Re: Non-stereotypical elves was Re: Quick Intro
| From: | Wesley Parish <wes.parish@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, February 22, 2003, 8:10 |
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On Saturday 22 February 2003 02:25 am, you wrote:
> Wesley Parish wrote:
> >At last, someone who's put some thought into "Elves".
> >
> >I remind myself of the times I was warned in Papua New Guinea about
> > masalai -
> >forest spirits - who'd eat me if they caught me; and Tolkien's Quenyar are
> >essentially forest spirits with a touch of the Christian Church's Angels
> >about them.
>
> Apart from that Tolkien's elves are called "Quendi", I find that
> characterization extremely odd. Certainly, some of them were more than a
> bit fond of forests, but "forest spirits"? That sounds alot more like the
> Ents.
Sorry about that Quendi/Quenyar mix-up.
"Forest spirits"? If you go into Western folktales and folklore and suchlike,
you'll find that "elves" are spirits who live in the woodlands. Related are
the sea-spirits (Selkies) in (mostly) Scottish folk-lore - or at least, they
are the ones that spring to mind at the moment. And Tolkien can hardly be
accused of being as ignorant of that as some of the more contemporary
"Fantasy" authors appear to be - "Sword of Shannara" springs to mind.
Of course, he mixed it in with a lot of potent myth, including his own
Christianity, and as a result, the Elves became so much more.
Some aspects of that that spring to mind are the Wood-Elves of Mirkwood in
"The Hobbit", which I am just rereading for the nth time - "In the Wide World
the Wood-elves lingered in the twilight of our Sun and Moon, but loved best
the stars; and they wandered in the great forests that grew tall in lands
that are now lost. ..." The "Angelic" aspects are not seen in that case.
But the various "faerie" aspects are straight from Middle English tales - the
hunt, the wood-land feasts, the King of Elfland ... and they are prettified
versions of tales told in the English "bush" of the woodland spirits who the
peasants felt constrained to keep happy.
The Ents are a form of Woodland spirit, which is of course why Fangorn gets on
so well with Celeborn, but they are the spirits of trees, they are not
spirits who frequent the woodlands. (It's like this: Ents are the
tree-spirits, of individual tree types, while Elves are the tutelary spirits
of the woodlands - and the grasslands even - see the relationship of Elves
and horses in The Silmarillion.)
Wesley Parish
--
Mau e ki, "He aha te mea nui?"
You ask, "What is the most important thing?"
Maku e ki, "He tangata, he tangata, he tangata."
I reply, "It is people, it is people, it is people."
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