alicedusstuff

[main-to-arywizm]

mortui vivos docent

'posthumous rehabilitation' ~ Różewicz

full poem and some of my thoughts under the cut, the title means 'the dead teach the living'

I was discussing the problem of guilt and responsibility in modern literature with my mum the other day (john mulaney's voice: that's where we are, in our relationship as mother and son daughter), we started with post WWII poetry and ended with the silmarillion (of course) and she drew some interesting parallels between the ways those authors view this problem. the discussion was mostly theoretical so when we finished I wanted to give it some shape and started looking for examples in the events of the silmarillion , then I got a little sidetracked and this happened.

this comic is obviously not meant to illustrate the point mentioned above, it's just me linking this poem with the silm. I might write something about it though if I have the time, we also talked about how the motif of hope changes between the silmarillion and lotr, which I thought even more interesting so if that's something you'd read let me know in the tags/comments and maybe I'll elaborate on that.

I suppose you can read this comic in many ways, so I'm not going to throw my interpretation at you this time (I'd love to hear yours though :))

as for the visuals, I mostly stuck to my simplified designs of the characters, with the exception of maedhros - I gave him sharper features than usual to make sure he won't be confused with either fingon or amrod later on (I don't know if it worked tbh) . other than that, I used the weta workshop design for the ring of barahir, just to make sure it's clear what it is , then I added the snakes because I thought it was too small and therefore unrecognisable.

that's all I think, I've put a lot of work into this and am quite happy with the result for once lol

the full poem is here