I grew up reading books, and in hindsight, many of the characters I loved had an elvish air: Mowgli and Tarzan who ran around in the trees and talked to animals, the kid in The Forgotten Door (by Alexander Key) who could read thoughts, speak to animals, lighten his feet, dressed in grey, and fell through a dimensional doorway from elsewhere. Every Jedi, every kung fu monk, and even The Faithful Indian Sidekick that was a staple of westerns (stereotyped to be sure, but one played with dignity by Mohawk actor Jay Silverheels). Even Spock and other Vulcans (and later, the Romulan, Elnor, dubbed "Space Legolas" as well as being compared to Elrond) were in the same Venn diagram of archetype. People who were close to the natural world, sensed things mere mortals could not, talked to animals and trees, and had a few superhero capabilities, twitched just a notch beyond mundane humans.
Rudolph, D&D and Galadriel's Yard Sale.
Scene; a boring art school classroom in the mid-ninteen-seventies, where we were learning to line up bits of type in straight lines or something. A geeky kid in the back of the class says to a late teen-something slightly geeky woman: "You look like an Elf in that shirt." Indeed, the late hippie era green flowy thing I was wearing did look like a refuge from Galadriel's yard sale. If I'd had any clue who Galadriel was...
"Huh? You mean like Herbie in Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer?"
Scene; 1978, a smokey kitchen crowded with mostly youngish guys, a table cluttered with dice and maps and piles of books and paper. One twenty-three year old woman raises a sheaf of paper and waves it at a bespectacled middle-aged male; the Dungeonmaster.
"What do I make of this?" I said.
He peers at it, makes noises rather like Treebeard; hoooom, hom, hmmm.
"Play an Elf." he says.
"Huh? You mean like Herbie in Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer?"
It was actually Hermey, short, blond and round-eared, and he had nothing at all to do with our Dungeons and Dragons game. Tolkien, and his world of Middle-earth had a lot more to do with it; Lord of the Rings and a few other fantasies of the time were the basis for the now famous fantasy role-playing game where I met my first Elves. And Tolkien was what my DM told me to read. I dove into The Book, appendices first, looking for any info on these mysterious creatures I thought I already knew.
Quoth the Appendix.
'Elves has been used to translate both Quendi, 'the speakers'. the High-elven name of all their kind, and Eldar, the name of the three kindreds that sought for the Undying Realm and came there at the beginning of Days (save the Sindar only). This old word was indeed the only one available, and was once fitted to apply to such memories of this people as Men preserved, or to the making of Men's minds not wholly dissimilar. But it has been diminished, and to many it may now suggest fancies either pretty or silly, as unlike to the Quendi of old as are butterflies to the swift falcon--not that any of the Quendi ever possessed wings of the body, as unnatural to them as to Men. They were a race high and beautiful, the older Children of the world, and among them the Eldar were as kings, who are now gone: the People of the Great Journey, the People of the Stars. They were tall, fair of skin and grey-eyed, though their locks were dark, save in the golden house of Finarfin, and their voices had more melodies than any mortal voice that now is heard. They were valiant, but the history of those that returned to Middle-earth in exile was grievous; and though it was in far off days crossed by the fate of the Fathers, their fate is not that of Men. Their dominion passed long ago, and they dwell now beyond their circles of the world, and do not return.'
We'll now use "fair" to mean just beautiful. Elves are an archetype that everyone in every culture has, and everyone tells stories of, and everyone identifies with. Tolkien was writing in a particular space and time and clearly used his culture's Default Mode. The streaming series Rings of Power has a cast that represents the entire world: Middle Earth is neither history nor northern Europe, it is a world, with all of a world's complexity and diversity. The other most elvish elf I have seen portrayed thus far onscreen grew up in a mountain village in Puerto Rico, identifying with the Elves, but not seeing himself represented. Elves are universal and should be depicted as such. I am also far more fond of the wood Elves, the Sindar and Nandor and Avari, than the High Elves, who seem to have made all the "News At Eleven" (their tales being sung down through the ages of Middle Earth), and who also seem to be a bit above it all at times. Thanks, I'll go party in Mirkwood.
Rudolph, D&D and Galadriel's Yard Sale.
Scene; a boring art school classroom in the mid-ninteen-seventies, where we were learning to line up bits of type in straight lines or something. A geeky kid in the back of the class says to a late teen-something slightly geeky woman: "You look like an Elf in that shirt." Indeed, the late hippie era green flowy thing I was wearing did look like a refuge from Galadriel's yard sale. If I'd had any clue who Galadriel was...
"Huh? You mean like Herbie in Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer?"
Scene; 1978, a smokey kitchen crowded with mostly youngish guys, a table cluttered with dice and maps and piles of books and paper. One twenty-three year old woman raises a sheaf of paper and waves it at a bespectacled middle-aged male; the Dungeonmaster.
"What do I make of this?" I said.
He peers at it, makes noises rather like Treebeard; hoooom, hom, hmmm.
"Play an Elf." he says.
"Huh? You mean like Herbie in Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer?"
It was actually Hermey, short, blond and round-eared, and he had nothing at all to do with our Dungeons and Dragons game. Tolkien, and his world of Middle-earth had a lot more to do with it; Lord of the Rings and a few other fantasies of the time were the basis for the now famous fantasy role-playing game where I met my first Elves. And Tolkien was what my DM told me to read. I dove into The Book, appendices first, looking for any info on these mysterious creatures I thought I already knew.
Quoth the Appendix.
'Elves has been used to translate both Quendi, 'the speakers'. the High-elven name of all their kind, and Eldar, the name of the three kindreds that sought for the Undying Realm and came there at the beginning of Days (save the Sindar only). This old word was indeed the only one available, and was once fitted to apply to such memories of this people as Men preserved, or to the making of Men's minds not wholly dissimilar. But it has been diminished, and to many it may now suggest fancies either pretty or silly, as unlike to the Quendi of old as are butterflies to the swift falcon--not that any of the Quendi ever possessed wings of the body, as unnatural to them as to Men. They were a race high and beautiful, the older Children of the world, and among them the Eldar were as kings, who are now gone: the People of the Great Journey, the People of the Stars. They were tall, fair of skin and grey-eyed, though their locks were dark, save in the golden house of Finarfin, and their voices had more melodies than any mortal voice that now is heard. They were valiant, but the history of those that returned to Middle-earth in exile was grievous; and though it was in far off days crossed by the fate of the Fathers, their fate is not that of Men. Their dominion passed long ago, and they dwell now beyond their circles of the world, and do not return.'
We'll now use "fair" to mean just beautiful. Elves are an archetype that everyone in every culture has, and everyone tells stories of, and everyone identifies with. Tolkien was writing in a particular space and time and clearly used his culture's Default Mode. The streaming series Rings of Power has a cast that represents the entire world: Middle Earth is neither history nor northern Europe, it is a world, with all of a world's complexity and diversity. The other most elvish elf I have seen portrayed thus far onscreen grew up in a mountain village in Puerto Rico, identifying with the Elves, but not seeing himself represented. Elves are universal and should be depicted as such. I am also far more fond of the wood Elves, the Sindar and Nandor and Avari, than the High Elves, who seem to have made all the "News At Eleven" (their tales being sung down through the ages of Middle Earth), and who also seem to be a bit above it all at times. Thanks, I'll go party in Mirkwood.
My favorite part of LOTR (the books) remains this:
"A smaller and lighter horse, but restive and fiery, was brought to Legolas. Arod was his name. but Legolas asked them to take off the saddle and rein. 'I need them not,' he said and lightly leaped up, and to their wonder, Arod was tame and willing beneath him, moving here and there with but a spoken word: such was the elvish way with all good beasts." Book 3, Chapter 3, pg. 51
Here are two musings on Elves in both Middle Earth and legend in general, as well as other tales, including my own. I look at Legolas in LOTR (the book mostly) who is the Elf we ride with and get to know as a representative of his folk. I look at some of the other favorite Elves we meet in other Tolkien works. I also look at Arondir in the Second Age streaming series "Rings of Power", who a blogger dubbed "the most elvish elf who ever elfed" as the actor, Ismael Cruz Cordova threw heart and soul into bringing an archetype that resonated with him, to life.
"A smaller and lighter horse, but restive and fiery, was brought to Legolas. Arod was his name. but Legolas asked them to take off the saddle and rein. 'I need them not,' he said and lightly leaped up, and to their wonder, Arod was tame and willing beneath him, moving here and there with but a spoken word: such was the elvish way with all good beasts." Book 3, Chapter 3, pg. 51
Here are two musings on Elves in both Middle Earth and legend in general, as well as other tales, including my own. I look at Legolas in LOTR (the book mostly) who is the Elf we ride with and get to know as a representative of his folk. I look at some of the other favorite Elves we meet in other Tolkien works. I also look at Arondir in the Second Age streaming series "Rings of Power", who a blogger dubbed "the most elvish elf who ever elfed" as the actor, Ismael Cruz Cordova threw heart and soul into bringing an archetype that resonated with him, to life.
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That Darn Elf: part the first
Ah! Those mortals in love with Elven prin-cesses silv'ry of skin and lengthy of tresses Tuor and Idril and Luthien fair with brave Beren storming into Morgoth's lair Aragorn mucking about in the woods til he kicked Dark Lord butt and won his True Love JR was a Man writing in a Man's time but Real Women want to have equal rhyme PJ came along and gave us our prizes with chisel-dy cheekbones and great big brown eyeses lithe as a greyhound steadfast as a goose with possibly some parts resembling a moose Not Just Another Pretty Face a random and totally non-scholarly musing on the character of the Elf in the Fellowship and on the Elven archetype in general Legolas Greenleaf, long under tree, in joy thou hast lived, beware of the screams of zillions of ardent teenagery girls but take not that grey ship, depart not this world Peter Jackson and Company put Lord of the Rings on film, (and New Zealand on the map) and zillions of people who couldn't tell a Hobbit from an Elf came to see it. And loved it. 26 years after my fist reading of The Book, I could, at last!, walk into Wal-Mart and buy Elven action figures. Go online and acquire a six-foot Legolas standee, or parts of his costume or weaponry. Legolas appeared on the cover of TV Guide. It was amazing. Wonderful. Terrifying. All across the country, nay, across the Knowne Worlde, young women swooned, palpitated and bought endless copies of teen magazines that generally featured pix, fax and other misspellings, giant foldout drool posters, and the Hearthrob of the Month on the cover. This time, the Hearthrob was an Elf. And, since he's no doubt running on Elvish Time, he has lasted a bit longer than a month. For some of us...a lot longer. we'll descend on the-aters like Sauron's Dark Hordes and eat all the popcorn and drool on the floors we'll storm all the malls buy up all the toys (what's this? oh, hah hah for my nephew, in Boise) we'll write awful poetry, stories, and fix up all our walls with posters and pix (excerpts from the epic lay, Viagraquenta, by yours truly) The great thing about movies is, you cast a few hot actors as characters formerly only familiar to readers of Great Literature, and suddenly those characters are seen everywhere from the cover of Newsweek to your buddy's refrigerator. Every fourteen year old can tell Merry and Pippin apart, and can speak at least one word of Elvish. The bad thing about movies is...see above. And unless they've read The Book, all those fourteen year olds will be missing a big part of these characters: their character. Rudolph, D&D and Galadriel's Yard Sale. Scene; a boring art school classroom in the mid-ninteen-seventies, where we were learning to line up bits of type in straight lines or something. A geeky kid in the back of the class says to a late teen-something slightly geeky woman: "You look like an Elf in that shirt." Indeed, the late hippie era green flowy thing I was wearing did look like a refuge from Galadriel's yard sale. If I'd had any clue who Galadriel was... "Huh? You mean like Herbie in Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer?" Scene; 1978, a smokey kitchen crowded with mostly youngish guys, a table cluttered with dice and maps and piles of books and paper. One twenty-three year old woman raises a sheaf of paper and waves it at a bespectacled middle-aged male; the Dungeonmaster. "What do I make of this?" I said. He peers at it, makes noises rather like Treebeard; hoooom, hom, hmmm. "Play an Elf." he says. "Huh? You mean like Herbie in Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer?" It was actually Hermey, short, blond and round-eared, and he had nothing at all to do with our Dungeons and Dragons game. Tolkien, and his world of Middle-earth had a lot more to do with it; Lord of the Rings and a few other fantasies of the time were the basis for the now famous fantasy role-playing game where I met my first Elves. And Tolkien was what my DM told me to read. I dove into The Book, appendices first, looking for any info on these mysterious creatures I thought I already knew. Quoth the Appendix. 'Elves has been used to translate both Quendi, 'the speakers'. the High-elven name of all their kind, and Eldar, the name of the three kindreds that sought for the Undying Realm and came there at the beginning of Days (save the Sindar only). This old word was indeed the only one available, and was once fitted to apply to such memories of this people as Men preserved, or to the making of Men's minds not wholly dissimilar. But it has been diminished, and to many it may now suggest fancies either pretty or silly, as unlike to the Quendi of old as are butterflies to the swift falcon--not that any of the Quendi ever possessed wings of the body, as unnatural to them as to Men. They were a race high and beautiful, the older Children of the world, and among them the Eldar were as kings, who are now gone: the People of the Great Journey, the People of the Stars. They were tall, fair of skin and grey-eyed, though their locks were dark, save in the golden house of Finarfin, and their voices had more melodies than any mortal voice that now is heard. They were valiant, but the history of those that returned to Middle-earth in exile was grevious; and though it was in far off days crossed by the fate of the Fathers, their fate is not that of Men. Their dominion passed long ago, and they dwell now beyond their circles of the world, and do not return.' That excerpt from the Appendix didn't really tell me much, except for this line: 'But it ("elves") has been diminished, and to many it may now suggest fancies either pretty or silly, as unlike to the Quendi of old as are butterflies to the swift falcon.' I never had liked those cutesey wootsey bouncy wouncy little fairy things very much, they just didn't ring true. But 'Eldar, Sindar, Quendi'...those names had power, and there was something familiar about them. So I began to read the immensity of verbiage that was The Book. I had begun Fellowship when the Bakshi movie came out (ok, I admit to seeing it...a few times, and I still have the rather lovely Royal Doulton porcelain Legolas from it). Fortunately the real imagery for Middle-earth and its inhabitants did not come from that aborted attempt at filmmaking, but from a stray poster in a magazine I had picked up for the Star Wars stuff. The poster was a large foldout; a montage of various scenes from Middle-earth, by an artist named Judy King Reniets. In the center was the Fellowship. I had not quite started The Book yet, so I waved the poster under the DM's nose and said, "Whotheheck's this blond guy with the bow?" Something about that character in the illustration was like the call of gulls in the dark. Like the whisper of wind through green leaves. Like a half forgotten face from a dream. It pulled at me in a way those silly butterfly fancies of childhood elves could not. Still, it was just a cute guy in an illo. And like that really hot guy in Home-room, the character might turn out to be a jerk. I plowed into The Book, and the guy with the longbow began to feel familiar. Something about him, and the other Elves we met briefly along the way, resonated with something deep inside me. In the Firstborn, I had recognized an Archetype. Archetypes 101. Archetype: 'an original standard pattern or model. (Greek arche-first...).' Stereotype: 'a printing plate cast in metal from a matrix molded from a raised surface...anything made this way...a conventional hackneyed expression, custom, or mode of thought.' The original stereotype made printing many identical copies of one paper or book possible. But to simply copy your characters from ancient archetypes (without giving them character) turns them into stereotypes. All of the characters in LOTR are archetypal, as well as being distinct individuals. But it was the Elves I recognized. On the Elf archetype, The New Tolkien Companion (J.E.A.Tyler, Avon Books, 1979) says: "...today only dim memories of the Elder Race survive..." Tyler speaks of Northern European faerie tale creatures as murky, diminished, "debased folk memories", made small and safe for the nursery tale. Tyler also mentions the "shaft of light striking through the murk"; tales like the early mythological cycle of Ireland, the tales of the Tuatha DeDanaan, who were mighty warriors and wielders of magic. An Irish artist named Jim Fitzpatrick has illustrated several of these myths: The Book of Conquests and The Silver Arm. This may be an example of (as Galadriel says at the beginning of the 2001 film) history become legend, legend become myth. There are places in the British Isles with standing stones, raised by real stone or bronze age cultures, long forgotten, places which are said to be where the DeDanaan fought their foes. And in thousands of years of time, where history is passed down in oral stories, and magic is thoroughly, and literally, believed in, it would be easy to see how a real culture could become mythologized as something superhuman. But that's not where I remembered them from, I never read any of those myths until after I read LOTR. In The Lord of the Rings Tarot, Terry Donaldson says of the Elf archetype: "The Elves can be thought of as the artists and musicians....those involved in cultural pursuits or intellectual pursuits of any nature...reknowned for their sophistication and craftsmanship...advance and maintain knowledge and achievement, pushing back the boundaries of knowledge with their discoveries...