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Ran across this sketch of Daeron from like November (??) where he’s playing the hurdy gurdy to Doriath’s resident geese. I have no memory of drawing this and no idea why I’m posting it but surely someone on this forsaken website will enjoy it

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I read ‘The Horses’ and it was well-written, but it made me think about a debate I had here some time ago. It’s fascinating how so many voices in fandom insist that the ‘kinslayings’ were a citizen bloodbath when there’s no evidence to say civilian died, let alone children. I’m not defending them, and I understand all three were not good events, they were tactically the wrong choice. What I don’t get is why Feanorian haters act like they’re Putin or something, when they’re not even the villains of the Silmarillion. Are you all getting some info somewhere the rest of us cannot access? 

Apologies for the delay but this ask was so “???” I just assumed it was trolling and ignored it until I was directed to actual takes on this website with names attached, fully espousing this view… some of you are really braver than I could ever be. Anyway, guess I’ll bite 🥲

OK pls know I am coming at this as someone who adores the Fëanorians. 80% of my writing is about the two triple-Michelin star kinslayers, and none of it shows them as “unsympathetic” characters. Believe me, I’m not one of the “moral purity olympics” players who decide that enjoying “problematic” characters is a ticket to fan hell. I am not a Fëanorianhater, I am a Fëanorianfucker. I would like to fuck them all. I would like to fuck them all at once in the world’s greatest golf game. Nine holes, one Ball. That aside… 

Why do you need or expect proof that civilians or children died in the kinslayings? 😭

The majority of the legendarium is written as a “history” rather than a traditional story. The main parts where “civilians” take an active role and their individual lives are extensively described are the Hobbits and The Shire, because the whole point is that they’re civilians who lead “little lives”. Everything else has to do with either royalty, warriors or scribes: even Beren, the most “area man” character in the Silmarillion, is a chieftain’s son, ie a prince. Aragorn is not a ranger, Aragorn is a king. Nearly every single named character, including the Hobbits, are named only because of and through their proximity to Greatness™️, either the Great Stories™️ or those named in or writing them. 

Anyone with any exposure to history as a discipline knows that past a certain point, it is nearly impossible to learn much about the lives of ordinary people through written history, simply because there is no written record of lives deemed not important enough to chronicle. If your continent is sinking and you want to get archival material out, you’re not going to take a copy of the Friday market schedule of Doriath. Much of what we know about daily life of civilians prior to a certain time period comes from archeological evidence, like buried villages or skeletal remains. This is, obviously, not possible with a sunken continent. The broader world of the legendarium is given in anthropological sweeps, with much to be inferred rather than seen. 

But like… is this just pointless pedantry, or do you actually think that means there were no bakers in Beleriand? 

Now, please don’t come in with “________ didn’t relinquish the Silmaril so they could actually have saved the cities had they done so”. That is completely irrelevant to the question of civilian death. You can blame whoever you want for it happening in the first place, that is your prerogative or interpretation and honestly I don’t really care: I’m just saying that the kinslayings did happen and so civilians would have died in them.

City Sacking

Now, I don’t know if the term “sacking” would apply to Alqualondë, mainly because there isn’t much point for Fëanor and co. to fuck around there once the ships are secured: the whole point was to get to Middle Earth without wasting any time. Plus, the Teleri were still kicking about there when Elwing turned up, hence I assume the city itself survived to some extent. So because I’m not sure about that one, I’ll leave it out of the “sacking” definition. However, crucially, everyone who died in Alqualondë would have been a civilian regardless of whether or not the city was sacked. The Eldar at that point were not a warring race: the whole fandom joke about Fëanor is that he invented war (as we know it). The Teleri were ship-guys and had no swords: they're the definition of civilian. Again, you can have whatever interpretation for whoever is at fault but like… come on. 

