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skyeventide · 3 years ago

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my trsb fic has so many notes to the text that they didn’t fit within the ao3 notes’ section character limit lmao, so here is the lengthier version of it. you can consider it a teaser I guess? but either way, I need some place to store these and link them back in the fic.

contents here, cut for length

on the matter of the mother of Gil-Galad

Celebrimbor’s names

shibbolething all over Thauron’s name

actual quotes and canon

On the matter of the mother of Gil-Galad

Meril-i-Turinqi is a Book of Lost Tales character, lady of Tol Eressea, kin of In(g)we but also similar to the Solosimpi, which is to say the Teleri.

The character of "Meril" on the other hand, is a proto-Amarie, Finrod's love interest. In the early draft of Meril's appearance, Finrod is married and is father of Gil-Galad: this draft is obviously discarded and Finrod becomes childless, while Meril transforms into Amarie, who does not join the exile. Gil-Galad is instead transferred to Orodreth, which iirc is Tolkien's last word on the matter (I don't count the Fingon thing as even canon-adjacent, ChrisT was quite clear in admitting the mistake). Now I recall Orodreth is said to be married to a Sinda; why did I discard that? Cause I initally forgot it. Rip to me and Orodreth.

However, what I had was: a proto-Amarie, who is a Vanya, and a BoLT character who is of the family of Ingwe (so a Vanya), but also like the Teleri (so of the third clan, even though not a Sinda). And so Meril-proto-Amarie became Meril-i-Turinqi, wife of Orodreth.

The full headcanon on Meril here would have her as daughter of a Vanya who is kin of Ingwe and of Telerin nobility (or royalty? they're all big on intermarrying between royal families), which fulfills both sides of the coin and also stays true to the statement that Elenwe is the sole full-Vanya to join the exile (I'm gonna assume this excludes any non-royalty followers). Now regarding the parentage of Orodreth, he is here son of Angrod, as I feel that is a better option in almost all respects. This poses some issues with regard to age, as I recall Orodreth-son-of-Angrod and Idril as being named the only two non-adults to do the journey to ME (again... this surely excludes any non-royalty youngsters, but nonetheless). Obviously these issues grow even further if one also includes the matter of Celebrimbor being Aman-born to a wife who doesn't follow Curufin (and therefore the matter of his age at the time of exile), but reconciling these versions is borderline impossible with how the origins of Celebrimbor keep changing throughout the conception of the legendarium.

Long story short, I up the age of Orodreth to be at least old enough to speak softly with Finarfin (here his grandfather) during the flight of the Noldor, but I have him already married though childless. Finduilas is born early into the exile and Gil-Galad is her younger brother.

Meril returns to Aman at the end of the First Age and rules Tol Eressea for the exiles who are stuck there until the Ban is fully lifted.

Celebrimbor's names

FN = father-name, MN = mother-name

I do not claim to have come up with "Tyelperinquar is an epesse", that headcanon, which nonetheless I'm sure happened separately for other people, is one I first read in a fic by Tyelperintal on AO3. That of course means that I could no longer go with the FN Curufinwe MN Tyelperinquar option, and needed another mother-name, which I also borrowed from the same story, and went for Ilvanon, "the perfect". It's pretty, and also speaks of a mix of high expectations and love.

What in this story made me accept the epesse headcanon is the matter of the origin of "T(y)elperinquar" as a name. Vinyar Tengwar (and most recently also NoME) explains how "silver fist" is a name common among the Teleri, famous for their ability to smith silver even among the Noldor, and it is also mentioned how other similar names, such as Tegilbor "calligrapher", are given to people based on their skill. This, however, directly contradicts the fact that elves don't give the same name to more than one person. That statement is problematic in itself (impossible that all elves across all time are aware of all names that ever have been used -- and also of course there's the usual royalty exceptions, that however may well be exceptions because they are royalty), but if it is a common name among the Teleri and we are to keep the duplicate names lore in mind... my only solution is that it's a coveted epesse, given to the very skilled.

