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#11 | |
Byronic Brand
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: The 1590s
Posts: 2,778
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in defence of Tolk's Leggy
I think Legolas must have had a fairly healthy pre-Bloom fanbase, Galadriel55. He was certainly my favourite character at my first reading as a rather serious, self-important and chivalric little boy...
The reasons why, for reasons that rationally must be coincidental but certainly don't feel that way, were all extirpated from or altered in the films. Obviously I always thought Elves were cool but for me this controversial passage picked out Legolas in particular: Quote:
Legolas's next fine moment was his contribution to the Lament of the Winds. I've always loved that, though I understand why few songs made it cinematically. Still, sad. And now, to at last reach the ostensible topic of this thread, how about the wonderful verse of Galadriel's warning? "Legolas Greenleaf long under tree In joy thou hast lived. Beware of the Sea! If thou hearest the cry of the gull on the shore, Thy heart shall then rest in the forest no more." I seem to recall Legolas takes this as a warning that he is likely to be killed. Remember that on first reading you have next to no idea about the rules of the game re: Elves and the Sea, just indistinct feelings of elegy, often at an age before you know about anything else elegiac. I wouldn't be surprised if it was here (or maybe in some war at Troy retelling, but close enough) that I got the impression it was in some sense good to die, noble to be resigned to fate and defeat. I can see in the film this would have been complex: a prophecy about a peripheral character that doesn't even come true in any obvious clunking way (as no true prophecy should). But complex is beautiful, and I really resent that there was no reference to Legolas and the gulls in the film at all, except a nod in that admittedly lovely glimpse of Elves going seaward in FOTR: EE. I think Tolkien's last footnotes about Legolas are a way of reconciling this sense of elegy (about which there is SO much good, short Ang-Sax poetry) with Gimli's more upbeat spirit, of wagers, promises to visit Aglarond, grim irony. Of course there are times when the buskin is on the other foot: Gimli has his sentimental side too, and Legolas raises the spirits (not the Spirits) in the Paths of the Dead. Another lovely, structurally purposeless aside is Legolas's recognition of Imrahil's elven heritage; Imrahil himself being a sort of incidental flourish of a character. Finally, when Saruman warns "it will be a grey ship, and full of ghosts", I think of Legolas, going off at last to fulfil that prophecy, as much as or more than I do of the Ringbearers.
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Among the friendly dead, being bad at games did not seem to matter -Il Lupo Fenriso |
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