#elvenfair

[riding-with-the-wild-hunt]

But suddenly her eyes looked into his, and then Húrin knew her; for though they were wild now and full of fear, a light still gleamed in them hard to endure: the elven-light that long ago had earned her her name, Eledhwen, proudest of mortal women in the days of old." - J.R.R. Tolkien, The Children of Húrin, "The Death of Túrin"

[ID: an edit comprised of two dark-toned posters in red and shades of brown and tan.

1: A close-up of nepali model and musician Varsha Thapa. She is looking towards the viewer with a serious expression and her dark hair blends into the black background. She has light tan skin and is wearing dark red lipstick. Text in red and tan reads "morwen eledhwen" / 2: A group of white and red buildings surrounded by mountains. Red and tan text reads "Morwen was dark-haired and tall, and for the light of her glance and the beauty of her face men called her Eledhwen, the elvenfair; but she was somewhat stern of mood and proud. The sorrows of the House of Bëor saddened her heart; for she came as an exile to Dor-lómin from Dorthonion after the ruin of the Bragollach" and is framed by curly corner borders in the same colors /End ID]

[outofangband]

Note: I am posting/finishing this in between two shifts in one day so I’m very sleepy and thus apologize if this needs more work (it definitely does)

I am thinking a lot about Morwen in the minds of others, of those who valorize and praise her and those who hate and fear and dehumanize her

For all that Morwen is likened to the elves, for all that she is literally accused of being a witch, for all the stories and distortions of her she is still so strongly Morwen

I just think a lot about the various lines about Morwen’s appearance and other’s perceptions of her and how so many connect

And other lines too, Sador’s description of her and the description of her legacy in Brethil after her death.

“For the light of her glance and the beauty of her face, men called her Eledhwen, the Elvenfair”

“The light in her eyes, hard to endure”

“He had thought he had looked in the fell eyes of (an elf)”

I just think so much about how Morwen exists in various ways in the eyes of others who praise her and hate her and love and fear and admire and dehumanize her. And at the same time she is so distinctly herself and she holds onto this so tightly, even when it cuts into her as much as others’ views of her.

She is a character who both has such a strong and distinctive identity and personality and also who we see through the eyes of others, in ways that are sometimes accurate but also valorizing or othering.

And I know I’ve talked about this before but that horror of knowing you are viewed as dangerous and not only will this not protect you but people will view violence against you as righteous

Like she is the proudest and fairest of mortal women and a hated and feared elf witch and once she was a little girl who was nearly killed by terrible fires and invading armies who became a woman who was proud and stern and sharp also loyal and so deeply loved by those who knew her well.

It goes into a lot of things about gender and culture and cultural displacement/diaspora that I think about so much for her and her story

Anyways I’ll return to this later! Also thank you so much to @elwing and @slightnettles for listening to my ramblings about this and for your own amazing Morwen writing 🩵

[lordofladros-blog]

"I'm here to rescue you." (from your waifu @elvenfair)

It was a whisper that stirred him out of the darkness, and he surfaced slowly like from the great depth of a tainted lake. Gasping and blinking he awoke, daylight that had already become unfamiliar stinging in his eyes.

Light... How? There had only been the darkness of the tower’s pits, the utter silence of it, the pale, cold face of Finrod Felagund, terribly beautiful in the stillness of death. The quiet, inescapable despair that had taken root in his heart.

But like a breath of a western breeze, something had gently blown away the fog of desolation, and the air that filled his lungs was fresh and clean. The tower had crumbled to ruins around the dungeon, and there was a hold around him, warm and familiar, a solace and comfort that seemed to have been eliminated from the world altogether.

“Tinúviel.”

The whisper of a broken voice on his cracked lips, and his hands came up to her arms, afraid that, should he turn around, she would dissolve like a dream. Yet... there she stayed, solid and real, and he drew her into his arms when she didn’t respond, whispering her name over and over.

“Lúthien, Lúthien, my Tinúviel...”

[wingedherald-blog]

                                                                      ｢   @elvenfair   ｣       /       🌙 !

grim   smile ,   surprise   lining   its   edges    ────   familiar   faces   are   hardly   a   comfort   nowadays . 

❝     it   has   been   a   while .     ❞  

[emmitdemmit]

Meet Vanimelda she is my orchid #elvish #elvenfair #sindarin #orchid #vanimelda https://www.instagram.com/p/CFyJMQKJeSB/?igshid=1ww0ct2d3az93

[arofili]

@aspecardaweek day three | across the a-spectrum | nebularomantic morwen

Morwen was dark-haired and tall, and for the light of her glance and the beauty of her face men called her Eledhwen, the elvenfair; but she was somewhat stern of mood and proud. The sorrows of the House of Bëor saddened her heart; for she came as an exile to Dor-lómin from Dorthonion after the ruin of the Bragollach.

