Glorfindel
new version posted February 15, 2006
old version available below
When I decided to do some of the other residents of Rivendell who were not really shown in Jackson's movie (I know, there's some flap going about saying that a particular blond guy in the background is supposed to be Glorfindel, but if he is, someone has a very strange idea of what constitutes a beautiful and powerful Elven Lord who had lived in the Blessed Realm), Glorfndel was, of course, inevitable. He posed some of the inevitable problems of Sims who wear white, but my biggest puzzle was where to put him on the site when I was done with him. Although some scholars and scholarly websites insist that Tolkien was only toying with the idea of Glorfindel in LotR being the same Glorfindel of Gondolin who slew a Balrog back in the First Age, from reading his writings on the matter (and from knowing what my own speculative notes about characters in my writings tend to be like), I think he was fairly resolved in his own mind (subconscious, if not conscious) that they were indeed the same person. He had only to settle on the wheres and whens of how and why Glorfindel returned, and unfortunately passed away before he had completed and resolved his thoughts on the matter (so I believe). In any case, my Glorfindel is drawn from the supposition that the two are the same, and thus in his clothing he wears a belt and other accouterments with a golden flower motif, as Glorfindel of Gondolin was the head of the House of the Golden Flower in Turgon's realm. I was also torn over whether or not to give him straight or wavy hair, to make it braided, not braided, etcetera. Both in the original version and the revised, I decided to make it wavy, although I did add the braids in back for the revision.
Oh, and I decided to put him here in the Ages of the Sun rather than in the Elder Days, because my initial notion was to make other residents of Rivendell, which did not exist in the First Age.
The revised version was made for what I feel are fairly obvious reasons. Although my original design for Glorfindel wasn't too bad, given my mesh-making and skinning abilities at the time, I always felt his face lacked the kind of noble character it should have had, given his prominence as an Elven lord, and I knew that given time and sufficient practice, I could do it better. My overall idea for this presentation of the character was to make it look somewhat as I would have envisioned Glorfindel when he first met the hobbits and Aragorn en route to Rivendell -- minus the various riding cloaks and other trail gear. Perhaps someday, I'll make that version, too.
