“Pretty fair nonsense” – On Elvish frivolity in ‘The Hobbit’

Picture the Elf.

Tall, serene, wise, beautiful.  More graceful, more artistic, possessed of knowledge beyond our ken and in communion with nature and the world.  Lords and Ladies of higher mind and deeper purpose than ours, wielding strange magicks and with the understanding of thousands of years weighing heavily upon their lofty minds.

This, I think, is the impression of a Tolkien Elf to many people.  Indeed, so influential has this figure of a Middle-earth elf been that, in the space of Tolkien’s life, the very conception of an ‘elf’ was changed.  When Tolkien was writing, the perception of “elf” was near-synonymous to “fairy”, a diminutive and frivolous creature of childish fancy.  Tolkien hated this Victorianised vision of Faerie, bitterly (and fittingly) railing against it in On Fairy Stories.   But he was also conscious that such was the prevalent understanding in his day, making him cautious of using the word “elf” in his early writings.  Indeed, even following the publication of LOTR, he was still questioning whether “elf” was the best word for his immortal serially longaeval race of near-humans.

Today, of course, such doubts seem absurd.  Today, the word “elf” conjures up a Tolkienesque vision as described above, whether due to our familiarity with the man’s own works, or a host of derivatives and followers – Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer, and any number of books and video games with humans, dwarves and orcs.  Fairies, alas, have not yet had their renaissance, but the elves at least are afforded due respect.

Respect, perhaps.  But maybe not a full understanding, either.  Or at least, not a full understanding of the elves as I think Tolkien might have imagined them.

I have already invited you to imagine an elf – now, though, perhaps we can imagine an elf in a specific situation.  Say, at a party.  The wine is flowing, and the speech is merry, but what of the elf?  How would elves conduct themselves in occasion of festival?

NO.

Bad.  Stop imagining that.  Let’s, say…let’s go to the books instead:

Then Bilbo heard the king’s butler bidding the chief of the guards good-night.

“Now come with me,” he said, “and taste the new wine that has just come in. I shall be hard at work tonight clearing the cellars of the empty wood, so let us have a drink first to help the labour.”

“Very good,” laughed the chief of the guards. “I’ll taste with you, and see if it is fit for the king’s table. There is a feast tonight and it would not do to send up poor stuff!”

When he heard this Bilbo was all in a flutter, for he saw that luck was with him and he had a chance at once to try his desperate plan. He followed the two elves, until they entered a small cellar and sat down at a table on which two large flagons were set. Soon they began to drink and laugh merrily.

……..

Very soon the chief guard nodded his head, then he laid it on the table and fell fast asleep. The butler went on talking and laughing to himself for a while without seeming to notice, but soon his head too nodded to the table, and he fell asleep and snored beside his friend.

The Hobbit, Chapter IX, ‘Barrels Out of Bond’, by J.R.R. Tolkien

A very different picture from the cool and hardy Legolas (himself an Elf of these same people), or of the brilliant and passionate Fëanor.  These elves are silly, carefree, and (quite contrary to Bloom’s Legolas) both clearly well-acquainted with drink, and all too susceptible to its effects.

A number of elves came laughing and talking into the cellars and singing snatches of song. They had left a merry feast in one of the halls and were bent on returning as soon as they could.

“Where’s old Galion, the butler?” said one. “I haven’t seen him at the tables tonight. He ought to be here now to show us what is to be done.”

“I shall be angry if the old slowcoach is late,” said another. “I have no wish to waste time down here while the song is up!”

“Ha, ha!” came a cry. “Here’s the old villain with his head on a jug! He’s been having a little feast all to himself and his friend the captain.”

“Shake him! Wake him!” shouted the others impatiently.

Galion was not at all pleased at being shaken or wakened, and still less at being laughed at. “You’re all late,” he grumbled. “Here am I waiting and waiting down here, while you fellows drink and make merry and forget your tasks. Small wonder if I fall asleep from weariness!”

“Small wonder,” said they, “when the explanation stands close at hand in a jug! Come give us a taste of your sleeping-draught before we fall to! No need to wake the turnkey yonder. He has had his share by the looks of it.”

