#Tolkien + personal

[edennill-archived]

For that matter, while there is nothing more annoying than bad Tolkien + religion discourse (mostly falling into three types tbh: "why JRRT was actually Neopagan", "for some reason tumblr search starts turning in reams of discourse about shipping" and "every problem with the work is because of his Catholicism"), intelligent meta that takes this and related subjects into account might be the best thing in the fandom, whether I agree with all the specific takes or not.

[edennill-archived]

A double major in the Ainur and Making My Friends Care About Númenor, as well as a strong minor in Finrod.

One thing I love about the Silmarillion is that because it’s so massive, its fans have to specialize.

Like I love everything but my Silm major is in Finrod studies, with a minor in obscure background characters.

Reblog this post with your Silmarillion “speciality,”

[hellmersy]

I need people to understand that I want more scary Stiles Stilinski. I'm feral for this little sopping wet cat of a man whom everyone underestimates until he goes from 0 to 100. One second he's being a little damsel in distress but then one of his friends gets hurt and suddenly he stands in a field of gore cackling at the sky because the bloodlust has driven him nearly insane. Bonus points if Derek is there and matches his freak.

[fantasyinallforms]

"The Hobbit movies aren't accurate. The Hobbit's movies made the dwarves too hot"

SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Shhhhhh.... shh

Look into my eyes right now and know I'm being so serious.

I. Don't. Care.

I don't care that it's basically Tolkien fan fiction. I'm under no delusion that it's accurate, I know the studio used the movies as a money grab insted of letting PJ do what he actually wanted. I KNOW. We *all* know.

I still don't care. It brings me joy.

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[edennill-archived]

Oh, look, really relatable given what I spent the last three hours doing lol.

Obsessed with how Tolkien and his fandom seem to share exactly the same sentiments about his work

[ID: two photos of a page printed in the front matter of the Silmarillion, titled “From a letter by J.R.R. Tolkien to Milton Waldman, 1951.” Highlighted in yellow are the lines “It is difficult to say anything without saying too much: the attempt to say a few words opens a floodgate of excitement” and “I shall inflict some of this on you; but I will append a mere résumé of its contents: which is (may be) all that you want or will have use or time for.” In the second photo, from further down the page and regarding Tolkien’s extensive attention to linguistics, is also highlighted the line “Not all will feel this as important as I do, since I am cursed by acute sensibility in such matters.” /end ID]

[corsairspade]

there are many reasons I like the "Erestor son of Caranthir" headcanon but secretly the main one is that I'm imagining all of the remaining noldo auditors sighing of relief when Caranthir dies and they don't have to try play 4d chess with multiverse time travel trying to catch this guy doing tax evasion. life is good for exilic auditors now.

and then suddenly Elrond and Elros turn up again! even better! oh who's this, Elrond? your good friend Erestor? he's helping you with your taxes? oh how swe- what is this Elrond. What is this. your paperwork for your taxes you say. not a declaration of war? because it looks like a declaration of war on the exilic auditors, Elrond.

and then all the auditors are so busy doing "extreme tax auditing™" for the first time since the second Kinslaying that they don't tell anyone they're pretty sure there's another scion of the house of Fëanor running around.

[elodieunderglass]

I'm not as familiar with LOTR as you are, so I wondered if you could tell me if my wild theory is completely off-base.

No one knows where the Hobbits came from, except that at some point they diverged from the line of men. No one knows much about the Entwives' appearance, but we do know that they fucked off a long time ago.

Could the Entwives have been dryad-ish and hooked up with the hobbits' ancestors and so be the foremothers of the hobbits?

Ah I think I saw that post! The concept has a lot of charm, and when the Tolkien estate loses its corpse-grip on the property in 2050 or so, I think you should write it and sell it 😤 I’ve definitely read some good takes on entwives in fanfiction that both leaned into canon and moved away, and I think that sounds like good fun to explore. A common theme in the fandom is playing with Yavanna, the Green Lady, being the mother or patron of hobbits. This isn’t canonical, but she’s a “green goddess” archetype and is married to Mahal/Aulë, the father of dwarves, which shippers often leverage to their advantage. You could do something quite charming there with Yavanna if you wanted to. We also know that Entwives loved gardens and orchards rather than forests.

Some things I would explore with this include:

what is going on with all these consistent ideas of people, races, women disappearing. We know that a lot of it is how Tolkien processed an almost OCD-like Catholic framing of “the fallen world is getting worse and can never be repaired”, war experiences, romanticism and other stuff stewing in his old man head. What are some ways you could show what’s stewing in your head? What does “people disappearing” mean to you? and why is it especially healing that they disappeared in order to make new families?

I think “they disappeared from their old kin and made new kin” is an interesting and weird thing worth wondering about!

- this would possibly make hobbits a more recent race than is implied. What does that mean to you?

- why are hobbits teeny tiny?

A very good starting point, that Terry Pratchett used a lot, is taking some grand statement in fantasy fiction, and making it reflect a different political reality. “Most dwarves are girls actually.” “Wizards parody academia, but, like, FOR REAL.”

