying a great
feast while in fact he is slowly starving in an enchanted sleep, and Bilbo’s dream
of joining the feast when he too is enchanted upon stepping into the elf-ring and is
in fact not eating but lying sleeping on the ground, suggests that we are seeing here
examples of what Tolkien in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ called ‘Faërian drama’:
If you are present at a Faërian drama . . . [t]he experience may be very similar
to Dreaming . . . [b]ut in Faërian drama you are in a dream that some other
mind is weaving, and the knowledge of that alarming fact may slip from your
grasp . . . You are deluded – whether that is the intention of the elves . . . is another
question. They at any rate are not themselves deluded. (OFS.49)
I take this to mean that what among the elves is a high art presents itself to mortal
minds, like Bilbo’s and Bombur’s (and presumably Gandalf’s), as a dream. In short,
those who fall under the spell of the elves’ enchantment are overwhelmed and can
no longer distinguish fantasy from reality; they may even come to prefer the pleasant
dream over the harsh reality:
‘I was having such a lovely dream,’ he grumbled, ‘all about having a most gorgeous
dinner’.
‘Good heavens! he has gone like Bombur,’ they said. ‘Don’t tell us about
dreams. Dream dinners aren’t any good, and we can’t share them’.
‘They are the best I am likely to get in this beastly place’ he muttered as he
lay down beside the dwarves and tried to go back to sleep and find his dream
again.
—First Typescript; see p. 354.
Casting people into a trance or sleep while they carried them off, as the elves do
here with Gandalf, is yet another well-known fairy trick; Briggs cites a number of
examples in her chapter ‘Captives in Fairyland’ in The Vanishing People (cf. page
104):
Gandalf was caught much more fast than those bound by spiders! You remember
Bilbo falling like a log into sleep as he stepped into the feasting ring? Next
time Gandalf had stepped forward; and as the lights went out he fell like a
stone enchanted. All the noise of the dwarves lost in the night, their cries as the
spiders caught them, and all the sounds of the battle next day, had passed over
him. Till the wood-elves (and wood elves the people were of course) came to
him and bound him, and carried him away.
—Chapter VIII, pp. 314–5.
 

Часть 2

Many of the elements in the Enchanted Stream scene in The Hobbit are here, albeit
used very differently: the strange white hind, the fruitless hunt (as also in Sir
Orfeo), the eerie laughter in the dark wood, even (in lines 69–76 and 151–155) the
enchanted water that, when drunk, brings disaster upon the intruder.17 Similarly, in
Marie de France’s ‘Guigemar’, the first in her collection of twelve Breton lays, her
titular hero is out hunting one day when
Guigemar saw a hind with a fawn;
a completely white beast,
with deer’s antlers on her head.
Spurred by the barking of the dogs, she sprang
into the open.
Guigemar took his bow and shot at her . . .
—The Lais of Marie de France tr. Rbt Hanning & Joan
Ferrante [1978], ‘Guigemar’, lines 90–94.
In Guigemar’s case, his shot does strike and mortally wound the deer, but he is
unable to enjoy the meat because the arrow rebounds and injures him grievously as
well; if there were any doubt that the ‘completely white’ hind with antlers like a stag
were magical, they disappear when she speaks, laying a curse upon him for wounding
her. Perhaps an echo of this appears in The Hobbit, when Bombur is stricken at
the exact moment Thorin shoots the stag. Finally, in the Welsh tale ‘Pwyll, Prince of
Dyfed’, the First Branch of the Mabinogi, Pwyll meets with misfortune while hunting
a deer, although in this case it is not the deer but the hounds who are hunting it
who are white:
. . . of all the hunting dogs he had seen in the world, he had never seen dogs the
colour of them: the redness of the ears glittered as brightly as the whiteness of
their bodies.
—The Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh Tales,
tr. Patrick Ford [1977], page 37.
Naturally enough, since these particular hounds (the cwn annwn) belong to Arawn,
King of Annwn, the Welsh Otherworld (which is conceived of as both Faerie and
the Land of the Dead, depending on who is telling the story, rather like the faerie
realm in Sir Orfeo).18 White hounds also appear in Tolkien’s ballad ‘Ides Ælfscýne’
(‘Lady Elven-fair’), his own version of the belle dame sans merci legend which appeared
in Songs for the Philologists [1936] but had been written at Leeds sometime
in the first half of the 1920s as part of the Scheme B Songbook, where the narrator
describes his beloved’s unearthly homeland:
þær gréne wæs grund, ond hwít hire hund,
ond gylden wæs hwæte on healme
This passage may be translated as
There green was the ground and white her hound
And golden was the wheat in the fields [or: on the stalk].19
Even the horses being ridden by the elvenking, his knights, and damsels in Sir Orfeo
were ‘snow-white steeds/and white as milk were all their weeds’ [i.e., clothes]
(lines 145–146), as is the horse (‘her milk-white steed’) upon which the Queen of
Elfland takes Thomas Rhymer away with her after their tryst under the Eildon tree
(Child Ballad number 37, text A, stanza six); according to some versions of the
story, the two deer she sent years later to recall Thomas to Elfland were white as
well. Note the repeated insistence not just on whiteness as a feature of creatures native
to Faerie but on the strange intensity of the whiteness, which glimmered (The
Hobbit), glistered (‘The Lay of Aotrou & Itroun’), or glittered (The Mabinogi). And
once again we have the motif of a fruitless hunt that leads the hero into danger –
the deer Pwyll is hunting is actually killed before his pack reaches it by a strange
pack of white hounds, whom he drives from the kill, thus deeply offending their
lord, the King of the Underworld. Pwyll does not feast on deer-meat any more than
Guigemar or Bilbo’s companions, but instead rather than bear Arawn’s enmity he
willingly enters Faerie at Arawn’s bidding to take the faerie king’s place for a year
and, at the end of that time, kill Arawn’s great enemy and rival – a deed he accomplishes
so chivalrously that he thereafter to the end of his life bears the cognomen
Pwyll Pen Annwfn (‘Pwyll, Head of Annwn’).
Pwyll enters Faerie willingly, in order to make good on a debt he has incurred,
and perhaps for this reason comes back safely in the end to his own world and time,
winning the friendship of the Faerie King in the process and, shortly afterwards, a
faerie bride of his own, the Lady Rhiannon. More often, those who enter Faerie do
so unwillingly or unwittingly, like Lady Heurodis in Sir Orfeo, Lord Nann in the old
ballad, or the many prisoners carried off by the fairies – Briggs not only mentions
many similar tales in passing but devotes an entire chapter to the topic (The Vanishing
People, pages 104–17), as does Jacob Grimm in Teutonic Mythology (volume
three, chapter XXXII). And this in turn brings us to Tolkien’s final major borrowing
from fairy tradition in his depiction of the wood-elves: the theme of imprisonment
within an elf-mound.
For although Tolkien never calls it by that name, the Elvenking’s Halls in many
ways fit the folktale descriptions of an elf-mound or fairy hill. A number of the hills
so identified in the British isles are barrow-mounds, and it is perhaps significant
that in several of the pictures he drew of the scene Tolkien gave the entrance to the
Elvenking’s Halls a lintel gate (trilithon) such as those found on many real-world
megalithic tombs.20 Even without the neolithic associations, that Tolkien’s woodelves
live in caves (as did the elves of Doriath and Nargothrond in The Book of Lost
Tales and other stories in the Silmarillion tradition) may be yet another of his realistic
touches rationalizing fairy mythology: many of the traditional tales feature a
cave as the entrance into a fairy realm or, in at least one famous case, out of the fairy
realm into our world.21 The Tuatha dé Danaan, the fairy-folk of Ireland whose martial
prowess seems to have been Tolkien’s main model for the great warrior-elves
of the Quenta Silmarillion (and who were to have featured in an unwritten chapter
of The Lost Road [1936]; cf. HME V.77–8),22 were so closely associated with the
elf-mounds or fairy hills that they came to be more commonly known as aes sidhe
or daoine sidhe, both literally meaning ‘the people of the fairy hill’, until sidhe shifted
from its original meaning of ‘elf-mound’ to mean the elves themselves (as in the
anglicized banshee, or bean sidhe: ‘woman of the sidhe’, faerie-woman). The sidhe
were thought to live within the hollow hills, a conception that no doubt gave rise
to the modern idea that fairies were smaller than humans in size, but in earlier lore
these were simply the entrances to the Otherworld, as in Sir Orfeo, where the hero
follows the faerie ladies when they enter an elf-mound:
with right good will his feet he sped,
for stock nor stone he stayed his tread.
Right into a rock the ladies rode,
and in behind he fearless strode.
He went into that rocky hill
a good three miles or more, until
he came into a country fair . . .
—Sir Orfeo, lines 345–351.23
 

