#also camelot and avalon and all that is literally just england

[downtofragglerock]

That’s certainly an issue, but I think my biggest problem with this map is the size discrepancy regarding certain territories

Because if we’re using the middle earth part of the map for size comparison the labyrinth (i’m presuming it’s the 1986 one considering it’s neighbor), moomin valley, terabithia, and especially wonderland should nowhere near be the size they are on this map

And places like hyrule and thra? they should be waaaayyy larger

One of my favorite hobbies is thinking about the fucked up implications of this fantasy world map my parents got me for christmas

[Image ID: photo of a map. On the left side of the map is Middle Earth, with the Shire and Mordor labeled. To the direct right of Mordor is Whoville.]

[panharmonium]

beyond the white mountains

Since I’m on an Ealdor kick right now (not that I’m ever not, I mean, but working on that edit the other day and thinking about Merlin running away with Freya just started me feeling things with renewed intensity), here is some talk about my favorite location, for my own satisfaction.

(My deep and abiding interest in Merlin’s home is a pretty niche passion and probably not something that is particularly interesting to others, which means I haven’t ever really typed up any serious musings about it before, but at this point, I think anybody who hangs around my blog knows that my brain is at least 50% unfettered love for Merlin’s pre-Camelot life, so I’m just gonna go ahead and indulge myself here.)

Something that has always been a pet peeve of mine is the fact the map we’re all familiar with as supplemental material is wrong.

I know it comes from the BBC.  It is STILL WRONG.

I’m sure most everyone is already aware of this fact, just by virtue of looking at some of the other locations and thinking, “uhhh that really doesn’t make sense” (for instance, in the show, the Isle of the Blessed is canonically stated to be in Odin’s kingdom, whereas on this map it’s in Camelot) - but my particular area of interest, due to past writing escapades, is Ealdor and Cenred’s kingdom, so just to set the record straight on those locations specifically - this is what our supplemental map tries to tell us:

And this just isn’t right.  Canonically, Ealdor is NOT to the east of Camelot.  Cenred’s kingdom is NOT on Camelot’s eastern border.  And the White Mountains are NOT all the way over there!!!

Here are the Real Facts™, courtesy of the show:

1. Ealdor is NORTH of Camelot.

“So where are you headed?” (Tristan, asking where Merlin and Arthur are going, as they’re on their way to Ealdor.) “North, over the border.”

“We're heading north to a safe haven.  To Ealdor.”

2. The White Mountains lie BETWEEN Ealdor and Camelot, not way out in West Nowheresville.

“I know a place.  Ealdor.  It's beyond the White Mountains.”

“Ealdor lies at the far side of that valley....Agravaine couldn’t have tracked us through the mountains.” 

You can even see the mountain range in the show.  Ealdor is visibly situated in the valleys created by the foothills of The White Mountains.  Merlin has to hike THROUGH the White Mountains to get from Ealdor to Camelot:

And then this is the view on the way from Camelot to Ealdor:

And this is literally what Merlin sees every time he looks out his back door.  (This shot is from Hunith’s POV, when she’s standing on the village green watching the fab four head back to Camelot.)  

The map can say what it wants, but the White Mountains are NOT all the way over in the western reaches of Camelot, and Ealdor is not out to the east.  The mountains are NORTH of Camelot, forming a border between Uther and Cenred’s kingdoms, and Merlin’s home is nestled in their foothills.  When Merlin is out haymaking every June in the meadow pictured above, he’s doing it in the shadow of those very mountains. 

[This fits, too, with Hunith’s comment to Uther that “winters are harsh in Ealdor.”  The climate in various mountainous regions can differ tremendously, obviously, but if Ealdor is on the windward side of the range, it would receive a lot more precipitation (more snow!) than Camelot on the leeward side.  And then there’s mountain/gap winds to consider, altitude, etc - all things that could contribute to Ealdor experiencing slightly different winters than Camelot.]

It matters, too, when we think about the scene Merlin has with Freya in 2.09, when they’re talking about their respective homes - when Freya tells him her home was "surrounded by the tallest mountains” - when she talks about the winter storms, and the wind, and the summer wildflowers; when she says it was like heaven - that resonates with Merlin.  Freya doesn’t necessarily realize it, because Merlin has been more reticent than her about describing his home, but a lot of what she’s describing is familiar to him.  It speaks to him.  It paints a picture of something he misses, in a complicated way; it’s something he sees as beautiful.  “It sounds perfect,” he says to her.  And he means it.

