Was Dorwinion an Elf Kingdom?

Was Dorwinion An Elf Kingdom?

ANSWER: People have often asked who founded Dorwinion and if Dorwinion is an elf kingdom. There is no canonical answer to the question but we can look at the facts that J.R.R. Tolkien established concerning Dorwinion and infer from that information what he might have thought a reasonable extrapolation.

The name Dor-winion is first found in “Lay of the Children of Hurin” (dated to the years 1920-25), which retells the story of Turin Turambar (“Turambar and the Foaloki” from The Book of Lost Tales) in alliterative verse. In the earlier version of the poem, Dor-winion is mentioned in line 230:

Then Beleg bade them be blithe, and said:
‘The Gods have guided you to good keeping. 215
I have heard of the house of Hurin the Steadfast —
and who hath not heard of the hills of slain,
of Ninin Unothradin, the Unnumbered Tears?
To that war I went not, but wage a feud
with the Orcs unending, whom mine arrows bitter 220
oft stab unseen and strike to death.
I am the huntsman Beleg of the Hidden People.’
Then he bade them drink, and drew from his belt
a flask of leather full filled with wine
that is bruised from the berries of the burning South– 225
and the Gnome-folk know it, and the nation of the Elves,
and by long ways lead it to the lands of the North.
There baked flesh and bread from his wallet
they had to their hearts’ joy; but their heads were mazed
by the wine of Dor-Winion that went in their veins, 230
and they soundly slept on the soft needles
of the tall pine-trees that towered above.

There is a second reference to Dor-winion and its wines further on:

Then the fame of the fights on the far marches
were carried to the court of the King of Doriath,
and tales of Turin were told in his halls,
and how Beleg the ageless was brother-in-arms
to the black-haired boy from the beaten people.
Then the king called them to come before him
ever and anon when the Orc-raids waned;
to rest them and revel, and to raise awhile
the secret songs of the sons of Ing.
On a time was Turin at the table of Thingol —
there was laughter long and the loud clamour
of a countless company that quaffed the mead,
amid the wine of Dor-Winion that went ungrudged
in their golden goblets; and goodly meats
there burdened the boards, neath the blazing torches
set high in.those halls that were hewn of stone.

It is in the second version of the poem that we learn how the Elves of Doriath acquire the wine from Dor-winion:

Then he bade them drink from his belt drawing
a flask of leather full-filled with wine
that is bruised from the berries of the burning South —
the Gnome-folk know it, from Nogrod the Dwarves
by long ways lead it to the lands of the North
: for the Elves in exile who by evil fate
the vine-clad valleys now view no more
in the land of Gods.

We do not encounter the name Dorwinion again until the Second Phase of Tolkien’s development of The Hobbit, where Bilbo watches the Elvenking’s butler and his friend drink the heady wine from Dorwinion that was intended only for the king’s feasts and special occasions. John Rateliff pauses to reflect upon the possible meanings of Dorwinion, which most people assume is a combination of Sindarin Dor (“land”) and Welsh gwin (“wine”), meaning “land of wines”. While that may be what originally inspired the name, John points out that Tolkien himself translated the name Dorwinion as “Young-land Country”, specifically stating that it is indeed a Sindarin name.

John notes that above the text of this linguistic note J.R.R. Tolkien had written “or Land of Gwinion”. Turning to Tolkien’s Gnomish Lexicon (which dates to the same period as “Lay of the Children of Hurin”) John finds entries for gwinwen (“freshness”) and gwion (“young”) (he cites the newsletter Parma Eldalamberon XI.46 as his source). John suggests that Tolkien may have intended to somehow associate Dorwinion with the Irish Tir-na-nOg (“Land of Youth”) in the unfinished story The Lost Road.

There is, however, another use of Dorwinion which, as John points out, occurs in the 1937 “Quenta Silmarillion”, where the name is given to a region of Tol Eressea rather than a place in Middle-earth. The double usage could have a simple explanation, although John continues to associate its literal meaning “Land of Youth” with the possible Celtic myth connection. There are other possible connections that are internally consistent within Tolkien’s own notes.

According to the note referenced above, Tolkien wrote Dorwinion “was probably far south down the R. Running , and its Sindarin name a testimony to the spread of Sindarin: in this case expectable since the cultivation of vines was not known originally to the Nandor or Avari.” This particular note, however, is an example of some of the clever backfitting that Tolkien often engaged in when he wanted to tie up loose ends and eliminate apparent contradictions in the texts. For though he eventually told Pauline Baynes to include the name Dorwinion on her celebrated map of Middle-earth (and its placement has not been contested), John Rateliff points out that the geography of Middle-earth had yet to be finished. At the time The Hobbit was published, Tolkien had no idea of where the River Running led to, except “Dorwinion in the south”.

