#AND SO MUCH MAKES SENSE TO ME NOW ABOUT LOTR

[et-cant-phone-home-no-signal]

Reacting to: “Finding Celebrían” written by Tumblr user balrogballs

This is a reaction to this wonderful essay, please give the essay a read, and just a note that this is just me writing my rambling thoughts, feelings and reaction to this stunning piece of writing.

Celebrían did not mean much to me the first time I was exposed to the Lord of the Rings, in fact, I didn’t know she existed until I picked up the books for the first time roughly 6 years after I’d first watched the films at age 10. My relationship to Tolkien’s works is once of a long-suffering lover who knows and sees all of the faults, cracks and missing chunks, and forgives it anyway because the rest of it is beautiful and fulfilling, despite its faults. But as I’ve gotten older, and wiser, and more experienced in many different ways, I’ve come to appreciate Tolkien’s cracks and missing pieces, perhaps more so than the pictures that are yet whole to enjoy. Celebrían is one of these missing pieces.

The opening of this essay immediately had me going “yes, agreed”, because I too was expecting so much more when I first found Cel in those Appendices and notes. The emphasis put here on Cel’s torment is such an important thing to hone in on, because in a world where there is such beauty, which Tolkien describes readily, for the wife of such a great elf lord as Elrond to decide that the pain she had endured was so much, and so heavy, and so irreparable, that the better choice was for her to leave the shores of Middle-Earth, and her family, behind. Lovers of lotr and Tolkien’s other works are not unfamiliar with the concepts of torture, war, consequences of actions and of death, but it’s still a striking word to use, especially in the context of the Appendices. Seeing this being pointed out certainly made me feel some sense of relief, that indeed I’m no the only one who sees.

Now, The Fields means something specific to Miss Balls, and this entire segment of the essay had me putting my phone down and willing my gathering tears to chill out and leave so I could keep reading. The tone of this section, as well as the vulnerability, made me pause and reflect on why I was feeling so upset at reading it. What about this was resonating with me? I don’t see myself has having my Field, rather, I have many Fields spread across many places. I did not have a steady Field growing up, and the one that I wish I could return to, the original comfort, is something far-off and distant to me; a hazy remnant of my childhood, so old and wrinkly I can no longer be sure of its cosy details. All of my other Fields however… I start to understand why this section is making me want to scream into a pillow. Most of my other Fields are withered, and they too became things I could no longer stand to look at, though I myself have never even considered the concept of cPTSD being a part of my (already damaged) psyche, but this writing has definitely opened a can of worms that was simply waiting to be found. I’m not sure whether to thank you, or curse you out.

Anway.

Following Cel became a natural pathway to trying to understand what was going on with her, but also what was going on with me. By the time she became a true interest in my life, I was already knee-deep into my own lotr writing project, one that’s been years in the making. Suddenly, I had to think about where Celebrían would fit in this narrative, on what kind of things she might say, or do, or like. How do you write someone who exists only in footnotes? As nothing more than a name in passing, another female tragedy, another missing wife. Like Miss Balls, I tried to find her, and felt cold disappointment when I found little to nothing for my efforts. How awful, to be a part of a world so wonderful and bright and big as Middle-Earth, and still be left behind in the shadows, like so many others. “I couldn’t find her in the story.” - and I could not either.

Now, I quote an entire paragraph, because I must. “But I think that was always what drew me to her, that absence. I didn’t find myself in Celebrían, but in the footnote that gestured to her presence. It wasn’t that I understood her so much as I knew how to decrypt the desperate scratches left behind by someone who drowned on dry land. That was how she and I were truly alike: people who wanted to change the world, or a little part of it, and did, did something good - and had all of it forgotten, crammed into a footnote read with a tender, pitying fret.” - I had a whole paragraph of words lined up when I first read this, hell, I was practically cheering in my seat, going “yes! exactly!” as I felt a connection with the words on my screen, but I think the visual of that reaction alone tells more than I ever could in a measly paragraph. The way Miss Balls writes Celebrían, the joy and craziness, the sweet tooth, everything that makes her her, is born within whatever has been unwritten. Cel is not just what we make of her in writing, but rather what she can be to use outside of it, what she is to the world she lives in. I’ve been finding her in my own writing, her small eccentricities that make her more than a footnote. My Cel hates bees, and she loves the colour purple, and she delights in eating with her hands. When I read “I don’t know, if I’m being honest, whether Celebrían changed me, or if I changed her. Whether change is an instant or a process, whether this version of almost-Celebrían mattered to anyone but myself.” I understand, and I wonder just how many version of Cel are out there - how many of us have read this footnote and decided that she was going to be so much more than what is assumed of her.

For Miss Balls, leaving The Fields is written as this freeing (yet scary) necessity (and feel free to tell me I’m talking bullshit, because at the end of the day, I am just an outsider looking in and reading an essay that makes me feel like my heart is going to implode on itself). And it brings me great joy to read this section in which freedom from the place that you perhaps don’t actually know you want to leave, until all of a sudden, you just know, because yeah, it really do be like that sometimes. I can agree with and understand Celebrían being a guide of sorts, at least mentally, because yes, she would not judge, she would understand and applaud. She would sit both of us down, as we leave our Fields behind, and offer us a (too sweet) glass of lemonade and say ‘it isn’t over yet’ with the kindest smile and a twinkle in her eye. The concept of being a “cracked vessel” applies not just to Cel, but to me as well, and I hated being confronted with that, but it’s a reminder that that is not all you are. And now my words begin to make less sense, so let’s slow it down, shall we?

Miss Balls speaks true; all of us that are sucked in by Celebrían are mirrors of a kind. There is no such thing as one Celebrían, and I don’t think there ever could be. The beauty of loving a character who is nobody, is that she can be everybody. I too had to write Celebrían to find her, or at least my version of her, and all of her idiosyncrasies, some of which are still hidden to me. It doesn’t all have to be said, if fact, I think that most of it goes unsaid, in the ways in which she thinks, and walks, and talks, in the colours that she wears, in the shoes (or lack thereof), in the way she styles her hair… “I look at her now, as she is in my head, and there Celebrían is neither alive nor dead.” - And as Miss Balls looks into her dusty wing mirror, so I do too look in mine. My mirror is not dusty, and it does not belong to me, but it is cracked and holding on by a thread. The girl in that mirror is stuck in some of those Fields, and she looks different in every single one, but just maybe, she can be consoled. I know for a fact that my Celebrían would know what to do.

After note: Miss Balls you make me cry, but I’ve been meaning to read this essay since I first saw you published it. Now that I finally have, I just could not stop thinking, and these thoughts flowed out onto my keyboard with such relative ease (relative mind you compared to whatever my writing capability is at any given moment) that I almost felt like should have bit the bullet days ago. Anyway, I encourage everyone to read the essay, especially if you have any love or feeling toward Celebrían because damn. Damn.

Finding Celebrían

For Tolkien Meta Week — an essay on autofiction, archives, healing, and why I moved across the country after finding out Elrond Peredhel had a wife. Being an essayist irl, believe me when I say I was thrilled to see @silmarillionwritersguild have the personal essay form as a format for Tolkien Meta Week! Here's something from the heart - warning for discussion of cPTSD and (non explicit) references to violence.

When I first found Celebrían in a footnote, I wrapped up warm and followed, certain she'd lead me to where she truly lived in the text.

By that point, it had been a good decade or so since I first read Tolkien – I had been aware that Elrond had a wife, and assumed she was dead or hung up in some other cold meat locker alongside a procession of wives spanning literary history.

It was only years later that I properly came across her, and blinked, realising she was a cursory line which led to a footnote in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, one which referred to her torment in passing, meant to explain why the sons of Elrond and to an extent Elrond himself, were the way they were. 

Fridging was one thing, but torment was another entirely, I thought — and so casually! Tea and torment in the Third Age, tra-la-lally traumatised into "losing all joy" in Middle-Earth and leaving the year after, taking ship to Valinor and leaving behind a grieving family. It was simple curiosity, really, until it turned into a cold, familiar grasp: the clear-cut knowledge of exactly what sort of torment it would have been, that drove away the wife of a noble lord living in what was very clearly described as being one of the last great sanctuaries in a ravaged realm. 

But to understand why The Footnote stopped me in my tracks, I need to tell you about The Fields. 

When I speak of The Fields (which are of course not really fields and neither are they called The Fields anywhere but here), I refer to one of the most beautiful spots in the country. The Fields combined the peaceful pastoral with quaint urban charm, rustic without being remote, safe without being detached. I lived in The Fields for several years, and made a little life for myself that grew into something bigger. 

I had been an activist in The Fields — moved from scrappy student to card-carrying revolutionary — and I did it because I loved where I lived very, very much, enough to think I could kiss it better. And I was good, I was! I belonged on the stage in that sense, I was invited to panel after panel, talk after talk, and I stood on little podiums that grew alongside me. I knew how to carry myself, present myself, leveraged my palatability and conventionality in return for rights and bare-minimum environmental reparations. 

Such wonders, of course, came with a cost I hadn’t foreseen — an incident, a couple really, that tossed a diagnosis of cPTSD into my lap and turned my lovely home into The Fields. And because I had been so good at presenting myself and clambering on podiums with shiny hair, the incidents became the talk of the town, and I in turn very quickly became a subject, the walking, talking cost of resistance. 

A feature of cPTSD, one that sets it apart from PTSD, is the overarching dullness with which the emotional flashbacks grasp you. Not like being plucked off the surface of the earth by a monstrous thing, but rather drowning quietly in sludge you never realised was beneath your feet in the first place. There was never a thing that terrified me about The Fields, it was only ever a quiet, creeping mass taking over everything, and in being so — easy to ignore and disguise. 

I love The Fields, I told myself, even after. I loved The Fields, even though life had turned into air and static, and I had turned into an unfeeling thing. I lived in the middle of that little city but felt as though I was in a small hut on no-man's land, or a joint security area, suspended between towers. I couldn't stand the wonderful hills and valleys, so I tried my hardest to cling onto the reasons I loved them, tried to medicate them back into my heart with the forcefulness of a pacemaker. I shoved things down throats and up noses, walked back onto all those stages, turned myself into an electric hearse chasing a long-dead dragon. I would walk around The Fields on some nights, very cold and very young, the bleached bones left behind by something very promising. 

Can you see why I stopped still at Appendix A, at Celebrían? I tried to follow her, and see where her story began, and what wonders it would end in, because if Celebrían's story ended in wonder then maybe, there might be a chance, perhaps….. 

It would be easy, I thought, I was a writer, a journalist, a researcher - I trained in asking questions and knowing things, even sticky, stunted, back-of-the-throat things that you'd rather not catch sight of in a mirror. The History of Middle Earth book sets were ordered, fresh copies of all the old texts, magnifying glasses held over Unfinished Tales. 

I’d been so certain I would find her. That Celebrían would ramble across page after page, legs dangling over the edge and an indolent expression fizzing on her face. She would be stubborn and glorious and righteous in her fervor to change the world. I would find her in the flesh, and then no longer would I stand in The Fields each night, hollow-eyed, self-haunting spectre holding myself thrall to a single series of events in what has been, objectively, a lovely, loving life.

But a full month went by, and all I found was footnote after endnote after cursory mention, almost all of them clothing her in torment, growing stiff and sharp against the tooth of the page: vicious, like a blade angled backwards. For Celebrían and I, the richest text in the world turned into a landscape of loss. 

What a wonderful, rich, textured world you have!

All the better to swallow you whole, my dear. 

