#tolkien theory time

[whiteladyofithilien]

The wielders of the three rings all three had the opportunity to seize the one...

We know Galadriel and Gandalf's fears about how it would turn them into a second Sauron but I wonder what Elrond's dark side would have looked like? Elrond who twice in his life could have taken it. Once by force the other by nature of being its guardian had it been left in Rivendell. Is that part of the reason why he wouldn't have it stay in Rivendell? He was afraid of temptation or was he both wise and disinterested like Faramir.

[elffromforests]

The Rings of Power 2x 5ep

NOOO . Shock. I am confused.

I am sure that Gil Galad's ring showed him three visions and the last one was about Gil Galad himself, about Gil Galad's death in Mordor. And the king understood it immediately. I am crying 😿

And that's why his expression changes and that's why he's a little depressed when he talks to Elrond.That is, rings do not show for the nearest time, but can show for a long period of time?

Now imagine that you are directly told and shown how you will die, but this is the only way to fight evil and you agree to these terms of the game. This is heroism 😥❤️

WTF

[eri-pl]

A long post about why chromaticism is awesome

(in the context of Ainulindale) and what Melkor did and what he didn't and what Rúmil got wrong

Because 17 of you voted for it, one for "don't care" and one for "we don't need anti-Melkor propaganda" which isn't true: we do need more anti-Melkor propaganda :D (Told you I'm going to ignore some of the votes! I like him ok? I just don't like what he did.) (It's not even particularly focused on that… )

So, long post below cut:

Inharmonious?

 it came into the heart of Melkor to interweave matters of his own imagining that were not in accord with the theme of Ilúvatar [to make himself more important]

Let me ask you a question: Did Melkor sing music that wa snot compatible with the theme of Ilúvatar? Yes, you say, 'tis in the quote.

Nay, I say. It came into his mind to do so. So he did try. But he did not do it, because it is not possible. He simply assumed that what he sang was fundamentally incompatibile. Also, it was too loud and badly timed and confused many of the Ainur. Yes, it was ugly and didn't work well. But it was not, on fundamental, harmonic level, incompatibile, as:

And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite

So: no. contrary to common way of talking about it in the fandom, Melkor didn't play anything fundamentally … how to phrase it? The themes were fundamentally good, just in wrong place and too loud.

["A lot of evil is a misprioritized good" is a thing that probably has a lot written about it already.]

The nature of discord

So, time for some music theory (Yay!)

"Discord" is Tolkien's word for "music I don't like, eg the Beatles and jazz", but generally, discordant notes mean notes that aren't part of the current harmony, or even part of the scale, and make spicy intervals with the notes that are already being played.

Except.

A better word for such notes is "dissonance" or "tension". Because they aren't inherently wrong or ugly. They are something that feels like it needs to be dealt with, they create more energy in the music.

Sure, a stiff classical music teacher (the kind who tries to be Mozartier than Mozart and cleans the trumpet only on the outside, you get the vibe) would tell you that you can't have a second, or a tritone (the famous "devil chord" allegedly) and so on.

That's not true.

You can have those, just not for long, and not too loud and they need to go somewhere and so on and so forth. But used properly, the tensions make music richer and alive.

(But of course when someone decides to be a jerk about it and plays them for too long and too loud… Every sensation made too long and too intense becomes pain, and empowering something that should be temporary always ends up badly.)

Fire isn't inherently wrong, but when it gets out of control and burns everything, it's bad. Cold isn't inherently wrong, but freezing to death is nasty. Change isn't wrong, but can be.

Well, "change isn't wrong" becomes true when there are imperfect beings: beings that can change without becoming less. Like, you know, mountains, and trees, and Men.

What was Melkor's calling?

I think it was to add tensions. But to add them in a normal amount. And this required him to do two things: a) to sing keeping the harmonic tension regardless of everyone else singing differently, and b) to not overdo it and frigging accept the fact that everyone else is singing together.

Well, he managed to do half of it. :F Yay. :F I'm gonna make him a sticker saying "you tried". :F

And yes, this is difficult. That's why the most powerful of the Ainur got the job! And he still messed it up. Because he preferred his pride than the actual job.

But yes, I believe his job was to sing "in discord", just politely. And then at the end on the Music get quiet and yield, because that's what you do with the tensions. And then go happily hang out with your fellow Ainur who would appreciate what he did. Because it's very much not "he was made evil", just "he was made different and other, and became evil by trying to make everything like him when he was supposed to be the contrast".

[Pause, because I made myself sad about how much he messed up such beautiful ideas]

Men (and Elves)

Rúmil says they were created only as a response to Melkor's discord. So, without evil there would be no free will, and no people. Right?

Wrong. Rúmil, go home and rethink your life.

If Melkor did what I described above, the themes would still be able to progress normally, just without drama. And we would have Men and Elves and whatnot, because I don't but a "people are inherently a result of evil" setting, my BS detector flares red on that. (Should I say "sorry"?)

I'm not going into "does free will need evil to exist, or just the possibility of evil or some secret third option" because I don't want to go into real-world philosophy with this post.

Chromaticism AKA: what do you mean "rarepair", it's not a rarepair!

OK, so back to the music theory. Remember when I said that dissonant notes are, among others, notes outside the scale? Those are called "chromatic tones" and are used to add more emotion to the music. Usually the sad types (and scary, yes, this too) of emotion.

So, Nienna. The Vala who, among other things said about her, gets probably the best, awesomest description line in the whole book. My fav. The gothy psychopompy evil-in-early-versions weird lady whose windows gaze West of the West, to Darkness. The edgiest but never crossing the edge (unlike you, Melkor!), the one who prefers to weep for so long than to rise in pride.

I love her so much.

Her reaction to Melkor's dissonance was to weep. And how do you weep in music? Chromaticism. Which is a type of dissonance, technically.

Oh, if only Melkor didn't get it into his head to try to court stalk and pester Varda… :(

Also, the text doesn't say that Nienna was one of the main singers in the Third Theme (like Manwë was in Second), but the vibes very much suggest it. And honestly, with a theme that's not finished it is honest to not discuss who was the star of it?… anyway she is closely tied with the Third Theme, I'm sure everyone will agree on that.

So yea, the Third Theme, I'm so veryveryvery about it *deep breath* I'll try to keep it on-topic

The one was deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came.

I cannt imagine "immesurable sorrow" in music without chromatic tones. I don't care what Rúmil would say, I don't care what Tolkien would say, the Third Theme is (if we imagine it as not physically music: it is the metaphysical equivalent of) chromatic. It just is.

It's sad and subtle, and the description sounds very much like a minor scale, but don't get me into scales and chord types, because then I'll digress into places we pretend aren't part of the discussion.

But yea, "minor ending with a Picardy third" would be a good approximation of the general feel, I guess.

Oh, and do you know how do you make a chromatic thing work— how do you make any "dissonant" (in classical terms) chord work? (No, Melkor (and Stravinsky), not by repetition!!!)

You put it into open voicing.

