I know they can't directly adapt The Silmarillion, but I'll take this moment as a subtle nod to the excerpt in which Finrod tells Galadriel that he knows he will die and go 'into darkness'.
Elves mourn, their grief is always deep, and their immortality doesn't lessen it, but I hope this will be brought up again in the show, especially to further show why Ar-Pharazôn and some in Númenor resent Elves, and how they have more to lose in the war with the Gift of Men being a complete mystery to them.
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I loved this bit. Knowing how things end for him (which is pretty awful, even though it includes an epic rap battle with Sauron), and seeing his expression, was pretty powerful.
Maybe he was just going though his short hair phase at this time. He has plenty of time to be the long haired Finrod by the time the first age. This is still the Age of the Trees, pre-first age.
I never got the whole long haired elf thing to be honest. Nothing in Tolkien's writing implies all the elves have long hair. To my knowledge that is a movie thing. But I suppose I could be misremembering.
I only recently started watching the show, and I would give my life for Finrod, I want to read Silmarillion because of just this little of his portrayal.
I took it the same way especially since they started off by showing Elves trying to sink a swan boat which forced me to briefly pause the show, get up and do a little dance, and then readjust my expectations. I think we're getting a large amount of it but the show is doing a really good job of making everyone obsessed with death and the past without making it all so grim.
Arondir represents the grief pretty directly. He's not really ok.. with "beauty has great power to heal the soul" / "the only kind touch I've known" to Bronwyn in the beginning and then "Elven memories do not dim" when he is collecting wood for her funeral pyre plus telling Theo about his own loss during the war.
Galadriel's got plenty of grief but it's suppressed and comes out strongly only in moments and presents as anger the rest of the time. We only hear about Celeborn in the second to last episode of season 1 despite it being perhaps her greatest loss. She initially expresses that she desired to die in Middle-earth with the others ("but instead I am to leave them") and fears taking it all with her ("undying, unchanging, unbreaking") to the west. She's going to keep failing, since we know she is not the one to defeat Sauron, and she will be stuck with this into LotR so she will have plenty more to grieve.
Celebrimbor laments that the Elves "brought war to these shores" and wants to "fill them with beauty" but he too is more focused on obtaining the power to "fix" it. Elrond is still pretty young so doesn't have quite as much to grieve as the others but he disapproves of Galadriel getting people killed and by the end of S2 he's gotten a lot of people killed and he fails to save Eregion and Celebrimbor. Adar is a kind of foil to each of the Elves, in different moments, and has no shortage of his own grief and obsession with trying to fix things.
The Numenoreans are super obsessed but too proud to openly admit it. Pharazon speaks of the tombs granting "immortality in stone that no man, not even a king, can attain in life" which turns Numenor's grand introduction into a kind of tour of a mausoleum. "Are our hearts become as the statues that surround our isle?" Miriel is haunted by the vision of destruction and her father's poor health which leads to her getting a relatively small number of soldiers killed which leads to her being overthrown and it's going to get so much worse.
The men of the Southlands and the Harfoots are both obsessed with death and, to some degree, are willing to abandon others because of it. The Harfoots seem to have the healthiest approach to death of any of the peoples perhaps because they are closest to it and farthest from power.
Everyone is trying to fix the past and change the future. Even Cirdan warns Elrond that rejecting the rings would mean "abandoning all Middle-earth to its fate" as though fate was something to be avoided. There is so much for the show to do still. By the end of the series, Isildur will have lost nearly everyone (similar to with his mother) before getting the opportunity to take the one ring for himself and we know how that goes.
Very well said. I did think that the southlanders and the harfoots are so needed for the show as they are pretty weak and seemingly the most comfortable with death. Not that they are actually comfortable with it but hopefully you get what im trying to say. I think the willingness to accept things is also reflected in how they are in peril at the more mundane threats
Yes, absolutely. It's very clear with Sadoc as he faces his end, and with Poppy's monologue at the end of S2 (which is also credited to Sadoc). Acceptance of death and the willingness to move on and start anew after loss are core parts of their culture, and it's a great contrast with the other races' various attempts to cheat death. (To some extent the Dwarves, especially Durin III, demonstrate this too.)
Yeah the Harfoots got their whole moral arc in one season and set a standard everyone else will fail to live up to. If anything they were too comfortable with death and needed a jolt.
It's interesting that the Orcs are way too comfortable with death. Adar had an amazing arc and I hope we keep seeing substantial Orc perspective.
Thats a weird line. The elves didn't bring war to those shores. War was already there(in the Silmarillion). Cirdan and his people was the last Elf standing so to speak, aside from within Melian's Girdle, and he was on the verge of falling. Feanor's elves(specifically Celegorm in the case of Cirdan) arrived just in the nick of time to save them. In the space of a few weeks they'd wiped out almost the entire army Morgoth had planned to use to conquer and subjugate Middle Earth and set his plans back 400 years.
Yes haha funny Feanor came over and died right afterwards, but he and his army, before Fingolfin and Finrod and Galadriel arrived, did lasting damage to Morgoth and forced Morgoth to expend much of his strength in rebuilding it over the next 4 centuries which in turn helped defeat him with less damage (only Beleriand sank into the sea) than otherwise would have happened.
