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The numenorean army set foot in valinor
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Sep 13, 2018 03:19
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cheetah7071 posted:The numenorean army set foot in valinor Exactly one foot
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Sep 13, 2018 03:22
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None of the LOTR folks make it to Valinor proper. Tuor and Eärendil were significantly more hardcore of course, but they also lived in the time when Valinor was literally just across the sea to the west and anyone could, in theory, have gone there as long as the gods weren’t condemning them to helplessly die without ever finding the way there for some reason. The fellowship guys go to Tol Eressea, which is still really nice and was removed from the circles of the world with Valinor, but isn’t strictly under the ban of the gods.
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Sep 13, 2018 03:23
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The division between Eressea and Valinor honestly feels like a leftover from the Book of Lost Tales that doesn't really fit anymore
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Sep 13, 2018 03:28
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Yeah, he abandoned the etiological myth the island was created to service and never came up with another purpose of similar importance.
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Sep 13, 2018 03:32
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:Are Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, and Gimli the only non-elves to set foot in Valinor? Maybe there's a "you must be below this height to enter Valinor" sign, and that's why the Numenorians weren't allowed in. (The elves obviously just limbo in under the bar)
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Sep 13, 2018 03:32
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skasion posted:None of the LOTR folks make it to Valinor proper. Tuor and Eärendil were significantly more hardcore of course, but they also lived in the time when Valinor was literally just across the sea to the west and anyone could, in theory, have gone there as long as the gods weren’t condemning them to helplessly die without ever finding the way there for some reason. The fellowship guys go to Tol Eressea, which is still really nice and was removed from the circles of the world with Valinor, but isn’t strictly under the ban of the gods. Somehow I've missed this distinction after all these years.
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Sep 13, 2018 04:02
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Yeah, same -- I thought everyone was hanging out with Manwe et. al. Does Tolkien make that clear in the letters or something?
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Sep 13, 2018 06:31
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In the Book of Lost Tales it is made very clear that the Elves who return to the West go to Eressea not Valinor. This is because they eventually move Eressea back to Middle-Earth and it becomes Britain after the men finish killing the elves. Tolkien eventually dropped that element of the mythology, but the return being to Eressea instead of Valinor is a vestige of it.
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Sep 13, 2018 06:53
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Exactly one foot The foot is, in fact, still there.
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Sep 13, 2018 11:21
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re: powerful elves in the third age: i took cirdan's beard and general "old" appearance to be a result of him giving narya to gandalf ~2000 years before the last ships start sailing. also that drinking game scene between legolas and gimli in the movies is extremely cringe worthy
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Sep 13, 2018 16:33
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Not Very Metal posted:re: powerful elves in the third age: i took cirdan's beard and general "old" appearance to be a result of him giving narya to gandalf ~2000 years before the last ships start sailing. How so?
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Sep 13, 2018 16:38
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sassassin posted:How so? given the three rings' ability to help bear weariness, cirdan passing it off to gandalf (i imagine) had some some detrimental effects on him. maybe detrimental is too strong a word, rather that cirdan stopped receiving those sweet ring perks for a couple dozen centuries. though now that I think about it, the three rings' powers weren't set to start diminishing until the one was destroyed, so i could be completely off base here. cirdan's appearance probably is just due to the fact that he's been in arda through the years of the trees and all three ages
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Sep 13, 2018 16:46
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He's just really god drat old.
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Sep 13, 2018 16:49
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Elves had some kind of vaguely-defined stages of life and only grew beards once they were in the last one. The stages seem to have been related to age in part, but also can just happen: Thingol noticeably changes after Lúthien dies and one possible reading of the passage is that he literally goes gray. No word on his facial hair though.
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Sep 13, 2018 17:12
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Was it still the case in the final version ribfest elves eventually become incorporeal?
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Sep 13, 2018 17:13
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The natural lifespan of an elf is greater than that of Arda, but they do age.
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Sep 13, 2018 17:13
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cheetah7071 posted:Was it still the case in the final version ribfest elves eventually become incorporeal? The idea that elves that don’t return to Valinor are fading into incorporeal ghosts comes from Laws & Customs, so it’s about as final as his writing on the subject got. It’s definite contrast to the idea in BOLT that elves are fading into goofy little Victorian fairies sitting on toadstools instead.
