The People of Middle Earth: an (Almost) Complete Guide

Middle Earth is one of the most well-constructed beautifully built fantasy worlds in literature history but it would be nothing without the people that inhabit it although to be completely fair I probably would read an 800-page novelization of just a tour of a completely empty Middle Earth this script was kind of hard to write tolkien's free peoples have so much Rich depth and development that I could probably make a full video just about each of these groups so you know I've decided I'm gonna do that so this video is just gonna act as a little primer overview into each of these different groups who they are their Origins and a little bit about what inspired them I'm Jess part-time Hobbit and today we're talking our way through the free peoples of Middle Earth let's begin by defining the free peoples of Middle Earth so they are a fully sentient groups of people and B never fully fell pretty to Sauron so that rules out any monsters or beasts like dragons or or trolls as well as anybody who permanently went to the dark side such as Orcs it's because of the Free People finally all uniting that Sauron Was Defeated at the end of The Return of the King so knowing the traits and origins of these groups is super important although they're not categorized within the Free People the first living Spirits within Middle Earth were called the ainu they were created by the one God called eru iluvitar and through his guidance they sang physical creation into being and then descended down to inhabit it the I know that came down into Middle Earth are known as the Valar and the Mayar and take the role of kind of demigods or angels and if you want to know more about either of them I have two videos on the subject so check those out once you're done here so while the Valor admirer were technically in Middle Earth First and every once in a while they did take on physical form the first actual created people to be born within Middle Earth were the dwarves now if you you only know a little about Middle Earth lore this may come as kind of a shock to you because the elves are literally called by everyone the firstborn of the louvitar but the dwarves were technically first you see the Valar while Divine are far from perfect and after creating and making the world perfect to be inhabited by these elves some of the Valar got a little antsy waiting for them to come along foremost in this feeling was aule the Valar with great skill in crafting and blacksmithing now it is super important to note here that allay's impatience while certainly misguided and a mistake was never ill intentioned ale's love of making and crafting was entirely unselfish and in the silmarillion Tolkien writes for so greatly did allay desire the coming of the children to have Learners to whom he could teach his lore and his crafts that he was unwilling to await the Fulfillment of the designs of illusitar so before the elves awoke in the secrecy of allay's Workshop he created his own People based on the vague Notions of the elves that he had seen in those first days of creation his people turned out a little short and ill-tempered and hairy and that is where we get dwarves they were strong and unyielding as Stone and had a great desire to learn but because allay wasn't working under the jurisdiction of iluvatar his people lacked their own will as well as the true spark of Life called the flame imperishable that only a louvitar could Grant it wouldn't be long until I luvatore saw what Alay had done and basically called him out for creating these things both outside of a Louis vuitar's chosen plan and for creating something that doesn't have its own will ale quickly realizes that he's made a mistake and throws himself on ailey's Mercy as for his Hasty Creations allay took up the great hammer to Smite the dwarves and he wept and the dwarves shrank from the hammer and were afraid and they bowed down their heads and begged for mercy in the guitar halts his hand and tells aulet to look at the dwarves who are cowering from his blow elevatar explains that they have now been bestowed with a will of their own or else they wouldn't have protested their own Extinction at the hand of their Master whom they had to obey haolei is ecstatic marveling at the creative powers of louvitar to perfect Ali's imperfect creation and although they weren't part of his original plan edu iluvitar accepts the dwarves as his own some in Middle Earth even refer to the dwarves as the adopted Children of the louvitar still olivatar didn't want to totally remake his plan so instead he put the dwarves to sleep deep in the mountains so that they could awake after the elves had already woken it feels kind of mean to say but the dwarves are kind of the oopsie people of Middle Earth they're like the the first Pancake of the morning when you're still trying to figure out if the batter's the right consistency if you need to add more milk and if you need to turn down the heat on the pan and that first one is kind of weirdly shaped and burnt but it's still a pancake still in spite or perhaps because of this the dwarves are one of the hardest and strongest people of Middle Earth they're described as Stone hard stubborn fast and friendship and an enmity and they suffer Toil and hunger and hurt a body more readily than all other speaking peoples though prone to Greed dwarves are generally pretty morally upright unable to be swayed by the corruption of evil all dwarves male and female alike are short and stocky and endowed with magnificent beards that will never be cut or trimmed as long as the dwarf has anything to say about it just like allay their creator dwarves are immensely skilled in crafting and blacksmithing and they've built forges and workshops deep in the caverns of their Mountain