There are a number of reasons why Merlin decides to run off with Freya in 2.09, and this is hardly the most important one.  But it does matter, and I personally think taking Merlin’s tangled, frequently-suppressed homesickness into account when we try to understand who he is and why he does the things that he does is relevant, always, even if that particular side of him usually goes undiscussed.

We know some other things about the geography surrounding Ealdor, too, though those features aren’t so egregiously mislabeled on the map.  

We know that there is a forest somewhere along the border that extends into Cenred’s kingdom (it’s labeled on the map, it’s just not big enough):

“We're going to Cenred's Kingdom, aren't we?” “What makes you say that?” “Er, because we're in the Forest of Ascetir and we're not stopping?”

(honestly, lol @ Arthur asking Merlin “what makes you say that”.....Merlin’s like “uhhhh i was born here???  i know where tf we are”)

We also know that there’s a “Ridge of Ascetir,” per Uther (I assume it’s associated with the White Mountains, but we can’t know that for sure):

“Ealdor lies beyond the Ridge of Ascetir.  For an army of Camelot to enter it would be an act of war.” 

^ The above two elements bring up a point that I haven’t actually ever seen discussed anywhere else, and I assume it’s just because I wasn’t involved in fandom back when the show was actually airing - but, for clarity’s sake: there is NO canon indication of what Cenred’s kingdom is actually called.  I’ve seen the term “Essetir” used in some places on AO3, but that’s not something that actually comes from the canon, and I assume it’s just a fanon misspelling that emerged out of people mishearing the word “Ascetir” (or “Aesctir,” as 1.10′s subtitles put it) when characters were talking about the forest or the ridge.  The only places that canonically bear that name are the Forest of Ascetir and the Ridge of Ascetir, both of which are partially located in Camelot - there is no indication that Merlin’s home country is actually called Ascetir, and in fact the kingdom is only ever referred to as “Cenred’s kingdom” (or Lot’s kingdom, after Cenred is dead).

In terms of the rest of the area’s geographical features: we already know about the mountains (discussed above), and some sort of cave system (”I thought you said you grew up in these tunnels”) which exits (in one place, at least) out onto the side of a mountain, beyond which are plains (in Arthur’s words, when he suggests moving further into Lot’s kingdom) and then in the other direction there’s the Forest of Ascetir.  We know that there is a river associated with Ealdor (Morgana says “they’ve crossed the river” re: the bandits in 1.10), and we also know that Ealdor itself is bounded on one side by a steep stone ridge (the same one that Agravaine’s men line up on to surround the place):

And this ridge actually fits very well with what we see of the village itself.  Ealdor has to be located in an area where stone is easily accessible, otherwise its buildings would not look the way they do.  (BBC Merlin is, of course, a fantasy show, not taking place in a particular historical period, but just drawing from real history, most peasant homes in medieval England were not of stone construction, unless the village itself was located in an area where stone was plentiful and easy to access.  Moving stone for construction purposes was incredibly labor-intensive and, generally, prohibitively expensive.  But Ealdor is obviously located in an area where stone is readily available, and you can see indications of that in the image above.

Ultimately, is any of the above information relevant to anyone who isn’t me?  

No, not really.  And are there a lot of ways in which this show is often super inconsistent when it comes to geography?  Yes, absolutely.  (The Lake of Avalon, for instance, is ALL OVER THE PLACE.)  But, surprisingly, geographical info on Ealdor/Cenred’s kingdom is actually pretty consistent throughout the canon, and the map is the odd man out - so since canon tops supplementary material for me, and since the map is so clearly wrong about other things, this is how I conceive of Ealdor whenever I think/write about it.

