Elrond the Useless

Cafe Society
1

Apologies for thread-jacking the Shelob thread (and length of this OP). Just to give some more thought to Shelob: However it may be “known” by anyone besides The Professor that she’s the undying offspring of Ungoliant, she’s really just a menace in Minas Morgul, not unlike how Gollum was in the Misty Mountains. Her mom, Ungoliant, after destroying the two trees in Valinor, was about to put some hurt on Melkor when he wouldn’t hand over the Silmarils. Melkor is bailed out by the arrival of Balrogs.

Yet my thread-jack (sorry again) went from who designs the clothing and spectral crowns of Witch King to how worthless Elrond “the wise” is.

First age he and his brother Elros are captured by Maglor for reasons. First Age ends, he chooses to be of Elf-kind.

Second Age, he stays around the High King of the Noldor, Gil-Galad. He is tasked with taking an army and defending Eregion which he utterly fails. Sauron has him surrounded and it’s not looking good for the wise guy till Lorien (the actual Elf) and Gondor bail him out. He retreats to and founds Rivendell, perhaps the one good thing he accomplished in 7,000 years.

For some reason, Gil-Galad gives him one of the Elven Rings of Power. He supposedly fights alongside Gil-Galad in War of the Last Alliance and witnesses Gil-Galad getting defeated by Sauron, Elendil getting defeated by Sauron and Isildur actually taking action and cutting the One Ring from Sauron’s hand. Good wins at a huge cost.

“Toss the ring into Orodruin” Elrond urges Isildur mildly, alongside Cirdan the Shipwright who has no ships at hand. Isildur says “Nope” and though he puts on the Ring doesn’t seem to realize Elrond and Cirdan have theirs and he can rule the world if he were inclined. Yet the Alliance is over and Isildur goes on to write about how he loves the Ring and I believe he’s the first to call it “precious” before going on to die an ignoble death when the Ring, with a will of its own, slips off and some crummy Orcs shoot him.

The place and time is known to Elrond. Does he do anything about finding the Ring? It’s gold so it should be heavy. Nah, we thought it washed all the way down the Anduin he says at the Council of Elrond. Wise.

It’s likely more fully described in the HoME books. His wife, Celebrian, daughter of Galadriel is captured and tortured by Orcs on her way from Rivendell to Lorien on the Redhorn Pass. To their credit, her sons Elladan and Elrohir rescue her but it’s too late. Too bad she didn’t have them with her.

Elrond has Glorfindel (whether or not the First Age Balrog fighter is debated) and many other Noldor residing with him. Do they try and wipe out Goblin Town or make the Redhorn Pass safer (once again Lothlorien would assist)? Not at all.

One thing really bothers me. In The Hobbit. after getting the trolls stoned, Gandalf, Bilbo and company find lots of really cool stuff the trolls had. Elrond looks at one sword, Glamdring, and remarks that it’s his grandfather’s sword from Gondolin. He “wisely” gives it back to Gandalf and passes on some wisdom: The Misty Mountains are dangerous!

When Gandalf (and Thorin with Orcrist) pull out their Gondolin swords in Goblin Town, the wise goblins shriek knowingly at the blades and Gandalf cuts Goblin King’s head off.

There’s some flooding of the Bruinen that temporarily wipes out the Black Riders (naturally enhanced by Gandalf). Elrond is a master healer. He adds nothing to the “Council of Elrond” besides testimonials about how useless he is and has been.

2

Combat soldiers like to sneer at REMFs, but if you want to win a war larger than the Hatfield-McCoy feud, you need the logistical support that those REMFs provide. When you are severely wounded, you need more than a combat medic; you need a hospital, of the sort that Rivendell provided.

Rivendell provided a base of operations for the northern Dunedain (Aragorn and the Rangers). The Shire and Bree (and presumably many other communities in Eriador) lived idyllic lives because the Rangers slaughtered orcs,trolls, and human bandits that ventured westward.

The elves had trouble with the goblins in the Misty Mountains, just like the Germans and Turks had trouble in the Balkans, and the British, Russians, and Americans had trouble in Afghanistan. Mountains are easy to defend and difficult to invade, and tend to favor troublemakers.

The Anduin river is many hundreds of miles long. Dredging it for an object smaller than most coins would have been unlikely to succeed.

3

What is an REMF?

4

Rear Echelon MF’er.

More formally, non-combat military occupational specialty.

5

So Glorfindel (First age re-incarnate or not) challenging the Black Riders at the Ford of Bruinen (about the edge of Elrond-land) is about all the combat action Rivendell did. Trollshaws and Misties are too dangerous.

ETA: So perhaps REMF’s (had to look that one up too) staying hidden is preferable to that time over Macho Grande Eregion.

6

IMHO, while the OP’s not without merit, I think it’s discounting the fact that Tolkien has essentially unlimited ad hoc justifications available for incidents of Elvish inertia, based on the premise that the Elves see the problem of Sauron’s renewed rise being fundamentally a YP rather than an MP: namely, part of the forthcoming Dominion of Men.

