Elrond

Elrond was born towards the end of the First Age, the son of Eärendil the mariner and of Elwing. Few figures of Middle-earth unite so many lines of descent in one person: his father was the child of Tuor, a mortal Man of the northern houses, and of Idril, daughter of Turgon, the Elven-king of the hidden city of Gondolin; his mother was descended from Dior, son of Beren and of Lúthien of Doriath. Elrond himself sets out this ancestry at his council in Rivendell, where he recalls that his memory reaches back into the Elder Days. Both strains of his heritage were thus royal, and both stood at the centre of the great matters of the First Age.

From this double descent comes his standing epithet: Elrond and his brother Elros were called the Peredhil, the Half-elven. Because they stood between the kindreds, the Valar granted the sons of Eärendil at the end of the First Age a choice, once made never to be revoked, of which people they would belong to. Elrond chose to be counted among the Elves and so became a master of lore and wisdom; Elros chose the lot of Men. The Hobbit, in which Elrond first appears as head of the Last Homely House, already sketches this mixed nature: a figure noble of face and bearing, in whom the lines of the Elves and of the heroes of the ancient North flow together, as venerable as a king and as kindly as the summer.

The name Elrond is Sindarin. Its first element el- means 'star'; the second, rond, denotes a vaulted or arched roof, or a great hall beneath such a roof, so that the name may be rendered 'star-dome'. It is deliberately paired with that of his brother, for Elros carries the same star-element joined to ros, 'foam' or 'spray'. The posthumously published Silmarillion also supplies what the works published in Tolkien's lifetime leave open: the brothers were born to Elwing at the refuge by the mouths of Sirion, where the survivors of the ruined Elven realms had gathered; and through Lúthien their line reached back to Melian of the people of the Maiar, so that a strain of divine ancestry ran in the Half-elven as well.

Elrond's earliest years fell amid the last convulsions of the First Age. While Eärendil was at sea, the surviving sons of Fëanor, still bound by their oath to the Silmaril that Elwing kept, descended upon the refuge at the mouths of Sirion, and in that assault the young brothers were taken captive. Yet Maglor, weary of the oath's burden, spared the children and cherished them, and an unlooked-for affection grew between the foster-father and his wards. After the host of the Valar had overthrown Morgoth in the War of Wrath, the brothers made the choice appointed to the Half-elven: Elros departed over the sea to become the first king of Númenor, while Elrond remained in Middle-earth and joined himself to Gil-galad, the last High King of the Noldor, in Lindon.

When Sauron, having forged the One Ring, made war upon the Elven smiths of Eregion, Gil-galad sent Elrond at the head of a force to their aid. He came too late to save the city; gathering its survivors together with the remnant of his own troops, he withdrew northwards and in the year 1697 of the Second Age established a hidden and fortified refuge in a deep valley under the Misty Mountains — Imladris, which Men would later call Rivendell. There he was beleaguered until a Númenórean army, landing in Eriador, turned the course of the war and Sauron's forces were swept from the west. Before his own end Gil-galad committed to Elrond the keeping of Vilya, mightiest of the Three Elven rings, by whose unseen power the valley was thereafter guarded and sustained.

Against Sauron's later rising Elrond played a part he would himself recount an age afterwards. In 3431 the combined host of Gil-galad and Elendil came to Imladris and mustered there, and Elrond marched with it as the herald of his king. He fought in the great battle upon Dagorlad, endured the seven years' siege of Barad-dûr, and stood upon the slopes of Orodruin when Gil-galad and Elendil perished in the final struggle and Sauron was cast down. When Isildur cut the One Ring from the enemy's hand, Elrond and Círdan urged him to destroy it at once in the mountain's fire; Isildur refused and kept it — a refusal whose consequences would occupy Elrond for the remainder of the age.

The Third Age made Rivendell the anchor of the North. In its year 109 Elrond wedded Celebrían, daughter of Celeborn and Galadriel; their sons Elladan and Elrohir were born in 130, and their daughter Arwen in 241. As the realm of the northern Dúnedain broke apart under the assaults of Angmar, Elrond's house became the sanctuary of Isildur's line: the heirs of the chieftains were raised in the valley, and the treasures of their house, among them the shards of Elendil's sword, were kept in his charge. The peace of his own family ended in 2509, when Celebrían, journeying to Lórien, was waylaid by orcs in the Redhorn Pass and received a poisoned wound; Elrond healed her body, but she found no more joy in Middle-earth and passed over the Sea in the following year.

Fostering shaped the last century of the Age as well. In 2933 the two-year-old Aragorn, heir of Isildur, was brought to Rivendell after his father's death, and Elrond raised him as a son under the name Estel, concealing his lineage even from the boy himself. In 2941 the company of Thorin Oakenshield, with Gandalf and Bilbo Baggins, rested fourteen days in the valley on the road to Erebor; Elrond recognised their swords as ancient work of Gondolin and read the moon-letters on Thrór's map that told of the secret door. Ten years later he revealed to Aragorn his true name and delivered to him the heirlooms of his house; and when love arose between Aragorn and Arwen, Elrond, foreseeing grief for himself whichever way it ended, declared that his daughter should wed no man less than the king of both Gondor and Arnor restored.

