Tolkienian Deep Time: Elves and Lothlórien

*Lord of the Rings* Reading Challenge, week three

The heart of Lothlórien, as pictured by Alan Lee in the centenary edition.

In Book Two of The Fellowship of the Ring, the company leaves Galadriel and Lothlórien by boat. She gives the company their precious gifts, including Frodo's phial, and then "the Lady arose, and Celeborn led them back to the hythe" (my italics). They launch their boats and look back:

As they passed her they turned and their eyes watched her slowly floating away from them. For so it seemed to them: Lórien was slipping backward, like a bright ship masted with enchanted trees, sailing on to forgotten shores, while they sat helpless upon the margin of the grey and leafless world. (377)

You have probably experienced this sort of spatial illusion of movement: as you sit facing backwards on a train, the platform may seem to move away from you, gradually accelerating as you stay still. We know, of course, that we are the ones who are moving, but still one may experience and even thrill in the illusion.

In this passage, however, the illusion is temporal as well as spatial: Galadriel, along with the trees of her magic forest, seem to recede into the ancient world from which they emerged, while the world that remains to them after that departure seems "grey and leafless." As they depart, Galadriel sings in her own language: “Ai! laurië la tar lassi súrinen, / yéni únótimë ve rámar aldaron!” ("Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind, long years numberless as the wings of trees," 377-378).

The ancient nature of Lothlórien is apparent even in Tolkien's antiquarian word choice for various aspects of the ecology: the word hythe, referring to a landing place on a river, is extremely rare in modern English and survives mostly in place names and historical accounts, though it appears often in Old English. Likewise, the word flet, which is used to describe the platforms in the trees where the elves live, is obsolete, unattested in this sense in the language after 1450, according to the OED. And then there is Galadriel's own language, which is not even the Sindarin used by most of the elves remaining in Middle-Earth, but rather the ancient Quenya, in which she refers to the Valar, or presiding spirits, by their ancient names (Varda, for example, rather than Elbereth).¹

Tolkien here is giving us a sense of deep time, as he does in a number of settings in this portion of the narrative—time that reaches back beyond the beginnings of human history to the making of the very forests and mountains—in comparison to which the lives of humans and hobbits seem fleeting. This is the time that he narrates in The Silmarillion, and it is the elves who provide the link of consciousness between the two narratives. Their presence creates a sense of time in The Lord of the Rings which is different from the works of any of Tolkien's contemporaries.

Indeed, negative criticism of the book has often attacked it on the grounds of "escapism" or lack of a sense of "reality," or accused it of an avoidance of various concerns of modernity—sexuality, subjectivity, etc.² Such criticism, however, fails to recognize the means through which the book addresses ideas and concerns seldom approached by its modernist contemporaries, which tend to be concerned only with the parts of reality that relate to post-Romantic individual experience and the fragmentation of a unified world view.³ In fact, to a large extent, Tolkien decenters individual experience in favor of a wider and deeper sense of time and space that takes into account non-human perspectives.

In this sense, Tolkien is actually well ahead of his time, as the critical theory of the past couple of decades has developed an ecological perspective. The fancy academic term is "object-oriented ontology," which simply means a perspective that is not human-centered—recognizing the independent reality of other forms of living and non-living objects like animals, trees, rocks, planets, oceans, stars, etc. Tolkien's technique for providing this wider sense of perspective involves beings with consciousness that extends into deep time: elves.⁴

Elves and "Realism"

The immortality of elves in Tolkien's universe has caused a great deal of confusion—confusion which Tolkien himself did not definitively clarify in the work that he published in his lifetime. The posthumous publication of multiple volumes of his Legendarium, beginning with The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales and extending through the twelve-volume History of Middle-Earth and beyond, has helped to clarify the issue, though it is clear that Tolkien's own ideas about the elves changed and developed through the decades during which he wrote about them.

The cover of my copy of the second edition of The Silmarillion shows the elves in the starlight before the creation of the sun and moon, as pictured by Ted Nasmith.

In short, the elves are not immortal in the sense that gods are. Rather, they live and die with the world. When the world dies, the elves die.⁵ (Also, they are not unconquerable and may "die" violently, for example, but they are then carried off to dwell in the far west, rather like the old nordic idea of Valhalla.) This is different from humans, who, in Tolkien's cosmology, will participate in the cosmic music after the current world ends. This idea accords with Tolkien's personal Catholic ontology, but it also separates human essence from the material world (i.e., through their souls) and distinguishes them from the elves.