Celebrimbor picks it as his chosen and preferred name over FN, already shared by two people and preferred as chosen name by his father, and the potential arrogance of picking his MN with its meaning.

This still led me to problems of both spelling and language choices.

As far as spelling goes, there's several variations. I'm marking with * the one that is not canonically attested, but can be inferred.

Pure Telerin: Telperimpar

Quenya-Telerin compound that maintains the Telerin spelling of silver: Telperinquar

As above, but shortened: Telpinquar

Pure Quenya: *Tyelperinquar

Pure Quenya, shortened: Tyelpinquar

I use all these except the last one at various stages: I decided (though I go back and forth on this) that his household might have used pure Quenya, and his mother sticks to it; the person in Tirion panicks and uses the shortened version Telpinquar, which together with Telperinquar (Telerin spelling maintained) was more common among the Noldor. The Tirion passage exemplifies the uses and applications of these names, how they were given and altered.

This leads me to problems of language and POV, Celebrimbor vs Tyelperinquar. His mother, in her POV, always uses the latter, but Celebrimbor himself uses the former. The true problem here was adapting my feeling that Celebrimbor would be far more used to thinking of himself as Celebrimbor (as opposed to the Quenya name) vs Tolkien's statement that elves do not use names in another language when speaking in X language. This doesn't stay wholly true through the legendarium and the texts, so it's something I've decided to partially ignore when it comes to POV, though I tend to stick to it in first person dialogue. Something that again I try to tackle in the text itself -- when Galadriel tells Celebrimbor which language to speak and which name to use for her.

I am not entirely satisfied with all my choices here and I might revisit them in the future, but for the moment, here we go.

Shibbolething all over Thauron's name

Another language and spelling headache. As I encountered the problem of Sauron, I encountered that of the spelling of his name: the eternal TH/S issue. Were I to have Celebrimbor's mother, and Celebrimbor himself, stick to the Shibboleth? I initially attempted to circumvent this by using Gorthaur, but the issue described just above, about mixing languages, yet again bit me in the ass.

Of course it comes down to characterisation: would Mrs Curufin stick to the Shibboleth, and would Celebrimbor? The matter with Celebrimbor was that I don't believe he spoke Quenya with any real frequency after the Nargothrond business, not as a choice but rather due to circumstances and preferences of those around him. With Ercasse, the conflict is part of the character, and that sadly meant that the TH/S choice became less of a personal choice and more of a political one, as usual.

That got me thinking about the circumstances around her and something interesting came to me: Finarfin spoke Quenya with the Shibboleth, because of the Teleri. And in the Darkening he becomes king in Tirion, and also has to adjust things with the Teleri -- not an easy task, imo, when he turns back only after the pronunciation of the Doom, and not just after the kinslaying occurred. Additionally, the Vanyar spoke preserving TH. Additionally x2, by the Fourth Age, Exilic Quenya (which uses S) is associated with those who rebelled and returned to Aman -- meanwhile any Sindar preserved TH naturally, as it's a sound that never went out of use in Sindarin.

So I chose to take these things and make something of it. If Finarfin maintains TH to keep the Telerin influence; if the Noldor who remain in Aman decide to step closer to the Vanyar in an anti-rebellion reactionary manner and to conform to the speech of the king; if Exilic Quenya gains the lower status of language of the exiles; and considering the canon fact that in later ages the elves are more likely to preserve language rather than change it -- what are our chances that Shibbolething gains opposite connotations as time passes? My conclusion was high chances. So I decided to implement it.

And so Ercasse doesn't have to think about her personal allegiances anymore and has a path built in for herself in these social changes. And Sauron is Thauron. (Unless Galadriel is talking: she doesn't Shibboleth, and uses “Sauron” and “Sindarin”.)

Quotes and canon

Many things I wrote are based on canon snippets. Here I tried to collect them.

