Really the more you understand Tolkien the more you realize his work is just ‘fantasy early Germanic cultures’ with a couple dashes of ‘rustic gentlemanly Englishmen are lovely’ tossed in. It’s basically like one of those anime where it’s ‘fantasy feudal japan’ or whatever
WTF!? LOL, people don’t become adults until they’re 33. NO, you are an adult in you’re twenties. You are learning what that means, yes. You are young, yes, and will probably be irresponsible and screw up sometimes. THAT DOES NOT MEAN YOU ARE A CHILD. FUCK THAT INFANITILIZING SHIT. I HATE THAT TUMBLR THINKS THIS IS FINE.
This is right after Gandalf says, “A balrog. A demon of the ancient world.”
I just love how PJ chose to cut to Legolas’ face because he is exactly who you should cut to at this moment. You need an elf to show what it really means. Other than Gandalf, the rest of the Fellowship can sense something is gravely wrong, but they don’t understand just how grave. Like Gandalf, Legolas knows the terror. He understands the gravity of what lies around that corner. He’s got a piddly little bow and he is mere steps away from a demon of the ancient world. This frame shows a kid coming to the realisation that he is way out of his depth, that this mission will take him to places he only knew to exist in legends of the Elder Days, a time long gone, barely history.
He’s probably one of the youngest elves in Middle Earth at this point. He probably grew up on stories of the balrogs, slaying the ancient High Kings of the Eldar and tearing Middle Earth apart, thousands and thousands of years ago. They are legends in old crumbling books, read illicitly by a little elfling who was kept up at night by the terrible tales.They are the monsters under the bed and the shadows in the heart of the forest. They are the beasts behind the winged hordes of hell, that older elves, who’ve seen the worst that Arda has to offer, always assured him were no more than distant nightmares, stories relegated to dust and ancient memory. Except now they are real. They are here. They are coming.
The best part is that in the books he just starts screaming when he lays eyes on it
In its right hand was a blade like a stabbing tongue of fire; in its left hand it held a whip of many thongs.
‘Ai! ai! wailed Legolas. “A Balrog! A Balrog has come!’
Legolas can be relied upon to have the correct reaction to everything.
It is not necessarily normal, or socially appropriate, or sane, but it is always 100% correct.
FFS, that is not the point of Eowyn’s character arc! She stops being a soldier and becomes a healer/rebuilder because Tolkien didn’t see war as glorious or good, he saw the rebuilding after as the best thing. She gets to live in peace, that’s her happy ending.
That feeling when you watch Fellowship of the Ring and realize that the lotr soundtrack seeped into your bones sometime in your childhood and became a physical part of you
Legolas pretty quickly gets in the habit of venting about his travelling companions in Elvish, so long as Gandalf & Aragorn aren’t in earshot they’ll never know right?
Then about a week into their journey like
Legolas: *in Elvish, for approximately the 20th time* ugh fucking hobbits, so annoying
Frodo: *also in Elvish, deadpan* yeah we’re the worst
Legolas:
~*~earlier~*~
Legolas: ugh fucking hobbits
Merry: Frodo what’d he say
Frodo: I’m not sure he speaks a weird dialect but I think he’s insulting us. I should tell him I can understand Elvish
i mean, honestly it’s amazing the Elves had as many languages and dialects as they did, considering Galadriel (for example) is over seven thousand years old.
english would probably have changed less since Chaucer’s time, if a lot of our cultural leaders from the thirteenth century were still alive and running things.
they’ve had like. seven generations since the sun happened, max.
frodo’s books are old to him, but outside any very old poetry copied down exactly, the dialect represented in them isn’t likely to be older than the Second Age, wherein Aragorn’s foster-father Elrond started out as a very young adult and grew into himself, and Legolas’ father was born.
so like, three to six thousand years old, maybe, which is probably a drop in the bucket of Elvish history judging by all the ethnic differentiation that had time to develop before Ungoliant came along, even if we can’t really tell because there weren’t years to count, before the Trees were destroyed.
plus a lot of Bilbo’s materials were probably directly from Elrond, whose library dates largely from the Third Age, probably, because he didn’t establish Imladris until after the Last Alliance. and Elrond isn’t the type to intentionally help Bilbo learn the wrong dialect and sound sillier than can be helped, even if everyone was humoring him more than a little.
so Frodo might sound hilariously formal for conversational use (though considering how most Elves use Westron he’s probably safe there) and kind of old-fashioned, but he’s not in any danger of being incomprehensible, because elves live on such a ridiculous timescale.
to over-analyse this awesome and hilarious post even more, legolas’ grandfather
was from linguistically stubborn Doriath and their family is actually from a
somewhat different, higher-status ethnic background than their subjects.
so depending on how much of a role Thranduil took in his
upbringing (and Oropher in his), Legolas may have some weird stilted old-fashioned speaking tics in his
Sindarin that reflect a more purely Doriathrin dialect rather than the Doriathrin-influenced Western Sindarin that became the most widely spoken Sindarin long before he was born, or he might have a School Voice
from having been taught how to Speak Proper and then lapse into really
obscure colloquial Avari dialect when he’s being casual. or both!
considering legolas’ moderately complicated political position, i expect he can code-switch.
