[William Cloud Hicklin]

Now we're getting into two really separate questions which run through an overlap of texts; but I'll split them up, turning to hair first.

The notorious passage from Appendix F remained a description of the Noldor even in the penultimate version of that text: "I have sometimes (not in this book) used Gnomes for Noldor, and Gnomish for Noldorin. This has been done...." etc. Note that this was several iterations after the "golden house of Finrod" line had first appeared. This vanished in the final text for the publishers, apparently since it seemed (in CT's word) otiose to talk about terminology which T had scrubbed from the LR. When preparing BOLT 1, Christopher was at a loss to explain it; "I am unable to determine how this extraordinary perversion of meaning arose." A dozen years later, after intensely studying the Appendices texts, he was more measured in expressing his puzzlement but no less puzzled: "it does indeed seem 'extraordinary' that he should have failed to observe this point [the Vanyar's hair]." He goes on with a speculation that Vanyarin hair-color had not yet arisen; but then, in a footnote (CT, it should be noted, often adds late corrections via footnote rather than disturb galley-proofs), shoots his own argument down, observing that the Golden Hair already existed in the first draft of the Tale of Maeglin, which is definitely older than the text at issue.

However carefully Tolkien emended "Noldor" to "Quendi" and "Eldar", and however attentive he was in emending Finrod to Finarfin in the 2nd Ed, it's still noteworthy that this 'care' didn't extend to noticing that his statement as re-applied was simply wrong. Homer does sometimes nod! (remember the Thror/Thrain mixup?) It becomes even more confusing when one observes that the passage is actually unclear as to whether "They" actually refers back to Eldar or to Quendi; grammatically and logically it could be either.

"In the final typescript, that sent to the printer, many changes entered that were not, as was almost invariably my father's practice when proceeding from one draft to the next, anticipated by corrections made to the preceding text: they seem in fact to have entered as he typed. There is no suggestion in Text B ... of the alteration of the passage concerning the word Gnomes so that it should apply to the word Elves, and the placing of it at the end of the text instead of preceding the discussion of Dwarves. Nothing could show more clearly the extreme pressure my father was under."

In short, the fact that a particular set of words appeared in print, while entitled to a presumption in its favor, doesn't get an irrebuttable presumption that this, absolutely, was precisely what Tolkien meant, especially since we know that T could in fact goof, or express himself elliptically, and further was capable of changing his mind about aspects of his world large and small. For example, App F as printed contains the statement that "The Westron was...in origin the language of those whom the Eldar called the Atani or Edain"- a shorthand which is not, strictly, accurate. The fact that the veteran Patience-player late in life set himself a 'rule' regarding printed matter, as in the Question of Ros, doesn't alter the freedom which on other occasions he exercised, nor the fact that Tolkien may have been the Creator of Arda but he wasn't the infallible Iluvatar.

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This Appendix was written and re-written during the period of the Great Linguistic Shift, the momentous decision, marked by the 'discursus' added to the Grey Annals, to convert the Noldorin of the Exiles into the Sindarin of Beleriand.

This required a complete recasting of the family tree of languages which had been in effect since Lammasthen, and which had still been 'valid' when the LR narrative was written. It took Tolkien a while to sort out what had become a real problem for him: whereas before "Doriathrin" and other Elf-tongues of Middle-earth could be classed as East-elven (and largely ignored), now he had to bring 'Danian' languages into a close relationship with Sindarin, a native Beleriandic language rather than a devolved Exilic Quenya. And the linguistic question necessarily redounds upon the 'ethnic question' (inevitably for the old philologist); if Sindarin was an Eldarin tongue then related languages must also in some way be 'Eldarin' and not Avarin, and the folk who spoke them likewise.

To be sure, even before the GLS T had hedged his bets somewhat, stating that Noldorin in Beleriand had "drawn closer" to the Doriathrin tongue of the natives; but even there of course Doriathrin was seen as a West-elven or Eldarin dialect. Yet Tolkien had in the 30s decided already that the Green-elves and their relatives east of the Blue Mountains were *not* Avari, but Pereldar . The Danas were "not counted among the Eldar, nor yet among the Lembi [->Avari]...nor was their tongue like the tongues of the Lembi, but was of its own kind, different from the tongues of Valinor and of the Lembi, and most like that of Doriath." This is I think an important conception for the future; remember that at this time and throughout the writing of LR there was apparently no connection at all between the Laiquendi and the Elves of the Vales of Anduin.

There is no question of course that at the time Tolkien wrote the Lorien chapters the woodland Elves were conceived as speaking an 'alien tongue' that none of the company save Legolas apparently can understand, especially so when one reflects that then and for a very long time thereafter T conceived of the Common Speech as being a sort of demotic Numenorean Noldorin; Rumil's inability to communicate in CS, and Haldir's hesitancy, indicate a native speech completely unconnected to Noldorin. Even as late as Text F4 of the Appendix, which came after the GLS, T explicitly tells us that the majority of the Elves of Mirkwood were "Eastern Elves that had hearkened to no summons to the Sea;" i.e. Avari. And yet, and yet: whereas earlier App F texts repeated the idea that personal and place-names from Mirkwood and Lorien were of Silvan or 'Lemberin' origin, in F4 he declares them to be Sindarin. It was at this time Thranduil and Legolas (and Celeborn) became Sindar of Beleriandic origin, and the Silvans had become "Sindarized" by their incoming ruling caste.

So in the text rushed to the printers in 1955 he simply draws a bright line between West-Elven and East-Elven tongues, the latter absent since former 'Silvan' vocabulary has become Sindarin (remarkably easily). But the history was moving apace. Most significantly for our purposes, the 1951 revision of the Quenta Silmarillion takes up the story of Dan and his breakaway, but expressly changes the neither-nor staus of QS and Lammasethen to make them Eldar and Alamanyar just like the (newly-renamed) Sindar. The Annals of Aman, contemporaneous but slightly later, makes it explicit for the first time that it was at the Anduin and the barrier of the Hithaeglir that the Nandor (now so named) broke away: again, a pregnant notion, but its import not yet realised ca. 1955; it would be by the time of Quendi and Eldar, about 4 years later, that the identity of the Silvan Elves with the Nandor becomes explicit.