We thought that we were immune to having our hearts broken further by The Rings of Power after Adar died in season two. But we were foolish, really, to think that. In The Rings of Power season three, Arondir is killed by his adopted son, Theo, who has taken one of Sauron’s nine Rings for Men. Somehow, before the season began, we assumed Arondir wasn’t in any present danger. We suppose elves seem so naturally eternal that it didn’t seem seriously possible for one of them to die on us. Of course, being an original The Rings of Power character and not a character from the lore did leave Arondir in a certain amount of jeopardy. But DEATH? Did Arondir truly have to meet death in The Rings of Power? It shatters our hearts to know we won’t be seeing any more from this incredible character.
We’ve often described Arondir as the elfiest elf in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. And we feel Arondir’s death leaves behind a hard-to-fill absence in the elven lineup on The Rings of Power. We love Galadriel, Elrond, Gil-galad, Círdan, and Celeborn—but they are all High Elves, and their stature makes them feel a bit less warm, in a sense. They’re naturally somewhat removed from the world and its hardships. Arondir was not only truly in tune with nature and growing things, but also had a capacity for love in his heart that struck us as truly Tolkienian. He was grounded in the world the way other elves are not, and he saw the potential not only in Elvendom, but in the Kingdoms of Men, and even in Uruk Nation, despite his many reservations and reasons to dislike them. There was a compassion in Arondir that struck us as befitting of Tolkien’s most goodly creatures of light.
Arondir actor Ismael Cruz Córdova shared with us, “Arondir has compassion, and he has curiosity, and I think that one comes before the other. I think curiosity can lead you to compassion. Curiosity can lead you to many, many positive places, really. And that’s what he’s had with Adar. And I think he has that with humans, and I think he brings that always to himself, distills that into a being.” Who will bring this necessary compassion to the table after Arondir’s death? It’s a question we’re not sure we have the answer to yet.
In The Rings of Power, the elves are occupied with many pursuits, with war, with fighting evil, with the machinations of politics and survival, but Arondir was always first occupied with love. More than most elves, he sought to understand the world around him and to let it into his heart. He cared, if anything, too deeply and for too many others.
And this sensibility seemed to come right from Cruz Córdova himself, who always wanted to be an elf. In previous interviews, Cruz Córdova told us:
I had a very long-standing desire to be an elf. And what drew me to be an elf is… I don’t know, nature or nurture, I can’t tell; it’s a chicken-and-egg kind of thing. I grew up in the mountains in Puerto Rico, very rural. I was very contemplative. I didn’t really have a lot of friends, and I was a little bullied in school, a little… I was quite bullied in school. But also my environment growing up poor, and we didn’t have a TV, and, so I spent a lot of time just outside and by myself. I was sketching, and playing with flowers, and making ink out of flowers, and climbing trees. And one of my best friends was a mango tree that I loved, absolutely loved. I would climb it every afternoon and do my homework there after school.
And once I got my hands on The Lord of the Rings and the movies, it felt so familiar. The elves felt so familiar to me, with the reverence that they have for nature, and the whimsy and the contemplation. I would look at the clouds and just try to figure out “What is that?” I was mesmerized by everything: these giants, and the sun, and the soil, and I still am. I respect and revere it. So yeah, that’s what drew me to want to be one.
And every aspect of these many variables that made Arondir and Ismael Cruz Córdova into the perfect elven character shows through on our screen. An actor doesn’t have to literally be an elf to play an elf, we suppose. But it certainly doesn’t hurt when that is the case, as it was here. We feel Cruz Córdova’s resonance with what it means to be an elf made Arondir more dimensional and believable, and drew us to his romantic, soft heart. It made us ache when Arondir, riddled with remorse, apologized to a tree before chopping it down. It made our hearts clench with grief for him when Bronwyn died. And it made us yearn for the beautiful ending where ARONDIR AND MARNÛKH ESCAPE GUNDABAD SIDE BY SIDE AND GO OPEN AN INN TOGETHER!!! (I am never letting this vision go, okay? Okay.) It made our hearts break when Arondir met his death in The Rings of Power season three, however beautifully.
It’s also critical to cheer on Cruz Córdova’s Arondir for being the first non-white elf in an adaptation of Tolkien’s texts. Cruz Córdova self-identifies as Afro-Puerto Rican and Afro-Latino as well as a “neurospicy” person, and the importance of his casting as an elf cannot be overstated. For too long, roles that should belong to everyone have been given only to the narrowest population of people. Seeing Ismael Cruz Córdova play Arondir was such a tremendously beautiful experience, and we truly mourn the ending of that representation on our screens. A representation that was so meaningful to so many groups. Truly, in the place of death, we wish that Arondir could have ridden off into the sunset of The Rings of Power filled with joy. We need more elves that represent all of us in mainstream fantasy series. And we really need them to get happy endings.
In our hearts, we know that after his death in The Rings of Power, Arondir got on the express train to the Halls of Mandos, where he was whisked right back to Valinor in the blink of an eye. And this express train better not make any unnecessary stops, so Ismael Cruz Córdova and Arondir can return to Middle-earth just in time to save the day on The Rings of Power—death be damned. Yes? Yes.
Namárië, Arondir. You will be missed.
The Rings of Power season three is now airing on Prime Video.