#Gondolithrim Squad Go Off

[nikosheba]

“Mom is base! You can’t get me when Mom is base!” --Eärendil, I hope

I cannot thank @navyinks enough for this INCREDIBLE charity commission for COVID relief in India, it’s everything I dreamed of and more: specifically, House of the Wing, No Bad Vibes, Navyinks draws the cutest kids and I wanted to see little Eärendil in that style so much <333 And it was better than I could have imagined.

So, I have a couple other people that I need to thank, because a few of my friends actually got together and surprised me by sending me the money to commission this when I was having a very difficult time. @stormxpadme, @admirablemonster, @sianascera, and Moietywhodoesn’thaveatumblr, you guys are such true and wonderful friends, and I’m immensely grateful and humbled to have you in my life. Love you so much!

brb need to make this my lock screen and my wallpaper and print it out and glue it to my face

[nikosheba]

Happy Gondolin Week!!! And I got my amazing commission from @esmeblaze for Penlod, Lord of the Pillar, and Nikalantë (my OC), Lord of the Tower of Snow. I’ve got a longfic about these two in the works, hopefully chapter 1 will be up today for Penlod Day. 

[nikosheba]

Glorthelion, 46?

A lingering kiss before a long trip apart.

“It will just be for a few months. A year, at most.”

“Are you trying to reassure me, or yourself?”

Laurëfindil closed his eyes, resting his forehead against Aegthel’s. “Surely, we’ve been parted for longer.”

“No. We haven’t.”

Laurëfindil‘s hands clasped his own--warm, always sun-warm, and Aegthel felt a sudden bright fury burst in his chest against the dark Vala, for prying them apart even for so brief a time. “What matter a year, when we have Gondolin?” Laurëfindil whispered, and neither of them looked towards the empty seat in the Council room, where the first Lord of the Tower of Snow had sat, before being sent through the Gates on a mission much like this one.

No. Laurëfindil was powerful even among their number. Aegthel would trust that, and him. 

“Come home,” he said, as much of an order as he could make it.

“Don’t let Gondolin fall without me,” Laurëfindil replied, and it was a long time before either of them spoke again, loathe to let their lips part.

[nikosheba]

Oh I can’t help myself I wrote something sad. (Uses Quenya names: Penlod | Pendelot, Glorfindel | Laurëfindil, Turgon | Turukáno, Dulin | Tuilindo, Ecthelion | Aegthel (primitive pre-split Sindarin not Quenya but........ghghgh languages), Galdor | Aldaron)

~

“It’s mine by right. Would anyone here say otherwise?”

They do not look at him. They cannot speak to him. He speaks of rights and duty, and they can do nothing less, out of love.

Pendelot walks through the Alley of Roses, leaving the King’s Square in his wake. None block his way. For a moment, it seems as though Rog will, and he raises his eyes.

But he drops them. Whatever he sees in Pendelot’s gaze cannot be met with wrath and fire and a spiteful determination to live and thrive. Pendelot has already decided to live. They weren’t certain if he would, when he returned from that fateful mission.

Alone.

The King is no less mute than the rest of the Lords, aches no less to say something, to offer something. But all he has to offer is what Pendelot has already claimed by right, and he strides towards the Tower of Snow, the cold of the winds blowing from Caragdûr moving his robes, his face unchanging.

There had been talk, once, of uniting the House of the Pillar and the House of the Tower of Snow. If the Lords of the two Houses were wed, would it not be simpler? Laughter, or its ghost, seems almost to echo about the Square of the King, in the voice of Pendelot from what seems like a thousand years ago. 

“Simpler? Think of the cloth involved--think of the waste! Have you all forgotten how long it took to make and embroider all those liveries in the first place? Nay, it will bide. I am no less myself because I am his, and he is no less himself, for being mine.”

If anyone could understand, the Lords think, it would be the King, who knows not whether Elenwë of the Vanyar walks in Tirion, her laughter forever frozen from the heart he wears upon his banner, or whether Mandos holds her still. But the King does not speak, perhaps cannot speak. Whatever Pendelot has told him of the mission he sent them on, the Lords of Snow and Pillar, he has not shared, and will not share.

