Q: Was It Fair for the Elves to Leave Middle-earth?
ANSWER: People occasionally ask my opinion on some pretty interesting things. I still have a few questions in the queue where people have asked me to speculate about things like Ar-Pharazôn’s final campaign in Middle-earth (when he landed at Umbar), and what Morgoth was thinking when Lúthien danced before his throne. These are not easy questions to answer. It took me ages to contrive a plausible scenario for how Beleriand may have been destroyed in the War of Wrath. And I’ve got a question in the queue about why the Valar didn’t want to intervene again after that.
I received this question in May 2020:
Do you think it’s unfair for the inhabitants of Middle-Earth to allow the Eldar to leave at a time when Sauron was preparing for war? After all the Noldor are partly responsible for the crisis against Sauron since they forged the Three with his help. I understand that they paid dearly for this mistake and some elves at the time of the War of the Ring were not born during the Second Age but still abandoning the Free Peoples before a major war shows a tremendous lack of solidarity.
Yes and no.
And the way Tolkien describes the Elves in The Lord of the Rings, I think those who were left in Middle-earth when Frodo left the Shire had stayed partly out of lingering guilt or a sense of obligation to the inhabitants of Middle-earth. Gildor Inglorion seems to hint there is something keeping him in Middle-earth – and he doesn’t hesitate to help when Frodo needs it.
But the Elves’ privilege to sail over Sea was more ancient than Sauron’s empire. It’s a bit like asking if it was fair for Americans to flee Europe prior to the Second World War. They had a right to return home. Eldamar was for all intents and purposes the rightful home of the Noldor. They had fled in exile but were forgiven.
Tolkien omitted a lot of details about the Elves’ histories. We don’t know why they were fleeing – other than that Sauron’s open returned frightened them – nor where they fled from.
The last great exodus occurred during the years leading up to the War of the Ring. Technically, Middle-earth wasn’t yet at war. It was a time in-between great wars, and though the Elves clearly saw a great conflict coming, they had already been defeated in many ways. Most of their realms had been destroyed.
So it was fair to them to be able to leave. And in a way their departure may have delayed the final war. Sauron wasn’t fully prepared when the war began. The narrative indicates he was still gathering forces, increasing his power, and he was in great doubt about what he would be capable of achieving.
It was only because Gollum was captured near Mordor that Sauron finally learned the One Ring still existed, and remained in Middle-earth. Until that time, he had no plan for reuniting with the Ring or imposing his will on all the inhabitants of Middle-earth. He was still engaged in his long-running plan to weaken and divide his enemies. (See the links below to my essays on Sauron’s strategies.)
It was fair to the Men and Dwarves in a way as well, because the departure of the Elves reduced the chances of conflict between them and the other races. That’s a backwards way of looking at it. But Sauron’s strategy for 2,000 years had been to divide his enemies and turn them against each other. The story (The Lord of the Rings) makes it clear that most men feared and distrusted the Elves by the end of the Third Age, and the Elves didn’t know which men they could trust.
Middle-earth had become a very dangerous place for the Elves.
And it was unfair to the free peoples of Middle-earth for so many of the Elves to abandon hope and flee. They could have retreated to Lindon and stayed there. It was still “elvish country”, protected by Cirdan. They could have strengthened his people and formed a new alliance with Gondor.
But in the Second Age Gil-galad had many friends and allies in Eriador and Lindon. During the first 2,000 years of the Third Age Cirdan and Elrond had friends and allies in the Dunadan realms. After the fall of Arnor and the destruction of the last cities of the Dunedain in the north, the Eldar were mostly on their own.
Even though new Elves were born in the Third Age, they no longer had the numbers to fight a great war against Sauron’s full power at the end of the Third Age. When Sauron declared himself openly, he controlled not only Mordor but many kingdoms of men far to the east and south of the lands friendly to the Elves.
Thematically, the flight of the Elves was equivalent to one of 3 armies suddenly pulling back from the battlefield on the eve of a great war. The Dwarves and Men thus had every right and reason to be suspicious of any Elves who remained. They might have been great allies in previous centuries but those days were done.