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Часть 3

One universal feature of elf-mounds, whatever else was believed about them, was
the difficulty of escaping from one once inside – cf. the Elvenking’s words (p. 380):
‘there is no escape through my magic doors, for those who are brought once inside’,
a point later re-affirmed by Bilbo’s experience (‘Magic shut the gates’, ibid.).24 One
motif often tied into this, as old as the myth of Persephone, is the idea that anyone
who eats fairy food becomes trapped in fairy-land and cannot thereafter escape;
Briggs recounts several tales of visitors being warned not to eat fairy-food, in at
least one case by someone who had already done so and become trapped herself who
prevents her beloved from sharing the same fate (‘The Fairy Dwelling on Selena
Moor’, British Folk-Tales and Legends [1977; rpt. 2002], pages 181–4). It is therefore
striking that The Hobbit contains no trace of this motif: the starving dwarves
(and the hobbit as well) eat the elven food as soon as it is offered and suffer no ill
effects whatsoever; in fact, it saves them from starvation and does not hinder their
eventual escape in any way.25
That eventual escape – originally after months of captivity, reduced in the published
version to a matter of weeks (see the calendaric reckonings accompanying
Tolkien’s notes for the 1960 Hobbit, p. 823) – comes after ‘a weary long time’. In
the folk-tales, those few captives in fairy-land who do succeed in escaping almost
always do so by one of two means. They are either rescued by someone outside the
elf-mound or fairy-circle – an idea Tolkien toyed with in Plot Notes A, as we have
already seen, but ultimately rejected – or they escape on their own by means of a
trick. Tolkien adopted the latter solution, and so far as I can discover the idea of escaping
in barrels was his own invention;26 there is nothing like it in the traditional
literature, and it may be taken as a typical intrusion of practical hobbitry into the
elven-dwarven impasse created by stubbornness, arrogance, and an unwillingness to
let go of ancient history.
Out of these motifs, drawn together from scattered passing references in various
medieval tales and some of their more modern descendents (e.g., the ballads) –
all the record we have left of a once-widespread belief system now recoverable
only through imaginative reconstruction of such remaining hints – Tolkien created a
seamless and satisfactory whole. To borrow Verlyn Flieger’s analogy, the individual
pieces of elf-lore that have by chance and good luck survived but shorn of their
original context are rather like broken pieces of ancient stained glass, retaining their
striking evocative quality but their original pattern lost; Tolkien has taken these fragments
and reassembled them, ‘remounting, as it were, the stained glass into a new
window’ (Interrupted Music, page 131).
 

Про эльфийское королевство
Часть 1

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.
 