It says enough that Pendelot returned alone, with a mute, stricken horror behind his eyes that has not faded in the months since.

“Someone should speak to him,” Laurëfindil murmurs, and does not look at Aegthel beside him.

“We will all speak to him,” Tuilindo says, and his own voice is hollow. “But not yet.”

“Why not?” Aldaron asks. “Think you that years will soften this grief?”

Turukáno clasps his hands, staring off after the Lord of Two Houses. “Centuries will not. Speaking will not. Keeping silent will not.”

They watch, as the Lord of Two Houses makes his way through the biting wind, and stands, facing the mountains, turning neither left nor right.

It is his by right. They wish they could ease the weight of two towers from his shoulders, but he stands, unbowed and too-tall, his eyes bright with the reflection of snow.

“The Lost Lord of Gondolin” would make a killer paper title but sadly right now he exists only in the ether of history

[nikosheba]

Ok, oh boy. @misswhalie you asked for it!! Under the cut so if you don’t want to see my Maeglin opinions (and they’re not Super Positive) you can just cheerfully scroll on by! I’m not here to hate on anyone for liking him or the way anyone portrays him, I just have a very clear idea about him in my head.

Ok so the first thing is, I’m not a huge fan of a Wholly Unreliable Narrator, and most of the Maeglin Stanning I see comes directly from that. It seems to me to be like “I like this character” > “but he did bad things” > “so maybe he didn’t do bad things” > “the book is wrong because Pengolodh was a big old meanie”

Edited to add: most of this is based on TFOG Maeglin, because it’s the most complete account we have extant, and a few things are referenced from The Shaping of Middle-Earth, which included some updated passages. I do tend to give those accounts more weight than the published Silm if there are conflicting narratives, and especially if there are narrative holes, because if canons conflict I’m going with the one that was written by J.R.R. Tolkien and not his son.

Whereas I see that there is a level of unreliable narration, but more in the sense of...I don’t think it was obvious at all at the time to most of the Gondothlim that Maeglin was Up To Something--in TFOG he’s not unpopular, he’s close in the King’s counsel, when he chooses to he joins in the dances and the merriment and this isn’t something that’s seen as wholly out of character, just that “Maeglin is softened.” So the most I really enjoy the unreliable narrator is to the extent of like...I kind of think that Pengolodh may have been trying to make it look like when you live next to a serial killer and you want to insist that you totally suspected him, you weren’t taken in, you knew he was bad all along! I’m not a huge fan of Unreliable Narrator in general; it only appeals to me when that unreliable narration is an actual plot point (like THE TRUE STORY OF THE 3 LITTLE PIGS BY A. WOLF), not as a place to start with, because then is it even interacting with the text? Like, an interesting fic for me would be something like “Here’s what really happened--and here’s why Pengolodh has a grudge against him, and how that got changed.” But “none of that stuff happened, here’s a story about something else” doesn’t appeal to me.

Maeglin’s character for me is a mixture of Mordred le Fey from Arthuriana and Loki/Ben Solo. And frankly, they’re all sort of callbacks to the same type of character; the one who was sort of an outsider, who was loved and accepted but never saw it that way due to his perception of himself as different, who eventually betrayed those that loved him and got them killed. 

(I also don’t know where the “Maeglin was a torture victim” thing comes from. In every edition of the text I’ve read it says he was threatened with torture, but I haven’t found one where it says anything actually happened to him. In TFOG he just immediately offers the city in exchange for his life, and for Idril as his prize.)

We also know from ósanwë-kenta that it’s not possible for an elf to read the mind of another without permission, which leads me to believe that the reason Idril knows all his horny dreams is because he’s deliberately slamming I SHOWED YOU MY DICK PLS RESPOND over and over into her brain at 2am every morning. At the very least, he’s being very unguarded--and again, in all versions of the text written directly by J.R.R.T., he’s explicitly motivated by his lust for the throne of Gondolin rather than by any genuine love of her.