On Celebrimbor and the mention of the bath of flames in his speech. It isn't, in fact, a corny lineage reference, but rather a metaphysical or pseudo-physical concept of purification from the Lost Tales:

Yet now the prayers of [their parents] came even to Manwe [the highest Valar], and the Gods had mercy on their unhappy fate, so that those twain Turin and Nienori entered into ... the bath of flame... and so were all their sorrows and stains washed away, and they dwelt as shining Valar among the blessed ones, and now the love of that brother and sister is very fair;

On the naming of Mithril (appears in the upcoming Nature of Middle Earth, as well as already published in Vinyar Tengwar):

[Celebrimbor] was a great silver-smith, and went to Eregion attracted by the rumours of the marvellous metal found in Moria, Moria-silver, to which he gave the name mithril.

On Celebrimbor's ambition and assorted choices, from Letter 131:

In the first we see a sort of second fall or at least ‘error’ of the Elves. There was nothing wrong essentially in their lingering against counsel, still sadly with the mortal lands of their old heroic deeds. But they wanted to have their cake without eating it. They wanted the peace and bliss and perfect memory of ‘The West’, and yet to remain on the ordinary earth where their prestige as the highest people, above wild Elves, dwarves, and Men, was greater than at the bottom of the hierarchy of Valinor. They thus became obsessed with 'fading’, the mode in which the changes of time (the law of the world under the sun) was perceived by them. They became sad, and their art (shall we say) antiquarian, and their efforts all really a kind of embalming – even though they also retained the old motive of their kind, the adornment of earth, and the healing of its hurts. […] But many of me Elves listened to Sauron. He was still fair in that early time, and his motives and those of the Elves seemed to go partly together: the healing of the desolate lands. Sauron found their weak point in suggesting that, helping one another, they could make Western Middle-earth as beautiful as Valinor. It was really a veiled attack on the gods, an incitement to try and make a separate independent paradise.

Legolas and Aragorn and my choice to use the word love:

"[...]Yet whatever is still to do, I hope to have a part in it, for the honour of the folk of the Lonely Mountain." "And I for the folk of the Great Wood," said Legolas, "and for the love of the Lord of the White Tree [Aragorn]."

Celebrimbor and the Elessar. It must be noted that this Celebrimbor is not Celebrimbor son of Curufin, but I still liked the tidbit of lore. From there my choice to have three different Elessar stones, one made by Feanor, one by Enerdhil of Gondolin, one by Celebrimbor (in the fic redressed to Celebrimbor son of Curufin, and without the romantic love for Galadriel):

But he did not say to Galadriel that he himself was of Gondolin long ago. Therefore he took thought, and began a long delicate labour, and so for Galadriel he made the greatest of his works (save the Three Rings only).And it is said that more subtle and clear was the green gem that he made than that of Enerdhil, but yet its light had less power. For whereas that of Enerdhil was lit by the Sun in its youth, already many years had passed ere Celebrimbor began his work, and nowhere in Middle-earth was the light as clear as it had been, for though Morgoth had been thrust out into the Void and could not enter again, his far shadow lay upon it.Radiant nonetheless was the Elessar of Celebrimbor; and he set it within a great brooch of silver in the likeness of an eagle rising upon outspread wings.

On the vale and the stream where Formenos is located, I utilised this passage from Lost Tales:

[...] here the entire people of the Noldoli are ordered to leave Kor for the rugged dale northwards where the stream Híri plunged underground, and the command to do so seems to have been less a punishment meted out to them by Manwe than a pre-caution and a safeguard. In connection with the place of the banishment of the Noldoli, here called Sirnúmen ('Western Stream') [...]

Relevant LotR quotes about the Eregion passages, used for soil description extrapolations and other elements:

Suddenly Gimli, who had pressed on ahead, called back to them. He was standing on a knoll and pointing to the right. Hurrying up they saw below them a deep and narrow channel. It was empty and silent, and hardly a trickle of water flowed among the brown and redstained stones of its bed; but on the near side there was a path, much broken and decayed, that wound its way among the ruined walls and paving-stones of an ancient highroad. ‘Ah! Here it is at last!’ said Gandalf. ‘This is where the stream ran: Sirannon, the Gate-stream, they used to call it. But what has happened to the water, I cannot guess; it used to be swift and noisy. Come! We must hurry on. We are late.’ [...] "...there is a wholesome air about Hollin. Much evil must befall a country before it wholly forgets the elves, if once they dwelt there." "That is true", said Legolas. "But the Elves of this land were of a race strange to us of the silvan folk, and the trees and the grass do not now remember them: Only I hear the stones lament them: deep they delved us, fair they wrought us, high they builded us; but they are gone. They are gone. They sought the Havens long ago."

