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Elves By the Numbers - Page 6

© Michael Martinez

Some people have argued that this passage implies the Eldar had fewer than four children on average, but Tolkien says "there were seldom more than four children in any house". We can infer that he means there were often four children, since if there were seldom more than three children per family he could have said as much. Hence, if there were often four children per family, the average number of children (in the early generations, at least) was probably closer to four than to three. Putting all these points together, we can look at how the Elves may have increased their population in the years leading up to the Great Journey. The Elves awoke in Year of the Trees 1050 and the Eldar left Cuivienen in Year of the Trees 1102. They probably had few if any children while traveling across Middle-earth, even though the Great Journey lasted many Years of the Trees. So the Great Journey seems to be a reasonable breaking point in calculating the growth of the Elven population. Now, since the Elves didn't have their children all at once, or all together, it's not reasonable to figure an average generation of 50 years. But the problem with spacing the generations out longer is that you end up with too few Elves. The Eldar, according to The Silmarillion, set out upon the Great Journey in four "hosts". A "host" is a lot of people. Tolkien could have used the word "companies" to describe the Elven groups but he chose instead to call them "hosts". So he is implying that these groups were larger than "companies", although he nowhere defines the size of a company. Still, it must be that Tolkien intended the reader to understand that thousands of Elves set out upon the Great Journey. If one simply assumes that a new generation of Elves was born every fifty years (of the Sun), and that there were approximately four children per couple, then by the time of the Great Journey you end up with nearly 150,000 Elves. This seems too great a number for several reasons, not the least being that the Elves were still afraid to venture out into the wider world on their own. There just couldn't yet have been that many of them. Many of the Elves had disappeared through the years. The disappearances might explain how younger Elves such as Ingwe, Finwe, and Elwe could rise up to positions of leadership. So even if we agree upon an algorithm which produces a smaller number of Elves, in fact Orome probably had even fewer Elves to contend with becaue we have no reliable means of estimating how many Elves were lost in each generation.

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