What I mean: Legolas built an ENTIRE BOAT to bring to Valinor so Gimli could go with him cause he couldn’t bear to spend ETERNITY without him and wanted to ALWAYS be with him and if that’s not true love I honestly don’t know what is
this evidenced by how many of the Rohirrim observed his attempt to crawl into Gimli’s lap and curl up there, burying his face and hands in Gimli’s hair and murmuring happily in Sindarin
(they were also impressed with how red a dwarf’s face could go, even as he curled his hand protectively around the back of Legolas’ neck. His gaze dared even one of them to comment on how Legolas’ legs hung, akimbo, over Gimli’s lap, and so none of them dared. The axe was within reach, and glinted with sharp promise of retribution.)
There are lots of passages in LOTR that I love, but my uncontested favorite is this sentence by Galadriel:
‘Dark are the waters of Khaled-zaram and cold are the springs of Kibil-Nala and fair were the many-pillared halls of Khazad-dum in elder days before the fall of mighty kings beneath the stone.’
This is the moment Gimli gets her, or at least he gets that she gets him. In this one sentence,
She acknowledges that Gandalf (and Gimli) was not wrong to pass through Moria.
She shows empathy for Gimli’s wish to see Moria again, even if it is ruined or unsafe.
She deliberately uses the Dwarven names of places – endonyms instead of exonyms, Khazad-Dum instead of Moria, Dwarrowdelf instead of Black Pit.
She doesn’t only show respect and understanding, she shows knowledge – in addition to knowing dwarven names, she seems to know dwarven culture, since the descriptions she uses are very similar to the ones in Gimli’s song.
Knowing Galadriel’s past, it seems like her understanding of Gimli’s grief for Khazad-Dum stems from her experiences with losing… well, she lost a lot of people and places over the eras. She stood witness to the losses of various paradises, she gets it. But the fall of Gondolin is the most obvious parallel, or maybe Doriath, and the knowledge that Lothlórien can only be a faint echo of its glories.
Knowing Galadriel’s future, it seems like her grief for losing Middle-Earth forever also shines through the sentence. The world is changing and beautiful things fade or die or must be left behind, and she knows this probably best of everyone on Middle-Earth.
And in this one utterance of knowledge and compassion, where she acknowledges the beauty of dwarven lands and the grief of their loss, she uses one-syllable adjectives, which, as @thearrogantemu pointed out, are Tolkien’s favorite mode of signaling beauty, age and gravitas. Dark. Cold. Fair.
willowfoot 