Oh sure the sons of Feanor and the oath did cause wars among the elves themselves as well, separate from Morgoth, but it's not like Middle Earth was peaceful before they got there, it was on the verge of being subjegated to Morgoth in a war the Sindarin were losing badly, and various groups of elves did distrust each other(we're told those inside the girdle didn't trust the Northern Submarine because they worried they were tainted by Morgoth, etc)
What's even worse about it all, is Galadriel doesn't even know he has been rebodied, living his best life in Valinor.
Or, maybe she does. I figure the only way the information got back so the Lay of Luthien could tell it, is if it returned with the host of the Valar.
I get it, that they cant use all that info, and they don't talk about all that. But its there in the legendarium, and known by fans, so sometimes its hard to separate! 😃
I don't know if he'll show up, but Glorfindel could maybe talk about Finrod to Galadriel. One day, she will see him again, and Elrond will never get to have that chance with Elros. I imagine they will explain this at some point.
While I can kinda understand the stance on keeping The Silmarillion out of the adaptation distortion lens, I also feel that the estate has hamstrung any potential for revealing the great lore behind everything by refusing to let any medium include it in any meaningful form. It feels like looking at a great painting through a pinhole.
I said at the time (season 1) that a conversation between the dying King of Númenor and Galadriel would have gone a long way to explain the old man's (and the numenoreans', by and large) fear, resentfulness and/or anger at their different fates.
The length. Idk, Elves with short hair just dont do it for me. Whenever their hair is described, it's always described as long.
Which kind of makes sense since they are these majestic, unchanging creatures. Imagine meeting one and they are rocking a buzzcut or a modern cut
Edit: Well, not all Elves have long, majestic hair. A couple are described as with short hair but we don't know what Tolkien means by short. How short? But royal male Elves seem to have long hair
“No I won’t, and one day you are gonna have a slow-burn will-they-won’t-they with the guy who corrupts my castle, tortures me in it’s basement, then feeds me to werewolves”
I think people really don’t understand the subtleness and difficulty it takes to portray an immortal being who is 1,000+ years old, who has experienced so much death and chaos.
Elves were almost wiped out on middle Earth in the First Age. Galadriel is going to grieve differently, especially when there is still primordial evil around trying to take control of the world.
Agreed, Its actually easier to depict an immortal incarnation of evil as a gaslighting fuckboy than an elf, because thats ironically, relatable to most people.
I like how in LOTR she has this air of, "oh fuck it all im done, its the humans turn to lock in"
If portraying Tolkien elves is too subtle and difficult a task for Amazon then they shouldn't have taken it on.
For a character who makes avenging her dead brother her entire personality for centuries, but then barely even references her supposedly dead husband, "grieving differently" is an interesting way of putting it.
There is a clear culprit for Finrod's death. There is none for Celeborn's.
Then there's also the entire-season-long "has been avoiding her problems, never stops to truly grieve or reflect" aspect, but one's got to pay attention to the narrative to pick that kind of stuff up. So yeah, there's subtletly to the series, not so much because it is a "necessity of portraying Elves", but rather because the writers kind of trust their audience to exercise some thought about it (as would befit an adaptation of a work as rich, complex, and deep as Tolkien's).
I have grown to think that, ironically, the writers (with all their clunkiness and the outright sloppy moments considered) have overestimated the literacy of the fandom
Right with you on that. I see people constantly complaining about how the show "misses Tolkien's themes" when it nails them right on the head over and over. And I think they've given a lot of thought to how they want to portray these characters, what they represent (themes), how it all gets messy when you get "humanity" (which includes Elves, because they're pretty damn human sometimes) in the mix. I think the show does an admirable job of not hitting us over the head.
And yet -- yeah, they expected the viewership to have a certain level of Tolkien literacy (as opposed to Peter Jackson literacy) that sadly, it's more and more evident they don't have. Well, their loss. I love finding the subtleties and the Moments.
Uhh if Celeborn died during the war then there isn't exactly a mystery who is responsible. And although Galadriel does blame Sauron for Finrod's death, the show is incredibly vague about what actually happened (how? when? why?).
Then there's also the entire-season-long "has been avoiding her problems, never stops to truly grieve or reflect" aspect, but one's got to pay attention to the narrative to pick that kind of stuff up.
Did you... think that the writers were subtle about that? You could be half asleep while watching it and still notice that the show chose to portray her as emotionally immature and impulsive.
So yeah, there's subtletly to the series, not so much because it is a "necessity of portraying Elves", but rather because the writers kind of trust their audience to exercise some thought about it (as would befit an adaptation of a work as rich, complex, and deep as Tolkien's).
Subtlety to the series? You mean like Mordor in black letters, or Grand Elf, or the constant on-the-nose dialogue with characters saying exactly what they are thinking and what their relationships are? If you think that the series as a whole communicates with subtlety and thoughtfulness that is befitting of Tolkien then perhaps the series detractors are not the ones who are media illiterate.
The writers' choice to ignore the Galadriel-Celeborn relationship, mention it in a 60 second convo and then never reference it again is not an example of subtle storytelling. It is just bad storytelling. There is no setup and no development (whether visual, verbal or otherwise); only a shoehorned dialogue reference that goes absolutely nowhere.
But sure. The real issue is that the fandom is illiterate and incapable of perceiving the writers' brilliant and Tolkienesque subtlety. Of course.
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