My headcanon is that a lot of Elves, very possibly including Elrond, are simply taking it for granted that the Dominion of Men is going to be intrinsically shitty and doomed to suffering, with some form of Dark Power inevitably dominant, and the dwindling Elvish population of Middle-earth isn’t actually going to make any difference to that outcome on a timescale that Elvish immortality perceives as significant. Ultimately, if Men are going to claw back any mortal-scaled resistance to Evil for the benefit of their own Dominion, it’s got to be Men taking the responsibility and leadership of that effort. Elves won’t be leading any grand campaign to throw away multitudes of their own immortal lives for the momentary benefit of a few mortal generations that are going to be wiped out tomorrow anyway, from the Elvish perspective.

I think the OP’s understandable lust for righteous battle against evil is maybe rushing him past some of the subtler tragic nuances of the Peoples of Middle-Earth. I sympathize with the impulse, but personally, in the last analysis I don’t really want Elves as a group to be playing the same role as, say, Eternals in the MCU: basically just another bunch of even badder-ass badasses with the same militarized outlook, and comparatively short-term thinking, as the non-immortal badasses.

One of the cold and poignant truths of Middle-Earth is that ultimately, Elves don’t care. Not the way you and I care. They may love and eulogize the fleeting transient beauty of the mortal world, but on some level it’s just shadows to them. Despite having enjoyed all those badass Elvish warriors and armies in the Peter Jackson movies, I think making Elrond into some kind of Third Age Napoleon running an endless sequence of anti-Sauron military expeditions would undermine that fundamentally tragic aspect of Elvishness, and hence would be a mistake.

7

I believe the term dates to the Vietnam era. For a more recent equivalent see “Fobbit”: Forward Operations Base personnel who stay within the wire while real soldiers go out on patrol.

One egregious omission on Elrond’s part was telling the dwarves nothing about the elves they might encounter in Mirkwood; not even a letter of credential vouching for the dwarves if passage through the wood should become an issue.

8

For deeper understanding of some of the issues raised by the OP here, I recommend a YouTube channel called In Deep Geek. The commentary there is thoughtful and well-researched through most or all of the printed works collected by Tolkien’s son. There is one video called How Powerful is Elrond? (and similar videos for a lot of other characters in LotR, the Hobbit and the Silmarillion), but his actions and character appear frequently across a lot of the channel’s output.

But my real answer is that this is the story that Tolkien wanted to tell, and Elrond is a character that serves the book that was written. If you would rather that the sweet (but surprisingly tough) Hobbits didn’t have to face all that danger and stress, and all those moral trials, just to come home to more danger and still Frodo never heals, then you want a different book.

9

I can agree with Kimstu’s point that for Elves, their time has come and Last Alliance was probably a phrase coined, as it were, early in the Third Age. Sure, Rivendell was a secret place and trying to take Lothlorien would not be worth it, at the same time the Noldor Retirees in Rivendell didn’t want any piece of the action. And certainly not led by a failure of a field marshall like Elrond.

Rivendell being a haven of sorts was of use, yet Elrond wasn’t too informative to the Dunedain or Gandalf. It came up, I believe in the Council, that either Nazgul or Orcs were searching around the Gladden Fields, right where Isildur fell. So Mordor was starting at a logical place for a piece of gold to be, even after 3000 years and not writing it off as having floated down the Anduin even into the Sea. I reckon that search was called off when Gollum was captured in Mordor.

Elrond letting his wife visit her mom without at least her sons and maybe some Noldor retirees was derelict. That the trollshaws even existed next to Elrond-land and his blase glance and comment about Glamdring, “That’s my grandfather’s sword. Golly” and that Turgon’s sword was very much recognized (along with Orcrist) by the Goblins before Gandalf was the first to use it in - what - nearly 6,000 years?

He doesn’t come across as the brightest bulb in the room. Did he tell Gandalf that perhaps Isildur wrote some interesting stuff? Gandalf learns more being imprisoned in/on Orthanc than he does from Elrond, who knowledge-wise is irrelevant. A good place for a meeting of various cultures and coming up with a plan as hopeless as the next was all he provided. I reckon, for plot sake, he couldn’t say “Should you pass near, stop by Lorien” which every non-hobbit in the party is aware of.

10

There, I think we’re getting a bit of a side blast of Tolkien’s own Victorian/Edwardian assumptions about the inherent fragility and vulnerability of women. He wasn’t totally consistent with this approach: for example, making Galadriel a more powerful magic-wielder than most Elves, including her own husband Celeborn, capable of shutting out the mind-power of Sauron himself.

But we’re supposed to take it for granted that Galadriel’s own daughter Celebrian just gets helplessly snatched by Orcs when traveling with her retinue through the mountains, like a Victorian lady being carried off by the proverbial Italian banditti. Subsequently, Celebrian’s two much younger sons (with correspondingly less mature Elvish wisdom and might etc.) are able to just march into the kidnappers’ den and seize their mom back like a parcel stolen by porch pirates.

