Vidumavi of the Northmen by Secondborn

One of the great joys for a particular brand of Tolkien fan is the wealth of obscure characters—those that exist for only a sentence or two in the main texts, those that live in the appendices or drafts, those that merit a mention only in a footnote or on a family tree. They may seem insignificant and are certainly often overlooked, but with a little digging and a lot of contemplation they provide valuable and interesting context, depth, and detail that will forever impact the way that you read and think about the larger, more familiar stories. Vidumavi of the Northmen is one such character for me.

Vidumavi was a woman who lived, loved, and died in the mid-Third Age. She was a quintessential human—a daughter, a wife, and a mother, not imbued with any magical or fantastical characteristics, someone whose life was full but who achieved no epic deeds and conquered no legendary villains. And yet, she stands as a perfect representation of how a single individual exists in the broader flow of Arda’s history. She was affected deeply in her daily existence by events and dynamics from two ages before her birth, and she made a series of decisions that would compound over time to shake the very foundations of Middle-earth’s largest and most powerful empire. Along the way, she came to shed light on the development of some of Tolkien’s most significant themes, including fellowship, how the intervention of the divine came to divide the races and societies of Middle-earth, and the slow but inevitable fading of elements of “faerie” from the everyday world. In short, I love her.

Who Were the Northmen?

Before you can begin to consider Vidumavi’s life, you need first to understand where she came from. Her people were the Northmen who abode in Rhovanion between the forest that became known as Mirkwood and the River Running.¹

The Northmen are thought to have descended from the same groups of Men who left their ancestral homes to journey west in the First Age. In fact, they are considered kin to the house of Hador, but they dropped off from the migration before making it all the way into Beleriand and became sundered from those related groups who went on to fight alongside the Elves and the Valar against Morgoth.² As such, the Northmen are not counted among the Edain, a distinction that would prove to be hugely significant to Vidumavi’s life many thousands of years later.

Although they are often lumped together under a single label, the Northmen were more of a loose association of proximate groups that had their own leaders and followed sometimes drastically different and conflicting paths. Over the course of the ages, these groups settled, resettled, fought, merged, split, suffered, rebounded, and eventually differentiated into the Third Age communities that are recognizable to us as the Men of Dale and Lake-town, the Woodmen of Mirkwood, and the Rohirrim of Rohan, among others.³

Vidumavi’s particular band of Northmen are the direct ancestors of Marhwini, who would first establish the people known as the Éothéod, and Eorl, the lord of the Éothéod who would become the first king of Rohan.⁴ To symbolize this ancestry, Tolkien reckoned the names of Vidumavi’s people using a form of ancient Gothic (Christopher Tolkien suggested her name translates to “wood maiden”), since Gothic is a linguistic ancestor of the Old English that represents the speech of the Rohirrim in The Lord of the Rings (LotR).⁵

Vidumavi’s Early Life

We don’t know the year of Vidumavi’s birth, but she was already married and had a baby in T.A. 1255.⁶ She was the daughter of Vidugavia, who fashioned himself “the king of Rhovanion,” though, as noted above, there were different groupings of Northmen in Rhovanion and they were not all united under Vidugavia’s rule.⁷ Still, Vidumavi was considered a princess among her people. Her mother’s name is not recorded (naturally) and neither are the names of her sibling(s), though we know she had at least one since Vidugavia is a known ancestor of Marhwini but not through Vidumavi.⁸

At the time of Vidumavi’s early life, her father had allied their people with Gondor under the rule of Minalcar. In T.A. 1248, Minalcar came with a large army to Rhovanion to beat back invading Easterlings, and he was aided by Vidugavia and his forces.⁹ (Note that this is the first formally documented instance of alliance between Gondor and the people who would become the Rohirrim, making it the earliest known antecedent of the Oath of Eorl that would unite those two kingdoms through many hundreds of years of struggle and friendship!) They won a great victory—so great that Minalcar took the name Rómendacil II, or East-victor, in the battle’s wake—and he began to show particular favor to Vidugavia as a result.¹⁰ Some Northmen were brought to Gondor at Rómendacil’s invitation, and in T.A. 1250 he sent his own son, Valacar, to live among Vidugavia’s people as an ambassador, intending him to learn their language, customs, and culture.¹¹

