#NoME

[randybutternubber]

Day eight for TSON/LN3tober by @ganglygamer - nome!

Still working on the previous prompt so expect that soon

[marysmirages]

Hope of Nome (2023)

The Great Race of Mercy was the transport of antitoxin by sled dogs to diphtheria-stricken Nome in the cold winter of 1925. Leonhard Seppala and his dog team, led by Togo, covered the most dangerous part of the relay route (from Nome to Nulato).

[d0d0-b0i]

testing this style !

[cutesykeito]

Doodles bc I can't draw. I got this idea from another post and bc I opened pinterest and saw three arts of Six being a menace to a loaf of bread in a row.

[unteriors]

Lyons Crescent, Nome, Queensland.

[foreverblondie23]

[conilsolenegliocchi]

~ Un altro nome ~

Come un bimbo

guarda

incredulo e stupito

chi gli pone

un regalo inatteso,

allungando

manine incerte

tra desiderio e timore,

così

io guardo te

che mi chiami amore.

@conilsolenegliocchi 🐞

[ladysternchen]

What is canon in Tolkien's universe? How to deal with the History of Middle-Earth and Tolkien's Letters

One last post before Tolkien Meta Week is up!

What is canon? Yes, we all know the correct (as in-'nobody can disagree with that') answer is 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings', because that is what Tolkien published himself.

Is it, though?

I would tend to answer no- not only because excluding the Silmarillion from canon would be utterly ridiculous (like, folks, Tolkien worked on it his entire life!), but also because Tolkien wrote things in both the Hobbit and LotR that don't make any sense within the wider lore. That 'dwarves helped Thranduil build his halls' passage is probably the most obvious example.

It is completely natural for an author to use their ideas in different ways than originally intended, especially if they think that they will never publish all their works. But we do have the Silmarillion now, and so can hardly take the 'Thranduil's halls were built by Dwarves' for canon, even though it is written in the LotR.

So we can likely agree on the fact that the Silmarillion is canon, even if it wasn't published by J.R.R. Tolkien himself. But Christopher knew his father's works like no other, perhaps, and I am very sure that he knew both Middle-Earth and his father well enough to capture the spirit.

But what with all the other works, then? The notes, the stories, all that we know now was 'The History of Middle-Earth' and the 'Unfinished Tales'. Everyone who ever tried to work with them as canon knows the problems that come with that attempt.

The thing is- these are completed essays and stories as well as background information Tolkien wrote down for himself and -probably worst- notes. Writing is a complex process, especially when there is such extensive worldbuidling behind the stories as there is with Tolkien's legendarium. There is the forming of one's own style and the lack of selfsame in the beginning, which results most often in a form of copying the source of inspiration, there are first drafts, plotlines that are thrown out, re-written or added, those thrown out sometimes entirely disregarded or else used in other stories, gap-fillers that only wait for a better idea,... you get the point.

Today, in the age of the vast majority of writers working with computers, these byproducts get mostly lost. No-one will know of an author's sketchy beginnings, of the many failed attempts to develop a character that seems natural and is really its own thing and not a trope or overly inspired by a RL person or other fictional character. Not many keep their disregarded ideas somewhere, those that did not work for that story and are not loved enough to keep for the next.

With Tolkien's works, we have those notes. Papers, sheets of paper, random notes scribbled in the margins- thanks to Christopher Tolkien, Carl Hostetter and co, we do have these notes. There is just one major problem with this: we have no way of knowing which of those were disregarded, and which of those Tolkien really intended to end up in the Silmarillion he never was able to finish. It is not even possible to say the younger the notes are, the more accurate, because sometimes, the first ideas stay the best ones.

So are those notes canon? Hardly, most of all because many of those openly contradict the published works. But can we then just disregard them? No, we cannot, or at least not easily.

What we end up doing with all the background information is up to each reader themselves, so what I write from now on is only my very own approach.

I like the HoME and UT for seeing where a character may have come from, or what ideas Tolkien might have had. And those parts that fit well with both the published stories and my headcanons, I take as canon 😅. And it is also fascinating to see how Tolkien developed his style.

(btw, little anecdote there, because it still gives me goosebumps- Elu Thingol was 'my' elf from the start, the character I identified with, and from early on, I imagined and read him very differently from how most within the fandom read him, and I wrote him like that in my fanfics as well. One of those traits that Elu had in my head was a dislike to force his decisions on others, and yes, I explicitly wrote this in one of my stories, even though I knew that many would read this as totally out of character. No, I had not read NoME then. And when I did, and read the 'I can but choose for myself' I sat on my bed shaking. Now, the rational part of my brain knows perfectly well that this was purely co-incidence, and that there are far more other passages in HoME and NoMe and so on that actually contradict my take on Elu Thingol, but still, that moment was totally magical for me. And that's why I really love those works, even though they are not what I would call canon)

That still leaves us with Tolkien's letters- and they are even more complicated to incorporate into canon or disregard as non-canonical than the HoME. On one hand, they are not a story, they were never meant to be published, we are often missing the other half if the conversation or the general context, but on the other hand, Tolkien often did referred to text passages, and explained his intents and ideas. And -most-importantly, the letters were written by him, the words not edited (the context is another story here).

Do I therefore take them into canon?

No. For one, they are as his notes- ideas that were in his head in that moment, without us having any clue of whether or not Tolkien later liked them or not. For another, by selecting which letters were published and which were not, the publishers intended of painting a certain picture of Tolkien. We are simply missing too much context to put those letters to any meaningful use on our quest to learn the truth about the lore we love.

@silmarillionwritersguild

[iwander12]

[incorrect-nightmares]

the nomes!!

[jafar-panahi]

Nome (2023, Guinea-Bissau 🇬🇼) directed by Sana Na N'Hada

[ultimateanna]

Little Nightmares III (video game) - Gallery

[beloved-cat-gremlin]

Happy 6th birthday to a game that means a lot to me!

[geek-of-fandoms]

Happy 7th anniversary Little Nightmares

Here’s a quick little nome sketch

[deadhearts02]

day 4: nome