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Of What Kind of Elves the Sons of Elrond Were, Which Is to Say: Unusual Ones
Here the account must say something that will surprise no one who knew them and will surprise everyone who knew only their father: Elladan and Elrohir, from a very early age, were the least Elvish elves in Rivendell, and they wore this distinction with complete and cheerful unapology.
This was, in one sense, entirely Elrond's fault. He had raised them with deliberate breadth — had brought to the table of their upbringing not only the long lore of the Eldar and the histories of the great houses but also the annals of Men, the chronicles of the Dwarven halls, the records of the Shire-folk, the accounts of those peoples of the world who were not Elvish and not royal and who had, in Elrond's view, rather more claim on his sons' understanding than most Elvish education cared to acknowledge. He had intended to raise children with the vision to see the whole of the world without the blinders of kindred and the pride of lineage. He had, in this respect, succeeded beyond his intentions, which is the particular fate of parents who teach their children to think.
What this meant in practice was as follows.
Elladan and Elrohir, given the choice between the company of Elvish children of similar age and the company of the mortal children who occasionally visited Rivendell with their families, chose the mortal children every time, and when asked to account for this preference said, without apparent embarrassment, that Elvish children already knew they were better than everyone else and this made them dull to talk to, whereas mortal children were interested in everything. And among mortal children they were simply themselves, which required rather less management than being the sons of Lord Elrond required among Elvish ones.
The preference did not narrow with age. If anything it widened. They befriended travelling merchants and rangers passing through Rivendell, and the children of those merchants and rangers, and the children of those children. They had friends among the Dúnedain whose names they remembered across generations, and among the Dwarves of Erebor and the Iron Hills, with whom they maintained a cautious and respectful correspondence quite independent of any official relationship between Rivendell and the mountain-halls. They had made peace with the Beornings before their mother's capture made orcs a personal matter — had met the great skin-changers in the wilderlands east of the Misty Mountains and come to a mutual arrangement of wariness and eventual goodwill that stood for a long time. They knew the Ents of Fangorn with the particular familiarity of those who had sat and drunk tree-draught and listened to very long-form accounts of local history with genuine interest. They had made, through Aragorn's introductions, a handful of friends in Bree and among the folk of the Shire — had sat in the common room of the Prancing Pony on more than one occasion and drunk the local ale and played at cards with hobbits, who were, Elrohir maintained with some conviction, the most unexpectedly sharp-witted card-players he had ever encountered.
It is worth saying plainly: Elladan and Elrohir liked things. This is not, among the Eldar of the elder days, a given. There are Elves for whom the world had become a disappointment to be endured until the sea-longing took them; there are Elves for whom the present is perpetually less than the past; there are Elves who look at the races of Men and Dwarves and Hobbits and see lesser things moving through a diminished world. Elladan and Elrohir were not these elves. They looked at the world and found it continuously and specifically interesting, and they looked at the creatures in it — the animals and the birds and the Eagles and the people of every kind and the trees — and found them, with the exception of creatures marked by Morgoth's long shadow, worth knowing.
The hatred of orcs deserves its own account, because it has been misunderstood.
The common account places it after their mother's capture on the Redhorn Pass — and indeed the capture of Celebrían sharpened what was already there into something that Elrond feared, in those years, might be a consuming fire. But the hatred had begun earlier, and had its roots not in personal loss but in accumulated witness. They had spent decades among mortal friends who were themselves the victims of orcish raids: families of Dúnedain who had lost kin, communities of Men in the wilds who lived in the shadow of the Misty Mountains with a specific, practical terror that no history book could have communicated as clearly as an evening around a campfire with a man who had buried his brother in the previous season. They had seen what the creatures of Morgoth did to living things — things that were, by the measure of any decent consideration, not enemies, not combatants, not parties to any war, only people going about the business of their brief lives. The hatred had grown from grief for those people. It was not a small or a simple thing.
After their mother, it became something else. After their mother, it became a thing that Elrond watched very carefully, with the particular vigilance of a healer watching a wound to determine whether it was healing or festering, and there were years when he was not certain which it was. They were not consumed. They emerged from those years still recognisably themselves — still curious, still companionable, still capable of sitting with a hobbit and losing at cards with good grace — but marked. Everyone who has survived something is marked. The question is only what the mark does to the shape of a person, and what Elladan and Elrohir's mark did was make them fearless in a specific, considered way: not the fearlessness of youth, which does not understand what it is risking, but the fearlessness of those who have looked at what they fear most and decided that facing it is better than avoiding it.
Elrond lost count of how many times he thought he had lost them.
He never lost count of how many times he thanked whatever grace remained in the world that he hadn't.