A Fateful Marriage

Whatever Rómendacil’s expectations for his son’s ambassadorship, he surely never expected what soon happened. Valacar “far exceeded his father’s designs. He grew to love the Northern lands and people, and he married Vidumavi.”¹² In T.A. 1255, they had a son (the drafts suggest they had more than one child, but only the first son is formally acknowledged or named in the texts).¹³ In a sweet and thematically resonant choice, they named him Vinitharya, which has the same meaning (East-victor) as the name of Valacar’s Gondorian father but rendered in the language of Vidumavi’s Northmen people.¹⁴ As such, Vidumavi gave her son a name that had significance in both kingdoms and paid tribute to the founding event that bound those kingdoms together, just as Vinitharya himself was a testament to and living embodiment of that bond.

There is no evidence that their time in Rhovanion was anything but happy or that their relationship stirred any negative, or even mixed, feelings among the Northmen. But eventually (T.A. 1260, in the drafts¹⁵) Valacar was recalled to Gondor, and Vidumavi’s life changed in profound ways.

A “Lesser and Alien” Crown Princess

Vidumavi and her son proved immediately controversial in Gondor. Although they were officially welcomed and life was not wholly unpleasant for them,¹⁶ the validity of their position in Gondorian life was never established firmly. According to the drafts, Valacar’s father only consented to the marriage because he felt that “he could not forbid it or refuse to recognize it without earning the enmity of Vidugavia,” which he didn’t think he could afford.¹⁷ In the main text, we’re also told that the Gondorian nobility “already looked askance at the Northmen among them; and it was a thing unheard of before that the heir of the crown, or any son of the King, should wed one of the lesser and alien race.”¹⁸

We see here that the opposition to Vidumavi and her son was not just that they were foreign (though many Gondorians did traffic in depressingly familiar xenophobic rhetoric¹⁹) but also inherently inferior. It was believed in Gondor, both at that time and lasting all the way through to the events of LotR, during which Faramir espouses these same views, that Men were divided into three tiers according to their relation to the Edain of old.²⁰ Those directly descended from the Edain, i.e., the Númenóreans and their heirs, the Gondorians, were considered High Men. Their ancestors had fought against Morgoth and been rewarded by the Valar with divine favor, including access to special teachings and skills and the provision of unusually long life.²¹ Those like Vidumavi’s people, who came from groups that acted with goodness and nobility but were not among the Edain and did not share in those divine gifts and favors, were reckoned instead as Middle Men, perhaps well intentioned but necessarily lesser, and those descended from peoples who had joined with or aided forces of evil were Low or Wild Men, implicitly deserving of the least regard and respect.²²

The introduction of Vidumavi into the Gondorian royal family roused deep and visceral fears that her so-called Middle Men blood would dilute the divine favor afforded to the High Men and cause her royal descendants to “fall from the majesty of the Kings of Men.”²³ This distrust for her and her son persisted despite significant efforts made to appease their detractors. Vidumavi adopted the language and customs of Gondor. In order to be seen as less “alien,” she agreed to be called Galadwen, a Sindarin translation of her Northmen name, and changed the name of her son to Eldacar, a Quenya name that was originally borne by no less than the grandson of Isildur.²⁴ With the passage of time, Eldacar showed no sign of aging faster than his father’s people and exhibited no weakness to call into question his fitness or ability to hold his place in the line of kings. But none of this was able to stave off the increasing spread of rebellious unrest, particularly in the southern regions, and when Eldacar eventually succeeded his father in T.A. 1432, a full scale civil war (the “Gondorian kinstrife”) erupted.²⁵

Perhaps mercifully, Vidumavi didn’t live to see the staging of this coup, the murder of one of her grandsons (Eldacar’s son Ornendil), or the exile of her son back to Rhovanion when the Gondorian hardliners installed one of their own on the throne. While still the Crown Princess, she died in either T.A. 1332 or 1344,²⁶ depending on which draft you’re looking at, having lived a long life for one of her people but still much shorter than the lives of her husband or children.

Vidumavi the Person

We have precious little information about what Vidumavi was like as an individual. She is described in Appendix A as fair and noble,²⁷ with the drafts adding that she was of “high courage,” “bore herself wisely,” and “endeared herself to all those who knew her,” but there is little other direct characterization.²⁸ Still, even what can only be inferred about her from context remains wholly positive.

