#and it was why i went back to tolkien. i had to escape into tales of elves (immortals) to numb my own pain

[elvesofnoldor]

like anne rice could be such good writer if she just wrote with compassion and empathy for her characters. There was this "baby Jenks" character from the beginning of the queen of the damned and her story was so afforded so much genuine love and compassion it was literally my favourite part of the first part of the book. Baby Jenks' story reminded me of some of the best Sandman one-off characters' story tbh, it was that good. Wish Anne Rice always write with so much love and compassion though. Anyways, It's no wonder, tbh, that Baby Jenks character is actually Claudia (lestat wept for that girl because he was weeping for Claudia from his life, pretty sure at this point Anne Rice consciously projects her own motherhood onto him). maybe at that point in anne rice's life, she has heard enough about things like re-incarnation and all the better places one can go to after death that all that stuff is allowing her to started to make peace with the tragic death of her late daughter?? but i wonder if she ever got to walk out of her grief? cause idk? she kept writing vampire books??? to the end of her life???

like it's honestly such a mess that she wrote IWTV in response to the very tragic death of her daughter. I have to be honest, i cannot begin to imagine just how painful it is to go through something that traumatic, but i also felt like writing a psychosexual gothic horror vampire story is not exactly therapeutic either. It's kind of funny that it takes getting into the vampire chronicles for me to truly understand what vampires really are. But i do, finally. Vampires are not weird fantastical creatures, they are not Death itself, and they are certainly not Life Everlasting. Vampires, like ghosts, are simply a spiritual embodiment of the very rejection of Death. They are very effective device to examine the human condition, because we as human beings all fundamentally reject the inevitability of death and obliteration of the self we currently possess. We inherently fear change, fear loss, the changefulness of life, and the annihilation of self. Vampires embody a certain state of mind that's frankly universal in humans. But I don't think Anne Rice always wrote her vampire chronicles knowing vampires are??? if she ever knew??? Definitely not at the beginning though, when Louis was definitely just her self-insert and he brought Claudia to live with a theatre of vampires and they live happily ever after. I mean, midnight mass really got the Point when it says "the only way to achieve True Immortality is to accept and embrace death, and because vampirism is inherently about rejecting death, it will NEVER be life everlasting". Honestly the only reason that motivated me to read more Vampire chronicles is....well...i wanna know if Lestat can just? idk, be happy? be free? But this dude kept trying to get together with his abuser and i honestly don't even know what to say. Really i do not understand why Anne Rice kept making it happen. I have seen zero evidence that Louis changed to become better person and someone actually deserving Lestat's love. And more importantly, idk man, im not a psychologist but can you stop being a p*dophile??? so um. humm. i don't fucking know about this, lol. Like, im gonna be fucking real here, fuck all that "lestat was a bad person" " lestat was manipulative" shit, please grow a brain!!! Lestat was a good and loving person!! Period! all his bullshit has to do with the fact that he died a horrific and traumatic death and was never able to free himself from the pain and despair that trapped him in his vampiric state. But to let go of his pain and truly be the good person that he always was again, it'd require him to...well, embrace true death. But since Lestat will never end im guessing he will just have to stop being a bonafide vampire and become some sort of dark fantasy faery creature lmao. I'm starting to suspect the reason people think prince lestat trilogy is cringey because her vampires just...aren't even vampires by the end of it lol. Im suspecting that Anne Rice literally had to come up with some fantastical mumbo jumbo to justify her vampire characters finding happiness because these bitches kept walking into the sun and they kept not dying from it. I mean, lestat croaking for reales is kind of depressing so MAYBE i will take this shit. maybe i will still read the prince lestat trilogy lol. I heard there is bloodborne lore in there.

[harmonictechnicality]

Memory Log Easter Eggs and Brain Worms

There’s quite a few of these, so I’m gonna do my best to scavenge for all of them. I’m going to start with the most important one:

Waking up Max: there were 3 key elements that were vital in waking up Max. 

Max’s birthday - I purposefully picked November 6th as Max’s birthday because it is the day that Will went missing in 1983. I think there is something so significant about the Upside Down being frozen in time on that specific day. That day must hold some sort of power and therefore, I needed Max to be tethered to that day somehow. Hence the November 6th birthday.

The happiest memory item/song - Max has been through a lot, especially as a kid. It is common for people (younger people especially) to repress their trauma in order to function day to day. However, a lot of good memories often times get repressed with the bad memories. The brain is just trying to stuff it all away and that can happen. So it made sense to me that Max couldn’t find her happiest memory because she repressed it, and needed to hear the song from the bear to pull the memory out of storage.

The witching hour - the time of day when supernatural entities are said to reach maximum power. Therefore, if Max’s consciousness is stuck in a supernatural realm, she would need as much power as possible to escape. This time of day gave her and Eddie the best chances of surviving.

(All three of these things needed to happen in order to set them free. The perfect storm.)

Going off of this, there is distinct significance in Max waking up on Day 77. Seven is commonly used as a number of extreme luck. So I used this day to represent that not only did they need those three conditions, but they also needed tons and tons of luck on their side.

And if you’re into math (I’m not, but I kinda had to for this fic), you’ll notice that Steve and Eddie kiss on Day 71. And if Max’s birthday is on Day 77, that would mean that their first kiss is on Halloween. Something, I doubt Steve cares about - but if Eddie’s memory had been better, I’m sure he would’ve be fucking STOKED.

The book behavior choices! Taming of the Shrew is such a nod to this fandom. I’ve seen a lot of people in the steddie nation that love 10 Things I Hate About You. And like, same. But 10 Things I Hate About You is a modern adaptation of Taming of the Shrew, by William Shakespeare. So, I threw this in there as a little nod to this community and their shared love of that tale :)

Jekyll and Hyde… this one is pretty obvious. One is nice and the other is a monster (via potion). I’m assuming that Eddie is on a lot of medicines, some probably affect his moods, so that’s why I chose this one.

Beowulf - okay, so I’ve read articles on how Tolkien LOVES Beowulf, and therefore, I think Eddie would also love Beowulf. It totally checks out with his love of fantasy worlds.

There’s a moment in chapter 3 where Steve calls Eddie “hero” and I think this is less of a term of endearment, and more his way of showing Eddie that he did indeed read Beowulf for him (even though he did not read it lol). It’s also a nod to s4 when Eddie says they are ‘no heroes.’ Even though Eddie doesn’t have memory of this moment, Steve calls back to it so that Eddie feels like a hero (just like Beowulf) for surviving the Bad Days.

The heart monitor - this became a huge symbol for Steve in determining Eddie’s feelings. Whether he was feeling sick or flustered or sleepy, all of those beeps sounded different. But then, Steve ALSO uses it to determine that Max is waking up. I think it is fun to play off of this thing that he saw as a reminder of mortality, and ends up using it to know that his friend is being revived.

I picked the Corduroy bear because the story reflects Eddie in a lot of ways. In the Children’s book, the bear is searching for his missing button. In this fic, Eddie is searching for his missing memories. I just liked the idea of connecting him and Max in yet another way.

The heart sticker being underneath the bear’s overalls is another callback to s4 - the Russian Doll with the note inside. It’s not entirely the same, but it’s a tiny detail I threw in there to pay homage to that scene (and it ultimately led to breaking someone - Hopper - free). Just like Max and Eddie were set free.

In the final chapter Eddie says this about the bear: ‘Looks like she sewed it back together with yellow threads?’ The color yellow is used to represent Steve throughout this fic (and the whole damn fandom). So I liked having it symbolize the thread holding this bear together, like Steve is the person that has brought them all together on this quest to wake up Max.

The Firestarter reference - I used this particular movie/novel for a few different reasons. The first is that it’s by Stephen King, and the show (in canon) makes TONS of Stephen King references. At the end of s4, we see Lucas reading The Talisman to Max, so we get the sense that she’s a fan of his books. I also chose it because Max’s hair is red, so I thought Eddie would immediately associate her with fire :)

The Nightmare on Elm Street reference - again, a lot of s4 paid respect to this movie, along with lots of other Teen Horror Slasher films. But since this fic is dealing with lucid dreaming, I felt it had to be mentioned at least once.

I based the original character of Sam off of the Nurse from Romeo and Juliet. Lets be honest: Romeo and Juliet are shitty people. But the Friar and the Nurse are literally carrying the whole damn play on their overworked backs (so is Mercutio until he bites the bullet). The Nurse helps Romeo and Juliet meet in secrecy and protects their relationship. So having an actual nurse do the same thing for Steve and Eddie seemed like a no-brainer in my Shakespeare-obsessed brain.

In the epilogue, Eddie tells Steve “Would be a complete idiot not to fall in love with you, Steve Harrington.” I used this to negate Nancy Wheeler saying “you’re an idiot, Steve Harrington” all throughout s1. While she probably means this in an endearing way, I can’t help but wonder how this affects Steve. Especially after seeing her response to his essay in the next season. Yes, it might be playful, but it becomes a very real opinion of hers a year into their relationship. So I thought it was important to have Eddie twist that phrase and tell Steve that someone would be an idiot not to fall in love with him. That seemed healing and important to me.

The final line. This is in reference to them holding hands in chapters 4 and 5. Each time they do so, it means something different. At first, it is a sign of “helpless support.” Steve cannot fix Eddie’s medical problems, but he can literally offer his hand to show that he’s physically there for him. Once they kiss in Chapter 5, Steve says “it means everything,” in determination to get Eddie’s memories back once and for all. And finally, he repeats this because the gesture now represents their togetherness. Their bond. When they hold hands at the end, it means everything they’ve experienced as a pair.

I hope this was interesting and not too boring. Sorry if it was! I cannot thank you all enough for the love and support on this fic. It was a joy to share with this community.

[warrioreowynofrohan]

Favourite Female Tolkien Character Poll - Round 2, Match 10

Both of these are from the tale of Aldarion and Erendis in Unfinished Tales.

Tar-Ancalimë

The daughter of Erendis and Tar-Aldarion, and first Ruling Queen of Númenor. Strong-minded and determined, she had no desire for marriage, and after a time her father rescinded the rule that by a certain age a female Heir must either marry or refuse the sceptre, due to her determination to do neither.

When she went into hiding as a shepherdess to avoid her suitors, she was courted by a supposed shepherd, and enjoyed his company; when revealed himself to in fact be a Númenorean noble suitor, Hallacar, she was angered at his deception.

“[If I wanted to marry a non-noble], I could lay down my royalty, and be free. But if I were to do so, I should be free to wed whom I will; and that would be Úner (which is “Noman”), whom I prefer above all others.

She did in fact marry him in time, though for political reasons not for love, and their marriage was unhappy. Their son was Tar-Anárion.

She ruled for 205 years, longer than any Númenorean ruler since Elros. After her father’s death she neglected his policies and gave no further aid to Gil-galad.

Zamîn

An old woman who worked for Erendis; had an unruly son named Îbal, and a husband named Ulbar who sailed with Aldarion.

After Ancalimë, as a child, meets her son, the first boy Ancalimë has met:

Zâmin was an old country-woman, free-tongued, and not easily daunted, even by [Erendis].

“What noisy thing was that?” said Ancalimë.

“A boy,” said Zamîn, “if you know what that is. But how should you? They’re breakers and eaters, mostly. That one is ever eating - but to no purpose. a fine lad his father will find when he comes back…he heard of those Venturers, and took up with them, and went away with your father, the Lord Aldarion: but the Valar know whither, or why.”

When Ancalimë, as a young woman proclaimed the King’s Heir, sought to escape from the importunity of her many suitors, Zamîn aided her in going into hiding as a shepherdess on a farm.

[erynalasse]

I've been thinking about this the last hour or so, so I'd like some second thoughts. how do you suppose the Sinking of Beleriand occurred? Like, literally speaking. My basic thought was always that maybe the battles between the Powers were so cataclysmic that they just kind of cratered it out, but honestly that doesn't really seem viable (you'd think they'd *miss* a lot of land - who'd be fighting south of Taur-im-Duinath, after all).

But then I thought, well, maybe it's tied to the idea of Morgoth making Endor his 'Ring' - his influence literally suffuses the land, spreading like a stain outwards from Angband, with the areas worst-afflicted being closest (i.e. Beleriand), and those he has less of a hand in (modern Middle Earth and whatnot) getting rattled but not actually annihilated. Once Morgoth's defeated, the land might have literally collapsed like Mordor in the film version of RoTK.

Yet that also leaves questions like, how in the fuck did anyone survive that? There's no way they ran the length of Beleriand to escape lol.

I would have also wondered where the space manifested for all that land to go, but then I remembered the 'Deep Places of the World' from Khazad Dum and I think it's just cool to imagine that that layer of caverns exists everywhere.

Thoughts? This actually bugs me a bit because it's arguably more of an influential event than Numenor's sinking (it destroyed more kingdoms and land, anyways, though it didn't reshape Arda itself).

This is such a good question. My biggest takeaway from my reread of this section of the Silm is that it's so... vague? It's actually more of a postscript to the final chapter of the Quenta Silmarillion: Chapter 24: The Voyage of Eärendil (and also Morgoth's defeat). HELLO!!???!! I want the gory blow-by-blow story of how this happened! We got much more of a blow-by-blow of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, down to the precise battle tactics and why they failed.

Interestingly, the Silmarillion does attempt an explanation as to why this is so:

Of the march of the host of the Valar to the north of Middle-Earth little is said in any tale; for among them went none of those Elves who had dwelt and suffered in the Hither Lands, and who made the histories of those days that still are known; and tidings of these things they only learned long afterwards from their kinsfolk in Aman.

To me, this reads a bit like a Watsonian justification for a Doylistic lack of a material. That is to say, this section feels like something that Tolkien never got around to fleshing out much, so Christopher Tolkien had to gloss over it and gave the above explanation for why. I don't know how true my assumption is, having not read the earlier drafts of the Silmarillion in the HoME volumes, but it does make me wonder!

And so we are stuck with minimal material to work with, both in-universe and out-of-universe. It does seem clear that the War of Wrath was closer to the scale of the Bragollach in that it had multiple fronts and spanned large sections of the continent ("Anfauglith could not contain [the host of Morgoth]; and all the North was aflame with war.") And... that's kind of it. The Host of the Valar pushed forward until they reached Angband, then there's that memorable fight of Ancalagon vs. Eärendil, Thangorodrim gets squashed, and Morgoth gets hauled away in chains. Hurrah, everyone sang and rejoiced.

And all that took 42 years? Really??? That's the timeline for a bitter conflict that's half guerrilla warfare as much as open conflict, all across multiple fronts. Definitely not a battle summed up in a few paragraphs! Thankfully, the magnificent @cycas constructed a plausible blow-by-blow battle progression here that I really think you should read! I particularly like it because it captures the back-and-forth messiness of territorial reconquest, rather like the Allies' recapture of France towards the end of WWII. She also has a series dealing with this era, plus this super cool fic that covers the Eastern front, in case you wanted some recs!

As an interesting side note, cycas makes an excellent point that the Host of the Valar is never actually mentioned as having Valar in it. We only see Eönwë explicitly. Take that as you will!

