The Sprite Stuff: 10 Great Pop-Culture Elves

As the lone elf in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, the nine adventurers who must bring the ring of power back to Mordor to be destroyed, Legolas (Orlando Bloom, in the role that made him famous) proves a fine ambassador for his race of isolationist immortals. He overcomes the millennia-old elvish aversion to dwarves and befriends Gimli; he’s a crack archer with a seemingly inexhaustible quiver of arrows; and he has lovely blond hair.

Of course, that’s all in The Lord of the Rings. In the new The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Bloom’s Legolas shows up again, a few decades younger and strikingly less mature. He still hates dwarves, and he’s still stuck on an elf woman (Tauriel) who’s beneath his station. But he’s also still a whiz with a bow and arrow, a fact he gets to prove often in this installment (and, presumably, the next one, 2014’s The Hobbit: There and Back Again).

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