More TBA if anything comes to mind.

#writing stuff #trsb21

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arcticdementor · 4 years ago

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I have a certain fondness for cyclical history, or at least the notion that there are some structural patterns that seem to recur in predictable waves throughout history – including ones that could explain our current period of upheaval.

Several observers of history have theorized broad 60-100 year secular “cycles” of historical disorder and reorder, such as William Strauss and Neil Howe’s generational theory and Peter Turchin’s “cliodynamic” forecast of an “age of discord” – both of which predicted a period of extended crisis around 2020 and now seem to pretty much be playing out exactly as prophesized.

…

This stuff is worth exploring more, and I aim to do so in the future. But first, I think it might be worth it for us to start by actually thinking bigger – much bigger. As in: what if we aren’t witnessing a period of change “unseen in a century,” but unseen in five centuries? And, what if we are engulfed not in a secular cycle, but in one more fundamentally religious in nature? That’s an important question to analyze, even if you aren’t religious.

In the last decade we’ve seen the emergence in the West of a strident new ideology of “Social Justice” which, despite its self-conceived secularism, many observers have now convincingly argued bears all the hallmarks of a new religious cult, complete with a new metaphysics of truth and reality, a concept of original sin, a new hierarchy of moral virtues, a self-constructed canonical liturgy and a strict orthodoxy, a de-facto priesthood, sacred spaces, self-abasing rituals, a community of believers, linguistic shibboleths, blasphemy laws, and excommunication – among other giveaways.

But, quite notably, this “New Faith” seems to have, consciously or unconsciously, modeled most of its belief system and ritual practices straight out of the Christian tradition, from an overarching preoccupation with the weak and the victimized, along with an emphasis on atonement (though any conception of grace, forgiveness, or redemption is notably absent), right down to specific forms of ritual, like the washing of feet or the symbolic reenactment of martyrdom.

This raises an interesting question: is what we are witnessing now less an entirely new faith than what in the past would have instead been immediately recognized and categorized as part of the long list of Christian heresies, large and small, which challenged the established church throughout history? Could we be living through, as I posited briefly in my introductory essay to The Upheaval, a religious revolution similar to the Reformation that wracked Europe beginning around 500 years ago?

A 500 Year Cycle

Enter the late Phyllis Tickle, an American academic and journalist following religious trends, and her 2008 book The Great Emergence, which essentially argued precisely that. Tickle’s book is frankly what I would have described as a work of pure kookery as recently as five years ago, but, well, times have changed.

The Great Emergence posits that Christianity has throughout its history been shaped by a recurring 500 year-long cycle of structural and spiritual dissolution, turmoil, and re-formation. Each time, the Church has seemingly been seized by a collective desire to cast off established institutional structures and beliefs. She identifies four past rotations of this cycle, coincidentally describing a “mighty upheaval” that has inevitably consumed the Christian world at every climax of this cycle before order was eventually restored.

…

Tickle describes an established religion as a sort of cable – not just a metaphorical “cable of meaning that keeps the human social unit connected to some purpose and/or power greater than itself,” but with the analogy of an actual cable.

Inside a steel cable are three interwoven strands, in this case representing spirituality (interior religious experience and belief), corporeality (the physical embodiment/evidence of a religious practice’s existence and practice, such as books, liturgy, or a priest’s robes), and morality (essentially applied spirituality, filtered through corporeality). On the outside of the cable is a waterproof casing that protects the interior. In our analogy, this is the religion’s story (the mythic and actual shared history that unites members). Finally, in between the casing and the strands is a pliable mesh sleeve that makes the cable more flexible and less brittle, and helps to absorb shocks. This is the common imagination or illusion of the religion’s believers about “how the world works” and is “to be imaged and thereby understood.” It serves as a general operating system for the group.

