verecunda - Tumblr blog

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'... and although it took courage, he finally asked for the hand of fair Rosie Cotton. It was the bravest thing he ever did.'

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Small golden ship's port and starboard lanterns charms, 19th century

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“Thus Aragorn for the first time in the full light of day beheld Éowyn, Lady of Rohan, and thought her fair, fair and cold, like a morning of pale spring that is not yet come to womanhood."

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what's the first movie you remember seeing in theaters? don't try and be all edgy and cool and say like tetsuo: the iron man. be honest.

Go!!

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Cat after all.

(Source)

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You know what I'm a slut for? When a character visibly drops a ruse. Like, the way their face changes the moment they give up a facade and reveal themselves.

This applies to revealing love, apathy, anger, evil intent. I mcfuckin love it.

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Romano-British Stone Carving of the Goddess Ceres, Corinium Museum, Cirencester

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TOBIAS MENZIES as Edwin Stanton MANHUNT (2024) — 1.06 'Useless'

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Some of you have never shipped a rare pair and it shows.

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we do not talk enough about how you get hit front and back by being a jew and supporting Palestine. For a recipe that i want to make during Shabbat I have to scroll through a jewish recipe blog and cringe at the I Stand With Israel posts and then go back.

so a bunch of jewish spaces aren't safe anymore or are landmines. then you're forced to go someplace else. then there's tumblr with the people who think Jews=Zionist.

like oh, you're jewish? they immediately think you support the idf or something and praise genocide or something. your family barely survived a genocide that wasn't even like more than three generations ago and its being used as some sort of crutch to israel's moral defense when israel does NOT give a fuck about holocaust survivors at all except for their pr...

like damn bro im just trying to live my life and cook normally. Palestine has my entire heart. but like the pipeline from Palestine advocacy to accidental antisemitism to purposeful antisemitism is so 😭😭. man. i just wanna say guys jewish people aren't your enemies. the goal is to stop genocide not make the nazis proud of you or something

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gigachad dwarf and elffailure prince enjoy sunset in Mirwood

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Unmute !

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A is for Arondir.

I decided to redo my lotr alphabet illust set. I am Just much more into traditional média at the moment, I would like to have them all as one set I can flip through In person. But the letters I have added on digital. 🤔

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the most unlikely friendship you can imagine

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Treebeard takes his pet hobbits for a walk.

This was so much fun to draw, really happy with how he looks, I think he turned out just as I imagined him in the series! I based him off an oak tree, I don’t believe he has a given tree in the books but I could be wrong lol.

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Okay I'm almost done with Fellowship, here's an incomplete list of shit I noticed and thought was buck fucking wild on my first ever read-thru: medieval edition.

In literally the second line of the book, Tolkien implies that Bilbo Baggins wrote a story which was preserved alongside the in-universe version of the Mabinogion (aka the best-known collection of Welsh myths; I promise this is batshit). This is because The Hobbit has been preserved, in Tolkien's AU version of our world, in a "selection of the Red Book of Westmarch" (Prologue, Concerning Hobbits). If you're a medievalist and you see something called "The Red Book of" or "The Black Book of" etc it's a Thing. In this case, a cheeky reference to the Red Book of Hergest (Llyfr Coch Hergest). There are a few Red Books, but only Hergest has stories).

not a medieval thing but i did not expect one common theory among hobbits for the death of Frodo's parents to be A RUMORED MURDER-SUICIDE.

At the beginning of the book a few hobbits report seeing a moving elm tree up on the moors, heading west (thru or past the Shire). I mentioned this in another post, but another rule: if you see an elm tree, that's a Girl Tree. In Norse creation myth, the first people were carved from driftwood by the gods. Their names were Askr (Ash, as in the tree), the first man, and Embla (debated, but likely elm tree), the first woman. A lot of ppl have I think guessed that that was an ent-wife, but like. Literally that was a GIRL. TREE.

Medieval thing: I used to read the runes on the covers of The Hobbit and LOTR for fun when I worked in a bookshop. There's a mix of Old Norse (viking) and Old English runes in use, but all the ones I've noticed so far are real and readable if you know runes.

Tom Bombadil makes perfect sense if you once spent months of your life researching the early medieval art of galdor, which was the use of poems or songs to do a form of word-magic, often incorporating gibberish. If you think maybe Tolkien did not base the entirety of Fellowship so far around learning and using galdor and thus the power of words and stories, that is fine I cannot force you. He did personally translate "galdor" in Beowulf as "spell" (spell, amusingly, used to mean "story"). And also he named an elf Galdor. Like he very much did name an elf Galdor.

Tom Bombadil in fact does galdor from the moment we meet him. He arrives and fights the evil galdor (song) of the willow tree ("old gray willow-man, he's a mighty singer"), which is singing the hobbits to sleep and possibly eating them, with a galdor (song) of his own. Then he wanders off still singing, incorporating gibberish. I think it was at this point that I started clawing my face.

THEN Tom Bombadil makes perfect sense if you've read the description of the scop's songs in Beowulf (Beowulf again, but hey, Tolkien did famously a. translate it b. write a fanfiction about it called Sellic Spell where he gave Beowulf an arguably homoerotic Best Friend). The scop (pronounched shop) is a poet who sings about deeds on earth, but also by profession must know how to sing the song or tell the story of how the cosmos itself came to be. The wise-singer who knows the deep lore of the early universe is a standard trope in Old English literature, not just Beowulf! Anyway Tom Bombadil takes everyone home and tells them THE ENTIRE STORY OF ALL THE AGES OF THE EARTH BACKWARDS UNTIL JUST BEFORE THE MOMENT OF CREATION, THE BIG BANG ITSELF and then Frodo Baggins falls asleep.

Tom Bombadil knows about plate tectonics

This is sort of a lie, Tom Bombadil describes the oceans of old being in a different place, which works as a standard visual of Old English creation, which being Christian followed vaguely Genesis lines, and vaguely Christian Genesis involves a lot of water. TOLKIEN knew about plate tectonics though.

Actually I just checked whether Tolkien knew about plate tectonics because I know the advent of plate tectonics theory took forever bc people HATED it and Alfred Wegener suffered for like 50 years. So! actually while Tolkien was writing LOTR, the scientific community was literally still not sure plate tectonics existed. Tom Bombadil knew tho.

Remember that next time you (a geologist) are forced to look at the Middle Earth map.

I'm not even done with Tom Bombadil but I'm stopping here tonight. Plate tectonics got me. There's a great early (but almost high!) medieval treatise on cosmology and also volcanoes and i wonder if tolkien read it. oh my god. i'm going to bed.

edit: part II

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Eurasian nuthatch/nötväcka. Värmland, Sweden (April 27, 2019).