—The Children of Húrin, “The Childhood of Túrin”

[image description: a 3x3 moodboard. 1: the full moon shining through a mauve cloudscape. 2: the silhouettes of a flock of black birds on a muted pink background. 3: black lineart and text on a pink background, depicting a rose on a stem with the caption “Your eyes are like oceans and Im slowly drowning in them” 4: small circular mauve flowers in a gray field. 5: Morwen from the Silmarillion on the background of the nebulromantic flag; she is depicted in a picrew as a human woman with medium olive skin, ice blue eyes, and long black hair pulled back in a ponytail; she is wearing silver laurels in her hair, black eyeshadow, many black and silver studs and hoops in hear ears, an off-the-shoulder black shirt with white spiral embroidery, and a fancy black necklace with blue gems; she is holding a lilac-colored teacup with blueberries painted on it. 6: a book open on a white tablecloth, surrounded by white flowers. 7: black text on a muted teal background reading “Every inch a queen” 8: a dark blue starscape. 9: calm, dark blue ocean waves with a reflection of moonlight on the water’s surface. end image description.]

[bombadil-archive4]

ellie’s blog list

I have basically lost control over my life and I’ve been making / bringing back a lot of blogs lately, so I thought I would compile a list for convenience. Please note that all of my blogs are sideblogs to this account, and all are private and excruciatingly slow activity. 

Andriel from LOTR: WitN-- @valorfated

Lúthien from The Silmarillion-- @elvenfair

Elsa from Frozen / Snedronningen-- @snowhearted

ASOIAF multimuse-- @deadladies

Maggie from The Walking Dead-- @maggie-greene

Annie from Dead Rising 2 / 3-- @zombrexed

Elaine from The Love Witch-- @lovepotential

Villanelle from Killing Eve-- @killnicely

I’m also working on a new protagonist for a novel I’d like to write, and I will be making a blog for her as soon as I have her character more developed. Please note that Elaine and Villanelle are new and under considerable construction. Thanks for coming to my ted talk. 

[lokilickedme]

Hello My Lady! Just because you asked, here are my faves of yours: #1 King (no surprise here), #2 Jack (too crazy not to love, and the stream crossing of pretty much all your stories is genius) #3 Chem/BD/TTW/TKH/TWK/can't remember them all. They're all special in their own way! Can't believe it'll be 3yrs soon since I started squatting your page!!! God time goes by fast! I'd like to add a special mention for the Muse Meetings, sooo funny, and a Golden Snowflake to Aleks. Cute little bumkin.

Thank you @fudgemuffinanon!  Dear god, has it been that long?  Seems like I joined up last year…*sits here blinking at my posts from 2015, wondering how that happened*

**LONG TEXT POST COMING UP**

You drew the lucky straw today my darling, I’m feeling wordy and in the mood to share.  A lot of people have asked me over the last couple of years how some of my stuff came about, and you mentioned one that gets a lot of asks.

Lemme tell you something about the Muse Meetings.  Way back in 1998 when I got my first computer, one of the very first things I ran across by way of internet fanfiction was a little something called The Very Secret Diaries penned by a writer named Cassandra Claire (who is now professionally published under the name Cassandra Clare).  The Very Secret Diaries (which are hilarious, btw) woke something up in me - mainly because, as a lifelong writer who had never allowed anyone to read 95% of my work, I finally realized that yeah, there were other people out there whose brains deviated from the standard in the same way mine did.  Her writing style back then (in the Diaries specifically, I’ve never actually read anything else she’s written) was very similar to the way I wrote, and those Diaries were exactly the sort of silly, ridiculous, irreverent thing I’d scribbled in my notebooks for most of my life.  And people liked it, she had a huge following based on just those out-of-context glimpses of her characters’ personal thoughts.  She was writing behind the scenes thoughts of characters, things that would never make it into books, and it was brilliant.  That was the kind of stuff I loved to write but had never given myself permission to show anyone.  She was showing hers to people, and they were loving it.

Which gave me the inspiration to not only put my work out there in the public eye for the first time ever, but to stick with my personal writing style (which I’d always assumed wasn’t what other people wanted to read, based on the books I’d been exposed to most of my life).  Not change anything.  Just do me.  And doing me meant writing silly nonsense if I wanted to.

So - The Very Secret Diaries are more or less the inspiration for the Muse Meetings, or at least the official written version of them.  I’d always imagined dialogues with my characters outside the confines of whatever story I was working on, but never thought anyone else would be interested in seeing me write it out.