So constructed, said religious cable can rest underwater on the seabed of history for quite a long time unperturbed in its function. However, eventually the outer casing (the story) will become corroded, and the interior mesh (collective imagination) disrupted by events. At first this is fine, and the cable continues to hold, or is even repaired. That is until “that fateful time, about once every five hundred years, when the outer casing of the story and inner sleeve of the shared illusion take a blow simultaneously. When that happens, a hole is opened straight through to the braid. The water rushes in; and human nature being what human nature is, we reach our collective hand in through the hole and pull out the three strands one at a time. Spirituality first, corporeality second, and morality last. We pull each up, consider it from every possible angle, and at times finger it beyond all imagining.” (If you’re now thinking of the rapid growth of people in the 21st century that began claiming they’re “spiritual but not religious,” you are connecting the dots here).

…

Which brings us to a final interesting pattern that Tickle identifies in every cycle: the emergence of at least one “new form” of Christianity, but also simultaneously a process of “re-traditioning” by the original faith that has “occurred with each turn of the eras and is a substantial dynamic in the progression from upheaval to renewed stability.” In the case of the Reformation, the Church was “freed” to tackle errors and corruptions, and to make significant institutional reforms (in the Fifth Lateran Council, the Councils of Trent, etc.) during a period of counter-reformation that would eventually produce a less decadent and more unified, clarified, and vibrant Catholic Church.

…

What happened in sum, in Tickle’s telling, is that “sola scriptura, scriptura sola,” which “had answered the authority question in the sixteenth century and, more or less, had sustained the centuries between the Great Reformation” and the modern day, was mortally wounded. In largely Protestant America, this had big consequences (and meanwhile the Catholic Church was facing similar pressures). Any agreement on the three strands of the cable – what it means to be “spiritual”; what the corporeality of the church should looks like, or if it should even exist; and eventually what it means to be a moral person – was now gone.

The result, she says, has been the emergence of a new faith structure.

The very first manifestation of this, Tickle argues, dates back to the birth and explosive growth in America of Pentecostalism, a form of “charismatic” Protestantism that emphasizes a radically egalitarian, direct and personal relationship with God sufficient to produce the famed “speaking in tongues” common in Pentecostal worship. Pentecostalism “by definition assumes direct contact of the believer with God and, by extension, the direct agency of the Holy Spirit as instructor and counselor and commander as well as comforter.” As such, “Pentecostalism assumes that ultimate authority is experiential rather than canonical… Pentecostalism, in other words offered the Great Emergence its first, solid, applied answer to the question of where now is our authority.”

Today, however, even Pentecostalism is beginning to break down – along with evangelicalism and pretty much every other denomination – and see its followers assimilated into something new: the “Emergent Church.” But what exactly is that?

…

And the “Emergents,” it turns out, “are postmodern.” Despite all that rationalist science from earlier, the takeaway from the collapse of authority has been “that logic is not worth nearly so much as the last five hundred years would have had us believe. It is, therefore, not to be trusted as an absolute, nor are its conclusions to be taken as truth just because they depend from logical thinking.”

…

But who ultimately determines the narrative in this ultra-democratic faith? Tickle taps into network theory to answer: crowd sourcing. The group will manifest its own values and own authority. This “differs [from the past] in that it employs total egalitarianism, a respect for worth of the hoi polloi that even pure democracy never had, and a complete indifference to capitalism as a virtue or to individualism as a godly circumstance.”

Is any of this beginning to sound somewhat worrying to you? Well don’t worry, says Tickle – and it is worth pausing here to note that Tickle is an enthusiastic self-described Emergent who thinks this is all great news – the coalescing Emergent Church will settle on new answers to authority, spirituality, morality, and practice, and find its footing as the new dominant Christianity. Meanwhile the reactionaries left in the corners will undergo a process of re-traditioning and come out the better for it in the end. And they can take heart that “every time the incrustations of an overly established Christianity have been broken open, the faith has spread – and been spread – dramatically into new geographic and demographic areas, thereby increasing exponentially the range and depth of Christianity’s reach as a result of its time of unease and distress.”

