Good writing began with right words. Tolkien accordingly schooled himself to drop forms like ‘elfin’, ‘dwarfish’, ‘fairy’, ‘gnome’, and eventually ‘goblin’, though he had used all of them in early works up to and including The Hobbit.2 More importantly he began to work out their replacements, and to ponder what concepts lay behind the words and uses which he recognised as linguistically authentic. This activity of re-creation – creation from philology – lies at the heart of Tolkien’s ‘invention’ (though maybe not of his ‘inspiration’); it was an activity which he kept up throughout his life, and one which is relatively easy to trace, or to ‘reconstruct’. Thus there can be little doubt what Tolkien thought of the ‘elves’ of English and Germanic tradition. He knew to begin with that Old English ælf was the ancestor of the modern word, was cognate with Old Norse álfr, Old High German alp, and for that matter, had it survived, Gothic *albs. It was used in Beowulf, where the descendants of Cain include eotenas ond ylfe ond orcnéas, ‘ettens and elves and demon-corpses’, and in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where the seven-foot green giant with his monstrous axe is described nervously by bystanders as an aluisch mon or uncanny creature. The wide distribution of the word in space and time proves that belief in such creatures, whatever they were, was once both normal and immemorially old, going back to the times when the ancestors of Englishmen and Germans and Norwegians still spoke the same tongue. Yet what did the belief involve? Considering concept rather than word, Tolkien must soon have come to the conclusion that all linguistically authentic accounts of the elves, from whichever country they came, agreed on one thing: that the elves were in several ways paradoxical.
For one thing, people did not know where to place them between the polarities of good and evil. They were the descendants of Cain, the primal murderer, said the Beowulf-poet. They weren’t as bad as that, imply the characters in Sir Gawain – actually the green giant plays fair and even lets Sir Gawain off – but they were certainly very frightening. It was wrong to offer sacrifice to them (álfa-blót) concurred all post-Christian Icelanders. On the other hand it might have seemed a good idea to propitiate them; if you didn’t, Anglo-Saxons perhaps reminded each other, you might get wæterælfádl, the ‘water-elf disease’, maybe dropsy, or ælfsogoða, lunacy. There was a widespread belief in ‘elf-shot’, associated on the one hand with the flint arrows of prehistoric man and on the other with the metaphorical arrows of diabolic temptation. The consensus of these references is fear.
Simultaneous with that, though, is allure. Ælfscýne is an approbatory Anglo-Saxon adjective for a woman, ‘elf-beautiful’. Fríð sem álfkona, said the Icelanders, ‘fair as an elf-woman’. The standing and much-repeated story about the elves stresses their mesmeric charm. It may be ‘True Thomas’ on Huntly bank who sees ‘the queen of fair Elfland’, or a young woman who hears the elf-horn blowing, but either way the immediate reaction is of desire. True Thomas disregards all warnings to make off with the elf-queen, does not return to earth for seven years, and (in Walter Scott’s version) leaves immediately again as soon as he is called. The medieval romance of Sir Launfal ends with the same glad desertion. For women to run off with elves was regarded with more suspicion. ‘Lady Isabel’ in the Scottish ballad saves her maidenhood and her life from the treacherous elf-knight she herself has summoned, and at the start of The Wife of Bath’s Tale Chaucer makes a series of jokes about elves and friars, the burden of which is that the latter are sexually more rapacious than the former, though the former had a bad reputation with young women as well. The allure and the danger are mixed. Indeed a common variant of the ‘young man/elf-queen’ story ends with him in despair, not at having been seduced but at being deserted. It is the memory of former happiness, the ‘disillusionment’ of loss of ‘glamour’, which leaves Keats’s character ‘Alone and palely loitering’.
Now one can see very easily how such an apparent discrepancy of fear and attraction might in sober reality arise. Beauty is itself dangerous: this is what Sam Gamgee tries to explain to Faramir in The Two Towers, when interrogated on the nature of Galadriel, the elf-queen herself. ‘I don’t know about perilous’ says Sam (pp. 664–5), replying to Faramir’s highly accurate remark that she must be ‘perilously fair’:
‘It strikes me that folk takes their peril with them into Lórien, and finds it there because they’ve brought it. But perhaps you could call her perilous, because she’s so strong in herself. You, you could dash yourself to pieces on her, like a ship on a rock; or drownd yourself, like a hobbit in a river. But neither rock nor river would be to blame.’
One could say the same of Sir Launfal’s lady, or True Thomas’s. One can also see how the rejected wives and fiancées, or husbands and fathers of people under elvish allure would concoct a very different story! Before long they would have the ylfe in exactly the same category as Cain – or Moloch. But this would be a second-hand opinion, and a prejudiced one (like those of Boromir, or Éomer and the Riders, LOTR p. 329 or p. 422).
It is in fact the strong point of Tolkien’s ‘re-creations’ that they take in all available evidence, trying to explain both good and bad sides of popular story; the sense of inquiry, prejudice, hearsay and conflicting opinion often gives the elves (and other races) depth. In Lothlórien we can see Tolkien exploiting, for instance, variant ideas about the elves and time. Most stories agreed that humans returning from Elf-land were temporally confused. Usually they thought time outside had speeded up: three nights in Elf-land might be three years outside, or a century. But sometimes they thought it had stood still. When the elf-maid sings in the Danish ballad of ‘Elverhøj’, or ‘Elf-hill’, time stops:
Striden strom den stiltes derved,
som førre var van at rinde; de liden smaafiske, i floden svam, de legte med deres finne.
‘The swift stream then stood still, that before had been running; the little fish that swam in it played their fins in time.’3
Did the discrepancy disprove the stories? Tolkien thought it pointed rather to what C. S. Lewis called the ‘unexpectedness’ of reality,4 and paused to explain the phenomenon in The Fellowship of the Ring, p. 379. There Sam thinks that their stay in Lothlórien, the ‘elf-hill’ itself, might have been three nights, but ‘never a whole month. Anyone would think that time did not count in there!’ Frodo agrees, but Legolas says that from an elvish viewpoint things are more complicated than that:
‘For the Elves the world moves, and it moves both very swift and very slow. Swift, because they themselves change little, and all else fleets by: it is a grief to them. Slow, because they do not count the running years, not for themselves. The passing seasons are but ripples ever repeated in the long long stream.’
His remarks harmonise the motifs of ‘The Night that Lasted a Year’ and ‘The Stream that Stood Still’. They are in a way redundant to the mere action, the plot of The Lord of the Rings. Yet they, and many other incidental turns, explanations,