So, what is open voicing? I'm glad you asked. Imagine you're playing on a piano. Open voicing is when the notes are far apart and you would need longer fingers to play them at the same time. It's generally the notes being far from each other in terms of pitch. This does reduce the dissonances, because for example C4 and D4 clash much more than C4 and D5. So you put the notes in separate octaves as much as possible and it works, and it makes a chord that would be clashing into a beautiful epic-sounding and generally awesome.

Now, ask yourself: Where have we seen (heard?) about something like that? Because we have.

and in one chord, deeper than the Abyss, higher than the Firmament, piercing as the light of the eye of Ilúvatar, the Music ceased

OK, you can argue that the "deeper and higher" mean it is wide, but it doesn't imply that it's a chromatic chord. the implication goes only one way. True.

But "piercing"? Can a purely diatonic chord feel piercing? IDK

…is diatonic/chromatic even still a question at this point?

So, chromatic is a good thing, right? So, Melkor—

Noo… Not like that. Chromaticism is like— like fire. Or electricity. It can make good thigs better, and beautiful things more beautiful, but it's tricky, and needs to be used properly.It's like admin mode on your computer. Like "see advanced settings" button.

Also, Melkor did …provoke (for lack of a better wors) chromaticism in the Music, but his song on its own is the very opposite of chromatic. Which is sad and ties very well to one of my earlier posts.

He's not nuanced. He's just

had now achieved a unity of its own; but it was loud, and vain, and endlessly repeated; and it had little harmony, but rather a clamorous unison as of many trumpets braying upon a few notes

which is as non-chromatic as you can probably get :(

I made myself sad again, end of post.

Edit: Yeah, no, I went to take a morning (noon) shower and ofc realized there's a lot of it left. Like: why is Melkor-being-not-chromatic a sad thing if the chromaticism is tricky?

So, to be explored in a next post some day:

the ("dynamic" says too little, "self-defeating" claims too much... complicated?) nature of dissonant non-classic chords

the nature of Men, their out-of-FateMusic-ness and how does that relate to chromatic and non-chord tones and music in general

idk, probably more

[gwaedhannen]

Thus ended Nirnaeth Arnoediad, as the sun went down beyond the sea. Night fell in Hithlum, and there came a great storm of wind out of the West.

Hey so the fuck's with this windstorm anyway. The capitalization of West makes it clear it's coming from Aman and presumably Manwë, so is it:

A "we warned you" to the Noldor?

A "time to run" warning to the people of Hithlum whose first knowledge of the defeat would instead be Orcs and Easterlings?

Clearing away the cloud of smoke that Morgoth generated at the start of the battle?

A "we're still watching" warning to Morgoth?

A completely coincidental natural storm accidentally attributed to the Valar?

[queerofthedagger]

my 'hey yes we have an all-consuming brainrot going but let's try and do something actually productive this week that I'm having off of work' project is sorting through my bookshelves, rigorously throwing things out (little miss I own over a thousand books in my one-room apartment is reaching the breaking point aka I'm finally and utterly running out of space) and i think i threw out almost a hundred books today and it's still not anywhere close for sorting shelves by genre without having to stack and put things second row. how am I supposed to live like this

[squirrelwrangler]

Re: your recent post about WoT - if I am not someone who is well versed in mythology (Arthurian, Norse, Vedic, any other mythos the series references), will that significantly impact my ability to understand and enjoy the series? How much context/foreshadowing will I lose? Is there a resource I could turn to that can identify these references that would go over my head without significantly spoiling the plot?

I call them Easter Eggs because that's the fandom term for them. They're very very rarely really plot important in anyway that would meaningfully impact the reading or watching, at least to my biased opinion, but also I was familiar going into the series with some but not all of the references and as a book reader who frequently lurked in the forums and theory crafting sites of the early 2000s, I don't know what online references are both currently up-to-date and have non-spoilery sections. I think on Youtube Unraveling the Pattern is pointed to as the lore series that does the most non-spoiler/newbie-friendly breakdowns.

But to give you a hint- for Arthuriana, as long as you know Excalibur as a magic sword concept, then as a fantasy fan you won't be surprised that there's a magic sword showing up at all in the series and if you squint the name sounds like Excalibur. Or knowing that "Galad, Elayne, Nynaeve, Gawyn, Camelyn, Tigraine" all are very similar to names from Arthuriana: Galahad, Gawain, Nimue/Ninianne( aka Lady of the Lake), Elaine, Camelot, Igraine. Which for those examples, only a few of them really have any relevance on their plot or hints of prophecy conclusions (and some are red herrings meant to trip up fans who do know the reference and thus make them guess wrong), but all those names come from places or characters in the country of Andor, which has the strongest concentration of Elizabethan English flavor to the world-building, so the vibe that the reader (or show watcher) gets is "Ah, this is the English and King Arthur place". So you start looking for Round Table or Avalon or Merlin (and maybe find one or two of those. Maybe.)

For instance- Perrin's name is an allusion to Slavic mythology, the chief god Perun, who controls weather - especially storms and thunder, also war (famously an axe), and oak trees. But that reference to Slavic mythology isn't widely known; I certainly didn't know about it while reading the books until I went online. But, thanks to the Indo-European shared roots, what I did notice was "hey this vaguely reminds me of Thor. And like, a little bit Zeus, but also Hephaestus." So when Perrin has some heavy symbolism attached to both a hammer and an axe, and the dichotomy of the blacksmith versus the warrior, the connection via his supporting cast to trees ... it congeals in the back of my brain that even if I don't know exactly what Easter Egg I might be catching, I don't need to know Perun to like Perrin and be comfortingly familiar. So even though Rand is the character with the last name al'Thor, I knew that reference was the red herring. Perrin was my Thor guy, and I knew to expect that Perrin would forge himself a magic hammer that would have a name that sounds like Mjolnir at some point in the series. (This is technically a late series spoiler, but it's so heavily foreshadowed, and thanks to the MCU I think most people know about Thor's hammer by now).

For real-world references, those can be even more heavily disguised. the most famous one is at some point a character comes across an object that 'feels like greed' that is actually the logo bit of metal on a fancy sports car- a BMW or Lexus or something like that - I don't even remember which car brand it was supposed to be. So, yeah, anon, that tells you just how important some of the Easter Eggs are and how missing them didn't impact my enjoyment.

The costuming (and casting) for the TV show does a great and yet subtle job of hinting that the world is post-apocalyptic and far far far in our future. The glimpses of clothing from 3,000 years ago looks almost but not quite like our modern clothing with only a little hint of SF, and the present day 'fantasy' clothing still has touches of modernity. Plus the diversity of everyone, aside from pissing off racists, also helps to sell that thousands of years ago everyone had intercontinental travel and trade and people moved around and the globe was connected- so that of course when the Breaking of the World happened thanks to half of the magical society going murderously crazy against their will (some of the saddest backstory hints from that time period are the male wizards and their friends trying to hold back against this madness as long as they could trying to save pieces), people are stranded regardless of origin, so rarely is there an initial starting ethnic hegemony. And, again with the reference hints you don't need to catch to still enjoy, each of the various countries and cultures in the Wheel of Time that exist in the present day series is inspired by or drawing on usually at least two different history cultures or places. For instance, the nation of Cairhein is modeled off a blend of 17th and 18th century France, especially the court of Louis XIV the Sun King, but also Heian era Japan. And when you see it in the show, the outfits and the furniture and the general vibes have those hints.

