The "I Hate Elves" Club
Most people know I'm a Tolkien expert/freak. What many may be surprised to know is that I have an impromptu club called the I Hate Elves club. Care to join? Read the mission statement here! ...okay, so it's not a club. But I had to give a name for something like this. Dedicated, out of pure spite, to Rachel. "Haldir!!!" Funniest part of The Two Towers!
Okay, so most people know that I�m a Lord of the Rings nut. Dedication for the books has reached a critical point for me. In the last four months, I�ve read the trilogy twice. So, you can imagine that I have a lot of things to say about it. I guess everyone has different opinions about things. You know, things like "would you have liked to see Eowyn and Aragorn get together?" or "who is Tom Bombadil?" Well, for me, I do have opinions on those kinds of issues, but there�s something much more pressing to consider: the fact that Elves are the worst creatures to "grace" the ground of Middle-earth.
The truth is that while Elves themselves may think of themselves gracing the world of Tolkien�s creation, they aren�t worth the ground that they barely manage to step on. You wouldn�t even notice that they were there. They don�t even leave footprints! Most people seem to think that Elves are so stealthy because they�ve learned to wage war that way, but that�s not the case at all. It�s actually because they�re so afraid of the other races finding them and laughing at them, again. You�d think that after so many years of humiliation, they would learn to deal with it. But that�s another thing: as Treebeard the Ent so eloquently puts it, "Ents are more like Men, more changeable than Elves are, and quicker at taking the colour of the outside, you might say. Or better than both: for they are steadier and keep their minds on things longer" (II 78). And so, since Elves spend so much time telling themselves they�re better because they�re immortal, they change very, VERY slowly, not noticing that Ents are immortal too. That, my friends, is why Elves haven�t learned to deal with their humiliation: they can�t deal with it!
So, how do Elves manage to survive, then? Surely, you say, they would have to find some way to vent their emotions, or they would just start killing themselves! Ah, beloved reader, you have brought me to yet another reason for the ultimate futility of creating Elves in the first place. Tolkien himself said, "For long they were at peace, wielding the Three Rings while Sauron slept and the One Ring was lost, but they attempted nothing new, living in memory of the past" (III, Appendix B, 451). The entire race of Elves has an eternal affliction with escapism. Just think about it: every nation of Elves is either impossible to find, fatally dangerous to approach, or in another time zone. Here, we can make a checklist: Imladris, or Rivendell to those non-Elvish speaking people out there: nearly impossible to find, as it says in The Hobbit. Mirkwood: well, if the name doesn�t do enough to make you not want to start a summer vacation there, then how about the giant spiders? No? Okay, then, take a lesson from Bilbo�s companions: they were LOST, and they got put in PRISON. They asked for food, and got jailed. �Oh, yes, King Thranduil, I�d looove to come and stay with you. Just, please, this time, don�t make me escape by taking refuge inside of barrels going down a waterfall.� And you don�t even want to get me started about Laurelindorenan, or Lothlorien, for those non-Ent people. There�s a permanent time zone displacement around that forest! Granted, the place was beautiful, and is the last bastion of what was beautiful before evil came. But honestly, Galadriel, WAKE UP AND SMELL THE 6000 YEARS PASSING! Why do all the most beautiful elves have to be hermits? The Grey Havens of Mithlond? They're the worst of them all! They live a good forty miles from the closest inhabited area, and that's the Shire, where no one cares about them anyways. And what do they do there? They build boats, so that they can run away if anyone does manage to find them! They've spent that last THREE THOUSAND YEARS building them! So, either Elves are the slowest workers in the universe, or they are just so horrible at making boats (a craft which they learned from a god, no less) that they have to keep remaking them as they fall apart. I'm willing to bet on the latter.
Oh, and just for clarification, Elves can�t kill themselves either. Before they could manage to do it, they would DIE OF GRIEF. Some races get all the pity. I guess, though, to their credit, Elves are pretty pitiful.
And so, our only conclusion can be that Elves do in fact have a problem with being too obsessed with escapism. All they can do is sit there and whine about how great things were when they were the only ones around. The Valar had the right idea about how to deal with them: send them right over the Sea! Even better, give them a little island with constant storms, so they can never bother anyone again! It beats me what Iluvatar (that�s God, for those non-Tolkien freaks) made them for in the first place.
�then again, maybe I do understand. He made them to teach everyone else patience! And maybe to be thankful for what they�re NOT!
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