Elves in Middle-earth

In J. R. R. Tolkien's writings, Elves are the first fictional race to appear in Middle-earth. Unlike Men and Dwarves, Elves do not die of disease or old age. Should they die in battle or of grief, their souls go to the Halls of Mandos in Aman. After a long life in Middle-earth, Elves yearn for the Earthly Paradise of Valinor, and can sail there from the Grey Havens. They are prominent in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and their history is described in detail in The Silmarillion.
Tolkien derived Elves from mentions in the ancient poetry and languages of Northern Europe, especially Old English. These suggested to him that Elves were large, dangerous, beautiful, lived in wild natural places, and practised archery. He invented languages for the Elves, including Sindarin and Quenya.
Tolkien-style Elves have become a staple of fantasy literature. They have appeared, too, in film and role-playing game adaptations of Tolkien's works.

Origins

Icelandic folklore

The framework for J. R. R. Tolkien's conception of his Elves, and many points of detail in his portrayal of them, is thought by Haukur Þorgeirsson to have come from the survey of folklore and early modern scholarship about elves in Icelandic tradition in Jón Árnason's introduction to his . It covered stories from the 17th century onwards, noting that elves are the firstborn race; that they could marry humans; and that they lack an immortal soul.

Germanic word

The modern English word Elf derives from the Old English word ælf. Numerous types of elves appear in Germanic mythology; the West Germanic concept appears to have come to differ from the Scandinavian notion in the early Middle Ages, and the Anglo-Saxon concept diverged even further, possibly under Celtic influence. J. R. R. Tolkien made it clear in a letter that his Elves differed from those "of the better known lore" of Scandinavian mythology.

Halfway beings

The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey notes that one Middle English source which he presumes Tolkien must have read, the South English Legendary from c. 1250, describes elves much as Tolkien does:

South English Legendary "St Michael" 253-258	Modern English
And ofte in fourme of wommane : In many derne weye grete compaygnie mon i-seoth of heom : boþe hoppie and pleiƺe, Þat Eluene beoth i-cleopede : and ofte heo comiez to toune, And bi daye muche in wodes heo beoth : and bi niƺte ope heiƺe dounes. Þat beoth þe wrechche gostes : Þat out of heuene weren i-nome, And manie of heom a-domesday : Ʒeot schullen to reste come.	And often shaped like women: On many secret paths men see great numbers of them: dancing and sporting. These are called Elves: and often they come to town and by day they are much in the woods: by night up on the high downs. Those are the wretched spirits: that were taken out of Heaven, And at Doomsday many of them shall come to rest.

Some of Tolkien's Elves are in the "undying lands" of Valinor, home of the godlike Valar, while others are in Middle-earth. The Elf-queen Galadriel indeed has been expelled from Valinor, much like the fallen Melkor, though she is clearly good, and much like an angel. Similarly, some of the Legendarys Eluene are on Earth, others in the "Earthly Paradise". So, did they have souls, Shippey asks? Since they could not leave the world, the answer was no; but given that they didn't disappear completely on death, the answer had to have been yes. In Shippey's view, the Silmarillion resolved the Middle English puzzle, letting Elves go not to Heaven but to the halfway house of the Halls of Mandos on Valinor.

Elf or fairy

By the late 19th century, the term 'fairy' had been taken up as a utopian theme, and was used to critique social and religious values, a tradition which Tolkien and T. H. White continued. One of the last of the Victorian Fairy-paintings, The Piper of Dreams by Estella Canziani, sold 250,000 copies and was well known within the trenches of World War I where Tolkien saw active service. Illustrated posters of Robert Louis Stevenson's poem Land of Nod had been sent out by a philanthropist to brighten servicemen's quarters, and Faery was used in other contexts as an image of "Old England" to inspire patriotism. By 1915, when Tolkien was writing his first elven poems, the words elf, fairy and gnome had many divergent and contradictory associations. Tolkien had been gently warned against the term 'fairy', which John Garth supposes may have been due to its growing association with homosexuality, but Tolkien continued to use it. According to Marjorie Burns, Tolkien eventually but hesitantly chose the term elf over fairy. In his 1939 essay On Fairy-Stories, Tolkien wrote that "English words such as elf have long been influenced by French ; but in later times, through their use in translation, fairy and elf have acquired much of the atmosphere of German, Scandinavian, and Celtic tales, and many characteristics of the huldu-fólk, the daoine-sithe, and the tylwyth-teg."