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In any case, given the freedom which Tolkien allowed himself when drawing
from his mythology in The Hobbit in this earliest draft (e.g., the application of ‘Fingolfin’
as a goblin name on p. 8), it’s unreasonable to expect a strict consistency
with his earlier material, especially given the fluid, shifting nature of details and
concepts within that corpus. Tolkien often seems to have described scenes as he initially
visualized them and worked out the details to make them consistent with the
rest of the tale afterwards (e.g., contrast p. 90 with p. 828): in this case, ‘goldenhaired
elf-lord’ was a motif he decided to use when inserting this interpolation into
The Hobbit and he did so, very effectively.
(iii)
The King of Wood and Stone
If Tolkien’s wood-elves as a whole harken back to folklore beliefs about ‘the Fair
Folk’, then in his depiction of the Elvenking he is drawing on a specific modern
literary source: his own unpublished writings.33 Certainly there are striking similarities
between the Elvenking’s halls and the caves of the Rodothlim, a shy and fugitive
people who in the later evolution of the mythology became the elves of Nargothrond:
. . . in the mountains there was a place of caves above a stream, and that
stream ran down to feed the river Sirion, but grass grew before the doors of
the caves, and these were cunningly concealed by trees and such magics as
those scattered bands that dwelt therein remembered still. Indeed at this time
this place had grown to be a strong dwelling of the folk . . . long ere [Túrin
and his companion] drew nigh to that region . . . the spies and watchers of the
Rodothlim (for so were that folk named) gave warning of their approach, and
the folk withdrew before them, such as were abroad from their dwelling. Then
they closed their doors and hoped that the strangers might not discover their
caves, for they feared and mistrusted all unknown folk of whatever race, so
evil were the lessons of that dreadful time.
Now then Flinding and Túrin dared even to the caves’ mouths, and perceiving
that these twain knew now the paths thereto the Rodothlim sallied and
made them prisoners and drew them within their rocky halls, and they were led
before the chief, Orodreth.
—‘Turambar and the Foalókë’ [circa 1919],
BLT II.81–2.
While the wood-elves’ dwelling [circa 1931] is not described as being located in
mountains, it otherwise strongly resembles the Rodothlim’s lair, being ‘a great cave’
alongside a river that ‘ran from out of the heights of the forest’; these heights are
also described as ‘the highlands’ (p. 315) and ‘a steep slope’ (p. 379). Like the
Rodothlim, the wood-elves initially flee before the intruders (at the three feasts),
only to waylay and capture the trespassers the next day and bring them before their
king for judgement. But aside from their dwelling the Rodothlim are not a very
close parallel to the wood-elves: we are told the former are so industrious that ‘there
the ancient arts and works of the Noldoli [Deep Elves] came once more to life . . .
There was smithying in secret and forging of good weapons, and even fashioning
of some fair things beside, and the women spun once more and wove, and at times
was gold quarried privily in places nigh . . . so that deep in those caverns might vessels
of beauty be seen in the flame of secret lights’ (BLT II.81). By contrast, we are
specifically told that the Elvenking’s treasure is small because his people ‘neither
mined nor worked metal or jewels, nor did they trade, nor till the earth more than
they could help’ (see below). Also, the wood-elves do not share the Rodothlim’s
aversion to marching off to war, as we shall see in later chapters, although admittedly
this was a slightly later development.
A much closer parallel to the wood-elves can be found in the woodland realm of
Doriath, located in the heart of a dark forest known for its impenetrability, a place
where most travellers get lost and perish miserably. Like the elven kingdom in Mirkwood,
Doriath is a realm of the Sea Elves (the Teleri), not the Deep Elves (the Noldoli
or Noldor) as had been the case with the Rodothlim of Nargothrond. At the
heart of Doriath lies their stronghold, Menegroth (‘The Thousand Caves’), which
can only be reached by crossing a guarded bridge over a stream that runs just past
its gates – or, as The Book of Lost Tales put it, describing a scene strikingly like the
one depicted in one of the illustrations for The Hobbit (DAA.224): ‘his halls were
builded in a deep cavern of great size, and they were nonetheless a kingly and a fair
abode. This cavern was in the heart of the mighty forest of Artanor [Doriath] that
is the mightiest of forests, and a stream ran before its doors, but none could enter
that portal save across the stream, and a bridge spanned it narrow and well-guarded’
(‘The Tale of Tinúviel’, BLT II.9–10).34
Furthermore, the wood-elves of Mirkwood are great archers, who can ‘hit a bird’s
eye in the dark’; indeed, their extreme skill with the bow is so well known that the
dwarves promptly and prudently surrender on the spot when faced with wood-elves
armed with bows. Similarly, the most renowned warrior of Doriath was Beleg of
the bow (also called Beleg the Bowman, the character known in The Silmarillion as
Beleg Strongbow), Túrin’s closest friend after whom the second canto of ‘The Lay
of the Children of Húrin’ is named (HME III.29–48). The bow is also the weapon
most associated with the Teleri of Eldamar, those of the Third Kindred who had immigrated
to Valinor, with which they defend themselves against the Noldor during
the Kinslaying (Silm.87).
The strongest parallel between Doriath and the wood-elves’ realm, however, is
the Elvenking himself, who strongly resembles one of the most famous characters in
the legendarium: King Thingol Greycloak, ruler of the woodland realm of Doriath
and high king of the Elves of Beleriand. It is said in the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion
that his name was ‘held in awe’ by the Lords of the Noldor (Fingolfin, Fingon,
Maidros/Maedhros, and Inglor/Finrod) [HME V.266]. Thingol is unique in that he is
a major character in not one but two of the ‘great tales’ that form the heart of the Silmarillion:
‘The Lay of Leithian’ (the story of his daughter, Lúthien Tinúviel, and her
mortal lover Beren) and the story of the children of Húrin (as loyal foster-father to
Túrin the Hapless). He is also one of the original elves, one of those who began life
in Cuiviénen, the lost elven Eden far to the east of what we know as Middle-earth,
and one of the three who travel to Valinor as representatives of their people. He thus
became the leader of one of the three great divisions of the Eldar, the Sea Elves (see
above), in their migration half-way across the world towards Elven-home. He is the
only one of the Children of Ilúvatar to marry one of the Ainur or angels, Queen
Melian, and ultimately became either ancestor or close kin to many of Tolkien’s other
important characters – for example, he is Elrond Halfelven’s great-great-grandfather.
35 Later legends, not yet written at the time The Hobbit was drafted, would
make him great-uncle to Galadriel (the most powerful elf depicted in The Lord of
the Rings) and her brother Finrod Felagund (the first elf to befriend humans and perhaps
the most appealing character in The Silmarillion), and the direct ancestor of
the kings of Númenor and hence of Gondor and Arnor as well, including Aragorn/
Strider.
 