So the nice thing about the Silmarillion being vague, of course, is that we get to stuff in our own headcanons and try not to make canon crash and burn. As for the miscellaneous points you addressed:

Corruption of the land by Morgoth. This is definitely something that I subscribe to on multiple levels. There's a lot of evidence for the Shadow being... sticky? I suppose? Maybe contagious is a better word. Prolonged exposure to an intensely evil artifact, individual, or location tends to have knock-on effects. (The inverse, interestingly, is true with places like Valinor.) So if you have Morgoth and Angband sitting up there in the north corrupting the bones of the land for a couple centuries, I think it's enough to give the continent some osteoporosis, so to speak. The force of the battle is just the last straw when it came to breaking the continent apart.

There are... actually a shocking number of references to underground caverns and tunnels and such. It's where the dragons come from, where the Balrogs hide, where they pull out Morgoth from, and how the sea rushes in to take the north of Beleriand. I think this is maybe a theme that alludes to the hollowness of the land at this point. It's been scraped empty and it's finally collapsing under its own weight.

That said, I think that we could argue for the collapse of all of Beleriand as very gradual. As I mentioned, the War of Wrath lasted 42 years, and we do know that the Host of the Valar worked its way northward from the coast to Angband, but not much else. So I think I like the idea that the sea started taking one chunk of land at a time in a way that's completely foreseeable, and thus escapable, but entirely unstoppable. This would prevent the scenario of sprinting across a collapsing continent, as you wisely pointed out! Frankly, I don't think there were many stragglers left in Beleriand by the time the War of Wrath concluded. You either left, you fought with the Host, or you died. A continent-wide war zone isn't very kind to people who don't get out of the way. So I don't think the Host had to worry about evacuating people, since they'd already sorted themselves out one way or the other.

I still think I want to make another post about why the War of Wrath isn't discussed much in folk legend in Valinor, as that passage quoted at the very beginning points out. There's lots of good material to be unpacked there!

[middle-earth-mythopoeia]

Thoughts on Beren, grief and depression

(This post includes a discussion of suicide/suicidal tendencies.)

One of the things that strikes me about Beren is that his early life was so full of suffering. Dorthonion was overrun by the forces of Morgoth when Beren was still very young, only in his early twenties. His mother left with the remnant of their people and it is implied that he never saw her again. After five years of defending Dorthonion with a small band of men, he lost his father under terrible circumstances, when Gorlim betrayed them, and Barahir and the other men were killed. Not only was Beren’s father killed by the treachery of one of his own men, his body was mutilated; Beren had to win back the ring of Barahir from the Orcs, who had taken his severed hand. Beren swore an oath of vengeance upon his father’s grave and defended Dorthonion alone as an outlaw until he was finally forced to escape to the south.

What it says in The Lays of Beleriand about Beren during this part of the story is really heartbreaking. When he buried his father, he ‘wept not, for his heart was ice,’ and because Barahir was dead, ‘sorrow now his soul had wrought to dark despair, and robbed his life of sweetness, that he longed for knife, or shaft, or sword, to end his pain.’ And afterwards, ‘danger he sought and death pursued.’ This is painful to read, but it also makes sense to me that Beren would feel this way: he has experienced so much trauma and loss. Even though it doesn’t say that he was planning to kill himself, pursuing death in battle seems to be so similar to suicidal ideation that it is almost indistinguishable from it, and that’s what these lines suggest to me.

I kept thinking about this part of the Lays of Beleriand, and why I found it so moving, and I think the reason is because in a lot of stories, heroic male characters like Beren aren’t usually shown to be depressed. If they’re portrayed feeling something after the death of a loved one, it’s usually anger, not deep sadness, grief and depression. And it’s comforting to see a heroic character like Beren portrayed as someone who went through all this—the grief, the depression, and wanting to die—and still had a happy ending. In many ways, it reminds me of Éowyn’s struggle with depression in LOTR.

I also think that Beren’s time in Dorthonion seems to reflect aspects of Tolkien’s own life. We all know that the tale of Beren and Lúthien was based on Tolkien’s relationship with Edith, but I think there are other aspects of his life reflected in Beren’s story: losing his parents at a young age, losing all of his closest friends, and the depression that would come with that. When I read about Beren living in Dorthonion, after his father and all his companions are dead, I think about how Tolkien lost all his friends in the war and was the only survivor. Along with characters like Frodo and Éowyn, Beren strikes me as another character where Tolkien’s own experiences of grief and loss really come through.

[365days365movies]

March 1, 2021: The Hobbit (1977) (Part 1)

In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit.

When I was 9, my school let us read a very special book, originally meant for kids, but beloved by everyone. My folks and I went to Borders Books (FUCK ME, I miss Borders), and we got an illustrated copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. I can’t find that book, but if I ever find it again, Imma buy it IMMEDIATELY, I tell you what. And...oh shit, it’s on Amazon for $12? 

Well. I just made that purchase, I guess. But yeah, I loved that book when I was a kid, and this was during the same year that Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy began, with Fellowship, of course. And I wouldn’t end up watching those until a few years later, but I loved those too when I saw them. And I’ve NEVER seen the abridged version, by the way, I’ve only ever seen the extended editions.

Although, I can’t call myself a hardcore fan. I’ve never read the Silmarillion, for example. Although, weirdly, I wanted it as a kid at some point, so I was almost there. But no, I ended up getting into comic books hardcore instead, so I can’t tell you the history of Tom Bombadil, but I can tell you about at least one of the fuckin’ 87 tieles that the Legion of Super-Heroes has been involved in. I’m not gonna like it though.

...Yes, I will, who am I kidding, I love the Legion. Anyway, I’ve still always been a fan of the franchise, and I was extremely excited when Jackson announced that he’d be doing an adaptation of The Hobbit! Seriously, I WAS FUCKING PUMPED, you have no idea. I re-read the book, I was super-excited...and then Harry Potter changed EVERYTHING. Kind of.

See, Harry Potter’s development as a two films made from one book seemed to kick off a trend. Breaking Dawn and Mockingjay are the two that immediately come to mind, as does this film. However, to be fair...that’s probably a coincidence. Yeah, this film was originally developed as two parts, WAY before Deathly Hallows got that treatment. And even then, Jackson and Del Toro had difficulty breaking it up into two parts, and three ended up being easier. Still...the change from two-to-three does feel a little connected to that trend.

Anyway, in celebration of that decision, I’m gonna break this review into three parts! Yes. Really. I want to see if it works. And so, let’s talk about the other most famous adaptation of this book by talking about its creators.

Yup. Rankin-Bass did 2D-animated cartoons, too! And this was one of their most famous ones, dating back to 1977. But wait! There’s more! This was followed by Ralph Bakshi’s version of Lord of the Rings by a different studio. You know, this one?

Yeah, that one. It was only based on the first two books, Fellowship and Towers. But it was technically unconnected to the Rankin-Bass version. Which is why it was REALLY weird when Rankin-Bass came out with an adaptation of the third book, Return of the King, right afterwards!

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE. Because both of Rankin-Bass’ specials were animated by a Japanese studio called Topcraft, who’d actually worked with Rankin-Bass for years. But then, they went bankrupt a few years later, and was bought by Isao Takahata, Toshio Suzuki, and...Hayao Miyazaki. And it was renamed as...

So, this is a Hobbit adaptation produced by the Rudolph people and animated by the people who would eventually become Studio Ghibli. Well, uh...holy fucking shit. Let’s DO THIS BABY. SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

Recap (1/3)

As we’re wont to do in this story, we head to Hobbiton in the Shire, where we meet Bilbo Baggins (Orson Bean). A simple Hobbit in a simple home, with a happy and simple life. But one day, he’s approached by Gandalf (John Huston), who seeks a burglar to help with the mission of a group of dwarves, led by Thorin Oakenshield (Hans Conried).

We also immediately start off with two songs from the original book, and I have to say that I like them a but better in the Jackson movies, but they’re still well performed here. Anyway, after dinner, the true goal of their quest is given. Beneath Lonely Mountain, the ancestral home of the Dwarves, there was a kingdom ruled by the King Under the Mountain, Thorin’s grandfather.

Through reading the lyrics of the song “Far over the Misty Mountains,” Thorin tells the tale of the takeover of the Dwarves’ great golden hoard by the dragon Smaug. Bilbo is tasked to help the Dwarves steal back the treasure stolen from them. And, while he’s extremely reluctant to be a part of all this, Gandalf basically forces him to, the pushy bastard. And Bilbo’s Greatest Adventure now lies ahead!

Speaking of, here’s the song “The Greatest Adventure”, sung by Glenn Yarborough, who is the living personification of vibrato. Fuckin’ seriously, this guy’s voice is ridiculous, but I love it so much. As the night passes underneath Glenn Yarborough’s hypnotically shaky voice, and uncertain, Bilbo stares out at the moon. Once it’s over, we’re on our way to the Misty Mountains.

Bilbo’s having a tough time with the long journey and rough weather, and it doesn’t get much better when they encounter a trio of trolls. They send out Bilbo to try and steal some mutton from them, but he’s IMMEDIATELY a failure, and also manages to tell the trolls that the dwarves are present. Nice one, Bilbo. The trolls catch all of the dwarves, although Bilbo manages to escape. 

The trolls argue about how to cook the dwarves, but before they get to do anything, Gandalf shows up and summons the dawn, turning the trolls into stone and saving the dwarves. While they’re initially quite frustrated by Bilbo’s failure, he makes it up by discovering a horde of goods and weapons stolen by the trolls. This is also where Bilbo gets his classic weapon, Sting.

Gandalf, cheeky bastard that he is, suddenly reveals a map that he’s kept secret from Thorin, its rightful owner. Bilbo, a classic cartomaniac, is able to interpret the map. But there are also runes that they can’t quite read. And so, Gandalf brings them to his friend, Elrond (), who’s wearing a sick-ass glittery tiara that’s hovering off his head. How come Hugo Weaving didn’t have that?

Anyway, Elrond identifies the swords that Thorin and Gandalf grabbed as Orcrist, the Goblin-Cleaver and Glamdring, the Foe-Hammer, because FUCK YEAH, BABY, those are some fuckin’ NAMES! WHOOOOOO!

Anyway, he also points them in the direction of the mountain, and shows them hidden features to the map. They head through the mountains after this, and rest in a cave. Unfortunately, this cave is on Goblin territory, and the group (sans Gandalf, who’s disappeared to make out with Cate Blanchett or whatever) is quickly ambushed by a group of now-horned Goblins, who chant their song as they go “Down, Down, to Goblin-Town”. Which is a song that I love, unironically. It compels me to sing along.

The Goblins nearly kill them when they discover Orcrist in Thorin’s possession, but they’re saved by the sudden appearance of Gandalf with the glowing sword Glamdring. He kills the Great Goblin, and the group run out with the Goblins in hot pursuit. Well, except for Bilbo.

Yeah, Bilbo falls into a cavern below the mountain, and the dwarves think him gone for good. However, he’s miraculously safe on the ground, having landed in an underground aquifer, in which lives THE GREATEST CHARACTER IN THE MIDDLE-EARTH FRANCHISE FUCKIN’ AT ME I DARE YOU

And just so we’re clear, I’m not talking about the film version only, I’m talking about Gollum/Smeagol in general. Granted, I don’t want a film starring him or anything (coughCruellacoughcoughMaleficentcoughcoughClaricecoughcough), but I love this dissociative little dude so much. He’s one of my favorite fantasy characters in general, and is also maybe the best example of a sympathetic villain, in film at least.

OK, to be fair, I love Andy Serkis’ version of the character a LOT, like a LOT a lot, and it’s a great version of the character. OK, so what do I think of this version? He’s...interesting, actually. If I’m honest, I kinda like him. This is similar to how I always pictured Gollum when I was a kid.

I mean, listen to this description from the book, yeah?

Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature. I don't know where he came from, nor who or what he was. He was Gollum - as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face...He was looking out of his pale lamp-like eyes for blind fish, which he grabbed with his long fingers as quick as thinking.

I dunno, that does sound more like this version of Gollum to me, just saying. Anyway, while Gollum is off fishing in the water, Bilbo gets up on the shore, where he finds a little golden ring Not important, just a ring, definitely means nothing at all, NOTHING AT ALL, NOTHING TO SEE HERE.

The hungry Gollum (Brother Theodore) happens upon Bilbo, precious, wonders if Bilbo would taste good, and is basically about to kill him for his sweet hobbit meat, before Bilbo takes out Sting. Now afraid, Gollum offers a game of riddles. The two make a deal: if Bilbo wins at a game of riddles, Gollum will show him the  way out. But if Gollum wins, precious will eat him raaaaaaaw and wrrrrrrrrrriggling!

The riddles commence, in a super-fuckin’-classic moment, and also ends with maybe the most bullshit moment in all of fantasy lore. After clever riddles with answers involving eggs, wind, and time, Bilbo’s last riddle is “What’s in my pocket?” The fuck, Bilbo, that’s absolute BULLSHIT!

Not that it matters. Bilbo wins, but Gollum goes to find his ring to show it to Bilbo before he takes him away. Thing is, though, that’s what was in Bilbo’s pocket, which Gollum quickly figures out, my precious. He’s about to kill Bilbo to get back his birthday present, precious, but Bilbo discovers the secret trick of the ring: it turns the wearer invisible, AND THAT WILL NEVER BE A BAD THING EVER.

Gollum thinks that Bilbo’s escaped and runs after him toward the exit. This, of course, leads Bilbo towards the exit inadvertently, and he follows Gollum, then jumps over him to get back. To which Gollum screams the following:

Thief! Thief! Baggins! We hates it! Hates it! Forever!

I hear you, buddy. I hear you. Well, once Bilbo escapes, he reconvenes with the rest, and shares his adventure in the cave, but leaves out the ring. And Gandalf seems to know, based on his dialogue. And I checked, and he figured it out in the book and Jackson movie, too. And I gotta say...WHAT THE FUCK GANDALF

I mean...DUDE. CHECK UP on that shit. Do you wizard job, man! If you’d been like, “Dude...you didn’t find a magic ring that turns you invisible, ight, because we’re FUCKED if you did”, NONE OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS WOULD’VE HAPPENED, AND BOROMIR WOULD STILL BE ALIVE

Everybody talks about the fuckin’ eagles, but WHY DO I NEVER HEAR ANYONE MENTION THIS SHIT? Gandalf the Grey: Middle-Earth’s most irresponsible asshole, I swear...

This seems like a good place to pause, actually. See you in the next part!

[avery-foxglove]

FrodoSam Moments in The Lord of the Rings (Books): The Return of the King

1.

 Sam shuddered and tried to force himself to move. There was plainly some devilry going on. Perhaps in spite of all orders the cruelty of the orcs had mastered them, and they were tormenting Frodo, or even savagely hacking him to pieces. He listened; and as he did a gleam of hope came to him. There could not be much doubt: there was fighting in the tower, the orcs must be at war among themselves, Shagrat and Gorbag had come to blows. Faint as was the hope that his guess brought him, it was enough to rouse him. There might be just a chance. His love for Frodo rose above all other thoughts, and forgetting his peril he cried aloud: ‘I’m coming, Mr. Frodo!’

2.

He ran up again, and sweat began to trickle down his face. He felt that even minutes were precious, but one by one they escaped; and he could do nothing. He cared no longer for Shagrat or Snaga or any other orc that was ever spawned. He longed only for his master, for one sight of his face or one touch of his hand.

3. 