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Sep 13, 2018 17:19
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Flitting on goblin feet
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Sep 13, 2018 17:37
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Bongo Bill posted:The natural lifespan of an elf is greater than that of Arda, but they do age. Man, can you imagine what a relief that was for the first Elven parents? You woke up fully formed and now you have this squalling dribbly creature, and you don't even know that it's going to at least grow up to be mostly self-cleaning. I hope one of the Maiar clued them in on the whole child-rearing thing, they don't breed fast enough to learn from mistakes.
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Sep 13, 2018 17:53
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Time before the sun rose is always a little vague but I always pictured elves living for several ages in cuivienen before orome showed up
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Sep 13, 2018 17:56
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cheetah7071 posted:Time before the sun rose is always a little vague but I always pictured elves living for several ages in cuivienen before orome showed up Must have been at least a couple hundred years because the guys leading the houses on the journey to the west are not the same mythic patriarchs who originally awakened, nor are they ever described as being close descendants of them. Timelines suggest it was about 500 solar years. If it was much longer than that, the Valar’s already extremely measured pace in doing anything about the situation starts getting kind of comical. I don’t know if this is the right idea guys, maybe we better think about making war on Melkor for another century before we do anything!
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Sep 13, 2018 18:12
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Well, The Cuivienen timeline is divided into two parts--before Orome even found them, and after that but before the journey west starts. The latter I'll agree can't be longer than a few centuries without getting comical, but the former could be millenia for all we know, unless I'm missing something.
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Sep 13, 2018 18:20
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We know elves appeared after Aule created the dwarves and after Varda created the stars. But all sense of time in the early legendarium is really fuzzy, so it's hard to pinpoint how long that was.
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Sep 13, 2018 19:19
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There wasn’t a sun so yeah. Time what does it mean.
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Sep 13, 2018 19:20
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sweet geek swag posted:We know elves appeared after Aule created the dwarves and after Varda created the stars. But all sense of time in the early legendarium is really fuzzy, so it's hard to pinpoint how long that was. Sort of fuzzy in the sense that Tolkien never devoted any attention to it in anything he published, and that it doesn’t especially matter to anything, but not fuzzy entirely, for he certainly thought about how many years it was and wrote precise opinions about that, even down to the calculations of how long a year was before there was a sun and what it meant (1000 Valian days, each day being the time it takes for both of the Trees to flower twelve times; since for both Trees to flower once takes about seven of our hours, a Valian year is between 9-10 solar years).
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Sep 13, 2018 19:51
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Yeah time definitely existed in the normal sense; Arda isn't Glorantha. There were just no cyclical events you could use to measure it until the trees were made, and that wasn't particularly helpful unless you lived in Valinor.
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Sep 13, 2018 19:56
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Little in The Silmarillion should be read as literal fact. These are (written to resemble) myths & fables of a lost oral storytelling culture. It is not an accurate documentary account of the dawn of time.
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Sep 13, 2018 20:20
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sassassin posted:Little in The Silmarillion should be read as literal fact. These are (written to resemble) myths & fables of a lost oral storytelling culture. It is not an accurate documentary account of the dawn of time. It doesn't seem like Elves go senile though so if we're to take the Silmarillion as a written account from the Elves of that time of how things were then you'd have to assume a lot of is accurate. Or accurate in the sense of this is how the Elves viewed the events of that time. Obviously they'd have certain biases and would represent events in a pro-elven light. But they'd clearly remember what happened then even if what they wrote was colored by their biases.
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Sep 13, 2018 20:24
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The Quenta Silmarillion itself is certainly a mythic text, but the various annals of Beleriand supporting it present themselves as just that, annals. That doesn’t mean that everything in them is true or that we need to be uncritical of their viewpoint, anymore so than we would be of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. But I don’t think they’re trying to present as an oral culture’s myths. Annals are a literary form and their use illuminates the shift in Tolkien’s conception of the elves from basically just extremely pretty and cool savages to a highly developed culture with professional scholars and such (and also an aristocracy of extremely pretty and cool savages). Annals are yearly records and are therefore deeply concerned with proper dating, even if they’re wrong (as, for example, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is about the date of Claudius’ invasion of Britain) they just aren’t waffling over it and saying “it was sometime, who knows”.
