the thing about aman that draws me in so much is yes, it is basically an epitome of gilded cage with all its attributes but it also contains a society that grows and develops and has to live there. and i feel that it's ignored so much in the fandom, with amanyar being portrayed as helpless unwilling society just stuck in there and stuck in the past, while the challenges they are met with are just too grand to be ignored. There is, of course, an influx of war veterans and refugees after the War of Wrath that can turn out catastrophical if ignored. There are people being reborn who never wanted to see Aman but who have no choice but to live there. The fall of NĂșmenor not only shakes their trust in Eru and Ainur, but also physically separates them from the rest of the world. Fucked up as it is, it is also deeply fascinating. How do you continue like this. How do you shape a society. What purpose do you find in eternal paradise where suffering is still very present. I eat that shit up ngl.
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If you're looking for a little horror, @acnh_amanyar from instagram designed Amanyar as an island with just that theme! It's creepy and feels full of secrets as you navigate around blood spots and gravestones. Really cool!
also since i'm on my amanyar appreciation spree. the fact that they faced winged dragons, got nearly destroyed, managed to regroup and proceed to victory really tells something. like. those guys had three years of military training, max. most of them never left valinor. their leaders, safe for eönwë, never left valinor. and they mannaged to pull THAT out. just. raise it up for the amanyar because they were some of the most competent soldiers in the history of arda
so i was thinking about Elves who died on/before the Great Journey and - I kind of wonder what happened to them?
like, did Ingwe and the Vanyar get to Valinor and end up assimilating a lot of non-Vanyar who finally got to be reborn now they wouldnât be stuck hanging around outside Mandos by themselves?
or did Ingwe and Finwe and Olwe and Elwe get to meet some of their reborn dead family/friends when they went on their first trip to Valinor? the text tells us they went on the Great Journey because of the Trees but i imagine getting to see your dead family again would also be a major attraction.
(imagine Elves whoâd been reborn in Valinor before even the Vanyar got there and ended up spending a long time hanging around with mostly the Valar and Maiar for company and started getting spooky and inhuman even by Elven standards. i kind of like this.)
now iâm thinking about Avari who died and ended up agreeing to get reborn in Valinor as an improvement over either being houseless spirits in Middle-earth or being stuck in Mandos* forever.
...I wonder how many of Feanorâs followers were actually Avari who were never all that keen on Valinor in the first place. hmmmm.
*(as a side-note, is there anything around about the fact that Angband/Angamando is just Mandos with the word for âironâ stuck in front? because absent further commentary that does suggest the Elves did not think of Mandos as a nice place at *all*. or maybe itâs just a leftover from a time before the Elves met the Valar when death and the underworld would have been much scarier - but then, they kept using it, so.)
Outside of the hyper-analytical silm fandom, the Tolkien legendarium is synonymous with medieval stasis in fantasy. While every age draws on medieval European tropes, thereâs evidence that such cultural comparisons arenât so static or clear-cut. And even though itâs inaccurate at best to try to map any society in the Silmarillion to a specific counterpart in human history, real world parallels can be helpful in constructing an accurate picture of what culture and technology could have looked like. Iâll start with an analysis on Amanyar culture during the years of the trees, because it forms an important foundation for almost everything that comes after it.
This is almost certainly a result of the direct influence of the Valar. In the real world, feudalism in medieval Europe was a result of the decentralization of the Western Roman Empire. Local lords consolidated their power and began to rent out fiefs to lesser nobility in exchange for military service. This system couldnât arise in a population that has no land to protect and no history of land ownership or organized warfare. Whatâs more, until they actually arrive in Aman theyâre still nomadic, but they seem to become feudalized long before then. The only solution I can think of is some external influence, and we know that the Valar already have a king. Itâs in their interest that their emissaries end up in charge, and that the elves all adopt a system that very explicitly establishes their loyalty and subservience.
Once the elves arrive in Aman and are presumably taught agriculture, the feudal nobility remains unnecessary. Now that they have land to protect, thereâs nothing to protect it from. More significantly, the Amanyar are always identified by the cities they live in, not the general territories in which those cities are situated. There were cities in medieval Europe, of course, but they tended to be small fortified towns, and certainly wouldnât function as centers of government in the way that Tirion, AlqualondĂ«, and Valimar seem to. Given the prevalence of city-states, Iâm going to tentatively identify early Amanyar civilization as Iron Age.
There are more specific markers of Iron Age civilization that the early Amanyar share. Year-round agriculture, a writing system, centralized government, and law codes, all of which are apparent at this time, are usually Bronze Age developments. However, the development of alphabetic (as opposed to pictographic) characters, written manuscripts and literature are characteristics of the Iron Age. These are evident in the creation of the Sarati and the presence of loremasters in the very beginning of Amanyar civilization. There is a Quenya word for iron or steel, erĂ«. Due to their association with AulĂ«, the early Noldor probably had more advanced metalworking techniques than any human culture at a comparable phase of their development. However, I donât think the rest of their culture was very different. The Valar are near-omnipotent beings that can change form at will and communicate telepathically. They have no need for a written language, laws, or, with the exception of AulĂ«âs specialized work, engineering of any kind. They wouldnât know about these things, and probably wouldnât teach them to the elves.Â
So what technology does Iron Age culture entail? Iâm going to Archaic Greece (800-480 B.C.) as a rough cipher, because thereâs a lot of archeological work in the area and itâs the Iron Age civilization that I know the most about. T the Greeks developed paved streets, cartography, cranes, locks, gears, plumbing, and urban planning, for a start. And this is just my estimate for the early arrivals in Aman. They would have had 360 years (more if we map years of the trees to solar years) to improve.
