Elrond Beginning to Regret Not Pushing Isildur Into Cracks of Doom When He Had the Chance
RIVENDELL—After a heated council meeting that lasted long past midday, Half-elven Lord of Rivendell Elrond was overheard lamenting to fellow Elves that he regretted not solving the issue of Sauron’s magical Ring three thousand years ago at the end of the Second Age of Middle-earth.
“It would have been so simple,” he allegedly mused. “I urged Isildur to do the right thing and destroy the Ring. ‘Cast it into the fire!’ I yelled. Can’t be much more direct than that, right? But nOoOoOo, he has to go on and on about taking the Ring as a ‘weregild’ for the death of his father and brother. Well guess what, Izzy? You know whose dad is a star and whose mom turned into a bird1 but doesn’t make a big deal about being COMPENSATED for it?”
“Plus now there’s the matter of Isildur’s dirty hobo heir nosing around here for the past few decades setting his sights on my daughter. If I’d only known I could have lit two beacons with one torch, I would have just cast ISILDUR into the fire.”
A Last Homely House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
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Elrond’s father, Eärendil, sails in his ship Vingilótë through the night skies with the final Silmaril and is known as the Star of Eärendil. Elrond’s mother, Elwing, lives in a tower on the edge of the Sundering Seas and has learned the language of sea birds as well as how to fly with wings like them. She greets Eärendil each time he returns. See https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Eärendil and https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Elwing for the short versions of the tale from The Silmarillion.
Aside from the big foreground characters, Isildur is one of the lore characters who got shafted the worst by the movies.
Neither Elrond or anyone else at the time Isildur kept the ring knew that doing that would keep Sauron “alive”. If they had, yeah, Elrond would probably have pushed him in, if he hadn’t done the job himself.
Isildur’s a hero. He already was when they fled Numenor, he stole the White Tree seedling from Sauron puppet Ar-Pharazon’s goons. Then he was one of the leaders who went head-to-head with Sauron for decades.
Tolkien even wrote a short story about the disaster of the Gladden Fields, where Isildur says to his son that he realizes he screwed up and that if he lives his plan is that “it should go to the keepers of the Three.”
This is great- it could be an article from McSweeney's.