My favorite canon fact from Lord of the Rings:

“We have heard tell that Legolas took Gimli Glóin’s son with him because of their great friendship, greater than any that has been between Elf and Dwarf. If this is true, then it is strange indeed: that a Dwarf should be willing to leave Middle-earth for any love, or that the Eldar should receive him, or that the Lords of the West should permit it. But it is said that Gimli went also out of desire to see again the beauty of Galadriel; and it may be that she, being mighty among the Eldar, obtained this grace for him. More cannot be said of this matter.”

– Appendix A, The Return of the King

This is wild. The idea that Legolas took Gimli with him into the West, to the blessed realm of Valinor beyond the sea (basically the Elf equivalent of the afterlife) is BONKERS. That shouldn’t be possible. It breaks all the rules of the universe. And Professor Tolkien knows this, because he’s the one who wrote the rules in the first place.

I can’t stress enough how big a deal this is. For so many reasons:

1. The last time someone tried to enter Valinor without permission, it nearly destroyed the world.

When the last king of Numenor (the great island nation where Aragon’s ancestors came from), sailed an armada into the West to try to steal eternal life by force, God broke and reshaped the world to stop it from happening. God ripped Valinor out of the earth and hid it, which sunk Numenor beneath the ocean in a giant tidal wave like Atlantis, and then he took the rest of the earth, which used to be FLAT, and bent it into a round globe, so ships would always sail in a circle back to where they started. Only elf-ships can find the hidden path which continues in a straight line, where the flat earth used to be, up and out of the atmosphere of the curved earth to reach the ancient West of Valinor. So yeah: kind of a big deal. The Powers-that-be take that shit seriously.

2. Dwarves were not part of God’s original Plan.

So, in Tolkien’s world, there are many “gods” with a lower-case “g”, but only one GOD with a capital “G”. The all-seeing, all-wise creator of the world is Eru Iluvatar: The One, the Father-of-All. The great Powers entrusted with governing individual aspects of the World day-to-day are the Valar. The Valar are not technically gods; they are actually created beings more like archangels, but in practice they function almost exactly like the pagan gods from Greek or Norse mythology. Tolkien’s world is ultimately monotheistic at the top level, but with that old-school polytheistic flavor in the middle bits.

Elves and Men are the Children of Iluvatar. They were the two races of thinking, speaking beings planned from the beginning and created solely by Iluvatar himself. The Dwarves were not. The Dwarves were made in secret by Aule the Smith, the god of crafting (like Hephaestus or Vulcan), without getting permission from Iluvatar first. Iluvatar allowed the Dwarves to exist and put souls into them, but insisted they had to wait for their turn, after the awakening of Elves and Men, before they could awaken into the world.

Elves believe that when Dwarves die, they turn back into the earth and stone from which they were made. However, the Dwarves believe that they will sleep beneath the earth until the End of the World, and then finally Iluvatar will make them honorary, adopted Children and they will help Aule rebuild the world after the Last Battle.

All of that is a long way of saying: Only Elves are allowed entry into Valinor. Men are forbidden to set foot there, even though they are Children of Iluvatar. If Men can’t, then Dwarves definitelycan’t.

The idea of Legolas rucking up to the shores of Aman in a rowboat with a living Dwarf onboard, and then just looking Mandos and Manwe in the eye and saying, “Hi I’m Legolas, this is my friend Gimli: He goes where I go. Let us in.” – It’s mind-boggling. I love it.

Within the rules of the cosmology, there’s no rational explanation for why that should be allowed, other than Tolkien wanted it that way. I think Tolkien just liked Legolas and Gimli’s friendship so much he couldn’t bear to separate them, and just thought, eh, I can break my own rules this once, to give them a happy ending. I love it.