Doriath and Sirion, however, were both sacked, ie, destroyed or made obsolete: had that not been the case, there would not have been a refugee column out of Doriath, and there would have been no need for Sirion to exist as a sanctuary city. And Sirion, explicitly said to be the worst of the three, would have likely been a site of even greater mass casualty, especially considering it was a refugee city of survivors from Doriath and Gondolin, where it can be assumed that many of the actual warriors/soldiers would have perished in the actual city-sackings hence Sirion is less likely to have been a particularly militarised space. And it was also here that soldiers refused to do the killings they were commanded to: again, the inference is that the people at the other end of the sword were not equally capable/trained soldiers. You can’t have a refugee city and then pretend that its only residents were a handful of Elwing’s guards.

There is no way to sack a city without wide-scale civilian death aside from total surrender, and even then there are likely to be deaths. Even in “targeted strikes” in modern warfare, conducted with drones and surveillance systems, civilian casualties are high. Now translate that to the context of pre-modern, sword-and-arrow warfare, in which combatants are storming dense, populated settlements. Doriath and Sirion were not military barracks; they were homes, cultural centres, places with food and art and literary networks, caretakers, nurseries, and schools. The sack of a city, even if conducted “with orders” or “against leadership targets,” does not function like a surgical operation. Chaos is inevitable. Soldiers disobey, mistakes are made, rage spirals, and those least able to defend themselves are the most likely to suffer. The civilian death toll of WWII was twice the military death toll.

If we're being pedantic about what's directly written in the text… these instances were specifically referred to as kinslayings. There are battles and there are slayings. Regardless of whether or not city sacking was the original goal or whose fault it was that the soldiers entered the gates, the sacking of a city or settlement guarantees mass civilian death in the way an open battle, eg. say Nirnaeth or Dagor-lad, does not. Sure, stablehands or armourers or healers do die in the latter, but it’s still a battlefield death, and the people there are conscious of being in said battlefield situation: the Èowyn plotline in LotR engages with this directly. It’s half the plot of Game of Thrones!

And all this matters immensely in the context of the Third Kinslaying especially, because by that point the Oath has metastasised from hubristic defiance+ethnonationalist ideology to what can only be termed a generational death drive. Something does not stop being militaristic brutality just because you like the guy who did it. A tragedy is not purely symbolic just because you view it through the effect it has on the psyche of the perpetrator. Acts of war aren't aberrations of personality, they're the predictable outcome of ideology, action and circumstance. I can’t find the exact post this was on but @antlered-vixen had a really fantastic comment on how fan-reactions to certain acts of individual violence (evil bad worst) vs acts of mass violence (did it really matter/happen?) says a lot about what kind of violence they tolerate, and who they view as “people”. Also re: “we love our war criminal blorbo who did no war crimes at all”. 

Impact on Blorbo

I don’t actually mean that the Fëanorians 100% hands-downs directly killed civilians: nobody is saying Maglor went around personally sniping pub-bards (although tbh… funny 🤭). Hell, I’d even say the Fëanorians probably didn’t do much civilian-killing themselves, as commanders/lords they’re less likely to have much contact with the civilians of a sacked city, and more likely to have gone straight for the targets, eg. Dior/Nimloth/Elwing, especially as they’d have the strongest guard around them. And considering Maedhros and Maglor’s actions after Doriath and Sirion respectively, I don’t actually think either of them would have much of a stomach to directly do something like killing civilians willy-nilly, Oath or no Oath. 

However, in real life, the dirtiest work in any war is not performed directly by the military command, prime ministers or royal families: the privileged are afforded the luxury of keeping to their conscience and principles in their individual actions, whilst the bulk of the brutality is conducted by the soldiers under their command. 

