#assuming elves are more Tolkien-like and live forever they age very slowly to the point that they are basically just twilight vampires

[dungeonmalcontent]

Twilight, but it's a reexamination of the way elves age in most fantasy universes.

"I know what you are. You're skin is pale and you're unbelievably fast."

"Not that fast. Marginally faster than most people. On average."

"Sometimes you speak like you're from another time, I've never seen your ears... and I've only ever seen you eat root vegetables."

"Just say it"

"no, you have to do the line..."

"*fine* Say it, out loud."

"You're an elf."

"Cool. Now can you please just not tell anyone about this?"

---

"How old are you?"

"I dunno, like... 460."

"But you don't look older than 17."

"I spent about 50 years looking like I was 10."

"And how long have you looked like you were 17?"

"uh--probably 200 years? I don't know. We don't age in reverse dog years, there isn't math for this."

"Ugh, Sindreth, you're so stupid."

[mask131]

If Middle-earth is Earth in the past, is there any possibility for the magic to return? The magical creatures are probably all dead, but I assume the more spiritual beings like the Maiar and the Valar should still be around, right?

Asked this to a couple of friends that are Tolkien fans and they couldn't answer me.

Now I am NOT at all a Tolkien expert. I will try my best to answer you but I can't recommend you enough to go check actual lore-wise people for Tolkien... I know there are a handful of Youtube channels dedicated to explaining little tidbits of lore and answering specific questions about Tolkien's works. "In Deep Geek" or "Nerd of the Rings" are good starting places for casual Youtube videos about Tolkien lore, to listen in some spare time or just as background.

Now it depends what you mean by "magic" but, taking into account the whole "Middle-Earth is just prehistoric Earth/England's mythology" angle, in this sense, yes you are right about the point.

Most of the fabulous and fantastical creatures of legends and myth are dead or gone, and it is the whole point of Tolkien's work. The Lord of the Ring is literaly the tale of how an entire Age ended. It is something that begins quite early in The Hobbit, with the death of what was the last great dragon, but one doesn't get the full scope until we reach The Lord of the Rings, and by the end of it we are hit with everything. The Elves are fading away, the Wizards have all broken off in various ways, Sauron and his underlings are no more, the rings of power have no power anymore, the Ents are doomed to extinction, even some of the last descendants of the eldritch horrors like the Balrog or Shelob are dead. The great wonders of Middle-Earth are gone, beautiful or horrible, and it is sad and an end - but also a new beginning for a new age. And in this sense, yes, magic is technically gone or going away by the end of the Lord of the Rings.

But, as you pointed out, it doesn't mean "magic" is still disappeared forever, because in the Tolkien universe, magic IS the world. As you said, indeed, the Valar/Maiar are still around, and will always be there until the end of time. They are just out of reach and out of sight: this is one of the big themes of the Silmarillion, since it is the book where we go from "The gods walk the same earth we walk today" to "The gods are nowhere to be seen and work in mysterious ways". The whole point is that the Valar slowly retracted themselves from the universe, isolating themselves in the West, acting less and less in mortals affairs, imposing indirect means of interacting with fate and events rather than direct action... And it is part of the entire aesthetic of Tolkien's Legendarium: the regression of magic is constant, and while the world described in The Lord of the Rings seems like the "magical world" we today lost, when one reads the Silmarillion you realize LotR's Middle-Earth was actually a pretty drab and mundane world compared to the earlier Ages of the World. It is just that the very passing of Ages means that less and less magic and wonders happen - it is the Tolkien's way.

But they are not gone. There is still of this "magic" left around, it is just out of reach, hard to spot, not usually seen - and you have to know what you are looking for. Just like the Valar, who will always be there, but mortals cannot reach them, nobody remembers them, and they don't interact with us anymore. I think it was in The Hobbit that Tolkien literaly began by saying that some Hobbits still lived around England, though they hide away from humans and thus one would need tough chance to ever find them. It was just a "child's story" narrative device, but it still set the tone for the idea that there are remnants of LotR's Middle-Earth in our day and age (well more like in the 19th/early 20th century England), the same way Middle-Earth had by the time of LotR remnants of the first ages of the world (Shelob reminding of the distant threat of Ungoliant, or Galadriel's vial containing a last piece of primordial light).

