Skip to main content

tolkiens legendarium - Did all of the Elves leave Middle-earth after the defeat of Sauron?



In both the books and movies of The Lord of the Rings the elves go to the West. However it says nothing of the Mirkwood Elves heading to go West, nor does it say anything about them having any plans to.


Do they leave across the sea at The Grey Havens or do they remain? And if they do stay in Middle-earth, what happened to them? Did other elves stay as well?


I did not read The Silmarillion.



Answer



Tolkien is quite clear on a number of occasions that the last of the Eldar (i.e the Elves of the West who undertook the Great Journey) left Middle-earth in the years following the defeat of Sauron, but sometimes this may have been many years after, and he's not always clear in exactly how long.


For example, in the prologue to the Lord of the Rings we read the following:



It is said that Celeborn went to dwell there after the departure of Galadriel; but there is no record of the day when at last he sought the Grey Havens, and with him went the last living memory of the Elder Days in Middle-earth.



And in Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age (published in the Silmarillion) we read:




In that time the last of the Noldor set sail from the Havens and left Middle-earth for ever. And latest of all the Keepers of the Three Rings rode to the Sea, and Master Elrond took there the ship that Círdan had made ready... it passed into the Ancient West, and an end was come for the Eldar of story and of song.



There was however another group of Elves known as the Avari, who refused the Great Journey, and many of the Mirkwood and Lórien Elves are members of this group. It's not told whether or not these went West or remained in Middle-earth following Sauron's defeat, but one would expect that they would have little motivation for going West since they refused the summons of the Valar in the first place.


The primarily linguistic essay Quendi and Eldar, published in History of Middle-earth 11, sheds some additional light on relationships between the Eldar and the Avari, noting in particular of the Tatyarin Avari (i.e those from the second clan, from which also came the Noldor) that:



They were actually unfriendly to the Noldor, and jealous of their more exalted kin, whom they accused of arrogance. This ill-feeling descended in part from the bitterness of the Debate before the March of the Eldar began...



But also:




For in contrast the Lindarin elements in the western Avari were friendly to the Eldar, and willing to learn from them; and so close was the feeling of kinship between the remnants of the Sindar, the Nandor, and the Lindarin Avari, that later in Eriador and the Vale of Anduin they often became merged together.



So in the end the matter of whether these Elves stayed or left is left open.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

languages - Do we ever see written English in the Star Wars films?

In Empire Strikes Back , we see a transcription of what R2's beeps and bloops mean, but it's not English (sorry for the low quality, it's from the 2004 DVDs): I'd assume it's what Basic looks like when written, but is there some point in the the Star Wars films we see written English instead? (This sort of spun off from a discussion in How do people understand astromech droids? .) Answer At one point there was English but it has been phased out in subsequent versions of the films. Chris Gould at DVD Active did a comparison of all versions of each of the Star Wars films, and in his comparison of Episode 4 , there are a couple of screenshots showing how the power gauge for the Death Star tractor beam was changed. I imagine there are probably more to be found in his other comparisons but I haven't got around to reading those yet.

Was the "pure soul" of Harry's what had really hurt Voldemort?

In the Order of the Phoenix, Voldemort possesses Harry, and it hurts. Greatly. I think that Dumbledore explained that it was because Voldemort's rotten soul was incapable of assimilating Harry's pure soul, that Voldemort didn't understand the love and friendship etc that Harry has in his heart. But, I think it was a lie. Remember that in Deathly Hallows, while looking for information regarding Horcruxes, it is discovered that it is in fact possible to merge a soul fragment back, but that the process was extremely painful. Now then, if Voldemort tried to possess Harry, and Harry had a fragment of Voldemort's soul, I think that it could have been the true cause of Voldemort's pain: the fact of having his soul so close of another fragment. I think that Dumbledore knew that fact, but had to lie to Harry because it was inappropriate to let him know that he had one of Voldemort's soul fragments at the moment. Is that right? Or was it truly the pure soul of Harry's...

star wars - What "exactly" happens when someone turns to the Dark Side?

When I saw the original Star Wars saga as a kid, the concept of the Dark Side imprinted in me was quite simple. You did a bad thing, so you're a bad person so you go to the Dark Side and keep doing bad things. Now, obviously this doesn't hold true in reality. In my mind it is perfectly reasonable for Luke to kill the Emperor and Vader and then just flee the Death Star and rejoin the Alliance. After all they are at war, those are enemy officers that have captured him and are taunting him by threatening with death of all loved ones and the whole operation was intended to kill the Emperor anyway. The same would hold true for Anakin. He could have killed Mace Windu to save the Chancellor and Padme but that doesn't mean he's going to then go mad and kill all Jedis including children. It doesn't add up from a merely psychological point of view. He had a set of objectives and that made him want to keep the Chancellor alive (quite valid by the way, Mace Windu is quite clums...

star trek - Warning regarding forward saucer section in Nemesis?

In Star Trek: Nemesis , just before the Enterprise rams into the Scimitar, Picard sends a text message from his captain's chair arm pad to Troi — who is manning the helm in lieu of the crewman who was just blown out through what was once the view screen — indicating that she should put full impulse on standby. (Literally, if you watch the scene closely, Troi's console prefaces the order with "TXT MSG" !) My question is: Did Picard also somehow warn crew members in the forward saucer section about what was about to happen? The ramming of the Scimitar was a heat of the moment decision. Considering that he also resorted to calling the auto-destruct sequence shortly after (which ended up being offline), he probably was of the mindset that any losses would be acceptable in order to hault Shinzon's march to Earth. Still, I'm curious. Answer The original script indicates that he called for the crew to " brace for impact ". Whether that call (or the comma...