Or the Tuatha'an, a group you meet in the first book/first season. They're called the Traveling People and the Tinkers, known for nomadic lifestyle and being shunned by others, but also for their colorful clothing and wagons, love of song and dance, and that they are staunch pacifists. So, from the name, it sounds like the Tuatha De Danann of Irish mythology which you might know especially if you were big into faeries as a kid. But culturally they sound familiar to the real world Irish Travelers and the Roma and also the pacifism of people who follow Jainism. They -and their Way of the Leaf- are their own thing, so you don't need to know the nods and inspirations.

[fatcatlittlebox]

I don't think they'd go as far as trying to insinuate that Celebrian is his. There are limits to the lore they can break, especially in regards to the Tolkien estate, who have set their limits and lines that can't be crossed. It would never happen. I love my Haladriels, truly I do, but as a fan of the Silmarillion and Tolkiens extended works, I'm begging yall to touch some grass here. I do not exclude the idea that he'll show her a version of their future where they are ruling together, where they might share a tender kiss, and maybe in that vision, Celebrian would exist as his daughter, though this could not be said outright.

You know everything. Ok well then we’ll just see. 🤷🏻‍♀️

[sillylotrpolls]

(Credit and a truly absurd amount of context below the poll in case you don't know who the Old Took is.)

Today's poll looks at a question posed by @sindar-princeling:

Bilbo barely passed Old Took's record lifespan after having a supernaturally-life-extending ring for 60 years. which begs a question. what the hell did Old Took do

In the notes on that post, the most popular theory by far was espoused by @mitsuhachiinthehive, who posited that Gandalf hooked up with a hobbit at some point and [some of] the Tooks are his descendants. This idea was further spread thanks to @the-haiku-bot.

Additional theories which I cribbed for poll options:

The diamond cufflinks were magical in more ways than one @elodieunderglass

He drank an ent-draught courtesy of the missing ent wives @betterofflost

He got hold of a random magic elven ring @morgulscribe

If you would like some a lot of context from canon so you can decide for yourself, more information about the Old Took is beneath the cut.

First off, it's established multiple times in the books what a big deal it was for Bilbo to beat Old Took's record. From The Return of the King:

He opened his eyes and looked up as they came in. 'Hullo, hullo!' he said. 'So you've come back? And tomorrow's my birthday, too. How clever of you! Do you know, I shall be one hundred and twenty-nine? And in one year more, if I am spared, I shall equal the Old Took. I should like to beat him; but we shall see.' [...] Little Elanor was nearly six months old, and 1421 had passed to its autumn, when Frodo called Sam into the study. 'It will be Bilbo's Birthday on Thursday, Sam,' he said. 'And he will pass the Old Took. He will be a hundred and thirty-one!' 'So he will!' said Sam. 'He's a marvel!'

Here's a biography on the old hobbit from Tolkien Gateway:

After the death of his father in 1248, Gerontius became the twenty-sixth Thain of the Shire. He was a friend of Gandalf, who gave him a pair of magic diamond studs and performed firework tricks during Gerontius' midsummer-eve parties. Gerontius Took reached the impressive age of 130, which made him the oldest Hobbit until his grandson Bilbo Baggins celebrated his 131st Birthday. He also held the record of most offspring, until Samwise Gamgee bested him with Tom's birth in S.R. 1442.

And from Tolkien Gateway's page on the Took Family:

Tooks were mainly of Fallohide Hobbit stock, and had quite a reputation for unusual behavior (among other things being more adventurous than the other Hobbits), a quality not valued in the Shire. For this they would be seen as less respectable, but those traits were "tolerated" thanks to their large numbers and wealth. An absurd legend among other families, was that one of the Took ancestors married a fairy. The Wizard Gandalf was a known, if disreputable, associate.

Here we have Gandalf introducing himself to Bilbo in The Hobbit. Note that Belladonna Took is one of the Old Took's 12 (!!) children.

“Yes, yes, my dear sir—and I do know your name, Mr. Bilbo Baggins. And you do know my name, though you don’t remember that I belong to it. I am Gandalf, and Gandalf means me! To think that I should have lived to be good-morninged by Belladonna Took’s son, as if I was selling buttons at the door!” “Gandalf, Gandalf! Good gracious me! Not the wandering wizard that gave Old Took a pair of magic diamond studs that fastened themselves and never came undone till ordered? Not the fellow who used to tell such wonderful tales at parties, about dragons and goblins and giants and the rescue of princesses and the unexpected luck of widows’ sons? Not the man that used to make such particularly excellent fireworks! I remember those! Old Took used to have them on Midsummer’s Eve. Splendid! They used to go up like great lilies and snapdragons and laburnums of fire and hang in the twilight all evening!” You will notice already that Mr. Baggins was not quite so prosy as he liked to believe, also that he was very fond of flowers. “Dear me!” he went on. “Not the Gandalf who was responsible for so many quiet lads and lasses going off into the Blue for mad adventures? Anything from climbing trees to visiting elves—or sailing in ships, sailing to other shores! Bless me, life used to be quite inter—I mean, you used to upset things badly in these parts once upon a time. I beg your pardon, but I had no idea you were still in business.” “Where else should I be?” said the wizard. “All the same I am pleased to find you remember something about me. You seem to remember my fireworks kindly, at any rate, and that is not without hope. Indeed for your old grandfather Took’s sake, and for the sake of poor Belladonna, I will give you what you asked for.”

And for context, Sam was 102 when he sailed West, Merry was at least 103 and almost certainly older when he died, and Pippin at least 95. The uncertainty is because Tolkien describes their last years thus in the Appendices:

1484 In the spring of the year a message came from Rohan to Buckland that King Éomer wished to see Master Holdwine once again. Meriadoc was then old (102) but still hale. He took counsel with his friend the Thain [Pippin], and soon after they handed over their goods and offices to their sons and rode away over the Sam Ford, and they were not seen again in the Shire. It was heard after that Master Meriadoc came to Edoras and was with King Éomer before he died in that autumn. Then he and Thain Peregrin went to Gondor and passed what short years were left to them in that realm, until they died and were laid in Rath Dínen among the great of Gondor. 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 bed of 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.

[whiteladyofithilien]

Tolkien Theory Time

I posit that in the Palantir one of the many possible futures Sauron caused Lord Denethor to see was a future that when both his sons had died there was no hope for Gondor. That this was somehow a sign of things he had seen. Losing Boromir was the first crack but so long as Faramir lived there was a glimmer that maybe Gondor would somehow survive and that there was a purpose in continuing to strive against the Dark Tower then when Faramir returns near enough to death to be mistaken for dead the last tiny thread of Denethor's hope and sanity snaps and with his city nearly in ruins he's like 'yep this is definitely the doomed future I saw in the Palantir one there's no purpose in living any longer when all is lost' and decides to turn himself and his son into a human smore party.

