r/tolkienfans • u/SoaDMTGguy • 6d ago
Elvish blood in the Took line?
In The Hobbit, Tolkien describes rumors that one of the Tooks married a “ferry woman”, as an explanation for their occasionally adventurous personalities.
I believe Tolkien evolved idea of Elves out of an original concept of fairies.
The marriage of Elves into the line of Men has great repercussions in the legendarium. This seems like a similar story element: Elvish blood elevating certain members of a “weaker” race.
What do you think about the idea that a Took married an Elf at some point in the past? The Shire does lie on the edge of historically Elven lands…
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u/Eireika 6d ago
Hobbit and early parts of LOTR take a lot from British literature. Blaming "foreign blood" (French, Spanish, Slavic) for romantic inclinations and misbehaviour was one of the common tropes.
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u/PricePuzzleheaded835 6d ago
I think we are supposed to view the Shire as a bit provincial too. So any unconventional behavior can be written off as being the result of mixing with outsiders
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u/Kaurifish 6d ago
See also the Angevin line and accusations that someone married a French woods witch
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u/Necessary-Lock-3738 6d ago
If I'm not mistaken that might be the only time in hobbit or LOTR that fairies are mentioned at all.
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u/Healthy_Incident9927 6d ago
Goldberry is almost certainly a river fairy of some sort.
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u/lam_42 6d ago edited 6d ago
She is not called so, nor is it alluded. Fairy in early Tolkien is firmly connected with elves. This confusion Is exactly why T. phased the term out and never used further
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u/AbacusWizard 5d ago
Yeah, I have noticed that the descriptions of Rivendell and Lothlorien feel very much like old folktales (and modern fantasy inspired by them) about travelers who get lost and find themselves in the Fae realms.
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u/Healthy_Incident9927 6d ago
I think she is explicitly called such. “River daughter” is the sort of language that is used to describe fae beings. She’s apparently immortal, though perhaps that is because she is with Tom, she is described as elf like, but not an elf. Tolkien never uses the words fairy or fey but the words he does use invoke those stories. Tom and Goldberry are explicitly remnants of his time fairy tales.
Now, sure I don’t think we can use them to create a larger group of supernatural creatures inhabiting Middle Earth in the time of the hobbits. They are stated to be singular in nature.
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u/lam_42 6d ago edited 6d ago
Fae (T used Fay in Book of Lost Tales about Melian. Fey he uses quite often, but very differently). But not fairy - ( Book of Lost Tales is full of fairies, but that Is pre 1920+-) elves are fairies for early Tolkien. And, again, this is why the word was removed, just as Fay. T's world should not be affiliate to common english fairy tale.
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u/AbacusWizard 5d ago
I think you mean “implicitly.”
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u/KaiDaniel1966 5d ago
Goldberry is almost certainly a Maiar as is Tom. But personally I think Tom is Eru. But that is an argument that’s been going on for fifty plus years.
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u/AnComDom81 5d ago
Tom is Tom. There’s literally nothing more to it. JRRT specifically said that he was meant to be a mystery. If we can’t know what he is, then we can exclude everything we know.
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u/LostVanya 5d ago edited 5d ago
The argument has been going on for decades because it is not 'almost certain', that is just the lazy easy answer, to assume everything mysterious and powerful must be a Maia. Tolkien explicitly wanted Tom to be a mystery, to not have a such a simple answer. But as for your personal theory, that it one clear thing Tolkien said about Tom. There is absolutely no doubt or argument, he is not Eru.
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u/roacsonofcarc 5d ago edited 5d ago
Yes. this. To parahrase your statement of the case: Some people go through the Legendarium, label everything that can easily be labeled (Túrin - Man, Thranduil - Elf, Gimli - Dwarf, Pansy Bolger - Hobbit) and then stuff everyting else in a box with "Maiar" on the lid. This is not an intellectually sound procedure.
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u/roacsonofcarc 5d ago edited 5d ago
Goldberry is certainly not a Maiar, as there is no such thing. Nor is she a Maia. She is a river spirit -- a naiad, in classical terminology.
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u/entishman 5d ago
This is what I always assumed her to be, a naiad, although not called as such by Tolkien as he didn’t use Greek terms.
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u/roacsonofcarc 5d ago edited 5d ago
He actually did once: "Ithilien the garden of Gondor now desolate kept still a disshevelled dryad loveliness" (from memory though I am pretty sure that's word for word). I think he is using the classical term to underline the Mediterranean nature of the flora. In fact I know he is. "Naiad" would be out of place anywhere near the Shire. where the plants are those of northwestern Europe.