Часть 3

Given the fluid nature of the unpublished myths, where Tolkien was willing to
play around with concepts and occasionally contemplate major changes in the legends,
we should ask the obvious question: is the elven-king Bilbo meets Thingol
himself or an entirely new character closely modelled upon him – an analogue, as it
were? The answer seems to be both: just as the status of The Hobbit itself hovered
in Tolkien’s mind between being part of the legendarium and standing apart from
it, so too within the book the identification of the elvenking straddles both options
and cannot conclusively be resolved either way. Even after Tolkien eventually, towards
the end of work on The Lord of the Rings, committed to the decision that the
wood-elf king was a separate character, he never fully reworked the original story
to completely support that decision.
To understand, then, exactly how the wood-elf king in The Hobbit relates to the
earlier stories, it is necessary (as so often) to make the mental effort to exclude from
our minds knowledge of what Tolkien later resolved while working on the sequel,
or that subsequent layer created as much as twenty years afterwards will prevent us
from seeing clearly what he was doing at the time he created the character – that is,
when writing the story of Mr. Baggins’ adventures as a stand-alone work deriving
in varying degrees from his already voluminous writings about Middle-earth. Seen
in this light, while the Elvenking strongly resembles King Thingol in general, the
evidence for and against the identification is contradictory. Two elements Tolkien
goes out of his way to include in the narrative support the argument that the two
kings are one and the same, while two unstated facts argue against it because of the
dissonance they would create between things we know to be true of Thingol that do
not appear to apply to the Elvenking.
The first passage that strengthens the identification between the Elvenking and
Thingol Greycloak is Tolkien’s mention of the three kindreds of the elves (see part ii
of this chapter’s commentary, starting on p. 405 above). This places the wood-elves
within the context of the old mythology, and we should not overlook the precision
of Tolkien’s phrasing that most of the wood-elves are descended from ancient elves
who never went to ‘the great FairyLand of the west’. In fact, only one Sea-elf in
the whole legendarium ever visited Valinor and returned to live in Middle-earth, this
being the figure originally known as Linwë Tinto (BLT I.106), then Tinwë Linto
(ibid., pages 130–1) or Tinwelint (‘The Tale of Tinúviel’, BLT II.8), then from ‘The
Lay of Leithian’, onwards as King Thingol. It’s possible that this is an oblique allusion
to the idea, expressed in the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’, that some of the
Gnomes (Noldor) returning to Middle-earth ‘take service with Thingol and Melian
of the Thousand Caves in Doriath’ (HME IV.23).36 It cannot, as it might first seem,
be an early form of the idea presented in The Lord of the Rings that Sindar (grey-elf)
lords settled among and ruled over Silvan (wood-elf) populations, since those rulers
would be Sindar like Celeborn who had never left Middle-earth. Given the Elvenking’s
general similarity to Thingol, it seems far more likely then that this passage is
a deliberate allusion to Thingol.
Thingol’s story is even more explicitly evoked in the account of the old enmity
between the dwarves and the elves (p. 315):
. . . [the wood elves] did not love dwarves. They had had wars in ancient days
with dwarves, and accused them of stealing their treasure (& the dwarves accused
them of the same, and also of hiring dwarves to shape their gold & silver,
and refusing to pay them after!).
The original ending to the first typescript of the Mirkwood chapter (1/1/30:4) expands
upon this somewhat:
. . . they did not love dwarves and thought he was an enemy. In ancient days
they had had wars with some of the dwarves whom they accused of stealing
their treasure. It is only fair to say that the dwarves gave a different account
and said that they only took what was their due, for the elf-king had bargained
with them to shape his raw gold and silver and had after refused to give them
their pay. If the elf-king had a weakness it was for treasure, especially for silver
and white gems, for though his hoard was rich yet he had not as great a treasure
as other elf-lords of old, since his people neither mined nor worked metal
or jewels, nor did they trade, nor till the earth more than they could help. All
this was well known to every dwarf, though Thorin’s family37 had had nothing
to do with the old quarrel I have spoken of.
This in turn is followed closely in the revised ending of the Mirkwood chapter (1/
1/58:17), which, in addition to a few small revisions of punctuation and phrasing,
achieves the text of the published book:
. . . though his hoard was rich, he was ever eager for more, since he had not
yet as great a treasure as other elf-lords of old38 . . . All this was well known to
every dwarf, though Thorin’s family had had nothing to do with the old quarrel
I have spoken of. Consequently Thorin was angry at their treatment of him,
when they took their spell off him and he came to his senses; and also he was
determined that no word of gold or jewels should be dragged out of him.
(compare DAA.220).
This quarrel is clearly an allusion to the Lost Tale known as ‘The Nauglafring: The
Necklace of the Dwarves’, the last of the tales (in terms of the cycle’s internal chronology)
to be written out in full (BLT II.221–51). This story changed greatly in its
details and tone but remained consistent in its overall outlines from The Book of Lost
Tales through ‘The Sketch of the Mythology’ into the 1930 Quenta, the last completed
version of the tale.39
The 1926 summary of the tale runs thusly:
Húrin and outlaws come to Nargothrond, whom none dare plunder for dread
of the spirit of Glórung [the dragon] or even of his memory. They slay Mîm
the Dwarf who had taken possession and enchanted all the gold. [After transporting
it to Doriath] Húrin casts the gold at Thingol’s feet with reproaches.
Thingol will not have it, and bears with Húrin, until goaded too far he bids him
begone. Húrin wanders away . . .
The enchanted gold lays its spell on Thingol. He summons the Dwarves of
Nogrod and Belegost to come and fashion it into beautiful things, and to make
a necklace of great wonder whereon the Silmaril shall hang. The Dwarves
plot treachery, and Thingol bitter with the curse of the gold denies them their
reward. After their smithying they are driven away without payment. The
Dwarves come back; aided by treachery of some Gnomes [that is, Noldor or
Deep Elves] who also were bitten by the lust of the gold, they surprise Thingol
on a hunt, slay him, and surprise the Thousand Caves and plunder them. Melian
they cannot touch . . .
[On the return journey to their homelands] The Dwarves are ambushed at a
ford by Beren and the brown and green Elves of the wood, and their king slain,
from whose neck Beren takes the ‘Nauglafring’ or necklace of the Dwarves,
with its Silmaril. It is said that Lúthien wearing that jewel is the most beautiful
thing that eyes have ever seen outside Valinor. But Melian warned Beren of
the curse of the gold and of the Silmaril. The rest of the gold is drowned in the
river.
But the ‘Nauglafring’ remains hoarded secretly in Beren’s keeping . . .
—‘The Sketch of the Mythology’ [1926] HME IV.32–3.
Besides prefiguring all the trouble that will erupt later in The Hobbit over
Smaug’s hoard, and the curse of possessiveness that falls upon Thorin in the end,
this passage clearly describes the same quarrel which lay between the wood-elves
and our dwarves in The Hobbit: dwarves hired to shape silver and gold (the Book of
Lost Tales version stresses the amount of unwrought gold in the hoard; cf. Note 38)
for an elvenking who then refuses them payment, an ensuing war, and lasting bitterness
over the whole incident, with each side nursing grudges as to the rightness of
their cause – the ‘(Later) Annals of Beleriand’, which are associated with the 1937
Quenta Silmarillion, goes so far as to claim ‘and there hath been war between Elf
and Dwarf since that day.’ If we were to go by Tolkien’s later writings in The Lord
of the Rings and published Silmarillion then in the account in The Hobbit the elfking
who bargained with the dwarves to shape his raw gold and silver and the elfking
of the next sentence who had a weakness for treasure are two separate people
(Thingol and Thranduil, respectively), but this is clearly untenable: nothing in Tolkien’s
prose here justifies the assumption of a complete shift in antecedent between
identical nouns used as the subjects of two consecutive sentences. Moreover the
phrase ‘as other elf-lords of old’ clearly implies that our Elvenking is himself one
among their number, not a newcomer of latter days but directly involved with the
elf-dwarf wars of ancient days.40 In short, there can be no doubt that here Tolkien
is stating it was the same king of the wood-elves whom Bilbo meets who had
quarreled and warred with the dwarves long ago, events that the Silmarillion tradition
unequivocally ascribes to King Thingol. Furthermore, in a letter written many
years later Tolkien explicitly said that this particular passage in The Hobbit is a reference
to ‘the quarrel of King Thingol, Lúthien’s father, with the Dwarves’ – JRRT
to Christopher Bretherton, 16th July 1964; Letters p. 346.
This very identification, however, raises the first of the two disconnects between
Thingol and the Elvenking that form the major objections to the possibility that the
two characters might be one and the same at different points in Middle-earth’s history.
A key part of Thingol’s legend was the account of his death at the hands of
the dwarves he had cheated, the sudden and shameful death of one of the greatest of
all the elves over a petty quarrel. If our Elvenking is Thingol, then how can he still
be alive at the time of our story? Either Tolkien has removed the quarrel from the
Thingol legend and given it to a new character, modifying it so that the chief elven
protagonist survives, or he is making the same modification while leaving Thingol
as its protagonist, thus extending Thingol’s story forward into a much later era and
setting aside the old account of Thingol’s death and the destruction of Doriath. That
he was willing to recast his stories in ways with far-reaching consequences we know
from other evidence, a prime example being his decision no more than five years
earlier between the original and revised versions of the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’
to change Beren from an elf to a human (HME IV.23–5).
 

