Shippey also considers the Christian Middle English attitude of the South English Legendary, a hagiographic work which he supposes Tolkien must have read, that elves were angels. In Shippey's view, Tolkien's elves are much like fallen angels, above Men but below the angelic Maiar and the godlike Valar. He comments at once that Galadriel is in one way certainly not fallen, as the elves avoided the war on Melkor in the First Age; but all the same, Galadriel has been expelled from a kind of Heaven, the Deathless land of Valinor, and has been forbidden to return. Shippey suggests that the Men of Middle-earth might have thought the fall of Melkor and the expulsion of Galadriel added up to a similar fallen status; and he praises Tolkien for taking both sides of the story of elves into account.