Avari

The refusal

When the three ambassadors came back from Aman to Cuiviénen and told the Elves of the light of the Trees, many of the Quendi were unwilling to go. They had seen the Valar only in the shape of Oromë riding out of the west, and the stories of Melkor's riders had taught them to fear anything that came from beyond their own country. They loved the starlit lake where they had woken. So they refused, and the Eldar departed without them. They are the Avari, the Unwilling, and their choice made the first and deepest division among the Elves: the Sundering, between those who went and those who stayed.

Of the three clans, few of the Vanyar if any remained. Some of the Noldor stayed; the greatest number were Teleri, the largest clan, from whom half or more refused the journey. Together with the Úmanyar, the Eldar who set out but never reached Aman, the Avari are counted among the Moriquendi, the Elves of Darkness who never saw the light of the Trees.

The unknown east

Almost nothing is recorded of the Avari, because the histories are the work of the Eldar and the Avari had no part in them. They stayed in the east and lived in the woods and by the waters, scattered in small groups, and in time they spread through the wide lands beyond the Misty Mountains and beyond Rhovanion. Their languages diverged from one another and from the tongues of the Eldar. In the days of the Sun they met Men, who awoke in Hildórien not far from the ancient home of the Elves, and the Elves who first taught Men speech and song may have been Avari. Some Avari, according to the lore recorded in the Appendices and in Unfinished Tales, were hostile to the Eldar and resented their claim to lordship over all Elves; others were friendly and were eventually absorbed.

Mingling with the Silvan folk

Over the Years of the Sun some Avari wandered west and came to the vales of the Anduin, where the Nandor had settled. They mingled with them and became part of the Silvan Elves of Greenwood and Lórien, so that the Wood-elves whom Men met in the Third Age were of mixed Nandorin and Avarin descent. The Silmarillion also allows that some of the wild Elves whom the Noldor and Sindar met in Beleriand were Avari who had crossed the Blue Mountains, and Eöl the Dark Elf, though a Sinda by birth, lived in the manner attributed to them. In The Hobbit the Wood-elves are described as descended from Elves who never went to Faerie in the West, which is the same tradition.

Under the Shadow

The Avari lived nearest to the places where Melkor and later Sauron had their strongholds in the east, and they were the most exposed of all the Elves to corruption. The Eldar believed that Orcs had been bred from Elves taken in the dark years before the Sundering, and it is likely that the Avari suffered such raids longest. Nothing is told of Avarin realms, kings or wars. Their story is a silence in the histories, and the writers of the West knew it: the Avari are what the Elves might have been had no summons ever come.

What sets them apart

The Avari are Elves of the woods and the east, more secretive than the Sindar and even less concerned with lore and craft than the Nandor. They never learned from the Valar or from Melian, and they kept the ancient ways of Cuiviénen. Yet they were Quendi, immortal, keen-sensed, bound to Arda, and in Mandos at death like any other Elf. Whatever they built or sang is lost.

Fate

The fate of the Avari is unknown. Those who joined the Silvan folk faded with them in the Fourth Age. Those who remained in the far east are never mentioned again, and it may be that they linger there still, or that they dwindled into the twilight people of Men's later tales.

The Avari are never described. As Quendi they shared the form of all Elves, but they lacked the light of Aman entirely, and the Eldar considered them lesser in body and mind, a judgement the Avari would not have accepted.

Almost nothing is known. They had several languages, kept to the woods and rivers of the east, and were reckoned by the Eldar to be secretive, clannish and sometimes hostile. Those who mingled with the Silvan Elves adopted Silvan and then Sindarin speech.

The Avari came into being at the moment of the Sundering, when the ambassadors returned from Aman and a great part of the Quendi, most of them Teleri, refused to leave Cuiviénen.

Absorbed in part into the Silvan folk of Rhovanion; otherwise unrecorded, lingering in the east beyond the knowledge of the West.