The fantasy that the Fëanorian leaders could have “clean hands” is to me a very ironic denialism simply, because it flattens the very complexity that makes these characters compelling. By insisting that no civilians died, what is really being argued is that you want the moral ledger of these characters to be easier to reconcile with your own, clean ideas of “goodness” and “evil” that maps onto contemporary geopolitical events. But ethical tension is not a bug, it’s the point of the narrative. Maglor’s lamentation, Maedhros’s despair, and any redemptive gestures (eg: search for twins, taking-in of other twins) are powerful textual symbols because they failed. Because their high ideals were eaten alive by the mechanisms of power they operated within and the violence they unleashed; to insist on the mass-sanitisation of such a narrative is to neuter it.

The kinslayings themselves are rarely discussed later in the story but they're absolutely a tectonic presence throughout: the structures of grief, disunity, desires for detached sanctuaries, uneasy alliances in SA+TA Middle Earth all are downstream from the memory of mass elf-on-elf violence. They're not isolated crimes that disappear with Beleriand, they shape everything to come. And yes, obviously the text doesn’t give you a blow by blow account of the kill rate or whatever, but that is just… a feature of mythic historiography. Leveraging that ambiguity as proof of “innocence” is to misread the function of the text.

Finally, if you remove the civilian deaths from the Kinslayings, what exactly do they mean? You reduce the weight of the events to a series of annoying nobles arguing with each other over jewelry lmao. The Kinslayings absolutely matter because they are disproportionate and shattering. They are considered and planned acts of violence, not political mistakes: it could be argued maybe that Alqualondë was an act of rashness spurred on by a perceived ticking clock, which goes with most things Fëanor, but the second and third kinslayings were absolutely premeditated, considering the attempts to “treat” with the cities prior to attack. 

Literally nobody is saying every fic about the Fëanorians has to directly engage with the moral cost of the kinslayings. They can just wank each other off in the bathtub, that’s fine. I have them wank each other off in my mind more than I have them doing war. You are shadow-boxing. I have never seen anyone tell people off for, idk, writing Fëanor fingering himself as a mid-morning brain-training activity without listing the death toll at Alqualondë. Even the moral olympics about “Fëanorian fans are evil” takes a less annoying stance.

Which is to say, there is nothing inherently wrong with interpreting the Kinslayings in ways that minimise civilian harm. Fan interpretation is a necessary part of engaging with any mythos, especially one as expansive as this one. It is entirely fair to say, “I like to imagine Maglor avoided harming innocents,” or “in my reading, Maedhros tried to limit bloodshed.” That kind of emotional engagement is what gives fandom its richness etc.

What is not defensible, imo, is the claim that such interpretations are canonically substantiated, especially when they fly in the face of basic narrative logic, historical realism, and the textual purpose of the Kinslayings as moral and national cataclysms. The narrative function of the Kinslayings is to stain the oath: not just to make it emotionally costly to the oath-takers, but to demonstrate how ideology wielded as absolute justification leads to atrocity. 

To claim that there is no evidence of civilian death and therefore none occurred, is not a neutral reading; it’s as ideologically driven as “anyone who writes sympathetic portrayals of the Fëanorians is going straight to hell because they’re all big evil bad misogynists”. And that matters because once you cross the line from interpretation to assertion of textual truth, it’s less reimagining, and more revisionism. You are not just saying “this is what I like to believe,” but “this is what happened,” and using that assertion to shut down other readings. 

Put plainly: we can absolutely love the Fëanorians, and write them as regretful, confident, heroic, horny, whatever. But it is not necessary to totally erase the cost of their actions from the fan-space, especially in the fanworks of others, in order to do so. They have pointy ears. You are allowed to like them. Fictional characters do not require a clean moral ledger to be enjoyed. I beg you, get a fucking grip. 

