#but we needs to rant about fëanor precious

[lostinmemoria]

There tolkien goes again, calling fëanor the most beautiful boy to have ever lived

And people draw interpretations of him looking wrinkled and stern of face, like, mate... respectfully: WHAT?!

To be noted, tolkien uses the word "fair" as a descriptor for many characters, but this isn't always a reference to appearance, as "fair" can be found throughout the text used majorly as a description for mood and conduct.

But for fëanor in particular, tolkien specifies "fair of face" (QS), and now, here (AAm), saying the most beautiful, too.

I'm sorry, but how am I supposed to not envision what could be the male equivalent of lúthien, as far as beauty? Striking, enrapturing, and all-encompassing; completely—in mind, spirit, and body—in all he is and does.

[crash-course-in-chaos]

My favourite gayboy Elves to walk Middle-Earth

Silmarillion Rants: No.1 The Forbidden Gayboys

That's right Maedhros and Fingon. I swear to gods Tolkien must have adored Romeo and Juliet because god DAMN is there some Romeo and Juliet forbidden love bullshit in the Silmarillion. Mainly with Beren and Lúthien but I’ll get to them another day. But right now I want to rant about these two dorks with a blood feud literally singing to find each other at the peaks of Thangorodrim right above the Enemy’s lair.

So without going into too much detail into how Maedhros ended up chained to the top of the Mountains of Tyranny....ok no let’s talk about it actually because he is an IDIOT but an excusable idiot. Our boy Maedhros, after Papa Fëanor gets wrecked by Gothmog in the Battle-under-Stars, gets offered a peace treaty by a servant of Morgoth who essentially says “Hey man, Morgoth here, just wanted to give you a Silmaril because you beat my armies so darn good, meet me here and its yours.” Then Maedhros, Chief Idiot of all the sons of Feanor (ok maybe not, but for now he is) convinces his brothers that its a good idea, except they are going to outsmart Morgoth by bringing more people than were agreed on. Then they get to the meeting place. It was at that moment he knew. He had fucked up. Morgoth had sent EVEN MORE force, and also a Balrog or two for good measure. So long story short, Maedhros for reasons unknown, possibly wasn't thinking straight cos his Dad just died, his brothers weren't thinking straight either, thought he could trust and outwit Morgoth based on that trust. Woops I guess. So that's how you get taken hostage, all your comrades killed (except your brothers, and their parties who all retreated) and chained by one hand to the top of the Enemy’s big bad mountain, just in case anyone was wondering.

So now that you’ve found yourself stuck at the top of Thangorodrim like Maedhros, what do you do? A. Wriggle out of it. B. Wait for Morgoth to get bored and kill you or set you free. C. Hang there in torment while your brothers are downstairs not doing much at all to rescue you. The answer is C. Luckily for Maedhros, a beautiful bean named Fingon arrived with HIS daddy, Fingolfin, after they were all forced to traverse the barren icy hell to the north thanks to Fëanor and sons. Despite this feud between Fëanor’s sons and Fingolfin however, precious Fingon goes “I’m getting tired of the bullshit between us all guys, can’t we all just get along we have a big bad guy to fight, not each other. Oh wait my old friend Maedhros, whom I was friends with before Morgoth was sprouting bullshit among our people way back in Valinor is on top of that mountain above the Enemy stronghold?? Hold that thought about war guys I’ll be right back, try not to kill each other....again.” And so by the good grace of Fingon’s mighty heart and love for his ‘friend’ Maedhros, the hero Maedhros needs but not the one he deserves appears on Tharongorodrim. Not being able to see or find a way because of all the smoke and haze spewing from the mountain, this motherfucking SAP of an Elf sits there, pulls out a harp, and starts singing an old AF song from way back when Fëanor and Fingolfin were cool(ish), back when the Noldor were one people more importantly though, back when these two god damn lovebirds were living a HAPPY life.