I couldn't find her in the story. I spent weeks and weeks on her, and I couldn't find her in the story and by then I had already fancied myself and Celebrían to be counterparts, like if she laughed, I would laugh too, like if she ran, then I would run too, and if she was lost, then… well. I suppose it shows the power of an enduring text. I had a PhD, at that point I had just gotten my publishing deal through, I'd spoken on all those podiums and done all those real-world, adult things, and still I was not immune to the indulgent tether of a good old self-insert. And then it turned out we were not counterparts but rather more akin to co-morbidities, that The Footnote and its friends were all I would ever know of Celebrían. 

It was summer, I remember, but my hands were cold — autopsy-fingers, my partner called them. Archive-fingers, autopsy-fingers, scrabbling around to find nothing, no indication as to how Celebrían's story truly ended and why I was the person I was. The texts shifted uneasily under my hands, like the Professor himself was turning out his pockets and shrugging, reminding me that it was neither Celebrían's nor my story, not really. Pointed me back to The Footnote like it was a pacifier, and still I turned in circles like a dog chasing its tail, looking for other instances of her name. I found nothing. I began to fear that I had wasted my life.

The Footnote started to blur across weeks, and soon it turned itself into My Footnote. The one I had found, a year or so before the hunt, in a fantastic, recently published book that spoke about activism in The Fields, where I came face to face with myself. But there, I hadn't been standing on a podium or being interviewed or writing pressure pieces or anything I had really, truly done, but I was instead a single footnote — condensed into the things that had happened to me, as opposed to the things I had made happen. As the months went on, I looked for references to myself in new books, newspapers, magazines — and I would find myself, but in the same scrap of footnote, wearing the same costume of torment, tragic poster children of a violent world. 

I sat there looking at the thousands and thousands of pages in the legendarium, the stack of books on things I had worked upon, statutes I had pulled down and little laws I had changed. And then at the scraps of Celebrían and I, reduced to scribbles and crossing outs in the margins. It was like we never lived at all. It seems a rather childish reaction, perhaps, to not finding the story you want in a book you bought. Still, that afternoon, when I put down the last page of HoME I had access to, I crawled into bed and stayed there for a very long time, trying very hard to not touch even the bedclothes around me.

But I think that was always what drew me to her, that absence. I didn't find myself in Celebrían, but in the footnote that gestured to her presence. It wasn't that I understood her so much as I knew how to decrypt the desperate scratches left behind by someone who drowned on dry land. That was how she and I were truly alike: people who wanted to change the world, or a little part of it, and did, did something good — and had all of it forgotten, crammed into a footnote read with a tender, pitying fret. 

But that's not canonical, is it? Yes, her absence shaped the story of the Ring War in certain regards. But who said Celebrían, Celebrían the Person, not Celebrían the Footnote — had ever changed anything, let alone the world in which she lived?

Simple – I did.

My Celebrían was a complete nutcase. I wrote her as a daughter born to a borderline-squirrel of a wood elf, who herself hated small creatures with a passion. I had her take off her shoe and beat earwigs to death, had her talk the ear off a perpetually grieving mother, irritate a kinslayer into planting a pine forest, and threaten the High King with a shovel. She would shove cotton in her ears to block out her husband's snoring, and put four teaspoons of sugar in her tea. She bribed her sons to dispose of a snake, and demanded magical healing for a little scrape on her forehead. 

I cut her into familiar shapes: the shape of someone who spent months unable to bear the slightest touch, whose loved one slept on the floor beside the bed, clinging to a listless hand dangled off the side. The shape of a small house in a forest, and the shape of a wonderful ending, in which she truly did change the world in all the ways she could. I don't know, if I'm being honest, whether Celebrían changed me, or if I changed her. Whether change was an instant or a process, whether this version of almost-Celebrían mattered to anyone but myself. I knew one thing though — my Celebrían is a thousand footnotes long, and counting. 

Footnotes, like most things in the archive, are of course caging things: keeping unpalatable violence in the past, or at least elsewhere, keeping the here and now good and quiet. It's easier to outsource healing and rediscovery to other places, to archives and museums and books and Valinor. Was being a footnote a punishment? What’s worse, being pickled wrongly or never being pickled at all? Was this yet another installment of the cautionary tale stretching all the way through time and reality from Celebrían to me; footnotes about women who held themselves thrall to the memory of violence, who lived as well as they could, till they couldn’t? Would it have been better if she never existed at all?

I don't know. All I know for certain is this: at some point between finding Celebrían and writing her, I moved out of The Fields and across the country.

It had been a long time coming. But for years, I had thought I would weather living in The Fields because even after the Torment, the Footnote, the Diagnosis, I never felt a disconnect from the place, because I was still extroverted and irritating and fizzing with the desire to stay in the Fields and love it, as I had always done. And then suddenly, I wanted to run.

It wasn't as if Celebrían burned The Fields down, leaving me there to watch flames eating its flat, starless sky. But what she did was this: carefully take off my rose-tinted glasses, and say run —- this earth has swallowed you whole. 

I had assumed it was my fault, my attachment to The Fields, that I was looking at things wrong, that I was maintaining unhealthy attachments to sites of trauma, prioritising the wrong perspectives, the body keeps an atlas and all that. But Celebrían did not call me crazy. Celebrían was not the kind of person who would ever call you crazy. She was the kind of person who would lay in a wide-open field beside you and ask you what you were looking at. 

And when you say "oh, just up at the big sky", she wouldn't probe. She would know exactly what you mean when you didn't say "-- because there is nothing ahead of me", and she wouldn't say a word about how the ground around you was soft with decay, reeking like a corpse, that you were caught in the straggling grass of its hair. 

She would instead shrug, wink, and point you towards Gollum, because of course she would. She would tell you that Tolkien, ever the Catholic, had drawn out a perfect depiction of what might have happened if Lazarus was left in that cave. And then she would say, run, for god's sake, girl, run, and you would. I did!

How stubbornly we all cling to the idea of staying fixed until being fixed, to the idea of a ready-made Valinor to sail to if we do well enough at life, stay still enough in the margins! How faithfully we believe that if you spend enough time being a very, very good cracked vessel, maybe one day you might feel the quiet triumph of bearing water again. Celebrían, not the Celebrían of The Footnote but my Cel, the manic pixie freakshow of Imladris, said shut the fuck up and run. That it was no use hungering for the impossible and thumbing listlessly though footnotes, and to instead run, and run, and start digging a garden at the ground you come to a stop at because it is only in new soil that something gentle could unfold unbidden. That as time passes, you will belong less and less to the ground you left behind and more and more to the ground you walk upon, to the new trees and new hills around you, to those who love you still.

Run! she said. How alive you looked, hunting for me. How badly you craved my story. See? There are still stories you crave. You are still human enough to crave. Run! 

I think many of us who love this brief, inexorable footnote of a Celebrían, whether we read her or write her, are bound by a similar truth: that in her we caught sight of something within ourselves. All around the world, these tiny, unflinching mirrors in Appendix A and the rest, tie together and create a hundred different Celebríans, all part of the same thread, each version carrying its own burden, though rarely do we ever acknowledge it in each other. It's a quiet nod, an unspoken connection, a reminder that we are all more alike and less alone than a cursory footnote might imply.

To find Celebrían, I had to write her. And in turn, she wrote me in her image. I look at her now, as she is in my head, and there Celebrían is neither alive nor dead. No, what is most clear in my mind is a girl in a dusty wing mirror, a life packed into boxes, sunglasses sliding down her nose. One hand sandwiched in an ordnance map, prying the pages open, hurtling at a perfectly legal speed down an M-road, The Fields growing smaller, and smaller, and smaller in the rearview mirror. Not gone, not truly, but invisible to the naked eye, unless you know exactly where to look. A grain of sand in a bucket of water, a single, sad-looking fish half-buried on a tropical beach. A finger to the past, a wave from a window, a footnote in an appendix. 

[itspileofgoodthings]

currently teaching Beowulf (with a heavy emphasis on Tolkien), I just started teaching the Hobbit, and I am in the middle (approaching the end) of a lord of the rings rewatch. it is Tolkien-city in my brain and I love it here.

[c0ffinshit]

Simon (John Q.) SFW AND NSFW Headcanons

a/n: i knew yall would like that so here are so hcs that i had that i can now share with the world

warnings: controversial, mentions of pussy eating, me speaking my truth

SFW:

okay, first off, this man claims to HATE modern music but… he has a soft spot for Fiona Apple

listen, this man is madddd and if he were a woman he would be a mean butch lesbian

he always drives you everywhere

even when you’re like “babe i can drive its fine” he’s like “no, i’ll drive”

he tells people his favorite movie is something film bro-y like fight club, but his favorite movie is something like little shop of horrors or when harry met sally

sorry im projecting

honestly, he is bad about talking about his emotions like homie doesn't have the words for it so he just gets angry

BUT he learns a lot from you about that

actually, you learn a lot from him too

he talks so highly of you, even before dating

like always talks about how he can hardly have a good and controlled day without you

if you two are a long distance away, he'll always call you and talk about your day

but even then, you two will stay on the phone for hours, just talking about whatever and how much you miss each other

always tries to be a sweet boyfriend and make you breakfast

expect he will burn it and the kitchen will be on fire

i will say this: simon is a sensitive boy, esp with people's emotions like if you're sad and crying about something you called 'stupid' he'll still hold you and tell you how not stupid it is

he HATES when you're upset, esp if he can't do anything to help you

he'll just sadly watch you til you feel better

and when you do, he'll get you your favorite blanket and stuffed animals and kiss you like the good bf. HE. IS.

sorry, my daddy issues are on full display *sobs*

definitely doesn't like it when you call him babygirl or pookie

even as a joke

the man doesn't get that

my man has an old soul IM SO FR

like he doesn’t really like modern TV or music

movies… that a different story

HE FUCKING LOVES MOVIES.

especially if it is like a movie musical or high fantasy (like lotr or hobbit)

maybe a comedy but like a comedy from like the '60s that is probably super offensive now

nfsw under the cut

NSFW:

first off, do i agree with the top allegations for simon? kinda.

listen listen, i only say kinda because of the fact that this man has angry ISSUES

like if you are being a brat, this man doesn’t hold back definitely into spanking for this reason

OKAY I HAVE A THING… when you two do it together, he is very… parental (if that makes sense)

like yes he is daddy we know but like he is the type to whisper “this is for your own good” as he spanks you

two words: BODY. WORSHIP.

this man will kiss and touch your body like it's your last day on earth

AUGH AND AND the look he gives you when he’s inside you FUCKKKKKKK

the look is filled with so much love and gratitude for you okay like this needs to be stated at all but like 8 inches

the type of 8 inches that hits against your cervix in the right way

AND ANOTHER THING when you two first get together, his libido is very low

which also means he is very easy to take care of

soooooo if you wanted to just do a blowjob, you hypothetically could

but then, like three or four months into dating, HORN DOG.

you're surpised when he isn't pressing against your while cuddling

but if anything, you’ll be the one getting head, not him

THIS MAN IS PUSSY WHIPPED.

like he will grab your thighs and pull you closer while eating you out he lovesssss hearing your moans when you're under him UGH

dude but like on the rare time like he will bottom, its lowkey kinda…

JOHN Q IS A SWITCH AND I WILL CONTINUE TO SPEAK MY TRUTH

this mfer groans like no tomorrow when he does bottom

soft,,,, begg…ing

like “you’re so good.” and then under his breath its “please keep going.”

also that boy has a praise kink with hints of degradation

am i saying that because i wrote a whole fic about it? yes. fuck yes.

im chewing at the bars of my enclosure

he gets so blushy when you look at him with your fuck-me eyes

COMMUNICATE WITH THAT BOY.

tell him what you want

tell him where you want it

tell him about your fantasies of him

he loves hearing your voice, especially when you talk in a soft and seductive voice

listen, the only reason i kinda don’t agree with the top allegations is because i believe JOHN Q IS A SERVICE TOP.

i've made my point very clear about that throughout this section

[shirefantasies]

How Many Kids Do They Want? LoTR Edition

This is just a headcanon set I like to think about because I love little ones & think all of the characters would make great parents in their own way 🥰 I definitely am going to expand on this in the future but for now enjoy!

