#gil galad#rings of power#lotr#silmarillion#wait someone break it down for those of us who haven’t read silm
Keeping in mind that I am a semi-casual Tolkien fan and will almost certainly get a few things wrong, here is my summary of The Gil-Galad Debate.
...please forgive me for the long post, this is my soapbox and I really feel like exposition at the moment.
Gil-Galad is referenced in JRR Tolkien’s *The Lord of the Rings* series as “the last of the great Elf-kings of Middle Earth”, who was in charge of the elvish forces during the Last Alliances of Elves and Men and was killed by Sauron. This is accurate, but not the entirety of his background as described in The Silmarillion.
Gil-Galad was the last High King of the Noldor in Exile in Middle Earth, the Noldor being essentially a subethnicity of elves, many of whom left Valinor (aka the Blessed Realm) and headed to Middle Earth for various reasons it would take a much longer post to explore in full. (It is interesting to note that this group does not include the Wood-Elves, who were never in Valinor to begin with - their own High King was historically someone else entirely. No, it wasn’t Thranduil, and yes, said someone else was long dead by the events of LOTR.)
Historically, the first High King of All The Noldor Everywhere was an elf called Finwe. The Kingship, descending as it apparently did via agnatic primogeniture (meaning, according to wiki, ‘determined by tracing shared descent from the nearest common ancestor through male ancestors’) means that all of the High Kings of the Noldor, in Exile or not, presumably back their claim to the throne via relationship to Finwe.
Meaning that Gil-Galad has to be related to Finwe in some way for his claim to hold. Got that? Good, because here’s where it gets complicated.
Here’s where we break the fourth wall and consider the Tolkiens - both JRR himself, and his son, Christopher Tolkien, who spent a good portion if not all of his life working with his father’s unpublished materials.
The issue regarding Gil-Galad is that canonically we do not know who his parents are. JRR Tolkien apparently listed Gil-Galad’s father as at least four separate elves in various drafts/unpublished materials, and never came to a definite conclusion about exactly how GG was related to Finwe. We think his final decision might have been that his father was an Elf named Orodreth (who himself had at least two separate fathers listed!) but we’re not sure. When Christopher Tolkien cleaned up and published his father’s drafts in The Silmarillion, he apparently chose a different elf (an elf named Fingon) to be Gil-Galad’s ‘definite’ father, adding some background material to make it work. HOWEVER.
Christopher Tolkien himself said that “ this decision to make Gil-galad a son of Fingon was an editorial mistake on his part, and did not represent his father's conception of the character. He suggested that it would have been better to have left Gil-galad's parentage obscure.”
Christopher Tolkien said that.
This means, of course, that the fandom has been arguing over just who Gil-Galad’s father was - and who the elf-king himself was - pretty much ever since the Silmarillion came out. The fandom has taken every single interpretation you can imagine and run with it - all four of the elves Tolkien considered making his father, plus a number of other options. Was his father Sauron? There’s fic for that. Was his father a background character who shows up in precisely one page of the Silmarillion only to be subsequently killed off? There’s fic for that, and entire online essays defending said options. Was he a time-traveling elf from the future? At least one good fic.
Much more amusing, in my opinion, are the stories where, in-universe, no-one knows exactly how Gil-Galad is related to the line of Finwe.
So. That’s my summary of ‘The Gil-Galad Debate’.
In my humble opinion, whatever option Amazon picks, it’s going to be debated and subsequently disputed by a large number of, if not the entire, fandom.
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