Last night, I decided to watch The Fellowship of the Ring. I’m also in the middle of The Gods of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burrows.
In FotR, there is a brief scene where Elrond basically pisses all over Aragorn’s love for Arwen. Essentially, he tell Aragorn that he’s not good enough for his daughter, becuase he wants her to travel west with him to Valinor, the Undying Lands. I can sorta sympathize, he doesn’t want his daughter to grow old and die. But still, to tell the man she loves (who is already well aware of her predicament), “You’re not good enough for my little girl, because if she stays with me, she can live forever, but if goes with you, she’ll grow old and die, and it’ll be ALL YOUR FAULT,” is a pretty dickish thing to do.
Anyhow, Elrond is talking about Valinor, and I got to thinking how similar it is to the Valley Dor on Barsoom. They are both reached by boat. The elves go west to Valinor when they’ve reached the end of their time on Middle Earth. The Red and Green Martians take the voluntary pilgrimage down the River Iss to the Valley Dor at the end of their long lives. They are both believed to be paradises, and (most importantly) no one has ever returned from either.
There is one major difference, though. The Valley Dor is a huge fucking death trap. How do we know the same isn’t true of Valinor?
I have a feeling the next time I watch the Grey Havens scene in The Return of the King, my brane will be screaming, “Don’t go, Frodo! It’s a trick!”
Some of the elves lived for a while in the west before coming to Middle Earth. The only survivor from those days is Galadriel. But since she’s Arwen’s grandmother, she’d probably let Elrond know if Valinor was a deathtrap.
Of course, Galadriel got from Valinor to Middle Earth when it was still possible to just walk from one to the other (you had to go over the polar ice cap, but this was before global warming). Has anyone returned AFTER the gods turned the world into a globe?
Guy Gavriel Kay, who actually worked for JRRT, wrote extremely derivative novels involving elf-like beings who sailed over the sea. His big reveal was that they got et.
Your brane is that little, evil voice in the back of your head that asks questions like:
[ul][li]How do we know that Valinor isn’t a giant ruse perpetrated by the powers that be to lure the elves to thier doom?[/li][li]If you were to put the WonderPets into a pen and make them fight to their deaths, who would win?[/li][li]What would be a good scenario to get the Wonderpets into the afore mentioned pen?[/li][li]If you were on an airplane with the Sesame Streep Muppets that crashed into the Andes, who would you eat first?[/li][li]Why did that car that passed Mac in Cars have a mattress tied to its top?[/li][li]Who the hell tied it there?[/ul][/li]I don’t get much sleep anymore.
Wrong. First: Eat Cookie Monster. He’s the biggest threat. Then go after Big Bird. He’ll keep everyone fed the longest, and give everyone more time for help to arrive.
Yeah, but wasn’t there some kind of “curse” on Galadriel that was supposed to keep her from “returning?” “Oh yeah, it’s really great there but, uh, I’m like, not allowed back…or something.”
And she, like, magically lifted it from herself? Nuts to that, she knows it’s a deathtrap. And the only reason she jumps on the boat is because she’s tired of living after, what, 6 million years?