Understood…I meant essentially dead to Middle Earth. If they can have no further impact upon Middle Earth then they are dead to Middle Earth. Some people think us mortals will live on in an afterlife but even if that is so we are still dead to those who we leave behind. I realize the elves aren’t dead given what everyone has written but they are dead to Middle Earth…history fading to legend fading to myth for those left behind.
[nitpick]The Grey Havens are part of Middle-Earth, from which the Elves depart to Valinor or the Undying Lands.
[/nitpick]
Yes. Once upon a time anyone could sail to the Undying Lands, but after the Numenorean invasion attempt and the Akkalabeth, Eru remade the world into a round one and placed Valinor off the mortal plane. But Elves could still make ships that would traverse the “straight road” and return to the Blessed Realm.
Umm, I beg to differ. I believe, though it’s not explicitly stated this way, that one part of the curse of the Ring was that it robbed its mortal wearers of the Gift of Death - irrevocably - though even Gandalf may not have known this for certain (or he might have given Frodo a still clearer warning against wearing it).
Gollum, in RotK, stated that once the Precious was gone he would be dust… but he may have been wrong. Certainly Bilbo, who is somewhat over-age for a hobbit, doesn’t immediately drop dead, though his true age does assert itself; but from the subsequent history of Sam, who seems to show no other after-effects from the Ring, it looks as though he too wasn’t going to die naturally. I’ve guessed that Bilbo, Frodo and eventually Sam were all allowed into the Blessed Realm because that was the only place where they could receive appropriate care for their condition: interminable senility, in the end.
The odd one out of those who went to the Blessed Realm? Gimli. No doubt he died a natural and contented death at the end of his dwarfishly long lifespan, leaving Gandalf, Legolas and Frodo as the last surviving trio from the Fellowship.
Got any evidence to back that up, Malacandra? Nothing like that appears in any of JRRT’s writings, IIRC. I doubt a bugger like Sauron would have had the power to withhold Iluvatar’s Gift of Death from men forever.
To the far flung Isles of Langerhans.
Got any evidence to back that up, Malacandra? Nothing like that appears in any of JRRT’s writings, IIRC. I doubt a bugger like Sauron would have had the power to withhold Iluvatar’s Gift of Death from men forever.
Qadgop the Mercotan: **Originally the elves arose in Middle-Earth, but the Powers thought they were cool, and invited them to come home to Valinor with them to live. Most did. Some stayed in Middle-earth, like Legolas’ people. **
Now, I could easily be wrong, but I was always under the impression that Legolas was one of the Light Elves.
I think it was in one of the letters collected by Humphrey Carpenter that Tolkien himself stated that the problem was that the Ring caused an attenuation of hobbit lifespan – not an extension but a drawing out of the natural lifespan, with attendant weariness and stress – sort of a sense of “Won’t this torture ever end?” Gollum shows this trait taken to its extreme – over 580 years old, when a normal hobbit lives scarcely past 100, and “attenuated” to the point that the sole thing for which he cares at all is his Precious.
Hobbits are explicitly a small race of Men, as opposed to Elves, Dwarves, Ents, Orcs, Trolls, and for all I know Collywobbles. (Middle-Earth sometimes resembles the main auditorium at a particularly odd SF convention!) Hence they share in the Gift of Men – death and passage beyond the Circles of the World.
The general idea is that Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam require to be purged, compassionately, of the effects of the Ring on them to pass to their due reward, and that Arwen offers her place on the ship to Tol Eressea, which she won’t be needing, to Frodo as a way of recompensing him for what he’s doing in behalf of them all. Tolkien speaks of the Ringbearers’ sojourn there as “purgatorial,” remembering that as a Catholic he understood Purgatory as a spiritual cleansing willingly undertaken. They will indeed eventually die in Tol Eressea and pass beyond the Circles of the World.
I thought he was a wood-elf, from Mirkwood. Am I wrong?
