In J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium, the sundering of the Elves is the complex process in which the immortal Elves successively break up into many groups with multiple causes of dissent between them. They awoke at Cuiviénen on the continent of Middle-earth, where they were divided into three tribes: Minyar (the Firsts), Tatyar (the Seconds) and Nelyar (the Thirds). After some time, they were summoned by Oromë to live with the Valar in Valinor, on Aman. That summoning and the Great Journey that followed split the Elves into two main groups (and many minor ones), which were never fully reunited.
Tolkien stated that the stories were made to create a world for his elvish languages, not the reverse. The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey writes that The Silmarillion derived from the linguistic relationship between the two languages, Quenya and Sindarin, of the divided Elves. The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger states that Tolkien used the Indo-European type of proto-language as his model. In her view, the sundering of the Elves reflects the progressive decline and fall in Middle-earth from its initial perfection; the highest Elves are those who deviated least from that state, meaning that in Tolkien's scheme, ancestry is a guide to character.
Context <span class="anchor" id="Eldar"></span>
Author
J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) is best known as the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He was a professional philologist, an expert in the changes in words between languages. He created a family of invented languages for Elves, carefully designing the differences between them to reflect their distance from their imaginary common origin. He stated that his languages led him to create the invented mythology of The Silmarillion, to provide a world in which his languages could have existed. In that world, the splintering of the Elvish peoples mirrored the fragmentation of their languages. came from the largest tribe, the Nelyar, but most of the Nelyar went on the journey.