Immortal being, daughter of Elrond, wife of Aragorn, queen of Gondor — Arwen the elf
lived quite a long and adventurous life even before Frodo and friends stumbled into her
neck of the woods in Fellowship of the Ring. Here's Arwen's entire backstory explained.
Ancestry is often a key part of what defines a person's path in life, and with Arwen,
it's essential. Right from birth, her lineage, both in the recent and distant past, makes her a
prime candidate for the Middle-earth limelight. Let's start with the familiar faces first.
Arwen's dad is Elrond. As the leader of Rivendell, a venerable warrior, and a famous counselor,
Arwen's father is practically always at the center of the continent's politics and wars,
and his daughter is often by his side in Rivendell, observing the action.
And then there's Arwen's maternal grandmother, Galadriel. The Lady of the Golden Wood is about as
old as an elf can get, and she's witnessed nearly all of Middle-earth's long, dramatic history.
She has incredible power, wields an elven ring, and is one of Sauron's chief enemies.
While having Elrond and Galadriel as her family members is already enough to set
Arwen up as a pretty important she-elf, the hereditary connections don't stop
there. Arwen's family history is studded with famous people,
particularly through her father. Elrond's father is Eärendil the Mariner, the half-elf, half-man
hero that saves the good guys from destruction at the end of the First Age of Middle-earth history.
On top of that, Elrond's mother is Elwing, the granddaughter of the man Beren and the half-elven,
half-angelic Lúthien, the power couple in one of Tolkien's most famous First Age epics.
And the thing is, we're only touching on the most famous of her relatives here. There are several
others who play critical roles in Tolkien's other writings, especially The Silmarillion. Suffice it
to say, Arwen is the Middle-earth equivalent of the offspring of a marriage between a rockstar and
a Hollywood celebrity. For those of you who didn't notice, she's also descended from men, elves,
and the angelic Maiar giving her and her immediate family a unique connection to all three races.
According to the appendix of The Return of the King, Arwen is born 241 years into the Third Age.
That makes her approximately 2,778 years old by the time the One Ring is
destroyed - which isn't terribly old for an elf. In comparison, Galadriel is over 8,000. However,
it does give her a good step up on her future husband's 88-year lifespan.
When Arwen is born, the world is relatively peaceful, a few hundred years away from the
epic War of the Last Alliance. That's the event depicted in the opening sequence of The Fellowship
of the Ring, where men, elves, and dwarves join together to resist Sauron's first run at
conquering the continent. When the dust settles, the Dark Lord is defeated, the Ring has been cut
from his hand, and Middle-earth settles down for a long period of relative peace and prosperity.
The primary thing to point out during these early centuries of Arwen's life is the fact that, while
the power of men grows in Middle-earth, the elves and dwarves slowly begin to fade into obscurity.
That's not to say that they're inconsequential. Places like Lothlórien, Rivendell, and Khazad-dûm
are still powerful and influential. However, they stop trending up at this point in time and,
if anything, begin to lose the larger political and military power that they once had.
Her people may have been slowly fading,
but the first few thousand years of Arwen's life are ones of peaceful comfort.
She spends a lot of her time bouncing between Rivendell and Lothlórien with her grandparents.
In The Return of the King, she even casually mentions that she'd been in
Lothlórien for a while. While there aren't a ton of details on Arwen's early activity,
the bulk of her time for the greater part of 3,000 years seems to have been spent following
this pattern of living in one of the two elven havens, or traveling between them.
In addition to her famous father and grandmother, Arwen also has two older twin brothers,
Elladan and Elrohir, as well as a mother named Celebrían. However, over time, she sees each of
these familial connections less often, primarily due to a tragic event that happens to her mother.
About 500 years before the War of the Ring, tragedy strikes the family, when their mother
is captured by orcs in the Misty Mountains. She's eventually found and rescued by her sons,
but by then, she's been tortured and poisoned. A devastated Elrond manages to save her life,
showing a glimpse of the skill that he later uses to save Frodo from his deadly knife wound.
