Arts & Culture Television
Legolas Bends the Space-Time Continuum
As the music crescendos, you fall, and then you fall some more. A portal, unused for twenty years, cracks open, and then—here you are again.
1. [2022]
When you open your husband’s message—a have you seen this yet? with a link for the trailer for the new Lord of the Rings TV show—you are still a grown woman. You are not yet twelve, have not yet crossed the portal, when you hand your toddler a graham cracker, tell her wait a minute, wait just a minute, and open the video. You don’t know much, but you know enough to sit down.
When you hear the music, something inside you drops. Like the moment between the jump and the splash. Or the moment between the cut and the bleed. The screen fills your peripheral vision. Though none of the actors are the same, there’s that green and craggy landscape, that misty cinematography, that shuddery voiceover. There’s the ancestor of the tree of Gondor, and the spire that reminds you of Orthanc, and that font, and that music that hearkens back to Howard Shore’s original.
And there’s a zoom-in on a palantír, a smooth crystal ball that can be used to communicate across space. The word means far-sight, for those with enough power can use the orbs to see anywhere in the world.
As the music crescendos, you fall, and then you fall some more. A portal, unused for twenty years, cracks open, and then—here you are again.
2. [2001]
Ugh—here you are again.
In 2001, when The Fellowship of the Ring premieres, you are twelve. After being homeschooled for the last four years, in seventh grade you once again enter public education.
Middle-earth is one thing, but middle school is another, and only actual middle schoolers have skin thick enough to endure it. Adults, used to their Pleasantries and their Social Masking and their Ability to Walk Away Without Getting a Detention, have forgotten this particular brand of hell. (You too will forget it; it is evolutionary.) In middle school, you are all your most gremlin, grasping versions. You’re emerging, and emerging is painful.
You’re emerging, and emerging is painful. While the year 2001 allegedly contains the defining moment of your generation, the day you remember is when your entire grade traipses to the movie theater that December. You’ve all read The Hobbit in English and your parents sign waivers allowing you to see a PG-13 film. You did not particularly like the book, and you are more excited about the idea of seeing a movie than this particular movie.
At the AMC, you try to sit close to Jason K. When he talks to you during class, you avoid his eyes. Sometimes you think about what it would be like to be kissed, and sometimes you think about Jason K., but those thoughts don’t intersect. The kissing fantasies are abstract. There’s a face close to your face in your mind’s eye, but you aren’t certain whose face it is—certainly not Jason K’s. These thoughts do not make your body tremble. When you daydream about Jason K., it’s about him revealing his attraction to you gradually, via cryptic AIM away messages, or a round of Truth or Dare in the daily chatrooms the gifted kids gather in.
But as soon as the movie starts, all thoughts of Jason K. fade. You are transported, and the next two hours disappear.
During Christmas break, you see the movie for the third time with your aunties and uncles who complain about not being able to tell any of those brown-haired white men apart, and you weep. You cry because Legolas isn’t real, and Lord of the Rings isn’t real. You cry because here there is no possibility of making eight life-long friends, no possibility of an elf with long hair and long fingers who will love you forever despite (or because of!!!) how you feel or how you look or your freaky little Plathian poems.
And most of all, you cry for reasons you do not understand. All you know is that your expanding imagination—your expanding world—is pushing against every rule: those of your parents, your community, your God. You are twelve and the world feels both full of possibility and impossibly closed to you.
In your bedroom, you look at the Legolas poster on your wall and you listen to the Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack CD your parents bought you and you close your eyes and you wait for something to change.
3. [Third Age 3018, 1418 by Shire-reckoning]
You are twelve. You are sitting on a fallen tree trunk in a thick forest, bathed in light you think is called dappled , but you’re not sure.
But you know for certain who is perched next to you: Legolas of the Woodland Realm. Legolas, son of Thranduil, prince of Mirkwood. He is fletching his arrows in preparation to leave for the Council of Elrond.
Up close, he smells of rain and vetiver. Up close, his cheekbones could cut you. You touch your own cheeks, warm and soft.
Today, Legolas is stressed, because it is partially his fault that Gollum escaped. He is a lesser son of a lesser elf-king and he had one duty and he did not do it well. Now his father is sending him to Rivendell to pay the piper. (Though anxiety on an elf does not crease the brow the same way as on a human. Emotions wear light on him. This is what happens when you are three thousand years old.)
You are also Stressed. You are the eldest daughter of an eldest son and there are many rules you must follow and you do not do them well. Even here, you carry these burdens with you. You are the same in this world as the other one.
