posted
I have been reading some history of the middle earth and when I came up to the awakening of the elves something occurred to me. It seems the elves became known when Orom� the hunter heard their singing voices, in the far east of middle earth. He named them "Eldar", the People of the Stars, but the Elves' own name for their kind was "Quendi", those who speak with voices.
Treebeard the Ent confirmed this when doing some reminiscing with Merry and Pippin, saying that the elves were the first to use words and language, a field greatly appreciated by ents, apparently.
So my question, naturally, is this. What form of communication was most common before the elves?
Gandalf, Sauron and the other eternals could hardly have gone through all the adventures and projects of the time between the creation and the elves through grunting and poking, could they?
Some form of telepathy, perchance? Galadriel had gotten that down pretty nicely, methinks...
-------------------- "I'm nigh-invulnerable when I'm blasting!" Mel Gibson, X-Men
Registered: Aug 1999
| IP: Logged
EdipisReks
Ex-Member
posted
i imagine that it was either telepathy or empathy. the empathy i'm thinking of is not what betazoids do, but more like feeling each others souls and thus knowing everything that the other is thinking and feeling, though i'm sure that if an individual immortal spirit wanted to hide what was in their thoughts (melkor comes to mind here)they could. maybe the spirits constantly lived with the thoughs and feelings of all other spirits "talking" to their heads simultaneously (kind of like tam elbren, i think that is how you spell it, hearing the thoughts of everyone around him at the same time, but without being driven to find a pet gomtuu in order to get some peace). elves, being physical beings, could not sample souls and thus had to use verbal language to convey their thoughts. regarldess of what method was used, i'm sure that the immortals had something better than grunting and poking .
[edit: i just read what i posted, and it's a little verbose. let me try to make my theory a little more concise: the eternal maiar and valar spirits did not require verbal language as they knew what was in the mind and hearts of all other eternal spirits by sampling the essences of the other spirits. i hope that makes more sense.]
posted
Can you help out an almost Tolkien-illiterate buddy? Where in the Chronology of Things would one properly place the primitive cavemen who in "LotR" helped out Rohan's troops and claimed they were the original inhabitants of the continent? They said something about having been there well before 'em tall guys in 'em tall ships came from across the sea. Would Men of this kind be younger or older than the Elves? Are they expanded upon somewhere outside "LotR"?
posted
the very first men woke up during the age of the sun. the woses are the "cave men" you are talking about, and they most likely simply stayed in isolation and thus didn't go through the same cultural evolution that the edain and, to a lesser extant, men such as those of rohan did. i think that the woses simply woke up in a different place than the numernoreans, and instead of becoming a grand worldly power simply reached a certain cultural point and then stagnated. no matter what types you are talking about, the first elves awoke in the age of stars, and the first men woke in the age of the sun.
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
.
Printer-friendly view of this topic