Valacar was not sent to Rhovanion to look for love. In fact, one could argue that getting involved in a love affair while he was abroad for official duties was the last thing he should have been doing, and, as noted above, Rómendacil did not welcome his son’s choices. With all of this stacked against the match, however, Valacar still apparently found the allure of Vidumavi undeniable, being so utterly besotted that he took a step that was both unprecedented in the history of his people and deeply displeasing to much of its power structure.

One can imagine he was attracted to both her beauty and royal status, but he must also have appreciated her intelligence. Once they returned to Gondor, she learned quickly to navigate a foreign court in a foreign tongue, and she was both shrewd and strategic, making compromises and concessions in an effort to build political support for herself and her son. Equally compelling, she clearly had a loyal heart, unwilling to give up on Valacar or Gondor in the face of the discrimination and resistance they encountered. She could have retreated to the safety and comfort of Rhovanion, sparing herself the indignity of being considered a second-class person in a land where she would ostensibly be queen, but she stood strong until the very end.

In fact, her marriage strikes me as one of the best and most genuine in Tolkien’s works, a truly moving example of love for love’s sake that endured harsh tests without failure. Vidumavi made many sacrifices for the sake of her husband, giving up her land, her family, her culture, her very name, and perhaps her sense of safety. But he also consistently supported her (and his son) despite what must have been extraordinary pressure to bow to the demands of the increasingly powerful hardliners. He never surrendered to the “lesser and alien” rhetoric, refusing to concede that his wife or son were any less legitimate as rulers of Gondor than a native-born descendant of Númenor, and he never remarried after her death despite living for another hundred years or so (admittedly, remarriage in Gondor seems to have been rare, but it’s not entirely unheard of!). I can’t imagine that Valacar would incur the hardships and challenges he did for a woman that he didn’t love fiercely and believe to be wholly worthy of filling the role of his wife, his partner, his queen, and the mother of his heirs.

Vidumavi’s Legacy in the Narrative of Middle Earth

Vidumavi’s decisions to marry Valacar, to bear his son, and to follow him home to Gondor are intensely personal, wrapped up in her emotions, her dreams, and her vision of the life she wanted to live for herself. And yet, they also had seismic impacts on Middle-earth as a whole. By merely existing as a Northman in Gondor, she touched off a rebellion that reverberated down through generations of Gondorian leadership and changed the fates of multiple lands in a way that few could have predicted.

Militarily, the kinstrife that was fought to exclude Vidumavi’s heritage from the Gondorian royal house was nothing short of catastrophic. There was massive “slaughter and destruction” at the hands of the hardliners, the capital was burned, a palantír was lost in the chaos, and most of Gondor suffered from a decade of neglect and abuse under the short reign of Eldacar’s usurper cousin, Castamir.²⁹ Although Eldacar eventually won back the throne, aided by his Northmen relatives and loyal Gondorians, the rebels weren’t entirely vanquished.³⁰ Instead, they retreated to Umbar, where they continued to foment anti-Gondor sentiment, make war against Gondor on-and-off for another 1,500+ years, and even affect events in far-off Arnor and Rohan, as at times Gondor was unable to send military aid to its allies due to the constant threat posed by its hostile southern neighbor.³¹

Politically, the effects of the kinstrife dominated Gondorian affairs of state through twelve generations, and though the rebellion was ostensibly waged to protect the sanctity of the monarchy, it ultimately led to its downfall instead. Descendants of the kings were “greatly diminished in the Kin-strife,” with some being killed and others fleeing to Umbar.³² Members of the high nobility continued to view one another with suspicion, ever mindful of the machinations that had already led to one coup, and that only caused more descendants to defect to Umbar over time or to simply give up their royal titles in order to be left in peace.³³ As a result, when Eärnur died childless in T.A. 2050, no claimant could be found that satisfied all parties and “all feared the memory of the Kin-strife, knowing that if any such dissension arose again, then Gondor would perish.”³⁴ Instead, the only acceptable solution was to leave the throne vacant, effectively ending the line of kings and beginning the thousand-year rule of the stewards.