Can elves die? you ask Legolas, as if the question has come to you all of a sudden, as he fits an arrow into his bow and lets it fly. His arrows are made of ash and tipped with gold, and when he releases it, it sings until it hits a far branch with a thwack.
Lately, you’ve been thinking of death. Over the last month, the thought has transformed from the abstract into some type of longing. That is what the feeling in your chest is, isn’t it? Longing? For an end to the everydailiness, to that tight knot of anger. Mirkwood is an escape for a moment, but what you long for is an escape for forever.
You think about someone telling you what to do, and how to do it, and about going on a journey where maybe you would die and maybe you wouldn’t, but either way you would be celebrated as a hero.
Yes, elves can die, Legolas says, without taking his eye away from his target. We can die in battle, as many of my kin have.
But otherwise?
No, he says. We live and we live and then we go on to the Undying Lands. It is, he says, frowning —well. Some think it a gift.
Do you think it is a gift?
You have tried to talk to some of your friends at school about this, but they always look at you sideways and say things like, You don’t really mean that, do you? You write in your journal at school: I will be dead by the time I’m twenty-five.
No, Legolas says. Many elves wish to be like the Dúnedain, who can sometimes choose their time to go.
Can I touch your ear, you ask. There are two longings that live in you, twined, and you can ask no one else about them. But this world collapses as soon as it’s over, and so here you can ask. Here in the forest your voice is clear. Who are you here? Are you also an elf, blessed (cursed) with long life? It seems improbable. Are you a dwarf? You look down but you cannot see your body. You can, however, see his.
You lean closer.
Yes, he says. He leans his head down. He is so much bigger than you, whomever you are.
You trace the edge of his ear’s helix. A breeze. All the feathers in his quiver flutter. Your fingertip reaches the top of his ear, which ends in a scalene point instead of curling inward like a conch. It still feels like a regular ear. Warm. An arrow pointing to another universe.
4. [2001]
This is the benefit of being twelve: Nearly all the portals are open to you. You are liminal and can pass through all membranes, all worlds. But you usually only go to Middle-earth. Sometimes you go to the world wherein when you walk down the hall after sixth period, and Billy N.—the basketball player with eyes big as Gollum’s—nods to you instead of walking on the other side of the hall. But that universe often collapses into the other universe where instead of ignoring you, he laughs at you, and then the whole team laughs at you, so generally all those verses are better avoided.
Even in Middle-earth, when you and Legolas hang out, it is never in a private room in the Prancing Pony or a dark Bree alley or pressed up against a rock on the cliff at Weathertop. (Okay, so Legolas is not supposed to be in any of those places, but technically neither are you. The amount of times you’ve scanned the backgrounds of the movie to see if, had you lived in New Zealand, you could have been cast as an extra, the answer is no. Not your skin, not your hair. Orc, yes; person of color, no.)
Because, in a few years, you’ll get your own ring, given by your father, made of sterling silver with a diamond chip. It is meant to keep you safe. It is meant to keep you tethered until you get married. The other girls in your circle wear these too. One ring to rule them all. In a few years you’ll sign a pledge at a Christian theater camp to keep yourself pure.
Your body is one thing, but your thoughts are another. And yet doesn’t the Bible say that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart ? And if your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you ?
So the beginning and ending of what you want starts with the elf lifting your hair out of her face and ends with him throwing over her shoulder onto his back, using the same gesture as when he puts his bow back in the quiver.
And he always leaves. He always leaves for his quest, and he never brings you along. Sometimes you try to trigger a different path but it does not appear. Your fantasies are, within the logic of their worlds, realistic.
5. [2022]
It is your daughter who portals you back to 2022 when she slaps the laptop closed, asking for another graham cracker. Here, here. You break the rectangle in half, and then in half again, and hope it will tide her over like lembas.
You open your laptop but something stops you before you press play on the trailer again. Need to catch your breath before that orchestra returns. A fermata. If it’s like this when you watch the trailer, you wonder what it’s going to be like when you watch the entire show. Will you be constantly ping-ponging between realms? Will you be sucked back into Middle-earth the way you were when you were twelve?
But it’s impossible. At twelve, you were thicker skinned, but thinner hearted. Your heart was open to so many things. There’s a reason Susan Pevensie can’t go back to Narnia after she gets older, why Winnie the Pooh dreads Christopher Robin going to school. When you watch The Rings of Power , you will be transfixed but not transported.
This is the blessing and the curse of growing up.