And with the new egalitarian faith tradition so deeply in touch with our common humanity, all the bloodshed and general unpleasantness experienced during every past historical case of “emergence” will presumably be avoided (Tickle seems to forget about that part in her excitement). Then everyone will live happily ever after – or at least for another 500 years.

That was Tickle’s conclusion anyway. But she published The Great Emergence in 2008 and died in 2015, so she didn’t live to see what’s actually happened.

The Actual Great Emergence

Tickle wrote her book too soon. Liberal, vibrating, Eastern-inspired hippies no longer, her “Emergent Church” seems to have taken a turn in the last decade that she didn’t see coming, transforming into a rather different beast.

Here’s what I think may have happened. Tickle got a lot of things very right: the cable of institutional Christianity was corroded by science and cultural entropy; sola scriptura, scriptura sola did break down, and the faith did enter a crisis centered on the question “where now is authority?” A new Christianity did began to emerge, just as she described.

In fact the trends toward the collapse of establishment Christianity were perhaps even more powerful than she may have predicted. A recent Gallup poll found that less than 50% of American’s are now official members of a church or other religious organization, down from over 60% in 2008.

…

But – and this is my theory – in the end Tickle’s version of Emergent Christianity proved a weak social construct. It existed to gratify its adherents with the belief that they were still morally good members of a religious tradition, whose primary goal was to provide for their happiness, while liberating them from any higher authority beyond themselves and freeing them from any of the responsibilities or strictures that had once characterized that religion.

In other words, Emergent Christianity was mostly Moralistic Therapeutic Deism all along.

Ultimately, this fragile early-stage Emergent Church didn’t resolve the crisis because it didn’t have any real authority, meaningful substance, or unifying purpose.

Meanwhile, many of the seeds planted within Emergent Christianity that Tickle mentioned were still finishing germinating, namely: post-modernism, narrative-driven reality, direct personal relationship with and self-interpretation of divinity, opposition to hierarchy, and crowd-sourced authority.

But, most important of all was I think something Tickle doesn’t really touch on too much: the modernity-driven suspicion, deep within the hearts even of many Christians, that in fact, as Nietzsche infamously put it, “God is dead.” Increasingly skeptical about the existence of any kingdom of God in heaven, they were primed for a logical alternative: building the kingdom of heaven on earth instead.

The stage was thus set for The Great Merger.

At some point the Emergent Church came face-to-face with secular, identity-based “Social Justice” activism – likely in the 2010s, when core theoretical ideas behind that movement, based on post-modern Critical Theory and neo-Marxist frameworks of identitarian struggle, first really began to seep out of the academy and crystalize into effective activist movements, such as Black Lives Matter or the trans rights movement, in a big way.

Both sides liked what they saw, but for the Emergent Church in particular this was a match made in narrative heaven. Secular Social Justice activism dovetailed perfectly with both the strong historical emphasis on social justice work within many Christian denominations (including the Social Gospel movement) and the post-modern seeds already present in Emergent Christianity (such as the primacy of self-interpreted identity). But more importantly it offered Emergents nearly everything they had been missing and longing for. Suddenly they had a new source of authority (the doctrines of Critical Theory and the hierarchy of intersectional identity), a clear metaphysics of good and evil (the oppressed and their oppressors), an ultimate objective (to perfect the world by the elimination of evil), and a grand narrative of how to live in the world.

George Orwell famously wrote in his 1940 review of Mein Kampf that: “Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.” Well, the Emergent Church offered its restless followers comfort and a good time on earth; neo-Marxist Social Justice offered them revolutionary struggle, and so they prostrated themselves immediately.

…

That’s not the end of the story though, as I think Emergent Christianity may have had more influence on the secular activist movement than the latter tends to consider. In fact I think it might have been quite important to the rapid emergence and spread of the New Faith.

