Any amount of time you spend apart from your loved one is, by definition, is a blip on the road of infinity. And “eventually” is not hard to wait for when you literally live forever. But her elven friends and family know they’ll see her again eventually. So yes, if an elf is killed in battle, her death will separate her from any loved ones she has on Middle-earth as her spirit travels to Valinor to be re-embodied. Their families and friends can visit them, but it’s not very fun. And if an elf lacks the will to live again - which has happened at least a few times - they remain as a sad, disembodied shade in the Halls of Mandos until the end of time or until they feel better, whichever happens first. Most elves “return to life” without much drama, but Mandos has the power to deny an elf corporeal form if they were a particularly bad person in life. Most of them are then returned to corporeal form and rejoin all the other elves living in Valinor. When elves die, their spirits travel to the Halls, where they rest for a time as disembodied shades. The Halls of Mandos are a system of great caverns and underground halls lined with god-woven tapestries depicting all of history. And within Valinor is the domain of Mandos, Middle-earth’s god of the afterlife. Valinor is Asgard, and it is Valhalla it is Heaven, and it is, in some ways, Eden. On the continent of Aman, the elves and the Valar founded a nation called Valinor. (Men were also in the blueprints for Middle-earth, but not for some eons later.) The Valar were not powerful enough to turn all of Middle-earth into a paradise, so after they made all the birds, and fish, and animals, and the mountains, and valleys, and rivers, and oceans, and most of the stars … they focused on crafting an elven homeland in the far west.Īnd when they found the first elves, they spent a long time gaining their trust and guiding them to Aman, with some factions of elves choosing to stay behind at various pinch points like mountain ranges and ocean shores - leaving a tidy trail of different elven cultures for Tolkien to play with during the course of The Silmarillion, his history of the pre- Lord of the Rings Middle-earth. In the far west of Middle-earth, there is a continent called Aman (or at least there used to be, but we’ll come back to that), that was shaped by Middle-earth’s gods, the Valar, as the best place in the world for elves.Īt the dawn of time, Middle-earth’s supreme creator god, Eru Ilúvatar, created the Valar to be the caretakers of the world, and to shape its form into one that would be good for Ilúvatar’s next creations, Elves.
#LORD OF RINGS ELVES TV#
What MAY or MAY NOT be a view of Valinor, in a promotional image for Amazon’s Lord of the Rings TV series. But the real key to understanding elven immortality is understanding that elven heaven is a place. They can also come back any time they want to. See, elves can die, and when they do, they get to go to heaven. And for those who want to know more (and there is so much more), the context for these contrasts - the lore that informed the dialogue, acting, even cinematography of the elves of the Lord of the Rings - is all found in Tolkien’s books, often beyond the main trilogy. They seem indifferent and helpful, wise and overly judgmental. Jackson’s elves are alien in ways that are difficult to articulate, but utterly compelling nonetheless.
Elves remember - the great elf-lord Elrond seems to hold a grudge against Aragorn for a weakness he witnessed in his distant ancestor, and puts up a mighty resistance to Aragorn marrying his daughter.
Elves are strange - they are oddly detached, even campy in their relations to men, dwarves, and hobbits. give outsize weight to elven deaths during the battle of Helm’s Deep, making sure Aragorn has a good chunk of a moment to honor Haldir’s sacrifice. The elves become a fascinating embodiment of this less-is-more approach to exposition. We don’t need to be told that elves live a very long time because Hugo Weaving looks exactly the same in a multi-millennia flashback. Jackson and company had to leave many details of Tolkien’s mythos unexplained for the Lord of the Rings movies, but the brilliance of the production is that they never let an opportunity to depict the effects of these details. So each Wednesday throughout the year, we'll go there and back again, examining how and why the films have endured as modern classics. 2021 marks The Lord of the Rings movies' 20th anniversary, and we couldn't imagine exploring the trilogy in just one story.
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