[silver-spider-art]

ToA: Trollhunters vs Wizards

First I don’t want to come off like I don’t think people should enjoy Wizards. Its a fun story and as a stand-alone or an AU its funny with so many call backs to favorite characters, and many emotional moments. Lots to enjoy on its own. However, it is AU. It doesn’t fit in the same timeline of events as what was hinted at and implied in ToA:Trollhunters. I believe the biggest reason beyond the tight time frame the crew had to work under is just that the main writers that were responsible for the majority of the original script for ToA:Trollhunters didn’t return to Wizards for whatever reason (they are back for the movie so fingers crossed). The people who wrote Wizards mostly had teleplay credits on ToA:Trollhunters (edited the screen play but didn’t write it) so while they’d been deeply involved in the original... well clearly a lot of ideas were lost in the swap.

So, why do I say the timeline was screwed up by Wizards version of events?

The opening of Wizards tells us that it’s the late 12th century and then says the present is 900 years later. We know that the current year is 2016 because Enrique’s crib in the Darklands lists him as born in 2016 (so while this doesn’t directly set the shows date it can’t be much past that and assuming Enrique is less than a year old, we can say it is 2016). Now 2016 - 900 is actually 1116 which is early 12th century, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

This drastically changes how we understand the history of this world. If Deya is the first Trollhunter, then all other Trollhunters existed between 1116 and 2016. We see at least 14 troll statues in the Hero’s Forge and we also see several others in storage when Claire retrieves Angor Rot’s head for Morgana, so we can assume a minimum of ~20 Trollhunters. This gives us an average of 45 years as the life span of a Trollhunter. And yes that might seem long to a human but we are told the oldest troll was 5,352 years old and since Vendel, Blinky, Arrrgh, and Draal are all there to see the first Trollhunter chosen and thus well over 900 years old (Draal is straight up said to be 1200 years old during ToA:Trollhunters), then to be chosen by the amulet would be a quick death sentence. Now, while Blinky does only say that the Trollhunters date back to the age of Merlin, this is implied to be further back than the lifetimes of the trolls of Heartstone Trollmarket. Draal talks about spending his entire life training to be worthy of it. Kanjigar pushed his son away to protect him from the dangers of the Trollhunter’s duty implying Draal was young and not an adult during this time, and the absolute faith the trolls have in the amulet and their reliance on the protection of the Trollhunter implies that they’d grown up seeing this as normal. Yet as shown in Wizards, Draal was an adult when the amulet was made. If this was the case he would've seen the amulet pick literally anyone other than him for 900 years and have no reason to think it’d pick him now. Also while showing Jim the box of stones to try in his amulet Vendel talks about Maddrux the Many from legends of old. So old they’d all forgotten what the stone’s actual power was, thinking it was the power of great strength and not the ability to make copies of yourself. 900 years, as we’ve established, isn’t long for a troll. Would you call something a legend of old if it was an event you were alive for? Even if Maddrux didn’t hang out in Heartstone Trollmarket, Maddrux wouldn’t have been an ancient legend. Vendel would've been alive for every Trollhunter to have ever been, so would’ve Blinky, yet they talk about the Trollhunter and the amulet in a revered way that doesn’t befit something which happened within a single lifetime, a single troll generation. 900 years is long for humans, but not for trolls. They would all have to have such bad memories if this is to be believed. 

Another point of contention is Angor Rot. It is shown in a flashback that Angor Rot gets power from Morgana in 1297 with the location stated as Bulgaria, Black Sea... which Wizards shows us Angor Rot taking Morgana here after she drowns... but Camelot is in England/UK (in the normal legends)... that seems quite the journey for a dead girl he randomly found but  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. He calls her forth by 4 names Argante (queen of Avalon or another name for Morgan Le Fey), Pale Lady, Baba Yaga, Eldrith Queen. So one, Angor Rot knows who he’s calling to, he’s not addressing the other spirits that Wizards showed using this place. Also it implies that Morgana has gained quite the legacy of power and influence. Now, when he gets her attention he says “Gunmar’s war for the surface lands has ravaged my village. I need the power to protect my people.” This very heavily implies that the war is ongoing. Based on Wizards, Gunmar was sealed away 181 years ago. It’s also strongly implied that all the Gumm-Gumms except Bular are gone now. So... who’s destroying Angor Rots village? Also we see Morgana’s hand in this scene, so either she’s really good at manifesting or she hasn’t been sealed yet. And if it was a manifestation, why would she make a physical ring? Regardless, she tells him he’s to seek Merlin’s Champions and kill his Trollhunters. Angor Rot was later sealed away in an ancient ruin of Aysa-Thoon in Ranthambore, India (which is in the middle of a tiger reserve btw). It’s old and overgrown implying he’s been there a while. Otto also says he found the location in old tomes so at the very least Angor Rot has been sealed away for centuries. So he runs around killing Trollhunters for ~300-400 years. If this is after the Killahead Bridge battle as Wizards would have us believe, then the only trolls on the evil side killing Trollhunters are just Angor Rot and Bular... which just seems off to me for how everything else is talked about in ToA:Trollhunters. 