[thexphial]

My wife and I just had a very high conversation about the origins of potatoes in Middle Earth, and have come up with three theories:

Tolkien just translated the word for some lost species of tuber into potato for us modern humans

The elves took a boat to the West, found South America, and brought back potatoes

The entwives gave up sentience for the privilege of becoming the most nutritious edible plant of all time.

Vote for your favorite

[elffromforests]

I want to talk to you about this moment with Elrond, although frankly I don't have any great philosophical thoughts that can be stretched into quotes. But still. This is a spoiler-knife moment from Galiadriel and her ring. For the first time, we see a screenplay of that mosegt if Elrond could die. If you know the texts, then Elrond miraculously survived being near Eregion.Elves and Elrond were saved by the dwarves; Durin sent out a force of Dwarves from Khazad-dûm

🫥But look at this look, it's not broken. He is not afraid. Elrond is ready to accept his fate. He remembers all his happy moments with the closest beings in this World

Maybe he thinks how much he didn't have time to do or even say the words "I love you. Thank you for everything" to someone.

This is probably the moment when he will meet Adar (Maglor). If you know the story and how Elrond and Maglor are related, then you will understand. If it is Maglor, then what does Elrond and the same Adar feel?

[balrogballs]

“To demand from Elrond a clear adjudication of the Kinslaying at Sirion, a final pronouncement on whether the Fëanorians were monsters or misunderstood and whether his biological parents were 'right' or 'wrong', risks flattening the emotional and narrative density of his position. It treats historical violence as something that can be ethically settled by a perceived moral arbitrator, rather than something that continues to impact upon the present in ways that may remain unresolved.”

Part fandom-commentary and part literary-critical reading, this meta considers the interpretive ease with which Elrond’s "kind" disposition is conflated with moral coherence, particularly when it comes to treating his affective attachments to the Fëanorians and/or Elwing and Eärendil as absolute ethical verdicts.

Drawing on affect theory, trauma theory and adaptation analysis, I explore a way to read Elrond’s kindness as a cultivated practice which is not incapable of bias or harm. By reframing Elrond as a figure whose kindness arises from ambivalence rather than moral certitude, I try to offer a perspective that considers how 'virtue' is not an innate or fixed quality but one shaped by violence, grief, loss and the structural constraints of doctrine.

Read on the SWG or click 'Keep Reading'.

"Kind as Summer": Elrond’s Moral Framework and the Limits of 'Virtue'

As the master of Rivendell, bearer of Vilya, and participant in nearly every defining moment of Middle-earth's history, Elrond Half-elven is often read as a figure of moral clarity: wise counsellor, gentle healer, unimpeachable steward of continuity. This interpretive tendency is understandable. The House of Elrond is one of refuge and restoration. He acts without personal ambition and rarely raises his voice. Elrond himself is frequently described in the texts as "kind”, "wise”, "noble” and strong of spirit, categories which, in the moral architecture of Tolkien’s legendarium, can sometimes tend to collapse into one another.

Nowhere is the reverberation of this moral legibility clearer than with fanwork narratives (including my own writing, as well as its reception) centering the adult Elrond’s loyalties to either his kidnappers or his birth-parents. These interpretations can often rely on the assumption that Elrond’s emotional affiliations carry juridical weight: that his remembered loyalties serve as moral judgments, retroactively assigning guilt or innocence to those who shaped his early life.

If Elrond is depicted as maintaining affection for one or both of the oldest Fëanorian brothers, it is taken by some as a totalising absolution of their actions; if he is instead aligned solely with Elwing and Eärendil, it becomes an overarching indictment of his captors, or ‘proof’ of an abusive childhood with his kidnappers. And if he has mixed loyalties, then the moral scales are read to be tentatively balanced, weighted primarily by his reaction to or feelings about either party.

But such an interpretive logic can sometimes risk flattening the ethical ambiguity that Tolkien embeds into Elrond’s narrative arc. It treats Elrond as an ethical oracle, his loyalties read not as contingent and emotionally-influenced responses, but as narrative verdicts. What is elided in these moralised readings is Elrond’s long history of familial ambivalence: a shifting set of attachments forged by centuries of war and loss.

"Kind as Summer"

The phrase “kind as summer" is in itself deceptively simple, drawing its power from the dissonance between the lexical gentleness of “kind” and the seasonal ambivalence embedded in “summer.” On first encounter, the simile suggests warmth, growth and plenitude, a cliché of natural benevolence.

But summer is also a time of excess, and one that can be read in several ways, rather than through Tolkien's geographical location, authorial intent and belief system alone. For instance, if one were to do a postcolonial reading, summer takes on complex resonances that may instead signify exhaustion, drought, and resource extraction.

The phrase kind as summer therefore has the potential to hold within it a doubleness: kindness as a condition susceptible to circumstance. The warmth of summer is thus ambivalent, holding both potential and limitation. In this light, Elrond’s kindness appears less as an inborn gentleness and more as an atmospheric condition: natural, perhaps, but also shaped by cycles and histories not entirely in his control.

Section 1: The Ambivalence of 'Virtue'

My position is that Elrond's character complicates normative readings of virtue in Tolkien's world by illuminating the ways kindness can function as a moral aesthetic rather than a transformative ethic. Essentially, I want to interrogate the interpretive ease with which the phrase “kind as summer” is conflated with moral infallibility, particularly in paternal figures like Elrond. Kindness, in my reading, can be a mode of care shaped by fear, fatigue and political memory, and one absolutely capable of 'causing harm', whether intentional or otherwise. I read Elrond as a figure whose affective presence both stabilises and restricts the narrative worlds around him. His kindness is absolutely real. But it is also strategic, fatigued, and at times, obstructive. It's not that I see him as a failed moral exemplar; more a figure of ethical ambiguity.

I've noticed a tendency in contemporary literary interpretations [not specific to The Silmarillion] to equate the descriptor "kind" with an idealised, almost infallible figure, particularly in parental contexts: by itself a perfectly understandable and valid interpretation, and one dependent upon the individual. Within such a reading, a character like Elrond begins to be interpreted as the closest thing to a "gold-star" father and son, incapable of personal bias and lacking the ability to cause harm through his choices.

I want to first underscore that I'm not claiming Elrond is depicted as a cruel, unkind or abusive figure, very far from it. Moreover, this is not a question of cruelty masquerading as benevolence. The argument is not that Elrond weaponises kindness in the name of power. Rather, it is that authentic kindness may still operate through distortion, limitation, and strategic deployment. Kindness is a virtue, but virtues themselves are part of a contingent and historically situated ethical tradition: constructed, performed, and always vulnerable to the pressures of context.

And truly kind individuals within the space of fiction may still act anxiously, make misjudgments, or behave unwisely. Kindness does not render one immune to error or to the transmission of inherited harm. It is not, as it were, a prophylactic against failure. I view Elrond’s kindness as a cultivated posture: a way of navigating the traumas of the First and Second Ages without replicating their violences. And at the same time I believe it also serves as a defensive mechanism, a mode of affective containment. His care, at times, emerges less from trust than from apprehension, presenting an instinct to shield those he loves from the life he has endured.