(Dwarves are the diligent laborers)...the Elvish qualities of inspiration, intelligence, ingenuity and sheer style can...find new solutions to old problems...charming the fiercest opponent into approachability...finding new ways to communicate with others...But we must not become too Elvish either:turning our backs on the world in our search for beauty, or substituting talk for action." What is represented, Donaldson says, by the myriad races of LOTR: "something of the soul of humanity is within them, waiting for us to find it." Ok, so they represent some aspect of human nature, of real people, of us. Wizards are wise, the knowledge of age and experience with the passion and strength of youth. Hobbits are us, or maybe the guy next door, or the garden club lady down the street, or the farmer in Kansas. Dwarves are hardy, hard-working, pragmatic, deeply connected to the dark earth, the underground, mining and making...they're probably a lot like the guy fixing your car, or driving that eighteen wheeler. Elves are light and air and tree and running water, art and music and intuition and empathy (I'm not sure where they'd be hiding out, national park service maybe, and by the looks of the LOTR films there are still a few left in New Zealand). Actually, my cousin worked for a local ski slope one winter... and noticed that all the ski instructors were tall and lithe and graceful... while all the maintenance guys were short and stout and hairy. Hmmmm. Devout Catholic Tolkien saw them as a kind of unfallen race; one more closely in tune with the elemental forces of the universe. Of Nature. Every culture has its Elves; beings who are neither gods nor ordinary men. In myth and fantasy it's Elves. In science fiction (the mythology of the future) it's aliens (Classic Trek's Spock) or droids (Next Gen's Data, or Jude Law in A.I.). All of these non-human humans help us understand what it is to be human; to see the forest you have to get out from under the trees. Look at the familiar world through another set of eyes, and you see it more clearly. But at that point I wasn't psychoanalyzing my fantasy, I was just reading it, and recognizing something familiar. Aha! The archetype had popped up before, in literature, TV, and film, if under different names. There are hints of the same archetype in the Wandering Kung-fu Monk who had the light deadly grace of a hunting cat, and a mystical way with animals and other lifeforms. In the Faithful Indian Sidekick who had talents Daniel Boone and the Lone Ranger didn't, and seemed to have a mysterious understanding of woods-lore and animals, and never missed with that bow. Both of these, because of their cultures, were other, looking at the familiar world through another set of eyes, and seeing it in a different way than the mundane Western European viewpoint. American Indians especially resonate with the Elven archetype for me; rooted in the natural world, a strong sense of "magic", or maybe it's just the cheekbones, the bows and the fact that I associate solitary rangers with both. I have a sudden awful vision of Strider, in a mask, yelling "Hi-yo Shadowfax!" Native American cultures, the first ones on this continent, are real cultures, real people, still living among us, with a history written, recorded, photographed, painted, documented, and even remembered by a few of the Elders of those peoples. We, the "mainstream culture", still have only the vaguest idea who they are; our ideas of them are more faerie tale than fact. In the space of a few lifetimes, history has already vanished into legend, and legend into myth. In Middle Earth, the Elves are in the same position: the Elder race, the Firstborn, the oldest culture, still there, but already vanishing into myth and legend, understood, loved, and respected by a few "Elf-friends" who carry their knowledge and lore into the next age. But feared or even heartily disliked by many others. I seem to remember reading (in a biography) that Tolkien was fond of "Indian stories" when he was small. Whether Native American images were at the back of Tolkien's mind when he "subcreated" Middle Earth, who knows...but I wouldn't have been surprised to find his Green Elves (Laiquendi) wearing leather tunics, soft-soled boots and hawk feathers. I think it was the Laiquendi who were described as not having steel arms or tools...a "stone age" technology akin to Native America's. Even Tarzan, and Mowgli of The Jungle Books had a bit of the Elf in them; they were Nature-spirit types who could talk to animals and 'run light over leaf or grass or snow', but with a bit more 19th century male macho than Tolkien's Quendi. There was a wonderful kid's book (Scholastic Book Services, mid-60's) called "The Forgotten Door" by Alexander Key, in which a boy coming out to watch the stars at night steps back into a forgotten door which spans space and time in an instant. He winds up on Earth, in a harrowing adventure, ending with a return to his homeworld, taking his new friends with him. He's clad in grey, hears thoughts, talks to animals, and can lighten his feet to jump higher and run faster than any human. And then there were all those pointy-eared Vulcans in Star Trek. Perhaps some of the Elves who sailed west invented warp drive and space-time gateways. And then there's the comics. And I'm not talking about Elfquest. We pause to briefly contemplate Nightcrawler of the X-Men, he of the pointy ears and glowing eyes, nicknamed by the short hairy guy (Wolverine) "fuzzy elf" or just "hey elf". On a forum on www.nightscrawlers.com I pointed out that Nightcrawler and Wolverine look and sound an awful lot like Legolas and Gimli. Dave Cockrum (a big LOTR fan who has drawn Nightcrawler as, of all things, a Hobbit) went something like "hmmmm, never thought of that." Nightcrawler was originally designed to look demonic (his original character was supposed to be dark too, but changed dramatically before publication), under the pencil of Dave Cockrum, and the pen of Chris Claremont, his character has emerged as angelic. He is odd (tail, blue fur, wierd feet and hands) but beautifully so (velvet skin, nice heavenly blue color, chiseled cheekbones, lithe, agile, immensely strong, able to draw a great warbow...no wait, that's somebody else. Well, he can wield three cutlasses at once...). You are saying; and the point is? Not the pointy ears. That's stereotypically rooted in our imaginations as something belonging to faerie. That likely has its origins in ancient godlings of field and wood: Pan, Cernunos and the like, who had some animal characteristics; because they were guardians of herds, either wild or domestic. Even in comics, or modern fantasy, if you want to make someone odd, other; make their extremities animalistic. Add a tail, antlers, hooves or bunny ears or something. The point is; glowing eyes, glowing with that inner light; the light of the Two Trees, starlight, the elf-bright eyes Tolkien describes so often. And that Nightcrawler is another example of the Elf archetype, in a different genre. And that he was originally a demon. Middle-earth's demons, the orcs, were once Elves, taken and corrupted by the dark powers. Demon and Elf are two sides of the same coin, yin and yang. In European myth, (think especially of the Irish myths of the Tuatha deDanann) when a new religion moved in with a new culture, the old culture's gods were demonized. Elves became orcs. Or eventually were turned into small cute things safe for the nursery. Only Tolkien seems to have remembered they were closer to angels. That Darn Elf. Back to The Book. I continued to plow through it, and the blond guy with the bow got better with each page of the adventure. When Legolas is handed Arod, warhorse of Rohan, and he takes off the saddle and bridle "for I need them not"...well, that was it. I'd wrestled plenty of thousand pound herbivores, rooted in fear at a mere mud puddle, or freaking from a bit of blowing paper. Legolas had 'the Elvish way with all good beasts,' I was awestruck. Throw away all that stuff about archetypes, for I need them not...I was in love. That was in 1978. Since then, I've done a lot of fantasy art, written stories, created my own characters, played more D&D, filled numerous sketchbooks, had a few adventures of my own. Swashed and buckled as a swordbroad in the Society for Creative Anachronisms, rowed a Viking longship with the Longship Company, rode my horses in chainmail, learned to hit the broad side of a stack of haybales with an arrow. Learned to do it from a horse. Trained a horse who'd run wild for the first eight years of her life, explored sunken ships, learned to kayak, trained my own sled-dog team, wrangled otters, emus and barfing vultures for local wildlife rehabbers. Backpacked, rode and paddled the marshes of Assateague Island. Wowed third graders with a demonstration of projectile pooping (aided by Thermal the Wonder Hawk). Planted some beach grass. Learned to tell a sparrow from a finch (with the aid of some birdfeeders and a Peterson's Field Guide to Eastern Birds). What's all that got to do with the Elf? Some of it, like the three bows I own, or the half-Arabian gelding who I eventually rode without a bridle, are directly inspired by the Elf. Some, like the chainmail byrnie and the numerous swords, grew out of a love of the pseudo-medieval fantasy worlds of Middle-earth and D&D. Some of it, mustangs and otters and vomiting vultures, was just who I am, though the Elf would probably approve. I had not read LOTR for many years when my buddy Dave (who looks a lot like Gimli, only balder) told me about the upcoming films. I researched them on the net, and decided it was time to re-read The Book. I fully expected it to be different. To have different parts resonate with me. To fall in love with a different character. Nope. Still in love with the bloody Elf. That long ago reading of LOTR was like floating over the surface of the ocean. Now I can dive, go below that surface, see far more in the story. Discuss it with others, and see parts of it from their perspective. But the same parts of the tale still evoke strong emotions in me, still resonate like the thunder of distant hooves. And I'm still in love with that darn Elf. Why? Who is he anyway? What is he? In Middle-earth, the Elves mostly remain somewhat distant, not concerned directly with the affairs of Men or Hobbits. Though Tolkien's whole saga started with the Elvish languages, and he himself seems to admire the Elves greatly, we don't get a close look at them in the Hobbit or in LOTR (The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, Lost Tales, and the rest of th HoME series are another matter: there we get the whole Elvish history, and a varied set of characters). In LOTR they remain as hard to find and define as a snow leopard at the top of the Himalayas. Except for one, the one we ride with through the entire War of the Ring; Legolas. He becomes the representative of his people for the rest of Middle-earth; the Hobbits, one Dwarf, the Rohirrim, the Men of Gondor...and for us. Legolas shall be for the Elves. In The Book, we first meet a heroic Elflord named Glorfindel. He helps our heroes, shows great compassion to the wounded Frodo, and has a really nice horse. He shows up, kicks butt and vanishes from the tale, never to be heard from again. And the next thing we know, this unknown kid from Mirkwood is going on the quest. Whattheheck happened to Glorfindel? I wrote an entire fanfic exploring this idea (Legolas Shall Be For the Elves, http://www.fanfiction.net/profile.php?userid=290949); it involved two young Hobbits, one of Elrond's piepans and a couple of stoic Dwarves, as well as our woodland prince. The bottom line is Legolas is young, curious, flexible, capable of bending like a willow shoot, not breaking like a mighty oak. And, in The Book, Elrond himself says "The road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far upon it." Power alone, even the power of a mighty Elflord, cannot help the Fellowship. In The Book, Legolas is introduced with a simple few lines:'There was also a strange Elf clad in green and brown, Legolas, a messenger from his father Thranduil, the King of the Elves of Northern Mirkwood.' This is followed by a detailed paragraph and a half of description of Boromir's magnificent and princely appearence. In the film, they ride in upon each other's heels; Boromir son of the Steward of Gondor, clad in finery, his horse covered in fancy trappings. The real prince rides up quietly, clad in simple camoflaged hunter's garb, on a horse with much simpler gear. And in the film, he looks up at Imladris, and his face has an openess, a sense of wonder on it. Perhaps it is his first time there; later he tells Aragorn; you have traveled further than I. Humility was a quality Tolkien seemed to cultivate within himself. His best characters all have it. Aragorn spends years tromping about the lands of Middle-earth serving under other kings, sleeping under trees, eating coneys he's shot himself ("No-ego Viggo" it seems, occasionally eats the odd coney he's accidentally run over with his car: quite the ranger/elvish bit of philosophy, waste no life). The Hobbits are by nature and culture humble. Gandalf has the powers of a Maia, but he is clad in travel-worn grey, showing his many journeys among the ordinary folk of Middle-earth. Real nobility serves. Legolas is the son of a king of one of the last great Elven kingdoms of Middle-earth. Yet he willingly follows and serves a mortal Man (Aragorn) as a faithful Hero Companion, and when Merry and Pippin are kidnapped utters lines like: "it burns my heart to see those merry young folk driven like cattle." Legolas is silent for pages and pages throughout the Council of Elrond. He apparently is listening to the wisdom of the wise. At last he makes the connection between the stories he's been hearing and the news he has brought; "Alas! Alas!" cried Legolas, and in his fair Elvish face there was great distress."The tidings that I was sent to bring must now be told. They are not good, but only here have I learned how evil they may seem to this company. Smeagol, who is now called Gollum has escaped." I always loved the line; and in his fair Elvish face there was great distress. There is no grim, stoic warrior here, but a guy with much emotional sensitivity and empathy. In his description of his people's treatment of Gollum we see more of this gentle empathy for even something as warped as Gollum; "But Gandalf bade us hope still for his cure, but we had not the heart to keep him ever in dungeons under the earth where he would fall back into his old black thoughts." Legolas does not react to Gloin's outburst referring to the temporary imprisonment of the Dwarves in "The Hobbit": "You were less tender to me"...says Gloin. It is Gandalf who smoothes Gloin's ruffled feathers, while the Elven prince remains diplomatically silent. Movie fans who haven't read The Book will have missed a deeper level of the Legolas/Gimli friendship: the clash between their fathers in The Hobbit. Gloin is one of the thirteen dwarves who, with Bilbo, go on a quest to the Lonely Mountain. The Elvenking of Mirkwood in The Hobbit, is Thranduil, father of Legolas. An older rift exists between Elves and Dwarves, going back to the awakening of the Dwarves by the Vala Aule, in The Silmarillion, somewhere at the beginning at the dawn of time. The Legolas/Gimli friendship heals some very old old wounds. I go to find The Sun. Little more is said of Legolas for awhile. As the Fellowship of the Ring sets out, they form a marching order, rather like our D&D teams; in front are Gandalf and Aragorn 'who knew the land even in the dark. The others were in file behind, and Legolas whose eyes were keen was the rearguard.' So now we know something of his unique, and useful physical capabilities. But we still don't know very much. One thing I do notice is that his introduction in Rivendell is the last time we hear about him being a prince. After that, he's just Legolas the Elf. They reach Hollin, Gandalf tells us "Much evil must befall a country before it wholly forgets the Elves." It says something about how closely the Elves are tied to their land, and how much they have affected it. We see this connection again with the healing of Ithilien by the folk of Mirkwood, after the War of the Ring. "What do you think of Elves now Sam?" Frodo asks in Lothlorien. In one of my favorite Sam lines, Sam replies: "...there's elves and there's elves. They're all Elvish enough, but they're not all the same. These folk...seem a bit nearer to the likes of us: they seem to belong here, more even than the Hobbits do in the Shire. Whether they've made the land or the land's made them, it's hard to say..." Elves feel a bit like indigenous peoples; Native American people, or traditional Australian Aboriginal people, or the Maoris of New Zealand. Not owning and changing the land, but blending with it. Letting it shape them. In tune with it. Real indigenous tribes have made their own ecological mistakes, but by and large they were, and are, tuned in to the natural rhythms of the land and sky and seasons. They have a deep spiritual connection to the land. Something most modern "advanced" civilizations have forgotten. LOTR was published in 1954-1955, post WWII, impending baby boom, growth, prosperity, industry...by the 60s we were watching peregrine falcons succumb to DDT, and other eco-disasters were happening worldwide. A few tree-huggin' hippies found LOTR had a message that was applicable to the times. Respect for and kinship with the natural world runs as a strong undercurrent in the entire book. You see it in the Hobbits homey, comfortable agricultural Shire. In the constant recurring imagery of tree and star. In the galloping horses. In the Ents (an endangered species). The Elves, though, are the Firstborn, the ones who woke up the trees and taught them to talk. They don't seem to be agriculturalists, they're not farmers like the Hobbits; they live among the trees of ancient forests, or on the edge of the Sea. They may garden and grow things, but more the way the Haudeenosaunee (Iroquois) did; on a small scale, in tune with the forest around them. In LOTR, Legolas is the voice for the natural world. While everyone else is planning battles or laboring to end the reign of the Dark Lord, he shows us the beauties of Middle-earth, the things we are fighting for: 'Nor till spring comes and the new green opens do they fall, and then the boughs are laden with yellow flowers; and the floor of the wood is golden, and golden is the roof, and its pillars are of silver, for the bark of the trees is smooth and grey.' And it is his voice we hear when those things are destroyed; "no other folk make such a trampling." Legolas replies to Gandalf's words about Hollin; '..the Elves of this land were of a race strange to us of the silvan folk, and the trees and the grass do not now remember them. Only I hear the stones lament them; deep they delved us, fair they wrought us, high they builded us, but they are gone. They are gone. They sought the Havens long ago.' He may be speaking poetically, but I always pictured him actually being able to pick up some sort of psychic vibration from the earth itself. From the very stones. Most readers from the Mainstream culture would call this fantasy...but there are many people from Native American to Asian to other cultures across the living world who connect with it through meditation, who feel the energies of tree and rock and animal and do not call it fantasy. It gives him an air of otherness. The sort of thing you see in the traveling kung-fu monk. In Spock. And yet it is part of us. The Elf archetype is some part of who we are, or who we were, or who we want to be. In the films, Orlando Bloom manages to evoke that quality you see in the characters in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, in the classic Seven Samurai; a catlike grace, a stillness, a balance that is a harmony of mind-body-spirit. Like the title of a book I saw recently; Samurai zen. Sindarin zen. Use the Force, Legolas. The Company climbs Caradhras, is inundated by snow, and 'it passed the skill of Elf or even Dwarf to strike a flame that would hold amid the swirling wind or catch in the wet fuel.' It seems more than rangers have excellent outdoor survival skills, even if they didn't work in this extreme environment. It's likely Legolas wasn't just sitting around the King's Halls drinking meade and singing the Elvish top 40. He is likely the kind of guy you can drop in the middle of the wilderness with only a knife, and he would survive. Maybe even without the knife. On Caradhras we learn that he's more than a pretty face, everybody else is on the verge of freezing, and he's ready to pull out the snowboard and have some fun: 'The storm had troubled him little and he alone of the Company remained still light of heart.' We get the first glimpse of his sense of humor here too: He and Gandalf exchange a few lines: Legolas; "If Gandalf would go before us with a bright flame he might melt a path for you." Gandalf; "If Elves could fly over mountains they might fetch the Sun to save us." Legolas stands back and watches (guarding the Hobbits with Gimli and Gandalf) while Manly Men Aragorn and Boromir man the snowplows and bash a way through the drift that is blocking their escape. Legolas watches them till they get stuck "...choose an otter for swimming, and for running light over grass and leaf or over snow--an Elf..." and zooms past them, on top of the snow, with all the exuberance of a snowboarder at the first snowfall. "Farewell, I go to find the Sun! " Someone on a forum on theonering.net asked why Legolas isn't blown off the mountain by the wind, if he is light enough to walk on snow (in the film). Obviously they've never seen many kung-fu movies. Crouching Tiger is the best example I can think of, though it is not unique: defying the apparent laws of physics is part of martial arts, real and imagined (Star Wars' Jedi do the same thing). In Crouching Tiger, people run up walls and stride across rooftops and dance in the swaying tops of bamboo. The characters are real flesh and blood people, but they have developed an extreme version of "mind over matter" (the film of course, is done with “wire-fu” special effects). Tolkien was probably not thinking of kung-fu movies, he probably wasn't thinking conciously at all, he was writing from the unconcious. I think, what he was saying here, unconciously perhaps, is something about spiritual lightness, mind over matter. Legolas runs on snow, not because he weighs 20 pounds or has really big feet, or because he's the only one who remembered to pack the skis, but because his mind and spirit are stronger than his apparent physical limitations. The Men have nearly given up, inundated in the great drift, and it is Legolas who tells them they have only a few yards to go till they are out of it. I didn't notice this