IMHO the combination of ancient heroic saga influence and Tolkien’s own cultural environment is what’s causing this unevenness. Galadriel is a veteran of Second Age warfare and war leadership, the most powerful magician on the Council of the Wise, the one who threw down the walls of Dol Guldur, etc. etc. Celebrian is partly a High Elf-queen who travels wherever the fuck she wants without needing Elrond’s supervision, any more than Galadriel needs Celeborn’s, and partly, as I said, a helpless fine lady who suffers the Unspeakable Defiling Tortures at the Filthy Hands of Ravishers so beloved of Victorian pornography. (No, not claiming that Tolkien actually read Victorian or any other pornography, but sanitized versions of this trope permeated the more “respectable” literary atmosphere of the time as well.)

So I don’t think it’s quite fair to blame Elrond for his author’s inconsistency in defining his role, particularly as it pertains to female characters. There’s Elrond just being a living legend of deep lore and mighty deeds from back in the First Age of the world when he became the first and only made-not-born immortal, and all of a sudden the author’s expecting him to deal with a classic Victorian traumatized chronic-invalid wife and a daughter who wants to marry beneath her station, and consequently has to stay at home literally working on her embroidery while Papá would prefer to send her abroad to stay with her relatives. Sheee-yit.

There are several aspects of LOTR where you can really see the early 20th-c. upper-middle-class English lath and canvas showing through the antique-heroic gauze and paint, and the overall treatment of Elven women is one of them. The effect on Elrond’s persona is just collateral damage.

11

Tolkien himself called the Elves “not wholly good” and “embalmers”. What they sought was preservation, not improvement.

But the Elves are not wholly good or in the right. Not so much because they had flirted with Sauron; as because with or without his assistance they were ‘embalmers’. They wanted to have their cake and eat it: to live in the mortal historical Middle-earth because they had become fond of it (and perhaps because they there had the advantages of a superior caste), and so tried to stop its change and history, stop its growth, keep it as a pleasaunce, even largely a desert, where they could be 'artists’ – and they were overburdened with sadness and nostalgic regret.

12

On this point, I believe the idea is that the War of the Last Alliance victors believed, not unreasonably, that Sauron was simply donezo. He’d been de-Ringed, dematerialized, and destroyed in terms of his empire and his armies. Yes, the cooler heads were in agreement that Isildur would be better off incinerating the One Ring because it was imbued with Sauronic evil, but once Isildur was dead and the Ring was lost it really didn’t seem like a serious threat anymore.

Probably not till Saruman started his secret researches did anybody think of the Ring as an object that could still have significant influence in the world. And the possibility of Sauron himself recorporealizing and regaining substantial power was long ruled out even among the White Council (latterly owing to the dishonest arguments of Saruman); it wasn’t confirmed until the confrontation with the Mirkwood Necromancer.

So, yeah. The Third Age was busy, the Third Age was long, and for the vast majority of it, both Sauron and the Ring seemed to have become, literally or effectively, nonentities. It’s easy to be wise after the event, but for nearly three thousand years there was no evident reason to be at all worried about either Sauron or the Ring.

(Not knowing much about Evil Spirit physics, I still don’t understand how Sauron could be decorporealized and de-potented to the extent of losing all influence over his subjects, living and undead, immediately after the battle, and then somehow spontaneously regenerate over the course of millennia afterwards. Physiotherapy? Wheatgrass juice? I can’t really blame the victors for regarding him as a solved problem; just as the Fellowship and their allies did after the destruction of the Ring, mind you. Hello, this guy existed and was evil before he had the One Ring, are you really so sure that this time it’s deffo-for-certain-posilutely over?)

13

He could come back because he was an evil spirit, a corrupted Maia; his body was just something he manifested and could eventually re-create if it was destroyed. It took him so long because his Ring was taken from him that time, so he had less power to work with; he came back much faster after being “killed” during the fall of Númenor.

14

However emphatic Elrond was in encouraging Isildur to toss the precious Ring into Orodruin, he probably knew that the Three, Seven and Nine would all lose cable access.

Of course this is appendix back-story. Gandalf had to leave Bilbo to have his hero quest, and (PJ’s movies don’t count) we know nothing about how badly things went with Gandalf, Galadriel and Saruman during that time (Elrond was celebrating Vingilot Week). Getting rid of a flying fire-breathing dragon becomes much less a worry than Necromancer revealing himself as Sauron and flying away to a Barad-dur which had been completely raised bottom-up in secret.

15

Just want to salute the hilarious snark in this thread. The vision of Sauron sitting in a cafe sipping wheatgrass juice is hilarious. Being evil, I bet his straw wasn’t even compostable.

16

I will not respond to these accusations outside of the pit.