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Elves By the Numbers - Page 9

© Michael Martinez

Suppose Finarfin and half his people turned back? That would leave 7/8 of the rebellious Noldor (minus their losses in battle and storm) to continue the flight into exile. Of course, almost any set of numbers would work, but it seems likely that if there were 130,000 Noldor at the beginning of Feanor's rebellion, fewer than 100,000 would have reached Middle-earth. There in Beleriand they would find the Sindar (the Mithrim, Falathrim, and Iathrim) and the Green-elves outnumbered them (by some ridiculous amount not worth calculating, since these populations would by this time also have suffered casualties through Morgoth's invasion). Over the next 500 Years of the Sun (appproximately) the Noldor would continue to increase their population, suffering occasional setbacks. They would end up with a population of well over 1,000,000 Elves. Of course, by the time you get up into the hundreds of thousands of Elves, people start raising their hands and saying, "Excuse me! What about Turgon's ten thousand?" That is, Turgon led ten thousand soldiers to the Nirnaeth Arnoediad. And he supposedly took a third of Fingolfin's people with him when he founded the city of Gondolin. Ten thousand soldiers doesn't seem like very many given the huge numbers of Elves we're looking at. But where does it say that Turgon brought all of his warriors out of Gondolin? Did he really strip the city of all its defenders? My feeling is that Gondolin was still well defended. The Noldor had already suffered grievous losses in the Dagor Bragollach. Dorthonion had been lost, the Vale of Sirion had fallen, and the sons of Feanor had been driven out of their lands for a while. Maedhros ended up taking back the lands which had been lost, but he didn't have all the Noldor on his side. Orodreth refused to join the Union of Maedhros, and Orodreth supposedly still had one of the largest if not the largest kingdom in Beleriand. So Turgon's ten thousand soldiers don't really imply there were fewer than 1,000,000 Noldor by the time of the Nirnaeth. Well, the numbers are about as bogus as one can get and still call it a discussion of Tolkien and Middle-earth. But no matter how you work your way through the generations, the Noldor end up with a huge population in Beleriand, and the Sindar must be even more numerous. So when Tolkien has Morgoth turn the tables on the Eldar and his legions of Orcs go streaming across the countryside, the devastation is worse than anything prior to the Napoleonic wars in true history. Perhaps it's even worse than the Napoleonic wars themselves. What the Eldar achieved in Beleriand seems fragile because we have only the one map done by Christopher Tolkien, and it names fewer than a dozen cities.

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