She was born before the First Age of Middle Earth, making her thousands of years old.
It takes about forty hours to learn the basics of swordfighting. After about seven years you should be pretty good.
Olympic level gymnasts and professional acrobats probably have been training for between five and twenty years.
Every elf is a master of what they want to do. Many are masters of idling around listening to poetry. Galadriel - TV Galadriel - spent a thousand years becoming a badass.
Any elf that wanted to be could be a badass. But as you see in the show, most elves get distracted by the thought of going home.
After having been stationed in Middle Earth as an occupying force.
And well, that's the interesting thing about fiction.
You can say 'none of this is there in Tolkein's text'. 'Its not true to Tolkein's vision' or whatever.
But... Tolkien was taking a certain Mittel Europe form of myth cycle and anglicising it, weaving in his experiences and culture. The British Empire was still an Empire, one in which we thought like the elves - that we were not there as an occupying force but as a liberating one who did not leave. This was also the American world view post 1945 - the liberators of Europe with their Coke and their Hersheys and their nylons and their atomic weapons of mass destruction.
World War Two was a clash of cultures who considered themselves morally, intellectually, culturally and technologically superior.
During the initial scramble for Africa, British diplomats visited Dahomey. The King of Dahomey had an army comprised totally of women. The British were a powerful empire, so he demonstrated his power by ordering his Amazons to mock battle with each other. They threw themselves onto thorn bush stockades to demonstrate their willingness to bleed and die on command.
Rather than impressed, the British were of course horrified, and pretty much immediately invaded to depose the guy. Because the British had already begun to fetishise the passivity of women, surrounding a female figurehead with the iron legions of patriarchy.
For queen and country.
And then we went and had our own version of Dahomey's thornbushes. We had the Somme, where we threw countless waves of young men fresh out of school onto barbed wire to die in their hundreds of thousands. And the only light in the darkness, the only gentleness in the carnage, were the nurses that tended to the injured and the dying.
My grandfather was there, in the trenches. He was a creative - we gave his diary, filled with art and poetry and signed by dead men to the Museum on the 75th anniversary of the battle. It felt like the right thing to do at the time, but I regret it now.
My aunt was a missionary, bringing Methodism, education, culture and medicine to China - before the Long March and Mao drove her out - and then Africa. She didn't think of herself as an occupying force until much, much later.
For an Age we thought Britain was a force for good, for prosperity, for happiness. We are the elves, the Americans the men of Westernesse, following in our footsteps. Wars of self interested liberation, followed by occupation, followed by assimilation. If conquerors can't pretend to be the heroes of the story, what are they? Everyone is somebody's villain.
After a hundred and fifty years, much of the Commonwealth is revolting. They are dumping the Queen as head of state, and its not because Harry married Megan Markle.
You know, those frontline Russian troops in Ukraine also imagined they would be greeted as liberators. I bet that's what a chunk of India thinks about Kashmir, or China thinks about Taiwan. But maybe, just maybe, its time to put the third age of this Mittel Earth well and truly to bed. To stop attempting to impose our elven culture on others as a masturbatory exercise in our own imagined superiority.
To diminish. To go into the west, into the undying lands of history.