On the other hand, it would have been unfair to trap the Elves in Middle-earth. They might have created the problem but the majority of the Noldor of Eregion were either dead or remained with Elrond in Rivendell. The remaining Elves who had no part in the making of the Rings of Power didn’t really deserve to be put in the position of having to defend Middle-earth forever. And if they were so struck by fear they could not longer remain, how reliable would they have been as allies in future wars anyway?
We have this idea that all of Tolkien’s elves were mighty warriors and powerful sorcerers, but both Morgoth and Sauron found ways to wear them down and eventually overrun them. Gil-galad was on the verge of losing the War of the Elves and Sauron when reinforcements from Númenor finally arrived. It was only after Sauron went to Númenor that Gil-galad was able to rebuild his former empire.
A Similar Question: Could the Elves have Taken Men with Them?
In February 2020 I received the following question:
In many theories fans have about what would have happened if Sauron had regained the One Ring during the War of the Ring, a common theme is that Men would have either been enslaved or wiped out by Sauron. If Sauron had regained the Ring, could the Elves have taken men with them to Valinor to escape Sauron and his forces? Would the Valar even allow such a thing, knowing that if Men were forced to stay behind, they would suffer a fate worse than death?
The short answer is “no”.
Men were forbidden from setting foot in Valinor. The ban was not a punishment, but rather a protective measure. Mortals could not live in the Undying Lands, where the Valar revealed themselves in their full power and dwelt with the Eldar. According to Tolkien, a mortal would have withered or died more quickly in Valinor than in Middle-earth.
And after the Changing of the World it was impossible for any ship to carry a mortal to Valinor anyway. The Elves built specially hallowed ships and were granted a special grace to sail a “straight road”.
The only exceptions were made for the Ring-bearers because they required special, spiritual healing. The One Ring had damaged their souls and the Valar gave them a chance to heal so they could die peacefully and in a state of grace.
(NOTE: An article on ScreenRant wrongly states “Frodo left Middle-earth because of what happened to him during Lord of the Rings. He experienced two injuries which never completely faded, meaning he couldn’t stay and be happy in Middle-earth.” While Frodo’s wounds did continue to bother him after Sauron was defeated, the healing he needed was for the spiritual damage the Ring itself had inflcted on him.)
And Gimli is also said to have been given a special privilege to see Galadriel one last time. He, too would have died soon after arriving on Tol Eressëa.
See the links given below for articles that deal with these issues in greater detail.
A Mostly Unrelated Question: About When the Suite 101 Essays Were Written
In February 2020 I received the following question:
Why is this article (“If I Only Had a Bombadil”) written as if it was made before the release of the movies, but the publish date is in 2013? Did you have to re-release a large portion of articles in 2013?
I wrote that essay about 20 years ago for the old Suite101 Tolkien and Middle-earth column. It was one of about 100 essays I wrote for that topic on Suite101 from 1999-ish to 2003-ish, give or take. “If I Only Had a Bombadil” was originally published about a year before The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was released in movie theaters. It was my faint hope at the time that Peter Jackson would include Bombadil in the movie – and as the essay explains, I felt there were good reasons to include his character in the dramatic adaptation. But it was impractical, as most of us knew back then.
If The Lord of the Rings is ever produced as a television show, I think Bombadil should be included. He plays an important role in the story despite one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s passing remarks about how he doesn’t. Bombadil isn’t crucial to resolving the conflict with Sauron, but he is important in other ways.
The two essays about Sauron’s strategies linked below are also from my Suite101 years.
In 2011 I took all of Xenite.Org offline for a month for reasons I won’t go into here. When I relaunched the site in June 2011, I started this blog and I republished the old essays on this blog. Each essay displays its original publication date at the bottom of the article. I probably should have backdated the articles but at the time I was still experimenting with ways to use WordPress.
You can browse all the old Suite101 essays in the Middle-earth and J.R.R. Tolkien Archive (still on this site). For what it’s worth, you can also buy many of those essays in my books Vizualizing Middle-earth (published 2001, through Xlibris) and Understanding Middle-earth (published 2003, through Vivisphere).