The Hobbit, Chapter IX

And, of course, the Elves in The Hobbit are generally less grave than when we see them otherwise.  The Wood-elves of Mirkwood seem to be perpetually feasting, except for when they are trying to make a quick buck by stopping by a dead dragon’s hoard.  For this is indeed what the Elven-king thinks when word first reaches him of Smaug’s death.

“That will be the last we shall hear of Thorin Oakenshield, I fear,” said the king. “He would have done better to have remained my guest. It is an ill wind, all the same,” he added, “that blows no one any good.” For he too had not forgotten the legend of the wealth of Thror.

The Hobbit, Chapter XIV, ‘Fire and Water’

Even in Rivendell, where the elves are older and wiser than in Mirkwood, the Elves of The Hobbit are very different to those we meet in LOTR.  The very, very first time we ever meet Elves in the Legendarium is as Bilbo descends into the Hidden Valley:

“Hmmm! it smells like elves!” thought Bilbo, and he looked up at the stars. They were burning bright and blue. Just then there came a burst of song like laughter in the trees:

A far cry from the grave and sad Elves of Rivendell and Lorien in LOTR, or the warring and passionate creatures in the First Age.  And to some Tolkien fans, this is a strike against The Hobbit’s elves, their rather more frivolous and silly depiction.

But to my mind, this is a strength of the elves in The Hobbit, not just within the book, but in terms of their overall characterisation, in terms of understanding them as a race.  I like the silly songs and the silly jokes, and I do not think they are incompatible with the graver depiction of elves in Tolkien’s other writings.  Indeed, I think that it enriches our understanding of them as a people.

First, and foremost, it’s worth returning once more to the concept that nearly all of Tolkien’s Legendarium is presented through various frame narratives.  I’ve previously written about how this can inform our understanding of the Legendarium (twice!), but I want to take a slightly different angle here.  See, if we accept that the tales of the Legendarium are historical records, then that means two things.  Firstly, that there was always a reason for these histories to be written, some event or happening that made it worthwhile for the Elvish scribes to set down details.  Secondly (and following easily from the first) that there must be massive gaps in those records.  Passages of decades, even centuries, that are free of fear and strife and thus warrant nothing more than a passing mention, if even that.

Indeed, The Hobbit takes place toward the tail end of such a period for the Elves.  By the time of LOTR, Sauron is revealed anew, the Nine are abroad, war is gathered on every border of the Free Peoples, and the Elves themselves seem to know that this is the end of their time, their final hurrah.  Win or lose the War of the Ring, the age of the Elves is over.

But in The Hobbit, the One remains lost.  The identity of the Necromancer has only just been revealed, and is likely not known to many.  The rumour of war is distant, and the true force of the Enemy is not yet known.  Is it any wonder that the Elves of this time are merry and joyous?  Or, to put it another way, what is there for them to be concerned with?

Honestly, rather than lessening the Elves, I think that their frivolity and silliness in The Hobbit is informative.  The Elves are more grave and more stern than Men, to be sure, but that does not necessarily mean that Elves are always stern and grave.  Rather, I think it would be true to say that Elves are more than Men in many different aspects and ways.  And, if they are more keenly affected by sorrow and evil than Men, why should they also not be more fullhearted in their joy and their feasting? 

This intensity of the Elves then cuts both ways, heightening their Faerie nature.  And as one of the few occasions in the Legendarium where we can observe Elves in time of peace and idleness, The Hobbit is really fascinating, even valuable.  Yes, the Elves of Rivendell are far sillier than we would ever be with their tra-la-la-lallying, just as they are wiser and graver and fairer and keener of thought than we are.  The Elves are more, in all things.

Indeed, such a reading is supported by Tolkien’s writings on the Elves in other Legendarium works.  We are told in The Silmarillion that the Elves are to “have the greater bliss in this world,” which seems to support the idea that the Elvish experience of the world is one that is elevated and heightened from our own (and it is notable that Elves “having that greater bliss” does not preclude them from also experiencing greater sorrow).  But the passage in which this is stated is also well worth reading, for I think it gives us a further clue as to in what way the Elves are akin and alien to our own experience:

Now all is said concerning the manner of the Earth and its rulers in the beginning of days, and ere the world became such as the Children of Ilúvatar have known it. For Elves and Men are the Children of Ilúvatar; and since they understood not fully that theme by which the Children entered into the Music, none of the Ainur dared to add anything to their fashion. For which reason the Valar are to these kindreds rather their elders and their chieftains than their masters; and if ever in their dealings with Elves and Men the Ainur have endeavoured to force them when they would not be guided, seldom has this turned to good, howsoever good the intent. The dealings of the Ainur have indeed been mostly with the Elves, for Ilúvatar made them more like in nature to the Ainur, though less in might and stature; whereas to Men he gave strange gifts.

