Last weekend I did a Lord of the rings marathon with some friends - in a butt-numbing 12 hour session of hobbits, moody rangers, hot elves, pizza and shandy (beer & lemonade) at a local cinema/brew house. To break up the event there was a trivia competition (I won a prize woo-hoo !) and a Gollum impersonation contest (I came third - the winner was awesome, so I do not begrudge him his trophy). The movies personal favourites of mine (alongside the "Princess Bride" and a couple of other movies), but I have to say the ending of the Return of the King is slow, and sonorously looooooong drawn out and you are glad when finally Frodo sails off to the undying lands with Bilbo, Gandalf and Galadriel and Sam, Merry and Pippin goes back to their life in teh Shire to live happily ever after ...
But that's not how it really ends if you read Tolkien...
Merry (my personal favourite character) and Pippin live unusually long lives and leave the Shire for Rohan to see an old and ailing Eomer on his deathbed. They then travel to Minas Tirith and live out the rest of their days there with Aragorn, and are entombed in the hall of the kings. Aragorn actually lives to be 210 years old (at the beginning of Lord of the Rings in Bree, he's in his eighties), and when he finally dies, he's entombed next to his two hobbit friends. Poor Arwen however, carries on, and eventually heads to Lothlorien and according to Tolkien's notes, she just lies down and dies of a broken heart. Pretty tragic.
Meeting the parents of your new girlfriend/boyfriend at any time is stressful, but when they tell their beloved child that by dating you "there is only death" it really could put a dampener and cast a pall over Thanksgiving and family holidays. Elrond, however, was a little concerned about the slight age gap between Arwen and Aragorn. When Aragorn met Arwen he was twenty and she was nearly 3000 years old. A daunting age gap by any means, especially as 20 year old guys are pretty immature compared to women of the same age, let alone one who is 150 times older than them. As I mentioned above, at the beginning of Lord of the Rings, Aragorn is in his eighties, so he and Arwen had had 60 years of an on-again-off-gain romance before the beginning of the story, that would kicks the antics of "friends" Rachel and Ross to the kerb.
After Aragorn dies, Legolas and Gimli head to the undying lands too. As the elves have largely all gone by then, Legolas builds a boat and the two of them set sail off into the sunset together, towards an eternal bromance across the sea.
And talking of bromances...
Samwise Gamgee doesn't stay in the Shire, despite the last scene of the movie. After Rosie passes away, he too takes a boat with the elves to the undying lands, to follow master Frodo. He leaves the famous book There and Back Again & The Lord of the Rings with his daughter, but sails away to the west to find his old friends and Frodo.... and they live happily forever after ...
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