Re: Answer to Sally's Question: Elves, Neste

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Cowan" <cowan@...>

> Sally Caves scripsit:
>
> > Tolkien neatly removed his Elves from all taint of the sexually
> > dangerous, while restoring them to proper size and to an original
> > Otherworldliness.  He turns them into almost angelic figures whom mortal
> > women cannot possibly fear or desire!
>
> In _Morgoth's Ring_ (volume X of _The History of Middle-Earth_)
> there is a wonderful piece called "Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth", which
> is a debate between the Elvenlord Finrod and the human woman Andreth
> set during the First Age.  Tolkien wrote it while trying to revise the
> Silmarillion after the publication of LotR.
>
> What they are talking about is primarily the difference in human and
> elvish attitudes about death/deathlessness (JRRT's elves, just to review,
> have no natural death, and even if they die of wounds or grief, they can
> be reincarnated).  But the underlying motivation for the conversation is
> that Andreth is hopelessly (quite literally) in love with Finrod's
> relative Aegnor, and Finrod knows it.
>
> It would be interesting if (in your copious spare time) you could read
> the Athrabeth (only the title's in Sindarin, I hasten to add!) and
> tell us how/if it changes your views.
Fascinating, John.  I was speaking primarily of the LotR which was available
to me as a child.  This text I haven't read--Jeez! look at that Teonaht
syntax: THIS TEXT I haven't read; it's creeping more and more into my
writing--and IT I am eager to rush down and right away obtain, volitionally.
:)

And when I said "cannot possibly fear or desire," I didn't mean to be taken
so literally, such that one example in a post LotR publication would
overturn my views.  I meant that the logistics of desire, when it comes to
Elves, are very much the same for that between classes.  Miscegenation is
forbidden, and not just because of the matter of immortality.  There is an
indecency implied except if the Man is powerful and noble.  Clearly this
wretched Andreth is doomed in her transgressive longing, and all the more so
because she is a woman who yearns.

Is it the only instance in which Tolkien brings up this issue of FEMALE
longing?   Does the woman reveal her love in her questions about
immortality?  I think it's significant that it should be a debate between a
male Elf and a mortal Woman, and not between a male Elf and a mortal Man.
Men attain (Aragorn), woman desire (Eowyn) in T's world, so I guess I'm not
sure that it will change my VIEWS all that much of Tolkien's portrayal of
women, who have to live in a Man's world in the same way that Men, in the
first age, had to live in the Elves' world.  Numenor and that fateful
longing.   Hegemonies everywhere: class, race, sex...

What was the outcome of the debate?  My question would be "Aren't you Elves
ever curious about mortality?  Look at me.  I'm dying as I speak to you.
Where are your Elvish anthropologists?"   I had a dream right after
Jackson's first movie where I posed a question about science to Elrond as we
ate sushi in a Japanese restaurant.  I don't think Hugo Weaving, had any
sushi.  He rested his head on one hand while he gripped the table edge with
another as I asked him over chop sticks if Elvish magic was a kind of
"technology."  A far cry from my fourteen-year-old self!  I had to laugh.

:)


Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
Eskkoat ol ai sendran, rohsan nuehra celyil takrem bomai nakuo.
"My shadow follows me, putting strange, new roses into the world."

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