scene much the first time I read The Book, though a friend said she always wanted to be able to run over snow like that. I do remember being a kid, and loving snow, and noticing its different textures; (native arctic peoples have a zillion different words for snow, for a reason); the mooshy kind that made good sculpture, the fluffy kind like powder that made lousy snowballs and you sank in, and the kind that had melted and frozen enough to make a crust dense enough for a kid to walk on. Not adults, just kids. I would run over the deepest drifts in glee, while everyone else floundered. Now I do it with the help of a small team of Siberian huskies. Legolas has a very large and healthy inner child. Perhaps we should remember and nourish our inner Elves. And hook up our Labs and pit bulls to sleds. Despite all that childhood building of snow horses and tunneling of hobbit holes into drifts, I am a Leo, a creature of bright August sun and beaches at high noon. As an adult, at least, I always hated winter (though I retained a childlike love of snow), then I aquired, by accident, a Siberian husky. Then another, and another. I got a dogsled from a friend, trained a 3-dog team, and learned to love winter again. I watch the Manly Men out there grumbling over their snowblowers, and smile as the last dog leaps into the crate in the van. Farewell, I go to find the Sun! The journey darkens as the Company reaches Moria. Only Gimli lifted up his head, a smouldering fire was in his eyes. On all the others a dread fell at the mention of that name. One good line from the Bakshi movie hangs in my head: Elves do not walk in the dark earth. It's archetypal: in Norse myth, dark elves (Dwarves) are the earth-dwellers, light elves belong to air and sky. Legolas tells Aragorn at the edges of Fangorn you have traveled farther than I, so it is likely he has never been out from under the trees of Mirkwood in his life, so Moria is a name of dread, from the songs of his people, but Legolas has no experience there. Despite Peter Jackson's inventive numbers (2000 + years old), Tolkien never tells us exactly how old Legolas is, but there are some clues. In his article "Speaking of Legolas" Michael Martinez makes the most of these clues and suggests: "Legolas may have been born after his father left the Emyn Duir (Mountains of Mirkwood) and led his people north to settle along the Forest River. That would have been shortly after Sauron rose again and established himself on the hill of Amon Lanc, building the fortress of Dol Guldur (1050) '...it may be...that Legolas was born sometime in The Watchful Peace, and perhaps towards the end of it.' The Watchful Peace; 2063-2460 Third Age; when Dol Guldur was temporarily abandoned by Sauron because of a desire to preserve his true identity from an increasingly inquisitive White Council. (New Tolkien Companion). The Hobbit begins in the year 2941 Third Age. LOTR in 3001 with Bilbo's farewell feast, 3018 Gandalf arrives back in Hobbiton to send Frodo on his Quest. I always saw Legolas as young, for an Elf, and agree with Mr. Martinez. I like the fact we don't have a specific age for him: he's a wonderful conundrum of young and old, naive and wise, skilled and inexperienced, all at once. Legolas knows things about the broader world of Middle-earth, about its peoples and legends; but he knows it from songs, tales told around the fire, books. The reality, as I have often discovered, is different from books. Training a real wild mustang proved to be somewhat different than the idealistic relationship between Joey and Fury on Saturday morning TV when I was four. The guy who wrote Ring of Bright Water never told me otters can bite through 6mil dive gloves. And who would have thought a chanimail byrnie would make one slosh weirdly on horseback, making me rethink twenty years of riding experience. Legolas does not wish to go into Moria, but he goes anyway when the Company decides in favor of it, faithfully following the lead of the Wise, and not abandoning his friends. He shows his archery skills for the first time in a warg attack before the Company reaches Moria, and demonstrates his trademark shot; shooting them through the throat. Not an easy shot, but one guaranteed to kill fast, and more effectively on something wearing armour. (At Helm's Deep in the film, he tells the others, that the orcs' armour is weak at the neck, among other places). He shows those skills again in the dark of the dwarrowdelf, a place where he feels not at all comfortable. There is nothing alive there, nothing green, growing and glad. No wind, no sky, no light dancing through green leaves, no stars, no birdsong. It is cold and dark and utterly alien for him. Orlando Bloom understood this, he talks about it in an interview, and tried to project that feeling of Legolas being in what was, for him, a dark and nightmarish place, and yet remaining strong, controlled, capable. In the film, Legolas' terrified reaction to the balrog is subtle. It works there beautifully. In The Book, he drops his arrow, a huge flub for such a skilled archer, and 'he gave a great cry of dismay and fear...ai! ai! a balrog! A balrog is come!' Gimli drops his axe, and even Gandalf leans on his staff as if defeated. The reactions of such doughty warriors show what a huge horror they are facing. In " The Letters of JRR Tolkien" a lengthy letter to Naomi Mitchison describes many of the details of Middle-earth, including the balrog; '...it is here found ...that one had escaped and taken refuge under the mountains of Hithaeglin (the Misty Mountains). It is observable that only the Elf knows what the thing is--and doubtless Gandalf.' Besides the wizard, Legolas is the only one in the party who knows, who really understands the enormity and horror of what they are facing. Later, in Lothlorien, he tells Galadriel; 'It was a Balrog of Morgoth, of all Elf-banes the most deadly, save the One who sits in the Dark Tower.' Gandalf falls fighting the balrog, they flee. 'Thus at last they came beyond hope under the sky and felt the wind on their faces...grief at last wholly overcame them, and they wept long: some standing and silent, some cast upon the ground.' In The Book, we do not know what Legolas' reaction is, whether he is one who is standing and silent or cast upon the ground. He seems emotional and empathic in other situations, so I think he does not do the archetypal Man Thing of holding his grief in. Again, the movie provides a strong image that resonates with my reading of The Book; there on the screen, Legolas looks like one who is young, a little naive, and has just had all that blasted away. He is neither standing and silent, nor cast upon the ground, but his grief is evident. There is an aloneness to him in that scene. The Hobbits are sharing their grief, as they share everything else. They are a family, a tribe...flock, pack, pod. It lightens the load. Even Boromir relates to the Hobbits at that moment in the film. But Legolas is alone. And it has nothing to do with pride or aloofness. In the entire Company, Gandalf and Aragorn...and perhaps Frodo who has learned the old tales through Bilbo...are the only people who would truly and deeply understand an Elf's heart. I am at home among trees, by root or bough. In their race from the walls of Moria, Frodo falls behind, in pain from his wound (the spear thrust delivered by an orc chieftain in The Book, and the troll in the film), it is Legolas who first senses his distress and halts the others. One of his defining character traits is a keen awareness of his surroundings, senses sharp as a natural creature like a wolf or hawk, and deep empathy for other living things. It is he and Aragorn who look in awe on the distant woods of Lothlorien, while some in the Company look on it with uncertainty, or fear. Here, on the brink of grief and disaster, Legolas pauses to look in wonder upon those distant trees, which he has never seen before, only heard of in song; 'there are no trees like the trees of that land. For in the autumn their leaves fall not, but turn to gold. Nor till the spring comes and the new green opens do they fall, and then the boughs are laden with yellow flowers; and the floor of the wood is golden, and golden is the roof, and its pillars are of silver, for the bark of the trees is smooth and grey. So our songs in Mirkwood say. 'There are many times in the whole tale where, even with darkness all around, he pauses to appreciate, and point out to others, that which is full of beauty and light To me he often seems to be the candle in the dark, the ray of light, the distant glimmer of the light of the Two Trees. The scene between him and Aragorn in the film, at Helm's Deep, (when he loses it and snaps at Aragorn in Elvish, to which Aragorn replies, "Then I will die with them") is nicely done, but it does not ring true for me because it seems out of character for Legolas. As the Company steps into the eaves of Golden Wood, the guides are Aragorn, who has been there before, and Legolas, who has not; "It is long since any of my folk journeyed hither back to the land whence we wandered ages ago. We hear that Lorien is not yet deserted...." He knows much about the land from his people's songs, and is delighted to share them with the rest of the Company, including part of the Lay of Nimrodel. He sings it on the banks of the stream which bears her name. But after several verses his voice finally falters and ceases. He says "I cannot sing any more...for I have forgotten much..." Perhaps, but I think it has raised emotions too strong to share with the others of the Company. He says later that he and his companions forgot their grief for awhile, wandering into Lorien, but it is possible that singing the Lay of Nimrodel raises feelings of grief for Gandalf. We have not seen much of the Elf/Dwarf interaction yet (but for a brief moment in Moria when Legolas drags Gimli from Balin's Tomb to safety). As Legolas ends his song, he says "it tells how sorrow came upon Lothlorien...when the Dwarves awakened evil in the mountains." "But the Dwarves did not make the evil." said Gimli. "I said not so, yet evil came," answered Legolas sadly. He softens his words about the balrog, carefully not laying blame directly on the Dwarves. Princely diplomacy, and likely he already knows the warrior worth of one tough and valiant little Dwarf. "I am at home among trees, by root or bough..." he says, and prepares to climb one of the great mallorns, a new experience for him, and one he approaches with wonder, and childlike exuberance. A year before I met Legolas in the Pages of LOTR, I met another Elf on the silver screen: Luke Skywalker of Star Wars. It may be a stretch to place him in the Elf archetype, but I think the Jedi are. Mark Hamill, who played Luke (just in case you were living in Antarctica, or were trapped in a cave for those years) was described as being childlike, not childish. The difference is important; childish is self-centered, throws tantrums, plays head games. Childlike looks at the world with a sense of wonder, remembers how to play, sings to the stars, talks to trees and animals. Like Legolas. Pippin mutters I cannot sleep in a perch! and Legolas tells him Then dig a hole in the ground if that is more after the fashion of your kind, but you must dig swift and deep if you wish to hide from orcs. I suppose that could be read several different ways, but I always see him saying it with a merry glint in his eye and a quirky smile. He is no aloof and haughty Prince of Faerie, but a friend who, with humor, shows the less wise and experienced Pippin the truth of the matter. Upon meeting Haldir and Orophin and Rumil, the Lorien guards, Legolas again becomes the guide, the liason between Elf and Company. He hedges a bit when asked about the Company, not mentioning the Dwarf till he must. He and Aragorn, as the only ones deeply familiar with Elven culture, must guard and answer for the Dwarf. In a few pages he goes from being excited and merry as a kid coming to Disney World for the first time, climbing trees, singing songs, to taking on the diplomatic responsibilities of a real Prince. One of the fun things about the films was seeing Legolas move. Orlando Bloom paid a great deal of attention to how the Elf should move; "like a cat." Like a umpteenth degree kung-fu black belt. Natural, efficient, flowing like a wolf or horse or running water. In the Bakshi animated film of 1978, Legolas looks, and moves, like a refugee from Swan Lake. Don't get me wrong, I like Mikhail Baryshnikov, but Legolas should not move like a ballet dancer; formal and tippy-toed. Orli moves with a bit more natural grace, even when he's got a few broken ribs, as in the race across Rohan scene. Some martial arts, especially kung-fu, are based on animal movements; there is a tiger-claw strike, a crane block, horse stance, snake strike...and entire forms based on what we can learn from the natural moves of animals. That's how I picture Legolas; an entirely natural creature. Tolkien says in his essay 'On Fairy Stories': "Supernatural is a dangerous and difficult word in any of its senses, looser or stricter. But to fairies it can hardly be applied, unless super is taken merely as a superlative prefix. For it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural (and often of diminutive stature); whereas they are natural, far more natural than he." The film made use of Legolas' obvious physical capabilities by having him do several outrageous stunts that would have had Tolkien rolling in his grave. Spinning, actually. While I would have preferred for the films to do a bit more character development, ok, a lot more...the stunts were fun, and echo what he actually does in The Book; like tightropewalking across the Nimrodel. On the borders of Lorien, Gimli sets his heels at being blindfolded. He draws his axe and Haldir and Co. draw their bows and all hell is about to break loose. "A plague on Dwarves and their stiff necks!" said Legolas. As he loses patience and any trace of princely diplomacy. It is the wiser, if not older in actual years, Aragorn who suggest that all the Company be blindfold, even Legolas. At which point the Elf loses all coolth and composure and blorts out, "But I am an Elf and a kinsman here!" "Now let us cry a plague on the stiff necks of Elves." Says Aragorn. You can just see the stern fatherly expression. And the glint of humor underneath. I like this little exchange, even though Legolas comes off rather childish. It shows his impulsiveness, and the other side of the childlike quality he often has. It also, for the Aragorn fans, shows the ranger's wisdom. Yet, even though Legolas complains; "Alas for the folly of these days, here all are enemies of the one Enemy, and yet I must walk blind, while the sun is merry under leaves of gold..." he follows Aragorn's lead, as he will throughout the tale.He may have many years under his belt, but he is young as his folk go, and he recognizes when one has more real "age" and experience than himself. One of my favorite images from Lothlorien is this: "...Frodo was aware that they had passed out under the shining Sun. Suddenly he heard the sound of many voices around him. A marching host of Elves had come up silently..." As we watched the part of the fillm where the Three Hunters leap off up the hill at the end of Fellowship, one of my D&D buddies quipped, "I can hear the Elf running." . I certainly would have edited that sound differently. The ability to run light...and silent..."over grass and leaf or over snow," is one of my favorite Elven qualities. It's something I tried over and over to do, and just came out sounding like a loose moose in the woods. Lately, in a martial arts class I take with one of my kayaking buddies, we learned a kind of walk done with certain forms of kung-fu and tai chi; sinking low on bent knees, rolling silently and fox-footed from heel to toe, never bobbing up and down. It's good exercise and the concept is to go silent and flowing. Like an Elf. Practice that for 500 years....you'd be able to walk crunchless over fallen leaves too. There is no "cut to shot of Legolas' reaction" in The Book when Galadriel's gentle and compassionate words move Gimli to say "Yet more fair is the living land of Lorien, and the Lady Galadriel is above all the jewels that lie beneath the earth." But it is soon after this that we discover: "Legolas was away much among the Galadhrim...Often he took Gimli when he went abroad in the land, and the others wondered at this change." I always pictured his reaction to the exchange between Galadriel and Gimli as startled amazement, and a sudden insight into the Dwarf's true heart. Perhaps Gimli hmself asked Legolas if he would be his guide to Lothlorien, his own heart having been opened to the inner beauty of the Elves, and perhaps Legolas was glad to show something of his own world to someone who, till now, had been an alien. "And with that word she held them with her eyes, and in silence looked searchingly at each of them in turn. None save Legolas and Aragorn could long endure her glance." Tolkien tells us Elves "were tall, fair of skin and grey-eyed, though their locks were dark, save in the golden house of Finarfin." I always pictured sea-grey, that shifting color of the surface of the sea. In fact, in his description of Voronwe (Noldorin Elf of Gondolin) in Unfinished Tales, Tolkien says "piercing glance of his sea-grey eyes".Tolkien often describes Elven eyes as bright, or starlit. And, like the description of Galadriel reading the hearts of the Fellowship, deep, and hard to look into. Tolkien uses light as an image in his tale, as often as he uses trees. Elven eyes seem to shine with the inner light of the soul, not like a glow-in-the-dark special effect, but on some other, non-visual level. Like an aura. Tolkien never tells us certain obvious things about Legolas, things we would notice right away if we met him. How tall he is (Aragorn is the tallest of the Company), or what color his hair is. Debates have raged on internet forums (are Tolkien geeks trivia freaks, or what?), but the bottom line, is nobody knows. His dad was blond; in The Hobbit; the scene where the dwarves crash the Mirkwood elves' woodland party for the first time; the Elvenking is described as "a woodland king with a crown of leaves upon his golden hair." Of course, Legolas' mother could have been dark. Thanks to that Judy King-Reniets illo, I have always seen him as blond. With sea-grey eyes. There is a lovely scene in the film, where the Lorien elves are singing the lament for Gandalf. Legolas paces under the trees with the grace of a stalking leopard, silver-blue tunic flowing like live water with every move. "For me, the grief is still too near." And his face is like a deep dark pool of quiet water, with much unseen below. In The Book, we hear: "But if Legolas was with the Company, he would not interpret the songs for them, saying that he had not the skill, (the Lorien dialect was different from his Mirkwood Sindarin) and that for him the grief was still too near, a matter for tears and not yet for song." No macho tough guy here, holding all of his emotions in like chained dragons. Empathy, emotion; one of favorite parts of his character. Whose folk know the swift Forest River. "There are those among you who can handle boats: Legolas whose folk know the swift Forest River; and Boromir of Gondor; and Aragorn the traveller." I skipped right over Celeborn's words the first time I read this, I had no use for floatin' boats; they were to jump off of to look at the sunken boat. Then I journeyed with a friend to her buddy's cabin in the Adirondacks. The cabin was on the shores of a great lake called Franklin Falls Pond, more like a small inland sea. There were two sea kayaks at the cabin, which I ignored till I discovered the lake's visibility was approximately to the end of my arm. I hung up my snorkel and said, "Well, what about those floatin' boats?" Got in one, weebled, wobbled, yawed and did the hula, and finally got the big blue boat to go in a straight line. I didn't get out of it for the rest of the week. Less than a year later I had my own sea kayak ("Makenuk's Fin"...makenuk is Kwakiutl for orca, and the fin is a reference to a northwest coast Indian legend in which the orca-folk take off their fins to walk on land in human form: the fin becopmes the boat...the paddles, Ramalinte and Minya, are named in Elvish). I have discovered a whole world I never knew: cormorants in the mist, eagles soaring over the glacial boulders of the Susquehanna, the swift curents of that great river, dancing the tides offshore, paddling silently beside dolphins, finding strange and inaccessible corners of a familiar island, weathering a storm in a duckblind, reaching the rock with the ancient petroglyphs. Now I read those lines: Legolas, whose folk know the swift Forest River...and I have a whole world to connect them to. He has known the feel of the bottom coming up under him in the shallows, the rush of adrenalin as he hits fast water, the feeling of soaring silently like a bird upon the wind. He could glide past the painted turtles on the rocks without ever sending them with a startled splash into the water. He could watch a beaver at work, or keep pace with a hawk overhead. He would know the harsh sound of a heron's call, and the ratcheting cry of the kingfisher. Water would be as much his element as trees. "Tell me Legolas, why did I come on this Quest? Little did I know where the chief peril