Aragorn

He wants to bring a life into the world, but only under good circumstances. When the time comes, he favors a small family he can focus on- one child is enough for him. As much attention as he can possibly give goes to his little one that way, no resentment, no competition, all of the time in Aragorn’s world to spend with those dearest. Despite the pressure to have a son, he is happy to have either a son or a daughter as long as they are happy and healthy and provided for. Aragorn’s child will grow up with an amazing guide to do what is right and care for their friends and family, not to mention learning Elvish and many skills to survive outdoors if need ever arises.

Legolas

Open-minded for sure, but I think he actually leans toward a larger family. No extreme amount, but four or five sounds good to him! Legolas is very caring, patient, and even has a playful side that all lend well to spending time with wee ones. No strong preference on sons or daughters, Legolas cares more for smiling faces and fair hearts. He pretends to be competitive with his children to motivate them, but always caves and lets them win in the end! They’ll all become amazing archers if he has anything to say about it.

Boromir

Having a big family warms Boromir's heart. He wants to be different from his father, carve out space for each and every child individually. Having a big family shows in his mind how much he loves his spouse and can provide for everyone, too. Boromir is definitely the type of dad whose children just come barreling toward the door upon his return home, rocketing into his arms as he manages to catch them all! If you ask him, Boromir's ideal family size would be four or five children. He loves the idea of having a son or sons to train up, but really doesn't want to miss out on having beautiful daughters too, so his hope is for a mix of both. Constantly encouraging his sons and praising every achievement at their passions. The girls are ladies of Gondor and nothing shall take that from them, least of all their father, who is always joining their tea parties and letting them take turns as queens knighting him and each other.

Gimli

Dwarves tend to have smaller families, whether that is by choice or happenstance. Gimli enjoys the idea of having three children, a moderate amount, and of course he really would love a son. He wants a mini-me as they say, a small reflection of himself to share all his favorite things with and teach to defend all that is important to him. Daughters are less common among his people, thus of course they are of great value and would be a blessing were he to have any as well. Gimli would constantly be hyping them up and reminding them that they are worth so much, any man in their life had better treat them so or else!

Frodo

If he were to have children, Frodo favors a smaller family. Growing up, it was just him and his uncle for as long as he remembered, and he likes the idea of being able to focus more on his child. Thus, his perfect family size if you ask is simply one or two children. In his mind there’s something about having a son, perhaps a mirror to his own youth or someone to impart his lessons into in the sense that feels most traditional to his family dynamic, but the idea of having one of each makes him so happy- Frodo’s little girl would have him wrapped around her finger!

Sam

I know I said at one point Sam only wants like three but that’s because I didn’t realize he canonically has so many forgive me. We all know Sam loves the idea of having a big family! Canonically he’s even down to have thirteen children, but of course he is fine with a smaller number too. Just definitely more than one, at least three or four. Sam has so much love to give and he adores bringing life into the world and nurturing it more than anything. Every little one is their own unique person he loves to foster and dote on. He wants some of each of course, but just loves the idea of having little girls especially!

Merry

Really wants one of each. His family will feel like a full package that way and he wants every type of experience he can have, walking a daughter down to her wedding and letting her dress him up and playing games with his son. Teaching both of them how to stand up and fight for themselves, of course! Merry is so the type who wants a mini version of both him and his spouse if he can have it. Would make so many jokes about the little clones and just melt for the child who looks like his partner. Regardless of who she looks like, his little girl has his exact smile and you'll always catch them making it at each other before the next moment of teasing and mischief!

Pippin

Wants so many kids. Five to ten, no problem. Numbers aren’t his concern so long as he can be involved with each and every one of them. Just the type who wants his family to be a small army! Definitely wants to experience having sons and daughters, but statistically he’s going to anyway at his rate! So good at getting down to their level and having the greatest time with them, but also showering them with love and calming words and learning their needs by actually listening. Just Pippin and his little army of fellow neurodivergent sweethearts all with different passions and gifts and special interests.

Faramir

Willing to concede to his partner especially if that’s who actually bears the children. Faramir adores the idea of having a family, of doing everything differently than he experienced, of pouring true love and respect into a little soul doing their best, and that is where his happiness truly lies. A part of him likes the idea of having two sons as full atonement for his and Boromir’s difficult childhood, but even one would make him happy. He is so patient at explaining things to a young mind and his optimism comes out all the more when spending time with a little one- all the world’s beauty is that much brighter!

Eomer

Big family! More than a number he dreams of a boisterous, active home where no one is ever lonely. A warm hearth and the voices of children nearly ever-present. His heart swells as he imagines having one in each hand and plenty more all around him. Eomer, for whatever reason, has the number six in his head. Of course he wants sons, sons to train as fine riders and fighters, but his sister has proved to him that that future is not lost on Rohan’s maid either. He would be so much softer, gentler with his daughter(s), still showing her things like how to shoot an arrow or how he sharpens his blades but with greater care. Gathering everyone for story time is one of Eomer’s greatest delights.

Haldir

For much of his life, Haldir did not think about children, was uncertain that was a future he would even attain. Thus, as the time approaches for consideration he realizes he simply feels blessed by the prospect and is very willing to listen to his partner about their wishes. Granted, he does not wish to live beyond his means or in a way that he could not provide for all he needs to, but in general he is open. The beauty of Lothlórien grows with every new addition, every fair member of elfkind so he is happy with boy(s) or girl(s). He would teach his daughter(s) to walk with grace and uphold their ancient strength and remind his son(s) that honor and respect must center all their actions.

Eowyn

Traditional housewife ‘duties’ were never her desire. Thus, she does not want a large family, though the idea of raising a little life with her partner makes her happy. She only wants one child, maybe two so they can play together, and her family will feel complete. Any child(ren) of hers will surely be active, so she and her spouse will have their hands full with whoever! Strength is a matter of the heart, and Eowyn will raise a strong family no matter if they are male or female. She loves the idea of having a daughter or daughters to share her stories and triumphs with, though- future Shieldmaidens of Rohan!

Arwen

She wants to be able to focus on her family, so ideally not a huge one. Carrying on her legacy and having someone to care for with her partner, a living breathing proof of their love and commitment, is the most important part. She has never been too particular about if the child is a boy or a girl, just that she wants to be there for them and a calming, loving presence in their life as much as possible. So good at holding and reassuring them it’s like magic.

Elrond

Elrond is patient, steady, and he likes to take his time both with his children and between having them. He is happy with a smaller or average-sized family, two or three children. That way he can spend his time, care, wisdom, on them all and lavish Rivendell’s resources on them in different ways. Perhaps they are interested in the rich history, the weapons of old, the art, textiles, the sheer natural beauty of the location. Whatever it may be, he will offer it to them so long as they use it well and with respect. It appeals to him to have one of each, but we all know he would have a soft spot for his daughter!

Lindir

All I can picture is twin dad Lindir. Don’t ask me why, all I know is this man elf has his hands full with a baby on each side. Exasperated but lovingly shaking his head as the two identical little elves/half-elves try to convince him they are their sibling again! Or even having one of each on one fell swoop, teaching them both their favored instrument and singing with them! Lindir doesn't mind so much whether he is to have sons, daughters, each, so long as his children have the finest things in life and know that he shall always give them what he can.

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[nowandforalways]

Today I'm thinking about how playing Frodo Baggins is a thankless job in much the same way Frodo actually carrying the Ring was.

Like, when people talk about performances in LOTR adaptations, they talk about Sam, they talk about Gollum, they talk about Gandalf and Galadriel. All these characters that have iconic lines and big flashy moments of greatness or bravery or twistedness that let the actor show off. Frodo doesn't have any of those. What Frodo does have is the arguably harder job of making something external that is almost entirely internal, and, in most adaptations, having the most to do, just from a time-on-stage/screen/microphone perspective. But this never seems to get acknowledged and that's always kinda weird/interesting to me. I suppose people just respond to the big heroic/heartwarming/menacing moments, and not so much to littler moments of the same kinds. In the musical, in one of the dialogue breaks in "Now And For Always", Frodo says to Sam "It's not me they'll remember, you know". And that's funny because even if Sam tries to fight that in-universe with the finishing of The Red Book, it consistently ends up being true in a meta sense.

Anyway I suppose what I'm saying is appreciate Christopher Guard, Sir Ian Holm, Elijah Wood, James Loye, James Byng, Louis Maskell, and Spencer Davis Milford or die by my blade.

7/11/24: EDITED TO INCLUDE CHICAGO FRODO

[machinesonix]

Somehow I have made it this long without realizing that none of the screen adoptions of Dune so much as mention the Butlerian Jihad. Like I guess it's burned into my brain so hard I sort of assumed it was part and parcel of the universe. Don't get me wrong, I think that's probably the first thing you learn if you want to dive deeper into the setting, but it still hits me like if the LotR movies showed us the big flaming eyeball tower and was like ‘Oh, that's why there are bad things, but don't worry, that's just background stuff.’ Yeah, you can understand the movie, but if the story is just like Frodo vs. The Witch King you are losing out on any of the conversation about the corruptive allure of power or theological undertones. So without further ado let's pretend this is for the benefit of interested new fans roped in by the movies and not part of my desperate attempt to silence the howling specters of literary analysis that live in my blood.

The Butlerian Jihad is an event set ~10k years prior to the events of Dune in which humanity won their freedom from the machines that they had enslaved themselves to. As a result, it is a religious taboo to create a machine that thinks like a human. That's frankly the bulk of the information presented by Frank Herbert in the text without dipping into books 7+, but whether or not those are canon is frankly an enormous can of worms, which really makes sense when you consider the size of the worms. But boy howdy, Frank loved his subtext and parallelism. Everyone has a foil character, every theme is hit from multiple angles, and Villinueve has been doing an excellent job of capturing a lot of that in repeated imagery and dialogue. The Butlerian Jihad happens off camera, but it's themes are absolutely critical to the big picture.

The Butlerian Jihad was a holy war. It was not merely a rebellion against the machines, it was a crusade against them. The prohibition against thinking machines isn't just a law, it's in the pan-universal Bible. Absolute psychopath Pieter DeVries himself claps back at the Baron for insinuating he might have a use for a computer, and this is a guy who has been hired specifically for his preternatural absence of morals. Let's hold onto that idea for a minute. 

Probably my favorite scene in the first book is the one where planetologist Liet-Kynes is dying out in the desert. As the last of his strength fades to dehydration he hallucinates conversations he had with his father concerning terraforming Arakkis for human habitability. He's told that the means are not complicated. There is already enough water on the planet, the Little Makers just have it all trapped deep underground as part of the sandworm reproductive cycle. You just need to isolate enough water to start irrigating plant life, and once it's established that'll keep the water on the surface on its own. The hard part is making sure everyone on the planet is environmentally conscious enough to foster a developing ecosystem. Nobody can drink any of that water while it's being collected, because they'll just introduce it back into the water cycle where the Little Makers are. It's going to take generations, so that sort of water discipline is going to have to go above and beyond a social convention. People need to be willing to die before they'll take a sip and compromise the plan. Ghost Dad Kynes concludes that the only mechanism in the human experience to enforce this consensus is religion. 