Socially, the introduction of Vidumavi to Gondorian court life was just the beginning for Northmen in Gondor. Those that had already been invited there by Valacar’s father carried themselves “more proudly” after her arrival, and some achieved places of high rank in the Gondorian army and society.³⁵ After the kinstrife, even more Northmen came to Gondor as Eldacar naturally looked on them favorably and was in need of people by which to “[replenish]” Gondor after the losses of the war.³⁶ No doubt this large migration resulted in a variety of social and cultural changes as the newcomers found their footing in their adopted land. The increasingly familiar presence of Northmen in Gondor must also have played a role in tightening the bond between the two peoples, which continued on—sometimes stronger and sometimes weaker—for many generations before becoming formalized in the swearing of perpetual friendship via the Oath of Eorl at the founding of Rohan.

The only long-lasting impact of Vidumavi’s life that did not reflect positively on her or her Northmen heritage was in the effect of her bloodline on the so-called purity of the Gondorians. Although the feared introduction of “lesser” blood into the royal house did not produce noticeable effects at first, an impact did slowly emerge over time as “the blood of the kingly house and kindred became more mixed.”³⁷ We can see this most clearly in the gradual shortening of the high Gondorian lifespans, which dwindled from a standard of 250 or so years at the time of Eldacar to only 160 by the time of Eärnil II, the last king of Gondor (pre-Aragorn) to die a natural death.³⁸ Tolkien was careful to specify that some element of this waning was inevitable regardless of the influence of the Northmen, as it was tied to the passage of time and the increasing distance from the glory of Númenor, but the “mingling” of the two peoples played a definite role.³⁹ By the time of LotR, Faramir notes that the high Gondorians scarcely deserve the title anymore, so degraded are they from the original standard.⁴⁰

Vidumavi’s Legacy in the Meta Narrative

Vidumavi’s role in the story both reflects and amplifies a number of Tolkien’s most significant narrative themes and meta ideas, including some which intriguingly conflict with one another.

Her marriage represents a literal joining of Gondor to the people who would become the Rohirrim, and it expanded their initial practical military alliance into one that also had political, cultural, and emotional facets. Whatever drama and unpleasantness the marriage caused within Gondor, the profound friendship that developed between the lands over time as a result produced unmitigated goods for both kingdoms and for Middle-earth as a whole. As such, it’s one of Tolkien’s best and most explicit examples of fellowship, which he clearly believed to be a moral virtue.

From the very moment of Arda’s inception—sung into existence through voices joined together in harmony and common purpose, and marred only by the discord of arrogant self-interest—Tolkien consistently positioned cooperation, friendship, and mutual aid as both duties and assets, signs of goodness and nobility that also earned both tangible and intangible rewards. The same is true of Vidumavi and Valacar. The narrative endorses their fellowship across multiple dimensions. The story treats them with sympathy, and it repudiates those who fought against them by having the rebels’ actions lead to failure and suffering. At the same time, the alliance between Gondor and the proto-Rohirrim that Vidumavi and Valacar helped solidify becomes key to the welfare of both kingdoms and one day helps to save all of Middle-earth from the dominion of Sauron. By choosing unity over division, Vidumavi and Valacar and, ultimately, Gondor and Rohan aligned themselves with one of Tolkien’s clearest paths to spiritual victory (and frequently material and physical victory as well!).

Among the other themes implicated in the Vidumavi story is Tolkien’s clear interest in how communities came to be divided between those who were “worthy” and those who were not and the extent to which those divisions reflected innate differences of capacity and character among people. The idea that all individuals are inherently equal is one that modern readers probably (hopefully?) take for granted, having been raised to believe that people have equal intrinsic value, that no one is better than anyone else based solely on where and when they were born, and that honor and regard are earned through intention and behavior rather than simply inherited from ancestors. But those concepts are much less straightforward in the legendarium.