lay!...Torment in the dark was the danger I feared, and it did not hold me back. But I would not have come had I known the danger of light and joy. Now I have taken my worst wound in this parting..." Gimli is smitten with Galadriel, (as some of us are with Legolas. perhaps) some Elvish cupid's arrow has gone straight through his heart. Legolas is no insensitive clod here as he offers words of comfort to a friend: "Alas for us all...for such is the way of it, to find and lose, as it seems to those whose boat is on the running stream...I count you blessed, Gimli Son of Gloin: for your loss you suffer of your own free will, and you might have chosen otherwise. But you have not forsaken your companions, and the least reward that you shall have is that the memory of Lothlorien shall remain ever clear and unstained in your heart and shall neither fade not grow stale." "Memory is not what the heart desires. That is only a mirror...or so says the heart of Gimli the Dwarf. Elves may see things otherwise. Indeed I have heard that for them memory is more like to the waking world than to a dream. Not so for Dwarves." But we see the difference in their viewpoints. Elves are intensely imaginative, memory is not like a faded photo, or half-remembered dream. They seem to be in that zen state of be here now, yet with their clear memories, living in the whole timestream at once. I suspect, from reading the biographies, and Letters of JRR Tolkien, that though he identified himself with the Hobbits most often, that he was more than a little Elvish; memory and imagination being as powerful for him as the waking world. The Fellowship sets out upon the Great River, the Anduin, and eventually the Brown Lands rise into bleak wolds over which flows a chill air from the east. There is little speech and no laughter among the Company now, each of them busy with their own thoughts. "...the heart of Legolas was running under the stars of a summer night in some northern glade amid the beechwoods." He is an utterly natural creature, tied to the rhythms of earth and tree and star. And in love with it. If you dropped him into the midst of New York City, he would die. "The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness". (John Muir). Here, on the banks of the Anduin, we catch a glimpse of Legolas' keen vision, as he verifies Aragorn's sighting of a faraway eagle. This echoes of the Faithful Indian Sidekick in all those old westerns and Daniel Boone stories...Hawkeye, Last of the Mohicans. But it also is a physical representation of something in the Elvish soul; that ability to see beyond the surface of things. To see far, in space and time. If you live forever, you see the world like Hawk, not Mouse. You see the whole great round world spread beneath you, you have a broader perspective. This little incident, this day, is but a passing ripple in the stream of time. Later Legolas answers Sam and Frodo's musings about Lothlorien and how time seemed to flow differently there: "nay, time does not tarry ever, but change and growth is not in all things and places alike. For the Elves, the world moves, and it moves both very swift and very slow. Swift, because they themselves change little, and all else fleets by: it is a grief to them. Slow, because they do not count the running years, not for themselves. The passing seasons are but ripples ever repeated in the long long stream. Yet beneath the Sun, all things must wear to an end at last." There is a joke among American Indians about running on Indian time: whenever you get there. Those cultures are rooted in the natural world and its rythms, not the precise clock time of the industrial age. Science Fiction fandom had fannish time, the medieval historical group SCA had SCAdian time, and I was born late, with an allergy to clocks. Running on Elvish time really isn't just a symptom of severe ADD, it's the way humans began, it's our natural state. Suddenly the great bow of Lorien sang. On the Anduin: "Legolas laid down his paddle and took up the bow that he had brought from Lorien. Then he sprang ashore and climbed a few paces up the bank.Stringing the bow and fitting an arrow he turned, peering back over the river into the darkness. Across the river there were shrill cries but nothing could be seen. " Unlike the films, he does not carry his bow strung. Tolkien knew enough about archery to get this right; keeping a bow strung all the time destroys it. Stringing a bow can be an annoying, difficult and time-consuming thing in a fight, but if you had five hundred years to practice, you could do it in a heartbeat. From these lines we learn that while Legolas sees far, unlike our D&D Elves, he cannot see in the dark. There is a line in The Fall of Gondolin (an early Tolkien tale, now found in the HoME series) about Legolas Greenleaf, whose eyes were like cats' for the dark. That is a Noldorin resident of Gondolin, not our Sindarin prince, but it is the first use of any of the names of the Fellowship in Tolkien's writings. "Frodo looked up at the Elf, standing tall above him as he gazed into the night, seeking a mark to shoot at. His head was dark, crowned with sharp white stars that glittered in the black pools of the sky behind. But now rising and sailing up from the South the great couds advanced, sending out dark outriders into the starry fields. A sudden dread fell on the Company. "Elbereth Gilthoniel !" sighed Legolas as he looked up." Just a really beautiful image, and one that hints at his spirituality. Elbereth is the Starkindler, the Vala Varda of the stars. Some have taken this line "His head was dark" to mean dark-haired. That would be splitting hairs: he is merely silhouetted against the sky. And again, it's a starry sky; Tolkien seems to associate his Elves with stars and the night more often than not. One of my small beefs with the film is that Faramir gets to shoot down a Nazgul. That shot belongs to Legolas, here: "Suddenly the great bow of Lorien sang. Shrill went the arrow from the elven-string. Frodo looked up. Almost above him the winged shape swerved. There was a harsh croaking scream, as it fell out of the air, vanishing down into the gloom of the eastern shore. The sky was clean again." "Praised be the bow of Galadriel, and the hand and eye of Legolas! That was a mighty shot in the dark my friend! " Well said, Gimli. "The great bow of Lorien sang " sets a wonderful image in my head. And inspired me to get several bows over the years, and make a few of my own quivers, though I remain somewhat archery-impaired. Archery is an old art, one that combines the necessity of hunting and killing something to survive with the beauty of wood and feather and flight. "So long as the new moon returns in heaven a bent, beautiful bow, so long will the fascination of archery keep hold of the hearts of Men." (Maurice Thompson, The Witchery of Archery) A Lakota (Sioux) warrior might say of a poor bow:it doesn't sing well. The Pawnees say: The moon gave us the bow, the sun gave us the arrow. The mooncurve of the bow is obvious...the arrow though, is the sun-ray, though its flight is a curve (hence the word ARCHery). Moon and Sun, Day and Night, Male and Female, Yin and Yang, both energies, both cosmic principles combined. In most native legend, moon is female, sun is male...the bow has a femaleness about it, releasing, giving birth, roundness, curves...Diana the Huntress of Greek myth is often shown with a bow which is also the curve of a new moon. In Elvish myth, the sun is female, how would this change the imagery? The mooncurve of the bow would be male. The arrow the ray of the female Sun. The arrow is also lightning. The bow itself combines plant (wood) and animal (the string of sinew or elfhair, the feathers of birds). Stillness (of the archer) and speed (of the arrow). Strength and finesse. Sight and flight. From German philosopher Eugen Herrigal's Zen and the Art of Archery: Is it I who draw the bow, or is it the bow that draws me? Do I hit the goal or does the goal hit me? Bow, arrow, goal, ego, all melt into one another, so that I can no longer separate them. And even the need to separate has gone. For as soon as I take the bow and shoot, everything becomes so clear and straightforward and ridiculously simple. "Now, at last," the Master broke in, "the bowstring has cut right through you." Think how good you'd be with five hundred years of practice. The most tireless of all the Fellowship. When the Company reaches the rapids of Sarn Gebir, they must find a portage around them. It is Legolas and Aragorn who set out, with orders to the Company to "wait for us one day. If we do not return in that time, you will know that evil has indeed befallen us." They actually return in a few hours, unscathed. Legolas, once again, has served as a sort of Faithful Indian Sidekick to the Ranger, as he often does throughout the rest of the tale. This too is an archetype; the Hero Companion, the Sidekick. And fairly often Hero and Sidekick have distinctly different qualities: think of Kirk and Spock in Classic Star Trek.The Lone Ranger and Tonto, or Daniel Boone and Mingo or a dozen other westerns. The Hero is the classic steely-eyed, square-jawed type, and the Sidekick is the slightly odd one, the one with strange and esoteric qualities the Hero doesn't have; whether it's the ability to mind-meld, or track a wind whisper across Kansas, or understand the speech of trees, the Sidekick is yin to the Hero's yang. On the actual portage around the rapids, "it needed the strength of the two Men to lift and haul the boats over the ground the Company now had to cross...One by one, Boromir and Aragorn carried the boats, while the others toiled and scrambled after them with the baggage." This suggests that Legolas is rather like those D&D Elves I've played for years: smaller, lighter, with more points in the agility and dexterity categories than in strength. Cheetah, not lion. Whippet, not mastiff. On Caradhras too, it was Aragorn and Boromir who did the heavy job of snow removal. Then there's this; Tolkien's wrathful comment on a too-pretty pictorial rendering of Legolas, as related by Christopher Tolkien in Lost Tales 2; "He was tall as a young tree, lithe, immensely strong, able to swiftly draw a great warbow and shoot down a Nazgul, endowed with the tremendous vitality of Elvish bodies, so hard and resistant to hurt that he went only in light shoes over rock or through snow, the most tireless of all the Fellowship." Something draws near, I can feel it. "A shadow and a threat has been growing in my mind...something draws near, I can feel it." Nice line from the film, shows that Elvish precognition, that sight that goes beyond the sight of Men. In The Book, it is Aragorn who utters most of that line. Lest we forget; he was raised by Elves and has some Elvish blood. Below the Argonath, while Frodo is on Amon Hen, the Company waits, and must decide on its course: west with Boromir, or east to the Fear and Shadow. Legolas' voice is heard here. "Grevious is our loss. Yet we must needs make up our minds without his (Gandalf) aid. Why cannot we decide and so help Frodo? Let us call him back and then vote! I should vote for Minas Tirith." Note Tolkien's exclamation point. Legolas shows a certain amount of impulsiveness and impatience here. Let's go! He reminds me a bit of my gung-ho sled dogs, or that smaller, but restive and fiery warhorse he aquires later. Gimli says: I would choose Minas Tirith but if he (Frodo) does not, then I follow him. Legolas agrees: And I too will go with him. Elf and Dwarf are now fast friends, and thinking on the same track. They are solid Hero Companions, faithful friends who will ride to hell and back with the Hero. They are probably more aware of the dangers they would face than the somewhat naive Hobbits, but that does not hold them back. Good guys to have on your side. Aragorn chooses Sam, and Gimli and himself as Frodo's potential companions, while everyone else goes to Minas Tirith. Then all hell breaks loose as Boromir tries to take the Ring. In the film, Legolas seems to be possessed of one of those magical quivers of never-ending arrows that my D&D characters sometimes aquire. In The Book, he is forever running out of arrows, and gleaning more. After he and Gimli find Aragorn mourning over the dead Boromir, Legolas searches through the horde of dead orcs for spent and undamaged arrows. He finds "not a few that were undamaged and longer in the shaft than such arrows as the Orcs were accustomed to use." He studies them closely, for they are strange, and Aragorn notices a difference in some of the dead orcs...this is their first look at the high-tech orcs of Saruman. It is Legolas and Aragorn who sing Boromir's funeral song. I don't know whether they made it up right there, or modified something they already knew. It seems to be made up on the spot, and Man and Elf are enough in sync to create something beautiful spontaneously. Add poet and bard to the list of Legolas' finer qualities. Aragorn's not too shabby either, but then he was raised by Elves. And in Two Towers, where this part of the Fellowship is boiled down to the Three Hunters, the Three friends, a close friendship between Legolas and Aragorn emerges. They should have known each other before; it is Aragorn who leaves Gollum under the care of the watchful Elves of Mirkwood, so certainly he would kow Thranduil's son. But there is no sign of that recognition at the Council of Elrond. Yet much happens offscreen, even in The Book. Or perhaps Tolkien just forgot to mention it. O.R.C.s The Three Hunters come back to the glade where Boromir fell, looking for the orc trail "...it needed little skill to find..." "No other folk make such a trampling. It seems their delight to slash and beat down growing things that are not even in their way." This is one of my favorite Legolas lines. It shows his deep empathy for the natural world, and for other lifeforms. I think of it when I see another bit of rampant development destroying farm or field or wood, or someone dumping garbage in a beautiful place, or off-road vehicles roaring over a path that should be trod lightly and silently. Saw this t-shirt on a guy once: O.R.C.s "What's that?" I asked him. "Off Road Cycles." Yeah. Orcs. No other folk make such a trampling. The Three Hunters leap away in pursuit of the orc band that has Merry and Pippin, here Aragorn assumes the role of tracker, seeing close up, like Mouse, Legolas sees like Hawk, and as they enter the wide flat plains of Rohan, his skill is needed. As they hit the green grass "Legolas took a deep breath, like one that drinks a great draught after long thirst in barren places. "Ah! the green smell! It is better than much sleep. Let us run!" I never noticed that green has a smell until I spent time on the water. Coming back from an ocean dive, thirty miles offshore, you can smell the land coming up. On the north end of the Chesapeake bay, where the great river (Susquehanna) flows down, you can paddle out till the land is a blue blur, and when you return, the green smell welcomes you back. On a small winding creek in the middle of a woodland, green breaks through the greys and browns of winter, and in the middle of the clean cool smell of water, it hits you like a heady draught of miruvor. They find the dropped brooch of Pippin, and Legolas says: Let us hope he did not pay too dearly for his boldness, "Come! Let us go on! The thought of those merry young folk driven like cattle burns my heart." He cares deeply about his companions, and will die defending them. As nightshade falls, they discuss whether to rest or go on by night. Legolas is eager as a hound on a scent, he would run till he dropped; "My heart bids me go on. But we must hold together. I will follow your counsel." He says to Aragorn. Here again, he bows to the experience of Aragorn. There is no trace of princely arrogance. True nobility serves. Just before dawn, Aragorn rises and sees Legolas "standing, gazing northwards into the darkness, thoughtful and silent as a young tree on a windless night." Tolkien's tree-imagery again, and a truly beautiful image, echoed by several in the films: him running catlike up those rocks, freezing in midstride to peer out at the approaching creabain...standing silent and watchful by the doors of Moria, hidden in treeshadow...standing still as a young tree, staring out at the veiled stars while the Rohirrim party inside, "time to see what the wind and sky are doing..." in many of these images there is an aloneness to him. Whether he is thoroughly comfortable in that aloneness, or whether he feels alone, the only Elf in the party, one whom no one else will totally understand...we don't know. I think these are moments when we catch him being most Elvish; meditating, being at one with the Universe. "They are far far away, I know in my heart they have not rested this night. Only an eagle could overtake them now." That Elvish sight again, as he sadly turns to Aragorn. And it seems that he has not slept at all. A little later, as Aragorn rises from where he has lain on the ground, listening for rumor of marching feet, Legolas impatiently insists "Let us go!" 'As before, Legolas was first afoot, if indeed he had ever slept. "Awake! Awake! It is a red dawn. Strange things await us by the eaves of the forest. Good or evil, I do not know, but we are called. Awake!" Pacing, champing at the bit, raring to go. This is the side of Legolas opposite to the thoughtful and silent side. When you hitch up a team of racing sled dogs, they leap and sing and yodel at the top of their lungs. The rig, or sled, is anchored to a large immoveable object, like a tree. You point them in the general direction you want to go, then release the anchor line. Zooooom. They're gone. I think I'll name the next dog Legolas...sled dogs can run on snow too. The strange paths of elvish dreams. As they race across the plains of Rohan, sometimes running, sometimes striding; 'Only Legolas still stepped as lightly as ever, his feet hardly seeming to press the grass, leaving no footprints as he passed...' I love this Elvish skill more than the great stunts he did in the movie. The idea of living lightly on the land, of moving so softly over it you leave no trace, no harm to other living things. I have a vague memory of a TV documentary showing some sort of monks on the far side of the world, who at the beginning of the day give prayers for the small insects and such that they might inadvertently trample. '...and he could sleep, if sleep it could be called by Men, resting his mind in the strange paths of Elvish dreams, even as he walked open-eyed in the light of this world.' Been there, done that. This resonated thoroughly with me. After reading the biographies of Tolkien and his letters, I think he drew this one from his own experience. No doubt his mind wandered often in random daydreams through Middle-earth, probably when he was supposed to be grading papers, or paying bills, or some other totally mundane thing. He did write the first line of The Hobbit on a blank page stuck between two homework assignments. I think most creative types walk the strange paths of Elvish dreams fairly often. I certainly do. And Elves seem able to readily and easily walk in both worlds at once; they are dreamers, and yet capable survivors in the real world. It's not easy being green "Let us go up onto this green hill." There is something uplifting about these words that Legolas says to his companions. The hill is a high place, above the sea of grass, a place from which they might see something to guide their path. It's green, full of life, though it has none of the trees familiar to Legolas, it is a cathedral, a temple, a mound, a sacred place raised above the rest of the round world. Legolas' name, too means green leaf. Something bright and living and hopeful in the midst of the dark. Eomer: Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight? Aragorn: The green earth say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day. "Ah! the green smell! It is better than much sleep. Let us run!" Elbereth. 'The night grew colder. Aragorn and Gimli slept fitfully, and whenever they awoke they saw Legolas standing beside them, or walking to and fro singing softly to himself in his own tongue, and as he sang the white stars opened in the hard black vault above.' The image of Legolas against the stars recurs several times. Tolkien connects his Elves to the stars; the People of the Great Journey, the People of the Stars as it says in the Appendix. The Elves were awakened under the stars, they sing to Elbereth, Starkindler, there is a spiritual connection here as well as a physical love of the night. Elves and stars are light in the dark. The glimmer of lights in the trees of the Galadhrim, the glow of silver lanterns of Wandering Companies in the woods. 