Before I keep going I feel like I really need to stress how much of a bean Fingon is. He has just come across a frozen HELL which he walked on for however many years I honestly cant remember, regardless he crossed the Grinding Ice because Feanor and his sons (aka, Maedhros) did a bit of kinslaying and then jumped in some boats saying they would send them back over, but then BURNED THE BOATS WHICH THE NOLDOR THEY LEFT BEHIND COULD SEE. So Fingon gets to Hithlum, after this long dreadful march, arrives to a battlefield essentially, where the people who fucked his people over are living, gets there hears that one of the guys who fucked him over is being tortured on the biggest and baddest mountain in Middle-Earth at this stage, and goes I need to risk my life by potentially diving into the hands of the enemy to save him. Once he gets there he sits down and plays a song and starts singing to him. Now, if that is not GOD DAMN LOVE I don't know what is.

So my boy Fingon eventually gets a response to his beautiful song from the good old days, and Maedhros is singing back to him. And it is beautiful and sad at the same time but also full of hope and I have some emotions. But he gets up there to a point where he can see his long lost lover Maedhros but can’t actually get to him to help him down. Realising this Fingon starts weeping (I would cry too if I couldn't reach that sweet elf booty) and Maedhros begs Fingon to kill him with his bow. In what they think are the final moments with Maedhros begging his ancient friend to end his misery, Fingon calls upon Manwë to guide his arrow as swift and true as he can as well as asking for pity upon the Noldor. Manwë then heeds his prayer and does one of the only commendable things he ever does in my opinion because he has a tiny bit of pity left for the Noldor (Manwë gets on my nerves but that's a rant for another day) and sends Thorondor, King of Eagles, basically at the speed of light to stop Fingon and instead carry him up to Maedhros, which would have been a much better prayer anyway, but what are Elves if not absolute drama queens. So now our lovers are united, but Fingon soon realizes that he can’t free Maedhros from the stone, to which Maedhros still being a drama queen goes “Just kill me with your knife please babe I can’t live anymore” I assure you those are the exact words as written by Tolkien. Fingon just goes dude shut the fuck up, and hacks off his hand by which he was bound instead. And with that they go back down, Fingon is renowned as a hero for saving his true love from the top of a mountain in the heart of Enemy territory, and Maedhros in his love and gratitude for Fingon revokes any right he had to kingship of the Noldor and passes it to Fingon, by which they reunite the Noldor and end the feud between the two branches. At least for a while because the other six sons of Fëanor aren’t too impressed.

This post has already become too long and there is so much more to be said about these two as individuals but for now I will wrap it up with their separation in the fifth battle of the First Age, Nirnaeth Arnoeidiad. My own personally headcanon here is that Fingon was distraught when Maedhros’s host was late to battle which is why Fingon’s host took such heavy losses at the beginning of the battle under the gates of Angband, due to the worry of Fingon for Maedhros. But I can imagine the relief on Fingon’s heart when he heard the trumpets of Maedhros coming to his aid. Even more so I think about the horror Fingon would have felt in witnessing after his host and the host of Maedhros being separated by Glaurung, the betrayal of the Easterlings who turned on the host of Maedhros, with such force that the entire host was scattered. Soon after, Fingon was separated from Turgon and Hurìn, and I think he would have fought out of hatred and desperation in not knowing the fate of Maedhros. While everyone around him died, and he was left alone fighting off Gothmog, I can’t help but think Maedhros was on his mind as he was finally slain by Gothmog after being ambushed from behind by a second Balrog.

SO IN SUMMARY, Fingon son of Fingolfon is the most precious god damn bean to walk Middle-Earth and is such a god damn sap full of love and forgiveness and he did not deserve to die alone at the hands of Gothmog. Who incidentally is kind of the reason he had to save Maedhros and become King of the Noldor in the first place, because Gothmog killed Fëanor….regardless Maedhros did not deserve Fingon and Fingon did not deserve to die.

[absynthe--minded]

magpiescholar replied to your post: just got into a conversation that reminded me how...