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And indeed there is already precedent for ambiguity over Thingol’s fate (or Tinwë
Lintö/Tinwelint as he was then called) within The Book of Lost Tales itself. The
story of the Nauglafring near the end of the collection recounts his violent death
(offstage in the narrative, while on one of the hunts so beloved of the wood-elves –
BLT II.231–2), yet in the section of The Book of Lost Tales that describes the origins
of the elves and their coming to Valinor (‘The Coming of the Elves and the Making
of Kôr’), we are told ‘yet ’tis said [Tinwë] lives still lord of the scattered Elves
of Hisilómë [Hithlum, later a region in northwest Beleriand], dancing in its twilight
places with Wendelin [Melian] his spouse’ (BLT I.115) – that is, that according to
this version of the story Tinwelint/Thingol is still alive at the time Eriol the narrator
is being told the story in the early fifth century AD.
Unfortunately, none of the later versions of the legendarium recount the story of
Thingol’s death and the fall of Doriath, all breaking off incomplete before this point
(see Note 39). So what evidence we have for Tolkien’s intentions regarding the latter
parts of the Silmarillion cycle must derive from sources such as the ‘(Later) Annals
of Beleriand’ [c. 1937] and ‘The Tale of Years’ ([c. 1951]; cf. HME XI.345),
which recount the old story of Thingol’s death at the hands of the dwarves in almost
the same terms as in the the ‘(Earliest) Annals of Beleriand’ [c. 1931]. In essence,
then, between the time The Hobbit is drafted and its unexpected publication, and
indeed well into the drafting of The Lord of the Rings,41 we seem to have two competing
traditions: one in which Thingol dies as in the old story (the Annals) and one
in which the issue is left open (The Hobbit). Since both existed at that time only in
unpublished manuscripts, it’s impossible to say which of the parallel traditions was
more definitive; The Hobbit’s version was certainly the first to reach print and might
thus be thought to be more authoritative, yet it was at least partly superseded by the
later account of the elvenking in The Lord of the Rings.
The second disconnect is an absence rather than a presence: namely, that there is
no Faërie Queen at the Elvenking’s side in Mirkwood. As great a figure as Thingol
himself is in the legendarium, he is just as famous for his wife (and daughter) as
for his own deeds, just as King Arthur is ultimately more famous for the deeds of
the knights of his Round Table than for his own exploits (aside from the realm-establishing
feat of drawing the sword from the stone). Thingol’s daughter Lúthien
Tinúviel is the fairest creature that ever walked the earth, and his wife Melian of
Valinor (Wendelin/Gwendeling/Tindriel the fay in the earliest versions of the story)
of another order of being altogether, as high above Thingol as Lúthien is above Beren
(or Arwen above Aragorn). It is Melian’s power that protects the woodland realm
of Doriath from its enemies, just as Galadriel later protects Lothlórien in The Lord
of the Rings. Such a figure could hardly escape Bilbo’s notice during the weeks
and months he was forced to lurk within the wood-elves’ halls and ‘go on burglaring’,
yet no queen is mentioned, either by the side of the woodland king in Bombur’s
visions and the description of the third great feast that followed in the Enchanted
Stream interpolation, nor anywhere in this chapter’s account of the woodelves’
halls. We can only infer her existence indirectly from much later evidence,
long after the time of our book: the fact that in The Lord of the Rings we are told the
Elvenking has a son, Legolas, who becomes one of the Fellowship of the Ring. If
Tolkien’s projected rewriting of our story in 1960 had proceeded as far as the Mirkwood
chapters, we might have been able to discover whether he intended to bring
Legolas into Mr. Baggins’ story (after all, in the light of later knowledge we can say
he would almost certainly have been present at the Battle of Five Armies); there is
no sign of it in the admittedly sketchy notes that survive. But even this would hardly
have resolved the question of what was in Tolkien’s mind almost thirty years earlier
when he wrote The Hobbit, since by that later date he was committed to the decision
that Thingol and the Elvenking were two different characters.
The only possibility that would unite both traditions would be if Thingol did indeed
die in the fall of Doriath but then later returned to Middle-earth after a suitable
time in the Halls of Mandos.42 Since elves experience serial immortality, it is
quite possible in Tolkien’s metaphysics for us to encounter in The Hobbit or The
Lord of the Rings an elf who died during events in the First Age, spent time in the
Halls of Mandos, was re-incarnated with the same personality and memories, and
then returned to Middle-earth during the Second or Third Age. In fact, we have one
specific example in the person of Glorfindel, Elrond’s chief advisor in Rivendell,
who dies fighting a balrog during the retreat from Gondolin near the end of the
First Age (‘The Fall of Gondolin’, BLT II.194; Silm.243) yet re-appears in Middleearth
before the end of the second millennium of the Third Age (LotR.225–6; HME
VI.214–5 & HME XII.377ff).
It might be argued that if the Elvenking in The Hobbit were indeed a figure returned
from death then Tolkien would have drawn attention to this fact in some way,
but the example of Glorfindel shows this is not necessarily the case; the same could
be true of any elf we meet in The Hobbit. However, while entirely possible in terms
of what we know to be true of the elves, one nonetheless cannot help feeling that
it would be a coming down in the world for Thingol Greycloak, one of the most
renowned elves of the First Age, to return to a diminished realm, sans wife and
daughter, his original home sunk beneath the waves in lost Beleriand, his kingdom
reduced to the wood-elf realm in Mirkwood. Glorfindel clearly had unfinished business
drawing him back into the mortal world.43 Thingol has no such motive; having
only stayed in Middle-earth originally because of Melian, it seems unlikely that
he would have left Valinor a second time without her. Instead, this sense of diminishment
may be part of the very reason Thingol and the Elvenking ultimately did
become separate characters. As Thingol grew in majesty and wisdom and stature
during the long evolution of the legendarium – a process reaching its apotheosis in
Narn i Hîn Húrin (cf. Unfinished Tales, page 83) but already well underway in ‘The
Lay of Leithian’ (cf. Note 34) – the simple wood-elf king that had been Tinwelint
became buried under the weight of glory; re-creating him in the person of the Elvenking
enabled Tolkien to recapture something much more like the original character,
regaining a quality that had been lost in the ennoblement of Thingol and one which
made him much more suited to the role he was to play in The Hobbit.
In the end it seems clear that when he wrote The Hobbit Tolkien drew on the old
story (which was, after all, unpublished and likely to remain so), changing it as he
did so, to make the material more suited to his new purpose. But he left his options
open as to whether the Elvenking was a new character or an old familiar character
appearing in a new story, slightly altered to fit his new surroundings. In time he decided
that the Elvenking was indeed a new character and gave him a name (see part
iv below) and (sketchy) history of his own, but this decision postdated the publication
of The Hobbit, probably by more than a decade, and he never went back and
re-wrote the key passage in The Hobbit to distinguish what was now the analogue
from the original. Thus to this day we are left with two contradictory accounts of
which elvenking was responsible for provoking the elf–dwarf war, the one in the
Silmarillion tradition and the other within The Hobbit.
 