With a cry Sam leapt across the floor, Sting in hand. The orc wheeled round, but before it could make a move Sam slashed its whip-hand from its arm. Howling with pain and fear but desperate the orc charged head-down at him. Sam’s next blow went wide, and thrown off his balance he fell backwards, clutching at the orc as it stumbled over him. Before he could scramble up he heard a cry and a thud. The orc in its wild haste had tripped on the ladder-head and fallen through the open trap-door. Sam gave no more thought to it. He ran to the figure huddled on the floor. It was Frodo.

 He was naked, lying as if in a swoon on a heap of filthy rags: his arm was flung up, shielding his head, and across his side there ran an ugly whip-weal.

 `Frodo! Mr. Frodo, my dear!’ cried Sam, tears almost blinding him. `It’s Sam, I’ve come!’ He half lifted his master and hugged him to his breast. Frodo opened his eyes.

 `Am I still dreaming?’ he muttered. `But the other dreams were horrible.’

 `You’re not dreaming at all, Master,’ said Sam. `It’s real. It’s me. I’ve come.’

 `I can hardly believe it,’ said Frodo, clutching him. `There was an orc with a whip, and then it turns into Sam! Then I wasn’t dreaming after all when I heard that singing down below, and I tried to answer? Was it you?’

 ‘It was indeed, Mr. Frodo. I’d given up hope, almost. I couldn’t find you.

 ‘Well, you have now, Sam, dear Sam,’ said Frodo, and he lay back in Sam’s gentle arms, closing his eyes, like a child at rest when night-fears are driven away by some loved voice or hand.

 Sam felt that he could sit like that in endless happiness; but it was not allowed. It was not enough for him to find his master, he had still to try and save him. He kissed Frodo’s forehead. `Come! Wake up Mr. Frodo!’ he said, trying to sound as cheerful as he had when he drew back the curtains at Bag End on a summer’s morning.

4.

He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.

They woke together, hand in hand.

5.

Sam began to wonder if a second darkness had begun and no day would ever reappear. At last he groped for Frodo’s hand. It was cold and trembling. His master was shivering.

 ‘I didn’t ought to have left my blanket behind,’ muttered Sam; and lying down he tried to comfort Frodo with his arms and body. Then sleep took him, and the dim light of the last day of their quest found them side by side. The wind had fallen the day before as it shifted from the West, and now it came from the North and began to rise; and slowly the light of the unseen Sun filtered down into the shadows where the hobbits lay.

 ‘Now for it! Now for the last gasp!’ said Sam as he struggled to his feet. He bent over Frodo, rousing him gently. Frodo groaned; but with a great effort of will he staggered up; and then he fell upon his knees again. He raised his eyes with difficulty to the dark slopes of Mount Doom towering above him, and then pitifully he began to crawl forward on his hands.

 Sam looked at him and wept in his heart, but no tears came to his dry and stinging eyes. ‘I said I’d carry him, if it broke my back,’ he muttered, ‘and I will!’

 ‘Come, Mr. Frodo!’ he cried. ‘I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you and it as well. So up you get! Come on, Mr. Frodo dear! Sam will give you a ride. Just tell him where to go, and he’ll go.’

6.

Sam knelt by him. Faint, almost inaudibly, he heard Frodo whispering: ‘Help me, Sam! Help me, Sam! Hold my hand! I can’t stop it.’ Sam took his master’s hands and laid them together, palm to palm, and kissed them; and then he held them gently between his own. The thought came suddenly to him: ‘He’s spotted us! It’s all up, or it soon will be. Now, Sam Gamgee, this is the end of ends.’

7.

‘Well, this is the end, Sam Gamgee,’ said a voice by his side. And there was Frodo, pale and worn, and yet himself again; and in his eyes there was peace now, neither strain of will, nor madness, nor any fear. His burden was taken away. There was the dear master of the sweet days in the Shire.

‘Master!’ cried Sam. and fell upon his knees. In all that ruin of the world for the moment he felt only joy, great joy. The burden was gone. His master had been saved; he was himself again, he was free. And then Sam caught sight of the maimed and bleeding hand.

‘Your poor hand!’ he said. ‘And I have nothing to bind it with, or comfort it. I would have spared him a whole hand of mine rather. But he’s gone now beyond recall, gone forever.’

8.

‘I am glad that you are here with me,’ said Frodo. ‘Here at the end of all things, Sam.’

‘Yes, I am with you, Master,’ said Sam, laying Frodo’s wounded hand gently to his breast. ‘And you’re with me. And the journey’s finished. But after coming all that way I don’t want to give up yet. It’s not like me, somehow, if you understand.’

‘Maybe not, Sam,’ said Frodo; ‘but it’s like things are in the world. Hopes fail. An end comes. We have only a little time to wait now. We are lost in ruin and downfall, and there is no escape.’

‘Well, Master, we could at least go further from this dangerous place here, from this Crack of Doom, if that’s its name. Now couldn’t we? Come, Mr. Frodo, let’s go down the path at any rate!’

‘Very well, Sam. If you wish to go, I’ll come,’ said Frodo; and they rose and went slowly down the winding road; and even as they passed towards the Mountain’s quaking feet, a great smoke and steam belched from the Sammath Naur, and the side of the cone was riven open, and a huge fiery vomit rolled in slow thunderous cascade down the eastern mountain-side.

Frodo and Sam could go no further. Their last strength of mind and body was swiftly ebbing. They had reached a low ashen hill piled at the Mountain’s foot; but from it there was no more escape. It was an island now, not long to endure, amid the torment of Orodruin. All about it the earth gaped, and from deep rifts and pits smoke and fumes leaped up. Behind them the Mountain was convulsed. Great rents opened in its side. Slow rivers of fire came down the long slopes towards them. Soon they would be engulfed. A rain of hot ash was falling.

They stood now; and Sam still holding his master’s hand caressed it. He sighed. ‘What a tale we have been in, Mr. Frodo, haven’t we?’ he said. ‘I wish I could hear it told! Do you think they’ll say: Now comes the story of Nine-fingered Frodo and the Ring of Doom? And then everyone will hush, like we did, when in Rivendell they told us the tale of Beren One-hand and the Great Jewel. I wish I could hear it! And I wonder how it will go on after our part.’

note: This is the second time that Tolkien calls into attention that he’s paralleling Frodo and Sam’s story with the tale of Beren and Lúthien (his favorite romatic power couple.)

9.

Sam stayed at first at the Cottons’ with Frodo; but when the New Row was ready he went with the Gaffer. In addition to all his other labours he was busy directing the cleaning up and restoring of Bag End; but he was often away in the Shire on his forestry work. So he was not at home in early March and did not know that Frodo had been ill. On the thirteenth of that month Farmer Cotton found Frodo lying on his bed; he was clutching a white gem that hung on a chain about his neck and he seemed half in a dream.

 ‘It is gone forever,’ he said, ‘and now all is dark and empty.’

 But the fit passed, and when Sam got back on the twenty-fifth, Frodo had recovered, and he said nothing about himself. In the meanwhile Bag End had been set in order, and Merry and Pippin came over from Crickhollow bringing back all the old furniture and gear, so that the old hole soon looked very much as it always had done.

 When all was at last ready Frodo said: ‘When are you going to move in and join me, Sam?’

 Sam looked a bit awkward.

 ‘There is no need to come yet, if you don’t want to,’ said Frodo. ‘But you know the Gaffer is close at hand, and he will be very well looked after by Widow Rumble.’

 ‘It’s not that, Mr. Frodo,’ said Sam, and he went very red.

 ‘Well, what is it?’

 ‘It’s Rosie, Rose Cotton,’ said Sam. ‘It seems she didn’t like my going abroad at all, poor lass; but as I hadn’t spoken, she couldn’t say so. And I didn’t speak, because I had a job to do first. But now I have spoken, and she says: “Well, you’ve wasted a year, so why wait longer?” “Wasted?” I says. “I wouldn’t call it that.” Still I see what she means. I feel torn in two, as you might say.’

 ‘I see,’ said Frodo: ‘you want to get married, and yet you want to live with me in Bag End too? But my dear Sam, how easy! Get married as soon as you can, and then move in with Rosie. There’s room enough in Bag End for as big a family as you could wish for.’

 10.

‘Well, Sam,’ said Frodo. ‘I want you to see Rose and find out if she can spare you, so that you and I can go off together. You can’t go far or for a long time now, of course,’ he said a little wistfully.

 ‘Well, not very well, Mr. Frodo.’

 ‘Of course not. But never mind. You can see me on my way. Tell Rose that you won’t be away very long, not more than a fortnight; and you’ll come back quite safe.’

 ‘I wish I could go all the way with you to Rivendell, Mr. Frodo, and see Mr. Bilbo,’ said Sam. ‘And yet the only place I really want to be in is here. I am that torn in two.’

 ‘Poor Sam! It will feel like that, I am afraid,’ said Frodo. ‘But you will be healed. You were meant to be solid and whole, and you will be.’

11.

 ‘Where are you going, Master?’ cried Sam, though at last he understood what was happening.

 ‘To the Havens, Sam,’ said Frodo.

 ‘And I can’t come.’

 ‘No, Sam. Not yet anyway, not further than the Havens. Though you too were a Ring-bearer, if only for a little while. Your time may come. Do not be too sad, Sam. You cannot be always torn in two. You will have to be one and whole, for many years. You have so much to enjoy and to be, and to do.

12. 

 Then Frodo kissed Merry and Pippin, and last of all Sam, and went aboard; and the sails were drawn up, and the wind blew, and slowly the ship slipped away down the long grey firth; and the light of the glass of Galadriel that Frodo bore glimmered and was lost. And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.

 But to Sam the evening deepened to darkness as he stood at the Haven; and as he looked at the grey sea he saw only a shadow on the waters that was soon lost in the West. There still he stood far into the night, hearing only the sigh and murmur of the waves on the shores of Middle-earth, and the sound of them sank deep into his heart.

13.

Bonus from Tolkien’s Unpublished Epilogue, found in Sauron Defeated: 

Elanor was silent for some time before she spoke again. 'I did not understand at first what Celeborn meant when he said goodbye to the King,' she said. 'But I think I do now. He knew that Lady Arwen would stay, but that Galadriel would leave him. * I think it was very sad for him. And for you, dear Sam-dad.' Her hand felt for his, and his brown hand clasped her slender fingers. 'For your treasure went too. I am glad Frodo of the Ring saw me, but I wish I could remember seeing him.'

'It was sad, Elanorelle,' said Sam, kissing her hair. 'It was, but It isn't now. For why? Well, for one thing, Mr. Frodo has gone where the elven-light isn't fading; and he deserved his reward. But I have had mine, too. I have had lots of treasures. I am a very rich hobbit. And there is one other reason, which I shall whisper to you, a secret I have never told before to no one, nor put in the Book yet. Before he went Mr. Frodo said that my time maybe would come. I can wait. I think maybe we haven't said farewell for good. But I can wait. I have learned that much from the Elves at any rate. They are not so troubled about time. And so I think Celeborn is still happy among his trees, in an Elvish way. His time hasn't come, and he isn't tired of his land yet. When he is tired he can go.'

'And when you're tired, you will go, Sam-dad. You will go to the Havens with the Elves.  Then I shall go with you. I shall not part with you, like Arwen did with Elrond.’

'Maybe, maybe,’ said Sam, kissing her gently. 'And maybe not. The choice of Luthien and Arwen comes to may, Elanorelle, or something like it; and it isn’t wise to choose before the time.’

 Note: This is referring to a segment in The Return of the King where Celeborn says this to Aragorn (in reference to Galadriel leaving without Celeborn): ‘Kinsman, farewell! May your doom be other than mine, and your treasure remain with you to the end!’

14. 

The Return of the King’s Appendices B: 

Death of Mistress Rose, wife of Master Samwise, on Mid-year's Day. On September 22 Master Sam-wise rides out from Bag End. He comes to the Tower Hills, and is last seen by Elanor, to whom he gives the Red Book afterwards kept by the Fairbairns. Among them the tradition is handed down from Elanor that Samwise passed the Towers, and went to the Grey Havens, and passed over Sea, last of the Ring-bearers.

[unnursvanablog]

All the books I read in 2020 / part 2.

The Golem and the Jinni - Helene Wecker: ☆☆☆☆☆

Loved how these myths and legends were used within this story. It is a beautiful tale of immigration and friendship and how Wecker conveyed that was just beautiful. The text did drag its feet in some places, but this story is also so character driven; their experience with the world, and their longings, so I understand that slow pace. Everything about it felt really sincere and it truly is a book that leaves you with something. I have never read anything like this before and I felt like it bridges the gap between historical history and fantasy well.

Naturally Tan - Tan France: ☆☆☆

I listened to this book in one sitting as I drove from the capital area and all the way home to the countryside. And I really enjoyed it because I really like Tan France and he narrated the audiobook himself. The text, the chapters and therefor the book itself goes a bit all over the place and it feels a bit vapid at times. It was about everything and nothing, really.

The Silence of Bones - June Hur: ☆☆☆

I am not so much for these types of mystery novels, so it was not something that drew me forward, but I did find the atmosphere that Hur created within the story and the historical elements really great and made the story quite enjoyable. I felt like learning a little more about certain parts of Korean history that I did not know before, and I really enjoyed that.

In the Labyrinth of Drakes - Marie Brennan: ☆☆☆

The world that Brennan has created continues to wow me. It is complex and it’s so much fun to travel around it. I love getting to know these characters at different stages of their lives and it just makes you like them even more. The story often runs into the same problem for me and that is that I find the first parts of the story so exciting, it is an adventure, but then it loses me a little towards the end.

The Will to Battle - Ada Palmer: ☆☆

After the amazing storyline of the second book, this book really lacked any excitement within the plot to propel you further and instead we got a lot of philosophical lessons and musings. In the previous books I felt like Palmer managed to strike a balance between those things, but not here. So little was going on. This story is deep, beautifully written, and complex and all that, but the text is often so long and dense, and my dyslexia just wants to skip these walls of texts that often just feel like statements about something philosophical but not real conversations or reflections from the characters.

The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep - H.G. Parry: ☆☆☆☆

I was hoping for a 'grown up version' of Cornelia Funke's Inkheart, and although that was not quite what I got, I really enjoyed this. I thought the world was well thought out, and the idea of the readers interpretation of the characters and even literary criticism can affect how they would appear in our world was a cool concept. In some places I felt that the story was a bit stunted or towards the end I was starting to predict where it was going, and there was a lot of misunderstanding between the characters so the story could continue, which got on my nerves. But for the majority of the time, it was a really fun read.

Midnight Sun - Stephenie Meyer: ☆

You can judge me for this. I judge myself too. It was strange to fall back into the Twilight world after completely falling out of it after reading the last Twilight book. But out of sheer curiosity, I decided to give this one a try. But wow… this was not fun and added almost nothing to the original story and Edward is just so damn boring and having to spend time in his mind was just kind of a torment.

The Absolute Sandman, vol 1 & 2 - Neil Gaiman: ☆☆, ☆

I was going to listen to the whole thing via the new and shiny audible version of the Sandman comics, but I could sit through more than the first two volumes. I could not tolerate the violence against the female and queer characters. Oh my god! You do not have to go that far to make your story edgy, or create a complex, dark world. Nothing that happened seemed to move me or make me want to keep listening to this story. It does not really seem to revolve around anything. Or maybe I am just too annoyed to pay attention to the story. Fortunately, Gaiman seems to have improved as a writer since.

