Moriquendi - Concept and Creation

Concept and Creation

Tom Shippey has identified the concept of Tolkien's "Light elves" and "Dark elves" as being inspired by the medieval Icelandic Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson which distinguishes between ljósálfar (light-elves) and dökkálfar (dark-elves). Snorri writes that the dark-elves are "black", svart, but simultaneously he writes of all "black-elves" being dwarves. This contradiction has first been investigated in the 19th century by the German linguist Jacob Grimm and the Danish philosopher Nikolaj Grundtvig, where Grimm noted a dualism between good and evil in the Edda's light-elves and dark-elves, like Grundtvig, but raised the question if not three kinds of Norse elves should be assumed. Shippey suggests that these discussions must have been known to Tolkien and that "one of the starting points of his whole developed mythology was this problem in nomenclature, this apparent contradiction in ancient texts...".

A first concept of Eöl the Dark Elf was written by Tolkien in 1917 in the tale The Fall of Gondolin and was eventually published in The Silmarillion by Christopher Tolkien. "Dark Elf" is however a personal appellation resulting from Eöl dwelling in a shaded forest. It was in the "Quenta Silmarillion" which was written in the 1930s, that Tolkien first used the term Dark-elves for those elves who were lost on their wanderings towards Valinor and did not see the light of the Two Trees.