Q: How Did the Vanyar React to the Rebellion of the Noldor?
ANSWER: J.R.R. Tolkien’s elvish histories are stories written about the rebellious Noldor and their Sindarin allies in Beleriand and Eriador. We hear about the Vanyar and a few other Elven groups but we don’t actually get to see them in action — we know nothing of their great aspirations and conflicts (if Tolkien envisioned any for them).
It is much like learning about the history of Rome, Greece, and Egypt by only having a small number of late Roman texts available to read from. Imagine a world where there are no ancient Greek and Egyptian writings surviving, no ruins, nothing really to convey to us what they saw in the world and how they reacted to it.
In fact, history provides us with plenty of references to “unattested peoples” in ancient literature. Sometimes we learn through archaeology or chance discoveries of lost archives that such peoples really did exist. One of the most famous examples of such remarkable discoveries is the city of Ebla, which is mentioned in the Bible. Many people point to unconfirmed names in the Bible and use them as “proof” that the Bible is an unreliable source of history, but archaeologists often use the Bible to guide their research. The historical books in the Bible have a very good track record for being correct; it’s just that modern science has to uncover the lost details.
An example of an “imaginary people” that we have learned about from ancient literature but not yet confirmed would be the Amazons of Greek mythology. Most people assume that if they are “a part of Greek mythology” the Amazons must not have existed, but it’s not so simple. Greek mythology (like all mythologies, including modern ones) attempts to explain things according to the world-view of and in terms that the ancient Greeks could understand. They were a very smart and skeptical people. They didn’t just believe things for no reason, but their explanations for things weren’t always right — and as generations passed stories that were intended to entertain might become mingled with stories that attempted to explain things.
So Greek mythology is a very complex, complicated, and sophisticated body of literature that — while not to be taken as historical fact — incorporates many historical facts into its details. And to the ancient Greek writers and historians the Amazons were a very real people who lived by the Thermodon river on the southern shores of the Black Sea. We just haven’t found much that we can link to the nomenclature and details that Greeks provide about the Amazons in their homeland. Some modern researchers claim that the Thermodon river is the modern Terme river in northern Turkey. People in and near Samsun, Turkey celebrate the Amazons as part of their ancient history. Samsun is west of Terme, a town named for the river.
One ancient Greek testimonial about the Amazons has been substantially supported by modern archaeological research. Herodotus (living around 484–425 BCE) tells us that the Sauromatae — a tribe living north of the Black Sea who fought with the Persian empire — were descended from a group of Amazons who had been captured in war but escaped to the northern shores of the Black Sea, where they eventually took young Scythian warriors as husbands. Archaeologists have excavated graves from the region where young women were buried with weapons. These finds have been used to argue that Herodotus’ tradition of women warriors among the Sauromatae is confirmed.
Some people even go so far as to argue that the Sauromatae gave rise to the Amazon myth, but that is clearly impossible for the Greeks were writing about Amazons hundreds of years before the Sauromatae entered into history. Greek writers provide us with names of Amazon queens and details of a war that the Amazons fought with the Greeks (in fact, it sounds like there were two wars). In theory we could begin excavations in various areas (including near Athens) to look for traces of these wars. Greek writers claimed that Amazons were buried in Greece after they were defeated in battle.
The Amazon question may never be fully resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. For now, they are a people of legend who have been connected to some historical people. And such is how Tolkien more-or-less presents the Vanyar. There are virtually no traces of them or their culture in The Lord of the Rings. The reader encounters none of their ruins, no one who claims to be related to them (except Elrond and Galadriel), and none of their artifacts. In short, everything we know about the Vanyar is preserved in a Noldorin point-of-view.
Tolkien would have understood how cultures might take on different personalities through the views of the cultures around them. In other words, a Greek might think of himself very differently from how the Romans thought of him. And so a Vanya might see himself in a very different way from how the Noldor viewed him. This limitation in viewpoint makes it easy for Tolkien to create distances between the Vanyar and his readers, such that he can say uncontestable things about them which almost certainly (in his mind) would not agree with what they may say about themselves.
That lengthy preamble is intended to make you very skeptical of any argument put forth about what the Vanyar thought or believed. Even if reported by a Noldorin scholar, statements about what the Vanyar thought or believed may not be entirely accurate. Tolkien knew that no one would be able to investigate any claims made about the Vanyar but he wrote his stories as if someone might, one day, question their veracity. He embedded subtle connections everywhere to build toward a consistency that was believable.
So, all that said, the only real evidence we have of what the Vanyar thought about the Noldorin rebellion is comprised of the actions they took. For example, they did not intervene in the battle between the Noldor and the Teleri. And they did, when the time came, go to war in Middle-earth for the sake of the Noldor and Sindar (and Men). The Teleri ferried the Host of Valinor to Middle-earth but they refused to leave their ships.
I would interpret this to mean that the Vanyar were sorely grieved by the rebellion (as indicated in The Silmarillion) but that they did not harbor any animosity toward the Noldor. They do not behave as interventionists might; they had no army at the time of the rebellion and so they could not have immediately taken up arms against the Noldor (although I think it significant that the Teleri also had weapons, not just the Noldor).
This question deserves such a long, roundabout answer — I think — because it raises the issue of how Tolkien constructed his fiction. He added layers upon layers of detail, and the layers became so well interwoven and confusing that one easily falls into the mesmerizing trap of filling in the details by extrapolation and comparison. The exercise in such analysis is engaging and challenging but it quickly leads one away from Tolkien’s work and into the world of one’s own imagination.
You can indeed imagine the Vanyar to be all sorts of things, to believe all sorts of things. Who is to say you are wrong? For at this point the only authority on the Vanyar and their secrets is no longer with us. Based on his writings we can know very little about the Vanyar and therefore we can say only very little with any certainty, with respect to their role inside the fictional world of Middle-earth as Tolkien imagined it.
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