In the context of this whole parallelism thing, you have probably noticed that the Butlerian Jihad is not the only holy war in the narrative. Paul sees a new jihad as the only way of creating a future where humans can flourish. Now you might be saying ‘Wait now, Machines. I thought the point of Paul’s holy war was to avenge Leto and disempower established power structures by taking away the control of the spice!’ And you’d be right. The thing is, without getting into spoiler territory, Dune Messiah is not going to be about how everything just gets so much better now that Paul has destroyed the economy, government, and untold billions of human lives. This isn’t the endgame. Dude can see the future and the way he does it involves looking into the past. Paul lives in a society defined by a holy war and his goal is to redefine society. 

Putting it all together you can see what I mean about the Butlerian Jihad being essential to the themes even though the story never shows us a thinking machine or a narrative beat where the absence of computers changes the outcome. It helps us see the big picture. I’ve seen a lot of dialogue lately on whether Paul is a tragic hero or a consummate villain and I’m not here to answer that, but I am here to underline the critical detail. Paul intends to be seen as a tyrant. Just like Kynes’ hallucination says, religion is the lever to make a value stick around forever. He wants to traumatize humanity to hate chosen ones and emperors the same way the machines traumatized humanity to change them forever. The Water of Life ritual doesn’t invert his values, it lets him realize these visions of war are the means, not the ends. He is absolutely not happy about it, but this is Paul’s terrible purpose. 

[elbiotipo]

Notes on a South Asian Tropical Cyrodiil (and more!)

So, many TES fans know that before Oblivion, Cyrodiil was supposed to be tropical. The most striking phrase to describe it, "most is endelss jungle", says it all. The quick and snarky explanation is that Todd Howard watched LOTR, was "inspired" by it, and that's why everything in Oblivion looks sort of like a Rennaisance Fair. In any case, I think it was a huge missed opportunity, especially in a world where most popular fantasy is European inspired, to have replaced what could have been very cool tropical enviroments with what is frankly a lame "Talos used his magic" lore retcon. You can read the 1st edition of the Pocket Guide to the Empire to see what we missed.

But it's not only Cyrodiil which we missed this way… Tamriel just makes more sense as a tropical continent. While the size and the exact location of the continent is discussed by nerdier nerds than me, I think it does make sense like this, and not only that, we have a very interesting world parallel to compare it to: India. From a tropical rainy south to the cold mountains of Skyrim, Tamriel is surprisingly similar to the Indian subcontinent, and many of its geographical quirks can be explained if, instead of assuming a temperate Cyrodiil, we go all out with that concept. This is going to be a long post, you have been warned.

So with that in mind, I'll try to make a not-so brief tour (with some evocative pictures along the way) of a rebuilt tropical Tamriel, following the rains of the moonson:

The position of Tamriel, in this case, would be roughly where the Indian subcontinent is located in real life, that is again, tropical, stretching the Tropic of Cancer (is there a name for the tropics of Nirn? Interesting to think about) Here, we see our numbers pan out well: Tamriel is mentioned to be between 4000 and 3000km across east to west and 2000 and 3000km south to north. VERY, VERY roughly, there is 4000km between Pakistan and Myanmar, and 3000km from Sri Lanka to the northern tip of Tibet. Plot that on a map, and you already can see some coincidences. Now, this is a rather average continent, not Pangea sized like some imagine Tamriel to be. This does help explain why, for example, the interior of Cyrodiil is rainy and good for agriculture instead of a desert. But it also means that it's very likely that Tamriel is ruled by monsoons. Monsoons are complex, but they basically form when there are plenty of warm places for water to evaporate (the South Indian ocean), and mountains that block cool winds from the opposite direction (the Himalayas). We have a very similar situation here, with a mountainous Skyrim on the north of a tropical Cyrodiil facing an equatorial southern ocean. So, what happens are monsoons, perhaps not as strong as IRL India, but carrying rains very deep into the continent. This would feed the rivers and the rich agricultural areas of Cyrodiil, and would have some other consequences.

So let's imagine our trip South to North. In the South, in Black Marsh, Blackwood and Lleyawiin, and Pellentine (southern Elsweyr) we would find, much like in the original lore, humid tropical climates, jungle, wetlands, and my favorite, mangrooves. I would expect mangrooves to stretch in this whole area, across rivers. In fact, one of the reasons why Black Marsh could be so hard to explore and control by the Empires at Cyrodiil would be the presence of thick mangrooves all over its coast. This is the region of Cyrodiil that would most resemble "endless jungle".

(Rice fields in India, what I imagine most of this Tropical Cyrodiil would look like)

However, as any lore person knows, Anequina, northern Elsweyr, is arid desert. Does this mean a contradiction? Far from it, we have a similar example in IRL India: the Deccan Plateau, which has a semi-arid to arid climate. This can be easily explained by higher elevations up to a small mountain chain separating it from Cyrodiil to the north, and the fact that little rain would reach behind this "Anequina Plateau" would make the region of Kvatch and Anvil more dry much like in canon, in this case, more scrublike. This highland desert would not be as harsh as Elsweyr is usually concieved, maybe, but its driest regions might justify places such as Dune. (On that matter, it always bothered me to read about the "cities" of southern Elsweyr and there being only two or three there. If I had to redesign it, I would move some from the north to the south).

(the Deccan Plateau in India, it gets greener or drier according to the monsoon)

Keeping on our tour of Tamriel, the Topal Bay and the very rainy Black Marsh funnels the rainy monsoon from the south towards central Cyrodiil. Here we find the endless jungle of the Nibenay Valley. But unlike the rainforests of Elsweyr and Black Marsh, these dense forests and rich river plains are mediated by the monsoon winds, with dry seasons alternating with copious rain. This has huge effects on agriculture and culture in general, as agriculture is defined by the rythms of the rain. Keeping with our South Asian theme and the 1st edition of the Guide to the Empire, Cyrodiil would have huge extensions of rice paddies, as well as terrace farming and much hardier crops in the highlands, instead of the… well, almost absent agriculture we saw in Oblivion. The food, clothing, architecture and overall culture of Cyrodiil would be very different with this. The original Pocket Guide said some of its main exports besides rice and fruit are moon sugar and silk. Moon sugar in Cyrodiil, can you believe it?

Another thing I imagine Cyrodiil would be famous for would be fish and seafood, well, river food. Rice plantations can host fishes and crustaceans to get some extra protein, and well, what about mudcrabs? Hell, as preparing muddy soil is vital for rice cultivation, no wonder mudcrabs are considered a nuisance. Imagining critters in gameplay in such an enviroment also makes my mind roam. Tigers, elephants, rhinoceros, and this is not even getting into the more mythical creatures you could find, instead of endless wolves… Rice cultivation is also more labor intensive than other crops, and it also has a deep impact on the terrain, "terraforming" so to say, huge expanses into paddies and terrace farms. This level of cultivation also requires an established infraestructure of irrigation. While this does not necessarily means a centralized goverment, as farmers can build it and maintain it by themselves, the rise of an empire, i.e., the Empire, will also increase the complexity of these systems, adding canals, dams, reservoirs and more ambitious projects, like we see in India and China. I am sure some people more knowledgeable about those cultures can comment more.

While this Cyrodiil is a tropical/subtropical region covered in "endless jungle", some parts might indeed resemble the rolling hills and grasslands you see in Oblivion. Deforesting jungle for pasture is something very common around the world (some have joked this mass deforestation was later in canon explained as a gift from Talos lol) and you can see the results, like in tropical Australia and my closer Mata Atlantica, do superficially resemble temperate pastures in say, Europe. Until you notice the palm trees, of course. But yes, I can see the Nords being a mostly herding people (more on that below) bringing their sheep and cows to the tropical lowlands and, well, deforesting to make space for them.

(ranches in Sao Paulo state, Brazil, notice the palm trees)

Imperial City just so happens to be built in an island in the middle of several river crossings, in what seems to be a swampland. The first thing that came to mind when I read that was Tenochtitlán. The districts of Imperial City would have been built over the centuries on artificial islands on a shallow lake, using plentiful mud and organic matter to make fertile chinampas. I believe this would make for a striking sight. Instead of just a city in the middle of a empty island, you would see the White-Gold tower and the rest of Imperial City rising from Lake Rumare, surrounded by rich farmland and its districts joined by walkways. (much like the old descriptions, actually, could you believe I wrote that without reading them?)

(Reconstruction of Tenochtitlán... and I just noticed, it's surrounded by (volcanic) mountains too, much like Imperial City)

Much like the Pantanal is one of the sources to the Paraguay River (which merges with the Paraná and then the Río de la Plata) IRL, here, the swamps of central Cyrodiil would be the source of the Niben. This does raise an interesting question, where is the source of the Niben? Is it Lake Rumare? No, I believe it would be several smaller rivers all the way from Bruma and even Skyrim. These small, violent mountain rivers eventually flow into the Rumare wetlands and only THEN in the placid great Niben. You DON'T want to be caught in one of the mountain valleys in rainy season. This does raise the question; won't the developments upriver, like Imperial City itself and the surrounding farmland, affect the course of the river downwards? There's plenty of water from the rain, but a more developed Cyrodiil might indeed have to grapple with this, supposing, for example, they manage to dam the river.

Looking west, we got the Colovian region, said to be composed of drier highlands and cliffs in the early Pocket Guide. Probably cut from the rain because of the Anequina Plateau, this is indeed more arid or "mediterranean", though I actually see it as more Australian. Maybe some of the drier parts near Hammerfell, resembling Argentine Cuyo and the northwest, would be a distant cry from the wetlands, having thorny dry forests and dry valleys, where yes, you could plant wine. The wetter cloud forests (much like the Yungas in South America, the place where the rain reaches last) could maybe be the home of the last pre-Imperial cultures of Cyrodiil. Fascinating places.

(Jujuy, Argentina. Just *near* are the Yungas cloud forests, where the last rains from the Atlantic meet the Andes, making for some AMAZING places)

Given that I mentioned enviroments near to/on the Andes IRL, let's talk about potatoes. Potatoes are unique crops, because they are the only ones who offer such calories and also be planted in cold enviroments like Europe. Or Skyrim. The discovery and spread of potatoes would cause demographic shifts on people living in cold areas. And they also originated in a unique enivorment IRL: the Andes, actually with possible hybridization from the Magallenic foresWHAT I MEAN, is that potatoes are very important and have been domesticated in very specific conditions. The Wroghtgarian Mountains would seem like a perfect equivalent of the Andes at the first glance, but they would be very different. The Andes, located between the Pacific Ocean and the greater Amazonian region, are very, very unique enviroments. These mountains, however, are in between inner seas. Something like the Atlas or the Alps? In any case, if there is some people who would appreciate hardy tubers that can grow in mountainous places, they are for sure the Orcs, or perhaps the Reachmen. Maybe an hybridization even between them?

This returns me back to Bruma and Skyrim. Some people (who make those excellent Oblivion mods) imagine Bruma with a Tibetan flavor. Personally, I imagine it more like Pakistan or Afghanistan, with lots of mesas and plateaus and valleys. It would look dry and rocky with some very fertile valleys by snowmelt, but it would look like a snowy wonderland on winter, indeed, Pakistan and Afghanistan are very snowy. Eventually, of course, ending up in the great barrier of the Jerall mountains and finally, Skyrim.

(the Alps? Skyrim? No, this is Kashmir on winter!)