I personally have a different take because of my own political feelings and framings! I have a lot of complex feelings about Tolkien chickening out of hobbits. For various political reasons I personally have to take the stance that they are fully human, fully indigenous, and have their own native language. and that their disappearance is less “teehee we lost them” or “O, the Catholic guilt of the Fallen World, how far we have fallen from the light of the two trees God’s sinless light” and a lot more “oh yeah I’ve seen THAT pattern before.”

If you have a political sort of lens on, someone telling you “yeah… hobbits came from nowhere 🤭 and then disappeared 🤷‍♀️ sad!” is a story that can also invite the response of “OHhhhh you wanted their LAND real bad, huh.” Like, we know what that means, right.

It’s a political stance for me. Hobbits have to be close enough to us to touch, and we have to be able to face that, and the fact that 5,000 media properties will chew on tolkienelves and sell them to you before even admitting to the 🤭 just makes it even more of a 🤨. To me.

…But I have literally just been elbow deep in my own demented fanfic thing that involves inventing a language just to swear in, to enable my standing on a box shouting HOBBITS OUGHT TO RESIST GOING EXTINCT ACTUALLY, based entirely on, I think, spite. Why do multiple authors publish orc football games (Terry Pratchett) and orc coffeeshops (Legends and Lattes guy) and do every damned thing with every bit of Tolkien’s corpse but refuse to look directly at hobbits. I am feral over this and wrote 59k words so far to damage and harm my friends

In conclusion I see a great story shape there about kindred and I think you should explore it and it should be about evolutionary biology and women and divorce and nobody being wrong.

And if anyone argues you with some podcast boy “well actually”, just bite them and do more character work and sit on their heads

[edennill-archived]

hmmm... so this is going to be a really complex one for me... because tbh I used to be irritated that Húrin even let himself be drawn into a conversation here, mostly due to years of hearing that you don't try to out-discuss the devil; you just ignore him — this was probably meant to have some more metaphorical meaning that would be applicable for me in real life, though I think it also cropped up in stories about saints with actual visions, but anyway, I internalised this a lot and wanted to shout at Húrin to stop listening. (Hopefully you've heard the kind of sentiment I mean, Eri, even if you don't consider Morgoth to be a successful satan-analogue.)

But ultimately, I suppose you cannot avoid talking to someone who's waging war against you, so maybe I have some apologies to make to you, Húrin. And if we do take Morgoth as evil incarnate, then resistance and mocking is admirable. (I'm not sure how far the two ideas contradict eachother.)

But on the other hand, if we're to consider Morgoth as a military opponent, it's kind of plain stupid. I probably can't say it's unrealistic though, given the sort of thing my great-grandfather told the UB (no, he was not imprisoned — and actually might have been willing to cooperate with the communists to an extent — but nonetheless it was the exact sort of thing you'd say if you did want to end up somewhere unpleasant. They told him so.)

And yeah, withholding the location of Gondolin under torture is nothing but admirable to the extreme.

Asking because some time ago, we've had a discussion about it (me and my teenager). @dfwbwfbbwfbwf I am particularly interested in your opinion, because you seem reasonable in a way my kid likes. :D (about Finrod and probably something more, I don't remember)

[edennill-archived]

My highest respects, by the way, to the atheist Tolkien fans who respect the underlying philosophical assumptions in his books.

[stellaluna33]

I love Peter Jackson's LOTR movies as much as anyone, but sometimes I resent them for perpetuating this stereotype that the Elves are always aloof and overly-serious and serene and kind of cold, and eat nothing but dainty cakes and salad and Lembas bread... when Tolkien's Elves are actually just so fiercely ALIVE, and love to sing and laugh and dance, and love telling and hearing stories and making music and feasting on good food and drinking good wine and even throwing raging parties. Like, yes, they can be ethereal and otherworldly and all that, but I feel like PJ kind of misses their fierce joy.

[perplexingly]

I love you video games that have ambient sounds of people casually humming/singing while working or idling or drinking, without any accompaniment of music

[balrogballs]

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. 

[flamingostalker]

[violecov]

Finarfin, third prince of the noldor (gaming style).

[edennill-archived]

I can't actually list them all (yet). Maybe up to Tar-Ciryatan, I think? And then wasn't his son Tar-Atanamir? But then up till Ar-Gimilzor, I only know some names, not the chronology. Also yes, I suppose this probably sounds crazy when I say it.

You seem really odd and your blog intrigues me, do you want to have [more] philosphical conversations or perhaps talk about fictional characters xdd

Thank you!

I would love more of it! (Just remind me once in a while to keep it fictional with plausible deniability of real elements (re: that one fic XD) because I will probably forget.)

Also, in my opinion you are actually not very odd (and it is a compliment). OK, probably you are really odd from a certain point of view (this is also a compliment, because it's a dumb point of view). And you are probably odd in ways I still haven't discovered and you know all the kings of Numenor and that is kind of odd but in a fascinating way.