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asshole brothers featuring Luthien lol

based on this post because I find it funny

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My boy 😔 RIP

Draw him at his soggiest. I mean the soggiest.

the fish are eating his corpse

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There he is

The bear in area

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Peter Mather Photography

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thank you for the tag @hailturinturambar! <3

The rules: pick one of the characters you write (Oc's always welcome) and fill in the details for these prompts and tag someone you think would enjoy this.

i write for a... fair amount of characters, both canon and oc. mostly Tolkien, but also Merlin, Witcher, Star Wars, KCD, and a bunch of other stuff. but for this prompt i'll focus on my very dear Tolkien oc Erin, daughter of Golweneth and Merion.

prompt 1: if your character had a go-to coffee order, what would it be? in the context of the setting their story takes place in, do they have a go-to morning drink?

seeing as Middle-Earth doesn't have coffee, i'll have to go with something else (though i do believe that like me, Erin would not enjoy bitter coffee for the fun of it, she'd definitely order a sweet monstrosity like a triple caramel frappe or whatever, idk i don't get coffee often). as a peredhel skin-changer, Erin needs more food and drink than the average elf, and she's definitely partial to a sweet herbal tea in the morning - think strawberry and mint, peach and lemon balm, that kind of thing (get your English tea with milk away from her!).

prompt 2: do they have a hair or skincare routine? if so, are they consistent about it?

absolutely not. Erin's hair and skin is surviving off of prayers and Arwen's long-suffering spa treatments alone. this girl has no real care for herself, and though she enjoys looking pretty (usually when she's in Rivendell, she likes to fit in with Arwen and the family, so she grooms herself better there), her mother and older sister always used be the ones to care more about those things and they would help her with it in Mélamar Ilyavan (place i made up as Erin's home settlement, on the Anduin river not far from the Old Ford). after their deaths, Erin just didn't care as much about the state of her skin and hair, as long as it was out of the way and clean. (emphasis on clean, she does not like being dirty, but the condition of said clean hair and skin is another matter)

that being said, as mentioned, Arwen hates this about her lover. when Erin is home you know damn well that Arwen is all over her like a fussy mother hen, making her bathe in bath *salts, properly washing, conditioning, and oiling Erin's hair after, drying it gently so that the curls can truly spring to life; and skincare is the same! Arwen always notices how rough Erin's skin is after she returns from whatever wanderings she was doing and she spends time moisturising, cleansing and tending to her lovers' skin. Erin does keep this up in Rivendell, but she does not keep it up in the wilds, she can't be bothered + won't carry all of the products Arwen insists she uses.

prompt 3: do they have a hobby or a passtime?

Erin is honestly so used to being in fight or flight mode that when she finally gets to Really sit down and do Nothing, she doesn't initially know what to do anymore. this lessens over time thankfully, and she finds great joy in reading from Elrond's vast library, or whatever books she can find if she's not home. she also likes carving, not just as a trade to earn money, but as something to soothe her mind; she doesn't usually make people things though, so if someone receives a hand-carved statuette, it means they are well liked and cared for by her. she also loves music nights, which are plenty often with the elves, and she likes singing and dancing the most - she wishes to be better at the harp like her mother was, but she never had the patience for it.

she does also find joy in just watching others do their thing - she'll often just pass time by observing the world around her, especially people working at their craft (like smithy's at the forge) because it's soothing and repetitive. she'd often do this back home as a child as well, just watching and shadowing in rapt silence as her father dealt with the bureaucracy of being a chieftain, soothing people with words and actions both. it's actually interesting to think of this one because i feel that Erin doesn't actually know how to relax properly and thus would never be Truly Comfortable wasting time fully on a hobby - even when she's reading she's usually reading a book to learn, not just to enjoy.

this was actually super super fun?? i love Erin and her family, i'd love to do more of this kind of thing for them actually, it's making my brain work again!

tag: @balrogballs @rana-temporaria @burnwater13 @rainfeather13 @olorinscombatboots @feanors-mom @novembermedusa @monjustmon @impmansloot

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I’ve always considered Carcharoth to be the most tragic character in the Silm and yet I never see him come up in discussion or even spoken of outside of Beren and Luthien. I think he should have gotten the chance to be angry - at Morgoth, Luthien, the Valar, whoever - but his end was cruel and unsatisfying and ultimately brushed off because “he was a wolf”, and an antagonist.

