Where Are the Aragorn and Arwen Web Sites?
© Michael Martinez
Search for the names "Aragorn" and "Arwen" on the Web today and you're likely to come up with a mixture of sites, most of them uninformative or, worse, misinformative. I am astonished at how many Web sites have a section which at least mentions Aragorn but which also attribute the wrong names and titles to him. One of his names was Thengel? That item must have escaped Tolkien's notice.
Although today there is a dearth of Aragorn and Arwen sites I think it's a safe bet to say that in a couple of years there will be a run on Aragorn/Arwen Web real estate. I don't just mean domain names (although with Aragorn's long list of names and titles it would be expensive to tie up all the namespace), but the topic in general. There will be official "unofficial" pages, unofficial pages, pages for Aragorn, pages for Arwen, pages for Stuart Townsend and Aragorn, pages for Liv Tyler and Arwen, link lists, Webrings, message boards, mailing lists....
Are Stuart and Liv prepared for this? They will forever more be The Cool Couple of Fantasy, like it or not, just as Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh have been Rhett and Scarlet ever since 1939's "Gone With the Wind" was released. And at least Gable and Leigh didn't have to worry about what would circulate on the Internet.
There are already pages out there for MERP players, the Elendor MUSH people, and a few attempts at encyclopedia-like works which give a few bare-bones facts about Aragorn. Arwen usually gets mentioned in passing, almost on the level of, "By the way, she was not only the daughter of Elrond, but also the girl who got to marry Elessar." Such passion. Such fury. Such eloquence.
There will be Aragorn and Arwen fan fiction elucidating their mysterious visits together, the lost days in Lothlorien, secret epistles Elrond never knew about. I suppose there will eventually even be Aragorn and Arwen pornography (and slash fiction, assuming someone can figure out which is more slashable). If you don't know what slash is you're probably safer not going there anyway.
Artists (both good and bad) will render the images of Aragorn and Arwen as portrayed by Townsend and Tyler, or as they would have preferred the characters portrayed by other actors and actresses. I don't mean the top-notch NAME artists like Alan Lee and John Howe, but Internet artists who scan their drawings or doodle up faces on their PCs. There is a great deal of fannish artwork out there for other subjects right now.
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