‘Rings of Power’s new episode has a scene that is heartbreakingly yet hopefully Tolkien
"Forgiveness takes an age."
There’s a lot of unnecessary hate aimed at The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power. Some are adamant about calling the adaptation “not Tolkien.” And yet, in its latest episode, the series gave us a moment with Arondir the elf that’s so beautifully Tolkien it’s impossible to doubt the show’s sincerity.
TROP season 2 spoilers ahead!
J.R.R. Tolkien’s love for nature, and trees in particular, is evident all over his works. In The Lord of The Rings movies, we see the rage of Treebread and the Ents, who are tired of Saruman and his orcs’ destruction of forests. However, in The Rings of Power, this particular theme has a much larger presence.
Trees are a recurring motif in The Rings of Power. There are the two trees of Valinor, the Mallorn tree of Lindon—a sign of the light of the Eldar fading—and the white tree of Númenor shedding “tears of the Valar.” When we first met the character of Arondir (Ismael Cruz Córdova), Tolkien nerds studied the details of the Silvan elves’ armor for hours, which has a tree with a face and a leaf brooch fastening for their cloak. The scene where Arondir has to cut a tree when he is captured by Adar’s orcs in TROP season 1 shows just how difficult it is for the woodland Elves to hurt nature. And, the tradition of the planting of alfirin seeds which both Adar (Joseph Mawle) and Bronwyn (Nazanin Boniadi) call “New life in defiance of death,” is once again a reminder that the makers understand just how much Tolkien cared about the trees.
TROP season 2, episode 4 was special for several reasons. We got Tom Bombadil (Rory Kinnear) and the barrow-wights, met a whole new tribe of Hobbits, Adar (Sam Hazeldine) said some magical words to Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), and we might even have gotten confirmation on our strongest theory about The Stranger’s (Daniel Weyman) identity.
Despite all of that, one of the best moments in this episode is the scene between Arondir and the Ents. Oh yes, we didn’t just get Ents this season, we got an Entwife!
The meeting of Arondir and the Entwife is the most Tolkien moment there is
In this episode, Arondir, Isildur (Maxim Baldry), and Estrid (Nia Towle) are searching for Theo (Tyroe Muhafidin), who got abducted by someone—we’re never shown who—when he and Isildur were trying to rescue the latter’s horse, Berek. Arondir follows the tracks and realizes that whoever it was also left behind the weapons of the wild men that were in the camp, and this was probably not someone human. And he was right because, in a moment when Estrid unsheathes a sword, they are attacked by an Entwife who thinks they are the ones that destroyed the trees of the forest!
Arondir asks the Entwife to stop, introducing himself to her as Arondir of the Greenwood, which would let the Ent know that he is a woodland elf. But she asks him if he has “ever touched an axe to wooded life,” and he speaks the truth about the time he had to do it in the orc camp. The Entwife is devastated and attacks him, but the arrival of another Ent, and Arondir’s pleas to explain what happened, calm her down and make her listen. We find out that the Ent is Snaggleroot (voiced by Jim Broadbent) and the Entwife is Winterblossom (voiced by Olivia Williams).
Snaggleroot explains to Arondir that “the spilling sap and burning branch” called to them, but when they reached this forest, it was gone. Winterblossom is heartbroken over the army of orcs destroying the forest which she had raised from seed to sprout, and claims that these new people they’ve encountered are no different. But Arondir proves her wrong when he offers her a heartfelt apology.
He says to her as he gently toucher her branches, “We would seek forgiveness for the injury we have done.” And as Winterblossom reaches out to hold his hand, she picks a flower from her foliage and places it on their entwined palms, as if to say she accepts his apology and is grateful for his kindness. However, she also reminds him, “Forgiveness takes an age.” This one line carries with it such gravitas and depth! The scene, paired with Bear McCreary’s beautiful composition also titled “Forgiveness Takes an Age” playing in the background, is easily one of the most beautiful moments from the series.
What this scene represents is perhaps the most important message that J.R.R. Tolkien would’ve wanted readers to take away from his writing. His stories hold a strong allegory about the dying of an older, slower world that cherished and preserved the beauty of all things and the coming of a new world full of darkness that destroyed all that was good about our home. This can be interpreted as modernization, the effects of the Industrial Revolution that led to the cutting down of trees and destroying forests to make way for factories, machinery, and the iron and steel hands of the human race. In The Lord of The Rings movies, Isengard and Saruman’s monologue about “the fires of industry” represent this very idea.
In this same episode of The Rings of Power, Galadriel tells Elrond, “Protecting that which is most fragile, most dear, is a task entrusted to all Elves. And one that is not complete.” The Elves of Tolkien stand for the old world, as a sort of last hope of passing on the knowledge of adoring and preserving nature to the race of men that is to inherit the earth after they leave the shores, lest it be overrun by darkness, by orcs, and all that want to see it damaged and destroyed. Because the Elves, who’ve been around for thousands of years and seen two ages pass on Middle-earth, know just how long it takes to heal the scars left behind by such darkness. They also know that some of those wounds can never be healed.
So when Winterblossom the Entwife tells Arondir that forgiveness takes an age, it is a reminder that can be rather easily applied to our current world, too, which teeters on the blink of a global climate crisis because we’ve pushed it to a point of no return when we destroyed the forests and green spaces to make way for human life and industry. If we are to even begin to reverse this, it would take an age—in Tolkien terms, some 3000-4000 years, perhaps—for us to fix what we have ruined.
However, in Tolkien’s world, as High King Gil-galad said, hope is never mere, even when it is meager. Winterblossom is in crippling pain over how these races have treated her and her children and the trees, and yet when Arondir apologizes, she plucks a flower from her branch and gives it to him. This act represents the idea that if men truly do repent for their actions, nature is forgiving and will continue to provide its bounty to the very race that destroyed it in the first place.
If anyone still wants to claim that The Rings of Power’s writers don’t understand Tolkien, they should speak to the Ents!
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