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I really think that for me I’m always going to choose the silmarillion interpretation that gives me the most interesting narrative. I refuse to let moral quantities or questions of who was objectively correct skew my interpretation of a narrative. In fictional not real land, the most important question is whether what I’m reading is interesting or not. I don’t care who had property rights to the silmaril. Maedhros isn’t going to the federal courts on union ave.

Anyway, this is all to say that I’m interested in the recent arguments over whether alqualonde was a massacre or not or whether the teleri were on equal playing fields with the exiles. I also think I’ll make a post soon about the property rights argument because I find it fascinating that that’s as big a discussion as it is

Anyway! So alqualonde! Alqualonde is such a huge narrative turning point in this story. Up to this point we have a very clear delineation between hero and villain. Morgoth as the big bad, the noldor as the freedom fighters who very understandably want to avenge finwe. The valar don’t want them to go to beleriand but that’s not a moral wrong whether they do or not. They’re desperate, the light have gone out in the world. No one has ever died before

So to go from that to marching into alqualonde, where they’re fucking relatives live, and murdering them over their life’s work that’s the original sin that overshadows the rest of the book. Everything that they do afterwards starts here.

It’s a betrayal on so many levels because these are craftsmen who know the value and attachment of a maker to his creations. The desperation with which they go about this completely skews their ability to see the horror of what they’ve done until they are literally doing it. But then there they are with their swords and more mastery of a killing weapon than the teleri would have had fully intent on killing them for their boats. Sure the teleri have their fish hooks and spears but I don’t think they were at all on equal ground with these burgeoning soldiers and i don’t think anyone can really make the argument that the teleri should have just given their boats, not with any real rationale anyway.

The oath is mostly said to be what curses feanor and his sons but I think this is really what changes them and poisons their hearts. Anything they were before now doesn’t really matter anymore, now they are killers. Now they have betrayed themselves for nothing and any allies, any understanding that they might have gained in Beleriand or valinore or anywhere is gone. And it’s because they murdered the teleri to take what is essentially the heart of their people, the swan ships! It obviously parallels morgoth killing finwe for the silmarils, I think that must have been purposeful.

So was this an equal fight? I doubt it. And anyway it doesn’t matter, because what they did was a curse on their souls that follows them for thousands of years after, repeating over and over again until the silmaril that they killed for rejects them entirely.

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LOTR drawings I never really finished. Tell me which you’d like to see done! :) the designs of the hobbits are based on this spectacular article

Éowyn, Faramir, Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin, Boromir, Arwen

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tenar in her labyrinth of primordial darkness <3

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WIP

Thank youuuuuuu @starshadeemilyart for tagging me to share a bit of a current WIP <33333 Not tagging anyone, because I think nearly everyone's been tagged so far. If you see this & you want to share a snippet from a WIP, please do.

This is from something I'm working on that is actually relatively not dead dove for once, centred around Maedhros & still in the very rough draft stage:

Up on Thangorodrim’s heights, the world was simple. Maedhros was a tragedy. A cautionary tale, a forgotten tale, but an essentially tragic one; the sort that had pathos and made people shake their heads and say a fine young man and cut down in the prime of his life. Then they would go about their business and none of them would wonder if he ought to be rescued. It was impossible, after all. That was the tragedy. Poor Maedhros. Cut down in the prime of his life, forgotten and abandoned by his brother, the coward. Maglor the Meek. Maedhros surprised himself by snorting at the nickname when he heard it. Maglor winced, then gave Maedhros one of his dolefully guilty looks. That was also a tragedy. Poor Maglor, suffering for his brother’s sake and then suffering again, because Fingon had dared where had not. So tragic, unlike Maedhros. Maedhros had lived and living was considerably less tragic than torture or death. People looked at him now and wondered, well, you lived. So it couldn’t be all that bad, could it, Nelyafinwë Maitimo Fëanárion? It couldn’t be all that bad if you lived and it couldn’t be all that bad if Fingon could rescue you single-handed. So really, the tragedy was the wasted time. The tragedy was Maglor the Meek. Really Russandol. The nerve of you. Returning and making things so complicated for everyone. You could have just been forgotten in peace. You could have been mad on Thangorodrim in peace. Instead he was here, inconveniently. Putting everyone’s nose out of joint. Mad and evidently so and every single Noldor watching him, wondering, because if it was bad, if it truly was bad, he ought to, should have been dead. Instead, he was inconvenient. He was alive.