The name is nonetheless acceptably used in The Hobbit for Tolkien would not have felt himself bound to use it in any way to refer to the mythical Irish Land of the Young — but given the fairly numerous Celtic motifs that have been identified in The Hobbit by Douglas Anderson and other commentators, such a borrowing would not have been exceptional and would not have prevented Tolkien from backfitting a “Middle-earth internal” explanation for the land and its name.

The linguistic note almost certainly confirms what many readers suspect: that Dorwinion was an elven land. Some people have argued that the construction of Tolkien’s sentence in The Hobbit, where the narrator mentions that the Wood Elves get their wines and other goods from their kin or the lands of men in the distant south, is ambiguous and not specifically associating Dorwinion with wine. Tolkien seems to have firmly set in his mind that Dorwinion was certainly a land that produced wines.

This region was not inhabited solely by Elves. In the essay “Of Dwarves and Men” (published in The Peoples of Middle-earth), Tolkien wrote of the relatives of the Hadorians and Beorians that:

When the First Age ended and Beleriand was destroyed, and most of the Atani who survived had passed over sea to Numenor, their laggard kindred were either in Eriador, some settled, some still wandering, or else had never passed the Misty Mountains and were scattered in the lands between the Iron Hills and the Sea of Rhun eastward and the Great Forest, in the borders of which, northward and eastward, many were already settled.

In a note attached to “The Problem of Ros” (another essay in the same book), JRRT added some more information (and Christopher provided some commentary):

13. The Atani had never seen the Great Sea before they came at last to Beleriand; but according to their own legends and histories the Folk of Hador had long dwelt during their westward migration by the shores of a sea too wide to see across; it had no tides, but was visited by great storms. It was not until they had developed a craft of boat-building that the people afterwards known as the Folk of Hador discovered that a part of their host from whom they had become separated had reached the same sea before them, and dwelt at the feet of the high hills to the south-west, whereas they [the Folk of Hador] lived in the north-east, in the woods that there came near to the shores. They were thus some two hundred miles apart, going by water; and they did not often meet and exchange tidings. Their tongues had already diverged, with the swiftness of the speeches of Men in the ‘Unwritten Days’, and continued to do so; though they remained friends of acknowledged kinship, bound by their hatred and fear of the Dark Lord (Morgoth), against whom they had rebelled. Nonetheless they did not know that the Lesser Folk had fled from the threat of the Servants of the Dark and gone on westward, while they had lain hidden in their woods, and so under their leader Beor reached Beleriand at last many years before they did. [There has of course never been any previous trace or hint of this story of the long sojourn of the ‘Beorians’ and the ‘Hadorians’ (‘the People of Marach’, a name not mentioned in this essay, see p. 325, note 41) by the shores of a great inland sea. In this account of their dwellings my father first wrote ‘south-east’ and ‘north-west’, changing them at once; and the particularity of this suggests that he had a specific geographical image in mind. This must surely be the Sea of Rhun, where (features going back to the First Map to The Lord of the Rings, VII.305) there are hills on the south-western side and a forest coming down to the northeastern shores; moreover the distance of two hundred miles across the sea agrees with the map. – It is said here that the ‘Beorians’ reached Beleriand ‘many years’ before the ‘Hadorians’. According to the later Quenta Silmarillion chapter Of the Coming of Men into the West Felagund met Beor in Ossiriand in 310, and the People of Marach came over the Blue Mountains in 313 (XI.218, $13 and commentary). In Of Dwarves and Men (p. 307) ‘the first of the three hosts of the Folk of Hador’ came into Beleriand ‘not long after’ the Folk of Beor, having in fact reached the eastern foothills of the Ered Lindon first of all the kindreds of the Edain. In that text there is mention of an opinion that a long period of separation between the two peoples would account for the divergence of their languages from an original common tongue (p. 308 and note 45).]

There is one more interesting piece of information that is provided in Note 29 accompanying the brief essay “Cirdan” from The Peoples of Middle-earth:

29. Before ever they came to Beleriand the Teleri had developed a craft of boat-making; first as rafts, and soon as light boats with paddles made in imitation of the water-birds upon the lakes near their first homes, and later on the Great Journey in crossing rivers, or especially during their long tarrying on the shores of the ‘Sea of Rhun’, where their ships became larger and stronger. But in all this work Cirdan had ever been the foremost and most inventive and skilful. [On the significance of the Sea of Rhun in the context of the Great Journey see XI.173-4.]