I’ve been very mad lately I probably should be allowed to post rn but 🤷‍♀️ anyways, current American politics and some chronic pain flare ups have made drawing and working through my emotions a challenge recently, but I managed watercolors pretty easily and quickly too. I have a lot of projects concerning Carcharoth in the works that will hopefully start coming out sooner rather than later. I have a lot to say about him.

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Maedhros: don't you ever want to talk about your feelings, Moryo?

Caranthir: No

Maglor: I do!

Maedhros: I know, Káno

Maglor: I'm sad!

Maedhros: I know, Káno

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Feanor gathers his sons

Feanor: Son, wanna help me commit arson? Caranthir, quietly: Adar, this is a library! Feanor: Oh, sorry, my bad. Feanor, whispering: Wanna help me commit arson? Caranthir, whispering: Of course. What do you need?

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Artfight Week 1 Wrap-up!

I decided to go with the theme of alternative centaurs this week! So any kind of ~taur! Very challenging but I’m very pleased with the results :)

take a look below 👇

Pine belonging to @cinnamon-flame (who revenged with this absolutely PHENOMENAL pic of Azalea you should look at!)

Aqillutaq belonging to ASKIYER

And finally Lark belonging to Choleric! (They are technically a sphinx but… shhh I can cheat a little)

looking forwards to the next week of Artfight >:3

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Hello and welcome to Tolkien Gen Week!

August 11-17, 2025

This is a week to appreciate all of the incredible characters and relationships within Tolkien’s legendarium that fall under the broad category of “gen.” There is a great wealth of wonderful gen content in the Tolkien fandom, but those creations are not always the most visible because of the shipping-focused nature of fandom at large. This week is an effort to give them the appreciation they deserve.

This year, Tolkien Gen Week will run from August 11-17, 2025!

Any content and creations are welcome as long as it is non-romantic and non-sexual! You can create edits, gifs, fanart, fanfic, fanmixes, and more! Please tag your posts with #tolkiengenweek AND @ mention this blog @tolkiengenweek so they can be easily found. If your submission turns into a long post, please put what you can beneath a “Keep reading” divider. You may also post your creations to our AO3 collection.

Below are some prompts for each day of the week. They are not mandatory, but they are here to inspire you. This post will lead to an explanation for each one.

DAY ONE: Family ● Mentorships ● Community

DAY TWO: Friendship ● Animals ● Group Dynamic

DAY THREE: Gray Spaces ● Enemies and Rivalries ● Fealty

DAY FOUR: Solo ● Work and Craft ● Language

DAY FIVE: Culture ● Diversity ● Traditions

DAY SIX: Environment ● Places ● Objects and Symbols

DAY SEVEN: Freeform

This event is being organized by @arofili. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to message this blog or my main.

For further clarification, check out our about, FAQ, code of conduct, and prompts pages! Happy creating!!

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Goldberry; the River Daughter

I mixed her green and white dress into one

COMMISSIONS OPEN - Support me on Ko-Fi; early access drawings + WIP + COMM discounts

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sick desire

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You know, for a long time I thought the statements about Thorin calling gold their joint treasurer with Bilbo were somewhat far-fetched, but then I thought and... But it's true. It makes sense. In the sense that he calls not only people traitors, but also his own relatives. He suspects everyone. Except for Bilbo. That is, in the midst of his illness, when greed makes Thorin want to start a war, he gives Bilbo a chainmail that is second only to Arkenstone in value. Of course, you could argue that when he says "ours," he means himself and his dark side. But even so... I think if Bilbo's deception hadn't been discovered, or if Bilbo had given him the stone, Thorin would have definitely... wanted to live with the gold and with Bilbo. Because it was all his. Also, look at how Bilbo is literally highlighted in gold in this scene.