Now with more Elves — for a limited time only! Book I, Chapter 3 of The Lord of the Rings concludes with a meeting between our hobbit heroes and the company of Gildor Inglorion in the Woody End. We reach back into The Silmarillion for a recap of the Elf kindreds, and turn to one of Tolkien’s letters (guess which one!) for a reminder of their destiny: to fade and leave Middle-earth to Men. We also take a look at This Week in Tolkien History, and our extended discussion about the stars may send you venturing into the attic to find your old telescope.
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Recommended Reading:
Garth, John. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (Mariner Books, hardcover)
Tolkien, J. R. R., and Donald Swann. The Road Goes Ever On (HarperCollins, hardcover)
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Hobbit (Mariner Books, paperback)
Tolkien, J. R. R. (Christopher Tolkien, ed.) The Silmarillion (Mariner Books, paperback)
Carpenter, Humphrey, ed. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Mariner Books, paperback)
Tolkien, J. R. R. Tales from the Perilous Realm (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, hardcover)
Just a minor note to add regarding the Elves’s song (“A Elbereth Gilthoniel”). In Appendix E of the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien translates the words “galadhremmin ennorath” as “tree-woven lands of Middle Earth.” This is the translation of the phrase that I was familiar with, and I thought of it when you were discussing the words of the hymn, although it took me a while to figure out where it appears. The version from The Road Goes Even On that you cited, “tree-tangled middle-lands,” is, I think, a more literal translation, although I feel that the other is more poetic.
(I did a little work as a translator, years ago – in my case, from Russian to English; while my own work was relatively straightforward, I know that translating from one language to another, even from a fictional language, is not always simple, all the more so where poetry is involved.)
Thanks for reminding us of the translation in the Appendix! It’s similar to the translation here, and both are not only more poetic but arguably plainer English. It seems fitting as a sense translation in the hobbits’ own minds.
Regarding tree-tangled and tree-woven: in Author of the Century Shippey suggests an influence of Milton’s Comus. The heroine gets lost…
“In the blind mazes of this tangl’d Wood”
— Comus line 180
Shippey draws parallels with Tolkien’s motifs, entrelacement etc. He mentions a “protecting plant”, i.e. a healing herb, not much to look at…
“But in another Country, as he said
Bore a bright golden flow’r”
— Comus lines 631-2
Athelas and elanor?
==========================================
The line
“Clear thy eyes and bright thy breath”
suggests a different parallel. At first draft it was
“Clear thy eyes and cold thy breath”
This recalls the Greek goddess Athena. Her conventional epithet was “clear (or bright-) eyed Athena”. She was step-grandmother-in-law of the North Wind, Boreas (who carried off Oreithya, daughter of Erectheus, whom Athena fostered).
Athena was, in particular, the protector of Orestes in his pursuit by the Furies (in Aeschylus’s play). They track their prey by the smell of human blood…