As with the Gondorians in Vidumavi’s day, Tolkien repeatedly set up societies that were stratified into quality-based hierarchies that were thought to reflect some measure of worthiness, ennoblement, and divine favor. We see this in the High, Middle, and Low Men as described in detail above. We see it among the Elves, with the Eldar that went to Valinor and saw the light of the trees, the Sindar that heeded the call but didn’t complete the journey, and the Avari, who refused to begin. We even see it in the relationship between Men and Elves, where the Elves are positioned as more powerful, more enlightened, and closer to the gods than even the Edain, the highest of Men.⁴¹

Often, these stratifications and the disparate treatment of individuals according to their hierarchical position are portrayed in the story as unjust and undesirable, and they frequently lead to conflict or outright violence. This is certainly the case for Vidumavi and her family, for whom (as noted above) the narrative shows a lot of empathy while simultaneously portraying those who looked down on her as foolish, cruel, and ineffective. It would be possible to read those narrative outcomes as a condemnation of the whole construct of hierarchies that attempt to sort individuals by inherent worth, and it would be possible to see the constant reappearance of these hierarchies across Tolkien’s ages and races as a comment on the harmful, real life tendency of people to fall into this way of thinking over and over again. But such a reading omits half the story.

For all that Tolkien signals to us that the treatment of Vidumavi and her Northmen people was wrong, he also does not fully reject the ideas behind the ideology that justified their mistreatment. The Gondorian rebels’ discriminatory rhetoric is based in truth, at least in-universe. The High Men of Gondor do have longer lives and access to special knowledge and abilities relative to the Northmen. Bringing Vidumavi into the royal family does dilute those divinely granted advantages over time.

The narrative repeatedly validates those bloodline concepts and, at times, even seems to endorse them. An only mildly less inflammatory version of the rhetoric of Vidumavi’s insurrectionist opponents is still being repeated in Gondor more than a thousand years after her death, and by no less than Faramir, Tolkien’s self-described author-insert character that we, as readers, are meant to like and trust. The narrative also requires reinstalling a king in Gondor with the “pure blood of Westernesse” in order to deliver Middle-earth from the threat of Sauron, implying that the coronation of Aragorn is the ultimate righting of a wrong that began with Vidumavi and her impure blood. If Tolkien was trying to tell us that it’s immoral to treat any individual differently on the basis of their position in one of these hierarchies, it sure seems like he was also telling us that the hierarchies themselves are valid and based in truth.

The implications of all of this are uncomfortable, at least for a modern reader. Notions of blood purity and “lesser” humans have caused (and are still causing) catastrophic suffering in the real world, and even in the story it results in situations and characterizations that seem patently unfair to us, where people who are clearly worthy are denied honor and vice versa. Why should Vidumavi and her Northmen, who do nothing in the story that lacks honor or goodness, be automatically consigned to a lower class of humanity than someone like Castamir, who illegally usurped his cousin, murdered untold numbers of his countrymen, and then abused and neglected the population but was yet a legitimate High Man of Gondor?

One possible explanation is that Tolkien, perhaps reflecting his own personal religious beliefs, was firmly committed to the idea that divine favor is earned through service to god—or, in the case of the Eldar and the Edain, to the Valar—and he was intent on reflecting that in his work by tangibly rewarding the communities that had provided that service (though making the divine favor inheritable such that it ultimately benefited people many generations later who played no part in the original act of service seems like a significant inconsistency of any such theology!). Another possible explanation is that retaining these hierarchies of Men and then having them interact with one another allowed him to incorporate another of his favored themes, the slow fading of the elements of faerie from Middle-earth.

The world of Middle-earth is our same world, but it’s a place that still has mystical forces, dynamics, and presences that no longer exist (or are no longer perceivable) in modernity: Elves and various creatures, inanimate objects imbued with power, talents and abilities that far exceed normal human skill … magic, for lack of a better word. In Gondor, these elements of faerie persist in the form of the divine favor that was granted to their ancestors by the Valar and gave them the distinct advantages that set them above the other Men of Middle-earth. Vidumavi does not share in that faerie-style divine favor, and the introduction of her non-faerie heritage into the Gondorian royal line ultimately degrades the effects of faerie in her descendants, making them more and more like to the “regular” world that Vidumavi represents rather than the magical world of Gondor’s legendary history. Her influence on their bloodlines hastens the long, slow process by which all things faerie will slowly disappear from Gondor, as it already has in so many other parts of Middle-earth.