This article is featured in the Middle-earth Blog Hot Zone.See Also
Suite 101 Essays
The Sauron Strategies: Footsteps Into Failure
The Sauron Strategies: One War to Win Them All, Except …
Other Question and Answer Articles
Why Did Frodo Leave Middle-earth and the Shire?
How Do Cirdan’s Ships Sail Over Sea?
Where Did the Undying Lands Go?
How Long was the Voyage from Middle-earth to Valinor?
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Have you read our other Tolkien and Middle-earth Questions and Answers articles?
The elves were leaving because their time in Middle earth was over.
Even if they stayed, there was very little they could do, because they were so few.
Also relations between humans and elves were pretty bad.
It seems that most humans did not trust elves at all, or perhaps they hated them.
Lorien and Thranduils realm assisted, but think their armies were small.
So Lorien and the wood elves did what they could.
I do not think Rivendell could do much, since they had no armies at all.
I thought the Eldar in Middle-earth were leaving because they felt that they had to, for personal reasons. I haven’t heard that Sauron’s activities had much of an influence on that decision.
Gildor reluctantly advised Frodo to make for Rivendell, but only after Frodo begged him repeatedly for advice. After he advised Frodo, Gildor said, “Now you should be grateful, for I do not give this counsel gladly. The Elves have their own labours and their own sorrows, and they are little concerned with the way of hobbits, or of any other creatures upon earth.”
Even in the Second Age, Gil-galad observed that “all things in Middle-earth grow colder.” That might have something to do with the Elves’ decision to leave.
I think the Elves’ purpose in leaving Middle-earth is meant to be a little mysterious, but I personally don’t see much evidence that they were fleeing from Sauron. Maybe I’m missing something.
I’m not particularly certain that one can lump all the Elves of Middle-earth into one grouping as to why they were leaving. I believe there were a host of reasons, some being rather complex.
We know of basically four remaining settlements of Elves and each had its own issues and situations.
For Cirdan at the Grey Havens, it would appear he did not have a large following as he was mostly there with a few others to maintain boats that would sail the straight-path to Eldamar. And as soon as the last Elf was to leave, he would leave and never return. (and who knows if that isn’t still going on today?)
Thranduil’s kingdom in Mirkwood was mostly populated by Sylvan elves who had never been to Beleriand and thus mostly never had firsthand knowledge of the failure of the Wars against Morgoth. They had nothing to be ‘forgiven’ for because they never made the Great March to Beleriand and on to Eldamar, never left there in a huff, and were never engaged in the Elf against Elf kinstrife. They were pretty much content it would seem to live in their little kingdom and keep others out. Only when they were threatened did they join the rest of Middle-earth, and apparently (although I can’t find where it’s specifically stated) were now given permission to continue their journey if they so desired. Whether any besides Legolas did, is uncertain.
Galadriel at Lothlorian was a Noldor who knew of the 1st Age Wars, had left during the kinstrife and settled to run her own kingdom in Middle-earth. She knew the weariness of the Noldor Elves and their many years of mostly failure against Morgoth and Sauron. Her kingdom was also mostly populated by Sylvan elves who again had never made it to Beleriand nor to Eldamar similar to those of Thranduil’s kingdom. Upon facing her own ‘demons’ and refusing the One Ring, she accepted that she would now return to Eldamar but at least join in to some extent in the War of the Ring. Before the Fellowship got to Lothlorien, though, she like Thranduil seemed to keep it closed…except of course for being part of the council that tried to deal with the Necromancer of the Hobbit. But it would seem that none of the residents of Lothlorien did much to join in on any activities after the end of the 2nd Age, until the final battles of the 3rd Age.
Finally, the last settlement, Rivendell, was populated by descendants of Noldor and Sindarin elves, and probably some Sylvan elves too, and did not have a large contingent of armed Elves, but was presided over by Elrond, who of all the remaining Elves in Middle-earth seemed to be the most desirous to at least aid Men against Sauron (and aid Dwarves if they asked nicely). He just needed to see if there were any Men who would try to unite the races and settlements and kingdoms of Middle-earth against Sauron, which may be part of why he helped raise Aragorn, probably hoping that he might become a leader of Men.