Часть 5

Hobbit.
(iv)
The Name ‘Thranduil’
The Elvenking is never named within The Hobbit; like the Mayor of Lake Town
(who never does acquire a name), he is always simply referred to by title throughout.
Not until The Lord of the Rings is he given a name, Thranduil, and made father
of the elven member of the Fellowship, Legolas Greenleaf. Even in The Lord of
the Rings most of what we learn about him comes from Appendix B: ‘The Tale of
Years’; he never actually appears in the main story. His name is not easily explicated
but seems to be in early Sindarin (that is, Gnomish/Noldorin, later rationalized as a
dialectical form), and to contain the same element as the place-name Nargothrond:44
Narog + othrond, ‘fortified cave by the river Narog’ [Salo, p. 386; HME XI.414].
The thrand/(o)thrond element, meaning fortified cave (ost + rond), fits very well
with the character as described in The Hobbit, where the chief thing we know about
him is that he’s a king dwelling in a cave; the –uil or -duil suffix might relate to
dûl (hollow), but more likely links to drui, drû (‘wood, forest’) [Gnomish Lexicon,
page 31]. If so, a possible gloss would be ‘(One who lives in) a (fortified) cave in
the woods’.
(v)
The Wine of Dorwinion
It must be potent wine to make a wood-elf drowsy. But this it would seem
was the heady brew of the great gardens of Dorwinion in the warm South, not
meant for his soldiers or his servants, but for the king’s feasts only, and for
smaller bowls, not the butler’s jugs. Soon the chief guard fell asleep and not
long after the butler put his head on the table and snored beside him.
—p. 383.
The presence of wine from Dorwinion in the Elvenking’s halls is yet another piece
of circumstantial evidence demonstrating the affinity in Tolkien’s mind between the
elves of Mirkwood and those of Doriath, Thingol’s people, since such wine appears
in only two of Tolkien’s works, The Hobbit and ‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’
[begun circa 1918], and both times in connection with wood-elves. In the alliterative
poem, Beleg the hunter gives this same wine to Túrin and his companions after
he finds them lost in the woods of Doriath:
... their heads were mazed
by the wine of Dor-Winion that went in their veins,
and they soundly slept ...
—‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’,
lines 229b–231a; HME III.11.
Furthermore, we are told that this wine
... is bruised from the berries of the burning South –
and the Gnome-folk know it, and the nation of the
Elves,
and by long ways lead it to the lands of the North.
—ibid., lines 225–227.
,br/>
That this wine would stupefy starving human travellers is no wonder, but its potency
is also testified by its effect on Orgof, one of Thingol’s high-ranking thanes
(the figure known as Saeros in the published Silmarillion); it is when he is ‘deep
drunken’ (line 484) on this same ‘wine of Dor-Winion that went ungrudged/in their
golden goblets’ (lines 425–426a) that he taunts Túrin, resulting in his own death.
These two incidents are the only two times in Tolkien’s work when he describes an
elf becoming drunk, and it can hardly be an accident that the same wine (potent indeed)
was involved in both cases.
Unlike many names in The Hobbit, Dorwinion seems easy to explicate: Dor, land
(as in Gondor, Mordor, Dorthonion); winion, wine: Wine-land or Vinland. David
Salo (A Gateway to Sindarin, page 374) considers it a mixed Sindarin-Welsh form
(Welsh gwin, wine) but it might as easily be taken as a case where Sindarin’s inspiration
in real-world Welsh has been less assimilated than usual; many similar
instances are cited in An Introduction to Elvish, Jim Allan et al., pages 49–50.
However, against this we must set a late linguistic essay Tolkien wrote glossing
names in The Fellowship of the Ring, in which he gave a completely different explanation
for the name:
In the Hobbit all names are translated except Galion (the Butler), Esgaroth,
and Dorwinion. Galion and Esgaroth are not Sindarin (though perhaps ‘Sindarized’
in shape) or are not recorded in Sindarin; but Dorwinion is Sindarin
meaning ‘Young-land country’.
Above the gloss he has later written in pencil ‘or Land of Gwinion’. The Gnomish
Lexicon gives gwinwen as a word meaning ‘freshness’ (Parma Eldalamberon
XI.46), with gwion being one of the words meaning ‘young’ (ibid.42). The glosses
given above, while authorial, postdate the creation of these names by decades and
so may be afterthoughts rather than definitive explanations. But if they do indeed
reveal what was in Tolkien’s mind when he first created the name – that is, if Dorwinion
in fact meant ‘Land of Youth’ rather than ‘Wine-land’ when Tolkien first
created the name – then here he is deliberately drawing on Celtic (specifically Irish)
myth. Not only is Tir na nÓg (‘The Land of Youth’) one of the most famous of the
Celtic otherworlds that could be reached through imrama (voyages into the mythic
West), but it was one that particularly interested Tolkien, who intended to devote a
chapter of the unfinished The Lost Road [1936] to ‘a Tuatha-de-Danaan story, or Tirnan-
Og’ (HME V.77), having already mentioned it in his 1924 poem ‘The Nameless
Land’, where he describes Tol Eressëa:
Than Tír na nÓg45 more fair and free,
Than Paradise more faint and far,
O! shore beyond the Shadowy Sea,
O! land forlorn where lost things are,
O! mountians where no man may be!
—lines 49–53; HME V.99–100.
If these associations were present from an early date, it would explain the unusual
potency of the wine from this magical land – compare Dunsany’s Gorgondy, the
wi`ne of the gnomes; so potent that drinking it can kill even a hardened sailor outright
(‘The Secret of the Sea’; The Last Book of Wonder [1916]), so superlative
that it surpasses all other wines and its taste can lure a man into fatal risks to gain
more (‘The Opal Arrow-Head’ [1920], collected in The Man Who Ate the Phoenix [
1947]).
If Dorwinion indeed means ‘The Land of Youth’, then we would expect there to
be only one such enchanted land in all the world. On the other hand, if it simply
means ‘Wine-land’, that name could plausibly be applied to more than one country.
Are we justified in considering the Dorwinion referred to in the Túrin story as the
same land referred to in The Hobbit? Certainly Tolkien does seem to have re-used
the name at least once, when he included in the final paragraph of the 1937 Quenta
Silmarillion a reference to ‘the undying flowers in the meads of Dorwinion’ as part
of Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle (HME V.334); while this fits in perfectly with the
‘Land of Youth’ gloss it cannot at the same time be accommodated to Dorwinion’s
mention in the alliterative poem and The Hobbit – however precious and potent the
wine drunken in Menegroth and the Halls of the Elvenking, it certainly had not been
imported all the way from Elvenhome. Moreover, in the revised version of The Lay
of the Children of Húrin [circa 1923], it specifies that this wine reaches Doriath by
way of dwarven traders:
... berries of the burning South–
the Gnome-folk know it, from Nogrod the Dwarves
by long ways lead it to the lands of the North
for the Elves in exile who by evil fate
the vine-clad valleys now view no more
in the land of Gods.
—lines 539–544a, HME III.111.
These two references could be reconciled if we assume that the vine-clad valleys
of Valinor were known as Dorwinion, as per the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion, and the
elves of Beleriand applied the name to a quite distinct wine district in Middle-earth
in memory of that other Dorwinion, but it seems far more probable that Tolkien
simply re-used the name in this section of the Quenta Silmarillion (which is more
closely related to the 1930 Quenta than most of the 1937 text; see Note 32 on p.
429). By contrast, I think the two Dorwinions referred to in the alliterative poem and
the wood-elf chapter of The Hobbit are one and the same, that Tolkien borrowed the
name and concept entire from the old lay and that, given the geographical flexibility
of lands ‘off the map’ to the south, the same referents would serve.
Dorwinion does not appear on any of Tolkien’s Beleriand maps (see ‘The First
“Silmarillion” Map’, HME.[219]–234), nor on the Wilderland map accompanying
The Hobbit (see DAA.[399] and the maps on Plates I and II), nor on the large foldout
map of Middle-earth published with volumes one and two of The Lord of the
Rings. However, it does appear on Pauline Baynes’ version of the Middle-earth map
published in 1970, at the mouth of the River Running on the north-west shore of
the Sea of Rhûn (in the exact same spot where the label ‘Sea of Rhûn’ appears on
Tolkien’s own map, drawn for him by his son Christopher). This is one of a number
of new names Tolkien provided Baynes for her map in 1969, not all of which
were placed correctly, as noted by Christopher Tolkien (Unfinished Tales, pages
261–2),46 but in this case we can confirm its placement thanks to the same unpublished
late linguistic essay already cited, in which Tolkien comments that Dorwinion
‘was probably far south down the R. Running, and its Sindarin name a testimony to
the spread of Sindarin: in this case expectable since the cultivation of vines was not
known originally to the Nandor or Avari’.47 In any case, its placement here, even if
in accordance with Tolkien’s instructions, is a late accretion and almost certainly not
what he intended at the time he wrote The Hobbit, when the surrounding geography
was as yet undetermined; on Baynes’ map, Dorwinion is no further south than the
Necromancer’s tower (Dol Guldur) and roughly equal to the southern edge of the
Wilderland map – hardly ‘in the warm South’ (a location more like the later Ithilien
would seem to be more in keeping with Tolkien’s original conception, given his descriptions
of the latter’s climate in The Lord of the Rings).
 

