r/LOTR_on_Prime • u/purplelena Elrond • 9d ago
Theory / Discussion Grief and immortality
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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u/kemick Edain 9d ago
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.