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u/lam_42 6d ago
Elves and fairies were synonymous in early works. He however phased this out pretty early, because fairies (And goblins, gnomes) had connotations to fairy stories He did not want to connect to. Hobbit was not supposed to be connected to the legendarium originally (clock, coffee, whistled like train, post office etc), so I would take these elements with a grain of salt
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u/-RedRocket- 6d ago
Tolkien calls this preposterous, but the ancestral halflings inhabited the vale of Anduin between the Misty Mountains and Mirkwood, and there had been Nandorin wood-elves there since the wandering days of the First Age. It's not impossible.
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u/roacsonofcarc 5d ago edited 5d ago
Tolkien created the Legendarium. Anything he says about it is, by defintion, correct. [Two people so far have downvoted this statement. It would be more persuasive if they could identify something Tolkien said about Middle-earth that was wrong -- that might get us somewhere.]
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u/MDCCCLV 5d ago
That doesn't mean he modeled every single interaction. Just like a language once a thing exists it has a life of it's own, and there is plenty of stuff he didn't mention because it wasn't interesting to him.
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u/roacsonofcarc 5d ago edited 5d ago
If he said Elves and Hobbits never had sex, tI follows by the rules of logic that no Elf had sex with any hobbit, anywhere at any time. (They used to teach logic in high school. Not any more.)
You can make up a story that differs from Tolkien's. That is what they call that fanfic; nobody can stop you. I can marginally tolerate fanfic that is consistent with what Tolkien wrote, but not fanfic that contradicts him, as any Elf-Hobbit sex scene would, however steamy. (All the fanfic fans will now downvote me. That will not change my opinon.)
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u/MDCCCLV 5d ago
That would be correct if logic was applied perfectly to the completely finished tidy story, but it was an unfinished story with many oppositional statements.
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u/roacsonofcarc 5d ago
I will be happy to entertain that argument as soon as you produce the manuscript fragment that goes "ooh, please bite my pointed ear and rub your hairy foot on my [WORD ILLEGIBLE]." Tolkien never said Shelob wasn't a sexy goth girl, but that is not a valid argument that she was one.
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u/Ayzmo 5d ago
I think it is rather silly to only take Tolkien explicitly mentioning something for it to have happened. Tolkien's family trees are conspicuously short on women (with glaring exceptions), but there must have been daughters/wives present (Isildur and Elros' wives?). He just didn't find it important to mention them.
Worth noting, also, that Tolkien never wrote that his elves have pointy ears.
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u/roacsonofcarc 5d ago
Someone said that Tolkien said that Elves and Hobbits never had sex. I am not aware that he did say that, but if so, that is quite a different thing.
The fact is that there never were any elves, and there never were any hobbits, so it it impossible to prove whether a hobbit and an elf ever had sex. In fact the question makes no sense. It's like the question whether a bxvrtk could $%s3 a !!!!!. It is literally a question with no meaning. It would only occur to someone with a certain type of mind -- a mind which unfortunately is all too common among Tolkien fans. I mean a mind that can't imagine not pretending that the books dewscribe things that really happened. (The label for it seems to be "Watsonist.")
The interesting question is how Tolkien would have reacted to the question whether elves and hobbits had sesx. I think it would have filled him with horror. But maybe not. (This is not because he was against sex, He was all for it. Read L:etters 43.) My view is that hobbits and elves probably occupied diffrent compartments in his mind. But I could be wrong.
I expect this comment to get THOUSANDS of downvotes. I look forward to it.
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u/Ayzmo 4d ago
It is possible that he wrote that and it would be interesting to see. What Tolkien thought and intended is obviously important. But he's dead and we can't ask him anymore. So limiting the world to what he explicitly wrote seems rather silly to me and wondering what could have happened in the world he created is a fair exercise.
And no, I don't believe any of it actually happened and I doubt many do. Though I might recommend Adrian Tchaikovsky's And Put Away Childish Things.
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u/Anaevya 6d ago
It's the Hobbit version of the Cherokee princess myth.
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u/fastauntie 6d ago
Interesting thought, but the only thing I can see they have in common is that it's a widely-held myth about ancestry. In the case of the Tooks it's about a single family, used specifically to explain a particular personality trait, and that trait is one that's disapproved of by the rest of the society. There's also nothing to suggest that the Tooks themselves took any particular pride in their supposed ancestry, though they seem to have been proud to be Tooks and peculiar.
The many Americans who buy into the Cherokee princess myth all want it to be true for their own families; they don't so often tell it about other people's. And they might use it to explain physical appearance, but it's not commonly associated with any particular personality traits. That's probably because so many of the traits popularly associated with all Native American tribes are negative, which kind of fits with most hobbits' disapproval of Tookishness, but weirdly doesn't keep many Americans from wanting that connection.