However, Celebrían is so traumatized by the experience that she never fully recovers
her former health, and eventually decides to leave Middle-earth to seek peace and healing
in the Blessed Realm - the same place that Frodo sails to at the end of The Return of the King.
After this experience, Arwen's brothers become especially bitter towards the orcs, and spend much
of their time out hunting their foes, often teaming up with the Rangers in the process.
Eventually, this morbid hobby even leads to their being present when Aragorn's
father is killed by orcs, making his young son chieftain in the process.
And that serves as the perfect segue to finally introduce Arwen's beau.
Soon after one of Arwen's trips back from Rivendell, she decides to take a walk,
and who should appear on the path in front of her but a young man.
Tell everyone who the young man is, Legolas!
"This is no mere Ranger. He is Aragorn, son of Arathorn."
At this point, he's a 20-year-old stripling who's over the moon because he just found out
that he's the chieftain of the Dúnedain and the heir to the throne of Gondor.
When the two meet, it's love at first sight — at least for Aragorn.
Arwen is little more than amused by his head-over-heels attraction to her beauty.
Nevertheless, Aragorn sets his heart on pursuing the elvish maiden,
which quickly leads to a gentle but stern confrontation with Elrond. The loremaster
sadly prophesies to the young Ranger that Arwen will only marry him if he becomes king,
and that in either case, either he or Aragorn will eventually be heartbroken by the situation.
"If Sauron is defeated and Aragorn made king and all that you hope for comes true,
you will still have to taste the bitterness of mortality."
The budding relationship between Arwen and Aragorn brings up an interesting question:
are the two related? The short answer is, well, yes. In fact, in The Return of the King,
when we learn how they met and Aragorn explains who he is, Arwen's immediate response is that,
"We are akin from afar."
However, while their bloodlines are related, it's definitely a very,
very distant connection. Elrond's brother is a man,
and we mean literally a man, named Elros. With their unique family history, the brothers
and their descendants are allowed to choose between either an immortal or a mortal life.
While Elrond chooses immortality, his brother opts for mortality, and ends up leading a nation of men
called Númenor. Over time, that nation becomes one of Sauron's chief enemies, and eventually,
it's the Númenóreans who set up the two kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor.
When Arnor collapses, its royal bloodline secretly
survives through the Rangers and their line of chieftains, the last of whom is Aragorn.
In other words, there are dozens of generations between Arwen and Aragorn,
making them technically, but extremely distantly related.
Considering the fact that Tolkien came from a world where English royalty
was constantly intermarrying with first and second cousins, the magnitude of the distance
in Aragorn and Arwen's relationship would hardly have seemed to be much of a concern.
Over time, Aragorn makes his case to Arwen in a convincing yet indirect way.
When he discovers that he doesn't have a shot with Elrond's daughter at present,
the Ranger leaves Rivendell and heads out into the wide world to forge his own path.
In the ensuing decades, the exiled king proves himself over and over again.
He travels in the wild, fights in disguise in Rohan and Gondor, befriends Gandalf,
and even makes a solo trip far into the mysterious eastern and southern regions of the continent.
Over this time, the son of Arathorn evolves from an inexperienced young
man to a battle-hardened warrior. He gains wisdom and experience beyond his years —
"Long years have passed. You did not have the cares you carry now."
- years that quickly add up. While still a drop in the bucket, the next time he meets Arwen,
Aragorn is around 50 years old. This time, they hook up in Lothlórien, and it's Arwen
who's surprised to see Aragorn walking towards her through the trees. They spend a season together,
and Arwen officially falls in love with the now-mature exiled king. By the time
they part ways, they've committed to marrying each other, and Elrond gives his sad approval,
though he clarifies that his daughter will marry no one less than the king of Arnor and Gondor.