Radio Silence - Alice Oseman: ☆☆☆☆

Listened to this and although contemporary YA is is usually not something that hooks me or interest me in any way, Oseman manages to make the story so genuine and down to earth despite all the teenage drama, and the character felt so real that it just draws you in. The daily problems of teenagers often seem too dramatic or unreal to me in books like this, but that was not here. The text is not to flowery, but not too simple either. The story just as a really good pace going on. Everything just flowed together.

Wicked Fox - Kat Cho: ☆☆☆

The story did sound like a kdrama to me and I was hoping it would be that. Just fun and cute and fluffy with some loveable characters and sprinkle of myths and legends. It was fun, it didn't go into too much depth with most things within the story. It kinda brushes over a lot of things. For me the book started of well, but then towards the middle of the book things start to happen to fast and there was not enough time spent on bulding things up, so in the end the story kinda went nowhere for me. The little bits of the Gumiho legend, at least how the legend was presented in this book, inbetween the chapters was my favorite bit.

The Silmarillion - J.R.R. Tolkien: ☆☆☆☆

You can tell that worldbuilding and just spending time making things up for this magical world that he crated was one of the things Tolkien enjoyed the most when it came to writing. The stories about Middle Earth, even the backstories, are so rich and lushus. I do struggle with the writing style, it does feel a bit dry to me at times, and it does feel like short stories set in the world of Middle Earth and not at tightly knit story which isn't always my cup of tea so it did take me a while to get into it.

The Left-Handed Booksellers of London - Garth Nix: ☆☆☆

The story really throws you straight into the action and you just have to find your bearings as best as you can while the story goes on. It was really fast paced and the story never really stops for too long to give you a breather. It was light and funny, a little weird and the character were whimsical, which I enjoyed. Sometimes I felt like I was in a Doctor Who episode, except with magic and not aliens. I just wish it would have let the story breath a little more for me to really enjoy the world that Nix had crafted and such things.

A Deadly Education - Naomi Novik: ☆☆

I do not know what happened here, but wow, this was so not Novik at her best. Neither the characters or the worldbuilding that I am used to getting from Novik was in this book and for the most part there wasn't a whole lot going on in this books. I can deal with a slow burning book and really just enjoy a good fantasy world but there was very little interesting things here to explore. I can deal with a unlikeable main character, but this one didn't grow at all during the book, she just kept on reminding us why she was cranky all the time and how much she delighted in it. There was a whole lot of telling about this magical school and the diverse world outside of it, but very little showing so it all seems rather empty and after a while I just started to skim over the text. And there was really no story there that kept me going and I could not see the purpose for anything that happened.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue - V.E. Schwab: ☆☆☆☆☆

Oh, wow. The feeling that this book created inside me and the sincerity within the text just grabbed me and would not let me go. I made me feel a lot of things, and I love when a books do that. There are so many emotions behind it and you can really feel them. The atmosphere that Schwab creates in the story is great and it hooks you in, but it is the character and their stories that make you stay. I don't usually enjoy timejumps, but Schwab did them so well and they do explain the story and the motivations for each of the characters really well, although it get's a bit repetitive at times, especially towards the end.

The Moomins: The Exploits of Moominpappa, Moominsummer Madness, Moominland Midwinter - Tove Jansson: ☆☆☆☆

I love the Moomins, but there's just something so cozy about these stories and characters. They are part of my childhood, they are so light, whimiscal and funny, yet have depth to them, which is a balance that is difficult to achieve in my opinion. My journey through this book took me almost a year, as I only occasionally picked it up to enjoy the text and my stay in this small, strange world that Jansson created. I was savoring it.

Shine - Jessica Jung: ☆☆☆

SNSD, the band that Jesscia Jung was in, is my favorite kpop band since I started listening to kpop more than 10 years ago and their music is one of the main reasons why I got into kpop to begin with. So of course I was intrigued! The story here is something that I think could be inspired Jessica experiences within the kpop industry, or that thought never left me as I read it even if there were lot of unbelievable things going on within these pages. But it's definitely overdramatized at times. But how she talks about gender discrimination between female singers and male singer, from other people in the business and from the fans and the expectations that people have towards these singers and such. That felt really authentic to me. For all the glamor and the dazzle of the kpop world within this book the plot and the characters are a bit dull, and some of the more unbelievable events (like all of those trips and secret cafes) often pulled me out of the story. And I did not find the clichéd YA romance fun to read at all.

[politicalmamaduck]

Aníron

A Reylo Aragorn and Arwen AU. A huge thank you to those who have created the many online Tolkien, especially Sindarin, resources, and to my beta, @rapturousaurora. Some lines taken directly from the film The Fellowship of the Ring. Read it on AO3 here.

The stars always seemed brighter in Rivendell. 

Rey could not resist looking up from her trusty, sturdy steed to gaze upon them, allowing them to fill her mortal heart and soul with joy. 

A, Elbereth Githoniel, the ancient hymn went, and though she was not a singer, she found herself humming it as they drew nearer the Last Homely House East of the Sea. 

A Elbereth Gilthoniel, silivren penna míriel, o menel aglar elenath! 

O Elbereth Starkindler, white-glittering, slanting down sparkling like a jewel, the glory of the starry host!

The words were apt, for it was a perfect crisp night, a light breeze stirring that had been pleasant under the summer sun. The stars and moon glimmered, guiding their way to the only home Rey had ever deemed worthy of the title. Even the great waterfalls seemed welcoming here. 

Her errand was most unfortunate; her tidings not glad, but borne on the black wings of war. 

The darkness that stirred in the East had spread; the One Ring was active and known once more, borne by a small but sturdy Hobbit in her party.   

There was but one being in all Middle-earth to whom she could unburden her heart, mind, and soul, and he bore burdens of his own. His father was one of the few Men left of Númenórean blood, and deemed worthy to take ship from the Grey Havens after a near fatal wound; his mother, one of the three remaining great powers, a true Princess among Elves and Lúthien’s heiress.

She would not burden him with her own struggles with the darkness within her.

He knew it all too well, bearing her mark upon his face from a training session turned duel, gone horribly wrong. 

Both she and he had infamous tempers, undignified and unbecoming of their lineages, all in Rivendell would say. 

Those tempers boiled over when a younger Rey, one who had more energy and less experience in the ways of the world, became frustrated with her companion’s reminders of the legacies they bore, the world for which they were responsible. At that point in her young mortal life, she felt increasingly alone and isolated, trying to learn everything she needed to learn, burdened by the weight of legacy and haunted by the ghosts that had abandoned her to her fate.

The darkness, the weakness that flowed through their veins, that could not be erased by thousands of years of ancestors in her case, nor thousands of years of repentance and redemption in his. 

They were training, using ancient swords, great heirlooms of his house, their blades meeting and crashing. She could still remember his words, the force behind them, and his great strength, powerful and looming over her as they held their stance and their weapons in place.

You need to learn. I can help you. I can teach you the ancient ways.

The ancient ways? She responded, shaking her head. 

My ancestors were slaughtered, their home destroyed and cast into the sea, for dabbling in Dark magic, for listening to a shadow that told them he could make them great like those of old.  

She pushed him off of her and swung out with her blade, striking him across the face. 

Rey still cringed at the memory; for all the good Leia had done for her, taking her in, giving her a home, teaching her the ancient languages of her people and everything she needed to know should she ever choose to reclaim the throne of Gondor....

Your mother knew you would be safe here. You are the last of that bloodline, there is no one left. 

She fled, not to return again until she had earned her position among the Dúnedain, and began to come to terms with her many-times great-grandfather Palpatine’s evil. 

Her thoughts were interrupted, as they always were, by Rivendell’s steward, Lindir, bidding them welcome and offering refreshment.

“Gi nathlof hí, Lady Rey,” he said, bowing deeply. “I will inform my mistress that you have arrived.”

“Thank you, Lindir,” she replied. “There is no need for her to be disturbed, however. I am certain she is already aware of our arrival and the tidings which I bear.”

Lindir nodded. “As you say, my lady. Food and your rooms have been made ready.”

“Thank you,” she replied once more, allowing her horse to be led away. She would be well cared for here, as she always was. Both horse, and rider. 

It was good to be back, though she did not long to see her childhood rooms once more. 

The library, however, was a place where she could pass many hours in quiet reflection, and put her mind and soul at ease.

Her heart was altogether a different story, one that could not be helped by the tales of old, for she knew what she would find looking at those tales. 

Another song sounded in Rey’s mind; she was unable to escape its pull, as if Rivendell’s great choir were performing just for her. The Elves, and their love of songs that could never easily be forgotten, wrapped around and through her each day of her upbringing alongside them. 

Tinúviel! Tinúviel!

He called her by her elvish name,

And there she halted listening.

One moment stood she, and a spell

His voice laid on her: Beren came,

And doom fell on Tinúviel

That in his arms lay glistening.

Tears appeared in Rey’s eyes, equally as unbidden as the song telling a tale she longed to avoid. 

Ben Solo, heir to Rivendell, Lúthien’s heir, Mîr n’Ardhon, she would not be his downfall the way Beren was to Lúthien. 

Only he would disturb her in the library, and so he did, catching her gazing down upon the remnants of a sword that was hers and hers alone to claim. 

She both dreaded and longed for this moment. 

“Why do you fear the past and the future?” He asked.  “You are Isildur Palpatine’s heir, not Isildur Palpatine himself.” 

“The same blood flows through my veins. The same weakness,” she answered, whispering, giving voice to the fears and darkness she had borne all her life. 

“Your time will come. You will face the same evil, and you will defeat it. The Shadow does not hold sway yet. Not over you, and not over me.” This last bit he added in Elvish, causing Rey’s spine to shudder at the beautiful and powerful words.

The darkness, they would face together, when the time came. She knew it to be as true as her love for him. 

He had the high cheekbones and dark eyes and waves of hair known to Luthien’s line. She had been unable to resist him from the moment they met. 

His thoughts had turned to that moment as well, it seemed, while they walked from the library into the gardens.  

“Do you remember when we first met?” he asked, tracing her cheekbone. 

“I thought I had strayed into a dream,” she murmured, looking up into his eyes.

“Long years have passed; you did not have the cares that you carry now.” He sighed, looking down and burdened for only a moment. He looked back up at her, focusing his powerful gaze once more. “Do you remember what I told you?”

She could not meet his gaze. She knew the words; they were etched on her heart. Yet she still could not believe them, could not believe that he had said them in the first place, let alone held himself to them all these years later.

“You said you would bind yourself to me, forsaking the immortal life of your people.” 

“And to that I hold. I would rather share one lifetime with you, than face the ages of this world alone. I choose a mortal life. Mine is the choice of Lúthien, and of my mother before me, and as she so have I chosen, both the sweet and the bitter.”

They kissed under the moon and stars, and pledged their troth to one another with those celestial lights as their witnesses. 

They kissed, hands tracing taut bodies and corded muscles, honed from years of training with swords and horses. 

Rey traced the outline of his pointed ears after they had sunk to the forest floor, causing his toes to curl and a moan to escape his throat. 

“Rey,” he said, looking up at her on top of him as if she were the light of the Two Trees themselves. 

“My Rey,” he said, reaching a now-trembling hand up to her cheek once more. 

She kissed him again, and knew she was as lost as Beren when he stumbled upon Lúthien before her. 

She would give her mortal life to protect and defend this elf and his people, as he would sacrifice his immortality for her. 

For tonight, however, they had each other. 

He wore simple, though elegant and exquisitely tailored clothes, suitable for one of his status and position. No armor was necessary for either of them within Rivendell; it was easy for him to divest her of her fighting leathers and her tunic.  

He unwrapped her breast band, then traced his fingers over every scar she bore, pressed his lips to them as if a burning brand, searing her with the fire of his love. 

She was straddling him, wearing only her trousers and underwear, when in the haze of love, she remembered a crucial detail from her childhood history lessons; it rose to her mind unbidden, much like the song that seemed to summon her would be lover to find her in the library.

"It was the act of bodily union that achieved marriage...it was at all times lawful for any of the Eldar, both being unwed, to marry thus of free consent one to the other without ceremony or witness…in flight and exile and wandering, such marriages were often made."

She placed a hand upon him, feeling his heart beat beneath his powerful, broad chest and breathed deeply, both of them doing so heavily.

“Are you sure?” was all she could ask in that moment, bonded and bound to the only one she had ever loved. 

“Yes, Rey, my Estel, Chieftess of the Dúnedain, my life,” he said, his eyes dark and shining. 

They kissed once more, Ben rising from the forest floor and lifting her into his arms, her legs about his waist. 

He put her down for just a moment, only to sweep her back up again as if she weighed nothing.

He carried her, bridal style, to his rooms under the stars and moon, where she helped him remove the rest of his clothing with trembling hands. 

She traced his scars as he traced hers, kissing them and claiming them for her own. 

I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine, he whispered to her in Sindarin after he entered her, his arms entwined about her, the silk sheets of his bed strewn about them. 

She was filled to capacity, joy overflowing, her body and soul one with his at last as they moved together, finding a rhythm in their bodies, their hearts beating as one, creating a song all their own. 

She gave herself to him as he gave himself to her, knowing they would never be alone to face the ages of the world and all its troubles again.

She cried out to the moonlight as the stars twinkled in his eyes, and vowed they would never be parted from that day hence. 

“Varda Elentári,” she cried once more as she came, and he chuckled, altogether undignified for an Elf, Lúthien’s heir, an altogether too mortal, too human gesture, recalling for her his father, so long departed to the West. 

She laughed with him, and kissed him again as they sank back down into the sheets, each tracing the other’s cheek and freckles or beauty marks. 

“Meleth nîn,” he murmured as they drifted off to sleep in each other’s arms, and Rey knew she was truly home.

[heatherinthesunshine]

The Party of the Poe

Shipwrecked Comedy is having a fan-creation contest to celebrate 5 years so here is my contribution: a fanfic/script/thing imagining what would happen if Poe Party was actually the Fellowship of the Ring instead of a Murder Mystery Dinner Party/Gala for Friends Potluck. Watch Poe Party first because my thing has spoilers and also because it won't make sense unless you watch Shipwrecked Comedy’s brilliant webseries: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs2T_dNZ-XW6UjWC-qUbZSWJyCLFmsdPP.

The Party of the Poe

By Heather

A fan work, based on Edgar Allan Poe’s Murder Mystery Dinner Party by Shipwrecked Comedy and The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien.

Chapter 1 – A Shadow of a Past

It was many and many a year ago…

[Edgar Allan Poe is sitting at his desk, writing furiously. He mutters to himself and crosses out a line. After a few moments there is an urgent a knocking at the door.]

POE: What is that rapping at my chamber door?

[He goes to the door and opens it. Annabel Lee is at the door, visibly shaken.]

POE: Ah the beautiful Annabel Lee! Hello! You are looking very beautiful today!

[Lenore has come to the door as well.]

LENORE: What’s wrong Anna-banana?

ANNABEL LEE: I was cleaning my mantelpiece while waiting for Eddie to pick me up after his volunteer shift sewing teddy-bears for the children’s hospital, and I found an envelope. I opened it and this ring fell out and it landed in the fire and strange writing appeared on it and Oh Edgar I’m frightened!

[Lenore snatches the ring and looks closely at the writing.]

LENORE: Hey, this is the One Ring!

[Poe and Annabel stare at her.]

LENORE: What? I saw it in one of those dusty old books in the library. Not like there’s anything ELSE to do around here!