Plus, you have to remember Tom Bombadil. The guy is definitively still around. And that's his role. When did he get there, we will never know, because he was never born - but he was there at some point, and he was there long before everybody else, and he will be there long after everybody else, and he'll still be around probably until the end of the world. As I said in my previous post, many people dismiss Tom Bombadil in LotR because yes, he provides nothing to the plot - but they miss his importance, that he is here as a symbolic and almost metaphysical character, as a tool not just to worldbuild but also to show the whole idea of this world. Yes the elves and dwarves and orcs are gone, and there are no more great wizards or terrible dark lords... but there will always be somewhere this weird singing guy who is definitively not human and nobody knows where he comes from, with his nature-spirit of a wife, and his grumpy murderous neighbor Old Willow. And I think it is quite important to understand Tolkien's whole approach to the "fading of magic". Tolkien's world is one of constant "degradation" (to the point he even stopped writing his story about a Fourth Age because he realized it would be much too bleak and dark even for him), but it is also one that is tied to his production for children and an interest in fairytale and children stories, and as such it also teaches to go search the real magic today not in immense dragons, or powerful elf-queens, or cursed antique jewels, but rather in a few Hobbits living their life hidden in some shire, or in an excentric Tom Bombadil deep within beautiful old woods.

[garden-ghoul]

fellowship of the bloggening, part 7

“I actually checked this time and it’s totally part 7″

THE BRIDGE OF KHAZAD-DUM

Gandalf finds a bloodstained book by Balin’s tomb, and Tolkien makes it his mission to recreate as accurately as possible the experience of reading a partial text that needs Deciphering. Because he’s a nerd. The book is basically a family diary that recounts how things went for Balin & co since they came to Moria 30 years ago.

'I fear their end was cruel. Listen! We cannot get out. We cannot get out. They have taken the Bridge and second hall. Frár and Lóni and Náli fell there. Then there are four lines smeared so that I can only read went 5 days ago. The last lines run The pool is up to the wall at Westgate. The Watcher in the Water took Óin. We cannot get out. The end comes, and then drums, drums in the deep. The last thing written is in a trailing scrawl of elf-letters: they are coming. There is nothing more.'

I’m endeared, because this is exactly the kind of thing I wrote in my journals when I was 12 because I thought it sounded impressive--that semi-poetic repetition of we cannot get out and the “trailing scrawl” at the end where you can see someone was trying to run away while writing. I really want dwarven record-keeping to be a specific poetic form, I want every kind of writing to have a specific poetic form, up to and including sales receipts.

As the company is leaving the records chamber they hear the doom, doom of enormous drums (have always loved that as an onomatopoeia). Legolas and Gimli, the nerds, immediately quote from the ominous text they just read, to express their fear, and at the same time the hypothesis that whatever killed Balin’s guys is coming for them. Very elegant use of echolalia! But it does make them sound, like nerds.

They are attacked by orcs, bla bla, the hobbits are surprisingly courageous and good at fighting! Well, Frodo and Sam are. We hear nothing of valiant deeds performed by Merry and Pippin. They flee out the other door of the records chamber; Gandalf stays behind to do something--I thought he was sealing the door with magic, but he says he was nearly defeated by something up there? It did a magic battle with Gandalf over the lock of the door, which is terribly exciting but left our wizard exhausted. When the door exploded, something “dark as a cloud” was obscuring the room. One point for my firesmoke balrogs. Anyway, we reach another hall, one level below the west gate (I love how Gandalf is carefully narrating exactly where they are). This hall has familiar pillars carved into the shapes of enormous trees. I assume it’s one of Tolkien’s imagery obsessions, but still I’m adding it to the Menegroth-Angband-Mandos trifecta of places to face one’s doom. Doom, doom, say the drums in the deep. The company moves on to the narrow bridge over a Hella Pit, designed to be difficult and unsafe for enemies to cross.

Also there’s this really neat balrog description:

What it was could not be seen: it was like a great shadow, in the middle of which was a dark form, of man-shape maybe, yet greater. It came to the edge of the fire and the light faded as if a cloud had bent over it. Then with a rush it leaped across the fissure. The flames roared up to greet it, and wreathed about it; and a black smoke swirled in the air. Its streaming mane kindled, and blazed behind it.

So basically balrogs look like a cloud of black smoke concealing an enormous humanoid form, but their dash attack is rocket powered. Also later it says that it has wings that span the entire hall. Very cool, but not as cool as walking tripod jellyfish things that whip out tendrils of fire to sting people.

Gandalf faces the balrog on the bridge, cuts its flaming sword to pieces (hell yeah). And he makes a stopping-spell so powerful that his staff shatters as the spell takes effect, cutting the bridge in two. But as we know he gets dragged into the pit. The company flees into daylight, scattering terrified orcs before them, and then once they’re out of bowshot of the walls they all stand there weeping.

Will our heroes make it to

LOTHLORIEN?

Tune in right now to find out! Or, in a little while. Aragorn says, enough crying we have lots to do. Gimli takes a brief detour to see Dimrill Dale’s biggest tourist spot, the location where Durin first looked into the Mirrormere and saw a prophetic vision of himself becoming an eternal king. You can actually see the jewels in his crown down there “till he wakes.” Um. What? What are those? Ah also Gimli really really wants Frodo, specifically, to see this with him. He knows Frodo is a history nerd. I love him.