To start with, it provided the concept of sin. This helped grow and empower the activist movement tremendously. Why? One might not think of free-wheeling secular culture embracing the idea of sin so easily, even joyfully, but it was a simple matter. As an example, picture a hypothetical middle-class suburban white lady, enjoying a relatively comfortable material life but wracked by a vague but unshakable sense of guilt about her existence – for being white in a country with a history often unkind to non-whites; for her consumption habits contributing to environmental pollution and climate change; for being the citizen of a rich country while elsewhere in the world children starve, and so on. Liberalism has never addressed this feeling in a satisfactory way. Suddenly, along comes the New Faith, and tells her that it’s all true: she is indeed a sinner, and she’s not alone! In fact the whole country and her whole race is corrupted by the original sins of colonialism, slavery, and genocide. What a relief! Even better, it has a comprehensive plan of action for how to address this sin.

This helped reorient Social Justice from the purely systemic to the personal. Neo-Marxist roots mean that the modern Social Justice movement tends to think primarily in terms of systems, and aims to drive systemic change to address systemic problems, like “systemic racism.” Broadly speaking, this is still the case, but the problem is that this is both a hard goal and a cold, impersonal one. It’s not very inspiring to tell people their individual agency is of little import to the machine and that the only way to affect progress is to change the whole machine. Activism seems like pretty desperate business in that case. The concept of sin, however, provides a short circuit to this problem: it implies that progress can be made through a sort of personal moral transformation (say by acknowledging one’s privilege and “unconscious bias” and moving from “racist” to “anti-racist”) which anyone can achieve if they “educate” themselves and “do the work.” Liberalism has studiously avoided telling our secular white lady how she should live in the world, so this kind of moral direction provides the relief of having a distinct path. Moreover, if everyone was to accept this path all the problems of the world would be immediately be solved, so convincing (or forcing) more people to accept the Good News and begin their personal transformation becomes an imperative mission.

…

Finally, it provides an even greater sense of community to the faithful, helping to overcome the atomizing isolation and loneliness of liquid modernity. This is a somewhat odd community though. Just as Tickle predicted, communications technology has made it simultaneously vast and hyper-democratic. You might question whether the strict orthodoxy and blasphemy codes of the New Faith, to which one must submit or be canceled, are democratic, but that is only because you have forgotten your Plato and Aristotle, either of whom could have warned you what tends to happen to pure democracies. As Aristotle put it in his Politics:

[T]here demagogues spring up. For the people becomes a monarch, and is many in one; and there many have the power in their hand, not as individuals, but collectively… At all events this sort of democracy, which is now a monarchy, and no longer under the control of law, seeks to exercise monarchical sway, and grows into a despot.

If you ever wonder why something you said that was fine 72 hours ago is now an unredeemably racist, sexist, excommunicable offense, it’s because the disembodied Swarm Pope, who leads the People’s Democratic Priesthood of All Believers, crowd-sourced it from the swirling Id of the mob on Twitter while you weren’t looking.

…

The problem is that, even if the 500 year cycle that Tickle describes is genuine, it isn’t clear in each case what is cause and what is effect. As Tickle acknowledges at one point in her book, “over and over again,” the “religious enthusiasms” of each period of cyclical emergence “are unfailingly symptomatic or expressive of concomitant political, economic, and social upheavals.” So was the Reformation the cause of Europe’s 16th century turmoil, or just one important manifestation of a broader secular dynamic driving general upheaval? If the “great emergence” was not the cause, then what was? Tickle doesn’t attempt an answer to that, so our inquiry is back near square one.

However, I do have a suspicion that the question Tickle identifies as at the core of recurring crises in established Christianity – “where now is authority?” – is key. It may be that the seeming collapse of any firm locus of authority in almost every aspect of life today – politics, geopolitics, elites in general, religion, morality in general, asset pricing, economics in general, media, information in general, etc. – is central to our whole broader upheaval in the world today.