For it is said that after the departure of the Valar there was silence, and for an age Ilúvatar sat alone in thought. Then he spoke and said: ‘Behold I love the Earth, which shall be a mansion for the Quendi and the Atani! But the Quendi shall be the fairest of all earthly creatures, and they shall have and shall conceive and bring forth more beauty than all my Children; and they shall have the greater bliss in this world. But to the Atani I will give a new gift.’ Therefore he willed that the hearts of Men should seek beyond the world and should find no rest therein; but they should have a virtue to shape their life, amid the powers and chances of the world, beyond the Music of the Ainur, which is as fate to all things else; and of their operation everything should be, in form and deed, completed, and the world fulfilled unto the last and smallest.

Quenta Silmarillion from The Silmarillion, Chapter 1, ‘Of the Beginning of Days’, by J.R.R. Tolkien

This passage is significant to Tolkien lovers less for its description of Elves, and more for its elucidation concerning Men – and, indeed, it has caused more than a few headaches for Tolkien scholars, as it implies that the Men of Middle-earth are free “beyond the Music of the Ainur”.  Or, to put it another way, Men are possessed of the capability of choice, they have free will, and are thus able to “shape their lives” of their own accord.  In the Catholic theology that underpins and informs Tolkien’s fiction, this is all well and good – but what, then, of the elves?  Do they, or do they not, have free will?

On the one hand, the answer would appear to be no.  For if this freedom from the Music is unique to Men, then by process of elimination, the Elves are not free of it, and their deeds and choices are ruled by the will of others.  Yet, if this is so, then it makes all the actions of the Eldar feel pointless, meaningless.  Further, it is theologically problematic – we are told that when the Children of Ilúvatar entered into the Music, “none of the Ainur dared to add anything to their fashion”, and so they are born solely of Eru’s will.  Yet individual Elves do great and many evils – how can this be so, if they are born of an all-powerful and all-good God and do not possess their own free will?

The answer, I think, is that it is not wholly correct to assume that the free will of Elves and Men is wholly alike, that there is some metaphysical difference between those wills.  And there is precedence for this in Catholic thought, through another class of being also said to be of God’s thought, and also provided with independent agency.  The angels.

The question of angelic free will and its nature is something that has never been officially codified by the Catholic Church.  However, St Thomas Aquinas spent some time dealing with the subject in his Summa Theologiae, and his conclusions are informative.  In Aquinas’ view, angels are possessed of a ‘perfectly informed’ free will, owing to their existence beyond the confines of time and space.  An angel is always permitted to act as it will (the ‘free’ bit), but it will also always act toward its understanding of what is right and best.

Humans, too, are permitted to act freely, but are not perfectly informed, and the introduction of new information may cause a person to act differently.  I may intend to eat the last piece of chocolate, thinking nobody else wants it – but when my wife says she wants it, that is new knowledge to me.  I might still eat the chocolate, or I might relent and allow her to eat it.

An angel with some chocolate, though, will always know what is to come to pass with that chocolate, as it exists before the chocolate was made, and also after it has been consumed.  This is not to say that angels have no free will!  Rather, that since they are always operating with perfectly informed knowledge, their will is absolute; an angel cannot learn new knowledge and thus come to a decision other than that it had already chosen.  And, further, if I give up that piece of chocolate to my wife, it could be for any number of reasons.  It could be because I don’t want it so much, or because I value generosity in my own code of morals/ethics/beliefs, or because I have weighed up the options and decided the scolding I may receive if I eat the chocolate is less desirable than the chocolate itself.

Whatever the outcome, though, whether I eat the chocolate myself, or give it up for a selfish or a selfless reason, I have done so because (in my imperfect and somewhat informed) understanding, it is the best course of action to take.  I may later regret that action (and may, again, regret it for selfish or selfless reasons), due to my imperfect and uninformed understanding changing.  An angel, though, is in accord with the mind, the will, the desire of God in Catholic understanding.  An angel is possessed of free will, but there is also no greater good, no better course of action to take, than that which the loving God wills.  So, an angel will always act in accordance with that Divine direction, because an angel is perfectly informed.