[Волвера]

Сообщение от Marusi4ko

Про Мирквуд, из Истории Хоббита (History of Hobbit):

In this chapter, Tolkien depicts Mirkwood in ways that conjure up not just one but
two archetypes: The Dark Wood and The Enchanted Forest. The realistic description
of a desperate journey through primal woodlands, struggling against starvation
and thirst, exhaustion and despair, dominates the first half of the chapter and represents
yet another tour de force as Tolkien uses sensory details to build up a claustrophobic
impression of a nightmarish journey in darkness and near-darkness that
never seems to end. Tolkien’s other journeys into darkness are relatively brief in
duration: Bilbo’s journey under the Misty Mountains, the Fellowship’s trek through
Moria, the Grey Company’s passage of the Paths of the Dead, and Frodo and Sam’s
disastrous trip through Shelob’s Lair all take a few days at most, in some cases only
hours. By contrast, Bilbo and the dwarves’ trip through Mirkwood lasts for weeks if
not months; in some outlines Tolkien projected that as much as an entire year might
pass while they remained lost or captive within the forest. For more on Mirkwood,
or Taur-na-Fuin as it was sometimes called, as it had appeared in Tolkien’s earlier
works in the Silmarillion tradition, see the commentary on The Pryftan Fragment, p.
20.
The second half of the chapter shifts the descriptions to highlight the eerie aspects
of the endless woods, dim rather than pitch-dark but full of disturbing features: the
alluring sounds and smells and sights that lure the travellers off the path into disaster,
the uncanny appearance and disappearance of the feasters, the spell of sleep
that falls first upon the hobbit and then the chief dwarf. For more on this enchanted
forest theme, see ‘The Vanishing People’ following Chapter IX.
 

---------- Сообщение добавлено в 17:52 ---------- Предыдущее сообщение было в 17:48 ----------

Про лесных эльфов (The Vanishing People)