ANNABEL: What is the One Ring?

LENORE: It basically lets you manipulate everybody. Like, one ring to rule them all. Sounds pretty great t.b.h.

POE: [Quickly takes the ring] NOT something to be left lying around. [He gives the ring back to Annabel.]

ANNABEL: What should we do about it?

LENORE: I know! You can go talk to JRR Tolkien! He’ll know what to do. He’s having a panel and book signing in DC today!

POE: That’s awfully convenient.

ANNABEL: Oh but what about Eddie? We were going to go dancing! And he’s so smart, I’m sure he’ll have some ideas!

[Poe scowls deeply.]

LENORE: [Glances at Poe] Well the panel starts in an hour, so you two should leave right now. I’ll tell Eddie, and he can meet you there!

[Annabel and Poe set off for DC. Lenore heads next door to Annabel’s house.]

[Enter Eddie]

EDDIE: Lenore, what are you doing here? Where is Annabel?

LENORE: Today has been so cray. Annabel found the One Ring.

EDDIE: The One Ring! So it IS in this house! I suspected as much when I began courting her. Where is it? Give it to me!

LENORE: Umm… It’s not here anymore. Annabel took it with her.

EDDIE: Annabel! That naïve girl! Annabel has insufficient wit to handle a treasure such as that. And you were a fool to let her walk off with it. But no matter. Tell me where she has gone.

If you join with me we can share the Ring.

LENORE: Ok ONE everyone knows that only one person can wield the Ring at a time and TWO I would never wrong my girl Annabel like that! My lips are sealed.

EDDIE: Then I will find her myself, and you will remain here until I do. [He locks her in Annabel’s study and leaves.]

LENORE: I am LITERALLY a ghost. [She escapes though a wall.]

Chapter 2 – Nine is a Party

[Meanwhile, Poe and Annabel have arrived at a cozy bookshop in DC, as have many other authors. The Panel of Tolkien begins…]

TOLKIEN: You have been called here, authors from various time periods and literary traditions. Called, I say, though I have not called you to me. For the One Ring has departed Middle Earth and been found here, in Baltimore, and it is we who sit here who must determine the fate of both worlds.

TOLKIEN: But first, I will explain the history of the Ring. This is the tale, as I know it…

[Eleven hours later…]

TOLKIEN: … and Frodo of the Nine Fingers and Samwise the Brave were at last successful in casting the Ring into the fire of Mount Doom and destroying Sauron once and for all, or so it was thought. But now here is the Ring. What shall we do with it?

WILDE: [Aside] Next time I’m insisting on the theatrical cut.

DOSTOEVSKY: Surely we must destroy it, but how? We do not have the means to destroy it here, and we do not know how to get to Mordor from America.

LENORE: [Materializes] Hey guys! Spoiler alert, Eddie is actually a bad guy. He wants the Ring for himself, and he’s on his way here to take it.

POE: Lenore, how did you even get here?

LENORE: Oh, apparently teleportation is one of my ghost powers! Cool, huh?

WELLS: If I can just have a few moments to measure Lenore’s teleportative ability, I may be able to calibrate my prototype time machine to create a portal to Middle Earth! Lenore, will you help me?

[They exit]

TOLKIEN: If we can get to Middle Earth, we must send the Ring into the Fire. Who will take it?

POE: Ok, hear me out. What if we give the ring to one of my ravens, and have the raven fly to Mordor and drop it into Mount Doom? Quick, low-budget, and no one needs to leave home.

BRONTE: I think if a bird would work, they would have done that the first time, don’t you?

[General sounds of agreement]

TOLKIEN: Yes, a party on foot does seem to be traditional.

HEMINGWAY: Besides, your ravens just fly around aimlessly as if they have never been trained. You’re a terrible owner.

POE: Hey! I pride myself on being a very good raven owner. Alright, fine. How about we do it once with all of the walking, and then try again with a raven and then we’ll see what is what.

WILDE: Yes, but we only have the one ring. [Smirks] Get it?

POE: Ok well if we’re not using ravens, who is going to take the Ring?

EMERSON:  I suppose I could take it. I’m accustomed to spending lots of time outdoors wandering through the Massachusetts woods, the leaves fluttering softly like…

POE: [Interrupting] I will die before I see the Ring in the hands of a Transcendentalist!

[The argument grows louder and louder. Annabel looks around concerned. Suddenly she speaks…]

ANNABEL: I will take it. [Everyone goes quiet.] I will take the Ring… though I do not know the way.

TOLKIEN: Thank you Annabel. I would not wish to force this burden on you, but I believe it is right for you to take it, if you take it willingly.

POE: But surely you won’t send her off alone!

TOLKIEN: Certainly not! You at least shall go.

DOSTOEVSKY: I will also help you bear this burden. Mordor cannot be worse than Siberian prison.

ELIOT: I have brought along the Duke of Coventry and Humphrey Cadwallader for your protection. You have my sword.

HEMINGWAY: And my guns [winks].

BRONTE: And my axe! [Pause] What? I like sharp objects!

ALCOTT: Yes, we women need to stick together.

SHELLEY: Besides, you’ll need someone of intelligence on this quest. Count me in.

DICKINSON: And I’ll come too!

TOLKIEN: Alright [counting] that makes eight people in the party…

DICKINSON: Nine. It’s nine people.

TOLKIEN: I was really hoping for nine. We need one more volunteer.

DICKINSON: I said I was going. I make nine.

WILDE: Oh what the heck, I’ll go. Could be fun?

TOLKIEN: Excellent. Nine it is.

DICKINSON: I’m right… oh forget you guys, I’ll just stay home.

WELLS: [Returning] If you’ll all come this way, Lenore and I are ready to send you to Middle Earth…

Chapter 3 – An Abridged Journey

NARRATOR: This is where I must jump in to speed up the tale, for it grows in the telling. Wells had transported the company to a beautiful mountain village, and it was from there that our heroes began their journey south. The first obstacle in their path was a range of misty mountains. They decided to take a pass over the mountains but were soon caught in a terrible blizzard, and forced to retreat. Dostoevsky, who was most suitably dressed for this type of weather, was able to get everyone off the mountain, but was killed in an avalanche. There was much grieving. The party then went under the mountains, through some dim and foreboding mines. Here they lost Mary Shelley, who sacrificed herself against a terrible monster (which they were pretty sure was not named Karen). There was more grieving. Next, the party came to a beautiful forest…

ALCOTT: I could stay in this forest forever!

NARRATOR: She did.

NARRATOR: And at last it was time to make a choice…

HEMINGWAY: We should head west, to Minas Tirith, and aid in the war effort. This Ring would be a mighty gift to turn the tide in their favor.

POE: No, we should head east, to the Mountain of Shadow, as was agreed at the council.

HEMINGWAY: I trust the strength of men in combat over this subterfuge.

POE: That’s because you lack all subtlety.

HEMINGWAY: Well why don’t we let the lady decide?

POE: Yes, the lady.

NARRATOR: The lady was, at this moment, in the process of being carried off by a group of rather large orcs. The party sprang to action. At last Annabel was rescued, but Hemingway lay dead, shot by one too many orc arrows. There was yet more grieving to be done.

POE: You valued brevity, so I will simply say farewell, my dear, uh…

WILDE: Friend?

POE: Mmmm… acquaintance.

ELIOT: What should we do now? Hemingway wasn’t wrong. Gondor does need help in its fight.

ANNABEL: I could not ask any more of you to die for me. I will go to Mordor alone.

POE: Great idea Annabel. George – you, Oscar, and Charlotte should go to Minas Tirith. Annabel and I will go to Mordor.

ANNABEL: I said “alone”.

POE: Right. Yes. Alone. With me.

Chapter 4 – Of Battles, Briefly

NARRATOR: George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Charlotte Bronte continued on to Minas Tirith. They arrived to find it under siege.

BRONTE: Well I suppose it’s time to get our hands dirty. [She strides into battle, swinging her axe] One… Two… Three…

WILDE: Oh I don’t know about all of this…

[The Witch King of Angmar, leader of the Nazgul, lands before Wilde and Eliot. He dismounts and hits Wilde with his giant mace. Wilde falls.]

ELIOT: NO! Oscar! [She kneels by him] Like a brother you were to me, for a little while. [Standing and turning to face the Witch King] Ringwraith! Darken this world no more!

WITCH KING: You fool! No man can kill me!

ELIOT: I [removes hat] George Eliot [removes moustache] am a woman. [She runs him through].

WITCH KING: [Dying] Argh no dammit. This is the SECOND time this has happened to me. Oh it’s so embarrassing.

Chapter 5 – A Song of Fire and Also More Fire

NARRATOR: I could tell you all about the trials faced by Annabel and Poe on their journey to The Land of Shadow. How Eddie the Banker found them in the wilderness and became their guide, causing no little strife between our two heroes. How Eddie tried to betray them but was eaten by a giant spider. I could tell you of the long trek through the desert with little water, and less food. How at the end, Annabel became so weak that Poe had to carry her. But it is a long and depressing tale and I do not wish to dwell on it. Suffice it to say that at last our heroes made it to their destination, a chamber carved into the side of Mount Doom.

POE: Well, here we are. Cast the Ring into the fire, Annabel, and let us be done with this ridiculous quest.

ANNABEL: Now that it comes to it, it is difficult to part with. It whispers in my mind. I could claim it as my own, and become a queen, great and terrible. All would love me and despair.

POE: We already do. Just get rid of it and I’ll get you a nicer ring.

ANNABEL: Wait, was that a proposal?

POE: No. Uh yes. Uh maybe?

[Annabel casts the Ring into the fires of Mount Doom. She sighs with relief.]

ANNABEL: It’s over. It’s done.

[Annabel and Poe slowly head out of the chamber and make their way down the mountain. Suddenly, with a great roar, the mountain erupts. Annabel and Poe cling together on an outcrop as rivers of lava flow all around them.]

ANNABEL: I am glad that you are with me, Edgar, here at the end of all things.

[She looks up at the sky. A flock of birds is flying towards them.]

ANNABEL: Oh Edgar! The ravens! The ravens are coming!

[The ravens pass overhead and continue on. Poe coughs uncomfortably. Just as all seems to be lost, Annabel and Poe dematerialize, then rematerialize.]

Chapter 6 – Party’s End:

[Poe and Annabel look around. They are back in the bookshop in Washington D.C. All of the other members of the Party are there as well, and they are applauding.]

POE: What happened? Are we dead?

WELLS: No! It is a convenient side effect of this form of travel! When you died in Middle Earth you awoke back here!

POE: [Frowns] Does this mean Eddie is also back?

LENORE: No, he must have traveled to Middle Earth using a different method. He was definitely really eaten by a giant spider. Too bad, so sad!

[Tolkien coughs to get everyone’s attention.]

TOLKIEN: The Ringbearer has fulfilled her quest! Praise her with great praise! Thanks to you and to all of the Party, a terrible threat has been vanquished.

ANNABEL: Is the darkness gone forever?

TOLKIEN: No my dear. The darkness is never gone forever. That is why each of us must return to our own places and times, and fight the darkness however it may come to us there.

NARRATOR: There were many tearful goodbyes. Dostoevsky insisted that the entire group take a shot, in celebration of the love than had grown amongst them. Hemingway took a few friendly jabs at Poe. Eventually, the group dispersed, and Poe, Annabel, and Lenore made their way home.

ANNABEL: Isn’t it strange to think that we went on that great adventure to save the world, and no one in Baltimore knows anything about it?

POE: Oh, I don’t like attention anyway.

Epilogue

NARRATOR: As you know, the time comes when a Ringbearer must make one final journey. And it is said when Annabel sailed over the sea that Edgar Allan Poe went with her.  And perhaps it was due to Poe’s great love for Annabel that the Lords of the West permitted it.

They took the last ship to the West, Poe and his Annabel Lee

There they loved with a love that was more than love, in a kingdom by the sea.

The End

[lokilickedme]

Hello My Lady! Just because you asked, here are my faves of yours: #1 King (no surprise here), #2 Jack (too crazy not to love, and the stream crossing of pretty much all your stories is genius) #3 Chem/BD/TTW/TKH/TWK/can't remember them all. They're all special in their own way! Can't believe it'll be 3yrs soon since I started squatting your page!!! God time goes by fast! I'd like to add a special mention for the Muse Meetings, sooo funny, and a Golden Snowflake to Aleks. Cute little bumkin.

Thank you @fudgemuffinanon!  Dear god, has it been that long?  Seems like I joined up last year…*sits here blinking at my posts from 2015, wondering how that happened*

**LONG TEXT POST COMING UP**

You drew the lucky straw today my darling, I’m feeling wordy and in the mood to share.  A lot of people have asked me over the last couple of years how some of my stuff came about, and you mentioned one that gets a lot of asks.

Lemme tell you something about the Muse Meetings.  Way back in 1998 when I got my first computer, one of the very first things I ran across by way of internet fanfiction was a little something called The Very Secret Diaries penned by a writer named Cassandra Claire (who is now professionally published under the name Cassandra Clare).  The Very Secret Diaries (which are hilarious, btw) woke something up in me - mainly because, as a lifelong writer who had never allowed anyone to read 95% of my work, I finally realized that yeah, there were other people out there whose brains deviated from the standard in the same way mine did.  Her writing style back then (in the Diaries specifically, I’ve never actually read anything else she’s written) was very similar to the way I wrote, and those Diaries were exactly the sort of silly, ridiculous, irreverent thing I’d scribbled in my notebooks for most of my life.  And people liked it, she had a huge following based on just those out-of-context glimpses of her characters’ personal thoughts.  She was writing behind the scenes thoughts of characters, things that would never make it into books, and it was brilliant.  That was the kind of stuff I loved to write but had never given myself permission to show anyone.  She was showing hers to people, and they were loving it.

Which gave me the inspiration to not only put my work out there in the public eye for the first time ever, but to stick with my personal writing style (which I’d always assumed wasn’t what other people wanted to read, based on the books I’d been exposed to most of my life).  Not change anything.  Just do me.  And doing me meant writing silly nonsense if I wanted to.

So - The Very Secret Diaries are more or less the inspiration for the Muse Meetings, or at least the official written version of them.  I’d always imagined dialogues with my characters outside the confines of whatever story I was working on, but never thought anyone else would be interested in seeing me write it out.

The Diaries made me realize different.  Not only were her characters yammering and complaining and snarking at each other (both out of character and in), they were doing it in exactly the way I’d imagined my own characters interacting in the real world.  I loved it.  Seeing someone else do what I’d always done in my head - and do it in an official, out-there-in-the-public-eye capacity, was a revelation.  Finally I was able to give myself permission to write the way I wanted to, without restricting myself to the styles and methods in the books in the family library.  It had always been in my head, but now it didn’t have to stay there.  I could write proper stories, but I could also write what was going on in the other room, where the reader seldom gets to peek.  And other people besides myself might like it because hey, there’s precedent.

That was freeing, and I am grateful to Ms Claire for that.