I missed this and I would love to read a rant from you about it!

oh boy oh BOY YOU WANT A RANT YOU GOT A RANT

okay so like. I get why 2012-ish Salmon Rioters were very easily sucked in to the whole “only HoME is canon, the published Silmarillion can get rekt/only MY SPECIFIC INTERPRETATION of HoME is canon everybody who doesn’t agree with me can go sit on a tack” thing? There was a lot of eloquent, compelling, well-researched meta that waxed poetic on why (for example) the Valar were actually malevolent rather than merely completely out of touch with the needs of the elves in their care, and it did a good job of sounding authoritative and it inspired a lot of fans. And I think it caused a lot of people to fall in love with versions of specific characters that arose as a result of what can honestly in some cases be called revisionist meta, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing?

but the thing that bothered me then and bothers me now is 1. the insistence that only some types of choose-your-own-adventure canon based on loose or highly specific interpretations of certain lines from fan-preferred texts were Okay or Right or deserving of fan interest 2. the exclusion of other texts from HoME as authoritative 3. the complete ignoring of the published Silmarillion as a valid interpretation of the source material SO let’s tackle these in order

point 1 mostly came up with the discussion of the Shibboleth of Fëanor iirc, which I recall was cited as the Most Accurate Version Of Events due to a lot of factors but its status as a later writing and addition to the Middle-Earth sandbox world seemed to lend it legitimacy. I remember getting into arguments with a couple of people because I found the presentation of Fingolfin’s actions to be wildly out of character when compared to everything else he ever did in the collected HoME, and therefore I came up with a few “choose your own adventure” style loose interpretations of the Shibboleth to justify why this particular record made him look bad; the general response was eloquent enough but came down to the fact that a lot of the people I was talking to preferred this Fingolfin because it made Fëanor (who was even more of a fan favorite back then) look better - of course, when I read the Shibboleth for the first time Fëanor reminded me of one of those “goes to city council meeting with giant folder about UFO attacks, rants for ten minutes” people, because while I completely understood feeling hurt about a dialectical shift changing the pronunciation of a name I couldn’t grasp why a dedicated linguist/language nerd was so insistent that this was a continent-wide conspiracy? bro. languages change. it’s necessary for survival of your tongue.

point 2 was mostly a corollary to point 1, because if only the fan-preferred HoME essay/narrative/whatever was Good, anything that contradicted it was Bad. And there were a lot of reasons for this, but it annoyed me because if you went against the Tumblr consensus you got yelled at, no matter how thoughtful or detailed or well-researched your academic work was - it didn’t matter even if you were able to make definitive statements about authorial intent based on a knowledge of Tolkien’s personal life/theology/etc, because it didn’t match up with the Approved Version Of History, which was generally “the Fëanorians did nothing wrong” (and like. I love the Fëanorians? But keep in mind that I also love Anakin Skywalker. I feel like that era of fandom had a hard time remembering that characters can be terrible people but awesome storytelling devices, but that’s just my opinion.) to the extent of arguing with people who had real-life trauma in their past similar to things suffered by Kinslaying survivors (I’m not naming names but I remember that series of posts and it was cringeworthy) that their opinions weren’t okay because My Precious Babies Did Nothing Wrong

and maybe I’m generalizing? I know that I love the Fëanorians and I think they’re all delightful murderous unstable elves and great characters - hell, my phone case is the Star of their House and ‘Tenn’ ambar-metta!’ in Quenyan Tengwar - but I also know that I saw a lot of opposition to the idea that they’d made mistakes. (And I get that? Part of why I made that “Fëanorians are millennials!” post from ages ago was an effort to explain why I thought our generation of fans were so quick to defend them and why opinions had shifted so drastically)

anyway on to Point 3, which is that I saw an attitude of “if you’ve only read the Silmarillion you can’t call yourself a real fan” paired with “the Silmarillion isn’t an authoritative or truly canonical text”. And again, there are legitimate arguments to be made about that? because yeah, I don’t like Chris’s editing either, I think sometimes it sucks. But I don’t think that we can discount the fact that this is the version that the guy charged with preserving the creator’s legacy declared the closest to the intended product, and I don’t think it was fair to expect all fans to slog through twelve volumes of history lectures/linguistic essays/sociological studies/poetry/Chris’s commentary about everything just so they could engage in discussion of meta. It felt very insular and in-crowd, and while I will admit I liked that at the time now I kind of feel it was... harsh, and intimidating.

anyway. that’s my rant.