Everybody should have somebody they'd follow, even if into a place they didn't really want to go. It was a fact of life that friendship or devotion involved such choices.

But Maru had asked a question that was hard to answer. "I'm a smith by trade, but a warrior by vocation. The world I grew up in was a dangerous place, and everyone who came to Middle-earth was in peril. We fought the first Dark Lord, Morgoth, for six hundred years. His soldiers were creatures called Orcs, Balrogs, trolls, werewolves, and other dire things. He created them by twisting natural beings into things of great evil and savagery, and he endowed them with part of his own dread spirit. They were absolutely under his control as long as they lived. We Elves got used to killing them without mercy. Mercy was useless in the face of such evil. I personally became as savage as they were when I fought them. In such a world, there is a tendency to harden one's heart in order to survive. I still revert to that state when I fight something that is as mindlessly evil as Morgoth and his minions. But I don't enjoy hurting human beings."