Are elves’ long lives realistic?
What’s the biology behind the elves’ extended lifespans in The Lord Of The Rings?
The new The Lord Of The Rings TV show, The Rings Of Power, is a prequel set in the Second Age of Middle-earth, thousands of years before Frodo takes his long walk to Mordor. And yet, the show features familiar characters like Elrond and Galadriel, elves who were alive during the original The Lord Of The Rings trilogy. According to the lore of author J. R. R. Tolkien, this is because elven lifespans are tied to the fate of the Earth, effectively making them immortal. But this is not BBC Magic Focus you’re reading. Surely there must be a biological reason for how elves manage to live so long, while we age, decay and die?
“There are many explanations for why we die,” says evolutionary biologist Henry Gee, author of The Science Of Middle-earth and A (Very) Short History Of Life On Earth. “One is that the action of living generates harmful chemicals called free radicals.”
These, says Gee, are not tiny anarchists running around your body. “[They] are active fragments of metabolised food. So you eat your sandwich and it gets broken down into various things, but it also releases these free radicals that go around damaging DNA and so on.” This leads to your tissues degrading as you get older, and increases the risks of mutations, such as cancer. “Your cells do renew, but because of free radicals this process of renewal becomes less effective as you get older,” he says.
Different species live for different lengths of time. The tiny roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, for example, rarely lives beyond three weeks. Your dog? It likely won’t see its 15th birthday. But cold-blooded creatures such as tortoises can live for well over a century. The reasons for these varying lifespans can generally be put down to attributes like diet, physical size and the speed of their metabolism.
“Various experiments on animals like mice have shown that calorie restriction can prolong life,” says Gee. “The elves have disgustingly healthy lifestyles. They’re not like the dwarves, who are always feasting.
They don’t eat much, so they would not subject themselves to excessive amounts of free radicals. I would also imagine that they have very robust mechanisms to soak up free radicals in their metabolism, which not only helps prevent diseases associated with ageing, but also avoids tissue damage as they age.”
According to Gee, another aspect that tends to affect lifespan is reproduction.
“Organisms that live fast and die young tend to have a lot of offspring,” he says.
“Creatures like rodents have a high-pressure life because they are constantly under the threat of predation. They need to reproduce as fast as possible if they want to maintain their species.” Elves, meanwhile, only invest in a small number of children. They also live a relatively privileged, risk-free existence.
This all sounds attractive.
We are, after all, restricted to a maximum lifespan of around 100. But Gee regards elven immortality as less of a gift, and more of a curse.
“I think immortality would be disastrous,” he says. “Just imagine the boredom. One of the themes of The Lord Of The Rings is that only bad comes from wanting to prolong your life indefinitely. You can see that with Gollum.
The elves themselves say that the gift of death to human beings is something that, as the ages progress, even the gods will envy.”
VERDICT
Elves’ disease-resistant biology and clean-living lifestyles help them on their way to immortality. We’re unlikely to be able to catch up.