Why the elves are leaving Middle-earth in Amazon’s Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is less important to me than what the elf maidens are doing as the boat heads to Valinor, and what Tolkien had to say about it.
Galadriel and I are both wrestling with the way of Middle-earth. In The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the hero is torn between returning to the West with the rest of her company and living out her days in total peace, and continuing to hunt Sauron, who she knows is alive. For me, well, I am kept up at night thinking about the elf maidens.
On the boat to the Undying Lands (aka Elf Heaven), as the elves granted passage are standing upright on the deck of the ship with swords in hand, there’s a line of elf maidens who file out and start to prepare them for the completion of their voyage. They take their weapons and their cloaks, oozing ceremony with every motion. And then they just… throw them on the ground. What’s more, once the ship itself (minus Galadriel) heads to the Undying Lands, the maidens are just still on the ship?
I brought the question up to Polygon’s resident Tolkien expert, Susana Polo, casually, expecting (as there often is) some deeper lore at play in the scene. She told me “I don’t know; Tolkien wasn’t very specific about these things.” I pushed a little harder, expecting there was surely some explanation behind the graceful visuals: Why were they all women? What happened to them once the ship went to Elf Heaven? Why did they take the weapons only to discard them just a few feet from the people they took them from?
Susana had no answers for me.