The portal is open to you just this once, just for today, and only because you weren’t looking for it. Only because, today, you were feeling especially tender.
If this is your last time, you decide, you are going to figure some stuff out. You are going to make sense of things. Like who you were back then, and how it happened, and what it means. People say things like time heals all wounds and hindsight is 20/20 except there are some moments of time that will always seem inexplicable, no matter how much distance you get.
But how to enter the portal while still holding on to the consciousness of the present? When you entered the portal last time, you were not adult-self-looking-back-at-twelve-year-old-self, you became twelve-year-old self. How to hold both selves in tandem?
You look at the video, where the screen is paused, again, at the black glistening surface of the palantír.
When powerful folk look into a palantír, they can see what is happening anywhere in Middle-earth. When Saruman the White looks into a palantír, he sees the immensity of Sauron’s destruction across the earth, and gives in.
But palantíri can easily lead folk astray. Sometimes they offer truncated or misleading visions. When the King Denethor of Rohan looks into one, he sees an enormous black fleet. Believing it is the enemy, he gives up and despairs. In reality, the fleet belongs to his ally Aragorn. He could not see the totality of what would happen. Could only imagine one specific future. Denethor throws himself onto a funeral pyre and burns to death.
And, importantly, under untrained hands, palantiri offer visions not of what is happening now , but what has happened in the past or the future. The users could be making decisions based on events that happened thousands of years ago, believing it is now. The timelines are confused.
Your hands are untrained.
You reach towards the screen.
This is the benefit of being twelve: Nearly all the portals are open to you. You are liminal and can pass through all membranes, all worlds. 7. [2022/Third Age 3018/2001]
Here you are and here you are and here you are.
When you arrive in Mirkwood, the sun is high in the sky, as it always is; the sun does not set here. The shadows are always stark. You look at your hands, where the veins are beginning to be visible and your skin beginning to thin into washi kozo. Okay. You are thirty-three.
There, on the fallen trunk is Legolas fletching his arrows. The thing about Legolas is that Legolas never ages. Or rather: He grows older but he never looks older. He is so young, and so pale; as close to death as he ever was.
Where are you? The other you?
You scan the scene until you see, there, under an ash tree, a glint of light, a place where the shadows flicker in too methodical a way.
And then, all of a sudden, there’s Arwen. Arwen? you think. Arwen? Of all the people young you could have chosen to be, you picked Arwen?
But then Arwen starts glitching. Arwen is replaced by Gimli, then Aragorn, then Frodo, each image stuttering before changing to the next. You can tell each one is you—you as you once were—because of your eyes. No matter what skin you’re in, the eyes are full of hesitation and wonder.
And then Frodo disappears and you change one last time.
8. [2001/Third Age 3018/2022]
In this world, you are twelve years old and something roils inside you.
You can only hold a thing if you do not desire it.
If you desire something, you cannot touch it at all.
In the movie, Galadriel and Bilbo and Gandalf all know this. Each of them has a terrifying moment—moments of being overcome —where their voices and affects change, they each scream at Frodo, their ring-lust vibrating through them, and then it ceases, and they deflate, and they are themselves again. Sorrowful for their actions. These moments of weakness reinforce their choice to abstain from carrying the ring to Mordor. Frodo can be trusted with the ring only because he does not want it.
And here you are, cloaked in black, riding a fell beast that hovers just above the ground. Here, finally, as ringwraith, you do not glitch. Here, as ringwraith, you have no eyes.
The ringwraiths, the servants of the evil lord Sauron, were once kings. Then, corrupted by their own rings, desired until their bodies turned to dust and still they lived, eaten alive by their desire, then kept alive by it. Their rings tightening around them until their bodies disappear.
*
In this world you are an adult and you watch yourself across the clearing. Ringwraith—free of long black hair or round glasses, any hungry body. Your palantír offers a gray slate full of fire and smoke.
You stare at one another, yards and decades apart.
From somewhere far off, you can hear your daughter saying mama, mama, feel her plump fingers on your knee. What time you have left is slipping away. You stride across the clearing where the beast is beginning to rise into the air, carrying your black-clad self on its back. You reach up but your arm is not long enough; your fingers barely skim the hem of the cloak. You just miss each other.
Wait a minute, you say to your wraith-self. Wait just a minute.
But you are a wraith and a wraith, like a twelve-year-old, does not know how to wait. Your fell beast flaps its wings, and you fly into the air. You have no sense of time, or of change. You are wraith, single minded, following your desire and your desire only, hunting it until its very end. Bodiless, how high you can rise.