There is also, I would suggest, an aesthetic dimension to this tension. We are conditioned to associate kindness with legibility: with emotional accessibility and moral ease. A character who is soft-spoken, emotionally literate, and reflective often becomes legible as "good" precisely because their tone aligns with our aesthetic preferences.

But this interpretive ease should be interrogated. What are the aesthetic codes through which we interpret kindness, and why do they so often elide contradiction? Why is Elrond, specifically, so often read as a model of pristine fatherhood and unbiased decision-making simply because his affect is calm and his language measured?

These aren’t questions meant to undermine his moral stature, but to open up space for a richer reading that allows for unpalatable emotions, ambivalence, and morally imperfect care. To reiterate: kindness is a virtue, and virtue is a theological construction. And this, in a text deeply intertwined with the form taken by the Western Catholic world-view in the early-mid 20th century, is worth exploring.

Section 2: Rivendell, Ritual, and Controlled Care

Kindness in Tolkien's work is often emblematic of moral certainty and goodness. Characters like Gandalf, Samwise, and Faramir are frequently described as "kind" in ways that imply inner moral coherence. But as Sara Ahmed puts it, kindness is not a moral category so much as an affective one. Kindness can be deeply sincere while also functioning ideologically: as a way of maintaining order, suppressing dissent, or preserving one's self-image. Kindness may look and feel good, but that does not make it ethically sufficient.

Elrond exemplifies this ambiguity. He is described as a master of wisdom, whose house was a refuge for the weary and the oppressed, a treasury of good counsel and wise lore. This characterisation of both Elrond and Rivendell signals hospitality, certainly, yet also formality, distance, and containment. Elrond’s kindness is architectural in both a literal and spiritual sense: it is built into the geometry of Rivendell, a beautiful, serene space governed by ritual, benevolence, and controlled access. It is a place of rest and sanctuary, but also of stasis.

This containment is not incidental. Rivendell is a sanctuary in the most theological sense, where healing is offered within a controlled environment, and where radical transformation is neither demanded nor structurally encouraged. Rivendell resembles, in this light, the Church-as-institution: a locus of consolation that also governs through procedure.

In drawing this analogy, we might return to Tolkien’s own Catholic intellectual formation, in which theological virtues like caritas (charity/kindness) are not autonomous affects but divinely structured orientations of the soul. As in, virtues that require cultivation, assent, and discipline. In Rivendell, healing and protection are not spontaneous nor inherent, they are administered. They flow downwards from Elrond as presiding moral authority and are extended through the formal mechanisms of counsel and rest, as grace is mediated through the sacraments.

But what, then, of those outside the covenant? What then, of those who transgress? 

Section 3: Flawed Fatherhood in Adaptation

Interestingly, my thoughts on this topic started out not from the text itself but from adaptation. Namely, my partner remarking on Hugo Weaving’s Elrond during a rewatch: “I forgot how much this guy just… looms.”

And whilst I have criticisms of Peter Jackson’s representation of Elrond, namely in the flattening of his emotional complexity to a “protective patriarch” trope and the consequent (cinematically unexplained) hostility to Aragorn whom he canonically viewed as a son, I do think the adaptation interestingly illustrates the moral tension described in this essay, and how it engages with perceived transgression. 

Hugo Weaving’s Elrond is a figure of grave restraint and moral distance. He's watchful, terse, and marked by a particular emotional economy that can sometimes border on detachment. His scenes with Arwen and Aragorn are defined by a fatigued, procedural kind of love shaped by prophetic loss. In these moments, his kindness becomes a politics of delay: his presence operating as a gatekeeping force, controlling the terms on which others are permitted to hope or act.

Rather than diminishing his character, this portrayal reveals the thematic complexity Elrond carries as a being who has lived long enough to doubt the usefulness of certainty and forward-movement. Importantly, Weaving’s performance does not resolve this ambivalence, but heightens it. His delivery is often clipped, curt and emotionally guarded but never without feeling. He oscillates between duty and disaffection, compassion and refusal.

This is particularly apparent in his interactions with Arwen, where his opposition to her choice is not simply paternal but fatalistic: he sees in her love a repetition of history’s cruelty, not its redemption. This dynamic reveals the deeper ambivalence of Elrond's ethical stance. His virtue is shaped by circumstance. But circumstance does not always sharpen moral attention. Sometimes it dulls it. His desire to shield Arwen from sorrow leads him to participate in a form of moral foreclosure. His filmic character gestures towards the costs of post-heroic care: the way kindness, when tasked with managing historical pain and potential loss, can become bureaucratic, strategic, and at times, emotionally ambivalent.

In his interaction with Gandalf during Fellowship, what might have been a moment of shared vulnerability instead becomes an act of controlled narration, Elrond weaponising not only personal memory but restricting interpretive access to it. The scene where Isildur takes the ring is described not through his own failure to stop Isildur or the allure and bind of the ring itself, but rather as evidence of the weakness of mortal men.

During the Council of Elrond, he delivers his historical exposition with a flat affect that diverges sharply from the accusatory grandeur of the tale he recounts to Gandalf. He does not seek to command, but to manage the emotional temperature of the room, which rapidly spirals into discord as tempers flare among the assembled parties. His silence in the face of this breakdown is telling; rather than intervene decisively as a ‘chair’, he allows the council to unravel until Frodo offers himself. Elrond’s position here is once again procedural and effective: he does not inspire, forbid or lead the Fellowship, but provides a static space within which others may act.

And the scene in The Return of the King where Arwen returns to Rivendell after choosing to forsake the Undying Lands is what I view as one of the few moments in Jackson’s trilogy where Elrond’s carefully maintained ethical posture collapses in on itself. He sees her as a living refutation of the moral architecture he has spent centuries constructing upon a framework of containment and emotional insulation. What Arwen’s return and the subsequent confrontation with loss forces upon Elrond is the ethical vertigo of having tried to forestall the loss in question. And I was intrigued by how Hugo Weaving played the moment as neither anger or even sorrow in the conventional sense, but as complete disorientation: pacing restlessly, quite literally brought to his knees, his usually measured expository cadence entirely fragmented.

His paternal care, shaped by personal suffering and a logic of prevention, is revealed as fundamentally incompatible with Arwen’s choice. And her “death drive”, when considered through the lens of The Silmarillion, seems inextricable from his past. Not only Elros' choice of mortality, no matter how extended, but also his traumatic engagements with Elwing and Maedhros: the two monumental suicide attempts that shaped his early life.

That incompatibility is not the product of malice, but of a deep structural disjunction that arises from Arwen having both been raised by Elrond, and raised in peacetime: his life is premised on prediction; hers on progression. For Elrond, kindness has long meant withholding, and nowhere is that clearer than his dialogue in The Tale of Arwen and Aragorn, specifically when directed to Aragorn: I love you, but, and the interesting deployment and withholding of the phrase my son throughout their conversations.

But that moment of Arwen's choice in the film is a rupture. Suddenly, there is no longer a future to delay toward.