So like, being honest? That scene at the battlements. I cannot get over this. He drags his cousin by her hair through the city as she fights him, commands his soldiers to stop or kill her husband, and deliberately goes up to the very top battlements because he wants to make her watch her seven-year-old son burn to death. He tries to stab said child and is only foiled by 1. Brave Baby Boy and 2. Baby Chain Mail.

Also I’m pretty sure i mentally live in Gondolin most days lately and You Betrayed My City. 

So in essence: I’m a canon purist. I try very hard to make all of my fics and headcanons work as closely within canon as possible, and my motto is that good fanfiction adds, but does not subtract. I’m very careful to delineate what is canon, what is headcanon, what is fanon, and what is AU. I 100% respect that this is NOT how everyone approaches fandom, and that’s fine with me. I do enjoy AUs, but I have strict personal rules about them. 

(My ONE RULE FOR A GREAT AU:

1. Change Only One of the Following: Who What Where When Why How; everything else different should follow from that one thing. Be very specific about what it is. i.e. you can have The Fellowship In Space or you can have Sam Leads The Fellowship but once you have Captain Sam of the S.S. Fellowship it gets really murky as an AU for me, and starts losing all connection to the original.) 

But it seems to me that every time I see a “sympathetic Maeglin” it doesn’t mean “maybe he had reasons for doing what he did beyond what we’ve seen,” it means “I don’t think he did those things at all.” And for me, that just kind of feels like it’s a different character than the one in the text. 

And frankly? If someone can make a 100% canon compliant TFOG Maeglin sympathetic, I think that would be fascinating. Tag me in that! 

Additional salt: I would really like some nice family art of Idril, Tuor, and Eärendil as a happy young family, but probably 80-90% of the art of them is like:

[ENORMOUS LOOMING MAEGLIN SNARLING OR LEERING]

                                  (house of the wing)

Hope that wasn’t too brutal lol.

[nikosheba]

Also, completely optional, but your Gondolin piece about Pendelot and the House of Snow Fucked Me Up, sooooo... 48 for them, if the difference is dramatic enough? Mr. Tower is supposedly very tall, after all.

ASKING ABOUT MY OCS, THE KEY TO MY HEART

One person has to bend down in order to kiss their partner, who is standing on their tip-toes to reach their partner’s.

“Lótë, put the scrolls down.”

Pendelot paused, turning to face the balcony and Nikalantë. The wind whipped about the Tower of Snow, freeing at least a quarter of his own hair from its tie, blowing it directly into his eyes. He blinked several times, shaking his head to clear the hair away, and only managing to free more of it. 

Nikalantë looked up at him, an exasperated, fond little smile on his face, as he moved to brush some of the hair out of Pendelot’s eyes, tucking it behind his ear. His hands were warm despite the cool of the day, and Pendelot felt his heart quicken. 

“Scrolls,” Nikalantë repeated, and shook the empty basket he carried. “They’ll be easier to bring back to Pillar like this.”

Pendelot dumped them in, ducking his head with a bashful little smile. “That is easier to carry,” he admitted. “Probably not good for the Lord of the Pillar to be seen running about with his arms full like a scribe.”

“Probably not.” 

Pendelot lifted the basket, settling it on his hip. He opened his mouth, then closed it, unable to think of a reason to stay. Surely, any day, Nikalantë would weary of his too-frequent visits, of the way he hovered, of the way his eyes would linger on the Lord of the Tower of Snow for far too long. 

Then he noticed that Nikalantë was... “Níko?” he asked, blinking. “Are you...a bit taller than usual?” He looked down, expecting to see heels such as Tuilindo had worn at the last Noth-na-Lothion, but Nikalantë was leaning up, up on his toes, and looking vaguely cross about it.

“Pendelot. Has anyone ever told you you’re uselessly tall?”

“Sorry. I can fold.”

“Don’t you mean bend?”

“I mean--”

“Forget it,” Nikalantë muttered, and before Pendelot could respond, the other Lord snaked a hand around his neck, tugging him down for a kiss that banished the morning’s cold.