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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9252092" data-attributes="member: 42582">Appendix A says that "grievous . . . was the parting of Elrond and Arwen, for they were sundered by the Sea and by a doom beyond the end of the world", that "Arwen became as a mortal woman", and finally that Arwen "laid herself to rest upon Cerin Amroth; and there is her green grave, until the world is changed".You are correct that "At the Grey Havens dwelt Cirdan the Shipwright, and some say he dwells there still, until the Last Ship sets sail into the West." Appendix A also notes that "In the days of the Kings most of the High Elves that still lingered in Middle-earth dwelt with Cirdan or in the seaward lands of Lindon." But Appendix B says that "after the passing of Galadriel in a few years [after the War of the Ring] Celeborn grew weary of his realm and went to Imladris to dwell with the sons of Elrond." I can't find anything in Appendix B that talks about Celeborn taking ship, and I can't find this either in the section of Unfished Tales on Galadriel and Celeborn.The only Fourth Age ships mentioned in Appendix are the one that took Sam, and then after the death of Aragorn the grey ship build by Legolas in Ithilien that carried him and Gimli "down Anduin and so over Sea".As is Cirdan's continued dwelling in the Havens.This may be so. It doesn't make the case for consistency, though. It's part of the case against it!Well, the "established lore" is what has been written and published, and so in a sense it can't contradict itself: it is what it is. But "things we don't understand" (eg the relationship between, and timelines pertaining to, Galadriel and Celeborn) don't have some objective existence that we strive to uncover: there is no objective reality here that anchors our inquiry.The fiction is written and our "understanding" flows from that. Consistency to prior "rules" or conceptions doesn't seem to be a particular constraint on JRRT's work.As I posted upthread, the corruption could - considered in the abstract - manifest in any number of other ways, and from the point of view of setting consistency any would do as well as any other, and indeed consistency might be increased if the Ring either made Gollum more like a Nazgul, or obliterated him with its power.Pointing out that certain things are exceptions or exceptional doesn't seem to me to refute the case against consistency. It helps make it out.There's an argument, in my view, that the whole of the Ent "arc" is an instance of this. Fangorn is full of these ancient peoples, and Celeborn and Galadriel live barely a stone's throw from them, and yet Treebeard (Bk VI, ch VI) laments that "It is long, long since we met by stock or by stone"; and earlier (Bk II, ch VIII) Celeborn warns the Fellowship not to "risk becoming entangled in the Forest of Fangorn. That is a strange land, and is now little known." Yet is seems that he and Galadriel know that Ents live there!But magic - and especially sorcery, the use of spells - is exactly whatever the story needs it to be, and no more. There is no consistent conception that I can see of what sorcery is, or how it works, or what effect it can have. (This contrasts, for instance, with A Wizard of Earthsea.)The latter.</blockquote>

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