Rachel Port
Well-Known Member
Legolas stirred in his boat. 'Nay, time does not tarry ever,' he said; 'but change and growth is not in all things and places alike. For the Elves the world moves, and it moves both very swift and very slow. Swift, because they themselves change little, and all else fleets by: it is a grief to them. Slow, because they do not count the running years, not for themselves. The passing seasons are but ripples ever repeated in the long long stream. Yet beneath the Sun all things must wear to an end at last.'
Not long ago I noticed this passage in The Fellowship of the Ring in a new way. It's after the Company has left Lorien, when Sam notices the moon and they are discussing how their short time in Lorien was a month in the outside world. It's the most personal description of how elves experience time in Middle-earth that I can think of, and it's very poignant. I began to think of the way elves experience a world moving so much faster then they do. And when we discussed Elven economy in Exploring LOTR, I thought of the way we think of "spending time." We "spend" something that we have in limited supply. So it seemed to me that elves do not "spend" time doing things. They do what they love for however long it takes, or until they move on to something else. It could take a day or a year or a century, with breaks for sleep and eating and singing and such. It puts Legolas' going without sleep, or with very little sleep, for days in a different light - his days are not like ours, though he is aware of the movement of the sun.
Anyway, after thinking about this, the first chapters of The Nature of Middle-earth made me smile. All the numbers are a bit less poetic, but it's interesting to find that Tolkien himself was thinking about these things also. In The Hobbit and LOTR we only see elves in their encounters with humans and other mortals. I wonder what those encounters would look like from the elves' point of view. And moving on to the elven life cycle is another look at the way Tolkien was turning it about and once again doing the math, which reference we need in order to comprehend the difference. He had pictured it vaguely, but only from the human perspective. I'm loving this.
Not long ago I noticed this passage in The Fellowship of the Ring in a new way. It's after the Company has left Lorien, when Sam notices the moon and they are discussing how their short time in Lorien was a month in the outside world. It's the most personal description of how elves experience time in Middle-earth that I can think of, and it's very poignant. I began to think of the way elves experience a world moving so much faster then they do. And when we discussed Elven economy in Exploring LOTR, I thought of the way we think of "spending time." We "spend" something that we have in limited supply. So it seemed to me that elves do not "spend" time doing things. They do what they love for however long it takes, or until they move on to something else. It could take a day or a year or a century, with breaks for sleep and eating and singing and such. It puts Legolas' going without sleep, or with very little sleep, for days in a different light - his days are not like ours, though he is aware of the movement of the sun.
Anyway, after thinking about this, the first chapters of The Nature of Middle-earth made me smile. All the numbers are a bit less poetic, but it's interesting to find that Tolkien himself was thinking about these things also. In The Hobbit and LOTR we only see elves in their encounters with humans and other mortals. I wonder what those encounters would look like from the elves' point of view. And moving on to the elven life cycle is another look at the way Tolkien was turning it about and once again doing the math, which reference we need in order to comprehend the difference. He had pictured it vaguely, but only from the human perspective. I'm loving this.
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