How Old is 🧝Galadriel?

[esrbl]

Wondering what's her accurate age in LoTR?

 

[Elthir]

Galadriel was born in Valian Year 1362, so we can't have an exact number with respect to Sun Years.

Anyway, when Tolkien originally wrote The Annals of Aman, 1 Valian Year equaled 9.582 Sun Years. Later, Tolkien appears to have desired that 1 Valian Year should rather equal the much longer Elvish yén, or 144 Sun Years. I won't go into the details about that, but obviously using this number would make her older.

My lazy answer, pretty old according to the reckoning of Men 🐾

 

[Olorgando]

Galadriel was born in Valian Year 1362, so we can't have an exact number with respect to Sun Years.

Anyway, when Tolkien originally wrote The Annals of Aman, 1 Valian Year equaled 9.582 Sun Years. Later, Tolkien appears to have desired that 1 Valian Year should rather equal the much longer Elvish yén, or 144 Sun Years. I won't go into the details about that, but obviously using this number would make her older.

My lazy answer, pretty old according to the reckoning of Men 🐾

Actually found that date VY 1362 in notes to the "Annals of Aman" in HoMe vol. 10 "Morgoth's Ring". Flipping through the pages, I certainly got the impression that they were far from being suitable for being published. Just out of curiosity, I checked HoMe vol. 11 "The War of the Jewels" and found the "Grey Annals". Flipped even faster, nothing I'm going to take a closer look at today … or in the next week … or month ...
At an attempt to be minimally more precise than E(A), and to put it into context of LoTR:
Galadriel was way older than Elrond, but way younger than Cirdan … 😬

 

[Elthir]

Okay . . . but on that note, what's your impression of Quenta Silmarillion, as found in HOME 10,11,12, with respect to being "suitable"
for publication?



In my opinion, the Annals, both Aman and Grey, were to be replaced by a Tale of Years of the First Age. Was Galadriel's year of birth
going to be mentioned in Tolkien's own finished/published version of this Tale of Years? Or in his finished Quenta Silmarillion proper?
Or was the year to be changed perhaps, in some text?

I don't know.

 

[Olorgando]

Okay . . . but on that note, what's your impression of The Silmarillion, as found in HOME 10,11,12, with respect to being "suitable" for publication?
In my opinion, the Annals, both Aman and Grey, were to be replaced by a Tale of Years of the First Age. Was Galadriel's year of birth going to be mentioned in Tolkien's own finished/published version of this Tale of Years? Or in his finished Quenta Silmarillion proper?
I can save you some time on the Grey Annals anyway, as nothing there contradicts 1362.

I'm afraid I'm also not going to be re-reading any of the Quenta Silmarillion versions in vols. 10 and 11 (nothing on the topic in vol. 12) anytime soon, see my previous post on annals.
Had JRRT ever managed to get the Sil polished to a stage approximately that of LoTR, then yes, Galadriel's date of birth would have been mentioned without a doubt. He had an obsession with Galadriel in later to latest years bordering on Mariolatry. But going down that path would have (almost) ruined Galadriel, who after all could imagine herself as a Dark Queen equivalent to Sauron in the chapter "The Mirror of Galadriel". But I think JRRT would have dealt with the First Age Annals, if not in the minute detail of Third Age years 3018 and 3019, but certainly in more detail than in the LoTR appendix B Annals for the Second Age (their Númenor / Atlantis complex being a late addition).

 

[Elthir]

I'm afraid I'm also not going to be re-reading any of the Quenta Silmarillion versions in vols. 10 and 11 (nothing on the topic in vol. 12) anytime soon, see my previous post on annals.

For clarity then: why repeat my answer above and add that the source of my answer is "far from being suitable for being published" (after not re-reading The Annals of Aman, but flipping through it)?

As an aside, HOME volume 12 does contain passages which relate to the topic of Quenta Silmarillion. Not a ton, but some.

 

[Olorgando]

For clarity then: why repeat my answer above and add that the source of my answer is "far from being suitable for being published"...

Nitpick alert.

... Flipping through the pages, I certainly got the impression that they were far from being suitable for being published. ...

Got the impression; superficial; not "is". To my thinking there is quite a severe difference between the two terms. I choose such expressions with care (at least I hope most of the time), and I have been getting progressively grumpier at having them shortened in inapplicable ways in paraphrases ...

 

[Alcuin]

The Annals are published, but not as finished work: that eluded JRR Tolkien during his lifetime. They were published by his son Christopher as compendia of his father’s notes, which he rearranged with great effort into more or less manageable and intelligible form over a period of forty-five years following his father’s death. I believe he once remarked that Gondolin was more real to him than ancient Babylon.

