#including jirt himself

[quickdraw-exposure]

Rereading The Hobbit, like you do, and when the party gets to Rivendell the narrator says “I wish I had time to tell you even a few of the tales or one or two of the songs that they heard in that house.”

And like. Jirt. My man.

I know it’s for narrative effect, but nothing I have ever read in my entire life has been less believable than Tolkien himself writing that he doesn’t have time to include a song.

[brethilach]

in The Hobbit book Fíli is described as the younger brother of Kíli but in the Appendices of Lord of the Rings Fíli is clearly stated as being older than Kíli by five years. this could easily just be chalked up as a mistake (or even an indication that Thorin himself mixed their ages up for whatever reason, as he's the one who made that statement in the book), but because of jirt's decision to retcon all of the major contradictions between the The Hobbit and LOTR by simply establishing Bilbo as an Unreliable Narrator(TM), this heavily implies that Bilbo just... forgot which one of them was older

Whether it's due to his failing memory with age or the Ring wearing down his mind (or both), I think this is highly likely because Bilbo himself admits (through the third-person narration in The Hobbit) that his memory was fallible even prior to the Quest: he forgets that he invited Gandalf over for tea the day prior to the Unexpected Party, he forgets multiple important items when he leaves his house (including money!) and Gandalf arrives afterward with most of his belongings he needed for the journey (apparently because this is a predictable enough behavior from Bilbo that Gandalf knew he'd forget them), and the narration itself states that Bilbo needed to write down important events as to not forget them ("like this: Gandalf Tea Wednesday"). This is one of the very first things we learn about him! (like, literally within the first few pages)

What else did Bilbo forget? How much of Bilbo's unreliability in The Hobbit stems from his bending of the truth or influence of the Ring, and how much of it is simply just... His mind failing him?

[undercat-overdog]

So I think that what we're told of Mrs Curufin implies that she's the opposite of meek and yielding and certainly isn't someone who Curufin barrels over.

Per footnote 7 in Of Dwarves and Men (PoME), Celebrimbor is a man "of wholly different temper" than Curufin, because "his mother had refused to take part in the rebellion of Feanor". (Aka, he inherited her temperament.)

First of all, refusing to go along with what 90% of the people around you are doing isn't something that's easy to do and if anything it implies strength of character. But more importantly, Celebrimbor shares his mother's temperament; she shares his. And Celebrimbor isn't meek or yielding or easily barrelled over. He's a character who is proud and ambitious and is willing to tell people no, including under tremendous duress, a character with more strength of will than Curufin. A character who desires to surpass Feanor himself in skill and fame. A character who welcomed Satan Jr, taught and learned from him, and at the end defied him unto death - Celebrimbor had his own rebellion against the Valar. A character whose ambition wasn't the piddly one of engineering a coup d'etat in a single city but to make the entire world a paradise equal to heaven.

If Celebrimbor's mother is anything like her son, and Jirt says her son is like her, she's one impressive woman.

She married down.

[marta-bee]

Rachel Maddow's recent piece on J.D. Vance reminded me of an intersting fact about him. I don't really buy her analysis for why Trump chose Vance for V.P., but I also don't want to do a deep dive into that. Rather, let's talk about the Tolkien element.

See, among other things Vance was a venture capitalist who was groomed by Peter Thiel, the ultra-rightwing even bigger venture capitalist investor who among other things provided some early funding for Facebook. His views on freedom and the common good aren't so far from Elon Musk's. He's also owned or invested in companies like Palantir, Anduril, and Mithril; Vance himself is part-owner in another investment firm, Narya.

Apparently the Tolkien schtick is a bit of a thing with the far right.

I'm not surprised; I've certainly heard of a certain kind of fan who ties Tolkien's good guys to a kind of northern-European heroic past. And I'm not blind to where that reading comes from, if you plot Middle-earth on a map you can draw some pretty racist one-to-one connections. Shire=Englad, Rohan=old Germanic highlands, Gondor=.... Italy I guess? or Greece? some sort of Mediterranean high-classic society? And the less said about Harad, Easterlings, Druedain and Orcs in this analogy, the better, obviously.