It’s obvious that there was little communication between these four different lesser settlements of Elves, probably more between Rivendell and the Grey Havens, practically none between Thranduil’s kingdom and the outside until forced into it, and only minor communications between Rivendell and Lothlorien although Elrond and Galadriel were related, in a way.
So, each of the groupings of Elves had their own reasons for what they were doing, as well as deciding if they wanted to leave, to stay and help then leave, and for what reason; and trying to lump them all into a single cause such as becoming tired of Middle-earth and some overwhelming desire to return to Eldamar is a little too simple of an explanation, I believe.
A question I’ve always had related to this is ‘How many Moriquendi were still in Middle-earth during the War of the Ring (hundreds? Thousands?), were they ever allowed to continue the journey to Eldamar, and how many did?’ These would include those that made it to Beleriand but did not go Eldamar but made it back to Middle-earth before the Sundering, those that started the March but didn’t even make it to Beleriand, and those who refused to even start the March. I don’t mean exact numbers, for even one would show that they were allowed, and of course, Legolas is ‘one’, but he might have had special dispensation for being such a strong part of the Fellowship. What about all the others?
Per your last paragraph, at the start of the Second Age the Valar extended their invitation/summons to all the Elves of Middle-earth. I’m pretty sure I’ve written something about that but have a bad sinus headache at the moment. Will try to remember to come back and edit this comment.
Yes, I did forget a part – towards the end of ‘Voyage of Earendil’ it says the Eonwe summoned the Elves of Beleriand to depart from Middle-earth and about a page or two later it says ‘a great building of boats’ etc. and ‘the Elves of Beleriand dwelt upon Tol Eressea’. As I suggested, I’m not sure there is anything about calling all the elves ‘back’ especially the Avari, but also the Nandor and Laiquendi, mostly because they never really left Middle-earth for Beleriand in the first place. From my understanding Eonwe seemed to be calling back all the Elves that had made it to Beleriand, including those who went on to Eldemar, but had turned back , for whatever reason. But not necessarily the others. We know about Thranduil, and Haldir’s people in Lothlorien. Maybe many of those did eventually go, but I’m not sure Tolkien wrote it out that they were included. We mostly would like to believe they were included because, to me anyway, it adds to a lingering melancholy of Middle-earth and later Ages of losing something very dear which shall never return.
I don’t have much time for scanning sources today but I did write the following in the article below:
“In Morgoth’s Ring Christopher Tolkien published an essay by his father in which J.R.R. Tolkien discussed Elvish fading. After the final overthrow of Melkor Eonwe traveled throughout Middle-earth and once again summoned all Elves to migrate to Aman. Though many refused, they were now put under a doom by the Valar, that they should fade and eventually become disembodied spirits if they did not ultimately sail over Sea…”
https://middle-earth.xenite.org/exploring-tolkiens-fourth-age/
I wrote that essay in January 2000 and I know I had a source for that comment. But it will take me a while to find it again.
It wasn’t within the power of the inhabitants of Middle-earth to “allow” the Eldar to leave. The Eldar had been called to depart Middle-earth many ages previously by Powers much higher than the mortals of Middle-earth.
Was it fair that they answered the call prior to the final chapter of Morgoth’s Rebellion? The question is, what would they have done if they’d remained? With few exceptions, those who did remain fought a defensive war against Sauron’s forces, repelling attacks upon their diminished, hidden realms.
Ultimately it seems necessary for the Dominion of Man that all immortals – good and bad – be removed from the circles of Middle-earth. So long as the promise of magical solutions to mortal problems existed, Man could not achieve full maturity. Had a new army of Elves marched openly to battle at the Gates of Mordor, Men would have again been reminded that a higher power existed to intervene in their troubles.
It seems appropriate and necessary that the Elves left quietly – whether before the final battle or afterwards is not important.