The Janus Order and the changelings are another confusing point that Wizards makes worse. When asked about changelings Blinky says that in the Old World Gumm-Gumms stole their young and did something unnatural to them and that their main purpose was to spy on the surface lands. Blinky also says that the Janus Order is an ancient guild of changeling spies, as old as they are mysterious. The phrasing of both these points imply that changelings have existed for a very long time by troll standards, not something that happened well within the lifespan of every troll seen in the show. In Wizards we see all of one changeling who’s already an adult and implies his power is new. Gunmar uses plural when he talks about Morgana’s changelings but they are also very clearly a brand new thing. From ToA:Trollhunter we know that human babies and changelings are exchanged through fetches into and out of the Darklands but if Wizards is to be believed and all the Gumm-Gumms except Bular were sealed away after the Killahead Bridge battle in 1116... who was stealing the babies? Bular? Considering how much Bular hates changelings I have a hard time picturing him setting up the exchanges to get the Janus Order established entirely on his own. If we assume there were a few changelings left loose after Morgana was sealed away... maybe... but Morgana and Gunmar just met and have worked together for like 3 days max... why are they so reliant on each other. And if most of the changelings were made after Morgana was sealed away then why are changelings like Otto so beholden and worshipful towards her? In his Janus Order orientation speech Strickler calls her their Lady Creator and that seems undisputed by any of the changelings. It is implied that Morgana is the only reason their are changelings. NotEnrique says he’s centuries old which means he’d been waiting in the Darklands as a baby until he was needed which I always took to mean that all the captured troll babies had been changed by Morgana before she was sealed away. If Morgana isn’t actually needed to make changelings, then why do they worship her and answer to her over Gunmar? Also Morgana only whispered to the changelings like Otto, never to Gunmar in the Darklands, so she couldn’t have helped set up the changeling magic from that side. 

Then there is Morgana and Gunmar’s relationship. What we see in Wizards, Morgana becomes the champion of the 3 new elemental villains, she makes a changeling (off screen) and sends him to kill her brother, only then does she go see Gunmar. When Morgana talks to Gunmar she immediately brings up the Eternal Night, which... if she’s the champions of the 3 elemental beings who want the humans dead to bring balance to the world... how does the eternal night help them? It certainly wouldn’t help Nari of the Eternal Forest and I can’t think of any reason the other two would want that either. It only helps trolls (trolls who don’t realize that all their food sources need sunlight to exist). After we see her add the mind control power to Gunmar’s Decimaar Blade we don’t learn anything else she does for the Gumm-Gumms. To be honest, if I were Gunmar at this point I’d assume she set me up. Some sorceress shows up, is the king’s sister, she frees your son with a new troll hybrid thing you think is impure in order to get you to trust her and gives you a weapon upgrade to make you think you should go all in on the next battle and then you and your whole army gets locked away for 900 years... kinda no reason to think she ever had your back, especially not to the point that you trust people who say they’ve gotten visions from her in a worshipful way. She very clearly did Gunmar no favors in Wizards. 