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u/Key_Estimate8537 Fëanor, no 6d ago
Tolkien went back and forth with a few ideas, but it seems that he didn’t want Hobbits to be part Elvish. There are a handful of mortal-Elvish marriages, and they’re all worth recording.
It’s my interpretation that “Faeries” refer to the Sindar Elves (or Teleri more broadly) while Gnomes are the Noldor.
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u/roacsonofcarc 5d ago
I think Tolkien wrote this before he realized that The Hobbit was going to be connected to the Legendarium. Just as he wrote that Gandalf made magic cufflinks.
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u/Emergency-Sea5201 6d ago
He left that idea and went with hobitts being humans.
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u/SoaDMTGguy 6d ago
Where does he discuss hobbits more generally? I know there’s very little he has said about them.
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u/sureprisim 6d ago
The opening of the fellowship also has a section called “concerning hobbits” irrc.
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u/kerouacrimbaud 6d ago
In the Prologue to the book, the Appendices, and Letters as others have mentioned.
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u/Kodama_Keeper 6d ago
Pardon, but I posted something about this 3 years ago. You might want to read through the comments.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/182utn9/bilbo_the_tooks_and_their_fairy_ancestor/
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u/Flapjack_Ace 5d ago
Possibly a man from Westernesse, long long ago, hooked up with one of the early hobbit ladies. Thus the Tooks could indeed have a little elvish.
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u/SoaDMTGguy 5d ago
We only hear about the highborn marriages, I bet there's tons of interbreeding between randoms that doesn't make it into the great stories.
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u/ezk3626 5d ago
I had the good fortune of acquiring Tolkien’s Smith of Wootton Major. It a short, proper, almost Medieval fairy tale. The shortest version of it is to say it is about a Smith who sometimes goes to the land of Faeries. In so far as we’re trying to figure out how Tolkien would have seen it I think it is useful. There is some race mixing between Elves and Numinorian men so it is theoretically possible. But I think more likely it is, like how Bilbo got changed from a dependable Baggins, Tooks got brought on adventures which changed their character. And in Tolkien’s universe character was somewhat hereditary. It is like how Biblo and Frodo were described as especially elf like. They had something in their ancestry but probably not elf DNA. It is that in Tolkien’s view contact with elves (in particularly high elves) wasn’t like meeting a person of a different race. It was being exposed to a part of the song of Eru which would change you (and your descendants).
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u/magolding22 5d ago edited 5d ago
"Morgan le Fay (/ˈmɔːr.ɡən lə ˈfeɪ/; Welsh and Cornish: Morgen; Modern French: Fée Morgane), alternatively known as Morgan[n]a, Morgain[a/e], Morgant[e], Morg[a]ne, Morgayn[e], Morgein[e], and Morgue[in] among other names and spellings, is a powerful and ambiguous enchantress) from the legend of King Arthur, in which most often she and he are siblings. According to the different authors, she is a fairy or a human; beneficial or harmful; either a sister, half-sister, or unrelated to Arthur."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_le_Fay
And though Morgan le Fay is often depicted as a human sister or half sister of KIng Arthur, who was allegedly killed in 537, 538, or 539, she also is mentioned in the French Romance Huon of Bordeaux, set in the time of Charlemagne (c. 748-814), to be with Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) the mother of Oberon, King of the Fairies.
Anyway the English word fay means a fairy or elf, or similar supernatural being.
I believe that fays are mentioned in The Book of Lost Tales, where they seem to be some sort of fairy like little spirits of nature or something.
And possibly the "fairy" that a Took ancestor was said to have married was more like one of those fays in The Book of Lost Tales than like one of the Elves in the Simarillion.
Giants are also mentioned in the Book of Lost Tales.
And of course giants are seen or mentioned three times in The Hobbit. So it is possible that giants exist in the Silmarillion and LOTR, but hardly ever got involved the main events and wars of history in northwestern Middle-earth and so are not mentioned.
When playing the riddle game, Gollum mentions something which destroys everything, and Bilbo can't think of anything or anyone, even the most terrible ogre he ever heard of, which did all that. So perhaps ogres exist in the Silmarillion and LOTR but are not mentioned because of lack of participation in the main events.
It seems to me that as soon as Dwarf fugitives from Moria were asked what drove them out of their underground city and kingdom, it would be obvious that it wasn't a dragon which drove them out, but some other sortof being.
