I’ve been meaning to write a post on this topic for ages and a conversation on twitter has brought it back into my mind, so here goes: my theories about what the elves in Tolkien’s mythology “really” looked like and how they came to be presented as the very face of the European beauty standard.
There are a few of things we’re told about elves that aren’t quite congruent with the image we’re given of them as some kind of willowy uber-Scandinavian - they had superhuman sight and hearing, they were probably minimally sexually dimorphic (while the popular translation we have of the Red Book of Westmarch is usaully taken to imply a level of sexual dimorphism similar to that found in ideally slender humans, I don’t actually recall any references to elves having tits!), and they have a few other biologically bizarre traits such as walking on top of snow and sleeping with their eyes open. I would argue that with a bit of imagination and reading between the lines, the image we get of elves is very strange indeed.
Let’s look at a passage from The Lord of the Rings concerning the sensory abilities of elves.
“‘Riders!’ cried Aragorn, springing to his feet. ‘Many riders on swift steeds are coming towards us!’ ‘Yes,’ said Legolas, ‘there are one hundred and five. Yellow is their hair, and bright are their spears. Their leader is very tall.’
Aragorn smiled. ‘Keen are the eyes of the Elves,’ he said.
‘Nay! The riders are little more than five leagues distant,’ said Legolas.”
– The Two Towers Chapter 2: The Riders of Rohan
At this point I’m going to reference a tumblr post some of you may recall from a few months ago (I can’t find it right now, but here is something that gestures at it), where somebody did the maths and realised that in order for Legolas to see the colour of someone’s hair five leagues (15 miles, or 24 kilometers) away, he would have to have absolutely massive pupils. Like, to the point of being incredibly disturbing to the average human. It’s my theory that the “grey-eyed elves” Tolkien describes were “grey-eyed” not in the sense of “that particular shade of blue most common in northern and eastern Europe”, but in the sense of the grey sheen you get on a wide black surface. It wouldn’t be so much “scandinavian” as “unnervingly similar to a perigrine falcon”.
Imagine seeing them sleeping with those open. As an aside – I’m not going to go too far into the stuff about sleeping with their eyes open and walking on snow, but if any creature sleeps and walks lightly, it’s a bird, and I think a certain birdlikeness is going to be part of the image of elves we’re left with when we consider all these factors. While birds are a common object of romantic comparisons, the way they move and speak is really not what you’d call conventionally attractive, and as beautiful as the voices of elves were held to be they were also described as all kinds of intimidating.
The superhuman sight and hearing of elves simply would not have left them with conventionally attractive human features. It’s generally accepted that elves had pointed ears, but given the acuteness of their hearing their ears may have been even more animalistic than that – perhaps higher up on their head, subject to voluntary movement, certainly larger than they’re generally depicted as. I’m not advocating for a picture of elves as basically hentai cat-people, but I think we have to accept that while you were being captivated by the “wells of deep memory” they were using to count your pores, it would be offset by some constantly twitching and prominent ears.
Now to address the topic of sexual dimorphism in elves.
“Very tall [Galadriel and Celeborn] were, and the Lady no less tall than the Lord; and they were grave and beautiful. They were clad wholly in white; and the hair of the Lady was of deep gold… but no sign of age was upon them, unless it were in the depths of their eyes; for these were keen as lances in the starlight, and yet profound, the wells of deep memory.”
– The Two Towers Chapter 7: The Mirror of Galadriel.
This passage is notable for not only mentioning no sexual dimorphism, but outright stating that one of the forms of sexual dimorphism generally expected in humans (the “male” being taller than the “female”) is not present. It is noted elsewhere that elves do not grow beards. While gender pronouns are always applied to elves, elves present themselves very androgynously and my reading is that the impression of a human gender binary is the product of the human translators rather than anything native to elven culture. It is notable that where “female” elves are recorded they are overwhelmingly either wives or mothers; while one explanation for this is that the authors saw no reason to note the contributions of female elves unless they related to those of a male elf, this could also be explained by elves not being assumed to be female at all until they gave birth or entered a relationship where according to a worldview that naturalised cis-hetero-sexuality, someone had to be the woman.
Given that Galadriel’s accomplishments independet of Celeborn are noted throughout the Silmarillion and the fact that the only thing visually distinguishing her from her partner is the colour of her hair, it is arguable that her gendering as female is only to do with her role in producing Celebrían. The fact that traditional human gender roles seem present in some interactions between elves (such as the trapping of Aredhel by Eöl in chapter 16 of The Silmarillion) is likewise explicable as the projection of human gender roles onto simply unequal or predatory interactions. Of course, Galadriel is such an exceptional case that using her as an example is tenuous, but the fact remains that I see no evidence for an elven gender binary that cannot be explained away by a mix of attempts to defend human heterosexual norms and a treatment of male as default. I believe the projection of male-and-femaleness onto elves was more to do with human men deciding that the elves they found attractive must be women than anything else.
So far, we have an image of elves as minimally dimorphic (to the point that elves capable of child-bearing etc may have had this ability unacknowledged in text purely due to human presumtuousness) and an explanation for the sexual dimorphism that is heavily implied (but never outright supported) by the text as we receive it today. The erasure of some of the elves’ alien features also has traits we might expect from translations where the expectations of the translator combine with the fact that some things were assumed knowledge by the original writers thousands of years ago. Of course “grey-eyed” meant the sheen on strange and piercing black wells to writers well acquainted with either real elves or reliable depictions of them, and of course “grey-eyed” could only mean eyes that fit an existing beauty standard when the stories told of human men being captivated by the beauty of elves. That the lightness and agility of elves was left in the text unquestioned points to the later translators not even being conscious of their agenda. We can only speculate as to what elves really looked like, but even if we take for granted that their paleness and long limbs were very humanoid (and the fact that elven weapons suit human hands and movements very well does point to the latter, at least), inferring that they look like stereotypical Swedish models with a human gender binary seems at best unsupported.
I think there’s more I could go into, but I’ve rambled on for about 1300 words now and there’s only so much people want to read in a tumblr post! I haven’t read LoTR or the Sil properly in ages though, so this could have a few glaring inaccuracies. I will fight anyone who claims elves had a gender binary though.