So, a little history that leads up to how and why I finally started writing out the Muse Meetings:

My first fandoms that I wrote for online were Harry Potter and Star Wars (Kenobi specifically).  And yes, way back then (late 90′s - early 2000′s) there were already muse meetings among my characters.  I’ve been doing these for a long time, and I wish the out-of-character stuff I’d written back then still existed (my HP stuff bit the dust when The Restricted Section shut down, and my SW stuff was on FF.net for a little while but honestly I don’t remember my user ID there or the titles of the fics, though I have searched…so they’re most likely lost as well).  It’s sort of a shame because there were some old Anakin/Obi-Wan muse meetings that you guys would have loved…and the stuff between Remus and Sirius while we were hashing out what was going to be in their next chapter?  It still pains me that it’s all lost, but maybe it’s for the best.  That was nearly two decades ago, we move on to bigger and (hopefully) better things.

After my urge to write HP fic fizzled out I stopped writing for a while, but there were always muse meetings going on in my head for stories I scribbled mentally.  To me they’ve always been more fun than the actual stories, which explains my love for gag reels and behind-the-scenes featurettes for movies (I watch those first, always).

And then I found AO3 - funnily enough, I discovered it while searching the internet for one of my lost HP fics - and I decided to start writing in earnest again.  With all those thousands and thousands of fics and endless fandoms, it seemed like the perfect place to indulge my need to share what went on in my head.  And as I settled into the MCU and my stories started to grow to include multitudes of characters, those impromptu staff meetings with my muses kept being called to order.  Stuff that my characters would never say in the context of their stories got said.  Scenarios that were too ridiculous to waste time writing were played out.  Arguments and fights and bantering between characters who, in the restrictive confines of their own tales, would never in a million years interact…now they were throwing poptarts at each other (and occasionally knives) while the side characters wandered out of the room to watch TV or raid the fridge or sat in horror as someone’s until-now unassuming wife brandished a melon baller as a weapon.

It was messy and fun and was by far my favorite part of the writing process.

That’s what eventually became the Muse Meetings.  You want to know how they escaped my head and became an official thing?

Well I’m gonna tell ya lol

One of my very first friends in here, the fantastic @elvenfair1, was one of my first readers at AO3 and she told me I should post links to my fics at this site called tumblr to bring in a bigger audience.  So I opened an account here, followed her, posted some links as suggested, and she and I began messaging back and forth pretty much every night as we wrote our respective fics, bouncing ideas off each other and discussing plot points and brainstorming for character names.  And as my characters sassed me and refused to cooperate with what I wanted them to do, I would tell elvenfair what was going on in my head with my dumbass OCs and OFCs and we’d laugh and gripe about trying unsuccessfully to reel in our unruly muses.

And then one night back in 2015 she said “You should post this muse stuff, it’s hilarious.”

You know what the first thing I thought was?  Cassandra Claire did it 14 years ago and people loved it.  So yeah, I can sure as hell do it if I want.  If nobody is interested in it, at least it’ll amuse me and elvenfair and that’s cool enough.

And so I did.  I started posting them in here first, then as people started requesting them more I eventually moved them to AO3 in a more structured format.  And now you guys have multiple Lokis hurling curses at a bartender and viciously baiting a hapless movie star while teenage versions of two other attendees flirt with unsuspecting OFCs, with an occasional appearance by Thor dropping hints about future chapters and looking for fruit roll-ups.  It’s messy, but it’s fun and I’ve always enjoyed writing it as a way to let my brain decompress, especially when one of my “real” stories has hit a roadbump.

Since then I’ve seen countless other professional writers doing the exact same thing - J.R. Ward even posts her own version of muse meetings on her official website AND has a published book (her Insiders Guide) that is almost entirely nothing BUT muse meetings.   It’s surprising how many writers actually do this and I sometimes wonder if authors like Poe, Steinbeck, Vonnegut, Tolkien, Gaiman, McMurtry didn’t do it themselves (I’d bet money on McMurtry).  Just goes to show there’s not an original idea anywhere in the universe…no matter how much you might believe you came up with it first, someone out there has been doing it for a long damn time before you - and a million more will do it after you :)

Anyway, I haven’t written any muse meetings in a while but they still go on constantly in my head.  I get asked about once a week to go back to doing them, and one day I will, when I have time for it.  My actual fics are struggling for writing time as it is and I made a conscious decision to weed out the unnecessary stuff in favor of “real work” (yeah right lol)…but yeah, the Meetings are still one of my favorite things and I won’t stop doing them permanently - they’ll be back.

So thank you Cassandra Claire for inspiring me to let them fly…if it weren’t for those whacked-out Diaries, the Muse Meetings would all still be in my head with only one person (me) laughing at them.

[dawnfelagund]

[I posted this essay to my blog The Heretic Loremaster over the weekend. Click the link above if you’d rather read it there. Reactions are welcome in both places.]

Who wrote The Silmarillion? It's a question with a more complicated answer than it seems on the surface. Yes, of course, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote the book that I picked up from a Barnes & Noble fourteen years ago, that is now on my desk with its cover coming off and its corners rounded from being read so many times. But who, in the vast imagined world within its pages, is telling the story? The narrator of The Silmarillion is so distant as to be barely discernible at all; it is possible to believe he doesn't exist at all. Indeed, in at least my first two readings, I did not think much of him. I assumed a distant, omniscient presence recounting what happened in plain, incontestable terms. Just the facts, ma'am.

The fact is, though, that J.R.R. Tolkien--the Silmarillion author whose name is on the cover--always imagined and constructed his stories not just as stories but as historiography: documents written by someone within the universe in which the history occurs. This complicates things: gone is the distance, the omniscience, and perhaps most importantly, the impression that the stories happened exactly as they are told.

This wouldn't be a problem--in fact, would be quite simple, as most fiction has point of view that is biased or unreliable--but for the fact that this isn't simple: This is Tolkien. So naturally, he had this idea that he wanted to write his stories as historiography, with a loremaster or chronicler who was himself a part of that history, but he couldn't make up his mind who this person was. In fact, he changed his mind several times, reversals that are documented in The History of Middle-earth for fans and scholars to angst and argue over.

I'm going to make the case that the "Quenta Silmarillion" is part of the Elvish tradition. This is contrary to the belief of Christopher Tolkien and other Tolkien scholars, who assign it to the "Mannish"--namely Númenórean--tradition. (@ingwiel has an excellent discussion of the evidence for this approach.) I understand why they did this, but I think that if you look deeply at the texts and the evidence those texts provide, there is not much to support that the tradition originated with the Númenóreans. (I am willing to concede that Elvish texts may have passed through Númenórean hands on their way back to Elrond and, eventually, Bilbo, but I persist in believing they are nonetheless predominantly Elvish texts representing an Elvish point of view.)

The Idea of the "Mannish" Tradition

The Elvish loremaster Pengolodh was first introduced as the primary author of the "Quenta Silmarillion" prior to 1930, when he was assigned author of the Annals of Beleriand (HoMe IV). Pengolodh was a tenacious character: Texts written as late as 1960 were still being assigned to him. So what happened?

The idea of the "Mannish" loremaster was a late idea and introduced as part of the series of writings collected by Christopher Tolkien under the title Myths Transformed (HoMe X). In a text that Christopher dates to 1958, Tolkien writes:

It is now clear to me that in any case the Mythology must actually be a 'Mannish' affair. ... The High Eldar living and being tutored by the demiurgic beings must have known, or at least their writers and loremasters must have known, the 'truth' (according to their measure of understanding). What we have in the Silmarillion etc. are traditions (especially personalized, and centred upon actors, such as Fëanor) handed on by Men in Númenor and later in Middle-earth (Arnor and Gondor); but already far back--from the first association of the Dúnedain and Elf-friends with the Eldar in Beleriand--blended and confused with their own Mannish myths and cosmic ideas. (Myths Transformed, "Text I," emphasis in the original)

To summarize: in 1958, Tolkien began to deeply question whether a civilization as advanced as that of the Eldar--a civilization that also had access to the teachings of the Ainur, who knew firsthand the structure of the universe--would produce myths that included such components as a flat Earth and the "astronomically absurd business of the making of the Sun and Moon" ("Text I"). This led to some radical cosmological rearrangements in Myths Transformed--and the relatively overlooked decision to reimagine the Silmarillion histories from a Mortal rather than an Elvish perspective. In an undated text also presented in Myths Transformed, Tolkien again takes up this question and explains the method of textual transmission in greater detail:

It has to be remembered that the 'mythology' is represented as being two stages removed from a true record: it is based first upon Elvish records and lore about the Valar and their own dealings with them; and these have reached us (fragmentarily) only through relics of Númenórean (human) traditions, derived from the Eldar, in the earlier parts, though for later times supplemented by anthropocentric histories and tales. These, it is true, came down through the 'Faithful' and their descendants in Middle-earth, but could not altogether escape the darkening of the picture due to the hostility of the rebellious Númenóreans to the Valar. ("Text VII")

"A leading consideration in the preparation of the text was the achievement of coherence and consistency," Christopher Tolkien wrote in a note on The Valaquenta in The Later Quenta Silmarillion II (HoMe X), "and a fundamental problem was uncertainty as to the mode by which in my father's later thought the 'Lore of the Eldar' had been transmitted."

Christopher Tolkien tentatively dates The Later Quenta Silmarillion II (LQ2) to 1958. Along with the last set of annals, The Annals of Aman and The Grey Annals, this represents the final version of the Silmarillion that his father produced. (See "Note on Dating" at the end of LQ2 in HoMe X.) Interesting about these texts--especially LQ2--is the fact that Tolkien removes all attributions Pengolodh. Mentions of Pengolodh are sprinkled throughout the Later Quenta Silmarillion I, which was written around 1951-52. When Tolkien "remoulded" LQ1 into LQ2, he removed Pengolodh. Also written around 1958? That first Myths Transformed text in which Tolkien  asserts that his cosmology requires a Mortal and specifically bars an Eldarin loremaster.

And the Evidence of the Elvish, Part 1: The Creative Process

All this probably seems very simple. Tolkien was clear on his intentions. The Elvish tradition doesn't work, in his opinion. Therefore, it must be Mortal. He even took out the Elvish loremaster from the oldest Silmarillion draft. Simple, right?

Never. Working with any of the Silmarillion material--including the published Silmarillion--is necessarily speculative. This is a posthumous text, unfinished and existing in many forms. I think Christopher Tolkien did an admirable job of making a published book out of the tangle of his father's writings, but making that book required making decisions, as alluded to above, about how to decide what to include.

On this particular question, there are two approaches to making a decision on mode of transmission: There is Tolkien's stated intention, and there are the texts themselves and what they show of the realization of that intention. Christopher Tolkien, and many scholars, clearly prefer the first approach. Tolkien was clear on what he wanted, so that's the way to read the texts.

I prefer the second.

Perhaps this is because I approach the welter of Silmarillion texts as a creative writer as well as a Tolkien scholar. My experiences as an author of fiction myself lead me to question whether the creative process lends itself to the kind of neat analysis that says, "The author stated his intention. Here we have our answer." My experience tells me it is rarely that simple.

Below is what I imagine the creative process looks like for worldbuilding and constructing stories in that world, done in clipart and scribbles. For me, most of my work goes on in my mind: while driving to work, falling asleep at night, reading other authors' work, washing dishes, daydreaming. Some of the thinking is intentional, other occurs because it's where my mind wanders where I'm bored. Sometimes, thinking is sparked by an outside stimulus: an interview on the radio, a song, an image, a clip from a movie or TV. All of it goes into this tangle of thought constantly swirling in my mind, making and remaking my imagined world. Every now and then, an idea leaves my mind and takes concrete form as I write it down.

But only in limited instances do these ideas become finalized, incontrovertible--"canon," if you will. Sometimes an idea won't work and withers, unfinished. Other times, an idea is written down, only to dive back into the welter of thought in my mind for further reworking and reshaping--sometimes radically so.

Every author's creative process is different, of course, but hold up The Tale of the Sun and the Moon from the Book of Lost Tales next to the story Tolkien writes in Myths Transformed and the two are radically different, showing what any Silmarillion fan can tell you: Just because Tolkien wrote it down doesn't mean he meant it. Likewise, he went years at times without working on the legendarium, yet his letters and the progress we observe in the drafts show that he was always thinking about it. In short, his creative process, in this regard, seems a lot like mine.

Around 1958, we can say with some certainty that an idea crystallized from Tolkien's thoughts about his legendarium that the mode of transmission had to be centered on Mortals, not Elves. The idea seems to have loomed large in his awareness--along with ancillary ideas about cosmology--to the extent that it appears to reflect in decisions he made in revising LQ2.

But does that mean it is definitive? That it is "canon"? Not necessarily. In fact, I'd argue that we have proof that this particular manifestation of an idea was one that was far from finalized but dove back into the swirl of thinking on worldbuilding to be reconsidered and reworked--and ultimately unrealized.

And the Evidence of the Elvish, Part 2: Point of View

Point of view is no small thing in a story. In fact, in all but a few cases, it is so essential that to change the point of view risks breaking the story in a way that changing other elements rarely does. It's like painting. If you paint from the point of view of a peasant looking at a castle from the field where she labors, you cannot suddenly decide that the point of view is that of the princess looking out from the room in the castle where she spends most of her days, at least without redoing the painting entirely.

Likewise, one cannot take a story written from one point of view, then suddenly decide to change to a different point of view with any guarantee that the story will still work, much less make sense, without rewriting the story. In fact, in many cases, it will not.

Changing from an Elvish to a Númenórean point of view is not so simple as declaring, "Let it be!" and there it is. In the case of the "Quenta Silmarillion," the Eldarin (specifically Gondolindrim) perspective is deeply embedded. @grundyscribbling‘s post here is a good run-down of how the narrator's affiliation with Gondolin is revealed, even if never stated, in the stories included as part of the "Quenta." My article Attainable Vistas looks at some of the numerical data I've compiled that suggests a Gondolindrim perspective. At last year's Tolkien at UVM Conference, I presented more of that data, as well as new evidence that even the narrator's language in the "Quenta," reveals the point of view of a loremaster from Gondolin. Tolkien didn't put Pengolodh's biography down on paper until the 1959-60 text Quendi and Eldar, but the texts suggest that Pengolodh's identity was swirling in his mind many decades before that, and he wrote the "Quenta" with that point of view always in mind. Changing the point of view of such a story requires significant rewriting of the text. Do we have evidence that any of that rewriting--short of striking Pengolodh's name from LQ2--occurred?

No, we do not.

In fact, we sometimes see the opposite.

And the Evidence of the Elvish, Part 3: The Texts

The Later Quenta Silmarillion II becomes a relevant text to examine here because 1) it was written at the time when we know Tolkien was thinking about the mode of transmission and 2) his striking of Pengolodh's name from this version suggests he was beginning to act on his stated intention to revise the "Quenta" to reflect a Númenórean point of view. It is also an interesting text to study because it is a revision of LQ1, written about seven years earlier when the mode of transmission was, as far as I can tell, unreservedly Elvish.

Does the LQ2 contain other revisions toward a Númenórean mode? No, it is does not. In fact, it includes additions that, from a Mortal perspective, are suspect.

Laws and Customs among the Eldar. One of two major additions to LQ2 was Laws and Customs among the Eldar (L&C). L&C is explicitly attributed to Ælfwine, the Mortal man who was part of the mode of the transmission involving Pengolodh. Ælfwine is Anglo-Saxon, not Númenórean, but L&C is clearly written from the point of view of a Mortal commenting on Elves.