This fading is a consistent, ever-present theme across LotR, and it is Tolkien’s in-universe explanation for how we got from a world of Elves and dragons and palantíri and rings of power to our real life and everyday existence. So it is not surprising, on some level, to see the theme of fading reflected in this part of the story as well. But if we’re to view the loss of faerie as a sad or negative thing—which is certainly a logical reading of this story, particularly as the elements of faerie were literal gifts from god—that has complicating implications for Tolkien’s other meta concepts, specifically the previously discussed theme of the moral value of fellowship. We’ve already established that the narrative positions Vidumavi and Valacar’s relationship as an exemplar of this kind of fellowship. But if the perpetuation of faerie-like divine favor is vulnerable to the homogenizing, profane influence of the “regular” world, then the positive effect of that fellowship is much less clear. If it is inevitable that a union between those in possession of the favor and those who were not will degrade that favor over time, it is no longer a forgone conclusion that fellowship is always the correct answer. Perhaps it is not always a moral virtue after all.

Tolkien may have been perfectly conscious of all these complexities and contradictions, and he may even have seen them as a good thing.They certainly make his work more similar to the real world, where complexities and contradictions abound—sometimes respect, honor, and reward are given with no regard to merit, sometimes what is good and just necessarily brings harm as well, etc. Or perhaps he just never found a way to successfully reconcile all of these concepts together and decided to let them stand as they were, with feints in both directions reflecting his unsettled state of mind and allowing each reader to make their own interpretation.

Either way, the nuances and subtleties give us good reason to spend valuable minutes contemplating the life and legacy of Vidumavi, a woman who shook an ages-old fictional empire from only a few paragraphs of an appendix.

Works Cited

1. The Lord of the Rings, “Appendix A, The Númenorean Kings."
2. Unfinished Tales, “Cirion and Eorl and the Friendship of Gondor and Rohan" and The History of Middle-earth, Volume XII: The Peoples of Middle-earth, Of Dwarves and Men, “Relations of the Longbeard Dwarves and Men.”
3. Unfinished Tales, “Cirion and Eorl and the Friendship of Gondor and Rohan.”
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. The History of Middle-earth, Volume XII: The Peoples of Middle-earth, The Heirs of Elendil, “The Heirs of Elendil.”
7. The Lord of the Rings, “Appendix A, The Númenorean Kings."
8. Unfinished Tales, “Cirion and Eorl and the Friendship of Gondor and Rohan.”
9. The Lord of the Rings, “Appendix A, The Númenorean Kings."
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. The History of Middle-earth, Volume XII: The Peoples of Middle-earth, The Making of Appendix A, “The Realms in Exile.”
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. The Lord of the Rings, “Appendix A, The Númenorean Kings."
19. The History of Middle-earth, Volume XII: The Peoples of Middle-earth, The Making of Appendix A, “The Realms in Exile”: “There were gathered many of those who declared that they would never accept as king a man half of foreign race, born in an alien country. ‘Vinitharya is his right name,’ they said. ‘Let him go back to the land where it belongs!’”
20. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, “Window on the West.”
21. The Silmarillion, Akallabêth.
22. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, “Window on the West.”
23. The Lord of the Rings, “Appendix A, The Númenorean Kings."
24. The History of Middle-earth, Volume XII: The Peoples of Middle-earth, The Making of Appendix A, “The Realms in Exile.”
25. The Lord of the Rings, “Appendix A, The Númenorean Kings."
26. The History of Middle-earth, Volume XII: The Peoples of Middle-earth, The Making of Appendix A, “The Realms in Exile.”
27. The Lord of the Rings, “Appendix A, The Númenorean Kings."
28. The History of Middle-earth, Volume XII: The Peoples of Middle-earth, The Making of Appendix A, “The Realms in Exile.”
29. The Lord of the Rings, “Appendix A, The Númenorean Kings."
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. The History of Middle-earth, Volume XII: The Peoples of Middle-earth, The Making of Appendix A, “The Realms in Exile.”
36. The Lord of the Rings, “Appendix A, The Númenorean Kings."
37. Ibid.
38. The History of Middle-earth, Volume XII: The Peoples of Middle-earth, The Heirs of Elendil, “The Heirs of Elendil.”
39. The Lord of the Rings, “Appendix A, The Númenorean Kings."
40. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, “Window on the West.”
41. I could certainly imagine that the enthusiasm for rank and hierarchy among the Gondorian descendants of the Edain stemmed directly from their own insecurity at having always been perceived as lesser than their Elven friends in prior ages. What is more unfortunately human than to react to unfairness and inequality by replicating those same structures and imposing them on someone else in order to reclaim a sense of power and dignity?