This moment marks not Elrond’s moral failure, but the failure of moral architecture to hold against affective rupture. The reforging of Narsil which follows is an act of weary concession. Elrond yields not because he was self-centred up to that moment or because he believes the world can change, but because he no longer trusts the adequacy of restraint. His assent is a gesture of relinquishment. This is what it means, in Jackson’s rendering, to love after centuries of loss: to give what one no longer has faith in, because withholding it would be worse.

The cinematic Elrond emerges not as an archetype of immutable virtue, but as an ethically ambiguous figure whose kindness functions as a survival strategy. It is this tension between stability and control, foresight and fracture, paternal care and emotional containment that to me makes him such a compelling object of study. He destabilises the binary between good and failed fatherhood, and draws our attention to the structures through which kindness itself can become exhausted, procedural, and even wounding.

Elrond’s parenting, therefore, might best be read through the lens of the ethics of care, as theorised by figures such as Carol Gilligan and further elaborated by Judith Butler. His love for Arwen and Aragorn is unquestionable, but it expresses itself through limitation. He protects by narrowing possibility, and guides by withholding consent. This is not mere paternal conservatism; it is the logic of anticipated grief. Elrond’s love is shaped by the prior losses that haunt him, and as such, he comes to embody one of the most compelling figures within the ethics of care: the caregiver who, in seeking to protect, constrains the autonomy of the cared-for.

To read this incarnation of Elrond generously is not to absolve him of harm nor to idealise his restraint, but to recognise in his contradictions the broader thematic concern of Tolkien’s legendarium: that goodness cannot exist outside of history, and that virtue, however luminous, is always mediated by circumstance and doctrine. Likewise, to trouble Elrond’s kindness as being shaped by theological virtue and the politics of ritual containment is not to indict Elrond, but to understand him.

Section 4: The Living Archive

Elrond’s ethical disposition is inextricable from his orientation in "deep time". He is not merely long-lived but deeply embedded in history: the bearer of the First Age’s unhealed wounds and the steward of its consequences. He occupies a unique continuity between the mythic and the historical, bearing firsthand knowledge of events that to others have become legend.

But more significantly, he is positioned as a carrier of memory, a living archive of sorts, tasked with both remembering and also holding, curating, and transmitting the aftermaths of war, loss and failure. To embody such a long duration is to move beyond individual heroism and into a form of custodial ethic: what we might call, following Lauren Berlant, a “slow death” style of care, oriented toward preservation and endurance rather than rupture or transformation.

This temporal saturation renders Elrond’s ethical stance as procedural in the Foucauldian sense: embedded in and through institutions of knowledge and governance. Once again, Rivendell serves as a structure of historical management, offering its guests not transcendence but historical context and a temporal pause. In this light, Elrond’s ethical mode parallels the archive, which is no neutral repository but a site of selective preservation subject to omission and constraint. His moral authority derives from the ability to contextualise: to locate any present crisis within a longue durée of injury and consequence. This is not the virtue of the hero or the prophet, but of the historiographer, who governs through pattern recognition. His kindness, shaped by this ethic, becomes a mode of calibration: allowing others to act, but only after they have been properly situated within Arda’s framework of consequence.

Elrond, then, is not the moral compass of Middle-earth, but its ethical barometer.

And yet crucially, he continues to participate. This is where Elrond’s ethical significance truly lies: not in wisdom as mastery, but in wisdom as endurance. His kindness is shaped by and negotiated across a centuries-long encounter with failure, contradiction, and partial repair. He does not lead the revolution, but enables the conditions under which a new generation might, and operates despite the knowledge that such a utopian future would necessarily be one that excludes him and the historical baggage he both carries and represents.

Conclusion

Elrond occupies a unique space in Tolkien's moral architecture. He is neither tragic nor triumphant, saint nor cynic. He is in every sense an embodiment of the in-between: between races, between ages, between powers. His disposition is the ethical posture of someone who has lived too long to believe in unbroken things. And so to read Elrond only as kind is to miss the ethical ambivalence that sustains such a figuration. He is not good in the sense of moral perfection. Yet to me, he is most compelling in his complexity.

That Elrond could continue to carry both grief for his parents and a lingering loyalty to Maglor (and/or Maedhros, depending on fanwork interpretation) should not be read as evidence of a resolved moral position. Rather, it reveals the complex mechanics of affective survival: the way in which bonds forged under duress persist because they have become structurally inseparable from the self. Elrond’s ethical outlook is not built upon decisive acts of forgiveness or condemnation; it is sedimented through centuries of living through contradiction after contradiction. His emotional responses are residues: remnants of a life shaped by the impossibility of full redress.

And so to demand from Elrond a clear adjudication of the Kinslaying at Sirion, a final pronouncement on whether the Fëanorians were monsters or misunderstood, whether his biological parents were 'right' or 'wrong', risks flattening the emotional and narrative density of his position. It treats historical violence as something that can be ethically settled by a perceived moral arbitrator, rather than something that continues to press upon the present in ways that remain unresolved.

His potential attachments to both his origins and his upbringing are signs of someone who has lived with too much loss to believe that care and harm are ever cleanly separable. He carries both because to let either go could mean severing part of the self that survived. His kindness is no higher virtue forged above the maelstrom: Elrond is a character shaped by the violence of history, not despite it.

Head to the SWG for a works cited/further reading list.

[elodieunderglass]

I'm not as familiar with LOTR as you are, so I wondered if you could tell me if my wild theory is completely off-base.

No one knows where the Hobbits came from, except that at some point they diverged from the line of men. No one knows much about the Entwives' appearance, but we do know that they fucked off a long time ago.

Could the Entwives have been dryad-ish and hooked up with the hobbits' ancestors and so be the foremothers of the hobbits?

Ah I think I saw that post! The concept has a lot of charm, and when the Tolkien estate loses its corpse-grip on the property in 2050 or so, I think you should write it and sell it 😤 I’ve definitely read some good takes on entwives in fanfiction that both leaned into canon and moved away, and I think that sounds like good fun to explore. A common theme in the fandom is playing with Yavanna, the Green Lady, being the mother or patron of hobbits. This isn’t canonical, but she’s a “green goddess” archetype and is married to Mahal/Aulë, the father of dwarves, which shippers often leverage to their advantage. You could do something quite charming there with Yavanna if you wanted to. We also know that Entwives loved gardens and orchards rather than forests.

Some things I would explore with this include:

what is going on with all these consistent ideas of people, races, women disappearing. We know that a lot of it is how Tolkien processed an almost OCD-like Catholic framing of “the fallen world is getting worse and can never be repaired”, war experiences, romanticism and other stuff stewing in his old man head. What are some ways you could show what’s stewing in your head? What does “people disappearing” mean to you? and why is it especially healing that they disappeared in order to make new families?

I think “they disappeared from their old kin and made new kin” is an interesting and weird thing worth wondering about!

- this would possibly make hobbits a more recent race than is implied. What does that mean to you?

- why are hobbits teeny tiny?