Within the legendarium Elrond occupies a role less like that of a king than of a keeper: his valley is a sanctuary and a storehouse of memory rather than the seat of a realm, and he commands no armies in the Third Age. Gandalf describes him as mighty among both Elves and Men, and as the chief of the masters of lore. His authority, however, works almost entirely through counsel. Even at the gathering that bears his name he imposes nothing; the errand of the Ring-bearer is taken up freely, and Elrond confirms the choice rather than decreeing it, adding only his judgement of who should go along.

The powers the texts actually show him exercising are narrow and bounded. He is accounted a master of healing, yet his art has limits he does not conceal: a Morgul-wound such as Frodo's can be arrested but not wholly undone, and its bearer may never be entirely free of it. The flood that overwhelms the Riders at the Ford of Bruinen rises at his command, but this mastery belongs to his own guarded valley and does not extend beyond it. Most telling is what he declines. Offered the chance to keep the One Ring, he refuses even its custody, reasoning that the very desire to wield it for good would turn its keeper to evil; and he states plainly that Rivendell could neither hide the Ring for long nor withstand the full might of Mordor at the last.

The nature of the power he does hold is defined by the character of the Three Rings. They were not forged as instruments of dominion or war but to preserve, to heal, and to hold back the weariness of time, and through his ring Elrond kept in Imladris a lingering likeness of the beauty of the Elder Days. That power carried its own end within it, for the fate of the Three was bound to the One: while Sauron held the master-ring their use was perilous, and with its destruction their virtue would fail — an outcome Elrond himself foresaw as likely, and accepted. His strength was thus wholly preservative, able to sustain and to shelter but not to conquer, and he supported the course that would unmake his own work.

The web of Elrond's attachments crosses the boundary between the kindreds more thoroughly than that of any other figure of the Third Age. Through his brother's choice, the kings of Númenor and after them the chieftains of the northern Dúnedain were his own remote kin, so that his long guardianship of Isildur's heirs was not merely a political alliance but a family obligation stretched across three thousand years. In Aragorn these threads knot together: the man is at once a descendant of Elros, a foster-son raised at Elrond's own hearth, and finally the husband of his daughter — kinsman, ward, and son-in-law in a single person.

Among the great of his own order Elrond stood as a colleague rather than a superior. With Galadriel — his wife's mother — Círdan of the Havens, and Gandalf he belonged to the circle of the Wise that sat in the White Council against the growing Shadow, and his opposition to Sauron was conducted chiefly through this fellowship of counsel and vigilance. Yet his friendships ran downward through the ranks of the world as easily as across them: Bilbo Baggins passed his last years in Middle-earth as an honoured guest of the house, and dwarves, rangers, and wandering Elves alike counted its master a friend.

In Tolkien's earliest connected accounts of the mythology, Elrond stands alone: the 'Sketch of the Mythology' of the 1920s, printed in The Shaping of Middle-earth, makes him the only child of Eärendel and Elwing, and Elros does not yet exist. There it is Maidros, not Maglor, who spares the boy after the assault on the dwellers at Sirion's mouth, the foster-father's role passing to Maglor only in the subsequent Quenta. Most striking is the reversal of his later fate: in this conception no formal choice of the Half-elven has yet been devised, and when the Elves return into the West it is Elrond's mortal strain that binds him, so that he elects to remain behind in the world — the exact inverse of the published resolution.

Elros entered the legendarium only in the mid-1930s, emerging with the first drafts of the Númenórean legend as the island's founding king and thereafter inserted into the Quenta tradition as Elrond's brother, which in turn allowed the doctrine of a divided choice to develop. The late Tale of Years of the First Age, given in The War of the Jewels, is the only source to date the brothers' birth, placing it in the year 532. Decades later the pairing of the two names still occupied Tolkien: the unfinished essay 'The Problem of Ros' shows him wrestling with the second element of Elros's name, whose intended derivation proved difficult to reconcile with other uses of ros already fixed in print.

In Peter Jackson's film trilogy The Lord of the Rings (2001–2003), Elrond is played by Hugo Weaving. The films depart from the book in several respects. The prologue shows Elrond leading Isildur into the fire-chamber of Mount Doom to destroy the One Ring, whereas the book has him and Círdan merely counsel its destruction after the battle. The screen Elrond voices an open distrust of Men that the novel does not give him, and he presses Arwen to leave Middle-earth rather than bind herself to Aragorn. The reforging of Narsil is likewise moved: instead of the sword being remade before the Company leaves Rivendell, Elrond himself carries the newly forged Andúril to Aragorn at Dunharrow. His sons Elladan and Elrohir, who ride to Aragorn's aid in the book, do not appear in the films.

Earlier and later adaptations cast the figure differently. In the Rankin/Bass animated television film of The Hobbit (1977) Elrond is voiced by Cyril Ritchard, and in Ralph Bakshi's animated The Lord of the Rings (1978) by André Morell. Jackson's Hobbit trilogy (2012–2014) returns Hugo Weaving to the role and enlarges it beyond the novel: Elrond attends a White Council meeting shown on screen and joins an invented assault on Dol Guldur to free Gandalf.