Anyway they hike until they get to Lorien; it being winter, the leaves on the trees are gold. Thanks Galadriel for acknowledging that seasons exist, kinda. Legolas notes that a “secret power” protects the wood, although apparently nobody knows what it is (Nenya). Boromir is less happy to be here, because in Gondor the rumor is that nobody who walks into the Golden Wood ever walks out. Probably because y’all aren’t exactly elf-friends.

'Perilous indeed,' said Aragorn, 'fair and perilous; but only evil need fear it, or those who bring some evil with them.’

Stares at Aragorn. Stares at the Ring, the most evil artifact left in the world. Stares at Aragorn again. Anyway they walk until they find the river Nimrodel, which Legolas says brings healing to the weary. So he paddles in it for a bit. When they make camp he sings about Nimrodel and her beau, but breaks off, saying that he forgot the rest. When did elves become able to forget things? This new?

Then there’s a long passage that I forgot to blog because it was really engagingly written, but basically our heroes meet some Lorien elves and hang out in treehouses for a while, Legolas and Gimli argue about why the Lorien elves distrust dwarves so much, and the party takes a stroll. Everyone gets un-blindfolded and Frodo and Sam talk a bunch about how dreamlike and unchanging Lorien is. Sounds like a terrifying place. There’s also an element of “echoes of the past” here; Frodo hears the sea and calls of extinct seabirds from on top of Amroth’s Hill. The implication is that Lorien has been unchanged for thousands of years, and Frodo feels it will remain that way forever.

THE MIRROR OF GALADRIEL

We enter the one and only city in Lothlorien, Caras Galadhon. This city is unique not only in that all the buildings are trees, but also in the fact that our heroes can’t see anyone there. They hear people moving around, talking, and singing, but they don’t see anyone. This implies some kind of very interesting culture, I’m sure. Well, when they get to the throne room or whatever, Celeborn greets each of the travellers by name, as if to impress upon them that he already knows everrrrythingggg. Galadriel is silent and scary until it’s time to correct her husband on the reason Gandalf isn’t here. The tale of Gandalf’s fall is told; Celeborn is so ready to blame dwarves for this, because he is as racist as ever, but Galadriel chides him for it like she always does. She speaks of Khazad-dum and environs in dwarvish, possibly for the purpose of flirting with Gimli, and they smile at each other.

He rose clumsily and bowed in dwarf-fashion, saying: 'Yet more fair is the living land of Lórien, and the Lady Galadriel is above all the jewels that lie beneath the earth!’ 

Did you have to put in ‘clumsily.’ We get it, he’s not an elf. Whatever. Gimli and Galadriel are cute, she’s trying very hard to show everyone that she’s less racist than her husband. I also want to appreciate how people keep using “before the fall of Gondolin and Nargothrond” as a very specific time measure. I’m guessing that that’s what people say when they mean “in the First Age” but don’t want to, uh, ruin immersion by being specific.

Our heroes get some much-needed rest. They sleep a lot and go for constitutionals among the trees. Legolas goes out to a lot of elf-ragers or something, and gradually starts bringing Gimli with him. Oh, you finally noticed he’s a real stand-up guy, huh? Well, it’s nice that they’re both making friends.

Later Galadriel fetches Frodo and Sam to look into her magic mirror. They see various things. Frodo last sees the Eye of Sauron, and Galadriel does a little speech about how she uses Nenya to defend Lothlorian from his eye and his mind.

‘Do you not see now wherefore your coming is to us as the footstep of Doom? For if you fail, then we are laid bare to the Enemy. Yet if you succeed, then our power is diminished, and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away.’

Oho! So the Three do draw a good portion of their power from the One, even though Celebrimbor tried his best to make them independent. That must have taken some doing, forging a magic that would subjugate all free rings. I like to think that he had to put a constraint of rings only on it, in order for it to be strong enough to stand against Celebrimbor’s work. Also:

‘We must depart into the West, or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten.'

Mmm perfect memory as maybe a First Age thing specifically; perfect memory that depends on the state of the world and maybe even the blessing of the Valar and their presence on the same planet. I friggin dig it. Frodo also offers Galadriel the Ring--one passing that I have to assume the Ring is actually encouraging, rather than its normal unwillingness to leave any one owner. Galadriel does her speech about what will happen if she gets the Ring. I read it as kind of a warning/intimidation tactic honestly. In the movie they portrayed it as a power trip and her being tempted, but I think she already finished tempting herself long ago and decided not to take it. The test she speaks of here isn’t a test of wisdom, it’s a test of willpower in sticking to the decision she already made.