In Tolkien’s Legendarium, the Powers of closest accord with Christian angels are, of course, the Ainur – the Valar and the Maiar, though they are also not wholly alike.  The Valar are presented as being angelic, yet also form a pantheon of sorts, born of Tolkien’s love for (though not belief in) ancient polytheistic religions.  More notably, though, the Ainur do not generally seem to be free of the confines of time in the same way that angels are, making the former prone to error and failure of judgement.  However, we also do not ever hear of an Ainu who falls after the Music is concluded, only during – as with angels in Catholic thought, it would seem that the Ainur had a choice, and some elected to stay faithful to Eru, whilst others rejected Eru and fell into evil, pride and selfishness.

(As an aside, in writing this blog post, I have started to wonder if, when Valinor was removed from the Circles of the World, this also began some process that eventually removed Valinor and its denizens from time itself.  This, then, would explain how the Ainur might become fully like angels in time, whilst preserving their imperfectly informed (though fully obedient and loving) nature in the Ages prior.  This is really a thought for another time, and I have not yet fully investigated or developed it, but I think it is worthy of further inquiry.)

Aquinas’ writings on the nature of free will in metaphysical beings is a long way from The Hobbit’s “party elves”.  But I think it is possible to bring these two thoughts together.  In the passage quoted above, we are told that, “the dealings of the Ainur have indeed been mostly with the Elves, for Ilúvatar made them more like in nature to the Ainur, though less in might and stature.”  And this, then, informs my argument from above, my argument that the Elves are somehow “more” in their very nature.  The Elves are not Ainur, are not angelic creatures.  But there is something of an angelic nature about them, too, and this nature goes beyond the trivial or superficial.

If a person has imperfect and uninformed free will, and an angel is possessed of perfectly informed free will, is it not possible that the Elves exist somewhere in between?  That Elves are capable of choice, as we are, but that they are also disinclined to changing that choice, as with angels.  This would appear to fit with everything we know about Elves, for we know also that they dislike change by their nature – and what is choice, but the changing of will?  And while Elves are said to be more like to the Ainur than Men, that does not mean that Elves are unalike to Men, nor wholly alike to the Ainur – rather, they could be a midpoint between the two, and this extends even to their metaphysical nature.

For Men, change is easy, almost expected.  I can be merry and yet turn to grief in an instant. I can make a choice and regret it within a split second.  The will of Men is by its nature indecisive, disordered and irregular, changing from moment to moment as new information is learnt, and old knowledge fades.  Elves, I think, are possessed of less flexibility in that regard.  On the one hand, this makes Men more adaptable, more flexible – but also more nebulous, less clear in thought.  If an Elf is moved to grief or joy, it is moved so fully, so completely, that it is fully grieving or completely merry, with an intensity that is almost impossible for us to imagine.  In this way, too, Elves are not “better” than Men, that is not what I wish to express through saying that they are “more”.  Rather, every experience of an Elf is fuller, more profoundly felt and realised, than the experience of a Man, due to their nature as intermediaries between the angelic and us.

This, then, is why I love the Elves of The Hobbit, because they provide us with a rare and useful insight into the mind of an Elf.  It is easy to read much of Tolkien’s Legendarium and to simply perceive the Elves as being wiser and possessed of greater majesty than us, due to their long lives, and due to their conduct.  But Elves are neither, rather, they are more wise and more majestic, just as they are also more foolish and more preposterous.  The Elves are, by their very nature, more fully committed to every choice of theirs than we could ever be, and it is this that gives them their purpose, their clarity of thought and deed.  If an Elf determines to take some course of action, then it is not impossible for them to change from that course – but while they follow it, they will follow it with a zeal and a single-mindedness that may make them seem elevated, profound, to our mercurial and disordered minds.

And sometimes, just sometimes, Elves choose to sing nonsense.  And you can bet that when they do so, it is more nonsensical than may seem sensible to us faltering Men.

[Editorial note – A few days after writing this post, I stumbled across some additional evidence to support my reading of Elves and their metaphysical manner, and wrote a short post that discussed and included this newly-found evidence – the post can be found here, if you fancy.]

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