cities the dwarves are actually a bit of an anomaly in that Tolkien doesn't explain to us what happens to their souls after they die they seem to have developed their own beliefs about it particularly in regards to the souls of their kings and Lords being reincarnated after they die but that has never been confirmed by The Wider lore maybe since their creation was so accidental and sudden he you know never came up with a plan for their souls and has just been procrastinating the choice ever since tolkien's dwarves whilst fairly original in their portrayal aren't a particularly new idea whilst creating them talking Drew directly from the Dwarfs of Norse and Germanic folklore and these dwarfs were often set to be the direct antithesis or the kind of natural opposite to elves short where they're tall and cunning where they're Noble though these dwarfs oftentimes aren't actually evil they'll use their skills of magic and their ability to craft in order to scheme these Legends also imply that dwarfs may be turned into stone By the Light of the sun on their skin which means that they dwell in dark caves although Tolkien didn't rip them directly out of myths he probably Drew from these old stories in order to craft his Dwarven race the dwarves are a study in the imperfect their creation story is messy and incidental and unlike many other groups in Middle Earth they don't rely on on beauty or nobility in order to be good people I think there are tolkien's way of showing that not everything that's good has to be glamorous or you know all that is gold does not glitter despite how great the dwarves are though you do have to take a step back and look at the sheer environmental impact of these guys I mean all the smoke and fumes they would have to produce like there there is no ventilation there are no Fume hoods for this OSHA would be having a field day and digging that deep into the heart of the mountain I mean you're just begging to get balrogged and then you have to have something to fuel all of those fires so the local forests just have to be decimate mated by them luckily since Tolkien was a big fan of the natural world he also had this thought and embodied his worries about the natural world in LA's spouse the Valar yavana after seeing what kind of destructive little dump trucks the dwarves were she came to illuvitar in order to speak on behalf of all of the little plants trees and animals that she had just finished growing in Middle Earth she worries that the dwarves obsession with crafting and creating would lead them to destroying her natural realm Avatar is like yeah so about that it's actually not just gonna be the dwarves all of the people that are coming are gonna have to make use of the natural world but uh they'll be really chill and cool and respectful I I promise to her credit Ivana doesn't back down and says that yes theoretically they'll be respectful and Nice To Nature but there's also going to be a lot of evil creeping into Middle Earth and that corruptive power may have a really bad impact on her defenseless plants and animals a levitar more or less agrees and since he already gave allay his little guys he tells Ivana she can pick one of her Creations to make sentient she decides that since animals can at least run away to defend themselves she should pick one of her plants and thus life is granted to a few great trees and we find Ants we don't quite know how much they woke up here since in their own mythology they were actually woken up and taught to speak by elves later on so it is kind of entirely unclear whether ants actually are trees that just woke up or if there are souls that got sent down by Ivana that now look like trees and we're never going to get answers on that because Tolkien himself was unsure writing ants were either Souls sent to inhabit trees or else that slowly took on the likeness of trees owing to their inborn love of trees either way it seems like being entish is kind of a state of mind Treebeard tells Mary and Pippin some of us are still true ants and Lively enough in our fashion but many are growing sleepy growing tree-ish as you might say so it seems we have a bit of a spectrum here from tree to ENT with one's level of awakedness being the defining Factor so if zero is like full on just like photosynthesizing in the sun and a 10 would be like that one ant whose head is on fire while they're destroying Isengard and he he dips it in the river I'll show the scene here I think I'm sitting at like a three and a half let me know in the comments where you are on that scale the ends are slow moving but formidable Force towering at over 14 feet tall and taking on the shape of whatever tree they were made to protect at one point in their story there were also end wives to go with the ants though their story is shrouded in mystery it's believed that long ago the ants and the end wives parted ways because the end wives needed Open Sky guys and clear sun in order to grow their flowers and vegetables outside of the darkness of the forest the ant wives taught humans and Hobbits the art of agriculture later on Tolkien theorizes that the end wives were probably wiped out at one point as Sauron was raising the land but the ants of fangorn forest still believe their ant wives to be simply lost and not dead Tolkien generally believed the ants to be one of his more original Creations although he did later realize that he may have taken some inspiration from the talking trees of George McDonald's fairy tales he also believes that they may have been an unconscious attack on William Shakespeare of all people Tolkien really was not a big Shakespeare guy and apparently he had always taken issue specifically with The Walking Forest part of his play Macbeth in the play Macbeth the main character receives a prophecy saying Macbeth