I do wish these tech-bros cosplaying as heroic white-saviors would read a bit of the Silmarillion. (When is that not the case?) Or even The Hobbit, because the idea that evil folk are centered in what we might think of as Arda-Africa and Arda-Near Asia just doesn't hold up. Smaug attacked Erebor from the North. Angmar, as in Witch King of? Also from the far North. Similarly for Angband, Morgoth's fortress in the First Age. And without looking it up, I'm pretty sure Ungoliant -- you know, the devourer of light, the giant spider allied with Morgoth when he destroyed the Two Trees -- was from the wastes to the far north of Valinor. So much for a fantasy of Nordic white power resisting the corruption of the hordes.

Which isn't to say Tolkien didn't have his problems with race, he clearly did. But this idea that the heroes of the Free Peoples of the West were all from fantasy-northern Europe is so very simplistic, it makes my teeth hurt. The closest I can get to this read of Tolkien is that all Middle-earth was meant to be northwest Europe, but that would include the free folk and the baddies alike. Minas Morgul is right there across the river from Minas Tirith. Ditto Dol Guldur and Thranduil's halls. Ditto again for Rohan and Isengard. The map just doesn't line up the way these idiots need it to, to make this fantasy work.

(Never mind anyone trying to put Tolkien on the side of historic-Nazism is just cuckoo bananas. Do I really need to dig out Jirt's admittedly hilarious response to his German publisher demanding he certify if he was of Aryan blood?)

But as fun as it is to bop the far right on the nose again and again, I think this focusing on literal racism misses the bigger point. I think a lot of the far-right drawn to Tolkien and other similar fantasy writers see the wolrd in rather apocalyptic terms: an existential threat to their civilization and everything they consider noble, a need for a hero to stand up against this age's Sauron. War must be, etc., etc.; and the stakes are so high, any niggling concerns we have about the proper way to obtain and exercise power must be overlooked. Our noble leader is the only one who can protect us against the encroaching darkness, and anyone who would stand against him might as well be an agent of Mordor.

The thing is, that doesn't sound like Gandalf, or Aragorn, or Frodo. If anything it reminds one of Denethor, who "saw in all the deeds of that time only a single combat between the lord of the White Tower and the Lord of Barad-dur; and mistrusted all others who resisted Sauron, unless they served himself alone."

Assume the Right is correct that we're facing an apocalyptic struggle against... entitled socialism-enabled laziness, or moral relativism, or multiculturalism, or wokeness, or whatever exactly it is. That people aren't doing noble and worthwhile things, they aren't working hard to build something that's worth preserving, that we are slipping into laziness and hedonism and whatever else and we're certainly not embracing virtue. If that was true, it's something I'd like to fight against. But the point of the far right, of Vance and Trump and all the rest, is it takes a singular hero to fight that fight for us. That we need to be marshalled and gathered under a single banner and commanded by a single voice.

There's no room for Smeagol to find the ring in the marshes of a certain riverbank, or for Bilbo's riddle-games, or for a decent Baggins of the Shire to stand up and say: I will take the Ring to Mordor, though I do not know the way. There's no room for chance meetings, or chance in any form; or for grace, or eucatastrophe, snatching joy from the jaws of despair.

And the thing is, Denethor was wrong. Not just because it wouldn't have worked, but his narrow vision came down to "mere politics," doing what must be done rather than what was truly right. That's kind of central to the narrative. It hurts me deeply to say that, because I'm usually so keen in my defense of him, and I truly do believe he's one of the most unfairly maligned characters in LOTR. But it's also true that the War and the necessity of Gondor's survival, the palantir and even his pride has really twisted his character, and he's just not capable of coming back from that. Gondor wouldn't have survived without him, I don't think, but precisely becuase of the way he had to shape himself to make that survival possible, there's very little place for him in the Gondor-to-Come. Moses didn't make it to the Promised Land, either.