L&C opens with the sentence, "The Eldar grew in bodily form slower than Men, but in mind more swiftly." This comparison immediately establishes a Mortal point of view different from that of the "Quenta" as a whole, where Mortals are usually but supporting actors in a drama enacted by Elves. The first two paragraphs continue this comparison and assume the distinct point of view of a Mortal. Later, in the section "Of Naming," the narrator notes that the variety of names used by a single Elf "in the reading of their histories may to us seem bewildering," again establishing a Mortal point of view (emphasis mine).

L&C is an example of what a text written from a Mortal point of view would look like. "Men are really only interested in Men and in Men's ideas and visions," Tolkien wrote in Myths Transformed, and L&C acknowledges this by bringing Elvish customs into the context of Mortal experience ("Text I"). This text shows that Tolkien did manipulate the point of view based on his narrator. (This won't be shocking to any writer of fiction, and as an Anglo-Saxonist, Tolkien would have been aware of the impact of point of view on a historical text from that perspective as well.)

Christopher Tolkien dates L&C to the late 1950s (LQ2, "Note on Dating"). The argument could be made that Tolkien hadn't yet begun the process of revising to incorporate a Númenórean narrator. However, of all of the texts in LQ2, L&C is the easiest to revise to change the point of view. It is already from a Mortal point of view! Simply change the attribution to Ælfwine to a suitably Númenórean name and you have a major chapter of LQ2 aligned with the Númenórean mode of transmission. It is a surface change on the order of removing attributions to Pengolodh, and the fact that Tolkien didn't undertake it makes me question how seriously he truly undertook to revise the point of view.

The Statute of Finwë and Míriel. The Statute of Finwë and Míriel is the second major addition to LQ2. It is likewise dated to the late 1950s (LQ2, "Note on Dating"). If Tolkien wanted to write a text representing a Númenórean point of view, he couldn't have done a worse job of it with the Statute of Finwë and Míriel. Here we have a text deeply concerned with eschatology: Elven eschatology.

The Númenóreans were also concerned with eschatology. You could even say the Númenóreans were obsessed with eschatology, and immortality in particular. Here's a people, after all, annihilated because of their king's obsession with an Oasis song proclaiming, "You and I are gonna live forever!" A Númenórean text that represents Elven eschatology with no commentary grounding it in a Mortal perspective (like Tolkien does with L&C) is almost impossible to fathom. A text that centers on immortality and the decision to forgo immortality would certainly excite commentary from a Númenórean loremaster. Revisions to represent a Númenórean point of view would have to address this chapter--but they don't. Again, this suggests that JRRT's ideas about the mode of transmission weren't as definitive as his writings in Myths Transformed suggest.

And all the rest ...? Outside of L&C, the remainder of LQ2 includes nothing that suggests a Mortal point of view, even though L&C shows that Tolkien was capable, with the addition of a few words, of beginning to establish this. A convincing Númenórean text would have needed deep revisions, but surface changes--like the deletion of Pengolodh--set the course in the right direction.

Throughout the "Quenta," Tolkien often uses formulas like "it is said," "it is told," and "it is sung" to indicate that the narrator is receiving information secondhand versus as an eyewitness account. As I discussed at the Tolkien at UVM Conference in 2017, these formulas are used primarily with the Ainur and Mortals. The image below shows the data from one of my slides from this presentation. Adding these formulas is a rather easy way to signal that the information the narrator is reporting is at a distance from him--and LQ2 uses them when reporting on the actions of Ainur to which even an Eldarin narrator could not have borne witness--yet Tolkien did not make these revisions. Instead, this part of the Silmarillion (originally attributed to Rúmil, who would have been present for this history) is written in the style of an eyewitness account, even though a Númenórean loremaster would certainly find these chapters of history the most distant and unattainable. Yet nothing in the style in which these chapters are written suggest this.

There is one passage in particular in the chapter "Of the Silmarils and the Unrest of the Noldor" that, like the Statute of Finwë and Míriel, seems a ripe opportunity to make revisions to signal a Mortal narrator if Tolkien desired to do so:

In those days, moreover, though the Valar knew indeed of the coming of Men that were to be, the Elves as yet knew naught of it ... but now a whisper went among the Elves that Manwë held them captive so that Men might come and supplant them in the dominions of Middle-earth. For the Valar saw that this weaker and short-lived race would be easily swayed by them. Alas! little have the Valar ever prevailed to sway the wills of Men; but many of the Noldor believed, or half-believed, these evil words. (emphasis mine)

It is hard to imagine a Mortal loremaster self-identifying as "weaker and short-lived" or offering up such an assessment without commentary. Yet this passage was brought over from LQ1--when the narrator was Elvish--without revision.

Another small passage again betrays the Elvish perspective: "But now the deeds of Fëanor could not be passed over, and the Valar were wroth; and dismayed also, perceiving that more was at work than the wilfulness of youth" ("Of the Silmarils," emphasis mine). According to the timelines in the Annals of Aman, Fëanor was about three hundred years old at this point. For a Mortal narrator--even a long-lived Númenórean one--to describe him as a "youth" is difficult to fathom.

Now one might claim that perhaps Tolkien just didn't get the chance to add material. It is one thing to remove Pengolodh but quite another to add content, even in a very brief form. However, he does add other content from Myths Transformed to LQ2: In the chapter "Of the Darkening of Valinor," he adds a reference to the "dome of Varda" that alludes to his revised cosmology. He also adds volumes of other details to flesh out the narrative of LQ1. Yet he leaves the question of transmission untouched. Ironically, Christopher Tolkien refused to consider the revised Myths Transformed cosmology in making the published Silmarllion but stripped Pengolodh from the story on the strength of the purported revision to a Mortal tradition found also in Myths Transformed.

I find the opposite. Tolkien may have stated a desire to change the mode of transmission, but he didn't actually do much to effect this, even when he had the chance to make surface changes to the text that would have set him on the path to deeper revisions. Therefore, I conclude that the "Quenta Silmarillion" should be read as a text written by an Eldarin loremaster and from an Eldarin point of view, with all that entails.

[grundyscribbling]

I told a commenter on The Deep Breath Before the Plunge that my headcanon about Gondolin involves the in-world narrator of the Silmarillion being unreliable, and that I wouldn’t write that essay in the comments.

Not saying the whole essay is going to make it into this post, but I just want to explain for anyone who may be wondering what the heck informs my characterization of Maeglin.

First, let’s talk about how the narrator of the text gets his/her information. The only possible sources of information about the fall of Gondolin are the survivors of Gondolin. The people who escape with Tuor, Idril and Eärendil. I would believe their eyewitness accounts of the Fall. What I would be more skeptical about is their account of Maeglin. 

From the start, the pump is already primed for everyone to declare in retrospect they knew Maeglin was no good. The tale of Aredhel and Eöl, which is almost certainly filtered through Turgon and/or Idril, paints Eöl to be a selfish and controlling jerk at best. 

But let’s look at what is said about Eöl: he is canonically Teleri and he puts only one stricture on Aredhel - he doesn’t want her around her Fëanorion cousins or the Noldor. In any other case, yes, this would be a red flag for a controller/abuser. But in this case, Eöl as a Telerin elf has some pretty good reasons to be concerned about his wife and child being near those groups of people.

First and foremost, the Doom of the Noldor is no joking matter. Even if you think Aredhel is exempt from the ‘treason of kin, and fear of treason’ part, she definitely falls under the ‘tears unnumbered’ part. So it makes sense that if he cares about her, Eöl would want to keep her as far awar from the rest of the Noldor as possible for her own safety. (It’s far from foolproof that staying away from the rest of the Noldor will mean safety, but I’d argue that there’s precedent in that Galadriel doesn’t spend a lot of time with her Noldorin relatives once she and Celeborn get together either.) 

Second, Eöl as a subject and kinsman of Thingol is definitely aware of the Kinslaying at Alqualondë. Not wanting one’s spouse and child around known murderers of one’s kin doesn’t seem unreasonable. Not to mention, Curufin’s treatment of Eöl strongly implies that the Noldor were inclined to treat the Teleri/Sindar as ‘lesser’ - note his derisive address of Eöl as ‘Dark Elf’. (You can argue about race/lack thereof in Tolkien all the day long, but the key point here is that it’s 100% clear in context that ‘Dark Elf’ is insulting regardless of its basis.) I can’t fault Eöl for not wanting his wife, much less their son exposed to that.

That’s all before Eöl arrives in Gondolin. How is he greeted when he gets there in pursuit of his runaway son? By Turgon saying welcome to the Hotel California Gondolin, I will treat you as a kinsman, but you can’t leave. Now, there’s a couple problems with this from Eöl’s perspective. 

For a start, as a subject of Thingol, it’s problematic as hell to have this Noldo proclaiming him subject to laws other than Thingol’s. (Remember that Thingol wasn’t thrilled to have the Noldor arriving in lands he regarded as his in the first place.) Eöl objects specifically on those grounds - “I acknowledge not your law. No right have you or any of your kin in this land to seize realms or to set bounds.” Second, Gondolin as a Noldorin city is not a place he wants his child. He explicitly acknowledges that Aredhel is free to do as she chooses. But regardless of how the Teleri/Sindar might view the matter, by normal Noldor rules, he’s right that his underage son should not be withheld from him - the Noldor run on patriarchal lines, and females have lesser rights. (Setting aside all arguments about Gil-galad’s parentage and how he got to be king after Turgon, just look at what’s related in the story of Gondolin: “Turgon had no heir” “Maeglin would not remain in Gondolin as regent of the King” - these statements only make sense if Idril is discounted entirely even before her marriage to Tuor.) By keeping Maeglin in Gondolin, Turgon is depriving Eöl of his heir.

Note that I don’t fault Maeglin for keeping quiet at this point - making no assumptions whatsoever about his relationships with his parents, he’s being asked to choose between parents, and that’s not a comfortable place to be. 

Now we come to the really questionable part - the sudden attack on Maeglin. Eöl has already expressed his certainty that Aredhel won’t want to stay in Gondolin permanently, and knows she was able to force her brother to yield to her will once already, so there’s every reason to expect she at least would be able to return to Nan Elmoth. Maeglin, however, is Turgon’s nephew, not his sister. Maeglin is going to have a harder time leaving if he changes his mind. And the problem keeping him in Gondolin is Turgon’s law. So how does it make sense in this scenario to attack Maeglin rather than Turgon? Not to mention, a javelin is not typically the first thing that comes to mind for a concealed weapon. Knife? Throwing star? Blowdart? All are smaller than a spear. Carrying around one of those with poison on the tip sounds like just asking for trouble. 

But what comes next is equally questionable. In a society where kinslaying is not just a big but a huge deal, Turgon has his brother-in-law, the father of his nephew, executed. The Silmarillion does not record a single other instance of execution among elves. Yet somehow the only one who ends up troubled by it is Idril - and her disquiet centers on Maeglin. Isn’t a bit odd that in a sequence of events in which Maeglin is the victim, attacked by his father and surviving only through the actions of his mother, that Idril ends up thinking he’s the suspicious one? Yet she says nothing to anyone of her suspicions. 

Now let’s look at the fall of Gondolin. First off, by that point, Gondolin is on borrowed time. And Turgon knows it - he admitted it at the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, just before Huor’s desperate last stand. “Not long now can Gondolin be hidden; and being discovered, it must fall.” Yet when Tuor arrives bearing Ulmo’s warning that it’s time to leave, Turgon doesn’t want to listen! It’s noted that Maeglin spoke against Tuor, but his words seemed the more weighty in that they went with Turgon’s heart. The decision to remain in Gondolin was Turgon’s.

This is a particularly risky decision because in the wake of the Nirnaeth, Turgon has enemies on nearly all sides. He’s only got one secure front, to his immediate south, and even that is shaky given that Thingol will not leave the Girdle to march to the rescue of any Noldor. With Morgoth now holding the territory north, west, and east of the Echoriad, it’s only a matter of time before he finds Gondolin. 

It should also be mentioned that Hurin, who had been held captive by Morgoth after the Nirnaeth, was eventually released and tried to return to Gondolin - and Turgon missed the chance to bring him into Gondolin before he yelled out for Turgon to hear him in his hidden halls, inadvertently revealing the approximate location of the hidden kingdom to spies of Morgoth. (This, however, would not have been common knowledge among the people of Gondolin.)

Then comes the capture of Maeglin. Maeglin went beyond the boundaries of Gondolin - the text tries to make this sound nefarious, but it’s previously been established that he’s one of the foremost smiths of the Gondolin, and bears a major role in equipping the defense of the city. He’s beyond the line because he’s seeking after metals for their smithying of things both of peace and war. In a city that’s been mining the same locations for a few hundred years, it’s entirely possible one or more of their regular sources of metals have run out. This is a serious problem - while he might want to remain in Gondolin, Maeglin has seen for himself the destructive power of Morgoth at the Nirnaeth. He knows the city needs to be well-armed. So he ventures beyond the king’s boundaries and gets captured. 

Now comes the really problematic part - Maeglin was no weakling or craven, but the torment wherewith he was threatened cowed his spirit, and he purchased his life and freedom by revealing to Morgoth the very place of Gondolin and the ways whereby it might be found and assailed. [emphasis mine] The only person who could definitively say whether or not Maeglin was merely threatened with torture or actually tortured would be Maeglin himself. Given that he was allegedly sent back to Gondolin without anyone suspecting the betrayal, who would have asked him? 

It is, however, entirely reasonable to assume that Maeglin was in fact tortured. It would be more remarkable if he hadn’t been, since torture and/or enslavement is generally what Morgoth does with elves. He has no incentive to treat any of them well, particularly not one who happens to be a grandson of Fingolfin. And as a Vala, it’s not as if he doesn’t have the power to patch a tortured elf up again if he decides he needs them in reasonably good condition.

Moreover, supposedly Maeglin was promised lordship of Gondolin and possession of Idril once the city was taken. Again, how would anyone have known what he was promised? (Did he monologue at the end?) And more importantly, even if that’s what he had been promised, why would he have believed it? If there’s one thing that’s been shown over and over through the history of both the Years of the Trees and the First Age to date, it’s that Morgoth lies. He routinely double-crosses anyone stupid enough to trust him.  And even if you don’t think the Sindar have examples of their own, Maeglin grew up listening to his mother. At the very least he should be aware of the way Maedhros was taken prisoner. Morgoth’s promises aren’t worth the breath they’re spoken with.

I also question whether Maeglin was acting of his own free will on his return to Gondolin. He was up against not only Morgoth, but also Sauron - Sauron, who at this point in time has not yet lost the ability to assume fair form, and who moreover is more powerful than Glaurung, a creature who was able to easily put the children of Hurin under spells powerful enough to blind them to what was happening directly in front of them or destroy/suppress their memories completely. Does anyone seriously want to argue that one or both of the dark lord duo weren’t capable of doing something similar to Maeglin?

Now let’s look at what happened after Maeglin’s death. A small remnant of the people of Gondolin, led by Idril and Tuor, escape the destruction of the city- losing Glorfindel to a balrog along the way- and eventually make their way to Sirion. They’ve lost pretty much everything. In Sirion, they mix with the survivors of Doriath and Nargothrond, who have their own tales of woe and betrayal, and meet with the folk of Balar. This is when the account of the Fall of Gondolin begins to take shape. 

Are these shattered survivors going to want to blame Turgon, the king who kept them safe for so many years? Absolutely not. They also won’t blame the lords of Gondolin who visibly fought like heroes to defend the city, buy time for the survivors to flee, or make good their escape. And they’re not going to lay any blame at Idril’s feet either, not when it was her secret tunnel that enabled their escape, and her young son was nearly killed before her eyes. If there’s blame to be assigned, it must be Maeglin’s fault to the greatest degree possible.