'The light of Earendil's star...a light in dark places, when all other lights go out.' Legolas fears for the Hobbits, but there is nothing he can do at the moment. He does not waste that moment fretting, or sleeping fitfully. He sings to the stars, to Elbereth. He is in the moment. Be here now. Tomorrow he will run again, to the edge of that round plain... and beyond. Tribbles and Rohirrim. Scene: the Starship Enterprise, mid 1960s, Kirk has just discovered where all the tribbles went: into the quadrotriticale grain which has apparently been poisoned. He has opened a grain storage hatch and had about a million tribbles land on his head. It was one of the great visual jokes of the series. Kirk utters a line like: "There must be millions of them!" Spock replies with Vulcan precision: "One million two hundred and eighty-seven thousand, nine hundred and forty-one." (Or something like that, I had to pull that one from memory). His precise number, deadpan expression, and cocked eyebrow are the punchline to the whole joke. Scene: the Plains of Rohan. Aragorn pastes himself to the ground, listening intently. At last he leaps up and says "Many riders on swift steeds are coming towards us!" Legolas is standing by, 'shading his bright elven-eyes with his long slender hand: "Yes, there are one hundred and five. Yellow is their hair, and bright are their spears. Their leader is very tall." You can almost see the cocked eyebrow and the deapan expression. The pointy ears are already there. Aragorn smiles; "Keen are the eyes of the Elves." "Nay, the riders are little more than five leagues distant." Give us a hand. Several times, Tolkien describes Legolas as having long, slender hands. It may be a Tolkienism, because he also describes Saruman as having long hands at one point. In this case I think it is one of those small things that describes much about the character. We don't know his hair color, but we do know his hands: to me it shows a long slender build, greyhound, cheetah, antelope...the light incredibly strong talons of a falcon, or an accipiter like the Cooper's Hawks that chase, with incredible agility, the sparrows at my bird feeder. And lean, long, chiseled hands seem to go with poets, musicians, artists. This is the one place where Orlando Bloom doesn't match Legolas' description(except in his general build, which is perfect), but I like his squarer, yet chiseled hands too, also the hands of a sculptor and artist. I'm not sure why, but my attention was drawn to his hands in the stills from the films. Perhaps it is because all you see of him, not covered by costume, is his hands and face. Our culture is used to seeing far more skin. There are some subtle contrasts between Legolas and the other characters in the film, shown by their hands: Frodo's notorious chewed fingernails, Aragorn's battle-torn hands contrasted with Legolas, to whom dirt seems not to stick. Then there's that perfect hair...what kind of Elvish mousse is he using anyway? Ah well, that's another musing... He stands not alone. When the Three Friends are caught in the sun-circle of the galloping Riders of Rohan, Legolas and Gimli remain silent, letting the Man Aragorn deal with these warriors of Men. Eomer utters several lines which show his folk's keen suspicion of Elves. Legolas remains silent, still. It is only when Eomer threatens to cut off Gimli's head that Legolas' hands move faster than sight, bending his bow and saying; "He stands not alone, you would die before your stroke fell." There is no exclamation point. He does not shout it. Five leagues ago he counted those one hundred and five Riders, certainly more than the gleaned arrows he is carrying. It doesn't matter, he stands beside a threatened friend at whatever cost. Of course it does show a bit of youthful impulsiveness. It is again Aragorn who shows his kingly diplomacy by smoothing over the ruffled feathers of the Rohirrim. I find myself liking Legolas' impulsiveness, it's part of that childlike side of him; the part that gleefully runs on snow on Caradhras, that peers into the depths of Fangorn with wonder, that sings to the stars. There is a moment in this sun-circle of Riders, when Aragorn reveals himself, telling his true name and drawing Anduril. Eomer steps back in awe. And 'for a moment it seemed to the eyes of Legolas that a white flame flickered on the brows of Aragorn like a shining crown.' Today we would call that being able to see an aura. Some of us might think of it as some hokey New Age thing, or we might take it seriously. Tolkien used the imagery of light over and over, especially the inner light, the sort of thing represented by halos in old religious paintings. We see it in Glorfindel when he drives the Black Riders into the River Bruinen (Frodo remembers a shining figure). We see it in Gandalf and Frodo at times, the inner light, shining through. Gandalf says of the Noldorin Lords, like Glorfindel: 'thery live at once in both worlds, and against both the Seen and the Unseen they have great power. You saw him for a moment as he is on the other side: one of the mighty of the Firstborn.' Legolas is Sindarin, one of the three kindreds of the Eldar, the one that started on the great journey to the Blessed Realm, then got distracted and stayed in Middle-earth. ADD Elves, I guess. Legolas apparently has the psychic capabilities of the Eldar, but he is from a small woodland realm, one that is a shadow and a memory of the great realms of the Silmarillion days. He does not have the great learning of the Noldor who went oversea and returned. Still, I think I like him better that way, more down to earth, more real. The Elvish Way With All Good Beasts. 'There was great wonder, and many dark and doubtful glances, when Eomer gave orders that the spare horses were to be lent to strangers...' There are three empty saddles, and three of our Fellowship. Gimli, though, is no horseman, and Legolas invites him to ride with him, a sensible solution. 'A smaller and lighter horse, but restive and fiery, was brought to Legolas. Arod was his name.' Note the words, "restive and fiery". This is not the quiet, actor-safe horse(s...there were two Arods, at least) we saw in the movie. The one Orli had to thump with his heels on several occasions, while Viggo looked like the excellent horseman he is, on a horse that I have heard is an umpteenth level FEI dressage horse. I have had Arabs and half-Arabs most of my life; small, tough, slender, elegant, fast, long on endurance. Elf horses. They are an ancient breed, the Firstborn, at the roots of most other modern breeds. They're smart, people oriented, but often "restive and fiery". They will dance under you. Leap sideways at a bit of blowing paper. Wonder why you want to walk through the mud puddle when they can sail over it. Argue with you about an exercise you are trying to perform, especially if they think it's a stupid human trick and utterly boring. 'But Legolas asked them to take off saddle and rein. "I need them not." He leapt lightly up, and to their wonder Arod was tame and willing beneath him, moving here and there with but a spoken word: such was the Elvish way with all good beasts.' 'Such was the Elvish way with all good beasts.' My favorite line in the entire Book. My favorite scene. The one which gives me much the same reaction to Legolas as Gimli has to Galadriel in Lothlorien. I've been surrounded by critters since I was born: cats, dogs, horses, the odd goat, and later (as a wildlife rehab volunteer) everything from wild geese and herons to hawks, owls, emus, otters, beaver, porcupine, vultures, a young tiger (who could embrace my ample thigh with his jaws), and a very young lion king (who dragged his blankie about like the Kill of the Week, and studied me with eyes that knew one day he would be large and I would be prey). 'The Elvish way with all good beasts' resonates with me on a very deep level. It is something I wish I had, and have struggled most of my life to understand. I have trained all of my own horses, and several others; including a number of mustangs "green-broke" or fresh off the range (the Bureau of Land Management's Adpot-a-Horse program had a distribution center here for many years and the area filled with wild horses). I've trained dogs, and cats (sort of) and helped train a couple of lecture vultures (yeah, vultures). It is a constant learning experience. Sometimes a hard and frustrating one. Tolkien apparently never trained any critters, he doesn't seem to have had many in his life, though he did spend some time with a cavalry unit. He writes horses and dogs neatly, though, and understands that his Elves have a deep kinship with all life. There is a wonderful book on my shelf called "All Those Girls in Love With Horses. It is a big coffee table book by a photographer named Robert Vavra. His photos are above the mundane sorts of calendar horse photos the way Galadriel is above Pop Star of the Week. It has many short chapters on various women involved with horses. One chapter is about a ranch in Oregon where they raise Arab horses. there is a sequence of photos of the farm manager riding a grey stallion (white in the picture, but most white horses are greys who have aged to white, and are still called grey)...Wazir is cantering, leaping, galloping among his mares, under total control. And he is wearing nothing but a thin cord around his neck. In 1985 friends and I traveled across the west and stopped at the farm in Oregon where Wazir resided. His owner rode him out of the barn with just the light cord around his neck, then turned him loose in a corral where he leapt and danced and galloped in a most restive and fiery way. If you watched LOTR closely, you will occasionally see a thin cord around Shadowfax's neck. That's how you train a horse to work without saddle or rein: they work off shifts of weight, leg cues, and the pressure of the neck rope. And moving here and there with but a spoken word works too, they will work off voice commands. In fact, that's how you first train a horse, in a round pen or on a lunge line, working with voice commands. Then, when you get on the horse, you have a language you both already know. Inspired by the Elf, I trained my 4-H project horse (who I had 25 of the 27 years of his life, longer than most marriages) to work bridleless. It's not impossible, Shadowfax, in the film, makes it look easy. It would be easier if you had Legolas' incredible empathy. um, about that saddle I said I didn't need... Which brings us to one of the big goobers of the story; a plothole of epic proportions: Legolas and Gimli gallop off into the sunset, on a horse with no saddle or bridle. Hmmmm, bet Tolkien never rode bareback with anyone. Especially an armoured Dwarf with a battleaxe. A saddle has a tree inside: a wooden frame that fits over the horse's back without touching the spine. It's covered with leather, padded underneath, strapped on by a sturdy girth under the belly (sometimes two), and sometimes by breast bands or breeching (straps around the haunches). It is hung with stirrups (invented by the Mongols), which allow you to brace yourself if wielding sword or couched spear (tucked under your arm, using the whole weight and speed of the horse to hit the enemy), or to stand up off the bumpity-bump of the gallop to shoot a bow, (ahem...like certain Elves). The saddle creates a sturdy and immoveable platform for you while your buddy sits behind and clings to you as one drowning. Horses' shoulder blades form a mountainous hump at the base of the neck, this is called the withers. A good saddle horse has high withers (exactly the opposit of a zebra or donkey, which has flat or mutton withers), to keep the saddle from sliding forward, or even sideways. Bareback, you sit with the withers about two inches in front of your crotch. With anyone behind you, the motion of the horse tends to send you bouncing forward. Bad enough if you're female. Really, really bad for Legolas. Who still has to shoot a bow, without stirrups. Dammit elfboy, what were you thinking! A reader actually wrote to Tolkien and asked why Glorfindel has a saddle (with stirrups) and a bridle on Asfaloth. Tolkien replies something like...ooops. He had not yet given any thought to the Elvish way with all good beasts, when he wrote Glorfindel's part. Bridle (which contains a bit, and reins and is therefore a control device) was later changed to headstall (which can be merely decorative, and is simply the straps around head and nose which normally hold the bit and reins in place). Perhaps, with that Elvish foresight, Glorfindel knew a Hobbit would need to ride his horse, so he graced Asfaloth with a saddle and stirrups which could be shortened to fit a Hobbit. Listening to trees. The Three Companions ride on, the orcs are destroyed, the Hobbits yet missing. At the eaves of Fangorn they build a fire, under Aragorn's admonition to cut no living wood. "If those unhappy hobbits are astray in the woods it might draw them hither." I may be wrong, but I think it is only Legolas who uses the word hither much. He seems to have a slightly older sense of speech, as if the Elven accent carried the classic echoes of the Firstborn, the First speakers, Quendi. (Quendi means the speakers) Another one of my favorite images: Aragorn sits 'silent, with his back to the great tree, deep in thought.' Gimli sits hunched by the fire, nervous at the edges of this great wood, fingering the edge of his axe. Legolas stands 'alone in the open, looking toward the profound shadow of the wood, leaning forward as one who listens to voices calling from a distance.' Fascinated by this great wood he has heard of, but never seen, listening to the far-off voices of the trees. I can see his eyes, wide with wonder, starlit with elflight as his spirit tunes itself to the trees. A few minutes later when he joins the others around the fire, he looks up at the boughs of the chestnut spreading above them, maybe it's the dancing light that tricks their eyes, or maybe this is one of the Huorns of the forest, or some other tree that has been half wakened. But the boughs seem to be bending toward the flame, the leaves rubbing together like cracked hands taking comfort in the warmth. And it is a hint at what awaits within Fangorn. Legolas looks up and says with delight, "Look! The tree is glad of the fire." We learn a little about all Three Companions in the conversation that follows: Fangorn is an unsettling place for Gimli, as unsettling as the Mines of Moria were for Legolas. He does not understand the speech of living things, he only sees the dark shadows under the tangled trees. Aragorn is silent, thinking grim ranger thoughts until Legolas interrupts him with questions about Fangorn. Again, I see him with a childlike, wide-eyed curiosity here. Aragorn says: I had thought of asking you what was the truth of the matter. And if an Elf of the Wood does not know, how shall a Man answer? Change and growth is not in all things and places alike. "You have journeyed further than I." For all his years, Legolas does not have the deep experience of Aragorn. This shows the contrast between Elf and Man nicely. Aragorn, in his few years, has traveled far, and changed much, while Legolas has lived under the same trees, treading the same paths for far longer. Legolas has had years to perfect the skills he has, and he knows a great deal from songs and poems and tales of his folk, but he does not have the broad-ranging experience of the ranger. Elves change but slowly. He is perhaps often overlooked by serious students of Tolkien, or literature, or film, because he is a character who does not change much. Few characters end a book or movie the same way they started out, it's one of the reasons we watch or read: to see what happens. Character, conflict, change, conclusion: those are the foundation stones of Story. But there are many characters in LOTR who do not change: Faramir is a cool drink of pure water in the chaos of that part of the story. Tom Bombadil (many people's favorite) is probably a Maia or Vala, an essential force of Nature who does not change, even in the presence of the Ring. Glorfindel shows up and escorts Our Heroes, shows many admirable qualities, and vanishes, unchanged. Does Arwen change? Galadriel? The Gaffer? Legolas does change. He steps out from under the trees of Mirkwood, and takes on what seems to be a simple errand to Rivendell. Maybe he was part of the Company that lost Gollum, or the Captain of that company. He may have been sent by his father, or he may have volunteered to right what he saw as his own mistake. I like to think he took the responsibility on himself. His reaction at the Council of Elrond shows his surprise and distress: and in his fair Elvish face there was great distress."The tidings that I was sent to bring must now be told. They are not good, but only here have I learned how evil they may seem to this company." There is no record of how or why he was chosen by Elrond for the Fellowship, he is just suddenly there: 'and Legolas shall be for the Elves.' I think, by the distress shown on his face earlier, he volunteered. Pleaded his case against more logical candidates like Glorfindel. He changes again as he faces the ultimate elf-bane, the balrog, and lives to tell the tale, though he cannot fight it himself. He has realized his limits, he has been, probably for the first time, in a position where he has no power. He makes a friend of a Dwarf, not just any old Dwarf, but one whose father butted heads with his own father. He, who has lived mainly among his own people, travels, the lone Elf, among Men who are less than welcoming at times. He stands before the Black Gates against hopeless odds, faces certain death again, and survives. But most significantly, he hears the call of the Valar; the gulls in the dark. And he is changed, for he can never go home again. Elvish Dreams. Just after this they draw watches, Gimli takes first watch, and the others rest. And we find out another wierd thing about Legolas: 'Legolas already lay motionless, his fair hands folded upon his breast, his eyes unclosed, blending living night and deep dream, as is the way with Elves.' He is the most tireless of all the Fellowship, according to Tolkien's description in Lost Tales 2, but he is a living breathing being of flesh and blood and bone, and he must still rest. There are tales of famous folk who only needed a few hours sleep each night, or of people who catnap for an hour or two at a time. There are forms of meditation which result in rest and refreshment, but are not sleep as we generally know it. Whales and dolphins (unlike seals who sink to the bottom and hold their breath for a half hour or so) sleep on the move, strolling through the water with the breathing parts of their minds awake; they would drown if they slept like humans. And no doubt, Legolas, unlike many of us, remembers all of his dreams. But where'd he get the rope? In the midst of the night, old man is seen briefly at the edge of the forest, he vanishes, then; 'Suddenly Legolas gave a cry. "The horses! The horses!" There is no warning whinny, no thunder of hooves, they are simply gone, and he is the first to notice. There is a nice little plothole here...Orlando's line in Pirates of the Caribbean fits it nicely... "Where'd he get the rope?" The horses were picketed. Tied by halters worn either under their bridles or carried among other gear, and rope. You can picket a horse by tying a rope between trees and tying the horses to that rope, or by tying the horse to a stake in the ground. Arod and Hasufel had 'dragged their pickets and disappeared.' So they were tied to longer ropes staked in the ground. Arod is wearing no tack. No bridle, no saddle. No nothing... Where'd he get the rope??? Ok, so Aragorn had a bit of spare rope in his pack. They wove a rope halter. Easy enough. Easier than roping two sea turtles anyway.... So why couldn't Legolas, he of 'the elvish way with all good beasts,' simply tell Arod to stay? "Did they sound to you like beasts in terror?" "No. I heard them clearly. But for the darkness and my own fear I should have guessed that they were beasts wild with some sudden gladness. They spoke as they will when they meet a friend that they have long missed." Aragorn does not think the horses ran in terror, and Legolas confirms it. Aragorn has grown up with Elves and learned some of their empathy, but Legolas has more. There is a small thing hidden in these lines; Legolas speaks of his own fear. He is strong, capable, but not invulnerable, or without fear. He goes forth on the quest in spite of it. Fangorn. On reading the trail of Merry and Pippin, Legolas falls into Elf humor: "Well, here is the strangest riddle that we have yet found! A bound prisoner escapes form both the Orcs and from the surrounding horsemen. He then stops while still in the open and cuts his bonds with an Orc-knife.But how and why? For if his legs were tied, how did he walk? And if his arms were tied, how did he use the knife? And if neither were tied, why did he cut the cords at all? Being pleased with his skill he then sat down and quietly ate some waybread! That at least is enough to show that he was a Hobbit, without the mallorn-leaf. After that I suppose, he turned his arms into wings and flew away singing into the trees. It should be easy to find him: we only need wings ourselves!" The fear that the Hobbits are dead is relieved, and Legolas is light of heart again. It is also obvious that he is amused by the Hobbits, he likes them, he has already called them merry young folk. On into Fangorn they follow the trail, Gimli is daunted by the dark ancient wood, but Legolas stands under the eaves of the wood, stooping forward as if he is listening, peering with wide eyes into the shadows, much as he did earlier around the fire: "I don't think the wood feels evil whatever tales may say. No, it is not evil; or what evil is in it is far away. I catch only the faintest echoes of dark places where the hearts of the trees are black. There is no malice near us; but there is watchfulness, and anger." I was pleased to see a fragment of this make it to the extended DVD of Two Towers. You can see his sense