What Do Your Elf Eyes See?

About

What Do Your Elf Eyes See?, sometimes written as Legolas! What Do Your Elf Eyes See?, is an exploitable image macro taken from the 2002 film The Lord Of The Rings The Two Towers that depicts Legolas overlooking a valley in Rohan while scanning for signs of the missing hobbits. The scene is used in reaction images and GIFs in addition to image macro memes.

Origin

The original scene used in the meme comes from the second Lord of the Rings film, The Two Towers, which was released in theaters on December 18th, 2002. During a scene where Legolas, Aragorn and Gimili are chasing down a pack of Uruk-hai that previously captured the hobbits Merry and Pippin in the first movie, Aragorn and Legolas climb a rock outcrop to scan the valley. At one point, Aragorn asks Legolas "what do your elf eyes see?" since elves in Middle-earth have better vision than other races, which is where the quote used in memes comes from (shown below).

The actual origin of the image used in memes is uncertain, however, the oldest known instance of it appeared on October 14th, 2006, when Facepunch^[1] forum member Zeldy created a thread titled "Legolas! What do your elf-eyes see?" The thread resulted in many new images made, spanned 11 pages over the course of about a year (examples shown below).^[2] This three-panel format became the most widespread use of the scene early on.

Spread

While the three-panel version was the most common variant of the meme initially, it later spread to other formats and platforms in the following years. One such example was a YouTube Poop on August 5th, 2011, from YouTuber^[3] Mooseboy018, which received nearly 600,000 views, 5,900 likes and 920 comments in 10 years (seen below, left). On June 30th, 2014, YouTuber^[4] minutephysics uploaded a video discussing the meme and Legolas's actual viewing distance, which received over 2.3 million views, 37,000 likes and 3,500 comments in seven years (seen below, right).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References