…it’s
also fairly likely considering the linguistic politics involved that Legolas is reasonably articulate in Sindarin, though
with some level of accent, but knows approximately zero Quenya outside of loanwords into Sindarin, and even those he mostly didn’t learn as a kid.
which would be extra hilarious when he and gimli fetch up in Valinor in his little homemade skiff, if the first elves he meets have never been to Middle Earth and they’re just standing there on the beach reduced to miming about what is the short beard person, and who are you, and why.
this is elvish dialects and tolkien, okay. there’s a lot of canon material! he actually initially developed the history of middle-earth specifically to ground the linguistic development of the various Elvish languages!
Legolas: Alas, verily would I have dispatched thine enemy posthaste, but y’all’d’ve pitched a feckin’ fit.
Aragorn: *eyelid twitching*
Frodo: *frantically scribbling* Hang on which language are you even speaking right now
Pippin, confused: Is he not speaking Elvish?
Frodo, sarcastically: I dunno, are you speaking Hobbit?
Boromir, who has been lowkey pissed-off at the Hobbits’ weird dialect this whole time: That’s what it sounds like to me.
Merry, who actually knows some shit about Hobbit background: We are actually speaking multiple variants of the Shire dialect of Westron, you ignorant fuck.
Sam, a mere working-class country boy: Honestly y’all could be talkin Dwarvish half the time for all I know.
Pippin, entering Gondor and speaking to the castle steward: hey yo my man
Boromir, from beyond the grave: j e s u s
OK, I can bear it no longer.
Merry does not know more history than Sam. STOP BEING FOOLED BY SAM’S RURAL PHRASING / ACCENT!!!
Sam ‘learned his letters’ from Bilbo, the most widely-travelled and educated Hobbit of his day. Sam is the ONLY one of the hobbits who knows who Gil-galad was, and what’s more, he can cite his sources! But he cites his sources in a local rural kind of voice, and he’s never travelled much himself: therefore EVERYONE IGNORES IT.
ARRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Sam, inside his head: I’m sure Mr Bilbo said that phrasing was out-dated, but I think I heard that pronunciation used in Rivendell when I was quietly listening to ALL the Elf-songs. How interesting. Perhaps I will write a sonnet about it.
Sam, out loud, where various people that he considers to be of higher social standing can hear him: Almost tea-time, Mr Frodo! I’ll put the kettle on shall I?
One of JRR Tolkien’s ideas for Aragorn’s backstory in The Lord of the Rings was that he was actually just three or four generations removed from Isildur himself.
Then how did he survive for the thousands of years between the Second and Third Ages?
The story goes something like this:
Many hundreds of years ago, young Aragorn fell in love with an Elven woman, who exactly resembled Lúthien Tinúviel in shape and outward form.
She called herself Arwen Undómiel, the Evenstar.
He fell for her, and romanced her, and gave himself to her; together they lived in her kingdom, where her magic and her power slowed Time to a crawl for them, while hundreds and hundreds of years passed in the world outside.
At first, the Elven-maid seemed every inch a queen: beautiful, graceful, soft-spoken, meek, and with the manners befitting an upbringing in Valimar long ago.
But over time, Aragorn came to realize that his beloved had a hard, greedy, grasping side, even a cruel streak, which more and more showed itself in unexpected flashes.
Worse, she was not who she seemed to be.
Eventually Aragorn pieced together the secret.
His bride was Sauron, divested of her usual male disguise.
Greatly weakened by the loss of the Ring, Sauron yet maintained strength enough to craft a prison for the heir of Isildur: a false realm of hollow bliss and sterile delights, where the one she thought was the greatest threat to her power could languish in eternity.
A part of herself, wearing a female aspect – the gender she had hidden long ago in the deeps of time, to gain entrance as an apprentice to the smithies of Aule – remained in this pocket world, as Aragorn’s bride: a plaything to keep his attention from the bars of his gilded cage.
But eventually, Aragorn figured it out.
Eventually, Aragorn escaped.
Thousands of years had gone by in the world outside since Aragorn had been ensnared by Sauron.
Now, emerging from long captivity in a magical sub-realm, he studied the world around him, and learned what had changed and what had endured.
He met Gandalf, and learned much from the Grey Pilgrim, and taught him some things of his own; and, in search of information, he pursued and captured Gollum, who had possessed, and been possessed by, the One Ring for so many centuries.
And, shortly before his ascent to the throne of the reunited Kingdom of Gondor and Arnor, he met his future bride: Eowyn Elfsheen, sister-daughter of Théoden, King of Rohan.
(PS: Christopher Tolkien or another amanuensis may have written this story down as part of the Secret Library Archive Project.)
I ship this now.
My reaction:
“Aragorn’s backstory“ Oh, ok, is this gonna be what the whole Amazon thing is going to be about?
“He meets Arwen“ Yeah ok
“She seemed evil” um, ok…that’s new.
“She was Sauron“
so you’re telling me Sauron was getting ploughed by Aragorn for thousands of years “as part of a fiendish plan to waylay the heir of Isildur”, no other reason, Sauron just lying back and thinking of Mordor, hating every second of it, is that what you’re telling me
lookashiny 