shall never be vanquished until great Burnham Wood to high duncanine hill shall come again against him Macbeth ever The Optimist takes this to mean that he'll never be vanquished since you know how could a forest walk up a hill Shakespeare of course then pulls a little Uno reverse on the guy and the enemy army takes branches from Burnham Wood and uses it to disguise themselves as they sneak up on his castle eventually tragically vanquishing Macbeth it's all very clever and word play e in the smug little way that Shakespeare always is but apparently Tolkien read this and went well why couldn't the trees just actually walk so in a very Cosmic way we have old Billy shakes to thank for Treebeard and his constituents ants are an embodiment of nature itself an encompassment of tolkien's own frustration with industrialization and a way for him to give a voice to the Natural World which he saw as being in Peril ivana's words to her husband aule after the creation of the ants truly sums it up now let thy children beware for there shall walk a power in the forests whose wrath they will arouse at their Peril but with those two groups out of the way let's get into the official firstborn people the elves before the Sun and the Moon had even been invented under the light of the freshly installed Stars the elves began to awake the first awake were three pairs of elves who woke on the shores of the Bay of quivenen they conveniently married whichever elf woke up directly next to them which is an incredibly efficient system them these six elves traveled throughout the Bay of quiven and waking up whoever they found and along the way inventing language and music to communicate it wasn't long until one of the Valar the hunter orome found them singing in the Starlight and was immediately enthralled the elves were immensely beautiful and powerful and through anime they learned a lot about the world and its making from the get-go all of the Valor were pretty much obsessed with the elves desperately wanting them to come over the sea to live with them in valinor in peace this call was so strong that it echoed throughout history calling all elves to valinor until at the end of the events of the Lord of the Rings they all permanently left the shores of Middle Earth for good in order to be in valinor however this was far from a simple process early on many of the elves outright refused to go in balinor leading to a fracturing in their ranks the three groups formed would be known as the noldor the vanyar and their taleri and the conflict between them and the forces of evil as well as between these groups interpersonally would shape much of the early history of Middle Earth elves are tall and ethereally beautiful generally wise and incredibly slow to age to all of the other peoples of Middle Earth they are utterly dazzling the hobbits could see the Starlight glimmering in their hair and in their eyes they bore no lights yet as they walked a shimmer like the light of the Moon Above the Rim of the hill before it rises seemed to fall about their feet though most don't have magical powers there is something of the Divine in the Alps they become cognizant of what's going on aware and capable of Reason fairly early on in their life but they don't actually reach full physical maturity until they're about 100 years old and very very importantly they are more or less Immortal I say more or less because of of course Tolkien would never make anything that simple The Souls of elves are immutably tied to Middle Earth much like the valard their souls will never depart from it and if they are killed in Warfare or disembodied due to grief which actually happens a lot their souls depart from their physical bodies and are eventually recycled into a new physical form in valinor unless of course you just really sucked as a person in which case you'll be floating around as a disembodied ghost for the rest of time but for the most part elves are ageless and Immortal their souls forever trapped within time and space elves are one of the people that Tolkien gets a lot of credit for creating but creating May kind of be the wrong word whilst he was writing the Lord of the Rings the concept of elves was much more small and sprightly more on par with our idea of fairies as inconsequential little garden dwellers to Delight children however Tolkien chose to look back back into the Mythic conception of elves in the Norse prose Etta as well as the tuidadanan of Irish folklore in order to kind of restore elves to their former Mythic glory and power these myths told of creatures that were tall immensely powerful and devastatingly beautiful they had close relationships with the gods of the old world and because of this they had some kind of primordial magical power it was from this tradition that Tolkien crafted his elves as Larger than Life powerful figures of fairy tale they were the first and most powerful evolutionars people but they were not the final word instead the fate of Middle Earth was to be eventually taken over by men less obviously powerful than elves but much more profoundly blessed men are considered the second born children of Louis vuitar born under the light of the brand new son on the first day of the first age they were born in the Far East but many of them migrated towards the new Sun heading west until they found the elves but already we can start to see the very unique traits of men as many of them stayed in the East already being tempted by the powers of evil whispering in their ears many of those that stayed behind would become the haradrim or the easterlings and would stand with Sauron at the end of the third age however Not all men were corrupted and a lot of them came to the west and fought with the elves against evil and those became known as the edain those that helped the