There are in History of Middle-earth, if I remember correctly, no fewer than three various timelines of the Years of the Trees, and at least two separate timelines of the First Age. (I don’t want to dig to confirm: please pardon my laziness today, and feel free to correct my memory.) And as Elthir pointed out (Elthir?? what has become of Galin in my absence?!) Tolkien proposed more than one conversion from Years of the Trees into Years of the Sun. I think Olorgando’s depiction of Galadriel as “way older than Elrond, but way younger than Círdan” is about as accurate as we can get.

For some perspective, though, if Círdan were in the same generation of Elves as Elu Thingol, which seems about right (they are supposed to be related), and Thingol and Finwë were also about the same generation (“the same age”, if we might use a phrase common to mortals), then Círdan was about the “same age” as Galadriel’s grandfather. To put an Elvish generation into human perspective, we know Elrond’s age in The Lord of the Rings. At the end of the First Age, his brother Elros was 58 years old. If you want to hold that Elros and Elrond were twins, then so was Elrond. (I prefer the telling in which Elros was the elder brother, but a few years doesn’t matter for this.) The Second Age lasted 3441 years. Elrond wed Celebrían daughter of Galadriel and Celeborn in year 109 of the Third Age, and their sons Elladan and Elrohir were born 21 years later. That’s over 3600 years, or about an age of Middle-earth. When Arwen wed Aragorn at the end of the Third Age, she was 2778 years old.

If Galadriel is from the generation before Elrond (in Elvish terms), then she’s roughly twice his age. She matured in one age of Arda, wedded and had children in the next, those children had children in the following age, and now her granddaughter has matured and wed at the end of that age. And we can surmise that, since Círdan has begun to appear old – something unusual among Elves in Middle-earth – then he is perhaps three times Elrond’s age.

Someplace (I don’t recall where: perhaps Galin – I mean Elthir – can refresh my memory) Tolkien noted that Men matured faster than Elves. But having reached maturity, it would seem that, at least in Middle-earth, Elves aged at about one one-hundredth the pace of Men, if these guesses at Elvish generations are in the ballpark.

 

[Elthir]

Nitpick alert.

Nitpick noted.

For clarity then: why repeat my answer above and add that you get the impression that my source (for my answer) is "far from being suitable for being published" (after not re-reading The Annals of Aman, but flipping through it)?

🐾

 

[Elthir]

Someplace (I don’t recall where: perhaps Galin – I mean Elthir – can refresh my memory) Tolkien noted that Men matured faster than Elves. But having reached maturity, it would seem that, at least in Middle-earth, Elves aged at about one one-hundredth the pace of Men, if these guesses at Elvish generations are in the ballpark

Tolkien noted in LACE that Men mature faster than Elves -- with respect to the ageing of the body at least. I can't recall anything with respect to a specific Elven rate after maturity.

I have some musings about possibly changing rates in the linked thread about Elvish Peak Populations, with respect to at least some passages from MR -- which don't necessarily represent Tolkien's "last" idea on how fast Elves mature, even if said musings are close to something Tolkien intended at one point.

Peak Elvish Populations During The First Age

Anyway, Laws and Customs notes (though not Tolkien's last word about this, it would appear) that it took the Eldar about fifty years, or for some 100 years, to reach full maturity of body. And I assume Sun Years is meant here, given the context.

🐾

 

[Olorgando]

For clarity then: why repeat my answer above and add that you get the impression that my source (for my answer) is "far from being suitable for being published" (after not re-reading The Annals of Aman, but flipping through it)?

🐾

My overall impression that very little of the enormous quantity of what JRRT had written about the Elder Days, which Christopher then selected and compressed into the published "Silmarillion", as shown in HoMe was ready, suitable for publication stems first from my original reading of the twelve volumes of HoMe. But that would have been finished not long after PoMe was published in 1996, since then I have only read selectively, like in an encyclopedia. That impression has been reinforced by the writings primarily of Carpenter and Shippey. It certainly was not dispelled by my superficial flipping through the AoA in MR.
JRRT took some care with the annals in LoTR, in RoTK appendices. At least responses by what we would now call nerds (among them ourselves) seem to have made it clear that some people were panting for more of the same. Christopher did not include anything of the sort in The Sil. Again, as with LoTR, concerns about length of the book might have played a role, though The Sil is only about the length of TTT; while longer that RoTK as pure text, it is decidedly shorter than RoTK including appendices. So maybe fitness for publication (meaning the additional effort to get these FA annals into such a state of fitness) was a non-trivial consideration for Christopher to leave them out.

 

[Elthir]

My overall impression that very little of the enormous quantity of what JRRT had written about the Elder Days, which Christopher then selected and compressed into the published "Silmarillion", as shown in HoMe was ready, suitable for publication stems first from my original reading of the twelve volumes of HoMe.