In this scenario, Skyrim would be a quite dry place… or would it? There is no need for the Jeralls to be a straight line of peaks like the Himalayas. They could be a more "broken" series of mountains, like the southern Andes, but in any case, the rain from the south would clash into the higher mountains. Indeed, that is what actually happens in the Himalayas, the foothills of the Himalayas are some of the rainest places IN THE WORLD. These small valleys are something very unique and not very well known part of the world IRL. I can imagine the Skyrim equivalent would be as unique too, hard to navigate and live in. The forests of the Rift and Falkreath would be mazes of windy forests valleys, each with their own unique secrets under a perpetual fog and drizzle. This is a very interesting enviroment to imagine, where again, some of the older cultures of Tamriel could still live.

(forests of Bhutan, note how the humid valleys stretch into the distance before the cold Himalayas begin)

However, what does Skyrim look like once you cross the border with Ralof? I imagine some sort of more fertile Tibet, not as high as the Tibetan plateau, allowing for forest and alpine tundra. This is mostly because, while Skyrim is high up, I don't imagine as a plateau, but rather a series of broken mountains like the North American Rockies, which makes sense when you account for all the volcanic activity (there is another super-volcano down in Skyrim but nobody notices). I imagine that Skyrim would be a primarily herding pastoral land before the introduction of hardier crops such as potatoes, and even then. Nord culture would be very interesting reimagined like this; hillforts guarding herds of sheep and cows. It would also create a clash between the very, very agrarian south and the nomadic herding north, with High Rock and Hammerfell a gradient between the two.

But here we enter a problem; if we are operating on a level where Cyrodiil is roughly at the same latitude of India, wouldn't that make Skyrim too far from the poles to allow its tundra like climate, even with elevation? No doubt. Tibet is only as cold as it is because it's the roof of the world and far from any ocean. The northernmost tip Skyrim, like Tibet, would be at the latitude of Turkey, Korea or California, which can get quite cold, but not to the level of what we see on Winterhold or Dawnstar (Solitude sounds familiar, though). What's more, having an ocean up north would only moderate the temperature. Cool currents often don't bring cold per-se, just decrease rainfall. This would end with a very temperate and pleasant Skyrim instead of tundra. Which is on its own, interesting to explore.

Could Nirn be going through an ice age, like it's implied with the dissapearance of Atmora? Possibly, but it would imply revising everything I said before, as ice ages decrease rainfall and mess up with weather patterns all over the world. A colder Nirn would explain a lot, though.

I decide I will stop here, I haven't even touched Valenwood (though its subtropical forest seems rather coherent to me), High Rock (the most boring part of Tamriel IMO), Hammerfell, Summerset Islands (if you don't have tropical elves in your setting, you're a coward), or whatever the hell is going on Morrowind. But I hope you enjoyed this worldbuilding exercise and how to make sense of Tamriel's crazy geography. Next time, I'll try to play with tectonics and see if we can make it even more interesting.

If you liked what you read and would like more worldbuilding, consider tipping me on Ko-Fi and send me stuff to talk about, or just send an ask! I'm the kind of guy who reads encyclopedias and RPG manuals for fun, so I have plenty to talk about about everything from fantasy to science fiction to speculative evolution and alternate history!

[neyafromfrance95]

as much as i want galadriel to stay with sauron, willingly or unwillingly, i do have reasons to believe that they won't go there, after all. let's talk about it so that we don't come out of s2 finale too bitter.

other than them saying that sau/gal dynamic is going to be central throughout all seasons, what gives me hope is that they have said sauron "groping" for galadriel was an inspiration for s/g relationship in the show (and i think of the story itself). it means that the creators are aware of the same thing we know - in order for trop to make sense in regards to lotr, sauron has to still covet galadriel at the end of s5, and galadriel still has to struggle with his temptations. so their push and pull has to continue till the end.

now, i think unlike the lorebros, the show isn't in a hurry to introduce celeborn (and if he is introduced, he is gonna be like molly from hannibal, lol) and a lot of timelines are going to change for convenience so that 8ep format is more or less neat for the gen audiences. i think this is an opportunity for them to re-establish the mind-palace. still not sure if they are intending to, but how else is sau going to grope to see gal's mind if they aren't in a close proximity? and also, how else is galadriel going to struggle with the darkness (bc again, even without succumbing, it wouldn't make sense narratively for her struggle to end yet)? how else is she going to become a powerful elf-witch and what of the dark!galadriel from the 3rd age? even more importantly, while she isn't even close to admitting to her greatest desires rn, she does in the 3rd age. so we need this development.

ofc sauron "stealing" galadriel like morgoth stole silmarils would create a perfect parallel, and give the writers an opportunity to explore a very interesting circumstance, to actually bring galadriel as close to the darkness as possible without making her fall into it. but i doubt the execs would allow that to unfold so literally. the star wars and marvel formula is still policing our mainstream media, after all.

doesn't mean that the finale is going to be bad for us shippers. it might be confirmed more clearly (for those who need it) that sauron indeed loves galadriel, and that galadriel has feelings for him too. i personally love the whole one-sided pursuit of marriage + one-sided hunt for slaying slow burn of an unresolved tension, it's the most lover/enemies dynamic of them all, after all! makes haladriel into a fantasy au hannigram, haha.

[myfairkatiecat]

LOTR Musical Chicago Experience (according to Katie)

I GOT TO SEE THE LORD OF THE RINGS MUSICAL IN CHICAGO! As promised, here’s a blog post detailing my experience, my opinions on the characters/plot portrayal, and basically everything else I’m still rotating in my brain after seeing it last night.

Audience Member Experience

After coming in off Navy Pier and into the theater (Navy Pier was cool too but that’s not why we were there), I started seeing Lord of the Rings fans. Some people even came in costume, which was fun. As we got closer to the beginning of the show, it got harder to tell cosplayers apart from actual actors cause… the actors were just there. Walking around, greeting the people, saying hello…

The show began at seven. At about 2 minutes til 7:00, they really began interacting. Our seats were on the main floor near the center, and Bilbo Baggins came out right in front of us, asking some of the people, “Who’s here for my birthday party?” we all responded enthusiastically, and then he shouted so the whole theater could hear, “WHO’S HERE FOR MY BIRTHDAY PARTY??” Then the entire theater sang the happy birthday song to Bilbo Baggins and applauded, but that wasn’t even the beginning of the show. Hobbits were walking around playing games with the audience. I heard Frodo introduce himself to some people behind us. Rosie was carrying around what I believe was a ring toss game.

At about four minutes after 7:00, the main character hobbits began to make their way from the audience and onto the stage, while ensemble members stayed throughout the audience to create the sense of really being there with them in the Shire. The Hobbits greeted each other, gave each other hugs, and everyone started playing instruments to indicate the beginning of the show.

I wouldn’t realize it until house lights finally went off, but they were still on through the whole first number! The actors looked like they were having a fantastic time. The prologue song was a rendition of the “Now and for Always” chorus sung by the hobbits, and then Bilbo said his iconic lines at his birthday party and ended up disappearing in a puff of smoke. When Bilbo said he was bequeathing everything to Frodo, this one actor far back in the audience started grumbling and telling everyone around him that was stupid, and I’m officially dubbing that guy Unidentified Sackville-Baggins Character.

After they began to tell the actual tale and Frodo’s journey began, the house lights finally turned off, and it was like, “oh, we were hanging out with hobbits in the Shire, and NOW we’re watching Frodo’s story after he leaves,” almost like we, the audience, were in the Shire the entire time.

The characters onstage played all of the music. I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel about that when I first heard about it at the watermill, but now having seen the show performed that way, it was AWESOME. It made everything feel very homey, like a story being told around a campfire, even though the effects for the epic parts were FANTASTIC (I’ll talk about that in a later part of the post).

The characters often showed the nature of their journey by trekking through the pathways in the audience. Act two began suddenly the the house lights going all the way off as Gollum suddenly appeared up in the audience, scurrying down and murmuring in the Gollum voice. (Sméagol’s actor was amazing, by the way. Amazing portrayal. 10/10.)

The audience interaction really made it feel like you were in the story, and it was absolutely so much fun. I could tell the actors agreed.

Casting and Character Portrayal

This is the casting we saw:

With the following cast update:

As you can see, Sam’s understudy played Legolas in the show I saw. He did a fantastic job. He kinda looked like a Sam to me? But that’s probably just because I saw that in the program. His acting was phenomenal and I could tell he was having a great time with the role (especially singing Lothlorien, which, of course. Singing that song is so much fun.)

The rivalry to friendship of Legolas and Gimli was portrayed fantastically. Both characterizations were spot-on and their catfighting from the very establishment of the Fellowship was very entertaining. While a lot of the show was understandably abridged from the original plot, leaving less room for a full development of the relationship, but their journey to understanding each other as friends was beautiful nonetheless, and one of the main things that stood out to me as far as the well-portrayed character development in the show.

Sam and Frodo were phenomenal. The portrayal of their relationship, the good parts and the bad parts, Frodo’s descent as the Ring affects him more and more paired with Sam’s unwavering loyalty—that was one of the things done best about the show. Sam embodied the role, and when he grunted in determination as he picked up Frodo to carry him over his shoulders, the entire audience burst into applause. It was such a wholesome moment because of how well their relationship was done.

Arwen and Aragorn’s romance was done about as well as I could have hoped for given the length of the show and how much of the rest of the plot was going on. It was sweet and given many moments, but there wasn’t tons of development there. However, it touched on the parts that were most important to the plot, and I definitely enjoyed them.

Merry and Pippin were chaotic and played amazingly. Nothing more to say there. Just. Fabulous. 🙃

Boromir!! They did my guy Boromir justice, from his initial hesitance, to the true development of why he sees the Ring as a possibility for good, to the unwavering way he cares for his people and their wellbeing, to the way his honor remained even in his worst moment… it was really good. His death scene made me cry. Aragorn holding Boromir as he died 😭 I don’t even remember their exact dialogue but I was like wow you might as well just kill me now 😢 I went from giggling at “GIVE ME THE RING wait no I didn’t mean it I’m sorry stay with me—“ (yes that was the exact wording he used) to absolutely sobbing over his death. YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO DO THAT TO ME (they did it was in the books)

Galadriel… :/ okay so the actress was very talented. Like, insanely good. I just would have done Galadriel’s character differently, and I think she was done differently in other productions of this show. She was a powerhouse for sure, but her scrunched expressions on long notes and moments of growling and the way she walked were giving “sassy girlboss” which was fine but not really what I was expecting for her character. So… do with that what you will.

Arwen’s character was portrayed amazingly. She usually only showed up to be in love with Aragorn, which was unfortunate, but the way she was done by the actress was an absolute 10/10. She was so graceful and tender and strong-willed and beautiful and just. Arwen vibes.

I don’t even have anything to say about Sméagol/Gollum. Just… perfect. Amazing. I can’t even describe how well he did the character. Imagine Sméagol in your head and that’s him. The script also did justice to his internal conflict, which I appreciated so much!

Effects

They gave a strobe lights warning but they did NOT tell me they were going to be flashing lights right at my eyes 😭 if you’re sensitive to lights at all, just don’t go to see it. Take care of yourself.

That said, if you can handle it, it was AWESOME. During the “you shall not pass” scene, they had a black tarp waving near the ground with projections of fire on it. It created a seriously awesome lava effect. They were also flashing white lights directly into the audience during the whole thing, which I think was purposefully disorienting while Gandalf ended up disappearing.

The Shelob scene featured an ACTUAL GIANT SPIDER ONSTAGE. I mean not a live spider, it was a puppet I guess? I have no idea how they did it. But it took up the entire stage and it was terrifying. People with arachnophobia DO NOT LOOK.

The effects were genuinely awesome the entire show. I can’t do them justice with description, but the use of their set pieces and lights and fog genuinely made for a great stage fantasy experience.

Other Stuff

The show began right before 7:00 with the interaction as I mentioned before, and bows ended at 10:15. So the actual show was 3 hours, with a fifteen minute intermission.