elves out were given the island Kingdom of numenor in thanks and although admittedly the whole numenor thing ended up a little bit tragic the descendants of the edain were still alive and well in Middle Earth now called the dunadine men were much like elves in physical form but they're less beautiful and less innately wise but their primary defining characteristic is something called The Gift of illuvatar at the conception of mankind it was said that the sons of men die indeed and leave the world wherefore they are called strangers or guests death is their fate the gift of a louvitar which As Time wears even the powers shall Envy unlike the elves whose souls are permanently tied to the physical world after death The Souls of men pass on outside of Middle Earth to a place that even the Valar aren't made aware of and you might be thinking to yourself well if I opened a present labeled the gift of the louvitar and found you know actual death itself inside of it I'd be pretty pissed off and you wouldn't be entirely wrong men weren't exactly always able to conceptualize the fact that they die as a gift in fact their curse of mortality is one of the things that the forces of evil would use to manipulate men then into becoming cruel and bitter however because men die because their souls are not tied to Middle Earth men have a freedom of will unlike any of the other free people illivitar says that men should have a virtue to shape their life amidst the powers and chances of the world beyond the music of the ainur which is fate to All Things else in plain speak men are the only creatures to have free will because their souls are not bound and governed by Fate men have the ability to shape their own short lives in a way that all the longevity and wisdom of the elves could never even consider it's this level of freedom and unpredictability that makes them the perfect inhabitants of Middle Earth in a way that the elves could never be elves are a relic of a Divine and storied history but men have the capacity to shape history over the course of their thousands and thousands of lifetimes of course we don't exactly need to go pouring through ancient Mythic manuscripts in order to find the inspiration for tolkien's human beings in your case you just need to you know look at the screen you know that being said I would argue that the men of tolkien's work aren't exactly modeled after you or me the profound drama of their lives this constant warring between good and evil seems much more a relic of the heroes of ancient Mythic Tales I can't even remember the last time I had to choose if I would betray my Birthright and stray to the dark side I don't I don't even know if I have a Birthright while tolkien's men are certainly men I think the Scopes of their stories and personalities are unrelatable to most people I would argue instead that we find a reflection of everyday man in the last group we're going to talk about Hobbits and the truly fascinating thing about Hobbits is that for all intents and purposes they are men their Origins are murky at Best But as much as we can tell Hobbits are just an offshoot of really early mankind made small by their habits and lifestyle rather than being in entirely different species and this would mean that they also bear the gift of illuvatar Independence and freedom despite the fear of death and an eventual claim to the entirety of Middle Earth itself habits are small generally even smaller and more slight than dwarves and they refuse to wear shoes for the most part since their feet are strong and leathery all on their own their isolation from the outside world has made Hobbits much more timid and mild-mannered than most men and Tolkien eloquently describes them they love peace and quiet and Good tilled Earth a well-ordered and well-farmed Countryside was their favorite haunt but that shouldn't belittle their strength or courage though unassuming Hobbits have the hardiness of dwarves the nurturing hearts of ants the wisdom of elves and The Bravery of human beings considering that it's clear that Hobbits are tolkien's love letter to the every man in an interview he said that Hobbits are just rustic English people made small in size because it reflects the generally small reach of their imagination not the small reach of their courage or latent power tolkien's Hobbits are just the peak of his idea that we are here surviving because of the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds I think that Tolkien used his different groups of people to explore various facets of mankind by exaggerating certain features for elves or dwarves by embodying different philosophies in ants and Men he was able to write a story with all of the Intrigue drama and force of any ancient tale but its Hobbits that he places at the center of this story the perfect medium of all of these traits and a lesson to all of us that even the smallest person can change the course of the future let me know which of these groups you guys think you would be because like obviously we all are probably Hobbits but I also think that in my case I have a bit of the Moody drama of a numenorean person inside of me so you know let me know in the comments like this video if you got to this point And subscribe because I put out videos almost every week except next week there won't be a video next week because I'm very busy but after that we'll be back to the normal posting schedule of every Friday at 3 pm EST thank you all so much for watching liking commenting and subscribing and I hope that you all have a very happy holiday [Music] I think

Channel: Jess of the Shire

Views: 71,692

Keywords: lotr, lord of the rings, tolkien, video essay, literature, booktok, deep dive

Id: JWCwbI5o7Kg

Length: 24min 41sec (1481 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2023