And so it makes sense that suddenly everyone knows that Maeglin was always going to come to a sticky end. With a father like that? A Dark Elf and a kinslayer? Why, Eöl even predicted his son would die the same way he did! And of course he capitulated to Morgoth of his own free will. If he really loved the city, he would have died under torture rather than let the knowledge be dragged from him!  And did you hear he had an unnatural desire for his cousin, the beautiful princess Idril? The high elves would never be drawn to such an incestuous union... 

If Idril hears the whispers, she’s not inclined to correct them - and even if she wanted to, how could she? Speak up and say her father ignored the promised warning from Ulmo? Reveal, if she’s even aware of it, that Hurin had tried to return to the city and might have already betrayed their location without Maeglin’s involvement? Admit that she, Tuor, and the other lords of Gondolin should have done more prior to the attack to convince Turgon to evacuate the city?  

But in the end, it doesn’t matter much what Idril did or didn’t say, because she sails with Tuor little more than a decade later, meaning the narrative of Gondolin East of the Sea becomes a matter beyond her control. 

[warrioreowynofrohan]

The Lord of the Rings as a Sequel to the Silmarillion (Part 4): The Tales That Really Mattered

Fourth and last part of this series!

So, if The Lord of the Rings is a sequel to The Silmarillion, which parts does it directly act as a sequel to? Which parts does it openly reference? Large parts of the Silm recieve little or no mention in The Lord of the Rings. Not a single word about any of the sons of Fëanor. Nothing about Fingolfin or Fingon. A fleeting mention of Nargothrond and Gondolin. One mention of Túrin. A couple mentions if Fëanor, but, as far as I recall, nothing about him being the creator of the Silmarils! Nothing about the Flight of the Noldor (apart from a distant reference to exile in Galadriel’s translated song), or the burning of the Teleri swan-ships, or the Kinslayings. In fact, very little at all about the sons and grandsons of Finwë.

The two stories in The Silmarillion that have any prominence in The Lord of the Rings are those of Lúthien and Beren and Eärendil and Elwing. The former is recounted by Aragorn at Weathertop, the latter sung by Bilbo in Rivendell and, crucially, both come into the story at Cirith Ungol, the point in The Lord of the Rings that most actively and deliberately references The Silmarillion.

“Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that’s a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it - and the Silmaril went on and came to Eärendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We’ve got - you’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?

And later on, when Sam rescues Frodo from the Tower of Cirith Ungol, it is a very strong reference to Lúthien rescuing Beren from Tol-in-Gaurhoth, to the point of Sam (apparently) defeating an entire tower full of enemies, to his discovering Frodo by mutual singing. And when they at last escape the Tower’s watchers, it is Eärendil that Frodo calls on, with Aiya elenion ancalima!

So why is it these two stories? Well, in the first place, they - and not the battles - are the key to the victory in the Silmarillion; a quest for the sake of love and a journey for the sake of mercy that together bring about the intervention of the Valar and the destruction of the great Evil of the First Age. And, taken together, the two roughly mirror the directions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - as Frodo puts it early on, one a journey to gain a treasure and return, the other to lose one and never return. And there is, of course, their relationship to the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen, as the stories of the Peredhil that are the source of both lineages.

And there is also something Sam says, just before the previous quote:

“The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folks seem to have been just landed in them, usually - their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t.

The Flight of the Noldor strikes me, to an extent, as connecting to Sam’s earlier idea of stories - even before the Darkening, a major impetus to Fëanor’s push to return to Middle-earth was, essentially, “because it was exciting and life was a bit dull”, and that kind of desire - not just for vengeance, not just to fight Morgoth, but to get to be heroes and rulers and legends - was a part of what struck such fire from the Noldor that they chose to follow him. It is very much an active choice, not ‘falling into’ a story, and Fëanor’s urgency that leads him to attack Alqualondë is the need to bring the host to depart before any of them cool down and think things through.

(It’s hard not to think that Tolkien put at least a little of the atmosphere surrounding young men at the start of World War I into this - the giddy confidence that it would all be over soon, the desire not to miss out on the great adventure of their Age. And if so, well, no wonder that the ‘great adventure’ in fact starts immediately with Kinslaying.)

The stories of Lúthien and Beren and of Eärendil and Elwing, in contrast, are the kind that they ‘fell into’; they didn’t go looking for them, but were placed in positions where their choices were to accept danger and trouble and suffering or to lose what they loved dearest. Beren and Lúthien went for love of each other. Eärendil went for love of the people of Middle-earth, for whom his desperate quest for Valinor was the only remaining chance of survival. Elwing chose to share his perils for love of him. And Eärendil and Elwing’s journey, more than any other, mirrors Frodo’s: It must often be so, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them. In the Third Age and the First, Middle-earth is saved, but those who save it lose it; lose home and family for a stranger fate.

[vardasvapors]

gurguliare replied to your post:                   crocordile replied to your post:                  ...                

   ‘veiled soon-to-be-ex-catholic hysteria’ is SUCH a LOOK    

Real talk: practical theodicy is the most ... fascinating thing in a world where the metaphysical questions about souls and afterlives and whether or not god and angels etc exist and what they are like, 90% directly answerable. The faith aspect is pushed like, waaaaaaay back to this tiny sliver of content covering ‘why does it happen THIS way for US and THIS way for YOU’ and ‘but what about the far future tho’ and ‘okay but like, OUTSIDE the universe there’s...?’ and things, because most of the rest of it is just, confirmed in-universe fact! Cut out the middleman, just expose the important non-semantics! it’s really great. also: “And for that reason I said that if your tale is true, then all in Arda is vain, from the pinnacle of Oiolossë to the uttermost abyss.”

Finrod.... :((((((

   also andie sorry for clarifying at your clarifications endlessly but don’t acknowledge this apology or we’ll never escape    

I’M SORRY about clarifying your clarif-- okay no

linguisticparadox replied to your post:                   gurguliare replied to your post:                ...                

   I was gonna be mad until you amended it to “beloved twit” bc I love Finrod with all my heart and soul    

sjhdfbsd YES an important distinction (finrod = literally my favorite silm elf...technically I sooooort of sliiiiightly love galadriel and elrond more, but only in lotr not in the silm, i don’t really consider them silm characters, and silm and lotr characters are apples to oranges for me)

actualmermaid replied to your post:                   crocordile replied to your post:                  ...                

   I am so much of a Feanorian fan that I went and had their symbol tattooed on my body but in what universe are they textual underdogs, like. really. they have the best stuff in the book but making them 100% sympathetic and always justified in everything they do robs them of most of what makes them compelling in the first place    

It’s like, the Godfather if the Corleones really were a respectable olive oil business or smth. idk. that’s a dumb example. but just yeah, 100% this.

kareenvorbarra replied to your post:                   crocordile replied to your post:                  ...                

   “the narrative is biased against the feanorians” discourse is still one of the most puzzling things i’ve ever seen in this fandom    

I just have to sit down and chinhands sometimes. Like. Do you know the sheer number of characters I would kill to have half as much juicy in-text character-clarification and focus and description and nuance and dialogue and filled-in timeline details as the Feanorians....(I mean, I GUESS Finrod technically gets several times more dialogue than any other Finwean except maybe Galadriel (in lotr), but still...? that’s, a philosophy debate? whereas the whole narrative is focused around the Feanorians’ tragedy - yes, all about tragic flaws and self-destructiveness etc of course, but it’s still written/presented as MUCH more similar to...Turin rather than Sauron, for example)

psychopompious replied to your post:                   actualmermaid replied to your post:               …                

   also seeing as I adore the Arafinwions, maybe I’ve finally found the answer to why I can’t write any of the Feanorions to save my life (with the lone exception of Celegorm, but does he really count)    

djhfsjf you know Celegorm IS kind of a weird standout one isn’t he? I wonder what it is about him…I was always very taken with his hippie animal-talking Orome fanboying nature guy aesthetic + psycho murderer who just like stands up and yells about shit to rile people up and just grabs ppl he thinks are hot bc he wants them and like, yells curses at his horse and dog when they don’t obey him like idk he’s fantastic man, and v different from most evil tolkien characters….tolkien is really into the sneaking/scheming sweet-voiced hidden villainy thing and Celegorm is, so not that

[kareenvorbarra]

Stealing an excellent prompt from Vardas - top 5 edain quotes!

OKAY GONNA ANSWER THESE LAST FEW ANCIENT MEME PROMPTS

i’m gonna do it the same way you did, with actual lines of dialogue spoken by Edain characters. honestly it was a struggle not to fill this list completely with CoH quotes but I did my best. 

Predictably this got long so quotes and explanatory yelling are under the cut

1. Beren

To Felagund then Beren said: ”Twere little loss if I were dead,and I am minded all to tell, and thus, perchance, from this dark hell thy life to loose. I set thee free from thine old oath, for more for me hast thou endured than e’er was earned.’

The Lay of Leithian, Canto X

OUCH. let me cry at you about how little Beren values his own life, how much guilt he feels at outliving almost everyone he ever cared about, how he recovered some of his will to live after spending a few months in the forest with Luthien but after watching his new friends get eaten in werewolf jail he’s pretty much right back to square one x_x save him

2. Hurin and Morwen

‘And if we gain our ends, then the Elven-kings are resolved to restore all the fief’s of Beor’s house to his heir; and that is you, Morwen daughter of Baragund. Wide lordships we should then wield, and a high inheritance come to our son. Without the malice in the North he should come to great wealth, and be a king among Men.’

‘Hurin Thalion,’ said Morwen, ‘this I judge truer to say: that you look high, but I fear to fall low.’

The Children of Hurin, Chapter 1

Hurin/Morwen is the best-written Tolkien ship and that is the hill i will die on. all their conversations in the CoH are so good and shippy and full of awful foreshadowing and dramatic irony. you can feel their devotion to one another and how much they trust each other even though they have such different personalities and ways of looking at the world. Hurin’s been through a lot but he’s so determinedly hopeful, and Morwen wants to believe things will be alright (and in Hurin’s company it’s almost easy to believe) but she can’t quite bring herself to do it after everything she’s seen. 

my favorite thing about THIS quote in particular is that apparently, at some point in the planning stages of the Nirnaeth, Hurin and Fingon and maybe Maedhros sat down and discussed what they were going to do once they took back Ladros, and Hurin was like “that land belongs to humans, specifically my wife” and the elves were like “yeah you’re right”….god idk just something about Hurin recognizing her as the heir to the house of Beor, that that position still holds weight in his eyes and the eyes of the elves, gives me a lot of feelings 

3. Turin

‘All this I have answered,’ said Túrin. 'Valiant defence of the borders and hard blows ere the enemy gathers; in that course lies the best hope of your long abiding together. And do those that you speak of love such skulkers in the woods, hunting strays like a wolf, better than one who puts on his helm and figured shield, and drives away the foe, be they far greater than all his host? At least the women of the Edain do not. They did not hold back the men from the Nirnaeth Arnoediad.’

The Children of Hurin, Chapter 10

okay i fucking HATE this quote kjghjlhgfjaksdgh along with the whole exchange between Turin and Gwindor that comes before it. i love it, but god does it hurt me. this is one of those moments when it’s so painfully obvious how out-of-touch Turin truly is, how little he knows about his own people. he was a child during the Nirnaeth, and sheltered from the worst of its aftermath in Dor-lomin, and it’s like he still views it through a child’s eyes - the men who went to the battle and never returned are heroes, and to behave any other way would be cowardly.

i love him, i love this speech, i totally understand how he ended up feeling this way, but GOD Turin you don’t know what you’re talking about!!!! i’m so mad!!!!!!!! “they did not hold back the men from the Nirnaeth Arnoedied” as if that means anything! as if that means none of them tried, or wanted to try but didn’t because it would have been useless! also this quote makes me think of Rian because you KNOW she didn’t want them to go, she’d been married for TWO MONTHS and she hated war and literally all her other male relatives had died in combat, and Morwen had major reservations about the whole thing too but Turin didn’t know about that because he was a little kid!!!!!!!! anyway i’m really upset about this family, why couldn’t they all stay together and be happy and get to know each other properly!!!!!!

4. Tuor

‘Gurth an Glamhoth!’ Tuor muttered. ‘Now the sword shall come from under the cloak. I will risk death for mastery of that fire, and even the meat of Orcs would be a prize.’

Unfinished Tales, Of Tuor and His Coming To Gondolin

Okay this one’s short but i LOVE all the lines where dangerous outlaw Tuor comes through, because he’s the same person as beautiful cinnamon roll Tuor, and kind, sweet characters with a violent streak are my WEAKNESS (see also: Tuor wrecking Maeglin’s shit with his bare hands in BoLT). so here’s my son snarling death threats in Sindarin, ready to kill the shit out of some Orcs. and possibly eat them afterwards, who knows (Voronwe: *whispers* what the fuck)

5. Aerin

'He speaks with the truth of death,’ said Aerin. 'You have learned what you would. Now go swiftly! But go first to Morwen and comfort her, or I will hold all the wrack you have wrought here hard to forgive. For ill though my life was, you have brought death to me with your violence. The Incomers will avenge this night on all that were here. Rash are your deeds, son of Hurin, as if you were still but the child that I knew.’

The Children of Hurin, Chapter 

ugh okay sorry that 2/5 of this post is me getting upset about things Turin says about Edain women, i actually love Turin a lot thanks ju but god….he’s so….oblivious sometimes and it’s not really his fault but i still want to shake him and yell “you have the NERVE to insult this woman who helped and protected your mother and sister for years and endured decades of horrifying abuse the likes of which you’ve never experienced, all of which you should KNOW because SADOR JUST TOLD YOU.” 

enough about Turin. Aerin is one of the most important Tolkien characters to me - she has such a presence even though she only appears in the story briefly, and everything she says and does carries so much weight and i’m impressed that Tolkien managed to create a character of such depth with just a few pages and a handful of earlier references. i don’t think Tolkien wrote enough women, but when he did, he tended to do a good job with them (better than some later fantasy writers tbqh). and the Children of Hurin is very special i think because it has maybe the highest density of female characters in anything Tolkien ever wrote (Morwen, Finduilas, Aerin, Nienor), and they’re all different and they actually say things and we get insight into their lives and thoughts and motivations. 

Aerin is very specifically portrayed as strong in a way that Turin doesn’t recognize as strength - quiet, enduring, pragmatic - and she’s bitter and miserable and victimized but she still uses what little power she has to help others. Tolkien recognizes that, and he makes it clear that Turin is wrong about her. My other favorite Aerin-related line that didn’t quite make this list is when Asgon, one of the thralls who escapes with Turin, tells him that he thinks Aerin was the one who set the hall on fire, then says, “Many a man of arms misreads patience and quiet. She did much good among us at much cost. Her heart was not faint, and patience will break at the last.” i love that Aerin is this respected figure among her people, that everyone from elderly homeless Sador to young strong restless Asgon loves Aerin and recognizes that just living her life the way she does requires strength and bravery. so i’d like to non-sarcastically thank Tolkien for giving us Aerin, and for leaving her fate ambiguous even though every Tolkien reference site/blog on this damn internet seems determined to pretend that her death is canon i’m looking at you askmiddlearth