LAST King of Gondor?

[Kalimac]

Gorwingel - Nah, not really. We don't know how old he is, after all. He's probably had a lot of time to study history, and who's to say if he hasn't been travelling before, at least a little? And I'm betting that Thranduil and Elrond probably keep in touch, if not very often. Besides, Mirkwood seems like the kind of place Strider would have encountered at some point or another.<P>As for the change in the movies - it made sense enough. We've seen Isildur take the Ring, be betrayed by it to horrible death, and then we find out that "the line of kings of broken." It makes sense for the movie to tie that breaking directly with the Ring - make it something else for the Ring to be responsible for. And also, to explain how it actually happened in the books would probably waste several minutes of exposition and still leave people confused, in a "Well, that was random," sort of way. And as Saucepan Man pointed out, for all we know from the movies, Isildur could have been the 500th King of Gondor, and breaking that line would really mean something.