There are several factors in Amanyar society that would probably slow down their rate of technological development relative to humans. They lived in a peaceful paradise with fertile land, good weather, and no diseases or wars. Central heating and sanitation features like indoor plumbing would have been unnecessary, and probably never developed. Without the need to improve the yield of poor farmland, what agriculture they did have would have been very inefficient. Their immortality would also have hurt. The affects of immortality on the psychology and social makeup of elven society in general is an essay in and of itself, so Iâll just say that populations that skew older tend to be less innovative.Â
One the other hand, those centuries of peace would have given Amanyar scientists and engineers plenty of time and resources to work with. Letâs go back to the Greek parallels. Hellenistic mathematicians fall within our 360-year timeframe, and their achievements include Euclidean geometry and the early foundations of integral calculus, but no algebra or trigonometry. Hellenistic scientists also developed a prototype analogue computer, the Antikythera mechanism, and Heroâs aeolipile, a small steam engine. More significantly, the water mill was invented in the 3rd century B.C., and was in common use by the 1st century A.D. This is crucial, because energy is a major limiting factor for most human accomplishments. The progression of power sources from human to animal to water to peat to coal to oil has historically defined how far a civilization can spread, and what they can accomplish once they get there. Â Water mills can be used for milling grain, sawing timber, and crushing ore, making mining, farming, and construction on a large scale exponentially easier. Again, there isnât enough evidence in the text to prove that the Amanyar had similar accomplishments, but it isnât impossible or even unlikely.
Finally, thereâs significant evidence that the Amanyar had a mercantile economy. The usage of telpe, meaning silver, as a word for money comes from a manuscript of early Quenya listing basic vocabulary, which means that this usage was almost certainly understood in Aman and is not a Beleriandish neologism. There are also Quenya words for wealth (autĂ«) and poverty (oise or oiste). All those Noldor craftsmen werenât working for free. If the elves understood financial inequality and heredity, itâs not a huge leap to assume that they had recognizable social class divisions.Â
The Noldor who returned to Middle-earth probably resembled Hellenistic Greece or possibly the early Roman Empire in terms of technology. Their culture retained the vestiges of pseudo-feudalism, which rapidly became less ceremonial. Part II is will be about the Noldor and Sindar in Beleriand, the relative accuracy medieval stasis, and why the dwarves are awesome.Â
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Finarfin (S, pron. [fiËnarfin]; born in Valinor during the Years of the Trees 1230) was the youngest of the five children of FinwĂ«, High King of the Noldor. Finarfin's mother was Indis, FinwĂ«'s second wife. The great Elf Lord FĂ«anor was his half-brother. His full siblings were Findis, Fingolfin, and IrimĂ«.
History
Two thousand years before the first rising of the Sun, Finarfin married EÀrwen, daughter of Olwë, King of the Teleri in Valinor. They had four children: Finrod, Angrod, Aegnor and Galadriel. Finarfin's mother was of the Vanyar, and he inherited her fair hair, which he passed on to his children. All other Noldor had dark hair, with the rare exceptions of Idril and Glorfindel of Gondolin. Thus the Eldar of the House of Finarfin were unique among their kin.
Centuries later, Melkor destroyed the Two Trees, slaughtered Finarfin's father FinwĂ«, and stole the Silmarils of FĂ«anor. Enraged, FĂ«anor came to the city of Tirion upon TĂșna and convinced many of his kinsmen to leave Valinor for Middle-earth, to recover the Silmarils and defeat Morgoth. FĂ«anor was a charismatic speaker, but Fingolfin and Finarfin were unmoved. However they too followed their half-brother, more for their children who eagerly accepted his cause.
The Noldor followed FĂ«anor in groups, and Fingolfin and Finarfin led the last host. As such they did not participate in the First Kinslaying or know its true cause at the time. While they were travelling up the coast of Araman, the Vala Mandos appeared and pronounced the Doom of the Noldor. Finarfin, dismayed by the prophecy and already contemplating return because of the tragedy of the Kinslaying of his wife's people at Alqualonde, returned to Valinor with a small group of his people. He presumably still rules the few remaining Noldor in Valinor from Tirion upon TĂșna.
Etymology
Finarfin's father-name was ArafinwĂ« (Q: "Noble [son of] FinwĂ«", pron. N [ËaraËfinwe], V [ËaraËÉžinwe]). His mother-name was IngalaurĂ« ("Inga-gold", pron. [ËiĆÉĄaËlaÍĄÊre]).
The name Finarfin is the Sindarin version of his father-name. It should be mentioned also that Inglor, an old name used in the early editions of Tolkien's mythology, could be interpreted perhaps as the Sindarin form of Ingalaurë.
Finarfin is rare among the High Elves of the Undying Lands who did not leave and fall under the Doom of Mandos, in that he is known primarily by his name in Sindarin, a language indigenous to Middle-earth and not though to have been known or studied in Aman until after the Exiles were allowed to return at the end of the First Age, save the possibility that Sindarin was learned from the Elves of Beleriand who died and went to sojourn in the Halls of Mandos.
Other such Amanya High Elves who stayed behind are primarily known by their Quenya or Telerin names. But both of Finarfin's brothers went into Exile, with the result that both were largely remembered by Sindarin names, and also Finarfin's name is structured very similarly to that of his brother Fingolfin. It is probably unlikely that FĂ«anor and Amras had the time to learn Sindarin before they died so soon after reaching Beleriand, but they fell under the Doom of Mandos nevertheless, making Finarfin the only known Amanya never under the Doom whose name is primarily known in its Sindarin form.