A very good starting point, that Terry Pratchett used a lot, is taking some grand statement in fantasy fiction, and making it reflect a different political reality. “Most dwarves are girls actually.” “Wizards parody academia, but, like, FOR REAL.”

I personally have a different take because of my own political feelings and framings! I have a lot of complex feelings about Tolkien chickening out of hobbits. For various political reasons I personally have to take the stance that they are fully human, fully indigenous, and have their own native language. and that their disappearance is less “teehee we lost them” or “O, the Catholic guilt of the Fallen World, how far we have fallen from the light of the two trees God’s sinless light” and a lot more “oh yeah I’ve seen THAT pattern before.”

If you have a political sort of lens on, someone telling you “yeah… hobbits came from nowhere 🤭 and then disappeared 🤷‍♀️ sad!” is a story that can also invite the response of “OHhhhh you wanted their LAND real bad, huh.” Like, we know what that means, right.

It’s a political stance for me. Hobbits have to be close enough to us to touch, and we have to be able to face that, and the fact that 5,000 media properties will chew on tolkienelves and sell them to you before even admitting to the 🤭 just makes it even more of a 🤨. To me.

…But I have literally just been elbow deep in my own demented fanfic thing that involves inventing a language just to swear in, to enable my standing on a box shouting HOBBITS OUGHT TO RESIST GOING EXTINCT ACTUALLY, based entirely on, I think, spite. Why do multiple authors publish orc football games (Terry Pratchett) and orc coffeeshops (Legends and Lattes guy) and do every damned thing with every bit of Tolkien’s corpse but refuse to look directly at hobbits. I am feral over this and wrote 59k words so far to damage and harm my friends

In conclusion I see a great story shape there about kindred and I think you should explore it and it should be about evolutionary biology and women and divorce and nobody being wrong.

And if anyone argues you with some podcast boy “well actually”, just bite them and do more character work and sit on their heads

[neyafromfrance95]

galadriel & sauron vs. morgoth theory + trop.

we all love the theory that sauron and galadriel would eventually fight side by side against morgoth.

if u think about it, trop is a perfect groundwork for this theory.

in trop, it is implied that sauron and galadriel meet by eru's design and their connection is destined. but why?

sure, galadriel has a hand in sauron's defeat, but so do many others. why does galadriel and sauron's relationship have to be so special and significant on the cosmic scales, above everything else?

in lotr, galadriel passes the test by the end of the 3rd age. she outgrows her pride and selfish need to rule without sharing her power with anyone and determination to rule the middle-earth even if it means becoming a terrible tyrant.

but it's interesting how later frodo sees galadriel through her phial's light:

“frodo took the phial, and for a moment as it shone between them, he saw her again standing like a queen, great and beautiful, but no longer terrible. he bowed, but found no words to say.”

i wonder if this is a subtle implication that galadriel has finally became worthy of succeeding her father one day. her father is the high king of the elves in valinor, and while he has sons, no one is as great as galadriel. tolkien himself commented on galadriel's commanding stature in valinor - "the equal if not unlike in endowments of fëanor." and "(galadriel) being mighty among the eldar, obtained this grace (entering valinor) for him (gimli)."

it has been generally agreed upon that since tolkien wrote several versions of it, galadriel’s story is convoluted, contradictory and inconsistent. but one thing has always remained at the core of her characterization - she is a politician who desires to be a leader. so ofc she would still be a politician in valinor, but it's interesting to imagine she would become a queen after outgrowing her greed and her time in the middle-earth was a neccessary test to shape her into a perfect leader.

considering trop canon, it can be said that even after everything, if sauron was to repent, galadriel would be the one to vouch for him or bring him up in a conversation regarding the battle against morgoth (and the first of all valinor to march to fight again).

another thing to note is that now, the only connection to the physical world sauron would have after the destruction of the one ring is galadriel's scar that binds them by blood! they have been bound by the sea, their admission of cosmic connection, nenya, and their souls are basically merged.

trop interestingly underlines the undertones of galadriel and sauron's comparability - they are mirrors that represent the light and the dark, but also galadriel is a natural born leader and sauron is a natural born follower. underneath sauron's desire to possess her, is the desire to serve and worship her as his queen!

and more importantly, his repentant phase in the show was when he was following her, when his presence actually was healing for galadriel.

so what does all of this have to do with haladriel vs. morgoth theory and how trop lays a groundwork for it?

galadriel's authority in valinor, sauron being bound to her, and galadriel being the one who makes sauron actually go back to his maiar purpose that valar ordained - the one who provides servitude and healing, all of this would make galadriel the perfect candidate to bring back sauron and make the valar consider his repentance.

as for sauron, by then, he would have enough time to get humbled and face what he knows subconsciously - he was meant to serve the light of his leader, not some silly ass rings. and by then, as we said, galadriel would have became even more perfect of a leader, maybe closer to how sauron saw her - a queen for all, a perfect antidote to morgoth. (and having outgrown her pride, galadriel would be able to admit her love and be by sauron's side as well.)

sauron says that after morgoth was defeated, he could feel the light of the one (eru) again and he knew if he ever was to be forgiven, he needed to heal everything he had helped ruin. he comes to see that light in galadriel. by helping her, he gets to receive "forgiveness" from the one he helped ruin ("i'm sorry for your brother, for everything" -> "whatever you did, be free of it"). he tells her that he never believed he could be free of it (morgoth's darkness) until fighting by her side (following her lead, serving her, healing her) and he wishes to bind that feeling (of being bound to galadriel's light) to his very being. and his subconscious screams at him that nothing he does will ever give him what he wants unless it's galadriel by his side, unless it's her light he worships ("your beauty still overshadows everything i could possibly write" ->"worship the light of its queen").

his repentance is tightly intertwined with his bond with galadriel and him coveting her light. he believes that he can be free of his bond to morgoth's darkness if he binds himself to galadriel's light instead. it's just that he can only truly repent if being bound to her light happens on *her* terms. in that case, they can be the force of the good together, pulling each other back from the darkness.

(it is interesting how in sauron's vision, his crown disappears once it's aligned with the sun, as if galadriel's light destroys it. girlboss taming her malewife but make it epic.)

whatever it is, i need one of u haladriels to adapt this theory on screen one day in the future.

[ecideras]

First of all, I want to make it clear: I don't intend to distort Tolkien's canon, much less force this theory on anyone. What I'm sharing here is just a free interpretation, born out of a desire to explore the silences, between the lines and poetic possibilities that Middle-earth offers us. The theory that Celebrían could be the daughter of Galadriel and Sauron may seem daring, and it is, but it doesn't seek to deny the original work. On the contrary, it is an exercise in affectionate imagination, which tries to shed light on characters that are often forgotten or underdeveloped. I am deeply grateful to anyone who takes the time to read it. May this text be an invitation, not to a truth, but to a journey.

Celebrían: between light and shadow

Ever since I began to explore the Tolkienian Legendarium and the vibrant culture of its fandom in greater depth, I have been struck by a theory that, although controversial, has provoked me intellectually in an intense way: the idea that Celebrían, traditionally the daughter of Galadriel and Celeborn, could, in an alternative universe, be the daughter of Galadriel and Sauron. This hypothesis, although not canonical, led me to revisit the character and her relationship with the world around her with a more critical, more symbolic and — why not? — more human.

