No, Tolkien stated that (see The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien). I agree, though, that my saying, “Tolkien modelled the dwarvish language on Hebrew, therefore he meant for them to be allegorical Jews” was bogus.
Similarly, some commentators have wondered if JRR modelled the hobbits on the Jews, in the context of WWII. In the foreward to Fellowship of the Ring, he said that was not his intention, in line with his strong dislike of allegory.
On we go to the Last Homely House, where we find mysteriously carefree elves who seem to know everyone’s name without asking.
I notice that elves are never described in this, their first appearance in the book. This is very interesting, as there are many conceptions of elves in the public mind: little Keebler-type elves; ethereal fairy-like elves; Elfquest elves. We should have some guidance if we’re to picture these fellows in our minds.
But all Tolkien gives us in this regard is to call one of the elves a “tall young fellow.” Tall compared to what? The other elves? Bilbo? Gandalf? We just don’t know.
How lucky for Thorin and company, that Elrond just happened to study the map with them on the one day of the year when the moon-letters would show up!
Fate at work again, no doubt–part and parcel with the way Bilbo has been swept along throughout the journey. He’s in a river already, and the twists and turns in it were set long before he fell in. I always felt that the sense of inevitability at this point plays well against Bilbo’s choices later.
Of course, in the context of LotR, it could be the Ring at work, subtly influencing events in its effort to return home.
Tolkien undoubtedly meant the Elves to be thought of as like to the Ljosalfar (Light Elves) of Nordic myth. They spent their days in dancing and singing, were noted as weavers, and, although beautiful beyond description, proved to be older than the trees and mountains when tricked into revealing their ages.
Tolkien drew a great deal upon Nordic myth for background (although he also drew upon other sources). Comparatively little of that shows up (in a pure form) in The Hobbit; it may well be considered a more creative (or at least better digested) work than The Lord of the Rings. The Silmarillion is undoubtedly a greater and more creative work than either, but the long span of time over which it was worked on (more than half a century), and its limited reading appeal (although it should be remembered that it was edited and published after JRRT’s death by his son Christopher) probably make it less impressive a work to many.
There are two explinations I can give you. The first one is that this once again shows how Tolkien initially never intended the Hobbit to tie into middle earth. No more than Farmer Giles of Ham does. If he had the whole story maped out at this time he never would included anything like this. Of course this grates a little, far from what king, Theoden? Certainly there was no known living king who claimed the land in question. The only one who did claim the title and land was not recognized and actually wasn’t far at all. As he (Aragorn) was living in Rivendell at the time.
However if you work at it you can come up with a story internal answer. My theory is that the Hobbits looked fondly on the past when they were given the Shire by Aragorn’s ancestors. The kings kept the peace. So a saying for the wilds was “far from the king.” When the kings and their men were diven off and presumed killed the saying had been in use for so long it stayed in use. By Bilbo’s time the origin of the saying had been lost and they continued to use the phrase. The narrator is thus echoing Bilbo’s thoughts when he states they are “far from the king.” What do you think?
I honestly don’t know why we don’t get a discription at this point. One option would be that he just assumed everyone would have a mental image of fair, small, pointy haired fairies. Keebler and Elfquest are both later additions to the public mind and owe their existance in part to Tolkien.
The other option is that he was already thinking of these elves being related to the Noldor. He had after all already included references to Gondolin. In which case he may have left out a description as his mental image did not agree with that of his readers and he didn’t want to jar them
My guess is that it falls somwere in between. Tolkien for all his careful attention to details tended to leave these kinds of descriptions light or even forget them entirely. There is a set of fans which to this day argue about certain scenes and if Balrogs have wings or not, among other things. So it is very likely that Tolkien gave them a brief amount of screen time so to speak and didn’t want so show anything other than that they were light hearted and carefree. To keep the pace flowing he may just decided to skip any description. After all it was dark, the charcters are tired. They themselves might not have been able to give a good description.
Tell the truth now: did you just stick this in to see if anyone was paying attention? If you mean this, and you can demonstrate just one way in which Tolkien’s elves are like the Keebler elves, I’ll send you a pack of E. L. Fudge cookies, and then I’ll send you over to this other thread where I’m sure your little theory will be greeted with much enthusiasm.
The Keebler elves owe their existence in part to Tolkien? I’m crying for humanity here.
Keebler is a very jarring note in a Tolkien discussion. Cutesy elves was the very sort of thing that irritated him the most!
But as soon as I picked up an Elfquest comic book, their being based on the Tolkien conception of Elves (a noble, terrible, ancient race close to nature, and far more refined than those crude humans) was immediately obvious.
One reason I think that TH works so well is that the transition from civilised Middle Earth to the rest of the world is that in some ways it parallels the differances between the First and Third worlds today.