The adaptation of the plot was very abridged, as I may have mentioned, because of entire the run time being the length of one LOTR movie (which is already a slightly abridged LOTR adaptation). Minor plot points/middle sized plot points were diminished in favor of major plot points and character development, which I think was appropriate for the medium. You could tell where the time skips were, of course—Frodo puts on the ring in the prancing pony and suddenly he’s been stabbed by the witchking and is recovering in Rivendell. And a lot of the plot of Return of the King that didn’t involve Sam and Frodo just vanished. But again, I wasn’t expecting a fully faithful adaptation of every plot point in three hours, and I truly believe the spirit of the Lord of the Rings was captured in this production.

Some of the best and most famous quotes were done basically word for word, which I really appreciated. I did feel like I was immersed in the world of Tolkien’s books, with a dash of the Peter Jackson movies and lots of really well composed music.

If you have any specific questions about my experience at the show, certain scenes or songs, etc, send me an ask or a DM because I could absolutely continue to talk about this show. I’m in love with it and I’m so lucky that I got to see it. If any of you get the chance, I highly recommend it!

[dailyadventureprompts]

So I was joking around on this post about the lack of alignment in Baldur's gate when a shiver ran down my spine. My badtake senses were tingling, and lo and behold there was this waiting for me in my notifications:

Now this is fascinating because this user obviously has an axe to grind: We were specifically talking about a notoriously clunky and contentious ruleset in d&d that no one really likes, not even the current developers, and this person decided to go off like I was the architect of the modern godless age.

Checking their blog shows we're dealing with someone with some baggage, as what appears to at first be your bog-standard cocktail of conservative cottage-core and LOTR memes gives way to Jordan Peterson clips, antichoice rhetoric, and more than a few posts that veer into Q-Anon nonsense.

What leaks through most however (especially if you're like me and spend a lot of time examining the whys of ideological brainrot) is that despite how much this person wants a peaceful life in the country what they REALLY want is to die for a righteous cause: Their blog name is a biblical reference to mass death and the punishment of the wicked, they're WEIRDLY invested in the final charge of the Rohirrim, and simmering below the pretty pictures of forests and mountains and animals and guns is the sense that the world is an evil place and the only thing that's going to fix it is a cleansing wave of violence.

Normally I wouldn't go so in depth like this but I thought since we were talking about morality systems and where they might lead us it'd be a good idea to get a read on where this criticism is coming from.

Now onto my rebuttal: My desire to see the alignment chart left behind along with other clunky rpg systems like Thac0 has no bearing on my real life stance on morality. You shouldn't NEED a fantasy rolplaying game to tell you that you're objectively good in order to soothe your IRL moral anxieties and you going off like this when I suggested changing something tells me that this is a bit of a safety blanket for you.

The fact that you can't tell the difference between a story with no moral compass and one that allows for diverse opinions on what could be considered "moral" tells me that you're terrified of doing the wrong thing and that makes you easily exploited by people who cloak themselves in righteous authority and call you a good boy for wasting your life in their service. I was like that too once but let me tell you it's far better to question who decides what rightness is than to follow it blindly.

Lastly, on the topic of morality codes in rpgs, I'm not against characters or the stories they're in having morals, I just think it's silly for there to be only nine codified (though extremely contradictory) options for how those morals can be expressed. Why hold onto a system that's too flawed to be useful ?

[conundrumoftime]

It’s late o’clock and i can’t sleep so have some thoughts about this:

As the element of this which is about offering her power: For Sauron this makes absolute sense as a vision of what offering someone power looks like, because of course there’d be two of them. He’s created to serve a more powerful being and to sing as one voice in a choir of creation, he’s not meant to be on his own, he’s not good at it, he doesn’t like it. TROP shows him repeatedly trying to carry out his vision by finding someone else to do it with and then getting angry and breaking things and people when that partnership doesn’t work. He’s going to end up ruling alone only by splitting himself into two and putting part of himself into a magic ring.

But Galadriel’s temptation to rule is not like that. And I don’t think the show does as much of this as it might have done (which, creative choice & demands of TV storytelling, i’m fine with the story they did tell). Galadriel spent much of the First and Second Age wanting to rule, went to Middle-earth for lands of her own without the Valar overseeing, didn’t want to return because “here I am mightier.” And by LOTR she’s co-ruling with her husband and they’re Lord and Lady not King and Queen, but once Frodo offers her the ring she makes it very clear what will happen if she accepts: “In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen.” No ‘Lady’ here, no co-ruling, no whatever kind of peaceful rule she currently has in Lothlórien: “all shall love me and despair.”

I have seen much discussion in the past two years about how much power Sauron would really have let her have if she’d accepted his offer, because at the end of the day he’s Sauron and we know what he’s like - and that’s all fine, I have no issues with that at all, but right now I am a lot more interested in the way she might have gone.

[frodo-with-glasses]

Dreams in the House of Tom Bombadil (and the Four Elements of Trauma)

Now that we've gotten to the point where the hobbits spend the night in Tom Bombadil's house, I'd like to expand on this bullet point from my chapter review:

Much apologies to my girlies on the server who headcanon the hobbits with phobias corresponding to the four elements; sadly, Tolkien is not on the same page as us this time.

For context, I present to you these screenshots of messages sent on the Fig Tree Discord Server back in January:

This started as a half-joke, but it's since evolved into something of a shared headcanon for some of us. Pippin has a Thing about fire, because of the Pyre of Denethor. Frodo has a Thing about water, because his parents drowned. Bri has since told me that she headcanons Merry has a Thing about air, specifically cold air, after his encounters with the Black Breath. And that leaves Earth to Sam.

The good news is that this is a really fun headcanon; and when you look at LotR through this lens, it's actually kind of staggering how well it fits with the events of the book.

The bad news is that Tolkien did not write LotR with this idea in mind; and the whole thing with Old Man Willow, and the subsequent nightmares that the hobbits have in Tom Bombadil's house, make that abundantly clear.

After all, what does Old Man Willow do to Frodo? Lulls him to sleep and then tips him face-first into the water. He almost drowns. He almost drowns. Sam finds him face-down in the water, unconscious, held down by a root and not struggling; there's water in his nose and his mouth and his eyes and ears and he can't breathe, he can't breathe, he nearly goes out the same way his parents did, in a river that connects to the one where they died. If Tolkien was writing Frodo with hydrophobia, this probably would've gotten a bit more attention than it did. But no; in Tom's house, Frodo dreams of Gandalf and Black Riders, because he's the protagonist and Tolkien needed an efficient way to foreshadow things a bit.

What does Old Man Willow do to Merry? Closes its roots over him, so that only his legs are sticking out; and when Frodo and Sam set fire to the tree, Merry screams, and begs them to put it out. "He'll squeeze me in two, if you don't. He says so!" He could feel the roots of the tree clamping like a vice under his ribs, squeezing, crushing, bruising; he could hear the voice of the tree in his head, demanding he communicate the ransom message. And as our beloved former anon, Meg, pointed out: Could he breathe in there? Was it dry and stuffy and stifling inside the tree? How much air could he even draw in, when his lungs were being crushed and had no space to expand? He screams with what little breath he has left, but can they hear him? He's going to die. He can't breathe. He's going to die.

But, ironically, he's the one who dreams about nearly drowning, and his dream-brain convinces him he's lying in a "soft slimy bog" before he wakes up and finds himself in Tom's house again. He's not the one who got tipped into the water, but go off Tolkien I guess.

What does Old Man Willow do to Pippin? Closes its roots over him completely, with a click like a lock snapping into place; and when Frodo and Sam set fire to the bark, and Old Man Willow gets angry, they can hear Pippin's "muffled yell" from deep inside the tree. Fire. Smoke and ash and anger. Could Pippin smell the burning wood around him? Could he feel any heat or sting? Did he hear Old Man Willow's voice, the same way Merry did, cursing the flames and threatening to smother him if it wasn't put out?

His nightmare, out of the three of them, is the only one that makes sense to me; he dreams that he is again inside the willow, hearing the wood creak as it sways in the breeze over him, and hearing the voice of the tree laughing at him again. But, sadly, no mention of fire.

All of that to say, if I wrote Lord of the Rings—which I realize is a terribly presumptuous thing to say given that I am, unlike Tolkien, Not A Genius, but hear me out—I definitely would have Frodo's nightmare be about drowning, Merry's be about suffocation, and Pippin's be about burning alive. This would then be foreshadowing for the later horrific stuff they're going to encounter concerning water, air, and fire respectively.

I dunno. It just seems like a missed opportunity is all. Which is probably why, despite how much I adore the “nightmares revealing inner turmoil and then characters waking up in safety and comfort” trope, I never really liked this sequence in the book all that much.

Sam, meanwhile, is welcome to continue sleeping “in deep content, if logs are contented". Good for him. 10/10, no notes.

[jadehaven]

A summary of the thoughts as I slowly realized that #Elrondriel would indeed become a thing in the show:

(for context, ROP was my first introduction to LOTR, so this was my perspective as a viewer with no concept of the lore)

Season 1:

Who is this guy? Is he her friend? More? Oh she touched his face, maybe it’s like, unrequited? Am confused.

Is this how elves flirt? What’s the history here? Oh well, she’s leaving anyway.

*Enter Halbrand* HOT DIGGITY DAWG now THATS what I call a love interest 😏😏😏

*Eating up all the enemies to lovers tropes and swooning over Halbrand*

*Elrond and Galadriel scenes* Me: Nah get this nice guy OUTTA HERE where is HOT HALBRAND? (future me is aghast that I would overlook the literal loml Elrond, Gal and I are the same ig)

Halbrand: *Is Sauron* Me: What!?? Nooo! No no no no no this can’t be happening oh noooo

*Elrond saves Galadriel*

Me: Wait

*Forehead touch, tears, deep breaths*

Me: Waaaiiittt

*Gasps* Omg. Of course, he loves her!! They’re going to fall in love! It’s perfect contrast to the enemies to lovers story— a *slow burn, best friends, it’s always been you* kind of love? Right? RIGHT!? That makes so much sense! I’m 1000% calling it for Season 2.

*Sometime between season 1 and season 2, discovers the heartbreaking truth* LOL what?? She’s his WHAT??! 😭😭😭

*Still holding out hope, clutching my suspicions like they’re my grandmas pearls*

Season 2:

Holy sheet he’s mad. Ofc he’s mad. But he’s her best friend :c?? Pls don’t make me sad like this, you’re supposed to love each other!

“You were my friend!!” Mhm yknow they tend to use this word a lot

That’s… that’s a lot of hand holding there…

omg she put her hand on his CHEST OMGSJHDHFBF

“It was entirely of your choosing, the lost king blah blah” Ok but this is literally him saying he knows her type?

Hollldd up, I see what’s happening. Tension. There’s negative tension. I’ll bet if they stick to the trope, there’ll be a *moment* between them at the end that breaks the tension. There has to be.

*Galadriel gets caught by the Barrow-Wights* Wait for it babe, Elronds going to rescue her oh— yep, there he is. Saving her again. Because he’s the love interest.

“Promise you will put defeating Sauron over saving my life” Pfft hahaha miss Galady, our boy has it bad, there’s no way he’ll stay true to that promise. (For real though this sentence just showed us what the most important thing in the world is to him, it’s her y’all)

*Galadriel gets captured and brought out to the battle field* Ooooh yup. Look at his FACE when he sees her, the slow mo and everything wow. That’s his whole life right there. He can’t sacrifice her, he can’t do it.

Dang he’s gonna do it???

“Let me bid her farewell” Omg please kiss her goodbye haha but no they wouldn—

0/////o!!???

