Immortality and the sons of Elrond

[Mithadan]

1

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by Mithadan

1

Is the loneliest number?

[Galadriel55]

Can someone explain?...

What on earth does 1 have to do with...anything?

[jallanite]

Why is 1 the loneliest number?

It’s like the song says:

One is one and all alone,
And ever more shall be so.

[Mithadan]

I did not have time to make my post earlier, and did not feel like searching for this thread again. So I left myself a place holder.

I am completing a re-read of LoTR, my first in 4 years. This is unlike me, as I read the books at least once a year when I was younger. At any rate, I came across something that immediately reminded me of this thread and some posts that I made here long ago. In short, and in the words of my profession, I write to "confess error".

Read this thread from the first post. It is an example of why this board is both fun as well as intellectually challenging. It begins with an apparently unanswerable question. What happened to Elladan and Elrohir? The thread travels through possible answers to the specific question, speculation upon the nature of the half-elven generally and the children of Elrond specifically, and even touches upon the issue of canon; what is most reliable as a source of information in Tolkien's work.

There is a great debate about "canon" somewhere on this board. The general consensus was that works published during Tolkien's lifetime were the most reliable (with debate as to LoTR versus The Hobbit versus the "lesser works" such as Tom Bombadil). Everything published posthumously is of somewhat uncertain reliability with varying opinions regarding The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales and the multiple and varying versions of materials found in HoME.

To start getting to the point, I am currently reading the Appendices to LoTR; an often overlooked source of information and enjoyment. For those of you who don't know this, if I recall correctly, the Appendices did not appear in the first printing of Return of the King. JRRT had gone overboard and created an altogether too long and comprehensive work that would have required a fourth volume of LoTR to publish the Appendices in their entirety. He had to edit it down drastically. The pieces he cut are found in HoME 12. These excerpts are very well written, were prepared with the intention that they be published, and to return to the issue of canonicity, probably are more reliable than any version of the Silmarillion.

Anyway, in the published appendices, which deserve even greater deference than the unpublished excerpts found in Peoples of Middle Earth, there is the following refrence to the children of Elrond which appears to have been overlooked in this thread.

But to the children of Elrond a choice was also appointed: to pass with him from the circles of the world; or if they remained to become mortal and die in Middle-earth."

OK. I was wrong when I argued that the initial choice of Elrond bound his children and that the "Choice of Luthien" given to Arwen somehow arose after she married Aragorn. This quote also raises the question of whether Elladan and Elrohir made their choice merely by not accompanying Elrond.

The above quote does not resolve potential inconsistencies debated above. But as part of his work published during Tolkien's lifetime, it deserves considerable deference, equal to that accorded to LoTR and more than Letters, The Silmarillion or HoME... Or is it?

[Inziladun]

Originally Posted by Mithadan

I did not have time to make my post earlier, and did not feel like searching for this thread again. So I left myself a place holder.

Aww. I wanted to see more head-scratching over it.

Originally Posted by Mithadan

OK. I was wrong when I argued that the initial choice of Elrond bound his children and that the "Choice of Luthien" given to Arwen somehow arose after she married Aragorn. This quote also raises the question of whether Elladan and Elrohir made their choice merely by not accompanying Elrond.

The above quote does not resolve potential inconsistencies debated above. But as part of his work published during Tolkien's lifetime, it deserves considerable deference, equal to that accorded to LoTR and more than Letters, The Silmarillion or HoME... Or is it?

Personally, I think that quote has the right of it. Or should. For the sake of fairness, if nothing else. Why should Arwen be made to make her irrevocable choice before her daddy left, when her brothers get some indefinite period to think things over? The words of Tolkien in Letters # 153, here:

The end of [Elrond's] sons...is not told. They delay their choice and remain for a while.

were from a draft letter written in 1954. I like to think the "delay" was perhaps only meant in the sense that the brothers didn't choose when Arwen did, but still decided before Elrond left. If that was indeed the case, then both apparently picked picked mortality.
There's still plenty of room for debate, granted, but it still just doesn't seem right that the standards would be seemingly different among Elrond's children.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

From Letter No. 151

* It is not made explicit how [Arwen] could arrange this. She could not of course just transfer her ticket on the boat like that! For any except those of Elvish race ‘sailing West’ was not permitted, and any exception required ‘authority’, and she was not in direct communication with the Valar, especially not since her choice to become ‘mortal’. What is meant is that it was Arwen who first thought of sending Frodo into the West, and put in a plea for him to Gandalf (direct or through Galadriel, or both), and she used her own renunciation of the right to go West as an argument. Her renunciation and suffering were related to and enmeshed with Frodo’s : both were parts of a plan for the regeneration of the state of Men. Her prayer might therefore be specially effective, and her plan have a certain equity of exchange. No doubt it was Gandalf who was the authority that accepted her plea. The Appendices show clearly that he was an emissary of the Valar, and virtually their plenipotentiary in accomplishing the plan against Sauron.

As for Elladan and Elrohir, they certainly remained for a certain time after Elrond sailed; Tolkien wrote (can't find the cite) that after Galadriel left, and Lothlorien started to fade, Celeborn went to Rivendell to live with them, for a while.

The impression I get is that here as with so many other matters around the edges Tolkien never really made up his mind, and even his 'definitive' statements may conceal complexity when expressed elliptically or briefly. Suffice it to say that Elrond's children got to make the Choice at some point, but it's unclear when.