And he looked at the slain, recalling their names. Then suddenly he beheld his sister Éowyn as she lay, and he knew her. He stood a moment as a man who is pierced in the midst of a cry by an arrow through the heart; and then his face went deathly white; and a cold fury rose in him, so that all speech failed him for a while. A fey mood took him.
‘Éowyn, Éowyn!’ he cried at last: ‘Éowyn, how come you here? What madness or devilry is this? Death, death, death! Death take us all!’ . The Return of the King, J. R. R. Tolkien.
So (according to the concept art book) as the Fellowship travels deeper into Middle Earth, the places they pass through become inspired by progressively older periods of history. The farther along you are in the story, the more ancient the design influences
We begin in The Shire: which feels so familiar because, with its tea-kettles and cozy fireplaces, it’s inspired by the relatively recent era of rural England in the 1800s
But when we leave Hobbiton, we also leave that familiar 1800s-England aesthetic behind and start going farther back in time.
Bree is based on late 1600s English architecture
Rohan is even farther back, based on old anglo-saxon era architecture (400s-700s? ce)
Gondor is way back, and no longer the familiar English or Anglo-Saxon: its design comes from classical Greek and Roman architecture
And far far FAR back is Mordor. It’s a land of tents and huts: prehistoric, primitive, primeval. Cavemen times
And the heart of Mordor is a barren lifeless hellscape of volcanic rock…like a relic from the ages when the world was still being formed, and life didn’t yet exist
And then they finally reach Mount Doom, which one artist described as
“where the ring was made, which represents, in a sense, the moment of creation itself”
He has a general, ball park idea of his age, he can (usually) guess it within 20- 30 or so years. But that’s all.
He lost count somehwere in his first thousandth years of life and never bothered to figure it out again.
However, if you ask him his age he will tell you WILDLY different answers that seem to be randomly selected out of thin air.
Pippin: Legolas, how old are you?
Legolas: I am 8987 years.
Aragorn: Okay no, Ada isn’t even 8000 years old yet. Try again.
Legolas: I am 72 years old.
Aragorn: And you certainly arnt younger than me.
Legolas: I am 678 years old.
Aragorn: I also feel like that is incorrect.
Legolas: I am 3000 years old.
Aragorn: Much more plausible, but still, I think, incorrect.
Legolas: I am exactly 8 years old.
Aragorn: why are you the way that you are
Legolas: 🙂
Elves actually count time in a period called a yén iirc, equivalent to 144 of our years.
So it’s not that Legolas doesn’t know how old he is. He just wants to put things in measurements his friends can understand, but he’s very bad at math.
Update: Legolas’ pupils are about 3.5 cm wide each. Now drawing kawaii Legolas on physics assignment.
And they told you science was no fun.
Science!
I’m going to do it. I’m going to hand it in.
Legolas’s pupil size isn’t the problem here, though. 5 leagues is 17.262 miles. The curvature of the Earth means that for a person of average height, the visual horizon is less than three miles away. Even if your vision is telescopic and the atmosphere is perfectly clear, you can’t see around the planet. If they were standing on a hill, it would have to be at LEAST 198 feet above sea level in order to see the horizon at 17.2 miles away, with nothing tall in between. Which, knowing Rohan, isn’t impossible.
But consider: Elven satellite eyeballs.
you mean like
@sidereanuncia it’s back, the post that I can only imagine haunts your nightmares
I shall never find peace.
Also, for what it’s worth, there’s absolutely no reason to believe that the curvature of Middle Earth is the same as that of Earth.
There’s no evidence that Middle Earth curves.
Yeah there is. The Silmarillion states that the world was curved after the fall of Numenor (I believe), preventing access to Valinor. But Elves (among others) can travel the straight path across it.
So middle earth is round, but not for Elves because magic.
So wait, the reason he can see that far is because Elves just have the ability to ignore the curve of the earth? That’s awesome. It also means that no matter how good your optics got, you would always want elf eyes manning the spyglass because they can see arbitrarily far while everybody else is limited by this ‘horizon’ bullshit.
Oh thank God, my poor elf prince has seen too much in this post