Merlin, oh Merlin... one, he’s entirely useless in the entirety of Wizards and always doing something wrong or just not having any power to do anything which is just baffling compared to the power he was throwing around in ToA:Trollhunters. As we see Morgana get sealed away in Wizards, it’s Douxie doing the sealing and Merlin has already fallen down and is asleep for some reason. This despite the fact that in ToA:Trollhunters he claimed he needed to use nearly all his power to seal her away and that was why he was asleep. That her being free meant he could get his power back which just... isn’t how anything happened in Wizards. Also Merlin very pointedly claimed that Jim couldn’t defeat Gunmar as a human, that he would die. But, in Wizards Merlin had originally been building the amulet for Arthur, a human. It was only afterwards that he decided to make it for trolls. So was the only reason Jim had to be a troll because the Jim he met was a troll? Because that is just really fucked up. The speech he gave Jim about needing to sacrifice his humanity, it implied that Merlin had planned this all out, seen this moment... but Wizards Merlin was just constantly in reaction mode and was completely backing Arthur and ignoring literally anything anyone else said until right before they went to the trolls for help. Merlin didn’t give a shit about trolls and they also hated him... but afterwards they love him to the point that they’ll talk worshiply about him? And why did they have to go back to the past? Merlin was so insistent they go back to the past at the start of Wizards... implied like they needed to flee the enemy but a moment after the kids are lost in time he just defeats the skull ship and no one that’s left on Camelot is in danger  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. 

Also when Merlin and King Arthur go to the trolls to ask for help, at this point in Wizards it’s mostly been shown to be a battle between Gunmar and King Arthur for territory. It’s implied that the other trolls have until recently been more hurt by Arthur than Gunmar and Gunmar is only now trying to force them to join because he needs more recruits. Yet in ToA:Trollhunter the war was stated to be mostly a disagreement between Gumm-Gumms and all the “good” trolls and the humans just the victims. Everything in ToA:Trollhunters implied that humans didn’t stand a chance against trolls, Gunmar was endlessly dismissive but in Wizards King Arthur and company were a real danger to trolls, Cal/Deya was nearly taken out by an arrow. In fact the trolls of Dwoza were so useless that they needed humans to train them how to fight. They had no warriors? Where were Draal and Kanjigar during the fight with Arrrgh? So all of the trolls who would become the Heartstone Trollmarket trolls (including Bagdwella) had to be trained to fight by humans before Killahead but then were so disgusted by human Trollhunter Jim that they fainted? That they thought the very idea that a human could fight a troll was laughable? Yeah, that doesn’t make sense. 

And Killahead Bridge, let us not forget. It is the portal to the Darklands but as Cal/Deya walks over it she dismissively says its nothing but a bridge over a dried up river so clearly Wizards is saying that Gunmar isn’t actively using the bridge as a portal, in fact we see no portals or any sort of magic used by trolls in Wizards, not even the door like in Heartstone Trollmarket, Dwoza just has a physical door. The only person who seems to have known that the bridge was a portal was Merlin as he is making battle plans. This also implies that the whole point of the amulet was just to seal Gunmar away in the Darklands. Which is just... why? The amulet hadn’t even been tested against Gunmar yet at this point. This brings up so many questions about the Darklands that are more confusing like how anyone figured out the fetches if travel back and forth from the Darklands wasn’t a thing until after the bridge became a sealed door. 

As for the Trollhunters themselves, what were they all doing if every other Trollhunter existed between Deya and Kanjigar? Deya defeated Gunmar and sealed him away leaving only Bular and Angor Rot and the changelings. We know they weren’t fighting the Janus Order because Blinky had to look them up in a book and Blinky has actively been involved in several instances of Trollhunters (at least Kanjigar and Unkar) so he should know. Jim killed both Bular and Angor Rot, to whom everyone else just died. So what were they doing? Just cleaning up Gnome messes and Goblin battles? If there were no other Gumm-Gumms to fight, why was it a revered position that anyone wanted. The way Wizards sets up the timeline its more a curse that just means you have a countdown timer until Bular kills you. Also every single Trollhunter in the void tells Jim its suicide to fight Gunmar, even after he killed Bular. But by Wizards logic the first time the amulet was used against Gunmar it was able to seal him away forever with hardly a fight. If anything they should think Bular was more powerful than his father by that logic. It all just makes no sense. 

There is more, like character backstory elements that upset me. For example how Arrrgh’s trauma over his treatment as a pet by Gunmar was ignored by Wizards and how his fear of violence was intrinsically linked to that trauma which fueled his insistence on pacifism and how Wizards showed him just casually hitting people after swapping sides with out any issues and that is just very upsetting to me, but that’s a very different rant. 

In conclusion, Wizards has a lot of fun elements to it and can be a very fun watch, but it comes off like fan fiction to me, an alternate universe unconnected to the rest of canon. It doesn’t understand the world building that was established in ToA:Trollhunter and absolutely breaks its own timeline. 

