#stone of erech

[lena-point]

the stone doesn't even do anything...

[isilwhore]

For at Erech there stands yet a black stone that was brought, it was said, from Númenor by Isildur; and it was set upon a hill, and upon it the King of the Mountains swore allegiance to him in the beginning of the realm of Gondor. But when Sauron returned and grew in might again, Isildur summoned the Men of the Mountains to fulfil their oath, and they would not: for they had worshipped Sauron in the Dark Years.

Then Isildur said to their king: “Thou shalt be the last king. And if the West prove mightier than thy Black Master, this curse I lay upon thee and thy folk: to rest never until your oath is fulfilled. For this war will last through years uncounted, and you shall be summoned once again ere the end.” And they fled before the wrath of Isildur, and did not dare to go forth to war on Sauron’s part.

-J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, The Return of the King

The Life of Isildur 5/10

[googlyeyesonmagiccards]

This Erech guy REALLY likes to get stoned

[katjaschmitt]

I had almost forgotten that there was this unfinished painting of the Paths of the Dead. It is *very* large (70 x 100 cm) and I have no idea whether I should finish it or not... I mean, who hangs something like that on their wall? (What did I even think when I started this??)

[rannadylin]

Very tiny Hobbit. Very big rock.

[g-m-kaye]

A listing for larger prints of this painting will be available soon! But I do still have some smaller sized prints available right now (links below! 💫)

Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1172799386/

Folksy: https://folksy.com/items/8355655-THE-OATH-Tolkien-s-Middle-Earth-Inspired-Fine-Art-Print-of-Original-Painting

(^Full painting!)

Detail from: “The Men of the White Mountain swear allegiance to Isildur at the Stone of Erech”

Full painting available as a print from my Etsy shop :)

[aurore-parle-de-ses-idees]

agoroth doesn’t look quite as much like durthand as i remembered, but there’s still a lot of similarities

agoroth-

durthand-

[ar-gemlad]

Aragorn at the stone of Erech: Behold my secret banner! You can't see it because it's too dark, but believe me it's inspiring as shit!

[rrcraft-and-lore]

Armies of the Dead/heaven in myths and epic fantasy - and the magic horns behind them!

One of the most famous armies of dead soldiers? The Men of Dunharrow, the army of the dead from Lord of the Rings who broke their oaths and renewed them finally under Aragorn.

Let's do this!

If you're a younger fantasy reader, or more modern, perhaps your introduction to this idea is in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time with his magical horn that summons an army and legendary heroes to the field.

Some fans have said this is inspired by the Norse horn Gjallarhorn. 

This is the horn trusted to Heimdallr to be blown to announce the beginning of Ragnarok and summon the Norse gods to the "thing" (thing is used in this case legitimately to mean - meeting, assembly, folkmoot) - in a moment like NORSE AVENGERS, ASSEMBLE! 

This includes the Einherjar, the spirits of Norse warriors of honored dead who fell in battle and reside in Valhalla. But was there another possible influence?

Well, we know RJ was a Tolkien fan, and honestly who wouldn't be back in the days of early fantasy? 

So, what of Tolkien's ghostly army of dead warriors? Well, if you haven't read the books, you might not know that Aragorn too summons his army of the dead with a magical horn (cut from the films). That's right. 

You see, Elrohir (one of the sons of Elrond, also cut from the films) entrusts Aragorn with a silver horn to summon the dead with at the Stone of Erech to deal with them. Tolkien was a Norse buff and loved the old epics as well as poems. 

So he was likely familiar with the stories just like with Gjallarhorn as well. But also, quite possibly the Song of Roland (a French epic poem) in where Roland and his forces are ambushed at Roncesvalles and are going to lose. In final desperation, Roland blows the horn, and the emperor hears the call. But the aid will not arrive in time (unlike the films and more modern stories where the heroes do arrive to save the day - this is cuz we like the just in the nick of time trope) so Roland dies blowing it one last time to hard in vengeance his temples burst (and he ascends to heaven), but...Charlemagne's army arrives in the aftermath and scatters the enemy. But, are there other armies of the dead? In fact, yes. 

The Night Marchers of Hawaii who come with a warm wind, & the smell of sulfur, and the call of a conch shell to herald them. If you come upon this procession with torches in the night, and you are an enemy...time to RUN! Because if you watch them your eyes might be incinerated.

Then there is the Wild Hunt - a shared myth motif present through eastern, northern, and western European cultures. A ghostly army of the souls of dead men (and creatures) usually united under a leader (though this figure changes), Herne, Odin/Woden, Gwyn ap Nudd, Sigurd or Siegfried the Dragon Slayer, Theodoric the Great, onward. Now, they're not summoned by a horn, but in some tales their coming is announced by one.

