everyone in fantasy novels is horny on main for elves and it’s honestly a travesty like why the hell would you want to marry an elf you’ll just spend the rest of your days growing old in the woods with a bunch of immortal bastards whose heads are so far up their asses they think singing week-long ballads is prime entertainment and say shit like “thou” and “beseech” unironically y’all should be hooking up with dwarves who 1. actually know how to throw the fuck down and let loose at a party 2. will literally shower you in diamond dust and gold they mined and crafted with their bare hands and 3. can sling you over their shoulder like a sack of potatoes with their huge muscular arms developed from hours of said mining and crafting. there’s literally no contest.
Legolas pretty quickly gets in the habit of venting about his travelling companions in Elvish, so long as Gandalf & Aragorn aren’t in earshot they’ll never know right?
Then about a week into their journey like
Legolas: *in Elvish, for approximately the 20th time* ugh fucking hobbits, so annoying
Frodo: *also in Elvish, deadpan* yeah we’re the worst
Legolas:
~*~earlier~*~
Legolas: ugh fucking hobbits
Merry: Frodo what’d he say
Frodo: I’m not sure he speaks a weird dialect but I think he’s insulting us. I should tell him I can understand Elvish
Which was quite clever, seeing as they were going to try to recover a treasure from a dragon.
It’s actually the letter G for Gandalf in the Cirth runic alphabet! Tolkien modeled Cirth off real-world runes because he was a Norse uber-nerd, of course.
Yep! It works on a couple of levels; it’s ‘G’ in Tolkien’s runic alphabet, which he based on the Futhark; the top of Gandalf the white’s staff is also made of stylized linked runes, as you can see here
But it’s also identical to the rune Fehu, which is of course the rune of wealth, and they were going to burgle a dragon horde.
In addition, Odin is of course the inspiration for Gandalf, to the point where if you threw some ravens in there and subtracted an eye the character is nearly identical in appearance, and one of Odin’s chiefly used names is ‘Gondlir’, which means ‘wand/staff bearer’. And there, of course, is the ‘G’ again!
It works on many levels that delight me.
doesn’t the
Rohirrim call Gandalf storm raven or something close? I read the books in french so I’m iffy on the actual name.
“Stormcrow”
Again, 10000000000% not a coincidence. Indeed, Gandalf’s tendency to pick up different names fucking everywhere is trait of Odin’s that wasn’t changed a single bit.
…and his original name among the Maiar was Olórin. And he’s Gandalf the Grey, which in Norse myth is the colour of magic. The elvish ‘Mithrandir’ means ‘Grey Wanderer’. Oh, also he’s associated with wisdom – ‘wisest among the Maiar’ and all that. I mean. Tolkien was Not Subtle about this.
Like, At All.
Tolkien wasn’t subtle about anything. He was just like “eh most people don’t know the history I’m pretty much just blatantly ripping off, it’ll be fine” and it was fine. Most people don’t know, and the handful that do think it’s rad as fuck.
the thing about lotr that the movies don’t convey so fully is how the story is set in an age heavily overshadowed by all the ages before. they’re constantly traveling through ruins, discussing the glory of days gone by, the empires of men are much diminished, the elves (especially galadriel) are described as seeming incongruent, frozen in time….some of the imagery is even near-apocalyptic, like the ruins of moria and of course the landscape surrounding mordor
this is a strange thought to me, somehow: that the archetypal “high fantasy” story is set at the point where the…fantasy…used to be much higher? this is not the golden age; this is a remnant
LotR is Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome of the elves.
i want to emphasize that people have added excerpts of their theses in reply to this post but this is still my favorite reblog
Penhales 