The Rings of Power’s elf servants fucked me all the way up

Galadriel, Galadriel and myself are wrestling with Middle-earth’s way. In The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of PowerThe hero must choose between going back to the West and living in peace with her friends and hunting Sauron. The elf maidens are what keeps me up at night.

On the boat to the Undying Lands (aka Elf Heaven), as the elves granted passage are standing upright on the deck of the ship with swords in hand, there’s a line of elf maidens who file out and start to prepare them for the completion of their voyage. They grab their weapons and cloaks and begin to perform ritualistic movements. And then they just… throw them on the ground. What’s more, once the ship itself (minus Galadriel) heads to the Undying Lands, the maidens are just still on the ship?

I brought the question up to Polygon’s resident Tolkien expert, Susana Polo, casually, expecting (as there often is) Some deeper lore at play in the scene. She told me “I don’t know; Tolkien wasn’t very specific about these things.” I pushed a little harder, expecting there was surely someThe graceful visuals are explained by: Why did they all become women? They went to Elf Heaven. What did they do? They took the weapons and then discarded them within a couple of feet of the people from whom they were taken.

Susana had no answers for me. As she put it, Tolkien doesn’t really dig into how elves “decide what to do with their lives.” We have the broad strokes of the major families or ruling parties. But beyond that Tolkien (who, Susana notes, was very Catholic) went long on marriage, aging, children, linguistics… but not jobs.

That leaves me wondering what that could mean for the elf maidens. You could think of them as a lower level elf servant. But, there may be something more. Rings of Power. Before your mind goes down the rabbit hole too much, I can assure you my brain already did. According to legend, being on the ship to Valinor gives an elf the most honor, the opportunity to return to Valinor or a pardon after their expulsion. These servants were they? AlsoInvited in? This is similar to the idea that pharaohs were buried together with their servants, or something else? Or were the handmaidens simply heavenly flight attendants, doing the circuit between Lindon and the Undying Lands and only paid when the ship’s doors were locked?

These thoughts will, if they are allowed to, make you a fool and likely cause several people to leave your room. You will continue to shout about the consequences of this behavior. Rings of PowerElf ascension scene. These aren’t the main point of the divine moment, but they seem representative of what I see in the cracks. Rings of Power.

The scene itself is meant to ground us in Galadriel’s struggle, turning away from the afterlife so many of her kind seek in order to put herself (presumably) through much more conflict and pain in order to ensure a better world and make good on her promise to her brother. Amid it all are the ship’s celestial deckhands, helping (I guess?) They help the tired soldiers get on their way. They’re the sort of thing that feels in the moment cool and in keeping with the elves’ elegantly stoic aesthetic.

But scratch at it for even a moment and it all comes apart; these maidens seem to exist purely to further dramatize Galadriel’s reluctance, something already fairly well established throughout the first hour. Rings of Power is, reportedly, a billion-dollar series, and a world as rich as Tolkien’s deserves more than visuals that feel so thinly drawn. Middle-earth is a realm filled with many mysteries, but the fate of the elf servants/choir/shiphands on the way to Elf Heaven shouldn’t be one of them.