of wonder about the wood, his empathy for the forest, for the individual trees. His psychic sight shows here too, that elfsight that sees beyond the surface of things. Orlando Bloom did a nice job of evoking that quality, that way of seeing. "It is old, very old. So old that almost I feel young again, as I have not felt since I journeyed with you children. It is old and full of memory. I could have been happy here, if I had come in days of peace." When I first read those lines, it blew my picture of Legolas right out of the water. I was 23, and was picturing Legolas much the same as myself. Suddenly he is ancient, but that does not match his character, or the way he relates to other characters, especially Aragorn, who he respects as an elder. Whattheheck??? It took me a long time to realize we are talking about an Elf. And Elves run on Elvish time. Part of his "so old that almost I feel young again" line is tongue-in-cheek Elf humor. Spock's cocked eyebrow and deadpan expression. Part of it is true, save Gandalf, he is the oldest in years of the entire Fellowship. But Elves do not count the running years, not for themselves. He is still quite young, as his folk go, yet a young Elf is not the same as a young human, any more than a three year old horse is really like a teenaged human. In some ways he is more skilled, more knowledgeable than even Aragorn, and in other ways he is quite young, quite naive. And that is perhaps the most Elvish trait of all, being old and young all at once. "Every Elf in Wilderland has sung songs of the old Onodrim and their long sorrow. Yet even among us they are only a memory.If I were to meet one still walking in this world, then indeed I should feel young again!" The White Rider. It is Legolas who first sees the Old Man coming through the trees... There are two and a half pages of the Old Man approaching the Three Friends in my 1992 Alan Lee illustrated hardback edition of LOTR. The tension mounts, and Gimli tries to cut it with all the subtlety of a battleaxe. Legolas seems unable to do anything, his bow and hands hang loose at his sides. Whether it is because he senses something Gimli cannot, it is hard to say, he is certainly (see "you would die before your stroke fell") no less impulsive, now would he be easier to enchant. I would think Elves would be harder to enchant. At any rate, it is he who at last recognizes Mithrandir (before either of his companions) and shouts out with childlike glee, as his arrow bursts flaming into the air. Here Mithrandir, Gandalf the White, brings messages to the Fellowship from Galadriel. Legolas says of his message: "Dark are her words, and little do they mean to those who receive them..." "Legolas Greenleaf, long under tree. In joy thou hast lived. Beware of the sea! If thou hearest the cry of the gull on the shore, Thy heart shall then rest in the forest no more." She, who has been to the Blessed Realm, is speaking of the Sea-longing. The hidden whisper of the Valar in the heart of the Eldar, calling them home. Legolas' people, the Sindar, started on the Great Journey eons ago, and never went across the Sea. The longing for Home is still there, buried. Waiting. Water is a potent mythic image. I dived into this imagery in an essay called The Sea-Longing. It is one of the images in The Book that hits me hard. I still remember the moment when I was 12, coming up over the last sand dune and staring out at living, breathing, leaping water that filled the world to the far horizon and beyond. Since then I have paddled its surface and dived beneath it. Gone offshore to where the whole world is a silver circle of sea and sky. Dropped beneath its surface to where the world is dark and green as a forest at twilight. Floated eye to eye with a stingray, skimmed my kayak along beside dolphins, drifted down a river with eagles soaring overhead, heard the distant cry of gulls in the dark. "Thy heart shall then rest in the forest no more." Indeed, it won't. My friend Arod. Gandalf calls the horses, who had, in fact, run off with Shadowfax. In the film, Legolas has a wonderful line: "that is one of the mearas, unless my eyes are cheated by some spell..." and the look on his face, again, is one of gentle wonder. In The Book, he says: "There is Hasufel, and there is my friend Arod beside him!" I love the way he says "my friend Arod". He does not see the horse as merely a convenience, a conveyance, a way to get from Point A to Point B. He does not see the horse as a lesser being. He sees him as another living being worthy of friendship. Edoras and Elf-fu. On the approach to Edoras, Gandalf bids Legolas; "Speak! Tell us what you see there before us!" Legolas describes the Golden Hall, and the few Men guarding it, though it is yet miles away. "The horse-lords do not sleep, even if it seem so from afar." Says Gandalf. Better than binoculars is an Elf in the party... Running on Elvish Time; "Many long lives of men it is since the Golden Hall was built." "Five hundred times have the red leaves fallen in Mirkwood in my home since then, and but a little while does that seem to us." "But to the Riders of the Mark, it seems so long ago, that the raising of this house is but a memory of song, and the years before are lost in the mist of time." Our heroes enter the Golden Hall, Aragorn is introduced as "Heir of Kings", but Legolas and Gimli as simply "Legolas the Elf and Gimli the Dwarf", representatives of their entire peoples. They reluctantly leave their weapons (perhaps Legolas leaves his with the same flair he used in the film), Legolas admonishing the guard: "Keep these well, for they come from the Golden Wood and the Lady of Lothlorien gave them to me." The guard reacts with fear and wonder, and lays the Elvish weapons hastily by the wall. "No man will touch them." No Man ever has touched them, for they were made, given and carried by Elves till now. From Boromir's reaction on the eaves of Lorien, to the varied reactions of the Rohirrim, to Farmir's men questioning whether Sam and Frodo were Elves, it seems Elves have already begun to fade into myth and legend in Middle-earth, and often they are viewed with uncertainty, or even fear and suspicion. Tolkien writes from a sort of camerra eye view. He does not get inside his characters' heads, but if he did, what would we see of Legolas? Would he feel alienated, hurt, the lone Elf traveling in lands where his kind are viewed with suspicion? If he does, he does not show it, remaining the staunch Hero Companion. In the films he shows gentle empathy to the people of Rohan. Watch him in the background of one scene where Aragorn is talking; Rohirrim are crowding by in the streets of Helm's Deep, Legolas could hold himself aloof, or shoulder the passing folk out of the way, like a fish swimming against the current to stay in one place. But he does not, he stands behind Aragorn, a look of quiet composure on his face, reaching out with a gentle touch now and again to passers by as if to reassure them. The Rohirrim array Aragorn and Legolas in shining mail, unlike the film, where Legolas keeps his forest colored leathers. In D&D, Elves often go in leather; their higher agility is weighed down by mail or heavy plate armour. The leather seemed to suit Legolas, and I liked the simple addition of the heavy leather shoulder pads, remarkably like the ones I made for my SCA armour, back in the dark ages of the eighties. It's hard to write fight scenes in books, that's where film shines. It was wonderful to see Legolas move. I have tried fighting with two swords, or sword and dagger (SCA, with rattan stand-ins for the weapons, armour, and real hard blows...and some choreographed steel fighting in Markland) and know how difficult that can be (I have a bad knee to prove it). When I saw TTT in the theaters, I was sad to see what I thought were basic punches being thrown about by the Elf as Our Heroes enter the Golden Hall. Ack! Horrors! Manstuff! Elves should move like those people (Michele Yoe and Chow Yun Fat) in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Then I ran the DVD in slow-mo. Watch Legolas closely, he's throwing open-handed palm strikes, and blocks that belong in several Asian martial arts. Aha! Elf-fu! Kudos to the stunt coordinator guys! Gimli:"Men need many words before deeds. My axe is restless in my hands. I wish I could walk and not bump like a sack at Gandalf's saddlebow." Legolas: "A safer seat than many, I guess. Yet doubtless Gandalf will put you down on your feet when blows begin; or Shadowfax himself. An axe is no weapon for a rider." Indeed. A sword is hard enough to manage. I accidently nicked my mare's brow with one swinging at a melon. And what's this about a saddlebow? Gandalf has none, Shadowfax is ridden without tack of any sort! Eomer: "Legolas upon my left and Aragorn upon my right and none will dare to stand before us!" One of my favorite lines. An ode to two great warriors, a sign of Eomer's respect for both, but also a shift of attitude for Eomer who first says, with suspicion, "are you Elvish folk?" Aragorn too, is rather Elvish; he is the descendant of Elrond's brother, and was himself raised by Elrond and the Elves of Rivendell. Still, in The Book, he does not come off with the same quirks that define Legolas' Elvishness, nor does he have the same lightness, or childlike sense of wonder.(He always seemed a bit too grim and serious for me). And despite the scene in the film (which he stole from Legolas, grrrrr) where he charms a horse, he cannot ride without saddle or bridle. (Though Viggo is, in fact, the better horseman.) One could further analyze the whole left and right thing there (Aragorn on the right...). In certain times and cultures, left-handed was "sinister"; at least different, if not downright evil(perhaps a sign of witchery; itself an echo of an earlier, more female, more intuitive, elvish age). At times, left is considered feminine, right masculine. At the very least, they are opposites. Only left handed people are in their right minds: it seems to be the opposite side of the brain which controls each side of the body; left(brain, right hand) is supposed to be logic and reason and math, right(brain left hand) is supposed to be creative, intuitive and artistic. Aragorn is the pragmatic human, leading the way into the Age of Reason, Legolas is the intuitive Elf, all poetry and dancing leaflight. Or maybe Tolkien didn't think about any of this, he just wanted them all riding abreast. You can tell a sparrow from a finch... Gandalf: You have the keen eyes of your fair kindred, Legolas, and they can tell a sparrow from a finch a league off. Tell me, can you see anything yonder towards Isengard? I never appreciated the humor of this line from The Book until I put up a bird feeder and broke out my Peterson's Field Guide to Eastern Birds (North America). My previous bird experience had been raising one parakeet, having my cats eat two more, helping round up wild geese, a fish-hooked duck, and some manic emus for a wildlife rehabber, and handling big birds with sharp pointy feet (raptors) for another rehabber. When I couldn't find the house (English) sparrows in Peterson's, I eventually discovered it was because they are on the finch pages (under weaver finches). Sparrows and finches in Peterson's run from page 263 to page 289. They are divided into weaver finches/family ploceidae , and "grosbeaks, finches, sparrows, buntings"/family fringillidae. I can now tell a sparrow from a finch a yard away with a field guide and good binoculars. My esteem for the skills of Legolas has gone up tremendously. Yet you comfort me. As they ride with the Rohirrim toward Helm's Deep, Legolas goes with Aragorn and Eomer in the van (vanguard; forward part of the advancing army), sticking by Aragorn's side. Later Legolas and Gimli stand on the wall, Gimli is pleased with the tough bones of the mountain fortress, and speaks of how he and his kin could turn it into a place where armies break upon it like water. "I do not doubt it" says Legolas, "But you are a dwarf, and dwarves ar strange folk. I do not like this place, and I shall like it no more by the light of day. But you comfort me Gimli, and I am glad to have you standing nigh with your stout legs and your hard axe. I wish there were more of your kin among us. But even more would I give for a hundred good archers of Mirkwood." This mirrors the lines said by Gimli earlier in Fangorn: Legolas has said "I could have been happy here if I had come in days of peace." Gimli replies: "I dare say you could. You are a Woodelf and Elves of any kind are strange folk. Yet you comfort me. Where you go I will go. But keep your bow ready to hand, and I will keep my axe loose in my belt. Not for use on trees!" "But even more would I give for a hundred good archers of Mirkwood." I guess that explains Legolas' great grin when the Galadhrim archers march into Helm's Deep in the film, he got his wish, sort of. The Great Orc Slaying Contest. "Two!" said Gimli patting his axe. He had returned to his place on the wall. "Two?" said Legolas. "I have done better, though now I must grope for spent arrows; all mine are gone. But I make my tale twenty at the least. But that is only a few leaves in a forest." Thus begins the Great Orc Slaying Contest, something many men in battle have done, in one way or another. It is a deadly game, but it lightens the load, fires the spirit, keeps them from succumbing to the horrible realities of the situation. Note that Legolas is using forest imagery in the above lines, and that he has had to search for spent arrows. "Twenty-one! cried Gimli, He hewed a two-handed stroke and laid the last orc before his feet. "Now my count passes Master Legolas again." 'He climbed up and found Legolas beside Aragorn and Eomer. The Elf was whetting his long knife.' "Twenty-one! said Gimli. "Good! said Legolas, "But my count is now two dozen. It has been knife-work up here." An eerie little line, and image, if you think about it long enough. Gimli has been knocking orcs down with a battleaxe, but Legolas, out of even spent arrows, has facing orcs with only a knife. One single knife, not the pair he carries in the film. It shows not only the realities of battle, but just how deadly he really is. Glad he's on our side. The battle rages on, with all its twists and turns till Aragorn stands on the stair that leads up to the rear-gate of the Hornburg. Behind him, on the upper steps kneels Legolas, Protective Hero Companion, one last gleaned arrow in his bent bow. "All who can have now got safe within, Aragorn, come back!" The fear of the bright blade Anduril has held off the orcs briefly, now Aragorn turns and runs up the stair, but he stumbles... ...the first orc falls with Legolas' last arrow in his throat. Someone throws a great rock from above, and it crashes through the orcs, giving Aragorn and Legolas time to get to safety. A small moment in the great battle, but a decisive one; the once and future king has been pulled from the brink of death by a friend. Why is Legolas here, risking his immortal life for one who will be gone anyway in a mere ripple in the stream of time? Why not just take ship west and forsake Middle-earth? He has a thousand chances to walk away, to turn back, but he doesn't. Why? Somewhere in The Silmarillion an Elf makes a comment about the bravery of Men; how amazing it is that they who have so few years are willing to sacrifice those few to fight Darkness and Evil. Immortal Elves astonished by the willingness of mortal Men to sacrifice what little life they have for a cause. A number of the Elves, in the Silmarillion especially, have repaid the favor. 'Taking his leave, he returned to the walls, and passed round all their circuit, enheartening the men, and lending aid wherever the assault was hot. Legolas went with him.' A brief one-liner in the middle of Helm's Deep, Aragorn doing what leaders do...and Legolas at his side like a guardian angel, offering aid, support, and that shaft of light in the dark. When Aragorn and Legolas get safe within the Hornburg, Legolas realizes Gimli is missing, and Aragorn last saw him in the fight on the ground behind the wall. "Alas, that is evil news." says Legolas. "He is stout and strong. Let us hope he will escape back to the caves...that would be to the liking of a dwarf." "That must be my hope. But I wish that he had come this way. I desired to tell Master Gimli that my tale is now thirty-nine..." Here Aragorn laughs, a rare thing for him now. "If he wins back to the caves, he will pass your count again. Never did I see an axe so wielded." Perhaps he has seen through Legolas' stoic line about telling Gimli his score, to the real worry, and fear for a friend, underneath. As the battle concludes, Gandalf and a thousand men on foot show up to save the day, but Legolas is awestruck by the sudden appearance of a forest where none had been before; the Huorns from Fangorn. The extended DVD has a very few shots of the Huorn wood, but they add a great deal to the movie, and there is a lovely shot of Legolas' reaction to seeing it for the first time. Though it only lasts a few seconds, Orli's expression pretty well captures the surprise and wonder of Legolas first glimpse of the Huorn Wood. Gimli and Legolas meet again, after the battle: "Forty-two Master Legolas!" Legolas notes the bandage around Gimli's head; "You have passed my score by one, but I do not grudge you the game, so glad I am to see you on your legs! " Note that the Elf does not tell his score until he hears Gimli's. I have a deep suspicion that he fudged his own score, letting Gimli have the contest, for his hurts, and because Legolas was so glad to see him alive. Huorns. As they ride through the Huorn wood, Gimli again feels terrified of the strange wood. "It is hot in here. I feel a great wrath about me. Do you not feel the air throb in your ears? "says Legolas. He is ever glancing from side to side, fascinated with the wood, wanting to halt and listen to the sounds of the forest. Gimli will not allow it. Legolas says; "These are the strangest trees that ever I saw, and I have seen many an oak grow from acorn to ruinous age. I wish that there were leisure now to walk among them: they have voices, and in time I might come to understand their thought." From several sources I have read, we can pin Legolas' age at around 500, give or take a century. But if you live in a forest, you can see many trees grow and die, quite a few at the same time. "...their speech is of crushing and strangling!" says Gimli, who then waxes eloquent about the Glittering Caves, and how dwarves would pay pure gold for a glimpse. At first Legolas takes it lightly saying "I would give gold to be excused, and double to be let out if I strayed in!" Gimli, with the stubborness of dwarves, persists, and at last Legolas is moved by his words, for words are the realm of Elves. It was they, the Quendi, the speakers, who first woke up the trees and taught them to talk. And trees come into the bargain Legolas makes now with his friend: "Come! Let us make this bargain---if we both return safe out of the perils that await us, we will journey for awhile together. You shall visit Fangorn with me, and then I will come with you to see Helm's Deep." (the Glittering Caves) Gimli says: "I will endure Fangorn, if I have your promise to come back to the caves and share their wonder with me." I love this bargain of opposites. Neither appreciates the thing that the other finds beautiful, in fact, they each find the other's thing of beauty terrifying and alien. But they have traveled long together, fought and risked their lives side by side for the same cause. The little differences of Elf and Dwarf don't seem so big anymore. Legolas and Gimli are opposites, earth and leaf, crystal and tree, dark and light; these two opposing forces are reconciled with their friendship, and this bargain. Think of a few of your favorite movies, TV shows or books, and see how many times this kind of pair of opposites has cropped up. "As they rode out from under the eaves of the wood, Legolas halted and looked back with regret. Then he gave a sudden cry." "There are eyes!" he said, "Eyes looking out from the shadows of the boughs! I have never seen such eyes before. He turns and rides back... "No no! cried Gimli, "Do as you please in your madness, but let me first get down from this horse!" I love this! Legolas leaving the wood with great reluctance, looking back and wishing he could hang up his bow and poke around in the woods for a few hundred years. He's Jaques Cousteau, Jane Goodall, Bernd Heinrich, anyone who's spent years in the wilderness watching dolphins or chimps or ravens. He's a tough, capable warrior, a stout Hero Companion, a really scary fighter with knife or bow...but what he really wants to do is wander about under the trees for a few years, in a kind of Elvish zen. It is Gandalf who finally yells, using his name in two languages: "Stay Legolas Greenleaf!" "And now the songs have come down among us out of strange places, and walk visible under the Sun." (Theoden, of the Ents) If you strange folk did not wreathe yourselves in smoke. Upon finding Merry and Pippin at Isengard, lying about feasting and smoking, Gimli waxes eloquent about the "fine hunt you have led us! Two hundred leagues through fen and forest, battle and death to rescue you, and here we find you feasting and idling and smoking...I am so torn between rage and joy that if I do not burst it will be a marvel." Legolas says, laughing: "you speak for