After she's officially betrothed to Aragorn, Arwen spends most of the next few decades in
Rivendell as things ramp up to the War of the Ring. Once the war breaks out,
her role varies depending on if you're reading the books or watching the movies.
Arwen remains more or less on the sidelines throughout the book series. However,
just because she's out of sight doesn't mean she's out of mind. In fact, Aragorn is depicted thinking
of her on multiple occasions. For instance, when the Fellowship arrives in Lothlórien,
Frodo sees the Ranger wrapped in a memory, in the same place where he and Arwen got engaged.
In addition to remembrances, Arwen meets with Aragorn when he arrives with the
hobbits in Rivendell. She also personally makes an enormous banner that Aragorn unveils during
the Battle of Pelennor Fields, using it to officially announce his return as the king.
Arwen's role was dramatically beefed up for Peter Jackson's trilogy. The she-elf helps Frodo escape
from the Black Riders, revives a waterlogged Aragorn via a vision, and is repeatedly shown
struggling with her father's desire for her to leave Middle-earth rather than become mortal.
Even in this enhanced role, though,
Arwen's participation in the plot is actually reduced from the original cinematic scripts.
In an interview with IGN, Liv Tyler herself clarified that the character was supposed to
be much more heavily involved in the story. In an earlier version of the script, she was
actually supposed to lead the elf contingent that fights at Helm's Deep in The Two Towers.
However, as they shot the movie, the filmmakers realized that inserting Arwen
into the violent action wasn't doing justice to her character. Tyler herself points out that,
"You don't have to put a sword in a woman's hand to make her seem tough. That's little actual
makeup of who Arwen is, and her sheer will and strength and love for this man was strong enough."
Whether she had been depicted in battle or not, though, there's no doubt that Arwen is more
present in the film adaptations than she ever is in the original The Lord of the Rings story.
Both the written and cinematic versions of Arwen's story reconnect when she marries Aragorn.
In all of the annals of Middle-earth lore, this becomes just the third time that an elf and a man
get hitched, with both of the previous unions also taking place in their shared family tree.
Their nuptials are a high-water mark in the story of the two lovers.
Of course, Arwen's marriage also means she officially becomes the queen of the
reunited realms of Gondor and Arnor. Practically overnight, this makes her the most powerful woman
in all of Middle-earth. As queen, she helps Aragorn rule their kingdom for 120 years.
During that time, she brings Sam's daughter, Elanor, to be her maid of honor in Minas Tirith.
She also has at least two daughters, who remain nameless,
and a son named Eldarion who eventually succeeds his father to the throne.
One of the most complicated and confusing elements about Arwen's life is her mortality — or more
accurately, her immortality that is replaced by mortality. In essence, Arwen is allowed to
choose between being immortal or mortal, since she has both elves and men in her ancestry.
"The life of the Eldar is leaving you."
"This was my choice."
However, the specific ground rules for this choice are never clarified by Tolkien. It would
appear that, at least, once someone chooses to be mortal, the choice isn't given to their children.
Regardless of the specifics,
Arwen lives as an immortal elf until she gives up her immortality to marry Aragorn.
"I choose a mortal life."
This enables her to grant Frodo her spot on the ship headed west to the Blessed Realm,
but it also sets her up for a painfully difficult parting, as well.
When Arwen discusses her choice to become mortal in The Return of the King,
she explains that she has chosen quote -
"Both the sweet and the bitter,"
and 120 years after her marriage to Aragorn, the "bitter" part really comes home to roost.
After he passes and Eldarion becomes king, it says in the book that in her sorrow,
she says goodbye to her children and her loved ones, and then she leaves Minas Tirith, returning
to her past home of Lothlórien. However, by this time, Galadriel and her people have left, and no
elves remain in the Golden Wood. She wanders there through the following winter and then finally
lies down to rest in the same place where she had betrothed herself to Aragorn so many years before.
There, tasting the bitterness at the very end of her mortal life, she passes away quietly,
eventually surrounded by a green grave that will never change until the world itself is altered.
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