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Tarot card coat, Christian Dior Haute Couture, A/W 2017-18

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fingon is older than maglor by a little and finrod is younger than him by a little and with maedhros they are all the oldest gang ,

or

the first born gang + honorary member maglor

or

the musical gang + honorary member maedhros

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In which Fingon takes pity on an orc, and Maedhros has something to say about it (1,2k words, T).

Read on AO3.

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Delighting myself with the idea of one of Curufin's brothers not looking carefully and accidentally mistaking him for Feanor and calling him dad before immediately realizing their mistake with horror because Curufin is insufferable enough without being given free ammunition

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Gertrude Jekyll Garden, Hestercombe Park, Taunton, Somerset, England   

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Embroidered Jewelry

Salt Water Stitches on Etsy

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This project took me about 3 years to finish.

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Having intense Círdan brainrot thanks to @nimphelos fantastic artwork so sharing one of the ballpoint illustrations from one of my current WIPs: a “longform essay journalism” piece in which the motor-mouthed amateur historian Legolas (as seen in Cast in Stone) and long-suffering woodcut illustrator Gimli attempt to record the long shadow of the kinslaying at Sirion i.e they go around interviewing people in TA Middle Earth and Aman about it and put together something stylistically similar to, say, a The New Yorker or The Atavist style essay-article.

Círdan is one of the people Legolas interviews, and obviously takes the opportunity bring up Losgar + his trusty ship in a bottle. Enjoy a snippet!

The historical record of the kinslayings also bore the marks of design, the stamp of the Eldar’s craft. Alqualönde, Doriath and Sirion moved through history with the precision of ritual, choreographed and bound by the laws of ancestry, palatability and binary even as it broke them. Like old Beleriand itself, violence lingered not in the songs and maps, which tend to occlude and bear undeniable hallmarks of the craftsperson, but in preserved artefact. Reconstructions had no historical value. Or so I thought.

More than any scholar I had met, including and perhaps especially the archivists of Imladris, Círdan the Shipwright understood the grain of things: how much memory timber could be expected to hold, how a mishandled curve in a hull carried the inheritance of a full-fleet of burned ships that didn’t miscurve. He knew the difference between restoration and reverence, and told me that for him, craft was the truest form of archival practice: not the preservation of history as it was, but a reassembly conscious of its own absences.

When Gimli complimented him on the craftsmanship of the old Teleri vessel-in-a-bottle on his mantelpiece and told him how realistic it seemed, Círdan rolled his eyes, then did so again when I asked him why. “Because it’s still, Legolas. Ships are not meant to be still. This ship shouldn’t be here on my dusty mantelpiece, it should bob around fearlessly on the waves, fleet as it had been in life.”

He passed it across to me and let us look closely at the thing itself. Mist had not yet cleared the bottle’s interior, but I recognised the jagged coastline of Losgar. Masts tilted as though in wind, and impossibly precise figures no larger than ants moved along the decks: a helmsman’s posture, a sailor’s slack arm mid-turn. When I held the bottle in shadow, smoke seemed to be sculpted into the glass itself, feathering up around the burnt rigging.

Gimli and I leaned closer. One side, blackened nearly to vanishing, held a gilded figurehead unfamiliar to me, its angles catching a sliver of afternoon light. Then the light shifted. Shadows fell inward, and the flame vanished from the prow. All that remained were the ribs of wood and thread, and an unburnt ship in a cold bottle.

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