O/////O!!!!!!!

I CALLED IT I FKING CALLED IT ARE YOU KIDDING ME I AM SCREAMING

THIS IS THE MOMENT THAT BROKE THE TENSION.

Everyone online: iT wASNt RoManTIC

😐

Sigh. Of course it “wasn’t romantic”. THATS THE WHOLE POINT. That’s how this whole “forced to kiss” trope works. They don’t have feelings for each other yet, that they’re aware of anyway. It’s supposed to be an awakening. This is only the beginning.

*Continues to get gaslit by everyone and their mother including the actors and writers themselves*

Ok ok fine. Maybe I’m delusional about the whole thing. But every scene so far has been classic romantic arc set up. If they have a scene next episode where Elrond saves Galadriel again and maybe like, puts the ring on her finger all proposal style, then I’ll know. That would seal it for me.

*Episode 8*

*Speechless*

LITERALLY SPEECHLESS.

That’s it yall. If you didn’t pick up on that, then I’ll see you next season for all the slow burn tropes. I can see them already. LFG. #Elrondriel for life.

[anghraine]

this is entirely unprompted on your end, but i love your darcy and faramir takes and wanted to get your opinion on aragorn/faramir as a ship.

i'm salivating over it and nobody. cares. but i just love how it can show the possibilities of book faramir being a "threat" to aragorn's kingship in a way that nobody else is...how they can relate through their shared ancestry but the entirely different ways it impacted them in their respective lives - something about aragorn being the heir of isildur, growing up surrounded by elves, arnor. something about faramir being distinctly aware of the legacy of the stewards, his numenorean heritage and how it's fading away in the world of men, gondor (my fav world in lotr, you are so under-appreciated, gondor.) i personally adhere to the stewards-were-most-likely-also-royalty headcanon because of that extra juicy tension. throw in the i-knew-your-father-as-a-young-man aspect, the whole steward-quite-literally-serving-in-wait-of-the-true-king aspect? it's everything.

i dunno. the natural cause and effect of "return of the king" & "departure of the steward" is so interesting to play with in a romantic context, especially if it keeps both of them in the limelight when naturally, it should only be one of them? i think it's the aragorn ship that pushes his character and ambition the most, and in the same way, it can push faramir to show more machiavellian traits, more of him utilizing his political power and/or personal strengths. especially since his canonical fate is extremely satisfying but also...very conclusively an *ending* if that makes sense.

i might just want to see faramir clashing with aragorn wanting to wage more war. let him cook! let the man speak about "queen among other queens: not a mistress of many slaves"!!!!

also must admit that it's my contrarian ass wanting to rebel against the fanon "aragorn never ever wanted to be king" + "faramir is a pathetic meow meow" headcanons. the existing faramir x aragorn fics i've read all adhere to it which is frustrating.

anyways, any thoughts on this ship i randomly latched on to?

Anon, this is my #1 Tolkien ship and actually one of the only m/m ships I've ever been super into. I used to guiltily sneak-read Aragorn/Faramir as a teenager because I grew up in a conservative community and hadn't come to terms with my own queerness at the time, and was still figuring out how to get by in that community just as a Democrat, much less a lesbian.

Anyway, I got a huge kick out of your ask because it's basically point-for-point my own feelings about them. If you haven't seen it, I even wrote a ship manifesto for them over ten years ago.

And unfortunately I do also agree that the (very PJ film-inflected) fanons around both characters have made it very difficult to find fic for the ship that isn't deeply OOC for the original versions of the characters (tbh the last time I looked, it was hard enough to even find F/A fics where Faramir had black hair, much less his deeper canon characteristics). Add in the fanon depictions of Gondor and the Stewardship, and a lot of what appeals about the pairing is lost for me. I read some good ones a longggg time ago, but wouldn't begin to know where to find them now.

(I know I should be the change I want to see and write some myself, but apart from the AU f/f and m/f/f versions, I think the closest I ever came to it was this post about a mostly-the-same-as-LOTR AU only with Faramir/Aragorn and this feeling explosion about "Faramir actually does accepts the dream-visions obviously intending him to be the one going to Rivendell but also it's Faramir/Aragorn.")

And if you haven't found it yet, my ship tag is #otp: love was kindled.

I hope you enjoy <3

[shirefantasies]

Hiii!!! I love your works so so much, you're truly amazing!! I would like to make a request if that's fine with you. I would like to request Thorin's company with a reader that is afraid of heights. You don't have to do it if you don't want to, it was just a stupid idea that crossed my mind. If you do decide to do it, take as much time as you want and thank you so so much!! Again love your works, your way of writing and the way you portray the characters!!

Thanks pal 🥰 for your kind words and for being one of the longest-standing members of this blog's taglist! It's funny because someone else sent this in for LoTR a while back so it is not at all stupid, quite a common ask~

Warnings: canon typical peril, suggestive jokes in one

Thorin's Company + Your Fear of Heights

Balin

“Look at the river,” Balin encourages, taking your arm, “a fair chance we are not to see it like this again, after all!” You hesitantly hum at his side, and that is when he looks over to see your tightly shut eyes and stiff posture, your hands firm and flat against the great eagle’s soft, downy feathers. “We’re safe now,” he tells you quietly, scooting into your side. The warmth of his coat brings some comfort, but not enough for you to open your eyes, even if they shine red beneath your crushing lids. “This does not feel safe,” you reply, your voice barely exceeding a whisper. Balin does not fight, does not argue, presumably continues enjoying whatever view you did not doubt was beautiful. You simply cannot appreciate it. “I understand,” he replies, running a soothing hand up and down your back, “and I’m here. I’ll hold you down.”

Dwalin

“I bet you’ve never been afraid a day in your life.” Those were the words that set the conversation- or challenge, more like- flying between you and Dwalin, both of you huddled near the smoldering remains of your earlier fire on watch of camp. Hazes of fatigue descended upon both of your heads as you spoke, your musing bringing quite a surprise to Dwalin, who immediately sat up straighter and fixed you with surprise. “Are you mocking me?” “No,” you shrugged, shaking your head, “I simply could not imagine what that would be. It is quite difficult to picture you afraid.” It was your turn to be surprised as Dwalin’s expression softened far beyond what you were used to. “Even the greatest of warriors have them. I, then, am far from an exception.” “What is it, then?” “Pardon.” “Your fear,” you lit up, “is it the ocean? Dogs? Speaking to a crowd?” “Why are you selecting such ridiculous-” “You’re dodging,” you teased, “Thought you might be embarrassed.” “I’m not,” he crossed his arms, “Tell me yours and I shall share mine.” “Fine,” you replied with a shrug, “I am terrified of heights. Fell off a roof as a little one. …long story.” “That… makes a lot of sense.” “Hey, now what is that supposed to mean?”

Thorin

In all honesty, you’d expected the king to have no patience for such matters. You had avoided mentioning your phobia to any of the company for that exact reason, in fact. No more reason given for Thorin to see you as a liability, an outsider. At least until the booms of thunder, the slick of rain and your cold sweat alike as you slid along cliffs, eyes closed and then squeezed so shut your skin warmed and almost burned. Great stone giants you stood upon, legs rising and sending you swinging out wildly, unable to stifle your scream. As the giant slowed, having been struck by a massive rock, you were righted again, and feeling a hand tighten about your shoulder you turned around, expecting to see fatherly Gloin or Balin and instead almost starting at the sight of Thorin there behind you. “I can tell you fear the precipice. Stay here and no harm will come to you.” Your lips parted wordlessly, unable to form a sound beneath the thrum of blood in your ears, the heat creeping to your face, the echo of shattering stone still reverberating through your whole body. As if he heard you regardless, Thorin added, “I promise.”

Oin

“You’re sweating. Do you have a fever?” “No, Oin, I’m fine,” you replied, shaking your head. “Are you certain? For I’ve got quite the concoction- two in fact! One you put on and one you put in. Yourself, that is. You drink it, you see.” “I gathered.” You mustered a smile, but it was halfhearted and, judging by Oin’s expression, obviously so. “No need to be proud. Come on. I’m the one who can help you. And trust me, I’ve seen it all!” Oin was right. A fear of heights was far less embarrassing than all the accidents you imagined dwarves got into. Bofur alone had plenty such stories. “To be honest, it simply is this climb,” you nodded to the foot of the mountain, the great steps you’d heard so much about- and stars, they were nothing like the steps in your old home! “Afraid of heights?” You nodded in reply and the healer’s bearded face burst open in sympathy. “Well, that’s more than understandable! Seen plenty of- Ahem,” he cleared his throat, “Well, that is to say you’re not alone. I’ll let you in on a little secret- from what I hear, it took Kili years before he’d even get on a ladder! ‘N he’s a prince! You’ve nothing to worry about. I can give you something to calm you down as we speak, and beside that I can stay by you every step of the way. How’s that?” “That’ll be great,” you smile, “Thank you, Oin.”

Gloin

“What d’you think you’re doing? …Rotation my arse, send someone else if you’d like to avoid discussing this with the business end of my axe!” What was going on? Emerging from the brush, you followed the sound of Gloin’s voice, the volume of which had steadily been increasing, to see him glaring with all intents of intimidation at Dwalin of all people. As much as you knew you should step in and resolve any tension, you couldn’t deny your amusement. Kindling in arm, you shook your head fondly at the scene before you. Ever since he found out you were afraid of heights, rather than mock you as you’d half expected the dwarves to Gloin had made it his personal mission to swoop in and lobby for you whenever the opportunity availed itself. Such as climbing trees for watch. Muttering, Dwalin walked away with a shrug and a roll of his eyes, and you took your own opportunity to set the kindling down and sneak up behind Gloin to pull him into a hug.

Bifur

Snapping jaws narrowly missed the edges of your legs. Wargs ran to the feet of the trees, standing against the trunks and trying in vain to pull you down. They were coming closer than they should have, though, one even catching a dangling strap from your boot and tearing the buckle on it clean off. Jumping at a tap on your shoulder, you swiveled your head and peered up, admittedly a bit relieved to forget you were above ground, even if it was not by much. Bifur had gotten your attention and was urgently circling his hand, encouraging you to go further up to his branch. You shook your head. “I am fi-” SNAP! The moment you attempted to defend yourself was the moment the branch at your side was ripped off, scrabbling claws following its descent. Another tap to your shoulder, this time with the hand groping down to find yours and pry its fingers from their death grip on your branch. “What are you doing?” You hissed, panicking at your loosening grip, but your complaint was quieted when Bifur yanked you up against his chest and held you there fast. He muttered something in Khuzdul and while you weren’t certain what, his tone alone soothed you a bit more, keeping you in place there with your rapid heartbeat against his.

Bofur

“What’s the matter, no foothold? These hills can be a bit slippery, can’t they? Pesky when it’s so far to fall, pesky indeed.” “Bofur,” you breathe, voice wavering as you near tears. The sheer desperation in your voice shakes the hatted dwarf to his senses, his eyes and smile softening and falling as if seeing you for the first time. “Hey now, you’ll be all right. Thorin put you in the middle on purpose. So many hands here to catch you. ‘Sides that, I’m right here next to you, and you know I’ll always protect you, right?” Smiling faintly, you nod, eyes still blurred faintly with the sheen of tears. Strength renewed slightly, your hands dig even tighter into the rough stone and with all your might, you pull up to the next ledge. “See, there you are! Before we know it you’ll be outclimbing us all,” Bofur teases, leaning over and gently bumping your shoulder with his. “Bofur!” You squeal. “Oh, yes, right, sorry! Say, why don’t we just talk about the weather instead?”

