That Rings of Power character didn’t really die in the Lord of the Rings universe
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for a few elf characters in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power episode 3.]
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has the unenviable task of prequel-ing not only one of the most beloved and acclaimed movie trilogies of all time, but also building out a new conflict that we all know will be resolved in a few thousand years (give or take a few hundred years, with the show’s timeline). And while I find myself emotionally at odds with what the show is doing with its characters, trust me when I say no one was more surprised than me when the elf friend died trying to escape the orc prison camp. The elf friend!
Thondir (Fabian McCallum) might not have made the biggest impression on anyone else watching. But for me, I appreciated him as the odd elf with a sense of humor, the one razzing his friend for being in love with a mortal, who managed the tricky balance of feeling human (if not like the rest of Tolkien’s Men) and acknowledging the sticky place elves occupy in the narrative. So when he got his throat slit by an orc as a show of force, it actually felt kind of surprising in the moment. Suddenly he was just gone, and Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova) was heartbroken enough to cut down a tree to prevent more bloodshed.
It doesn’t work — more elves die later in the attempted prison escape — but with each new death I was forced to confront something our own Susana Polo, resident Tolkien lore expert, keeps bringing up in meetings: These elves aren’t actually dying. Like, they are, but they’re not gone forever like humans are. They’re just going to Valinor, aka the Undying Lands, aka the place Galadriel opted out of in the opening episode, aka the elf heaven where all these elves are
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