Christopher refers to the discussion of the chapter “Of Men” in “Quenta Silmarillion” provided in Morgoth’s Ring:

9. OF MEN.
This chapter was numbered 7 in the QS manuscript (for the text see V.245-7, $$81-7). The difference is simply due to the fact that the three ‘sub-chapters’ in QS numbered in Vol.V 3(a), 3(b), and 3(c) were in Vol.X called 3, 4, and 5 (see X.299). Few changes were made to the QS manuscript in later revision, and those that were made were incorporated in LQ 1. That typescript received no alterations, and is of textual value in only a few respects; the typist of LQ 2 did not use it, but worked directly from the old manuscript.

$81. ‘The Valar sat now behind the mountains and feasted’ > ‘Thus the Valar sat now behind their mountains in peace’.

$82. The placing of Hildorien ‘in the uttermost East of Middle-earth that lies beside the eastern sea’ was changed to: ‘in the midmost parts of Middle-earth beyond the Great River and the Inner Sea, in regions which neither the Eldar nor the Avari have known’. Many phrases have been used of the site of Hildorien. In the ‘Annals’ tradition it was ‘in the East of the world’ (IV.269, V.118, 125), but this was changed on the manuscript of AV 2 to ‘in the midmost regions of the world’ (V.120, note 13). In the Quenta it was ‘in the East of East’ (IV.99), and in QS, as cited above, ‘in the uttermost East of Middle-earth’: in my commentary on QS (V.248) I suggested that this last was not in contradiction with the changed reading of AV 2: ‘Hildorien was in the furthest east of Middle-earth, but it was in the middle regions of the world; see Ambarkanta map IV, on which Hildorien is marked (IV.249).’

In the texts of the post-Lord of the Rings period there is the statement in the Grey Annals (GA) $57 that it was ‘in the midmost regions of the world’, as in the emended reading of AV 2; and there is the new phrase in the revision of QS, ‘in the midmost parts of Middle-earth beyond the Great River and the Inner Sea’ (with loss of the mention in the original text of ‘the eastern sea’). This last shows unambiguously that a change had taken place, but it is very hard to say what it was. It cannot be made to agree with the old Ambarkanta maps: one might indeed doubt that those maps carried much validity for the eastern regions by this time, and wonder whether by ‘the Inner Sea’ my father was referring to ‘the Inland Sea of Rhun’ (see The Treason of Isengard pp. 307, 333) – but on the other hand, in the Annals of Aman (X.72, 82) from this same period the Great Journey of the Elves from Kuivienen (‘a bay in the Inland Sea of Helkar’) is described in terms that suggest that the old conception was still fully present. Can the Sea of Rhun be identified with the Sea of Helkar, vastly shrunken? – Nor is it easy to understand how Hildorien ‘in the midmost parts of Middle-earth’ could be ‘in regions which neither the Eldar nor the Avari have known’.

In LQ 2 most of the revised passage is absent, and the text reads simply: ‘in the land of Hildorien in the midmost parts of Middleearth; for measured time had come upon Earth …’ If this is significant, it must depend on a verbal direction from my father. On the other hand, the revision was written on the manuscript in two parts: ‘in the midmost parts’ in the margin and the remainder on another part of the page, where it would be possible to miss it; and I think this much the likeliest explanation.

Finally, we can refer to a passage oft-cited from The Lord of the Rings, taken from the introduction to “Appendix B: The Tale of Years”:

In the beginning of this age many of the High Elves still remained. Most of these dwelt in Lindon west of the Ered Luin; but before the building of the Barad-dûr many of the Sindar passed eastward, and some established realms in the forests far away, where their people were mostly Silvan Elves. Thranduil, king in the north of Greenwood the Great, was one of these….

In post-LoTR writings Tolkien established that Thranduil was in fact the son of Oropher, who was the greatest of the Sindarin princes who fled the western coastlands to establish their own realms among the Sindarin Elves. We know that another prince, named Amdir in one text and Malgalad in another, established a kingdom near Oropher’s in Lothlorion. Dorwinion could have been established during the First Age but Tolkien seems to have dropped that tradition from his Beleriandic writings, especially in the post-LoTR phase. It therefore follows that Dorwinion could have been one of those realms established by Sindarin Elves early in the Second Age among the Silvan Elves of the east. Another of these realms was most likely Edhellond, which lay close to lands that had been settled by Nandorin Elves in the First Age.

While we cannot say these are the facts that Tolkien intended (at any point in his life), they are certainly consistent with the facts he established either in print or in his private notes.

# # #

Have you read our other Tolkien and Middle-earth Questions and Answers articles?

18

Click to Like