Did you invent that?

Zhie

In answer to follow up question posted upon the Haldir Lovers yahoo!group.

November 15, 2003

Message 23094

The short answer is I made pretty much all of it up. The long answer follows:

Everything I know about Erestor from Tolkien is practically nothing at all. As difficult as it is to find information about the Lorien brothers, it is three thousand times harder to discover anything about Elrond's chief counselor. So when I started to incorporate this elf into stories, I based his origin on what little I did have to work with.

He's the head of Elrond's council, therefore, he likely has high intelligence and a fair amount of wisdom. That places him to be at least a second age elf. His idea at the council isn't to destroy the ring, but to let someone else deal with it, more or less. He might have just had some knowledge of the ring and related events surrounding it and the others made via his studies, but more than likely he was around for a while and had witnessed quite a few things first-hand.

He also comments that he isn't as wise as Elrond (again, I don't have the book in front of me [LOL, and here I'm in a library...oh well] so I don't have the exact phrase). Now, although one might think that by saying 'I'm not as smart as him', actually means, 'That elf is smarter than me', in the case of Erestor, I think that this was really slid in sarcastically. More of a 'Oh, I'm only chief counsel to Elrond, but what can I know? Obviously he knows better than I could advise.' I think he was a teensy bit bitter about the whole situation. He's supposed to be the one Elrond would call upon in a crisis (and if finding the one ring doesn't count, I don't know what does), and instead, ends up in a roundtable with not only other elves, but some dwarves and men and hobbits besides. This just seems to me to be more of the thing a more ancient elf would do. If he was younger than Elrond, he wouldn't have even made such a comment. That made me place him at least First Age, but in the end, I made him even older.

If that's the case, where to have him come from? Gondolin seemed to have been a nice little place, and I somehow imagined it being quite the place for scholars, but if he was born there, then when it was sacked, I think he would have been of a mind to defend the place. And if that were the case, I think such a thing would have shown up on his resume somewhere.

I thought that having him born back in Valinor was a little much - after all, elves in Middle Earth in the Third Age who were originally residents of Valinor are highly publicized(SP?), eg., Galadriel, Cirdan.

So Doriath sounded as good a place as any. With all the thousand caves, it was reasonable to think that when Gondolin was sacked and Doriath fallen, going to some other cozy cave place was a plausible solution, hence, onto Greenwood.

Imladris was like a smaller scale version of Gondolin, both in how I think it was run, and also because I think the two places put a high value on education. Yeah, I'm beginning to stretch stuff again, but bear with me here, I'm sick and on cold medicine (and not the good stuff, either), have fielded no less than a hundred questions involving Clifford and the Berenstain Bears, still need to do some book shopping tonight, and really need a hug. *Sigh*

*Erestor comes over from out of nowhere and gives Zhie a hug. Zhie's happiness increases +3.*

So he decides to go to Imladris. Why wasn't he drawn to the West in all that time? Here's where things don't have any bearing on the books. Well, I go with the idea he is Noldor, and I think that somewhere in his past he had a relative of some sort who did play along with the kinslaying, and he's a bit upset and not ready to deal with that yet when he finally does go to Valinor.

I'm continuing to search for clues on Erestor, because I think there has to be something somewhere if he had such a high post in Imladris. But until that time, that's my story, and I'm stickin' to it.