do u ever just sit down and realize how fucking great lord of the rings is like fuck we’re all still crying about sams speech and his po-ta-toes and i mean how amazing is the battle of the pelennor fields?11?!!? and the music you guys thE MUSIC and aragorns resting bitch face and legolas and gimlis kill count game “tHAT STILL ONLY COUNTS AS ONE” and “I AM NO MAN” and “ONE DOES NOT SIMPLY WALK INTO MORDOR” and like the hobbit squad right hobbits are fucking cool man and i mean do you ever just do that do you sit down and think about lord of the rings
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
elves can’t ignore the curve of the earth – the “straight path” is a metaphor referring to the way to get to valinor through space, not the literal curvature of the earth. in the past, valinor was just another continent to the west of middle-earth and theoretically anyone could go there, but then ilúvatar got mad and chunked it into space above the planet and curved the earth and only gave the elves the knowledge to sail up through space and get to it
thranduil sleeps calmer knowing even if his son married a dwarf at least he married The Supermodel dwarf and singlehandedly crushed the hopes of single dwarves and dwarrowdams everywhere
this is my headcanon and you will never take it from me.
listen, just Listen for a second, okay.
Gimli Gloinul is from the line of Durin okay, he’s from the line of KINGS, his bloodline stands up against Legolas’ perfectly, if the elves and dwarves got their shit together for a hot second they would be like “YES, PERFECT, A DIPLOMATIC MARRIAGE TO BIND OUR HOUSES TOGETHER AND NEVER SHALL THE TWAIN THROW ONE ANOTHER TO DRAGONS…again.” because you have a king’s son and a king’s nephew which, well, I love Dain but he’s not an EREBOR KING and GIMLI IS FROM THE FAMILY OF EREBOR KINGS.
And Gimli acts like he’s from the line of Erebor kings, too, okay, he’s a diplomat and a warrior and a nobleman, he’s the sort of person who SAYS things like ‘faithless is he who says fairwell when the road darkens’ and stares down Elrond Peredhil in his own home when his strength and faith are questioned. And he’s the kind of person who swears his allegiance to people he barely knows because it’s Right and Good and Gimli knows it.
And Thorin Oakenshield was handsome, and his sister the lady Dis is beautiful, and Gimli’s cousins Fili and Kili were fine young dwarrows, and Gimli’s mother is a great beauty.
Basically my point here is that Gimli, proud strong gimli with his firebeard hair and bold laugh and mithril tongue and clever fingers, broke the hearts of everyone in Erebor and not a few people outside of Erebor when he married a goddamn elf. Like. Not even Arwen Undomiel (WHO MARRIED A GODDAMN HUMAN, it’s been a weird couple of years in Middle-Earth, everyone wonders strongly if they’ve been drinking too much). Like he’s not even marrying a great beauty of the elves, Legolas isn’t ugly by elvish standards but also he’s nothing particularly special, and he’s not a great diplomat, and he’s BARELY a king’s son because everyone knows that Mirkwood elves are…a little odd. Legolas is a big cheerful hunter who sings songs he doesn’t remember all of, who chatters to trees and has no sense of the right thing to say even if he’s developed enough self-preservation to know the wrong thing to say, and FOR THE LOVE OF MAHAL HE FIGHTS WITH A BOW.
“GIMLI” Gloin bellows “YOU TURNED DOWN THIRTY-TWO SUITORS FROM FINE DWARVISH LINES FOR THIS”
“Ignore him, amrâlime, he’ll get over it” Gimli says in amusement as he beckons Legolas over to his forge, where he’s carefully smithing mithril-inlaid gold marriage clasps that will grip fine elvish hair. It’s too hot in the forge to wear shirts, if you’re working. Every dwarf in twenty feet stops what they’re doing to watch Gimli’s biceps flex as he holds up a jewel for Legolas’ inspection.
“YOU COULD HAVE HAD A HAREM” Gloin wails from down the hall.
#a headcanon I never knew I needed until this very moment
And speaking of pronouns, flat-out my favorite part of the LOTR Appendices is when it’s revealed that the Gondorian dialect of the Common Speech differentiates between formal and informal second-person pronouns but the distinction’s been lost in the Hobbit’s dialect, so Pippin’s blithely been using familiar terms of address with the Lord of the City, and thus helps to explain both why the Gondorians are so ready to assume he’s a prince and why Denethor finds him so amusing to have around.
not what i expected from a post that began with “speaking of pronouns,” but an a++ show of the versatility and surprise daily available on tumblr dot com
i went to the local shakespeare festival (and by local, i mean on the other end of the state) and during the day i convinced my mother to go hiking with me because we were in the center of like four national parks
so we end up hiking this trail that sort of jack-knifes down the mountain and I end up climbing partway up a tree on the edge of the trail to see further out, so my smartass mother asks “legolas, what do your elf eyes see?”
and i, in my smarmy glory, go “they’re taking the hobbits to isengard!”
which is funny enough as is, but then the entire mountainside of hikers hidden in the trees goes “THEY’RE TAKING THE HOBBITS TO ISENGARD-GARD-GARD-GARD-GARD! THE HOBBITS, THE HOBBITS, THE HOBBITS, THE HOBBITS TO ISENGARD, TO ISENGARD!”
and that’s how an entire hiking trail of people who never actually saw one another convinced my mother i’m some sort of meme-summoning mountain troll
myblog 