#n. s. lyons #substack #religion #long #read the whole thing #phyllis tickle #christianity

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cyrefinn · 6 years ago

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On passion and calculation

Headcanon time! I was thinking earlier about how I wrote Curufin four years ago and how to hit my stride with him again. At my peak activity level, it felt natural to write in his voice. I felt I knew him well. I’ve been revising the canon and revisiting also my old threads and headcanons, and I came up with this as a corollary to a few of my previous headcanon posts in which I speak of Curufin’s as being crafty (outside of the forge), thoughtful, deliberate, manipulative, etc. (e.g. here) And yet, this is not entirely accurate.

This is only part of the picture. For is not Curufin his father’s son, most like him in temper, as well as look and appearance? And is Fëanor not known to be passionate?

Curufin consciously tries to come off as always in control, and often he does act in a cold and calculating way. He certainly spends a good deal of thought and energy on thinking what roads to take, how to optimize his choices to most efficiently achieve his goals, how to influence the things and people around him that he can to help himself. He is crafty...

But he has many strong passions, as well. His interest is easily diverted, and he loves to learn and to experiment. He will often do things out of curiosity. He will do things just because they feel good. Because he wants to. It’s the centuries-old Noldorin equivalent of considering something and then just being like, “Fuck it,” and going for it, just for the hell of it. Sometimes these things will set him back, and he will acknowledge that, and he’ll do them anyway. If asked to explain something like that, Curufin would probably say some version of that the utility he derives from the activity offsets, or even outweighs, the disutility of the strategic setback. (There’s always a logical explanation.)

And he can be moved to anger, hate, and malice much more easily than he lets on, and himself believes. Again, take Fëanor, the one who cursed and insulted Morgoth and slammed the door in his face (ref. the immortal quote, “Get thee gone from my gate, thou jail-crow of Mandos!”), the one who swore that infamous Oath, the one who burned the ships, who (to his downfall) was so eager “to come at Morgoth himself” that in battle he pressed beyond his vanguard alone and fought a bunch of Balrogs like it was his day job (“long he fought on, and undismayed, though he was wrapped in fire and wounded”).

A note in particular about the burning of the ships at Losgar. There’s a quote from The Shibboleth of Fëanor I’ve always found interesting for a number of reasons but here the only relevant part is the detail about the relationship between Fëanor and Curufin: “In the night Feanor, filled with malice, aroused Curufin, and with him and a few of those most close to Feanor in obedience he went to the ships and set them all aflame; and the dark sky was red as with a terrible dawn.” Here Curufin is the only son of Fëanor mentioned by name to participate in the burning of the ships. That’s no accident. Although in my RP I subscribe to the Silmarillion version (in which all the sons but Maedhros participate), I do draw upon the Shibboleth’s version for inspiration and information about who Curufin is.

Curufin is his father’s son. In Fëanor’s place, Curufin would likely have felt the same malice and done the same thing; in helping his father burn the ships, he probably felt some version of that malice because he loved his father and sympathized and was affine with him.

I like to think of Curufin’s conversation with Eöl as well, in which he is said to be “of perilous mood.” I always read this as “of perilous mood at the time” but it’s still interesting. Curufin is somewhat rude to Eöl in this interaction, laughing at him and giving him to understand in no unclear terms how much he dislikes and distrusts him. (Yet I note that, despite his dislike of Eöl and disapproval of his choice in spouse, Curufin nonetheless grants Eöl his life (when he might have taken it easily with impunity), his leave, and a warning: “This counsel I add: return now to your dwelling in the darkness of Nan El-moth; for my heart warns me that if you now pursue those who love you no more, never will you return thither.”) This is sloppier work than I would normally ascribe to Curufin, and it serves to underline that, when he’s in a mood, Curufin can be careless and say/do things that might be better left unsaid/undone.

All this is to say I wonder sometimes if I focus too much on the “crafty” aspect and not enough on the fact that he is like Fëanor and, like his father, has a fire in his spirit that often masters him. I do love me some complicated characters (the more complicated, the better!), so I may start exploring this aspect of Curufin a bit more going forward.

#headcanon #out of the forge #[if you've been wondering why I am so slow]#[it's because I haven't written curufin in literally 4 years and am a little out of practice]#[also because my job is insane but mainly this]#[it's like getting to know someone again after a long time apart]

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