Annotated 50-7
To the surprise of nobody, Syr’Nj is more productive in retirement-from-adventuring than any of her fellows. She was already a government figure, ambassador, and scientist when she was with the Peacemakers. Now she’s got new frontiers to explore and the luxury of not having to deal with all those distracting threats to her life. She has two or three centuries still ahead of her, but one gift that adventuring has given her is the inspiration to seize every day. I couldn’t even say what her greatest contributions will end up being, but I’m sure this painting (showing the very endpoint of her active adventuring days) will be one of a series.
I may have addressed this before, but the disparity in elf and human life cycles is a big source of anxiety in Tolkien-influenced fantasy. Arwen has to become “mortal” so she and Aragorn can OTP. That doesn’t seem worth angsting about, to me…every love story ends in death if you extrapolate it far enough. Everything is “only for now,” as Avenue Q puts it. Byron and Syr’Nj are likely to have a happy half-century or so. She may tell him in ten years, “I can’t imagine life without you,” but after he passes and she plants his willow, she will have the tools to find happiness without him, on her own or possibly with some other mature partner who knows what they’re getting into. It won’t be like the violent grief she experienced from losing him at Pardo’s village. It’ll be a sad passage, but one that leaves her stronger for the time well spent.
FB: Fields of study Syr’Nj has more time for now: “photonics,” botany, chemistry, economics, environmental science, innuendo, snarking the patriarchy.
She’ll leave him after she plants his willow??
They’re about to plant his willow right now!
Oh no, what a sad epilogue after all…
:-D
Ahhh. The happy ending I (and probably a lot of readers) were hoping for throughout most of the series!
I can’t remember if this has already been adressed in the annotations somewhere, but will Syr’Nj and Byron have children? It seems like a natural progression from where their relationship is now, but if course not every couple wants kids.
I forget where, but I did share my headcanon about this at some point. IIRC…
Scipio and Fr’Nj will conceive naturally, but while that’s possible between humans and wood elves, it is more difficult. Syr’Nj and Byron will instead adopt a couple of kids who belonged to fallen adventurers. (No matter how much Byron does to improve adventurers’ lot, it’s never going to be an entirely safe profession.)
I suppose that’s pretty in character for them. Thanks for the answer!
I feel like a lot of the angst in Tolkien-esque fantasy about mortal/faerie partnerings is that the supernatural half is eternal-barring-violence and tempestuous of nature. GA Elves don’t really seem to be that at all.
Modern D&D-style elves are basically Vulcans–long lived, alarmingly skilled, sort of alien, but internally they’re really a human mind with one or two differences layered on top. Even World of Warcraft Elves have more in common with humans than they do with their literary (and eventually mythological) ancestors. They even have Arcanoholics Anonymous, after all.
Yeah. It’s easy to miss if you just read LotR (Aragorn drops one hint) but Tolkien elves aren’t just naturally immortal (more accurately, co-eval with the life of the world) but they usually get re-embodied eventually after death. (Tolkien always had something like that in mind, though he moved from re-incarnation in a new birth with gradual return of past-life memory, to the Valar spinning up a new adult body for you to respawn in). Not that Tolkien really addresses the psychological aspects of that, but it’s still there. Whereas human souls leave the World after death — and elves aren’t guaranteed an existence after the World. So it’s not just about short lives or not, but different afterlives (or post-death, anyway.)
Luthien and Arwen turning mortal for their marriages are cleaving to their husbands, but giving up a world-lifetime with their elven families. Arwen falling for Aragorn meant that she was never going to see her mother again. A human analogy would be a young couple going from Europe to the Americas or Australia and never seeing their Old World families again… without any letters. Seems worth a bit of angst, even without substituting “life of the world” for “50 years or so”.
(Tuor turning elven for Idril would mean giving up his human family afterlife, but he was pretty much raised by elves anyway, so small loss there.)
Tuor turning elven? Wait, that’s posible? Was that in the Silmarillion?
Still, Tolkien doesn’t really explain why Luthien and Arwen would have to turn mortal. They could have stayed elves and just gone on afterwards. Although I guess that an Elf would be able to do that approximately an infinite number of times, and at some point a human might feel a bit weird in that sort of arrangement. So giving up immortality to demonstrate that you’re serious does make sense. Also, Tolkien describes the mortality of humans as a gift — although that never made complete sense to me.
Jeesh. Every time I learn something I didn’t previously know about Tolkien the more I think his editors deserve the credit for his long-form fiction being as close to cogent as it is.
Seeing how much half-finished Middle Earth material he never finished, and therefore how his own idea of how it all works was still evolving, I think it’s to be expected that it’s not all completely consistent — and if it were, it wouldn’t be what he intended it to be, which is mythical stories.
He wanted to create something like the ancient myths and sagas, and those were created by centuries of oral retelling, and thus also pretty confusing at times.
The conundrum for partnerships where one has a significantly longer lifetime than the other is – how do you deal with the loss, given that you will have to live with it for most of your remaining life?
In most human partnerships, we grow old together and expect to outlive the first to go by only a short while.
When thinking of Tolkein, remember the gravestones. Edith’s is marked “Luthien” and JRRT’s “Beren”.