me too, though I would sooner learn how they came by the wine." Two nifty things here: one is that Gimli has beaten an Elf in a contest of words. His entire speech is quite a fat paragraph. Legolas only says "you speak for me too." The other is that Leggy seems to be the only non-smoker in the party (there's more of this later), and then there's that wine reference... ...back in The Hobbit, there is a scene in the cellars of the King (Thranduil, Legolas' father), in which a butler named Galion, and a Chief Guard, who is not named feel the need to taste test the wine, freshly come from Dorwinion, before it is sent up to the King's table. It is particularly potent wine, enough to make a woodelf...or two...quite sleepy. They fall snoring onto the table, and very soon the chief guard has no keys, but Bilbo is trotting down the hall to free the dwarves. Chief Guard; the sort of position a King might give to his youngest son on a time... "You have drunk of the waters of the Ents, have you?" said Legolas, "Ah, then I think it is likely that Gimli's eyes do not decieve him. Strange songs have been sung of the draughts of the Ents." Legolas and Gimli have noticed Merry and Pippin's increased height, as well as their uncommon health and vigor, even after their kidnapping by orcs. Again Legolas knows somethig of the wide world through the songs and stories of his people, though he has only seen the Ents from a distance so far. As the Hobbits and Gimli and Aragorn settle down after their meal in the storeroom at Isengard, for a smoke, Legolas says: "Well, I am going back into the open air, to see what the wind and sky are doing!" I totally love this. I've suffered a few choking sessions with folk who had the strange habit of sucking smoke into their lungs. And Legolas seems like the sort who would grow fidgety if kept long from wind and sky and tree. And if locked away from them for too long, he would certainly grow ill and die. As he rises and leaves, Aragorn and the others follow him. They sit on the piled stones before the gates of Isengard, smoking in silence, while 'Legolas lay still, looking up at the sun and sky with steady eyes, and singing softly to himself.' As in the chase across Rohan, in the night, he is in the moment, in a sort of quiet Sindarin zen, singing to himself, watching the natural rhythms of sun and sky. It is something humans rarely do: look up. It is a kind of meditation, a prayer, or the kind of be-here-nowness that birds and wolves and horses have. It's incredibly appealing, incredibly beautiful to me. He also seems to be staring at the sun without going blind. One of those crazy superhuman Elf things he can do, like running on snow, or sleeping with his eyes open. At last he grows Legolasly impatient: "Come now! Time wears on and the mists are blowing away, or would, if you strange folk did not wreathe yourselves in smoke. What of the tale?" Add to his many fine qualities 'non-smoker'. Tolkien of course was writing in a time period before anyone took seriously tobacco's dangers. He himself smoked the occasional pipe. It's kind of funny that one of his main characters seems to be annoyed by it. Treebeard. In the confrontation with Saruman, locked in his tower, it is Gimli who speaks, while Legolas remains silent and no doubt watchful. When the Company returns to the Gate, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli see Treebeard for the first time up close, and look on him in wonder. "The Old Ent looked at them long and searchingly, and spoke to them in turn. Last he turned to Legolas" (who is by now no doubt growing marvelously impatient). "So you have come all the way from Mirkwood my good Elf? A very great forest it used to be." "And still is. But not so great that we who dwell there ever tire of seeing new trees. I should dearly love to journey in Fangorn's Wood. I scarcely passed beyond the eaves of it, and I did not wish to turn back." Understated, but I see the excitement in his eyes. 'Treebeard's eyes gleamed with pleasure, "I hope you may have your wish, ere the hills be much older." "I will come if I have the fortune. I have made a bargain with my friend that, if all goes well, we will visit Fangorn together---by your leave." Princely diplomacy. "Any Elf that comes with you will be welcome." "The friend that I speak of is not an Elf." More princely diplomacy. "Hoom, hm! Ah now, a Dwarf and an axe bearer!..." "Strange it may seem, but while Gimli lives, I shall not come to Fangorn alone. His axe is not for trees, but for orc-necks, oh Fangorn, Master of Fangorn's Wood. Forty-two he hewed in the battle." Lots of princely diplomacy and sticking up for a friend. Legolas' voice shows his awe and delight and respect of Treebeard. And once again he defends his buddy, even if it carries the possibility of not being allowed into Fangorn's Wood. I wish that we had seen more of Legolas' reaction to meeting Treebeard in the film; the delight, childlike wonder and astonishment on his face would be wonderful. The Passing of the Grey Company. "So four of the Company still remain," said Aragorn. Merry, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli. "And then whither?" said Legolas? "I cannot say...the King will go to the muster at Edoras...but for myself and any that will go with me..." "I for one!" cried Legolas. "And Gimli with him!" said the Dwarf. And so they ride on the road that will take them, and the Dunedain of the North that they soon meet, through the Paths of the Dead. Legolas and Gimli do not abandon their friend, their leader, their king. At their camp at Helm's Deep, Legolas and Gimli rouse Merry from sleep with "The Sun is high, all others are up and doing. Come Master Sluggard, and look at this place while you may!" The cheeful chiding of friends, rather like a group of teenage boys calling each other rude names. They are discussing the arrival of the Dunadain of the North, Aragorn's kin, and of Elladan and Elrohir, and how it was Galadriel reading many hearts and desires who sent them. "Why did we not wish for some of our own kinfolk, Legolas." asks Gimli. 'Legolas stood before the gate and turned his bright eyes away north and east, and his fair face was troubled. "I do not think that any would come. They have no need to ride to war; war already marches on their own lands." Nothing is said of what happens outside the circle of the nine members of the Fellowship. Undoubtedly Mirkwood is overun, and Thranduil has his own battles to fight. Does he miss his son? Does he wonder if he yet lives? Does Legolas question his descision to fight for strangers in a far land? Does he fear for his own folk back home? This is the closest we come to knowing. 'Together they went back into the Burg; yet for sometime Aragorn sat silent at the table in the hall, and the others waited for him to speak.' "Come!" said Legolas at last. "Speak and be comforted, and shake off the shadow! What has happened since we came back to this grim place in the grey morning?" He speaks like a poet, and not only notices the beauty of places he encounters on his journey, but spirit dampening greyness of others. Aragorn often seems as grim and burdened as Frodo. The other Rangers of the North are also described as grim and weathered men, though fair of speech. Legolas maintains a different perspective, an Elvish one. Maybe it is the long distance vision of Hawk; this too shall pass. Or maybe it is the be-here-nowness of any natural creature; we''ll burn that bridge when we get to it. He is empathic and feels the emotions of those around him, but he is lighter, brighter, a hopeful shaft of light breaking through the clouds of doom. 'There under the gloom of black trees that not even Legolas could long endure they found a hollow place opening at the mountain's root...fear flowed from it like a grey vapour.' Like Moria, this is a place alien to the Elf, and it is also a dark and corrupted place, not a healthy living ecosystem. 'The company halted, and there was not a heart among them that did not quail, unless it were the heart of Legolas of the Elves, for whom the ghosts of Men have no terror.' Somehow Tolkien forgot to mention Elladan and Elrohir, who are also Elves, the sons of Elrond half-Elven (who chose the Elven path) and Galadriel's daughter Celebrian. '...they live at once in both worlds, and against the Seen and Unseen, they have great power.' There are many evil things in Middle-earth, from ghosts to Ringwraiths whose main power is in fear, not physical force. Elves, with their keen, bright eyes, seem to be able to see through this psychic deception. Words that went soft in the gloom. The Dunedain and their horses follow Aragorn through the Door of the Dead; 'the love that the horses of the Rangers bore for their riders was so greathat they were willing to face even the terror of the Door , if their masters' hearts were steady...' 'But Arod, the horse of Rohan, refused the way, and he stood sweating and trembling in a fear that was grevious to see. Then Legolas laid his hands on his eyes and sang some words that went soft in the gloom, until he suffered himself to be led...' My other ulitmately favorite line in the entire Book. And the one thing I wish had not been left out of the film. It echoes with the horse-whisperer legends of Europe; horse-tamers who could do magic with wild and unmanageable horses. It shows that incredibly gentle and poetic side of Legolas' nature, the part that's tuned into all things living. It is the quality I most admire about him, and the one I most wish I had. It is something that is far more appealing in a male than huge muscles and testosterone-laden swagger. "Here is a thing unheard of, an Elf will go underground and a Dwarf dare not"...Nothing assailed the Company nor withstood their passage, and yet steadily fear grew on the Dwarf... Aragorn is in the front with a torch, and Elladan in the rear with another...and then a chill blast comes and the torches go out, and cannot be rekindled...it seems a lifetime to Gimli till they come out under the sky again. There he reunites with Legolas, though I always wondered how Legolas loses him in the dark of the Paths of the Dead. Perhaps it didn't occur to the Elf how terrifying the passage would be to the Dwarf, after all, Gimli is at home underground in a way no Elf would ever be. Perhaps Gimli's own fear was never voiced, his terror was all internal, and either because it was so overwhelming, or because he wanted to maintain some last shred of Dwarvish dignity, he never called out for help. At any rate, it is his eyes we see the terror of the passage through; the only one who truly was terrorized. The others were Rangers following the lead of their lord, Elrond's sons, who had the fearlessness of Elves when it came to the ghosts of Men, and Legolas. At last they are riding again upon Arod: 'Legolas turning to speak to Gimli looked back and the Dwarf saw before his face the glitter of the Elf's bright eyes..."The Dead are following, I see shapes of Men and of horses, and pale banners like shreds of cloud, and spears like winter thickets on a misty night. The Dead are following." Those bright eyes sometimes seem to glow with a light of their own, an inner light, the echo of the light of the Two Trees at the dawn of time. With the light of Elbereth's stars. And they can see things Men cannot. Things faraway in space or time, things which have no form. 'It seemed to those who stood near that they heard a sound of answering horns, as if it was an echo in deep caves far away...they were aware of a great host gathered all about the hill...a voice was heard out of the night that answered...as if from far away...' It may be that the Men with Aragorn can't see the Army of the Dead, they feel them, hear faint whispers of voice and horn and footfall, but Legolas does see them, as he sees many things Men do not. And when he describes them to Gimli, he speaks in poetry, in words that might come from a song; a'nd pale banners like shreds of cloud, and spears like winter thickets on a misty night.' Brrrrrrrrrr. Pirates of the Anduin. Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli pass out of all knowledge for nearly sixty pages of The Book. When we next see them, they are leaping off the black corsairs into the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. What happened in between is related later, in the Houses of Healing (at the beginning of "The Last Debate" chapter), to the Hobbits as a flashback: "The Sun may shine here, but there are memories of that road that I do not wish to recall out of the darkness. Gimli tells Merry. Gimli Gloin's son, who had deemed himself more tough than Men and hardier under earth than any Elf...was held to the road only by the will of Aragorn." "And by the love of him also, for all those who know him, come to love him after his own fashion, even the cold maiden of the Rohirrim." Both show their admiration for Aragorn, though Gimli seems to esteem the strength of Aragorn's will and Legolas sees a broader picture, one that contains love, brotherly, or in the case of Eowyn, otherwise. He has also noticed the feelings of Eowyn for Aragorn; "there was grief at that parting, and I was grieved to behold it." He seems again to be deeply empathic, feeling Eowyn's grief intensely. Now there wuld have been an interesting love triangle. Watching the film I find myself wanting to shout at Eowyn the Extremely Dense, "Dude, the blond guy's single!, and he'll still look good in fifty years..." Swiftly Legolas tells of the haunted road under the mountains, the dark tryst at the Stone of Erech, and the long ride to Linhir above the mouth of Gilrain, where a battle is fought at the fords with fell folk of Umbar and Harad, then on across the green fields of Lebennin to Pelargir. He pauses and sighs, and turns his eyes south, and sings softly: "Silver flow the streams from Celos to Erui In the green fields of Lebennin! Tall grows the grass there. In the wind from the Sea The white lilies sway, And the golden bells are shaken of mallos and alfirin In the green fields of Lebennin, In the wind from the sea!" "Green are those fields in the songs of my people; but they were dark then, grey wastes in the blackness before us. And over the wide land, trampling unheeded the grass and the flowers, we hunted out foes through a day and a night, until we came at the bitter end to the Great River at last." No other folk make such a trampling, he had said as he followed the swath of destruction left by the orcs across the wide plains of Rohan. Now he is part of an army that, in its need for speed, wreaks havoc in its wake. He rides across a place he has only heard of in song; a sacred place, a beautiful place full of life, threatened by the Dark. He is ready to die trying to save it and the rest of the living land he loves. There is sadness and longing in his voice as he sings the Lebennin song for his friends, longing for the war to be over, sadness for the havoc wreaked on such beauty. Longing to hang up bow and quiver and knife and stand knee-deep in the grass watching the birds and listening to the song of the wind. The Sea-longing. And he has finally understood the words of Galadriel: he has heard the distant wail of the gulls in the dark. It has awakened the call of the Valar that lies buried deep in the hearts of all his kindred; the Sea-longing. He is changed. Something that normally happens to Elves only slowly, if at all. Changed. He will never be able to go home again. "Your heart will then dwell in the forest no more!" "Look! Gulls! They are flying far inland. A wonder they are to me and a trouble to my heart. Never in all my life had I met them, until we came to Pelargir, and there I heard them crying in the air as we rode to the battle of the ships. Then I stood still, forgetting war in Middle-earth; for their wailing voices spoke to me of the Sea. The Sea! Alas! I have not yet beheld it. But deep in the hearts of all my kindred lies the Sea-longing, which it is perilous to stir. Alas! for the gulls. No peace shall I have again under beech or under elm." The war is not yet won. He still must ride to possible death and destruction for a world he now realizes is no longer his. He might have turned around right then, on the road to Pelargir, turned and ridden to the Havens, and taken ship, like so many others. But he does not. His heart is torn in two; he hears the Call, but he will not abandon his friends. He could not live the rest of eternity with that. The Sea-longing is one of those things that resonated with me, like the rumble in the sand as the tsunami approaches, when I first read The Book. It is a place I had seen; in books, on tv, but never been to till I was twelve; I came up over the Last Sand Dune At the Edge of the Knowne Worlde and stood in awe for a heartbeat, for forever. It roared, it breathed, it danced, it sang. I wanted to be part of it. I have plunged deeper into meditation on the Sea-longing in another essay, but here I will say this much... "Look! Gulls! They are flying far inland. A wonder they are to me and a trouble to my heart." Since I read those lines in RotK, gulls have become, for me, the spirit of the Sea-longing, of wind and wave and mysterious depths. Of far horizons and dreams yet unreached. Of quests both physical and spiritual. And every year after, I have made my own Hero Journey to the edge of the Knowne Worlde; a circle of sand and sea and sky called Assateague Island, on the coast of Virginia, USA. It is the Undying Lands; nothing matters here, on this Lonely Isle but the eternal cycles of Nature. Wind and tide and sun and desert sand moved by tide and wind; the Barrier Island rolling over itself, renewing itself, ever young, ever changing, ever the same. Water and the Sea, are potent archetypal images. Water hides. Water reveals. It can draw you down, or hold you up, depending on how you react to it. It can save you, or destroy you. You can't fight it, you must go with its energy. Someone, Bruce Lee, I think, said "water is the strongest stuff on earth". The Sea is an end, and a beginning. A circle. Inside it you are in the center of a perfect sphere of water, with seven directions, not just four (north, south, east, west, up, down, center). In Middle-earth, water destroys Evil; the corrupted Atalante (Numenor), the horsed Nazgul. In Middle-earth (as in many Primary World legends) Evil fears to cross water, especially moving water. And Nenya, the Ring of Water, holds great power of healing and protection. Things are revealed in Galadriel's mirror of water. The mighty River Anduin carries the Fellowship to safety, and carries the fleet of Corsairs, led by Aragorn, to the aid of Minas Tirith. The Argonath, and the narrow chasm after it, ("the black waters roared and echoed") are a gateway, guarded by the forces of water, into an ancient kingdom, and to Aragorn's future. Boromir has a "viking burial", laid to rest on the bosom of the Anduin, and the River carries him home to his kin. Merry and Pippin are healed and refreshed by entdraughts. Isengard is cleansed by water. Faramir's Henneth Annun is hidden and protected by water. And in the Paths of the Dead, Gimli's dread is broken by a "tinkle of water, a sound hard and clear as a stone falling into a dream of dark shadow". The Watcher in the Water at the gates of Moria is the archetypal Monster in the Depths, one of the few places in Middle-earth where water becomes ominous. Then again, the Ring was lost, and found, in water. Here in southcentral Pennsylvania, we are at the end of the long Susquehanna River, which starts somewhere in New York as a trickle, and winds down to the Chesapeake Bay, and then to the Sea. To the Sea! As on the Anduin, gulls come up the Bay, and the River, and in winter and early spring, hang out at the malls, looking for leftover Happy Meals, or whatever else they can glean from civilization. Not very romantic, perhaps, but definitely a survival skill. Most people see them, I guess, as noisy raucous sea-crows, rats of the air. Not me. Not any more. Well, then there's those gulls in Finding Nemo: mine, mine, minemineminemine! Birds that sing and trees that do not die. There is a wonderful moment as Legolas and Gimli enter Minas Tirith for the first time, before they meet the Hobbits in the Houses of Healing. Gimli stalks through the gates stroking his beard, staring about him and remarking on the design and stonework of the city: There is some good stonework here, but also some that is less good, and the streets could be contrived better...when Aragorn comes into his own, I shall offer him the service of stonewrights of the Mountain, and we will make this a town to be proud of. Legolas, by contrast, walks lightly, 'fair of face beyond the measure of Men,' singing an elven-song in a clear voice, joyfully in the moment, though war yet looms. He looks around at the ancient city and says: "They need more gardens. The houses are dead and there is too little here that grows and is glad. If Aragorn comes into his own, the people of the Wood shall bring him birds that sing and trees that do not die." Another favorite line of mine: too little here that grows and is glad... birds that sing and trees that do not die. While Gimli sees the crumbling stonework, Legolas sees the lack of life, one seeing the physical part of the city, the other the spiritual energy. Note that Gimli says "when" Aragorn comes into his own, and Legolas says "if". It may be a typo, or it may say something about how Dwarves and Elves see things: go not to the Elves for council, for they will say both yes and no. Legolas may be able to see farther than Men, but he will not make absolute claims about the future, even the future of Aragorn. There is another little goodie here, an exchange between Elf and Dwarf which shows their differing viewpoints: Gimli: And doubtless the good stonework is the older and was wrought in the first building. It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in Spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise. Legolas: Yet seldom do they fail of their seed. And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked for. The voice of hope, of light, of optimism. Dory, awash in the whale's mouth, Finding Nemo: I think it's half full... The end of all things. 