Whether or not you, as a reader, believe in human immortal souls is not relevant to the point that elves are a mechanism that provides a consciousness of deep time. They awoke before the sun and moon, and the oldest of them have memories that extend thousands of years through the three great ages of Middle-Earth. They have memories of the formation and transformation of land masses, the births and deaths of great forests, the coming of humans and other creatures, etc.

Is this "realistic"? No, of course not. But that is not the point: the point is to contextualize the narrative with a perspective of the universe beyond human apprehension—a perspective that some of our own academic and scientific disciplines attempt to provide outside the world of literature (philosophy, astronomy, geology, etc.), but which is not often taken into account in modern novels. Of course, what LOTR's negative critics fail to acknowledge is that "realism" is also an artificial literary mode, a construction just as much as is Middle-Earth, and that Tolkien's literary world explores aspects of "reality" unavailable to traditional literary realism.

Elves and Trees: Lothlórien

One essential aspect of reality that Tolkien explores through the elves is the life of trees. (Of course, he does this also through the ents, which we will discuss in the coming weeks.) Trees are central not only to the book's ecology but also to its cosmology: two trees provide light to the world in the days before the sun and moon in The Silmarillion. These trees are destroyed by the powers of evil, but the Valar preserve their blooms and, therefore, their light, which they then shape into the sun and moon.⁶ Trees are, therefore, the source of light and beauty.

Some Bristlecone Pine trees live as long as 5000 years or more—some of the oldest living things on the planet. They grow in the western United States. Photo by Juvian Duff on Unsplash

In LOTR, this connection is most clearly manifested in the ancient forest of Lothlórien and the mallorn trees that grow there. When Frodo first touches these trees, he experiences a radical shift in perspective:

[. . .] he laid his hand upon the tree beside the ladder: never before had he been so suddenly and so keenly aware of the feel and texture of a tree's skin and of the life within it. He felt a delight in wood and the touch of it, neither as forester nor as carpenter; it was delight of the living tree itself. (351)

This delight is essential to the elves of Lothlórien, who live in perfect harmony with the trees, as long as they shall last. And this is the other aspect of the elves' deeper perspective: they view the passage of time as a long process of fading and ecological degradation. As Galadriel says to Frodo: "[. . .] through the ages of the world we have fought the long defeat" (357). The elves of the forest will fade as the forest fades, giving way to modernity. Later, Galadriel foresees her fate:

"Do you not see now wherefore your coming is to us as the footstep of Doom? For if you fail, then we are laid bare to the Enemy. Yet if you succeed, then our power is diminished, and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten." (365)

This is a remarkable moment in the narrative, as it shows that Frodo's possible success in his venture will not bring with it unalloyed good and that all human (or hobbit) achievements are transitory in relation to deep time. Despite this fact, however, or perhaps because of it, it becomes more and more difficult for humans to value the ecology that has formed and sustained their world, as they reshape it and it fades. Before the company leaves the forest, Frodo sees Galadriel differently:

She seemed no longer perilous or terrible, nor filled with hidden power. Already she seemed to him, as by men of later days Elves still at times are seen: present and yet remote, a living vision of that which has already been left far behind by the flowing streams of Time. (373)

Note the move briefly into present tense here: if we remember Bilbo as the presumed narrative voice of the text, then that present is Bilbo's present. However, in this case, it seems that tense may transcend this narrative conceit and bring the perspective into the reader's present. To the modern reader, elves, or what elves represent, may be present in the preserved "nature" of national parks or weekend getaways, but they are no longer central to our consciousness, to the "reality" of modernity that the critics complain is absent from Tolkien's works.

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So what do you think about the elves? Are they a problem for Tolkien's readers? Do they create a sense of "escapism"? Is there something substantial to these particular attacks on Tolkien’s work? Clearly, there are aspects of modern life that Tolkien does not address: is this a problem?

There are other manifestations of the idea of deep time in The Fellowship of the Ring, Caradhras and Moria, specifically, and I will address these in Friday's piece for paid subscribers.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet tree to yours.

Photo by Dave Hoefler on Unsplash

1. For much more on the languages of elves and on Varda/Elbereth, see the Appendices and The Silmarillion.

2. Tom Shippey gives a full account of (and response to) such criticism in J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century.

3. There are, of course, exceptions to this generalization. I’m thinking, specifically, of books like Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. And many postmodern novels and many works of science fiction, most of which postdate LOTR, reclaim these wider perspectives, as do the novels, for example, of Gabriel García Márquez.

4. For a good, readable account of object-oriented ontology, see Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010).

5. Tolkien does not actually pronounce on this definitively, though it is implicit in the contrast with humans.

6. See The Silmarillion, chapter 11.