Before any argument, it's important to emphasise that, yes, the canon is clear: Celebrían is the daughter of Galadriel and Celeborn. However, speculative fiction exists to allow for new perspectives, and Tolkien's universe — rich in mythology, symbolism and universal themes — offers a fertile basis for interpretations and reimaginings. The idea of a half-breed, half-maia, half-elf is not new in Arda. Lúthien, daughter of Thingol (elf) and Melian (maia), is one of the greatest examples of how miscegenation can generate powerful figures, not only in mystical power, but in emotional and spiritual complexity.

Why, then, would it be impossible or "perverse" to imagine Celebrían with this dual heritage?

In the canon, Celebrían is a marginalised figure. We know that she was married to Elrond, had three children and was captured by orcs and deeply wounded, which led her to leave Middle-earth. However, little is explored of her psychology, her inner conflicts and her journey as an elven woman born of the oldest lineage.

By proposing that she be the daughter of Galadriel and Sauron, I'm not advocating a replacement of the canon, but rather a possible expansion within a creative headcanon. Celebrían, in this scenario, would gain a layer of depth that would make her more interesting — not a corrupted character, but someone who carries the burden of a dual origin. A being whose essence is both light and shadow — and who, by choice and will, follows the path of light.

Wouldn't that be deeply Tolkienian? Tolkien didn't create flat characters; his works are, above all, about moral struggle, free will and redemption. Boromir fell. Frodo almost fell. Gollum was redeemed, albeit by accident. Gandalf and Galadriel were tempted. And even Sauron, one day, was just a maia serving Aulë.

The argument that Elrond would never accept Celebrían if he learnt of her half-maia heritage, from Sauron, seems to underestimate the character's nature. Elrond, who is himself the fruit of a mixed-race union (son of Eärendil and Elwing, therefore with elven, maia and human blood), is one of the wisest and most tolerant characters in Tolkien's work. His life was marked by difficult decisions and unconditional love — including, later, allowing his daughter to choose a mortal destiny alongside Aragorn.

If Celebrían were Sauron's daughter, that wouldn't define her as an evil being, and such thinking is reductionist and ignores one of the central pillars of Tolkien's Legendarium: free will. In Arda, evil is not inherited as an inevitable genetic curse, but arises from the choices made along an individual's journey. To reduce Celebrían to her ancestry would be to dehumanise her, denying her agency and complexity. After all, Sauron himself was not born corrupted — he was initially Mairon, a maia dedicated to order and creation, who fell of his own free will. If he had the freedom to choose darkness, why couldn't his supposed daughter choose light? Such an essentialist perspective reinforces a deterministic logic that Tolkien fought against with vigour in his work. Celebrían, even with a dark lineage, could be — and perhaps precisely because of this — one of the greatest proofs that light can be born from the midst of darkness, and that good is not hereditary property, but a personal achievement. The real narrative strength of this headcanon lies in the fact that she chose, despite her origin, to live a life of compassion, wisdom and motherhood. Wasn't it precisely this kind of moral strength that would attract Elrond? A spirit that has transcended its dark heritage — and is therefore more worthy of love?

Furthermore, the union of Celebrían and Elrond in this context would become even more significant: two beings who carry the weight of an ambiguous lineage, but who together choose to perpetuate hope.

The pessimistic view that "if you have a child of a corrupted being, you will have a corrupted being" contradicts everything Tolkien says about legacy and choice. Elladan, Elrohir and Arwen would not be "cursed" by their heritage, but enhanced by it. Arwen, in choosing the fate of men, honours the path of Lúthien, her ancestor — she is not corrupted by her heritage, but made noble by it.

What this headcanon offers is the opportunity to see these children as reflections of complexity. Arwen, for example, in choosing mortality, may not only be repeating Lúthien's story, but also freeing herself from the weight of a dark past that she carries. Elladan and Elrohir, known for their impetuosity, could have this read as an expression of an inner fire — perhaps inherited, but channelled for good.

It's important to remember that Tolkien's work recognises that even beings with great power — like the maiar — are susceptible to free will. Gandalf chose to protect. Saruman chose to dominate. And Sauron chose to corrupt. Power alone does not spell doom; it is how it is used that defines destiny.

The comment I read about this theory — "do you realise the metaphysical aspects to which you are literally condemning Celebrían?" — carries with it not only a legitimate fear, but also an interpretative limitation. The criticism is not without foundation: indeed, carrying Sauron's blood would have implications. But why do we assume that this, necessarily, means corruption?

Celebrían was not a "dark Lúthien", as has been suggested, but a new entity — moulded by her mother's choices, her father's rejection, and her own decision to follow the light. Lúthien was also a creature of immense power. If Celebrían inherited something similar — an enchanting power, a voice capable of healing or disintegrating — it would only make her richer narratively. There is no contradiction in imagining a powerful, but restrained, gentle Celebrían, marked by the ancestral shadow but determined to live in the light.

The fear that this will erase the "canonical" Celebrían — who is already quite forgettable — is understandable. But fandom doesn't have to be a binary battleground between the "real" and the "invented". We can — and should — coexist with multiple readings. Celebrían's half-maia headcanon doesn't deny its traditional version; it simply proposes a symbolic, tragic and redemptive alternative.

To defend the idea of Celebrían as Sauron's daughter is not to deny Tolkien, but to recognise that his work is so rich that it can generate multiform interpretations. This version isn't for everyone — and nor should it be. But for me, it represents something profound: the strength of a character forgotten by the canon, who gains, through the shadow, a new place in the light. And this is perhaps the most Tolkienian of narratives.

[ringsofpowerconfessions]

I've read so many times here and Twitter that Sauron HAD to be Arwen's grandfather because she's "too powerful for a random Elf in PJ's movies" that I need to remind everyone that Elrond, Arwen's father, has Maia AND High Elf blood in his veins because his foremother Melian was a Maia, who married an High Elf! So Arwen ISN'T some random Elf indeed. She doesn't need a conspiracy theory to be true to be able to kick the Nazgul's ass and to summon the waters that protect Rivendell. And I'm being nice even taking this scene in consideration, because it's 100% a movie invention. The lore-bros love to call TROP a fanfiction, but so are the movies they claim to be faithful to Tolkien's books. It's tiring (to say the least) to see great characters being so often erased from the narrative for the sake of propping up Sauron. Arwen has Maia blood thanks to Melian. She's also not stubborn because her grandfather is Sauron, like I have read: didn't you watch the show? Seems to me that the most stubborn characters of Middle Earth are Galadriel and Elrond... To make that point across the writers even had them argue like little kids and jump off a cliff when they were ordered to surrender!! If that's not stubbornness to you then I don't know what is 😂 Have fun with your headcanon by the way, if you want to believe that Sauron knocked up Galadriel, whatever floats your boat, have fun etc. But leave Arwen's personality and powers out of this please 😭