J.D. Vance is no Moses, or even a Denethor. He's certainly not an Aragorn. And as for Frodo, if Vance would even deign to see himself as one of the Little Folk? Fuggedaboutit.

I'm rambling. This is my barely-edited, first-flush response to how wrong the idea that Tolkien's legendarium could be telling the same story as Vance & Co. I mean, I get it, I do, but also they're so very very wrong. The fact the wrongness is so blindingly obvious should probably tell us all something.

I would pay good money, though, to see him try to defend Elrond's letting Isildur walk away with the One Ring. Colbert should really get on that.

[fingons-rad-harp]

some of y’all do maedhros real dirty in kidnap fam fics acting like he hated the twins and wanted them gone.

Sure, he was terrified of losing them. Sure, he thought that they would hate him; they had every right to. Sure, he didn’t want to be responsible for them.

But Maedhros was the one who looked in the woods for Elúred and Elúrin for hours after learning that they had been abandoned in the woods by Celegorm’s people. He was the one that did everything before fighting, putting off the temptation of the oath for as long as he possibly could.

Maybe he wouldn’t have wanted to get too close to them, he wouldn’t have wanted to get attached, but don’t act like he wanted them dead. that’s not who maedhros is.

[frodo-baggins]

i was about to write a whole essay in your inbox about how frodo is 100% a goddamn hero, but it is midnight here and i'm far too tired to be eloquent enough to do frodo's heroism justice lmao

but yeah, everybody needs to drink their 'respect frodo baggins' juice because he did not carry both the weight of the ring and the fate of middle earth on his shoulders for people to claim he's not a hero smh

(also sidenote: your blog is wonderful 💕)

honestly i’ll force myself to keep this as short as poss cos it’s late here too but like it’s just beggars belief to me that there’s still such a loud subsection of lotr ‘fans’ that truly don’t believe frodo qualifies as a hero. even if theyre completely unacquainted with book!frodo and their ideas come purely from the movies it’s still so confusing to me. cos like even in the movies where do we see frodo complain or whine? like really, where?? i feel like it’s almost fandom myth at this point. like in both the books and the movies frodo takes on this impossible awful task out of the absolute goodness of his heart. it’s this utterly selfless move. and he bears this unthinkable unspeakable torment. and he’s already had to deal with the rings influence for like 17 years previous right. he does what even the “wise ones” fear to do. and he sacrifices literally everything, including himself, in doing so. as jirt says in letter 192 my beloved “few others, possibly no others of his time, would have got so far.” so yeah everyone drink their ‘respect and appreciate frodo baggins’ juice or else 🔪🔪🔪

[myshadowfaxisparked]

Let’s Talk About Elrond

I have a lot of feelings about the Lord of Imladris and yall are gonna hear them.

This dude has suffered too much. Like really, why did Jirt put him through all of that? 

First, his parents “die,” leaving him and Elros, his twin brother, alone as very young elflings. They get picked up by Maehdros and Maglor who raise them for a while on the road, but then they both die. Then, since they are half-elven, Elros decides to give up his immortality to join the world of men, leaving Elrond to face eternity without his twin brother, his other half.

Eventually, he starts working with Gil-Galad and gets a nifty job in Rivendell, which is nice until Sauron starts causing problems and they have to summon an army against him where a bunch of elves, including Gil-Galad die in front of Elrond’s eyes. Then, just when they have the chance to destroy the ring of power and Sauron once and for all, freaking Isildur won’t cast the ring into the fire and the ring trots off to Eru knows where. Oh, and now Elrond has to protect one of the elven rings in case anyone decides to go on a ring-based power trip again. And also he’s the Lord of Rivendell now so that’s a thing.

In a shocking spin of good news, Elrond finally talks to the girl he’s been crushing on for centuries, Celebrian, and they get married (although, now Galadriel is his mother-in-law so that’s kind of terrifying). Life is going great for a bit here, but then Celebrian gives birth to twins and, as joyous as the occasion is, you know Elrond had to see a young Elros and himself every time he looked at his sons. He had to have begged the Valar that one of them wouldn’t decide to leave the other to face eternity alone as Elros did to him. Nevertheless, things are still okay, even if the prospect of one of his son’s repeating the incident with Elros looms in the back of his mind.

