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I jsut finished the peoples of middle earth for the second time and the whole glorfindel conspiracy still bothers me. All i ask is that some of my fellow tolkein fans share their veiws and help me out on this one. I'm not sure what to think.
posted
haha. i'll look into it. Does it have info. in it that i couldn't find in one of tolkein's histories of middle earth?
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posted
I read that it was originaly just a mistake usuing the same name twice.....and many years apart within the story. Then Tolkien realized the mistake, and came up with a story to expalin it, a story that didn't really fit well within his own cosmology.
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The thing to keep in mind is that Tolkien was working-at ever slower paces-on LotR and the Silmarillion until his death. There were many revisions, major revisions, that he had in mind but simply grew too old (according to his own letters) to make. Glorfindel was one, and among the biggest was a drastic change in the history of Galadriel. Heck, he didn't even actually finish the Silmarillion before dying; his son, Christopher, did that.
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posted
Kwea, last I looked your link wasn't quite right--it needed a repair on the "http" part.
As for repeating names--humans do that because we don't live very long. Would elves do that, considering they're (normally) immortal? "No, not that Galadriel...Galadriel my youngest sister's niece!"
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Sure. I have two brothers that share names with uncles of mine. The are all alive, and I sometimes have to ask which one is beeing referred to.
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We do know that Glorfindel in the Fellowship of the Ring was an elf lord of great power and stature. It makes more sense to me to believe he was the same as the Glorfindel who fell in Gondolin.
One of the very cool things about Tolkien's universe is that you get hints of things that you don't ever quite understand fully. It's a real place, Middle Earth is. Real worlds have loose ends left untied. Maybe there is some entire story which we will never know that explains why Mandos should send Glorfindel back to Middle Earth. Maybe Tolkien just didn't live long enough to dream of that one and tell it.
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quote:As for repeating names--humans do that because we don't live very long. Would elves do that, considering they're (normally) immortal? "No, not that Galadriel...Galadriel my youngest sister's niece!"
lol... good point. But in Glorfindel's case, if the original one died in Gondolin, it should be ok for a subsequent elf to get that name again. It's not like they're going to run into each other at cocktail parties...
quote:Maybe Tolkien just didn't live long enough to dream of that one and tell it.
Maybe he just ran out of pipe weed that day. Posts: 4116 | Registered: Apr 2002
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I fixed the link, so now it goes right to the page adressing this topic.
Tolkien often said that he felt that he was "discovering" a new world rather than writing one, and it kept growing beyond his wildest expectations even during his own lifetime. So it was not unusual for him to "find" new information that further "enlightened" him.
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Yeah, like he said when he met Strider in the inn at Bree he had no more idea who he was than did Frodo.
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Yep....that is one example of how the story grew....also, consider that he thought that the real work being done was the Similirion, not LOTR....LOTR was the end of a very long story (or group of stories), but not the phenominon it has become.
The Sil was never finished before Tolkien died, so it had not gone through final revisions at that point. Chris Tolkien edited it with quite a bit of help from Guy Gavriel Kay, and they put it out....but they never really knew what form it would have taken if JRR had done it himself.
Of course there is the fact that JRR didn't ever think it would be released either....he didn't think it would be possible.
And the Sil is where the first Glorfindal's story is from....
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Christopher Tolkien has expressed some regret about how he did parts of the Silmarilion.
For example, he has said that he thinks he should have said that is was the red book, a compilation of elven tales done by Frodo.
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You know what else makes me think? He said he didn't know who strider was at the time he was writing about him. but at some point he decided to make him a main character and all that. The part that makes me wonder is that he somehow concluded that aragorn should be in his mid 80's at the time of WR (war of the ring).
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Well, the Dunedain were long lived, and he is a distant descendant of Elros, so he has elven blood.
Not surprising he would be that old, he had seen a done a lot before the events of Fellowship, it might have been a bit incredulous had he supposedly done all that in his early 20's, KWIM?
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All of what you have said is true. But 80 year olds don't become the strong rugged hero of an epic tale. haha. Just ignore my ramblings please, i'm very tired.
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Why do you think the immortal elves had so few children, for example Elrond with two sons and a daughter ina couple of thousand years. Shucks me and my wife managed that in 7 years!! Never seemed logical to me...
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Many long-lived species produce children quite slowly, so that they don't overpopulate their home. Believe it or not, humans reproduce this way, despite our considerable numbers. Short-lived species tend to have many babies at once--rats might have a dozen babies, but few of them will survive to adulthood and even those that do don't live more than a year or two.
Since elves are immortal, if they had children at the same rate as humans, they'd be SRO in a couple hundred years. Keeping the birth rate low may be a conscious choice, or it could be that they're just generally infertile.
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Point of geek order: Elves are not actually immortal. They will live as long as Middle-Earth lasts. Beyond that, though, no one knows what happens to them.
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Aragorn was given the lifespan of the Numenoreans, which was thrice that of lesser humans (like us). So his lifespan would be roughly 9 score years and 30, or 210 years, right? At 80 he was in full maturity, but still a young man. A little over 1/3 his full lifespan. That corresponds to late 20s in one of us. If you add in the fact that the actual skin weathering and so on would have been extreme, then you realize that he looked about the right age as played by a 46 year old actor. Not only had Aragorn's skin been through 80 years of life, but it was an extremely rough 80 years, traveling the wilds, fighting alongside warriors of Rohan and Gondor under different names, and so on.
One thing I disliked about the movies is that they showed Aragorn's character incorrectly, in that they showed him as reluctant to take up the quest and the burden of fighting against Sauron and returning his line to kingship over humans in Middle Earth. This is slander. Aragorn from his earliest youth (he grew up in Rivendell with Elrond) was an enemy of Sauron and embraced his destiny.
