Hobbit2 - Chapter 03 - A Short Rest

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

If PJ will not add anything of his own,this chapter might merit a full 10 seconds. But knowing him, I'd say that the names will be the only things true to the book here, and the chapter will take up to 5 minutes, with some nice sub-plot. This sub-plot will ultimately become the reason for Elrond's warm welcome of Frodo in FOTR.



The sad thing is, I'm half serious.

If there is a banana in the scene in the movie, we'll know who to blame.

Originally Posted by Formendacil, from The History of The Hobbit I: Rivendell

The master of the house was an elf-friend - one of those people whose fathers came into the strange stories of the beginning of history and the wars of the Elves and goblins, and the brave men of North. There were still some people in those day [who were>] who had both elves and heroes of the North for ancestors, and Elrond the master of the house was one.

There's another word in this passage, which is also in my edition of TH, that is interesting and it is of course the word "elf-friend".

Both here and in the published text the term appears to refer to what readers later call "half-elven", those who share the blood of both elf and men.

Yet in LotR, the term is used to describe Frodo, who is all hobbit, the erratic Tooks still being recognised as hobbits. Both Glorfindel and Goldberry claim they can see that Frodo is an "elf-friend".

The Legendarium has the figures of Eriol and Aelfwine who have a role in the transmission of Elvish stories and traditions to mankind; they are referred to by Scull and Hammond as "transmitters" (although their Reader's Guide has no entry for elf-friend). Christopher Tolkien refers to them as mere transmitters as well. But they, like Frodo, lack elven blood.

Verlyn Fleiger's study of "elf-friend" in Tolkien's Legendarium discusses these liminal characters but I don't have a copy of the essay at hand so I can't say if she references this use in TH.

What she concludes about the elf-friend characters is that they are connectors or mediators between the world of fairie and the world of men, those who can connect with myth via imagination. But I can't recall if she addresses any point that an elf-friend could in fact have elven blood.

So did Tolkien change his use of "elf-friend" or can it be made consistent with the later references?