Then his daughter is born.

And gosh darn it she looks almost exactly like Luthien and now Elrond is worried about yet another child of his giving up eternal life and he can barely stand the thought of not seeing all of his offspring in the Grey Havens when the time comes. 

And then!!!!! Celebrian is captured by goblins and tortured to the point of near death. Although the twins rescue her and Elrond manages to heal her physical wounds, the wounds upon her mind and spirit are not things he can fix, try as he might, and she sails for the Grey Havens without him. 

So, if you are keeping a pain score here like me, we are up to 1 orphanhood, 1 twin brother gone, 1 Dark Lord looming in the background, 1 wife gone, 3 children who might possibly decide not to be immortal, and an uncountable number of traumatic experiences sprinkled generously in between. 

Oh, and a large number of elves are now deciding to sail for the Grey Havens, so Elrond’s people are beginning to pass into legend. Fun.

Things settle down for a bit (except, of course, that Incident with the dwarves of the Lonely Mountain). Elrond keeps ruling like a boss, his sons are pretty cool, his daughter is lovely, and Imladris is doing alright. The only thing is that Elrond is helping to raise this Dunedain kid who is the heir of Isildur and he may or may not be falling for Elrond’s aforementioned lovely daughter, Arwen. Although Aragorn/Estel is an honorable, noble, and courageous man, he is just that: a man. If Arwen chooses to be with him, she will lose her immortality and will not be able to sail for the Grey Havens and join her family.

Try as Elrond might, he cannot stop them from falling in love and he can only watch as he loses his daughter. 

On top of all of that, Sauron decides to show up again and Elrond has to organize the group of people who will have to stare death in the face as they attempt to destroy the Ring of Power and stop the Dark Lord once and for all. War begins to rage again, the twins, Elladan and Elrohir ride off to help Aragorn, who Elrond also loves like a son, beat back the forces of Mordor and reclaim Aragorn’s throne. 

By the grace of the Valar, the good guys win and Middle Earth is saved, but Arwen marries Aragorn, who is a king now. Elrond realizes that he has seen enough and it’s time to leave. He sails for the Grey Havens and leaves his sons in Imladris, hoping that, even if their sister will not be joining them in the Undying Lands, perhaps they will both find him someday when the rest of the elves are all but gone.

So yeah, this dude has a pretty rough life and honestly, if he seems a little grumpy throughout the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, he kind of has every single right to be. All things considered, its amazing that he is still capable of such kindness and hospitality towards the 

TL;DR: Elrond’s life kinda sucks and yall need to be nice to him.

[hildorien]

The reason why I think we live in the bad time because Andreth isn’t in the published silm is just the fact without her so much of edain history, culture, and philosophy is cut from the silm that makes the story weaker as a result. The edain—humans—interact with Arda in a way that is wholly separate from elves: Andreth explains in very poetic and effective ways their wants, their desires, as well as their cultural life and even their language.

They aren’t the followers as the elves call them, they are seekers.

They live, have lived, and continue to live and fight for themsleves. Athrabeth Finrod Ah Andreth is not an elvish story, it is a edain story. It gives the first age much more demension and more depth. It says “hey, these edain aren’t just meat shields, they are as smart as the elves, they have cultures and lifestyles worth protecting. They mean something.” Andreth means something.

We often think of the first age as a tradegy because of all the elves whom die but have you wondered thought of this, the elves will be reborn and their reintroduction into life won’t be easy. But they will have a second chance.

The edain will die, most likely flourish in heaven. But their graves. Their graves will be forever desocrated, drowned and never to be reached again. Their buildings crushed and forgotten years before that. Theyre imprint on history will be forever gone with beleriand. Thousands of stories gone never to even be dug up and examined years later. That is a tradegy. Especially when you see how scared they are of death. How scared they are not to matter, in the athrabeth.