'At last the trumpets rang and the army began to move...' Legolas and Gimli ride again together in the company of Aragorn and Gandalf to the Black Gates of Mordor. 'The last glint of the morning sun on spear and helm twinkled and was lost...' and Legolas rides out of the tale, for the most part, for now the action centers on the Hobbits and the World of Men. The Third Age is drawing to a close, Legolas has heard the call, and the Elves will, if any are left in Middle-earth, return to the Blessed Realm across the sea. There is the Battle Before the Gates, and Legolas and Gimli are lost in the melee.The Book turns to Frodo and Sam, and the end of their quest. Only on the Field of Cormallen do we see Elf and Dwarf once more. They rejoin their friends, all four Hobbits now, and all tell their own parts of the tale. Gimli has a few lines here, but in The Book, if Legolas says anything, it is not reported. Perhaps he is silent. Perhaps his mind is elsewhere, already taking wing under great sails heading west. But at last he does speak, as the friends depart for bed and rest: On the gwaith-i-phethdain site on elvish.org, Ryszard Derdzinski translated Tolkien's words into Legolas' Sindarin tongue: Pent Legolas: "Ar im padathon vi eryn en-dor vain hen i na idh far. Ned orath i telithar, ae hir nin Edhellen devitha, pin o gwaith vin anglennatha simen; ar ir telitham natha dor hin i alu, dan na lu thent. Na lu thent: ahad, cuil, haran inath in Edain. Dan Anduin nef, ar Anduin tog dadbenn na 'Aear. Na 'Aear! "And I," said Legolas, "shall walk in the woods of this fair land, which is rest enough. In days to come, if my Elven-lord allows, some of our folk shall remove hither: and when we come it shall be blessed, for awhile. For awhile: a month, a life, a hundred years of Men. But Anduin is near, and Anduin leads down to the Sea. To the Sea!" to the sea, to the sea, the white gulls are crying na aear, na aear, myl lain nallol the wind is blowing, the white foam is flying i sul ribiel, a i falf los reviol west, west away, the round sun is falling na annun hae, ias annor dannol grey ship, grey ship, do you hear them calling cair vith, cair vith, lastal hain canel the voices of my people, who have gone on before me lammath in-gwaithen, i gwennin no nin I will leave, I will leave, the forests that bore me gwannathon, gwannathon, taur i onnant nin for our days are ending, our years failing an midui orath vin, a dennin inath vin I will pass the wide waters' lonely sailing trevidithon aear land erui ciriel long are the waves on the last shore falling falvath enain bo mathedfalas dannol sweet are the voices in the Lost Isle calling lammath vilui vi Tol Gwannen cannen in Eressea, which no Man can discover vi Tol Ereb i Edain u-gennir where the leaves fall not, land of my people forever ias lais u-dhannar, dor en-gwaith nin an-uir (Sindarin translation by Ryszard Derdzinski http://www.elvish.org/gwaith/tothesea.htm) There is one last mention of Elf and Dwarf, in "Many Partings" nearly twenty pages later; 'Then Legolas repaid his promise to Gimli and went with him to the Glittering Caves; and when they returned he was silent, and would say only that Gimli alone could find fit words to speak of them. "And never before has a Dwarf claimed a victory over an Elf in a contest of words," said he. "Now therefore let us go to Fangorn and set the score right!" Perhaps it was Elvish courtesy, perhaps it seemed more right for a Dwarf to speak of the caves. Perhaps it would have seemed rude for an Elf to outshine a Dwarf in such a circumstance, so Legolas held his eloquent tongue.. Or perhaps Legolas still didn't like the caves very much, and would rather say nothing than say anything that might hurt his friend's feelings. Or maybe he was right, and only a Dwarf could find adequate words. They meet with Treebeard at Orthanc, and from there 'all save Legolas said that they must now take their leave..."Come Gimli, now by Fangorn's leaveI will visit the deep places of the Entwood and see such trees as are nowhere else to be found in Middle-earth. You shall come with me and keep your word; and thus we will journey on together to our own lands in Mirkwood and beyond." 'To this Gimli agreed, though with no great delight, it seemed.' ("Darn tree-hugging hippie elves," grumbled Gimli.) Tolkien makes a comment in a letter, or an essay, or a bio, somewhere, that he left room in Middle-earth for other hands wielding brush and pen. To fill in the corners, rather like Hobbits at the end of a feast. For as long as I have lived, (as long as The Book has existed) artists and writers have done just that. If you log onto only one of many fanfiction sites (www.fanfiction.net) you will find over a thousand current tales set in Middle-earth, a number of them about Elf and Dwarf. As Legolas and Gimli ride off into the sunset, there are plenty of tales left to tell about them... "Here then at last comes the ending of the Fellowship of the Ring," said Aragorn. Indeed, it is. The Hobbits will return home, and Frodo and Bilbo...and one day, it is said, Sam...will sail west on a grey-elvenship. Aragorn is the once and future king, and Legolas and Gimli will bring stonemasons and birds that sing and trees that do not die and help rebuild Minas Tirith.. Legolas brings some of his own folk from Mirkwood and settles in Ithilien, alongside Faramir and Eowyn who also dwell there. Much of this is not learned within the pages of The Book, but from the other works of Tolkien, and his scholars. There is one last note in The Book though, one last echo of this Great Adventure we have shared in; at the end of Appendix B, sad and joyful and wonderful: 1541 In this year on March 1st came at last the Passing of King Elessar. It is said that the beds of Meriadoc and Peregrin were set beside the great king. Then Legolas built a grey ship in Ithilien, and sailed down Anduin and so over Sea; and with him, it is said, went Gimli the Dwarf. And when that ship passed, an end was come in the Middle-earth of the Fellowship of the Ring. And in the darkroom bind them. 2004.01.16: I'm holding a rather large, nervous redtailed hawk on one gloved hand, speaking to some fidgety fourth grade girl scouts about the wonders of the natural world, and getting giggles as Thermal leaves a great splot of poo on the floor. It's midwinter and the scouts are having a sleepover under the (taxidermy) bears and tigers and antelope of the visitor's center of Nixon County Park. I have brought Thermal, and two other birds from raptor rehabber Mitzi's house, where they live, and where Legolas, to my surprise, graces the refrigerator; a school art project done by Mitzi's young son. After I answer a zillion girl scout questions, and leave a few more splots on the floor, several young scouts recognize the mallorn leaf brooch I am wearing; a copy of the ones from the films. "Who's you favorite character?" I ask. Almost invariably it is Legolas. Almost invariably they have not (yet) read The Book, though they have read the 800+ page immensity that is Harry Potter. I tell them some of the things they didn't know about Legolas; talking to horses, running on snow, listening to trees speak. Hey, he could hold this hawk without the little leash thingie... "Read The Book." I say. And I think they might. |
That Darn Elf: part the Second (Age)
particularly Rings of Power Definitely contains spoilers, if you have not yet streamed the series... will be updates as it airs... It is 2022, and after a long drought of Tolkien content, Amazon Prime has brought us back to Middle Earth with Lord of the Rings: the Rings of Power. One could make a point that Lord of the Rings is the Third Age story of the Fellowship destroying the One Ring to Rule Them All, but the LOTR himself is Sauron, and he is rising, for the first time in the Second Age, in which LOTR: RoP takes place. RoP introduces some canon characters in their earlier years, as well as new ones. Elves abound. But some are more elvish than others... That Darn Elf: part two a deep dive into what it is to be elvish I grew up reading books, and in hindsight, many of the characters I loved had an elvish air: Mowgli and Tarzan who ran around in the trees and talked to animals, the kid in The Forgotten Door (by Alexander Key) who could read thoughts, speak to animals, lighten his feet, dressed in grey, and fell through a dimensional doorway from elsewhere. Every Jedi, every kung fu monk, and even The Faithful Indian Sidekick that was a staple of westerns (stereotyped to be sure, but one played with dignity by Mohawk actor Jay Silverheels). Even Spock and other Vulcans (and later, the Romulan, Elnor, dubbed "Space Legolas" as well as being compared to Elrond) were in the same Venn diagram of archetype. People who were close to the natural world, sensed things mere mortals could not, talked to animals and trees, and had a few superhero capabilities. My favorite part of LOTR (the books) remains this: "A smaller and lighter horse, but restive and fiery, was brought to Legolas. Arod was his name. but Legolas asked them to take off the saddle and rein. 'I need them not,' he said and lightly leaped up, and to their wonder, Arod was tame and willing beneath him, moving here and there with but a spoken word: such was the elvish way with all good beasts." Book 3, Chapter 3, pg. 51 In 1978, I rolled up a character in a D&D game, waved it at the DM, and he said; "Play an Elf." I finally began reading the LOTR set I had been given, starting with the appendices: 'Elves has been used to translate both Quendi, 'the speakers'. the High-elven name of all their kind, and Eldar, the name of the three kindreds that sought for the Undying Realm and came there at the beginning of Days (save the Sindar only). This old word was indeed the only one available, and was once fitted to apply to such memories of this people as Men preserved, or to the making of Men's minds not wholly dissimilar. But it has been diminished, and to many it may now suggest fancies either pretty or silly, as unlike to the Quendi of old as are butterflies to the swift falcon--not that any of the Quendi ever possessed wings of the body, as unnatural to them as to Men. They were a race high and beautiful, the older Children of the world, and among them the Eldar were as kings, who are now gone: the People of the Great Journey, the People of the Stars. They were tall, fair of skin and grey-eyed, though their locks were dark, save in the golden house of Finarfin, and their voices had more melodies than any mortal voice that now is heard. They were valiant, but the history of those that returned to Middle-earth in exile was greivous; and though it was in far off days crossed by the fate of the Fathers, their fate is not that of Men. Their dominion passed long ago, and they dwell now beyond their circles of the world, and do not return.' That excerpt from the Appendix didn't really tell me much, except for this line: 'But it ("elves") has been diminished, and to many it may now suggest fancies either pretty or silly, as unlike to the Quendi of old as are butterflies to the swift falcon.' I never had liked those cutesey wootsey bouncy wouncy little fairy things very much, they just didn't ring true. But 'Eldar, Sindar, Quendi'...those names had power, and there was something familiar about them. So I began to read the immensity of verbiage that was The Book. AN IMPORTANT NOTE FROM GRAMMA SWORDWHALE: We'll now use "fair" to mean just beautiful. Elves are an archetype that everyone in every culture has, and everyone tells stories of, and everyone identifies with. Tolkien was writing in a particular space and time and clearly used his culture's Default Mode of pale Englishman. The streaming series Rings of Power has a cast that represents the entire world: Middle Earth is neither history nor northern Europe, it is a world, with all of a world's complexity and diversity. The other most elvish Elf I have seen portrayed thus far onscreen grew up in a mountain village in Puerto Rico, identifying with the Elves, but not seeing himself represented. Elves are universal and should be depicted as such. I am also far more fond of the wood Elves, the Sindar and Nandor and Avari, than the High Elves, who seem to have made all the "News At Eleven" (their tales being sung down through the ages of Middle Earth), and who also seem to be a bit above it all at times. Thanks, I'll go party in Mirkwood. AND: Tolkien was a man writing in a man's time; there was a very bad case of All Those Mortal Men In Love With Elven Princesses. It's actually part of the Hero Journey: the Worthy Hero weds the Goddess. But for female fans, the exclusion of our adventures and longings is annoying as hell. So the inclusion of a So Tense You Can Cut It With A Fine Elvish Blade romance in RoP is kinda wonderful, since it's male Elf/female Human. A great deal is made of how tragic and rare Human/Elf alliances are (cough*Elrond HALF-ELVEN*cough) and, yeah tragedy (well you gotta start the series with draaaaaaaaamaaaaaaa amirite?). No real dive into those pairings is made (they exist outside that storyline), but they produced some of the most epic tales, and epic descendants ever in Middle Earth. Cough*Elrond*cough. They may have endured difficulty and tragedy but most of them worked out epically. The other aspect of this is that the "Aronwyn" ship (Arondir/Bronwyn) is two people who are not kings, queens or Noldorin High Elves. They are boots on the ground ordinary folk: a Silvan Elf and a Human healer. There were doubtless gazillions of Nandor, Avari and other Silvan Elves who interacted with humans and never made the news. Probably didn't go dying of heartbreak on some forest mound either when their mortal lover passed. Basically, it doesn't have to play out in tragedy. We should note that Tolkien was also a Catholic; his lovers choose to leave the world together (much as he and his wife did, he died only a couple years after her, and their gravestones say "Beren" and "Luthien" in honor of his best known lovers), and go to the afterlife together, forever. Working from other spiritual viewpoints, one can say this isn't necessary. Elves would be aware of the cycles of life, of things coming and going like waves on a beach, and they can either be fine with how the world is, rejoice, grieve, move onto the next cycle...or be dragged into despair. They may still meet in a universal afterworld, or a higher plane, or circle back to find each other again. I write the Elves in my tales this way, they are in the ever present now, though they remember the past as needed, and many mortal beings they've loved, find them again. They do not resist change (Tolkien's Elves tended to want to preserve everything) because it is part of the natural cycle. They have a bird's eye view, of long life, of seeing the cycles over a vast time, vs the mouse eye view of humans. Elves in RoP: We are, in RoP, in a somewhat wilder, earlier Age, but one everyone assumes is peaceful... but wait, what's this? Orcs tunneling under towns in the Southlands, meteors falling from the skies? Uh ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. We have four canon Elves: Galadriel (a younger, spicier version), Gil-Galad (was an Elven King, of him the harpers sadly sing), Elrond (yes, THAT Elrond, but younger and more wide eyed), and Celbrimbor (ooooooo pretty rings!). We know the fates of all of these (spoiler, two die rather epic terrible deaths). We know Galadriel and Elrond from LOTR, books and films. Gil-Galad and Celebrimbor are mentioned. We see Gil at the beginning of the Peter Jackson films fighting the Dark Lord (of the rings) Sauron... which is the end point of RoP. So far, we get Spicey Galadriel kicking snow troll ass, being a bit spicier toward Numenoreans and others, and glaring at Gil-Galad because he told her to go home and stop fighting, which she is not. She is badass, but elvish? not ..yet... so ... much. Gil is kinda, royal. Maybe we'll see more later (Benjamin Walker is fabulous, he just hasn't had much to do yet). Old Brimby is...um... we'll see. Elrond & Durin are a fun friend ship, and we see Elf eavesdropping on Dwarves, cause, enhanced senses. So far, Arondir, the Silvan Elf feels the most elvish. His companions in arms are there briefly, so we don't get to see their character deeply. Here are my observations from episode one on about what makes this Elf elvish... An Elf Walks Into a Bar... When Arondir and Medhor stride down the muddy track to Tirharad, we get a long shot of tiny a farming community. The Elves are an occupying force, much like armies long after a conflict has ended, keeping an eye on the folk who once sided with Morgoth, Sauron's boss. The Elves are a slash of silver grey elven cloaks against the muddy browns of the landscape. A bit of ethereal elegance maybe. More like wandering Jedi or kung-fu monks. Things from the TV series Kung Fu to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (one of many things used as a reference for building the character of Arondir) have top level martial artists with superhuman skills and a very calm nature, wandering into town, meeting suspicion or quelling violence. Seven Samurai si one of these tales. And if dabbling in martial arts taught me anything, it's that people with real power are very calm. Arondir walks past two old guys playing a chess-like board game, and cloaked and hooded like a Jedi, quietly tells them how to win it, without missing a beat or a step. Mysterious, intelligent, and showing some empathy. His companion has split off, so he enters the tavern/public house alone to suspicious or annoyed stares, which he ignores. A small thing, a moment's camera closeup, but significant and very very elvish: he lowers a hand to greet the wolfhound, who sniffs it (I saw no treats given, but likely dog actor was taught to expect one, and maybe Hand Smell Like Treat). This is 100% the "elvish way with all good beasts"... "A smaller and lighter horse, but restive and fiery, was brought to Legolas. Arod was his name. but Legolas asked them to take off the saddle and rein. 'I need them not,' he said and lightly leaped up, and to their wonder, Arod was tame and willing beneath him, moving here and there with but a spoken word: such was the elvish way with all good beasts." Book 3, Chapter 3, pg. 51 Your dog/cat/horse greets him. You know he's a good guy. When he uncloaks, a clip used in every trailer, the dark tavern is lit by a few beams of light, and one hits his face, lighting up his sea grey eyes. Tolkien described his elves (and other noble types) as having sea grey eyes, that is the changing color of the sea. For Orlando Bloom's Legolas, they used contacts to give him the sky eyes that went with the blond. For Arondir... yep, those are actually Ismael Cruz Cordova's sea grey eyes. Arondir reacts to the aggression of a drunk teen with Utter Bottomless Calm, and a block so swift you don't see it coming. So much Kung Fu, so much Jedi! I love it. All those mortals in love with elves ...His interaction with Bronwyn is understated, with romantic tension you could cut with a fine elvish blade. He respects her space, he does not go to her, she comes to him. She hands him a small bottle of alfirin seeds and we see his wonder at a thing he has not seen since childhood (which is a very long long time ago). When she tells him how they are used in medicine, he responds, surprised and dismayed, "You crush them?" Later we learn he was a "grower" before he joined the Elvish army outpost. He has deep empathy for living things. He maintains a dignity and balance, poised like a hawk or big cat, at ease but aware of his world. He says little, but when he does, it means something. His face shows calm, but with emotions that run deep. He moves with the grace and surety of someone who's practiced those moves for thousands of years, and has observed the natural world and its patterns of movement, even of plants, over a long time. Actor and crew used several martial arts (many are based on observations of nature and animals) and thought of how Arondir would absorb his observations of natural patterns into his movements. In dire danger, in the orc tunnels and in orc camp, he is like a wounded hawk: terrified underneath, but fierce and defiant, ready to go down fighting with nothing more than a shard of rock if necessary. He makes choices out of love and empathy: when released by the bad guy to carry a message to the Humans in the tower, he detours to the village to check on Bronwyn's family and people, despite the danger. The internet trolls were cruel in the years before the series aired. The real fans have proven loyal, and uplifted this actor and character with the kind of love Arondir has in his very big heart. |