If so, there are plenty of threads that contain answers derived from sources that are arguably unsuitable for publication as they stand, so my question was: why in Arda did you choose to quote my entire post -- my glittering, Alcuin/Cirdan Linweilin approved post, which was a fairly specific answer regarding the matter of calculating Galadriel's age -- to give this impression?

Important note [for some reason, confusingly given at this point]: I no longer really care about your answer to this repeated question as I have already given you the benefit of the doubt that you were not trying to undermine my post.

But if you're wondering why I said that: let's say someone asks the forum to name Galadriel's brothers. And you do, perhaps even quoting from something Tolkien wrote. Very well, but next I quote your answer and follow with a statement that the source you used to derive that answer is (even if it's just my impression) not suitable for publication. You don't think, especially with respect to readers who have not read HOME, that someone might then at the very least wonder if my answer is undermined in some way?

I'll happily try again.

Emilsrbl

To my knowledge, the date I gave above for Galadriel's birth is not contradicted in any Tolkien-published text, nor (so far) in any posthumously published text written by JRRT.

Granted, neither the date nor the text from which it hails was published by Tolkien himself (just like so many texts that concern the Elder Days), nor, in my opinion, was the text even likely to be published by Tolkien himself -- because in Christopher Tolkien's opinion (which I find reasonable here), the traditions/texts referred to as The Annals of Aman and The Grey Annals were "morphing" into texts akin to the Quenta Silmarillion tradition, and thus I would say/have said/might say again, that The Tale of Years was going to take over for the Annals [CJRT reproduces parts of this Tale of Years text, with commentary, in HOME 11, The War of the Jewels].

Christopher Tolkien drew from both these Annals, Aman and Grey/Beleriand, for his reconstructed Silmarillion published in 1977.

And he drew at least one detail from HOME 12 too. Ahem. And just for more clarity: I am obsessed with Galadriel. . . and obviously bored enough today to write this mostly meaningless, meandering mess.

 

[Olorgando]

Why are you harping again and again about my quoting your entire post?
Or to put it another way, what partial, selective quote of your post would have met your approval?

 

[Elthir]

Gando wrote: "Why are you harping again and again about my quoting your entire post?"

Elthir twice wrote: "For clarity then: why repeat my answer above . . ."

Here I was referring to my answer regarding the Valian Year of Galadriel's birth, which you repeated in your response . . . and I asked this twice because the first time I asked you, you merely responded with a nitpick.

With respect to my last post, admittedly even I misremembered this, as indeed I said there that my question "was" (entire post and so on). . . when again, earlier I had been referring to you repeating my answer about Galadriel's birth year being VY 1362.

So, for more disclarity, I only meant to ask you once about quoting my entire post -- in a response that I ultimately characterized as a mostly meaningless, meandering mess -- and despite initially wondering about your first response in this thread -- in a post which I also noted that I had come to think you were not trying to cast doubt upon the date I gave, due to something about its source.

 

[Alcuin]

[self-promotion] For some perspective on Galadriel’s presumed age, just in case you missed it (engaged, perhaps, in discussing other matters), this post. [/self-promotion]

😁

 

[Elthir]

I didn't miss it Alcuin!

And perhaps I'm too attuned to folks attacking source, possibly because I do it (often attacking the late "adumbrated" note about Galadriel, as it contradicts author-published text) . . . and because others do it often enough, or at least have done so over the years . . . most notably by a person who argued that RGEO was an external commentary by Tolkien the author, and thus its content could be ignored (said person invoking the "death of author" thingy), as opposed to being an internal text from JRRT as translator.

Both topics concerned Galadriel of course!

 

[Elthir]

By the way, in retrospect I mishandled part of this discussion by being oblique instead of clear enough, and jumped too soon at my assumption.

Apologies Gando.

I wrote: Anyway, when Tolkien originally wrote The Annals of Aman, 1 Valian Year equaled 9.582 Sun Years. Later, Tolkien appears to have desired that 1 Valian Year should rather equal the much longer Elvish yén, or 144 Sun Years. I won't go into the details about that, but obviously using this number would make her older.

I should (or will) add that if we simply plug in 144 for 9.582 with the dates as they appear in the Annals of Aman, arguable "questions" arise when we get to those years that involve the Rebellion at least . . . and generally speaking, some think doing so gives "too much time" for certain events. Or to say it another way, "much" might occur in simply 1 Valian Year . . . but in Sun Years, that's a long time!

And if you're a Maedros fan like me, if you think he hanged by the wrist for a long time using 9.582, try plugging in 144!

Anyway, on the web I'm guessing that one will more likely find Galadriel's age calculated with 9.582 rather than 144 . . .

. . . for what that's worth!

 

[Olorgando]

… And if you're a Maedros fan like me, ...

Awks! If I have created that impression, I have done (posted) something seriously wrong! ...