With the wood-elves, we have finally come full circle to what, had this been one
of the Lost Tales, would have been either the starting point or the core of the book.
With the inversion of Tolkien’s invented races we have already discussed back in
the commentary to the conclusion of Chapter I (see pp. 76 & 78), The Hobbit starts
far from the elf-centric core of all Tolkien’s earlier works in the legendarium1 (perhaps
one reason why he was sometimes ambivalent about whether it was or was
not part of the mythology). Bilbo’s story only comes to a sustained treatment of the
elves mid-way through the book, and even then views them only from outside, and
relatively briefly, before passing on. The flighty elves in the trees surrounding the
Last Decent House (Rivendell) had been more like the fairies of Elizabethan and
Victorian tales, a tradition Tolkien was probably first exposed to in Knatchbull-Hugesson’s
Stories for My Children [1870] – see Letters pp. 407 & 453 – and himself
contributed to in ‘Goblin Feet’ [1915], ‘Tinfang Warble’ [1914], and similar early
poems during the era when that tradition reached its lowest ebb in Barrie’s Tinkerbell
[1904] and Conan Doyle’s flower-fairies of the Cottingley Photographs [1920].
By contrast, the wood-elves harken back to a more sinister side of faerie belief, one
dominant throughout the Middle Ages and surviving into at least the nineteenth and
possibly early twentieth century in Ireland and the more isolated parts of Britain.2
Tolkien professed, in his Andrew Lang lecture (revised and expanded as ‘On
Fairy-Stories’), not to be an expert in faerie lore,3 but this is simply typical modesty
on his part, as the essay itself shows; his definition of ‘expert’ required exhaustive,
comprehensive knowledge of all the publications in a field (cf. his Beowulf essay,
which although well-researched includes his disclaimer against having read every
book ever written about his topic). His interest in elves dates back at least to his
undergraduate days4 and possibly much earlier – the wood-elves of Mirkwood display
so many traditional traits ascribed to elves in folklore that it is clear Tolkien
knew and directly drew on those folklore traditions.5 Although he chose not to draw
from modern works such as Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter (published
in 1924, only some seven years earlier, by an author Tolkien admired and who
had heavily influenced his earlier work),6 even a cursory examination of traditional
elf-behavior in folklore as described in Katharine Briggs’ A Dictionary of Fairies
[1976] or in The Vanishing People: Fairy Lore and Legends [1978] shows that
Tolkien had not chosen to call his Eldar ‘elves’ haphazardly but, like the cooks in
his metaphor of the great Cauldron of Story (OFS.31), had picked and chosen from
among the various strands of tradition with a fine, discriminating eye: his woodelves
are recognizably the elves of folk-lore belief.
Consider, for example, the elves of British folk-lore as described by Briggs.
Among their characteristics was their ability to vanish from mortals’ sight in the
blink of an eye (a characteristic Tolkien refers to pointedly early in ‘On Fairy-Stories’;
cf. OFS.11); this feature is in fact one of the reasons Briggs calls her book The
Vanishing People.7 In The Hobbit this is paralleled by the scenes where the elven
feasters thrice disappear when all their lights are suddenly and simultaneously extinguished.
In itself, this looks like a realistic rationalization of how the old legend
might have started (‘Somebody kicked the fire’, p. 306), but an uncanny element remains:
how to explain ‘hundreds of torches and many fires’ which on the one hand
appear so suddenly that they ‘must have been lit . . . by magic’ (‘The Enchanted
Stream’ p. 354), only to have all the lights disappear ‘as if by magic’ (Ch. VIII, pp.
306–7), all simultaneously snuffed out in an instant. These elf-lights seem to have
something of the air of a will-o’-the-wisp about them; we have already been told
that the feast thus illuminated had an ‘enchanting’ aroma (p. 353) that lured the travellers
to stray from their way and meet disaster, and there are hints that the forest
clearings are enchanted spots (e.g., elf-rings or fairy circles) – cf. a passage in the
typescript when the spiders suddenly break off their pursuit of the fleeing dwarves
as soon as the latter enter the fairy-ring:
The dwarves then noticed that they had come to the edge of a ring where elffires
had been. Whether it was one of those they had seen the night before,
they could not tell. But it seemed that some good magic lingered in such spots,
which the spiders did not like . . .
—First Typescript 1/1/58:15; italics mine.
The motif of enchantment falling upon a mortal who steps into a fairy-ring,
as happens to first Bilbo and then Gandalf (Thorin), also derives from traditional
folklore: Briggs gives several examples, most of which involve the mortal joining
briefly in a fairy dance (rather than, as here, a feast)8 only to discover that vast
stretches of time had passed in what seemed mere minutes – cf. Bombur’s dream
of ‘a great feast going on, going on for ever’ (‘The Enchanted Stream’ p. 352; emphasis
mine).9 To have the hobbit or dwarves caught up in a tarantella would hardly
have suited the solemn mood Tolkien had worked so hard to establish for the Mirkwood
chapter; the substitution of enchanted sleep makes a reasonable equivalent but
raises some interesting questions of its own. Bombur’s dream of enjoying a great
feast while in fact he is slowly starving in an enchanted sleep, and Bilbo’s dream
of joining the feast when he too is enchanted upon stepping into the elf-ring and is
in fact not eating but lying sleeping on the ground, suggests that we are seeing here
examples of what Tolkien in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ called ‘Faërian drama’:
If you are present at a Faërian drama . . . [t]he experience may be very similar
to Dreaming . . . [b]ut in Faërian drama you are in a dream that some other
mind is weaving, and the knowledge of that alarming fact may slip from your
grasp . . . You are deluded – whether that is the intention of the elves . . . is another
question. They at any rate are not themselves deluded. (OFS.49)
I take this to mean that what among the elves is a high art presents itself to mortal
minds, like Bilbo’s and Bombur’s (and presumably Gandalf’s), as a dream. In short,
those who fall under the spell of the elves’ enchantment are overwhelmed and can
no longer distinguish fantasy from reality; they may even come to prefer the pleasant
dream over the harsh reality:
‘I was having such a lovely dream,’ he grumbled, ‘all about having a most gorgeous
dinner’.
‘Good heavens! he has gone like Bombur,’ they said. ‘Don’t tell us about
dreams. Dream dinners aren’t any good, and we can’t share them’.
‘They are the best I am likely to get in this beastly place’ he muttered as he
lay down beside the dwarves and tried to go back to sleep and find his dream
again.
—First Typescript; see p. 354.
Casting people into a trance or sleep while they carried them off, as the elves do
here with Gandalf, is yet another well-known fairy trick; Briggs cites a number of
examples in her chapter ‘Captives in Fairyland’ in The Vanishing People (cf. page
104):
Gandalf was caught much more fast than those bound by spiders! You remember
Bilbo falling like a log into sleep as he stepped into the feasting ring? Next
time Gandalf had stepped forward; and as the lights went out he fell like a
stone enchanted. All the noise of the dwarves lost in the night, their cries as the
spiders caught them, and all the sounds of the battle next day, had passed over
him. Till the wood-elves (and wood elves the people were of course) came to
him and bound him, and carried him away.
—Chapter VIII, pp. 314–5.
 

Я сейчас начну рыдать горючими слезами из-за незнания инглиша))

Сообщение от Волвера

Я сейчас начну рыдать горючими слезами из-за незнания инглиша))

Я планировала перевести для Ани, может переведу просто так. Сама еще не читала, завтра собираюсь вместо тредов с круговыми обсуждениями лучше Рэтлифа почитать, всяко больше пользы.

[Niolle]

Забавное хулиганство, Тауриэль рисует Трандуила с натуры

 

(И подписывает "я люблю гномов", как бы от лица Трандуила )

---------- Сообщение добавлено в 03:24 ---------- Предыдущее сообщение было в 01:54 ----------

Вот такое попалось, прекрасное...

[Хенвен]

Прекрасное прекрасно.

[Niolle]

Ворота во дворец Трандуила

 

[aliquis]

Ворота красивые и таинственные. Но что там с сидящим эльфом?! По-моему, у него голова лицом назад растёт! "ужасающийся смайл"

[Niolle]

Это кажется) Он просто влево голову повернул.

[aliquis]

Сообщение от Niolle

Это кажется) Он просто влево голову повернул.

Круто он её... А вообще, это шутка, конечно.))) Дурацкая, согласна.)))) Ворота и правда красивые. А предыдущая картинка, с оленем и прочим, вообще замечательная. Волшебная совершенно. И я, конечно, начинаю сразу фантазии фантазировать всяческие... Сказочные, волшебные... Хорошая-хорошая картинка, вдохновляющая.)))))