Now, an Indian cognate of the Wild Hunt and warriors in the service of heavens The Maruts.

The number of them vary from 20+ to over 180, to even more (yay conflicting mythological sources and arguments in ancient texts and interpretations).

But who are they? Companions and servants to Lord Indra, Slayer of the First Born of Dragons, and lord of the heavens and storms! So, fittingly, these warriors are very...storm themed. Violent, aggressive, expert combatants armed with lightning weaponary, and golden chariots to fly through the clouds on. Their war crys and battle sounds are like thunder. Their blows would split clouds (sounding thunder) and would hunt the enemies of Lord Indra and slaughter demons/monsters.

Interestingly they are often associated as the sons (children) of Rudra (the Rig Vedic storm and wind god). However, there is another group that often gets that association (obviously so), the Rudras.

The Rudras are similar in (some) regards to the Maruts but not all. They aid Vishnu in his battles against demons and are clad in lion-skins, and wear serpents around their necks. A crescent moon adorns their foreheads, and they wield golden tridents and carry a skull in one hand they wear necklaces of lightning illuminated clouds (how's that for bling bling?), and are monstrously feral in battle. Lord Shiva can call them with a blow of a conch shell/horn. 

Their overlap, association with the Maruts is because of some etymology and shared functions as they too are a divine/spiritual/demigod group of heavenly warriors to aid the good and destroy evil - demons/adversaries, and the root word in their name means the roarers, thunderers, or the shouters - and this is also mentioned of the Maruts.

Are these all there are for legendary armies of the dead, of gods/heaven to be summoned to the field or aid? No. But, it's rainy, I'm a little messed up (mental health and meds), and tired. 

So I'm going to bow out and read and study for Tremaine 3 and leave this minor comparative thread here for folks into this stuff.

[rethdis-love]

Erech Stone, me and my son Boogie!

[isilwhore]

Priorities

[tuuliareads]

What I want to see in the Rings of Power:

Sauron finding out about Shelob and thinkin, yea, best guard dog ever

Elrond building Imladris

Weathertop. Messenger riding past it or something. Just a little easter egg

Building / settling in Arnor

That awkward moment when Elrond has to ask Galadriel for Celebrian's hand

Elrond meeting Elendil and kids, and thinking they look just like his brother Elros

Just give me Celeborn meeting Galadriel again and the first thing he does is looses his sh*t over everything she's done

Isildur bringing the stone of Erech from Númenor, because how???

Just more Middle-earth

[elronds-library]

The Captain and the Queen

by evocates

Three years after she was crowned the Queen of Gondor, Arwen finds Boromir in a small village near the Stone of Erech. Finding him seems easy when compared to her new Quest of bringing the Son of Gondor back home. Subtitled “An Exploration of the Problems of a Postwar Gondor”.

Explicit, No Archive Warnings

Words: 32,842

[haggishlyhagging]

In India the Goddess Sarasvati was honored as the inventor of the original alphabet, while in Celtic Ireland the Goddess Brigit was esteemed as the patron deity of language. Texts revealed that it was the Goddess Nidaba in Sumer who was paid honor as the one who initially invented clay tablets and the art of writing. She appeared in that position earlier than any of the male deities who later replaced Her. The official scribe of the Sumerian heaven was a woman. But most significant was the archaeological evidence of the earliest examples of written language so far discovered; these were also located in Sumer, at the temple of the Queen of Heaven in Erech, written there over five thousand years ago. Though writing is most often said to have been invented by man, however that may be defined, the combination of the above factors presents a most convincing argument that it may have actually been woman who pressed those first meaningful marks into wet clay.

-Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman

[whocookedthelastsupper]

“The power and centrality of the first woman-God is one of the best-kept secrets of history. We think today of a number of goddesses, all with different names—Isis, Juno, Demeter —and have forgotten what, 5,000 years ago, every schoolgirl knew; no matter what name or guise she took, there was only one God and her name was woman.

The Roman lawyer Lucius Apuleius was skillfully recycling the whole compendium of contemporary clichés in his portrait of "the Goddess" as she spoke to him in a vision:

I am nature, the universal mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead... Though I am worshipped in many aspects, known by countless names, propitiated with all manner of different rites, yet the whole round earth venerates me.