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Sep 13, 2018 20:34
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Honestly, the immortality of elves as Tolkien presents it gets in the way of the stories being told in the Silmarillion. He needs being slain to have meaning, so they resurrect somewhere else--so what is even the point? And he wants this to be a culture with an oral tradition similar to Anglo Saxons but then he invented people who lived long enough they were there and could just recount their memories instead of the epic poem that was written about it.
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Sep 13, 2018 20:38
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Dying still hurt and they weren’t guaranteed to come back to Arda.
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Sep 13, 2018 20:40
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euphronius posted:Dying still hurt and they weren’t guaranteed to come back to Arda. I mean yes he successfully came up with a way for their immortality to never effect the story in any way So the question is, why bother making them immortal e: I will say that elves being long-lived does effect LotR. It's the Silmarillion, for which the immortality was originally invented, where it's almost completely irrelevant.
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Sep 13, 2018 20:40
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You mean not being able to die of old age? I don’t know. To make them different form men?
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Sep 13, 2018 20:42
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Well, that and the notion that they don't really die when slain.
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Sep 13, 2018 20:43
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Hroa is def dead as roadkill. fea does not die but that is the same as men really. We just don’t know where men’s feas go.
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Sep 13, 2018 20:46
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The elves writing the Red Book are not all Galdadriel.
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Sep 13, 2018 22:04
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Isn't Glorfindel the only elf that ever comes back to do anything? It's not like they can just respawn at their last save point. The Elves are of Arda, they exist wholly in the world. If they die their spirit stays in the world. Their immortality makes them a lasting part of the world to the point it's not too much of a stretch to view them as a physical feature of Arda as much as the mountains and rivers. Their immortality and physical perfection sets them apart from Men who are defined by their transience and a fate that is ultimately beyond the world.
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Sep 13, 2018 22:27
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Building on that: broadly speaking the elves are meant to contrast a “pagan” ideal of humanity with the Christian concept of humanity that Tolkien refers to as “men”. The elves are godlike entities. They walk with the gods and know their minds, they even mate with them to produce a heroic demigod whose ancestry will go on to define the legitimacy of even later merely human monarchs. They are beautiful and physically flawless and live forever, unafraid of death and sometimes glorying in it, but consequently have a monumental lack of humility that casts their morality and ultimate fate into doubt. Despite this, they were the originators of the culture to which men consider themselves heirs, uplifting men from a barbarous state and making possible their future civilization. They are at first fascinated by humanity, but ultimately disappointed and doomed by them. Even the best of them must ultimately resign themselves to this change and let their memories be consigned to myth while they retreat from the world proper into a worldly paradise. Men are not godlike. All but a chosen few are ignorant of the divine. They are physically and spiritually frail and live in fear of death, but there is a consolation for them beyond death that redeems their lives in a way the elves are seemingly incapable of comprehending. Ultimately, God created the earth for their sake, and the whole saga of the elves was only a prelude to this. The legends of the elder days are concerned with understanding the relationship between these two kinds of human ideal. The reason why this works is because it’s what’s at the root of folkloric elves: they are remnants of some kind of pre-Christian Germanic worldview, but we know of them exclusively through Christian attempts to make sense of this passed-down tradition.
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Sep 13, 2018 23:01
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Wonder what the original plan for Arda was, without Melkor's loving it up. A symmetrical, flat world with men and elves living together (no dwarves), lit by the lamps, men not afraid of death / don't distrust the elves. Possibly with the Ainur just wandering around hanging out and making trees, that sort of thing. Like, what was the plan for how long the world should remain, what changes were expected, etc. One might ask similar questions as to what God intended with Adam, Eve, and Eden before the fall. (The answer in both cases is probably 'boring, pleasant life, forever')
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Sep 13, 2018 23:21
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