The Diaries made me realize different.  Not only were her characters yammering and complaining and snarking at each other (both out of character and in), they were doing it in exactly the way I’d imagined my own characters interacting in the real world.  I loved it.  Seeing someone else do what I’d always done in my head - and do it in an official, out-there-in-the-public-eye capacity, was a revelation.  Finally I was able to give myself permission to write the way I wanted to, without restricting myself to the styles and methods in the books in the family library.  It had always been in my head, but now it didn’t have to stay there.  I could write proper stories, but I could also write what was going on in the other room, where the reader seldom gets to peek.  And other people besides myself might like it because hey, there’s precedent.

That was freeing, and I am grateful to Ms Claire for that.

So, a little history that leads up to how and why I finally started writing out the Muse Meetings:

My first fandoms that I wrote for online were Harry Potter and Star Wars (Kenobi specifically).  And yes, way back then (late 90′s - early 2000′s) there were already muse meetings among my characters.  I’ve been doing these for a long time, and I wish the out-of-character stuff I’d written back then still existed (my HP stuff bit the dust when The Restricted Section shut down, and my SW stuff was on FF.net for a little while but honestly I don’t remember my user ID there or the titles of the fics, though I have searched…so they’re most likely lost as well).  It’s sort of a shame because there were some old Anakin/Obi-Wan muse meetings that you guys would have loved…and the stuff between Remus and Sirius while we were hashing out what was going to be in their next chapter?  It still pains me that it’s all lost, but maybe it’s for the best.  That was nearly two decades ago, we move on to bigger and (hopefully) better things.

After my urge to write HP fic fizzled out I stopped writing for a while, but there were always muse meetings going on in my head for stories I scribbled mentally.  To me they’ve always been more fun than the actual stories, which explains my love for gag reels and behind-the-scenes featurettes for movies (I watch those first, always).

And then I found AO3 - funnily enough, I discovered it while searching the internet for one of my lost HP fics - and I decided to start writing in earnest again.  With all those thousands and thousands of fics and endless fandoms, it seemed like the perfect place to indulge my need to share what went on in my head.  And as I settled into the MCU and my stories started to grow to include multitudes of characters, those impromptu staff meetings with my muses kept being called to order.  Stuff that my characters would never say in the context of their stories got said.  Scenarios that were too ridiculous to waste time writing were played out.  Arguments and fights and bantering between characters who, in the restrictive confines of their own tales, would never in a million years interact…now they were throwing poptarts at each other (and occasionally knives) while the side characters wandered out of the room to watch TV or raid the fridge or sat in horror as someone’s until-now unassuming wife brandished a melon baller as a weapon.

It was messy and fun and was by far my favorite part of the writing process.

That’s what eventually became the Muse Meetings.  You want to know how they escaped my head and became an official thing?

Well I’m gonna tell ya lol

One of my very first friends in here, the fantastic @elvenfair1, was one of my first readers at AO3 and she told me I should post links to my fics at this site called tumblr to bring in a bigger audience.  So I opened an account here, followed her, posted some links as suggested, and she and I began messaging back and forth pretty much every night as we wrote our respective fics, bouncing ideas off each other and discussing plot points and brainstorming for character names.  And as my characters sassed me and refused to cooperate with what I wanted them to do, I would tell elvenfair what was going on in my head with my dumbass OCs and OFCs and we’d laugh and gripe about trying unsuccessfully to reel in our unruly muses.

And then one night back in 2015 she said “You should post this muse stuff, it’s hilarious.”

You know what the first thing I thought was?  Cassandra Claire did it 14 years ago and people loved it.  So yeah, I can sure as hell do it if I want.  If nobody is interested in it, at least it’ll amuse me and elvenfair and that’s cool enough.

And so I did.  I started posting them in here first, then as people started requesting them more I eventually moved them to AO3 in a more structured format.  And now you guys have multiple Lokis hurling curses at a bartender and viciously baiting a hapless movie star while teenage versions of two other attendees flirt with unsuspecting OFCs, with an occasional appearance by Thor dropping hints about future chapters and looking for fruit roll-ups.  It’s messy, but it’s fun and I’ve always enjoyed writing it as a way to let my brain decompress, especially when one of my “real” stories has hit a roadbump.

Since then I’ve seen countless other professional writers doing the exact same thing - J.R. Ward even posts her own version of muse meetings on her official website AND has a published book (her Insiders Guide) that is almost entirely nothing BUT muse meetings.   It’s surprising how many writers actually do this and I sometimes wonder if authors like Poe, Steinbeck, Vonnegut, Tolkien, Gaiman, McMurtry didn’t do it themselves (I’d bet money on McMurtry).  Just goes to show there’s not an original idea anywhere in the universe…no matter how much you might believe you came up with it first, someone out there has been doing it for a long damn time before you - and a million more will do it after you :)

Anyway, I haven’t written any muse meetings in a while but they still go on constantly in my head.  I get asked about once a week to go back to doing them, and one day I will, when I have time for it.  My actual fics are struggling for writing time as it is and I made a conscious decision to weed out the unnecessary stuff in favor of “real work” (yeah right lol)…but yeah, the Meetings are still one of my favorite things and I won’t stop doing them permanently - they’ll be back.