Bombur

“I can’t.” “You must,” Bombur insisted, always-gentle voice even quieter than usual. Groaning beneath the weight of your bodies, the great pine you’d been forced to climb bent further. “If we don’t, who knows what’ll happen to us. I’m scared, too.” The shocks running through your heart calmed slightly at the sight of his soft eyes. “Who wouldn’t be scared of jumping off a cliff?” “Fili ‘n Kili, probably.” “You’re right,” you giggled, delaying the inevitable that much further.” “Why don’t we go together. See, just because we’re both ‘fraidy cats, you know?” Bombur sounded so… shy? He truly meant it, not that you doubted his sincerity much- a more sincere dwarf could scarcely be found. “Of course,” you replied, and beaming, he took your hand. “Just close your eyes. Trust the wizard. You’ll be alright if I have anything to say about it.”

Dori

“Is this truly necessary?” “Unfortunately that is the best way to keep things away from bears. Awful creatures trying to spoil our picnic!” “This is no picnic, Dori,” you giggled, “on account of we’re on a perilous journey? If you remember.” “Yes, yes,” he waved the hand that was free of the bundle, “but I will suffer much before I go this whole mess without doing something for you. Now Bilbo was kind enough to lend this food…” “You lot stole it, didn’t you?” Dori pointedly ignored you. “Be a dear and climb up to that branch with the rope,” he requested, pointing up into the tree and sending a wave of apprehension straight through you. “Can I hold it?” You asked, shuffling your feet. “Please?” Dori inhaled. He frowned slightly. His frown softened almost immediately at your slight pout. His shoulders deflated, hand loosening about the bundle. “Very well. You certainly are lucky to be so adorable.”

Nori

“Come on, let’s have a look at the stars, huh?” Something about Nori’s tone, a sort of provocation you hope to be deciphering correctly, has you shying your eyes away from the smooth-talking dwarf, hands behind your back as you nod. “That’s a good’n,” he smiles proudly, grabbing your hand tightly, a bit harshly even as he tugs you outside. Your gaze drifts up, but Nori tilts it back down to face him. “Not out here!” You are puzzled, tilting your head back at him. Rivendell’s garden is the most beautiful you’ve seen, a perfect little gazebo to sit under surrounded by pure white flowers and vines that reach up to the very stars upon which you wish to gaze. “Elrond can’t mind too much if we get a bit closer, after all, can he? Those elves love the stars as much as anything, after all.” You see now that he is motioning up to the roof of the enclave set aside for you all to stay, a conveniently flat expanse granted access to only by a risky-looking trellis. Nori wants to climb that with you. All the blood drains from your face at the very sight, the mental image of your shoes slipping from the hole, tumbling you back into the… “What’s the matter, hm? Scared? Afraid of getting trapped up there with me? I promise I won’t bite…unless you ask me to, of course.” His joke brings you back to your senses, out of the unexpected tenderness and back to your usual joking. “What’s the matter with you?” You shoot back. “Can’t get excited without being imperiled?” Cackling, Nori lets you slide, instead winding an arm about your waist and sweeping an arm, letting you lead him to the gazebo bench. “Got me there.”

Ori

“What’s the matter?” Ori ponders your name so sweetly it almost cuts through your fear. “Isn’t it wonderful?” ‘It’ being the view from, at least in your mind, the most precarious parapet in the whole kingdom of Erebor. “I see even more now why we were fighting for this,” he adds, smile growing and wonder positively glowing in his big brown eyes. In almost hilarious contrast, you struggle to feign a smile, fingers tightening around the wall’s edge like a lifeline. Which it quite literally is. It isn’t that high. You can simply take one step, no, two, and go tumbling off the whole of the mountain- The sound of your name cuts off your dread-laced internal ramblings, shaking you back to Ori, to feeling him take hold of your upper arm. “Are you alright? I can see your face, you look so-” Cutting off his desperation, the way he clearly is searching for a kind way to say it, you just sigh and answer him. “You were so excited to show me, I didn’t have the heart to tell you that, well, I have quite the fear of heights.” Ori’s jaw positively drops as he surges back, taking you away from the railing like it’ll burn you. “I’m so sorry, you never told me! How was I to know? Why, here you’ve been just-” You forget your fear entirely in favor of giggling at Ori’s kind reaction. You should have known better than to fear what he would say! “How about we go to the library instead?” Ori offers, hand still on your arm. “I’d like that,” you answer with a smile.

Fili

“Don’t let him catch me telling you this, but do you realize Kili used to have such a bad fear of heights he wouldn’t even set foot on a ladder?” Fili snickered to you, leaning with his arm along the back of your chair. “And that is supposed to be funny?” You replied, eyes wide and one brow raised. All attempts not to show your true thoughts- would Fili think you a fool? “Of course it was! I couldn’t even persuade him into the attic for all the deal it was,” the elder prince answered with a smile of great amusement. Pulling away from his warm proximity, you wrapped an arm around yourself instead. “And why was he wrong to fear harm? To- to avoid doing something he didn’t even need to do? Have you never felt the creeping of dread, of crushing danger?” Sitting back himself, Fili raised his hands defensively. “I’m sorry. I just thought it was funny the way he’d only put a toe up on it. You feel the same, do you not?” You nodded and he shifted back forward to put a hand on your shoulder. “Nothing wrong with that. I swear I won’t laugh about it again.”

Kili

For so-called ‘steps’, this climb certainly was involving your entire body, all of you company members heaving yourselves over each one and you suppressing a whimper at each slip and grind of your boot against smoothened stone. Why did the dwarves have to build their kingdoms so again? Sliding back, you winced, cringing back even harder when Fili playfully nudged you with his elbow. “Careful you don’t- oops!” He seemed to stumble back and fall, bringing you to cry out his name until he popped back up with a grin and laughter. “Quit that!” Kili stepped back down, making his way in between you two. “You’re really scared, aren’t you?” Nodding, you shied away at the way he wrapped an arm around your shoulders. “Don’t worry,” he spoke your name softly, “mean old Fili’s going to apologize, isn’t that right?” “I’m not a child,” you teased, “I just…hate the thought of falling. Of my feet wavering and giving out.” “Understandable,” Fili added, lowering his head, “I promise I won’t actually lay a hand upon you. No more jokes. For once, Kili’s right.” Smiling again, you allowed Kili to guide you up, one hand protectively over the small of your back. “You just wanted to play the hero.” You heard Fili hiss to his brother behind your back, shakily grinning at his words.

Bilbo

“We need to get out of here. Come on.” The hobbit whispers your name urgently, extending and waving his hand at you. How you have managed to avoid losing your mind completely is what you can only imagine to be a testament to your luck. But Bilbo? You had completely lost track of him and now he’s here before you, gripping a tree branch and pleading with those shining grey eyes. This forest has your head spinning, but those eyes are an anchor, something you can focus on for once. Your heart moves, but your body remains in place, blood rushing to your face and slamming chest. “I- I-” What can you say? “Please,” Bilbo adds, “I don’t want to lose you, too. We need air. You must come with me to clear our heads.” Blinking, you look back and forth. Did you need to? Wait, need to what? “Please,” Bilbo begs again, “I’m afraid too. But it won’t be so bad if we’re together, right? I would never let you fall.” The way he begs, says your name so carefully yet so intently, has you nodding and taking his hand, smiling faintly at the warm grip. “Let’s go.”

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[runawaymun]

Ask me about my not-yet-written-fics from this list

thanks, @eowyn7023 also tagging: @polutrope because you sent me an ask about this a while ago and I just haven't had the spoons to respond until now, sorry! <3

Elrond in Valinor + Second Flight of the Noldor

so this stems from three possibly spicy Opinions I have about LOTR: 1) The Valar kind of suck, actually, and it was wrong of them to bring Elves to Valinor in the first place and it went directly against Eru's plan. 2) Valinor is kind of liminal and bad for you if you were born in Middle Earth 3) Elrond sailing (and staying) in Valinor is makes very little sense for him as a character, and is more about Jirt's wish fulfillment than it is good writing.

Obviously, unfortunately, due to the narrative, Elrond must sail at the end of LOTR. He needs to recuperate from the absolute havoc Vilya wreaked on his system, and he also needs to reunite with Cel and get some closure about a few things, like Celebrimbor's death, Gil-Galad's death, and his relationship with Elwing.

So Elrond sails, as he does. He reunites with Celebrian. He spends some time meeting his various family members and spends quite a lot of time with Gil-Galad and Celebrimbor. He has exactly one (1) talk with Elwing to ask her some questions and explain what became of Elros, but in my head he is not really interested in pursuing much of a relationship with her. Elwing respects that.

He and Celebrian work on healing their relationship and re-establishing intimacy.

Elrond slowly recovers from the damage Vilya did to him.

He might need to spend some time in Lorien actually. He is very good friends with Este and Nienna.

After a while though, things just don't feel right. Valinor feels very static and strange to him, and he doesn't really feel like he Fits. And that hurts because everyone is so glad to have him there and they expect that he's just as glad to be here as they are.

Also he really misses his kids, and wonders about his grandkids, and the Dunedain.

Eventually he starts connecting with more and more people who feel like they don't Fit. Mostly Noldor and the few Sindar that sailed. Many of them are still dealing with PTSD from Middle Earth and Beleriand, or with scars that refuse to heal. Many of them are just Restless. Most Vanyar do not understand this, and it's hard to talk about.

He and Cel begin work on a second Rivendell, and this keeps them both busy for a short time. He still doesn't feel Right though.

Eventually he starts experiencing like a reverse sea-longing and it gets more, and more, and more painful.

Finally, he talks it over with Celebrian. And they petition the Valar, who are not very happy to be petitioned. And then Elrond starts preparing to sail East.

Listen listen listen. Everything that Elrond has ever built, worked for, or loved is back in Middle Earth. It makes zero sense for him to be happy in Valinor. He aligns overwhelmingly with the Sindar and with the Dunedain in the books, and the Dunedain also consider him as one of them. Rivendell is there (he left it in the care of the Dunedain). Arwen and Aragorn are there. Gondor, and what is left of Elros are there. His grandchildren are there. Elladan and Elrohir are still there. The people left for him in Valinor are all people he has already mourned and found closure with.

He's not really made for Valinor anyway. He's made to watch over Middle Earth, to keep its lore and secrets, and to caretake Elros' line. He made a vow, once, and sure Aragorn and his descendants are doing just fine but he still feels half-whole without them.

And he's not the only person who doesn't feel Right in Valinor, who miss the mold and the rot and the fungi and the sheer diversity of life, and the Men!!! The humans!!! The normalcy of pain and suffering and scars and disabilities!

And so Elrond sails with Celebrian, and many of the Noldor say 'fuck it' and they go with him. They're tired and restless and have misgivings about the Valar anyway. A remnant returns to Middle Earth, and this time they go for love.

Elrond retakes his seat in Rivendell and the Dunedain rejoice that the eldest of their race, their most beloved uncle has come home. Celebrian reunites with Arwen, and meets a long line of adopted children that she never got to see, and meets Aragorn and her grandchildren.

They live through the ages, quietly doing what they have always done: living as watchers and caretakers, carefully preserving memories and lore and history.

Rivendell becomes a place that is both mythologized and startlingly real, where it is rumored that anyone who needs it will find help and sanctuary.

Many of the Noldor live in Rivendell, but some set up their own small kingdoms or simply live alongside the men and dwarves. They're finally there to guide and watch over the Secondborn, just as was intended in the Theme.

Eventually, of course, Elrond must grieve Arwen and Aragorn, but he's there for his grandchildren, and his great grandchildren, and his great grandchildren, and all of his family thereafter -- and in Arwen and Aragorn and their line, it almost feels like he is reunited with Elros again.

Elrond is there to help.