#also on an entirely diff note music is such a poignant and. ahem. non-cringey and awful. a way to express love for maglor

[vardasvapors]

"I was at the council I speak of, for I was the minstrel and counsellor of Gilgalad." ~ Elrond, "At Rivendell", Return of the Shadow, presented without comment because it's perfect as is

AIUDSFIDJHDJG…MINSTREL OF GIL-GALAD….I’M…FUCKIGN—

god, i thought i had run out of moments (and fingers and toes to count them on) in the HOME where I had some vague theory about “hmm i mean this is probably really Out There but what if it was like ___?” only to then read Tolkien ALMOST LITERALLY ECHOING EXACTLY WHAT I WAS THINKING.

Ok it’s not THAT close to what i was thinking since the context of that line is:

‘You remember?’ said Bingo [Frodo], looking astonished at Elrond. ‘But I thought this tale was of days very long ago,’‘So it is,’ said Elrond, laughing. ‘But my memory reaches back a long way [>to long ago]. My father was Eärendel who was born in Gondolin seven years before it fell and my mother was Elwing daughter of Lúthien daughter of King Thingol of Doriath, and I have seen many ages in the West of the World. I was at the council I speak of, for I was the minstrel and counsellor of Gilgalad…

– i.e., about the Last Alliance era and therefore not entirely in-line with tolkien’s later narrative of the Eregion Incident, unless elrond is being consciously facetious here, in a, idk, alfred pennyworth vein, but even so, i wanna….finagle it into canon, like amroth-less galadriel. IT’S CUTE. even if he was actually describing an earlier phase of his lifetime, it’s cute! um. because i have a stupid sense of humor, one of the vague theories i had WAS definitely the whole ‘what would post-apocalyptic loremastery even LOOK like’ idea described here but ran out of room to speculate if this entailed, fucking, reciting all the perfectly-remembered stories he had heard from far and wide whenever he came home. but THANKS, TOLKIEN, FOR ENABLING MY DUMBEST DESIRES.

anyway uh. what was the first thing i wanted to respond with. oh yeah ‘flakey aristocrat minstrel pipes up suddenly that this annatar person is Bad News Bears and then shapes up into a general over the course of the next 500 years’ is a fun character arc. someone who can write multichapter stories write it.