He first fell in love with Arwen when he was in his early 20s, and she was over 1000 years old. At that time everyone shook their heads and gave him zero chance with her. When he was in his 40s they met again in Lothlorien and she beheld him in the fullness of manhood and returned his love. They pled their troth there, pledging their lives to the fight against the darkness. Elrond was grieved because it meant he would lose her after what would seem to him like a very short time. Arwen was something like 1200 years old when she and Aragorn married. She never considered almost leaving or anything of the sort, during the war of the ring. She was actively fighting behind the scenes the whole time, and would never have left him.
Anyway, saying Aragorn was an 80 year old man really doesn't tell the story. He had the lifespan of the Numenoreans. In fact, Denethor and Aragorn were almost the exact same age. In Denethor the Numenorean strain was also quite strong, as it was in his son Faramir, but not so much in Boromir. Just Denethor was aged before his time and worn out in his struggles against the Enemy in the Palantir.
[ August 04, 2004, 09:37 AM: Message edited by: ak ]
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posted
I love the story of Aragorn and Arwen because it echoes the story of Beren and Luthien, and both of them could be considered mythic retellings of the story of Tolkien and his wife Edith. They met and fell in love, though he was younger than she, they had to wait a long time and went through great trials and difficulties but eventually they married. She was his Luthien, he said. Luthien and Arwen as described in the books both looked very like her, with fair skin, long dark curly hair, and gray eyes.
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Now that caneither be taken as a very good thing or a very bad thing form the wifes perspective.
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Anyone have a link to a picture of Tolkein's wife, especially when she was in her 20s or 30s? I'm really curious to see if she looks the way I've imagined Arwen and Luthien looking.
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I haven't been able to turn one up via google either, but then yesterday I proved that I might not be the most effective user of search engines that ever walked the planet.
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Cool! Thanks Anne Kate, that's exactly the sort of thing I was looking for.
That isn't exactly how I pictured Arwen or Luthien either one--I imagined somewhat sharper features, especially the nose. Interestingly, if you gave her a dark blonde wig, that would be *very* similar to how I've always imagined Rosie Cotton.
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I wish I could draw well enough to create a portrait of Luthien, but I can't. I think, though, that my mental image of Tolkein's elves is generally informed by a calendar I had when I was about 4 that had paintings of scenes from LOTR and the Silmarillion. In general I picture his elves as being tall, gracefully slender beings with almost translucently pale skin and dark hair, generally with very sharp, angular features. Eyes the color of twilight.
You know, I had an enormous crush on Galadriel as a four year old, based partly on her depicition in LOTR, and partly on the calendar's depiction of her giving Frodo the phial.
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Galadriel is very cool. I really dislike her as protrayed in the movie by that actress, though. I heard her do an interview not long afterward, too, and she was like making FUN of elves and Tolkien. Ugh! She was a big mistake. I also think Elrond was miscast. The rest of the casting was excellent, though.
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You too? I also had a crush on Galadriel. I kept a picture of her (the pencil drawing done by Angus McBride found in the book Middle Earth Role Playing) in my wallet.
*hangs his head in geeky shame*
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Back to the elf children thing - elves don't really desire to reproduce and such the way humans do. Tolkien described it as being a very brief period in their long lives (the period in which they are interested in having a family) the rest of the time they are content. In other words, they don't have the same drive to further the species that human folk do. Makes sense, they don't need to, since they don't die. The species will go on, whether they have children or no. In fact, Tolkien said many elves never have children.
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posted
I didn't like her as galadriel either. She jsut didn't have that "elf" quality in my eyes. Neither did elrond. Liv Tyler did an exellent job though.
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That's funny Porter! My brother had a crush on Valkyrie from Marvel's Avengers comic at around the same time. I guess you and I just went for a higher class of fictional character.
Yay geekdom!
Yeah, the actress who played Galadriel seemed wrong for the part to me as well. Part of that was the whole "Galadriel as Large Marge" bit when she's offered the ring, but even without that she wouldn't have seemed right to me. Out of curiosity, who *would* you have cast in the role?
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In fact, Tolkien said that the elves generally have almost no drive about anything. They live a very long time, but most of it is spent just kinda existing, almost the equivalent of spendin all your time playing video games and smoking pot.
There are a few exceptions, which are the stories that you find in The Silmarilion.
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I was thinking aobut who i would caast in her place, but i couldn't find any matches. To me, the outstanding beauty that tolkein describes her as raised my expectations as to what she should look like in the movie. i'm sure that there someone out there that makes everyone's jaw drop with awe. Thats the one I would have picked.
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I dunno - I kinda liked Agent Smith as Elrond.
My only general gripe about the elves - would it have killed them to add just a touch of digital tweaking?
They look like humans wearing Vulcan ears. Which, let's face it - that's what they were. But given the degree of effort put forth in other areas of the film, giving non-humans a non-human appearance should have been a given.
posted
Cool call trevor! That's what i was trying to say, i just couldn't find the words. lol They should have been more..er...mysterious?mystical?. Something like that.
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posted
Actually, the Elves do have drive about things: creation and art, mostly. And some of them had serious drive about things like warfare and hatred, too.
The trouble with Elves, though (among many others, according to Tom D ), is that they don't change, yet the world does. Often-from their perspective-for the worse. And so they end up trying to preserve, trying to hold on to 'the good old days', since they have a clear memory of tgod and lived them.
Also, bear in mind that the Elves met in LotR were many millenia after their heyday in Middle-Earth. In the First Age-longer than the Second or the Third, and possibly both put together, I can't remember-it was the Elves who were the big movers and shakers, and in the Second Age, the Elves were perhaps 1/2 and 1/2 with Men.
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