Reconciling multiple traditions

Tolkien, a philologist, knew of the many seemingly contradictory traditions about elves. The Old English Beowulf-poet spoke of the strange eotenas ond ylfe ond orcnéas, "ettens and elves and demon-corpses", a grouping which Shippey calls "a very stern view of all non-human and un-Christian species". The Middle English Sir Gawain meets a green axe-wielding giant, an aluisch mon. Christian sources from Iceland knew and disapproved of the tradition of offering sacrifices to the elves, álfa-blót.
File:Elf-Arrows.JPG|thumb|upright|left|Elf-shot, associated with "elf arrows", Neolithic flint arrowheads sometimes used as amulets, was one of the hints Tolkien used to create his Elves.
Elves were directly dangerous, too: the medical condition "elf-shot", described in the spell Gif hors ofscoten sie, "if a horse is elf-shot", meaning some kind of internal injury, was associated both with Neolithic flint arrowheads and the temptations of the devil. Tolkien takes "elf-shot" as a hint to make his elves skilful in archery. Another danger was wæterælfádl, "water-elf disease", perhaps meaning dropsy, while a third condition was ælfsogoða, "elf-pain", glossed by Shippey as "lunacy". All the same, an Icelandic woman could be frið sem álfkona, "fair as an elf-woman", while the Anglo-Saxons might call a very fair woman ælfscýne, "elf-beautiful". Some aspects can readily be reconciled, Shippey writes, since "Beauty is itself dangerous". But there is more: Tolkien brought in the Old English usage of descriptions like wuduælfen "wood-elf, dryad", wæterælfen "water-elf", and sǣælfen "sea-elf, naiad", giving his elves strong links with wild nature. Yet another strand of legend holds that Elfland, as in Elvehøj and other traditional stories, is dangerous to mortals because time there is distorted, as in Tolkien's Lothlórien. Shippey comments that it is a strength of Tolkien's "re-creations", his imagined worlds, that they incorporate all the available evidence to create a many-layered impression of depth, making use of "both good and bad sides of popular story; the sense of inquiry, prejudice, hearsay and conflicting opinion".
Shippey suggests that the "fusion or kindling-point" of Tolkien's thinking about elves came from the Middle English lay Sir Orfeo, which transposes the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice into a wild and wooded Elfland, and makes the quest successful. In Tolkien's translation the elves appear and disappear: "the king of Faerie with his rout / came hunting in the woods about / with blowing far and crying dim, and barking hounds that were with him; yet never a beast they took nor slew, and where they went he never knew". Shippey comments that Tolkien took many suggestions from this passage, including the horns and the hunt of the Elves in Mirkwood; the proud but honourable Elf-king; and the placing of his elves in wild nature. Tolkien might only have had broken fragments to work on, but, Shippey writes, the more one explores how Tolkien used the ancient texts, the more one sees "how easy it was for him to feel that a consistency and a sense lay beneath the chaotic ruin of the old poetry of the North".
Tolkien's Sundering of the Elves allowed him to explain the existence of Norse mythology's Light Elves, who live in Alfheim and correspond to his Calaquendi, and Dark Elves, who live underground in Svartalfheim and whom he "rehabilitates" as his Moriquendi, the Elves who never went to see the light of the Two Trees of Valinor.

Medieval source	Term	Idea
Beowulf	eotenas ond ylfe ond orcnéas: "ettens, elves, and devil-corpses"	Elves are strong and dangerous.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight	The Green Knight is an aluisch mon: "elvish man, uncanny creature"	Elves have strange powers.
Sir Orfeo	"the king of Faerie with his rout / came hunting in the woods about"	Elves live in the wildwood.
Magical spell	ofscoten: "elf-shot"	Elves are archers.
Icelandic and Old English usage	frið sem álfkona: "fair as an elf-woman"; ælfscýne: "elf-beautiful"	Elves are beautiful.
Old English usage	wuduælfen, wæterælfen, sǣælfen: "dryads, water-elves, naiads"	Elves are strongly connected to nature.
Scandinavian ballad Elvehøj	Mortal visitors to Elfland are in danger, as time seems different there.	Time is distorted in Elfland.
Norse mythology	Dökkálfar, Ljósálfar: "dark elves, light elves"	Elves are sundered into multiple groups.