atariince

[atariince]

// Chokes on wine while realising some analyses of the Amazon series are tagged as 'tolkien meta'.

...

Please, send some help. //

[atariince]

painting old sketches

[atariince]

El arte y el artista + The art and the artist

@feanorianweek #5 - Curufin

[atariince]

Maglor (tormented singer)

for @feanorianweek 2025

[atariince]

Yep.

I know...

Have I created a (test) Curufin-Tav in Bg3?

Am I doing this because I want to see this freaking ass of a Noldo will react to Astarion?

Am I planning a fanfic about my two favourite high-elves from different plans?

So many questions... too early to answer.

Am I shipping them? tbh I don't know yet. I'll see how Curvo will deal with that beautiful traumatized bastard of a vampire spawn.

[atariince]

The number of artists I would commission if I had a budget for it is insane.

And I will commission them as soon as I can.

Please, pay the artists you like if you can afford it. If you can't, share their works. Tell them you love their work. They deserve to know you love what they do.

And to the artists : You are important. Your art is important. If your followers don't commission you, it's not because they don't like your work. We adore what you do.

AI will NEVER replace you.

[atariince]

Have I created a (test) Curufin-Tav in Bg3?

Am I doing this because I want to see this freaking ass of a Noldo will react to Astarion?

Am I planning a fanfic about my two favourite high-elves from different plans?

So many questions... too early to answer.

Am I shipping them? tbh I don't know yet. I'll see how Curvo will deal with that beautiful traumatized bastard of a vampire spawn.

[atariince]

Me: A people-pleaser plagued by low self-esteem.

My OCs : Conceited, selfish bastards plagued by vainglory.

[atariince]

Via

[atariince]

When the proof-reader tells me "This author is a bit judgemental against the House of Fëanor, isn't he?"

Oh, girl, you have no idea. Now, let me tell you something....

[atariince]

I've been working on this translation for 10 months and yessss, I'm so grateful to be able to translate this major publications! but oh god, it's driving me mad... 500 pages to proofread before next Wednesday 🙃 Anyway, soon available in French, thanks to my publisher, Bragelonne :

[atariince]

Friendly reminder than even if you use AI-generated images/texts/ videos for a good cause, for meaningful and important fights, you're still using fascist tools, thus playing the game of technofascists.

It's not inconsequential.

Don't use AI, please. You don't need it. They make you believe you need it. Don't give them this power.

[atariince]

I've been working on this translation for 10 months and yessss, I'm so grateful to be able to translate this major publications! but oh god, it's driving me mad... 500 pages to proofread before next Wednesday 🙃 Anyway, soon available in French, thanks to my publisher, Bragelonne :

[atariince]

This blog is and will probably remain mostly inactive.

I'm still on Tumblr, currently feeding my need for BG3 content, and it happens here:

[atariince]

This blog is and will probably remain mostly inactive.

I'm still on Tumblr, currently feeding my need for BG3 content, and it happens here:

[atariince]

Curufin the Crafty.

commission for @sunstone-merj

[atariince]

Back in 2019, I wrote a blog post called The Inequality Prototype. As part of it, I counted a bunch of stuff related to the Valar and looked at how those metrics differed based on gender. At the time, I thought it would be interesting to extend this work over the entire Silmarillion, namely looking at who speaks in the text and who doesn't. For Tolkien Meta Week, I began this work and am collecting my analyses related to it here. It is very much still a work in progress and will likely take me years to complete, but I'm going to post interesting data as I discover it.

This project, like all of my data projects, is available to use under a CC license for others who want to play with the data: View the data | Copy the data | Methodology, progress, etc.

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Dialogue does not occur evenly across The Silmarillion. While a little over 5% of the words in The Silmarillion as a whole are used in dialogue, this is very unevenly distributed across the chapters, with some chapters about half dialogue and six chapters containing no dialogue at all.

There is a lot more work to be done to tease out trends and patterns that might have some meaning, but just glancing at the graph above, some of those patterns do begin to emerge. First, dialogue increases as The Silmarillion progresses. In the second half of the book (calculated by chapter, not page or word count), only two chapters have no dialogue and only four chapters (inclusive of those two without dialogue) fall below the median of 5.3% dialogue. Put another way:

In the first half of chapters, 71% of chapters are below the median.

In the second half of chapters, 29% of chapters are below the median.

Why is this? My tentative theory is that we see the book moving from the realm of the mythic—from events that are passed down through the oral tradition and ancient written traditions—and into the historical, where the narrator has a greater array of sources, including eyewitness testimony, and begins to write with greater immediacy rather than the arm's-length style of myth and ancient history.

What I am curious about: As I dig deeper into these data, will I see this theory bear out in which episodes or characters/groups are granted actual dialogue? In other words, will characters and peoples lost to the mists of time speak less, as I would expect? Or will the type of dialogue (e.g., a formal speech that may have been preserved vs. an extempore conversation that would not) vary based on narrative distance? I have documented in the past that the narrator of The Silmarillion uses the "it is said/told/sung" construction more with characters who are less accessible, so there is evidence that Tolkien manipulated writing style based on what his narrators' access to various sources. Does he use dialogue similarly to communicate that "mythic distance"?

There are also chapters that are more expository in purpose (Valaquenta, "Of Beleriand and Its Realms") that do not contain dialogue. Without digging deeper into the chapters themselves, most of those without dialogue that aren't similarly expository are chapters where the material would be less accessible to Pengolodh as a narrator. Whether this bears added scrutiny remains to be seen!

Finally, in discussing these data on the SWG's Discord, polutropos noticed something interesting, which is that the chapter with the most dialogue—"Of Aulë and Yavanna," where almost 57% of the words of the chapter are given over to dialogue—was not in fact written by Tolkien. As document by Douglas Charles Kane in his book Arda Reconstructed, "This chapter is completely manufactured by Christopher, though using his father's own writings" (page 54). Where Kane usually includes a chart pointing to the source for each bit of The Silmarillion, his chapter on "Of Aulë and Yavanna" contains no such chart because, while he is able to document where ideas came from, Christopher actually wrote the chapter.

Interestingly, "Of the Noldor in Beleriand" is the chapter with the second most dialogue and, according to Kane, "The changes made in this chapter are among the smallest anywhere in the published text" (page 154). So Tolkien does sometimes write dialogue-heavy chapters—though without data to back me up (yet! it's coming!), most of that dialogue appears to come in the form of lengthier speeches, not necessarily the debate/conversation format of Of Aulë and Yavanna."

The biggest impact of the dialogue-heavy "Of Aulë and Yavanna," I suspect, will emerge as I dig more into the data on gender and who speak in The Silmarillion. Yavanna is one of the women who speaks the most in The Silmarillion, but almost all of her dialogue occurs in this chapter. If this chapter is constructed by Christopher, how does that impact the amount of speech women are permitted by Tolkien? Polutropos' observation spurred me to plan to document the source of the various dialogue sections: Are they original to Tolkien's writings or added? Kane, interestingly, is critical of Christopher Tolkien in Arda Reconstructed for what he perceives as Christopher removing women characters from the text. In this instance, we see a significant example of the opposite: a woman's role is not only expanded, but she is given an opportunity to speak.