Knowing how the story ends for the edain. There is no happy ending? Everything ends. And the edain died with beleriand.

In other ways, the lacking of Andreth and Aegnor romance actually takes away from the world. It shows why human and elf relationships are tragic not just through dramatic lines but because it’s shown to us. Andreth and Aegnor won’t be toegther for ever, they can’t go bother god into giving them a pass because they are, for the silm, normal. They aren’t special, they are just in love. But love cant solve immortality and morality. Aegnor leaves her not because he doesn’t love her or ever stop loving her, he is waiting for her after all, but because he doesn’t wanna hurt her, doesn’t wanna hurt himself. And Andreth is heartbroken and betrayed and hurt because well, she thinks it because she’s old, she’s ugly. They don’t get a happy ending, they aren’t ina fairy tale they are in the real life of the story. And due to everything out of their control, he will keep living and she will leave Arda forever. That’s the fate of mannish and elf relationships. No better example to show how truly heartbreaking that is for both parties than here and it’s a damn shame it’s removed.

To finish, I just want to touch on another big factor here; Finrod. He’s kind of a asshole in this and isn’t that lovely? For most of the story he has his head up his own ass and refuses to listen and that’s great. It gives him depth, gives him flaws, gives him personality. It also allows Andreth and Finrod to have one of the strongest friendships in the series based on mutual respect, and it’s a male and female friendship no less. Andreth herself isn’t just a wonderful character, like most most mannish/edainic women having the ability to speak and have a story during their time on the page does her wonders. She is intelligent, funny, and doesn’t take anyone shit. But she’s not cruel, she seemed like a huge romantic and she loves so strongly and she is very bitter and she’s not a daisy to be with all the time but that only makes her more realistic. In a way, Andreth represents the first generations of edain full of hope that slowly crusendos into Túrin Turambar generation, someone who I feel Andreth inspired.

Plus Jesus Christ the poetry in this book, it’s some of Jirts best work and no one barely know about it. ITS ABOUT THE MOTHS BARBRA. ITS ABOUT FINROD ASKING FOR ANDRETH TO WAIT FOR HIM AND HIS BROTHER ON THE OTHER SIDE KAREN. ITS ABOUT ANDRETH BURNING THE ENTIRE ELVEN RACE BY CALLING THEM A BUNCH OF BABIES SUSAN. Please for the love of god read the athrabeth, read the mariners wife and read CoH for the best of tolkien monologues.

This is a quick fucking meta I’m writing out of nowhere on a Saturday night eating hot chips. It’s not all well put together but I hope this shows why Andreth is fully fucking important and I require a reprint of the silm that includes the athrabeth, mariners wife, and the full fucking CoH including the wanders of Húrin.

[arothin]

the one positive argument for the vanyar I have accepted, including from jirt himself.

“As the ages passed the Vanyar grew to love the land of the Valar and the full light of the Trees.“

Is it just me, or does this imply that the Vanyar were not comfortable in Valinor at the beginning. Did they miss Cuivienen? Their lifestyle does seem to be the closest to it, compared to the Noldor and Teleri. Did they realize, way before anyone else, that even the Valar couldn’t guarantee their safety? Was there maybe some sort of regret, until they decided, we’re here to stay, so might as well make the most of it.

Slowly coming to love something/someone after you disliked them at first is a stronger emotion than being extremely enthusiastic from the outset and then realizing it wasn’t what you thought/what was promised.

The Vanyar thought of Valinor, with all its shortcomings, as home, and the Valar, with all their flaws, as friends. That’s why they were content. You’re supposed to stick by your friends, your family, through thick and thin.

The Noldorin Exiles however, thought of Valinor and the Valar in terms of what they could offer; mainly, security and knowledge. When the Valar failed to keep their word and provide these things, they left. There was no deeper bond keeping them there.

Both the Vanyar and the Noldor were right according to their own cultural values and beliefs.