I’ve always pictured the line of Trollhunters stretching back to the Broze Age and the beginning of humanity, a war that has lasted several millennia, long enough that every troll in Trollmarket grew up in war, their lives shaped by it. A war that stretched out into their parents and grandparents generations. Which is completely doable from what we know of troll ages. Gunmar could easily be 4,000 years old (he looks it with all his cracks) and still not beat the oldest troll on record. Merlin always felt inhuman and ancient (centuries long nap and he just has to crack his spine), so he could be far far older than the Arthurian legends and have gone by many names. Also I clearly wasn’t the only one with this idea as if you read the Trollhunters novels or comics based after ToA:Trollhunters those authors assumed as I did. One novel has Jim and the gang go back to 501 AD to see Gunmar lose his eye to Orlagk. The Comics show an early Trollhunter interacting with humans from the stone age. To me this makes so much more sense. Trolls are old and long lived, it only makes sense that their perception of what constituted ancient be very different to what we humans see as ancient. They are also shown to be very slow to change, which is why it makes sense that the Trollhunter mantel is something that has been around longer than the current living trolls.

So anyway, I just really hope the movie doesn’t rely on too much of the nonsense that was shown in Wizards and is a fun romp. I loved full troll Jim and I miss half-troll Jim already. It just feels like his whole sacrifice was meaningless, that by undoing it and showing that humans can fight trolls just fine that it had been for nothing. Its just very disappointing. But that’s just my opinion (but then I’ve always voted for a Jim who can change back and forth and really have one foot in each world). 

[flight-of-fantasy]

Okay, I have some headcanons about this!! Obviously, once Merlin learns he’s immortal, he’d panic about forgetting things. I imagine his happier memories of Camelot are something he desperately needs to hold on to for his mental health, and especially as at a certain point in his long life, Arthur’s return is the only thing keeping him going.

SO! I headcanon that Merlin has a memory stone, which is a bit like the Pensieve in Harry Potter. Basically, it’s just a little stone that he can load all his memories onto magically and watch them if he needs to remember--or even bask in them fully by going into them like Harry does in the Pensieve. Perhaps Merlin could wear the stone on a cord around his neck, or keep it in a pouch. He probably has a few of them with his most important memories stashed away in places, just to be safe. 

All that to say, whenever Merlin feels himself starting to forget, he can go back. Relive those memories years over if he wants to or needs to. Remind himself what Arthur’s voice sounds like, or Gwen’s or Gaius’. Remind himself what the language sounds like--as I imagine they’re actually speaking Old Welsh? 

To further expand on the language, the show is by no means historical, so it’s hard to pinpoint what time and place it’s in (which is on purpose, they just give us ‘a land of myth and time of magic’ because we don’t really need to know). However, my best reconciliation of history and the show would be placing the show around circa 10th century Northern Wales. This is because the 10 century puts us before the Norman invasion of the British Isles, and Northern Wales is where Snowdonia is--a.k.a the White Mountains in the show, which are shown not far to the west of Camelot in the maps in the show. Arthur is also known as a Welsh king in the legends and the Welsh are the OG Britons--I mean, they literally have Arthur’s dragon on their flag! So, Camelot was probably located a little east of Snowdonia.

All that to say is, in Camelot, Old Welsh was probably spoken and the written language was likely Latin (as Old Welsh was rarely written and Latin was used in books due to the Church). The 10th century helps with being slightly more the medieval “look” we’d expect than earlier periods without messing with the Normans. SO, Merlin could go back into his memories to remember the beauty of Old Welsh, since it’s a gorgeous Celtic language not spoken anymore (Modern Welsh is close and a descendent, but not mutually intelligible). I imagine Merlin speaks Modern Welsh too and loves speaking Welsh, but he also probably frequents Glastonbury, where Arthur is buried (Glastonbury Tor, a.k.a the Isle of Avalon), and that’s in England, so not much Welsh is likely spoken there. 

Basically, his memories are important and he’d absolutely find a way to keep them safe. 

you ever think how merlin remembers arthur and morgana and gwen and the knights longer than he ever knew them right now ?