Elrond
He is the bearer of the elven-ring Vilya, the Ring of Air, and master of Rivendell, where he has lived for thousands of years through the Second and Third Ages of Middle-earth.
[4] Elrond was born in the First Age at the refuge of the Mouths of Sirion in Beleriand, the son of the half-elven mariner Eärendil and Elwing his wife, and a great-grandson of Beren and Lúthien.
When Beleriand was destroyed at the end of the First Age, Elrond went to Lindon with the household of Gil-galad, the last High King of the Noldor.
Elrond was able to retreat north to a secluded valley, where he established the refuge of Imladris, later called Rivendell; he lived there through the Second and Third Ages.
[T 2][T 3] Near the end of the Second Age, the Last Alliance of Elves and Men was formed, and the army departed from Imladris to Mordor, led by Elendil and Gil-galad.
She was rescued by her sons and healed by Elrond, but "after fear and torment"[T 8] she could no longer find joy in Middle-earth, so she passed to the Grey Havens and over the Sea to Valinor in the following year.
[T 9] In The Hobbit, Elrond gave shelter to Thorin Oakenshield and his company during their quest to retake Erebor from the Dragon Smaug.
Elrond befriended the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins, the company's "burglar", and received him as a permanent guest some 60 years later.
He agreed that Frodo Baggins, Bilbo's nephew and heir, should bear the Ring during the journey, aided by eight others, reasoning that a company of nine in the service of Middle-earth would counteract the nine Nazgûl, Sauron's most fearsome servants, who sought to help their master conquer it.
[T 11] When Arwen chose mortality in order to be with Aragorn, Elrond reluctantly accepted her decision as the greater good, as she would help to renew the declining lineage of the Dúnedain.
Three years later, at the approximate age of 6,520, Elrond left Middle-earth to go over the Sea with Gandalf, Galadriel, Frodo, and Bilbo, never to return.
[5] The Tolkien scholar Richard C. West writes that there is a familiar trope in stories for a harsh, disapproving father to set difficult and possibly fatal obstacles in the path of his daughter's unwelcome suitors.
He gives as example King Thingol's demand that the hero Beren must bring a Silmaril from the iron crown of the Dark Lord Morgoth.
The demand that Arwen "shall not be the bride of any Man less than the King of both Gondor and Arnor" is in his view just "giving his foster son incentive to achieve what it is his hereditary duty to attempt anyway", as well as doing the best for his daughter: "Elrond loves them both".
[6] The humanities scholar Brian Rosebury writes that Tolkien contrasts Elrond's paternal love for Arwen with the distant, painful relationship of Denethor, the despairing and ultimately suicidal Steward of Gondor, and his son Faramir.
He notes that this was a major theme in Tolkien's legendarium, with father-son pairs like Húrin and Túrin, or the Dark Elf Eöl betrayed by his power-hungry son, Maeglin.
[4][a] Charles W. Nelson, writing in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, describes Elrond as a guide or wisdom figure, a wise person able to provide useful counsel to the protagonists.
Such, Nelson concludes, is the function of a guide, and Elrond fulfils it "admirably" and to the best of his ability, just as in their different ways do Aragorn, Galadriel, Faramir, and Tom Bombadil.
She notes that Elrond is certainly important, being "the thread that ties together all three of the great tales of the legendarium: Beren and Lúthien, The Fall of Gondolin, and The Children of Húrin."
She notes that he called Tom Bombadil "Master of wood, water, and hill", but denied that the term implied ownership.
Elrond, he writes, uses archaic conjunctions like "save" (meaning "except"), and literary phrases like "to wield at will", along with old-fashioned inversions of word order, like "That we now know too well".
In this way, Shippey writes, Tolkien gives Elrond a consistently archaic style, using not just old words "(the first resort of the amateur medievalist)" but more importantly through grammar.
Later, he sends a "surprisingly well-drilled army"[15] to the Battle of Helm's Deep, an act the Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey writes was made to fit a 21st century view of political and military expectations.