At first it seems a bit like an adventure holiday or rough guide to the world type trip but it soon gets serious.
Bartman, you little pixie, of course I know Keebler and Elfquest elves came later than Tolkien; my point was that someone coming to The Hobbit will have been exposed to many different concepts with the word “elf” attached to them. It doesn’t matter that they came after Tolkien if today’s new reader has been exposed to them first.
Tolkien abandons the task of assigning his elves to one of those concepts.
And I’m with Humble Servant: it’s on you to explain how Keebler elves were based in any way on Tolkien’s elves. They seem to me more like the small, tree-loving, fairy-esque elves that have been in the public imagination for hundreds of years, and which are very unlike the man-sized (we later learned in LotR) elves of Middle-Earth.
Well of all the things I’ve posted this is NOT the one I expected to have to defend. Ok, I overstated here. I was really thinking about Elfquest more than Keebler when I bunched both of them together. I was responding to them as a set and included both of them as part of that set. I didn’t really intend to create a thesis on parallels between Keebler and Tolkien. So at this point I should just say it was late and I was tired. However I’m nothing if not argumentative so here goes.
The first obvious link between Tolkien and Keebler is the name, Elves. Prior to Tolkien the only correct spelling was Elfs. Tolkien specifically choose a different spelling to differentiate his dwarves and elves from traditional dwarfs and elfs. In fact he had to fight repetitively with printers as they would correct his meticulous spelling on the press after it had been edited. So they owe the spelling of their name entirely to Tolkien.
The second link is their very existance. Keebler switched to a unified company and advertising in 1966, right in the middle of the Tolkien boom. I find it unlikely that the decision to use eleves right when elves were visible in popular culture for the first time is completely conincidental. Especially considering that they used the improper Tolkien spelling. However Keebler does not have their advertising history online, so that is a guess only.
So I will stand by my original statement Ernie and the others owe their existance in part (however small) to Tolkien.
How’s that.
Onto the real issue. Fiver, I think you are right in pointing out the jarring effect that modern readers might experience. As I pointed out earlier however Tolkien does sometimes abandon some descriptions for pacing reasons. At this point elves are very peripheral to the story. Tolkien uses them to allow us to relax after the encounter with the trolls. He uses the same device repetively both in the Hobbit and later in FotR. The reader is taken through a bad scene where the characters are put in danger. Then a lighter scene is put in relieve the tension. In FotR Tom Bombadil fills the same role. And while we do get a physical description of him, I can’t think of a more disscused and debated character in the series. There is just a lot of information left out. Why? My guess is because the author wants to keep us in the dark just like the characters. It creates a greater impression of reality. At his point Bilbo is tired, hungry and sore. He is not really paying close attention to these anoyingly happy elves. Certainly if these elves were going be a significant part of the story a greater description would have been provided. As it is they are bit players and thus the spotty information.
On a second note it may have been a case of being too close to the subject. Tolkien certainly knew the Norse myths very well and associated the term elf to some degree with Ljosalfar. I work in a technical field and occassionally use a word that means something very specific only to have it misunderstood by those outside my field. I don’t forsee how I am going to be misunderstood until it happens. The same may be happening here. Tolkien no more thought about including a basic description than he did when he said “tree,” assuming the same degree of understanding.
That said I’m not sure that especially now he wouldn’t be right. Tolkien’s vision of elves has been stolen so many times it has become dominant (at least within the fantasy genre). From fiction, to Role Playing (D&D), to video games a kid today would be hard pressed not to have been exposed to Tolkienish elves.
Sorry, elves has (as far as I can tell) always been the correct plural, and the OED backs me up on this. (There are, however, two plurals of dwarf – dwarfs and dwarves – with the former being the more common, but the word elves is not a similar case.)
I’ll grant you the Elfquest thing, since portrayals of elves in modern sword-and-sorcery fantasy do tend to owe a great deal to Tolkien, but linking JRRT and the Keebler Elves is a little too much of a stretch.
As far as the description of Elves goes – doesn’t he describe the Wood-elves in Mirkwood, at least a little? I don’t have my copy of TH on hand to check at the moment.
This is untrue, to be sure. Tolkien chose the spellings he did for purely archaizing and linguistic reasons. I am sure Jomo Mojo can back me up if I flake on the details.
Others have remarked that Tolkien was heavily inspired by the ljosalfar of Norse mythology. The plural of alf is not alfs, but alfar. Hence to add a pluralizing -s to elf would sound hideous to Tolkien’s ear. Other Norse and Old/Middle English derived words whose plurals end in -ar are pluralized in Modern English as -ves. So to a man like Tolkien, slapping on an -s a la some 19th century German fairy tale would be barbaric and would convey an altogether incorrect meaning.