So thank you Cassandra Claire for inspiring me to let them fly…if it weren’t for those whacked-out Diaries, the Muse Meetings would all still be in my head with only one person (me) laughing at them.

[outofangband]

Having to repost this because there was actually a part of a line I forgot to include that connects things even more strongly so I’m making a new post

Actually I’m not done obsessing about Morwen’s second name, Eledhwen

I’ve spent so many times analyzing the etymology of “Witchwife it is but elf-friend in the new language” but the actual translations of Eledhwen are very interesting too

Eledhwen is a title associated specifically with Morwen. It is described in Tolkien's etymologies as a "sobriquet of Morwen". That it is specifically for one person might explain the discrepancy between the roots and the given meanings. No trace of the words or roots usually meant for sheen, brightness or light appear in Eledhwen though it’s worth noting that the Quenya word for moon, Iþil which means sheen does appear to have phonetic similarities though this might be irrelevant.

The el obviously refers to the Eldar with the prefix Eledh meaning star folk or elven folk

The suffix wen is a feminine suffix but its connotations are specifically related to maidenhood and sometimes beauty.

In The Children of Húrin we get this, “and for the light of her glance and the beauty of her face men called her Eledhwen, the Elvenfair”. Later in the book and in other versions, Eledhwen is more specifically linked to Morwen’s gaze, for example, "The elven light that had long ago earned her name, Eledhwen"

Eledhwen is more specifically translated as Elfsheen in The Silmarillion, "and Morwen, who was named Eledhwen, that is Elfsheen, daughter of Baragund".

I was wondering about when she was first named this and by who. It seems to me that depending on when in her life (pre or post sudden flame, child, adolescent or adult) and by who (her own people, the Hadorians, both independently, etc ) give the name somewhat different connotations

Anyways, it’s fascinating to me that the reasons and associations for Eledhwen are indeed in many ways the same as those that lead to Morwen being called a witch, “Witchwife they called her”, just framed differently

It’s all connected!

“A light still gleaned in them hard to endure; The elven light that had long ago earned her her name”

“He thought that he had looked in the fell eyes of an elf and he was filled with a mortal fear lest some evil overtake him”

( I love Morwen so so much)

Sources: Letters of JRR Tolkien, linguistics indexes of Silmarillion, Lays, and unfinished index

[bombadil-archive4]

Here is a list of all the sideblogs attached to @valorfated, in case anyone is interested in my other muses:

@elvenfair -- Lúthien Tinúviel from the Silmarillion

@snowhearted -- Queen Elsa from a darker interpretation of Frozen

@boyeating -- Jennifer Check from Jennifer’s Body

@killnicely -- Villanelle from Killing Eve & Codename Villanelle

@maggie-greene -- Maggie Rhee from The Walking Dead

@lovepotential -- Elaine Parks from The Love Witch

@zombrexed -- Katey Greene from Dead Rising 2 & 3

@deadladies -- ASOIAF multi featuring Lyanna Stark 

I’m also working on a couple of new blogs that are heavily under construction, but I thought I’d list them here anyways in case you guys wanted to know:

@murderhunt -- Grace Olsen from an original detective novel

@psychoscopy -- Theodora Crain from Haunting of Hill House

[wingedherald-blog]

"I learned that nothing in this universe is what you think it is." (From elvenfair)

                                                                     ｢   @elvenfair   ｣       /       🌙 ! 

❝     no .  it  is  music ,  ever-changing .    ❞   an  elder  creature  such  as  she  should  be  stranger  to  surprise ,  &  yet   ────  doubt ,  a  present  companion  in  her  shadow .  celestial  heavens  seem  to  have  changed  over  the  ages ,  patterns  foreign  to  once-familiar  gaze .  the  mortals  have  new  names  for  them ,  now    /     &  she  hums  them   ‘neath  her  tongue .

an  illusion  of  a  smile  blossoms .  ❝    it  is  frustrating .    ❞    

[bombadil-archive4]

BLOG LIST

I have lost control of my life so here’s where you can find me:

@valorfated ANDRIEL OF IMLADRIS of LoTR: War in the North

@elvenfair LÚTHIEN TINÚVIEL of The Silmarillion

@zombrexed KATEY ANN GREENE of Dead Rising

@snowhearted SNOW QUEEN ELSA of Frozen & Snedronningen