I don’t have a cite, but I recall reading a quotation from one of Tolkien’s letters stating explicitly that Bilbo and Frodo and Sam would die eventually in Valinor, although not until they were ready to die (I think it was implied that they would voluntarily decide when they were ready, sometime after being fully purged of the Ring’s effects). But hobbits are mortal creatures, mortality is an inherent part of their nature, and nothing changes that in Tolkien’s world. Or that’s what I think I remember the letter saying.
No, Legolas was of the Moriquendi, the elves who never left Middle-earth. His roots are not completely untangled, but JRRT’s writings indicate that he was the son of Thranduil, lord of the Sylvan elf-realm in Mirkwood. Some early manuscripts indicate that Thranduil was the son of Oropher, who founded the Mirkwood elven kingdom. The sylvan elves departed from their Teleri brothers during the great trek east, and settled in the forests. Definitely backwoods, country cousins.
Other writings indicated that Legolas was a Sindarin elf; Teleri who held Elu Thingol as their king, and may have dwelt in Doriath for a time. There he would have been under the influence of Thingol, who had beheld the Light before Sun & Moon (aka the Two Trees) and gained much wisdom as a result. With Thingol’s queen Melian the Maia, the Sindarin elves stood head and shoulders above the sylvan elves and other Moriquendi in wisdom.
But either way, Legolas never lived in Valinor, nor did his ancestors. That’s the only way to become a Calaquendi (elf of the light).
To clarify further: In “Letters by JRRT” #297, JRRT writes explicitly that Oropher, Legolas’ grandfather, was a Sindarin elf of the royal line, who left Beleriand (& Doriath) after its destruction, and settled among the sylvan elves in Mirkwood, with a few other Sindarin refugees.
Qadgop beat me to the punch. But according to the Silmarillion indexes (indices?), Thranduil (and by proxy, Legolas his son) is a Sindarin.
QtM, I do not. And Polycarp has quoted the only authoritative source on the subject (which I’m most grateful for) and it ties in very well with the world-view presented by Tolkien.
On the subject of what Sauron could or couldn’t do, who can say? Melkor (Morgoth) was able to corrupt Elves and Ents to produce the entire races of Orcs and Trolls, and that entailed as gross a distortion of their nature as the removal of the Gift from mortals. And I have a vague memory from The Silmarillion to the effect that the Valar had no authority to change men’s mortal nature - not that they could not. However, Tolkien has stated what eventually became of the Ring-bearers, and this fills me with an unaccountable sense of satisfaction over what are, after all, only a collection of words on a page.
The Encyclopedia of Arda confirms this.
(Warning: Tolkien geeks can be lost here for days at a time. Use with caution.)
By blood Legolas is Sindar, by culture, Silvan.
DD
Swoon!
Oh, I dunno…Thingol may have had much wisdom, but he sure didn’t seem to use it much, what with entangling himself with the Doom of the Noldor and all that, by demanding that Beren bring him a Silmaril…pretty damn stupid, really…
Yes, but he made the demand specifically because he didn’t believe Beren could do it. Thingol wasn’t giving him an almost impossible quest so Beren could prove himself worthy of Luthien. He was giving him what he thought was a truly impossible quest to keep him away from her completely.
There’s some speculation that Thingol’s initiation of the Quest of the Silmaril was also part of the Doom, in which case he had no choice about it in the first place. If Melian, the equivalent of an angel, didn’t have the wisdom or influence on her besotted husband to keep him from doing this thing, then I’d say it was foretold rather than simply foolish.
Yes, he made the demand to Beren in the same sense that might have asked him for the Moon, but, by doing so (as recognized by Melian at the time) he ensnared himself in the Oath of Feanor and the Doom of the Noldor. Had he not done so, he might well have survived the War of the Silmarils and settled down in Mirkwood as King in place of Thranduil.
Thingol was already hopelessly entangled in the Doom of the Noldor when he invited his Noldorin kin (Finarfin’s children) into Doriath. From then on it was fated for him to become a chowderhead.