MR
Bartman:
I’m trying to see where I wrote anything about a jarring effect. Nope, don’t see it. What do you mean?
Oh yeah? Then how do you square that with this paragraph, from right after they’ve arrived in Rivendell but have not yet reached the house. The elves have been singing to them:
Looks to me like a golden opportunity to describe them. Bilbo has the interest regardless of his fatigue.
Bilbo is many things in this book, and one of them is the reader’s representative; he’s the point of view character. But he lets us down here.
Katisha, we’ll get to the description of the Mirkwood elves in due time. For now let’s stay focused on the chapter-by-chapter course.
“Drums, drums in the deep.”
The evil inhabitants of Moria used drums during battle.
[Hijack]
That, for me, was one of the best parts of any fantasy novel. The sense of fear and foreboding was so well done, especially the scene where Gandalf faces something (we don’t find out what until later) that can match his power.
[/Hijack]
I have sinned. Fogive me. As I said the original statement was poorly worded. I originally did not intend to associate Keebler with Tolkien. When I cut and pasted the line from Fiver’s post I picked up more than I intended. I was really commenting on Elfquest. Despite my valiant attempt to defend the undefendable, I obviously haven’t convinced anyone including myself, and never should have tried. It was meant as a joke but I obviously just dug myself in deeper. Katisha you are correct. I just looked up the entry in the Webster 1829 edition and elves was current even then (however elfs is given as an alternative spelling so I’m not completely off my rocker). I misremembered what words Tolkien had to fight the printers over. I mistakenly mentally grouped elves and dwarves together as similar word constructions. By the way Maeglin, I was argueing that Tolkien prefered the -ves over the -fs and specifically choose -ves. There are enough problems with my post as it is, you don’t need to add problems that aren’t there. So I beg the pardon of everyone on this thread for this unforgiveable sin. I will try to choose my sentence constructions much more carfully. I will also bring my Tolkien references to work so I have direct access rather than relying on memory. <bows his head in shame>
Sorry poor choice of words. (I seem to be doing that a lot all the sudden). I was really just trying to agree with you. I think that Tolkien may have made a mistake in allowing the reader to fill in their own image of elves rather than doing it himself. Jarring was a poor word to use. Although if someone had a mental image of say Caliban from Shakespeare as the prototypical elf, happily singing teasing elves might actually be jarring. In any case a good description of elves would have been nice to have at this point.
Quick Fiver read the next chapter so I can leave this embarrassing episode behind. Besides which we need to get new material to shame myself with again.
I’d say this is the first chapter that has genuinely scary material in it. The trolls were just a little too comical, but in this chapter we see our first goblins and our heroes’ lives are well and truly endangered.
Tolkien doesn’t really describe the goblins either, except to say they’re ugly. I’m in a slightly different circumstance from the rest of you with my reading, because my edition has Alan Lee’s illustrations to help with the imagery (or displace my existing head-pictures). Interestingly, there are three drawings that depict goblins in this chapter, but there were none of elves in “A Short Rest.” Maybe Lee didn’t feel up to depicting their beauty?
Another observation: We will learn in Silmarillion that orcs/goblins were made in mockery of elves, but here in The Hobbit they seem more like anti-dwarves:
In this same long paragraph, we get an implication that these characters are inhabiting the past of our world, not a different one:
This harks back to something I forgot to mention from the very first chapter:
So, whereas in Lord of the Rings we were unquestionably in Middle-Earth, a parallel world to our own, here Tolkien means to suggest Bilbo et al. are living in the storied past of our own Europe. That’s probably a more evocative course to take with this book’s presumed juvenile audience, and in fact as I write this I remember being a child, playing outdoors, and hoping to glimpse a hobbit hiding behind a tree somewhere.
In other matters, I think I’ve caught the first anachronism of the book in this chapter. At least, it’s the first one I’ve noticed. When the goblins come to take Gandalf:
We know they have fireworks in Bilbo’s world, but obviously they wouldn’t call gunpowder “gunpowder,” because no guns.
But the reasons you suggested were quite wrong. They were not “to differentiate” his elves and dwarves from “traditional” ones, but for purely linguistic reasons. Before you accuse me of creating problems that aren’t there, try reading my posts.
Hey, while we have all the smart Tolkien people in the same room, I have a question:
Since orcs were made in mockery of elves, do they age like men do? Opinions, anyone?
In TH, the only mention of age is of Gollum eating goblin babies, and hardly any at all in LOTR.
Um, gunpowder is Tolkien telling us what it smelled like. It is not said by any of the characters. Anyway, even if it was said by a character, Tolkien would be simply giving us a term that we are familiar with, like “wizard.” He does not call Gandalf an Istari througout the books, he uses the english “wizard.”