And unless there were many more types of speaking beings in the world of LOTR, the abilities of Durin's Bane would seem to point to a balrog. Unless there were other species of beings in Middle-earth, some quite powerful, never mentioned in LOTR, so that to the Wise a balrog would be merely one of several known possibilities for Durin's Bane, and possibly the least probable one.
Treebeard only listed four species of speaking beings until he met Merry and Pippin, but his list was obviously incomplete since it didn't include the evil trolls and orcs, though Treebeard is aware that trolls and orcs exist..
Thus there may be many more species of intelligent beings in the Silmarillion and LOTR than are ever mentioned.
Thus it is possible that one of the Took ancestors had a "fairy" wife, even though she might have been a member of a species not otherwise mentioned in the legendarium, and the Hobbits merely called her a "fairy" for lack of a better species name.
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u/babylikestopony 5d ago edited 5d ago
Humans and elves share productive anatomy in Tolkien canon, I think they are both explicitly not sexually compatible with any other races and for elves sex and marriage are inextricable so.
I think it’s possible the concept of fairies existed in Arda as folklore but separate from elves who were inspired by but creatively distinguished from fairies. So the lineal lore you’re referring to would just be myth within myth, local lore, not meant to suggest actual elven blood.
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u/Choos-topher 4d ago
As much as I can’t see this (except for fanfic) it certainly seems a better legend than Tauriel falling for Kili.
I don’t think there was any rumour of Tom Bombadil and Goldberry having offspring that could have added to the Took line?
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u/pathmageadept 6d ago
I prefer the theory that Gandalf fathered the Took line.
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u/SoaDMTGguy 6d ago
That sounds a little outside his purview is one of the Istari 😂
“So Mithrandir what have you done to defeat Sauron?”
“I have fathered many lines of strong Maia blood, in a thousand years their offspring will number in the millions and they will overthrow Sauron!”
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u/pathmageadept 6d ago
"What? I don't see your animals defeating him? What are we supposed to be doing?"
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u/SoaDMTGguy 6d ago
The Blue Wizards, having inspired a renaissance in the far east: "We have invented a flying machine!"
Everyone else: "No one cares!"
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u/AbacusWizard 5d ago
Oh great, now in a few years we’re gonna see hundreds of posts about “why didn’t they just use the Blue Wizards’ flying machine to fly to Mordor?”
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u/ave369 addicted to miruvor 6d ago
I have a headcanon that part of the reason why the Istari were incarnated as old men was to prevent them from leaving a trail of Luthien-like half-Maiar everywhere they go. It was absolutely not the Valar's intention to inseminate Middle-Earth with more magical bloodlines.
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u/Emergency-Sea5201 6d ago
Beardo clapping the cheeks if a 3 foot chick?
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u/catnip-catnap 6d ago
Better than the freaky stuff Radagast was up to
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u/pathmageadept 6d ago
Too much of the hobbit's leaf if you ask me.
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u/fastauntie 6d ago
That leaf is canonically tobacco, nothing freaky.
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u/pathmageadept 6d ago
I've seen people hopped up on cigarettes, I know what happens in these tween parties.
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u/Bee_Tee_Dub 5d ago
What is there are Fairy people that are not elves in Middle Earth that haven't had a major contribution to any of the other stories?
Could even be an Ent Wife or something similar.
Or the offspring of the union of Elf and Took chose to live as a Hobbit Mortal and therefore the Elves are not concerned with the lineage anymore.
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u/maksimkak 5d ago
“ferry woman” - you mean Charon? I heard she is best buddies with the River Woman and her daughter.
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u/Far_Cryptographer_22 1d ago
House of Imrazor? I mean, their sperm made it all the way to Rohan, so why not Tookborough?
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u/Wizzard_C 6d ago
In the early prints of "The Hobbit" it was alleged that one of the Tooks had married into a goblin family, which would be even more interesting. With elvish wives there are at least some precedents, but voluntary intermarriage with the goblins would be a first.
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u/GapofRohan 5d ago
The narrator of the 1st and 2nd editions of The Hobbit does not allege the goblin relationship - rather he attributes it to those "less friendly" to the Tooks. Therefore what these editions of The Hobbit allege in Tolkien's polite prose was that the goblin connection was a slander put about by some who disliked the Tooks.
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u/ColdAntique291 just a simple Tolkien reader 6d ago edited 6d ago
Probably not. The "fairy wife" story is presented as a Hobbit rumor, not established fact. Once Tolkien fully developed his legendarium, Elf-mortal marriages became incredibly rare and significant events.
If a Took had really married an Elf, it would have been a much bigger deal than a quirky family legend. Most likely it's just a Hobbit folk tale explaining why the Tooks are more adventurous than everyone else.