Institutt for kultur- og språkvitenskap
Universitetet i Stavanger
Guest Lecture
Date:
31 August 2023
Room:
AR V-101
Time:
14:30
Thomas Honegger (University of Jena)
Beautiful and sublime - and never mind the pointed ears: Visualizing the Elves throughout the centuries
Tolkien almost single-handedly rescued the Elves from dwindling away into oblivion [Pace Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter (1924)]. He did so by reverting the process of diminution that was already well under way by the time Shakespeare wrote plays such as A Midsummer Night's Dream (ca. 1595) and that reached its nadir a short time later in Michael Drayton's Nimphidia (1627). Tolkien turned back the clock and modelled his Elves on the inhabitants of Faërie as found in, for example, the Middle English Sir Orfeo (ca. 1330), which participates in an older and more venerable tradition. This tradition depicts the Elves as human-sized, impressive, and sometimes threatening figures.
Tolkien's literary reconceptualization of the Elves meant that the predominant image of the Victorian (and Edwardian) 'flower fairies' would be superseded by more appropriate visualisations. Consequently, we witness a reconceptualization of the inhabitants of Faërie also on a visual level, though illustrations featuring Elves were at first few and far between. Furthermore, since Tolkien neither painted nor drew any Elves [The one exception seems to be his painting 'Beleg finds Flinding in Taur-nu-Fuin' (July 1928), which shows the Elves Beleg and Flinding as diminutive figures. See here, accessed 17 August 2022], the starting points for the visualization of protagonists such as Legolas, Elrond, Arwen, or Galadriel have been the vague yet evocative descriptions in the texts themselves. It was thus basically a question which artist would successfully stake his or her claim first.
It is the aim of my paper to trace the development of the depiction of Tolkien's Elves and the impact this had on how we visualize the inhabitants of Faërie in art, movies, and video-games by means of selected examples.