[Kalimac]

OK, we're way out into the hypothetical universe now. Lush, nice point about her maybe sneaking out to help (though in that case you can only regret that there wasn't a scene showing Elrond and Arwen's first encounter after Frodo was brought to Rivendell). Marilea, I see what you mean about her not being as skilled a fighter as a 3,000 warrior princess would be, but I wasn't thinking of her so much as a real fighter (or warrior princess) as a defender, sort of like the difference between someone who studies martial arts for competition purposes and someone who takes some self-defense courses and learns enough to get by on. <P>And no, there's no support in Tolkien for the theory, and I doubt he himself would really have thought of Elves that way if you put it to him. All I was trying to do was find an explanation that would plausible for the ME that is presented both in the movie and the books; though if you look at the books you could always hypothesize a few more reasons why Arwen wasn't terribly skilled with the sword - maybe she only got interested after meeting Aragorn and he had to teach her (they did meet 60 years before the Fellowship, but he was away most of the time so wouldn't have had all that time to help her practice). Maybe what happened to her mother made her start thinking a little swordcraft wouldn't be a bad thing to have. <P>BTW sorry if my last post freaked some of you out! . (In terms of length, I mean). I really didn't mean to make it that long. Now why couldn't the words flow like that when I was writing papers, that's what I'd like to know.