#isildur stan reporting for duty

[elrondsscribe]

Once again, this was a Twitter thread. Behold! My sermon in defense of Isildur!

Longtime fan of the LOTR films here, but when it comes to Isildur, Peter Jackson can catch these hands.

As far as I’m concerned, he’s responsible for a generation of LOTR fans (including me) having no concept of Isildur other then “lol should’ve listened to Elrond, bro u suck”

Usually I’m not a gal who gets hung up on adaptations changing things from source material. I’m aware that putting LOTR on film necessarily meant cutting and condensing a LOT. Doesn’t mean I’m not gonna complain about characters who suffer as a result — including characters like Isildur!

First off, the event that launched the meme doesn’t seem to have actually happened in canon. What Elrond says is that after the battle he and Círdan advised Isildur to destroy the Ring, and Isildur refused. No mention of them going into the mountain so the Ring could completely overtake him.

And far from being a silly greedy seizure by a power-hungry warmonger, Isildur claims the Ring as weregild (rightful compensation owed by an offending party to someone they’ve injured or wronged, or whose relative/s they’ve killed). This is trauma, plain and simple.

Because Sauron’s taken a lot from Isildur by this point. Amandil (remember him?) had to sail away, Númenor’s been fucking drowned, Elendil and Anárion are dead, and parts of their people and kingdoms are lost and destroyed — all because of Sauron. Methinks a little weregild is owed, maybe? 🤷🏾‍♀️

And before y’all come for me, yes, it was prideful of Isildur to think he could control the Ring, turn it to good ends. But in terms of how Isildur-at-his-most-prideful compares to other prideful Men … I mean, his cousin made war on the Gods of their world to claim immortality. Oh yeah, did you know? Amandil, Elendil’s father, is third cousin to both Tar-Míriel and Ar-Pharazôn. Yep. How’s that for some hubris?

I’m just sayin, claiming a Ring you cut from Sauron’s hand seems pretty tame by comparison, at least to me.

Thing is, it only took Isildur a year to fully realize this himself. He was actually on his way to Imladris when he got ambushed by Orcs, in part to hand the Ring over to Elrond because he didn’t wanna burdened with it anymore and he knew he couldn’t wield it!

Like, during the Gladden Fields ambush, his son Elendur begs him to use the Ring to command the Orcs, and he won’t do it. Elendur at the last asks him to use the Ring just to escape, but Isildur says he ‘dreads the pain of touching it.’ And when he does ‘lose’ it, he feels the exact same wrench-then-relief that Bilbo felt.

As for what Isildur did in the year that he was under the Ring’s influence … well, he was in Gondor patching the kingdom back up after the war and getting his nephew established as King. That’s it.

(And yes, he also wrote that “precious to me” scroll, but judging by what he said to Elendur, he wrote it pretty soon after the event, because he was singing a different tune just a year later.)

And by the way, I didn’t know this until today: Gondor was being ruled jointly by Isildur and Anárion, and Isildur was the oldest. By Númenórean law and custom, he had the right to rule alone, but he didn’t. And then, once Anárion was dead, surely a darkened Isildur falling victim to the Ring’s influence could’ve snatched up sole kingship and deposed Anárion’s son, right? But he seems to have done exactly the opposite.

Weird that Isildur’s most prideful recorded act seems to have been taking the Ring, rather than anything he did while supposedly being consumed by its evil power.

(For all that I love Bilbo and Frodo, and for all they resisted the Ring so well for so long, you kind of can’t say that about them.)

Also there’s kind of a question mark about how much Isildur ever knew about the Ring. Elrond and Círdan knew that it was Sauron’s One, and Isildur called it ‘the Great Ring,’ but does that mean they knew it was going to be the bane of Middle-earth, at least back then?

And if Elrond and Círdan knew, did they relay this information to Isildur?

And as for who Isildur was as a person … I mean, he and his family opposed Sauron back in Númenor when everyone was listening to Sauron. He up and saved the White Tree before Sauron got Ar-Pharazôn to destroy it. Then he saved it AGAIN once Sauron came for it in Middle-earth. He was proud, but not prideful enough to claim sole kingship of Gondor, which by Númenor’s laws and traditions he definitely could’ve. After the big battle, he stayed to clean up the damage and help Meneldil out before going off to manage Arnor in Elendil’s stead. Such a firstborn, honestly.

All I’m saying is, if I was the Ring and I got saddled with Isildur, I’d have dumped that noble, responsible fucker after a year too.