Later ages dismissed accounts of Goddess-worship as "myths" or “cults." But since Sir Arthur Evans, discoverer of the lost Minoan civilization at the turn of this century, stated that all the innumerable goddess-figures he had discovered represented "the same Great Mother... whose worship under various names and titles extended over a large part of Asia Minor and the regions beyond," modern scholarship has accepted that "the Great Goddess, the 'Original Mother without a Spouse’, was in full control of all the mythologies" as "a worldwide fact."

Nor was this an isolated or temporary phenomenon. Commentators stress the prominence and prevalence of the Great Mother Goddess as an essential element from the dawn of human life. From its emergence in the cradleland of the steppes of southern Russia her worship ranged geographically throughout the Mediterranean, the Indus Valley, and Asia as far as China, to Africa and Australia. Historically the span is even more startling:

25,000-15,000 B.C.—with the so-called "Venus figurines" of stone and ivory in Europe, of Nile mud in Egypt, "the Great Mother... bursts on the world of men in overwhelming wholeness and perfection."

12,000-9000 B.C.—in Dolni Vestonie, iechoslovakia, and Shanidar, Iraq, ceremonial burials of bodies coated in red ocher, commonly associated with Goddess worship.

7000 B.C.—in Jericho, the first shrines to the Mother Goddess.

6000 B.C.—the village settlement of Catal Huytik in Turkey, a site of only thirty-two acres, contains no less than forty shrines to the Goddess, in three incarnations as maiden, mother and crone.

5000 B.C.—a statuette from Hacilar in Turkey shows the Goddess in the act of making love.

4000 B.C. —the first written language appears on the temple of the Goddess under her title of Queen of Heaven at Erech (modern Urak) in Sumeria.

3000 B.C.—she now appears everywhere in the known world, in statues, shrines and written records.

200 B.C.—tribal Celts send their own priests of the Goddess to the great sacred festival of Cybele in Anatolia.

A.D. 200— at Tralles, in western Anatolia, a woman called Aurelia Aemiliana erects a carving at the temple of the Goddess, recording that she has duly performed her sexual service (sacred intercourse in honor of the Goddess) as her mother and all her female ancestors have done before her.

A.D. 500— Christian emperors forcibly suppress the worship of the Goddess and close down the last of her temples.

As this shows, the sacred status of womanhood lasted for at least 25,000 years— some commentators would push it back further still, to 40,000 or even 50,000. In fact there was never a time at this stage of human history when woman was not special and magical.

As the struggle for survival eased by degrees into the far harder struggle for meaning, woman became both focus and vehicle of the first symbolic thought. The French archaeologist Leroi-Gourhan solved a riddle of the early cave paintings that had defeated anthropologists of more puritanical cultures when he revealed that the recurrent and puzzling "double-eye" figure was a symbol of the vulva. Similarly in a remarkable sculpted frieze of animal and human figures at Angles-sur-l'Anglin, the female forms are represented by pure abstract triangles of women's bodies, with the sexual triangle prominently emphasized.

How did woman assume from the first this special status? One source of it was undoubtedly her moon-linked menstruation and the mystery of her nonfatal yet incurable emission of blood. Another was her close and unique relation to nature, for as gathering gave way to planned horticulture, women consolidated their central importance as the principal food producers. But the real key lies where the exaggerated breasts and belly of the earliest images of woman direct us to look, in the miracle of birth. Before the process of reproduction was understood, babies were simply born to women. No connection was made with intercourse (to this day Australian Aboriginals believe that spirit children dwell in pools and trees, and enter any woman at random when they wish to be born). Men, so it seemed, therefore had no part in the chain of generation. Only women could produce new life, and they were revered accordingly: all the power of nature, and over nature, was theirs.”

-Rosalind Miles; Who Cooked the Last Supper? The Women’s History of the World

[aurore-parle-de-ses-idees]

85 (Struggle/Fighting Back) for anyone you deem fit!

(additional car bronach gundabad stuff! (sorry corunir you mostly got plinkod here to plinko est by extension))

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It had almost been an easy thing, shutting the door and leaving her there, with the stone and Olcrith’s body and a way out of the tower. If his chances of slipping back into the ranks of the Angmarim of Tûr Fúar unnoticed are slim, hers are worse, and one of them at least must escape. They came for information and information they found, but all of this serves no purpose at all if they are both taken captive.

“There! That’s the one!” Damn. The tower is large enough they had managed to avoid the guards who had escorted the last party from Barad Gúlaran- until now, at least.

He leads them on a great chase through the tower, down into the depths where cobwebs and crumbled stone give way to the bones of the older fortress on which Agal Dûn was built. He slips down human-sized stairs carved into far larger blocks of stone until the halls become winding tunnels that run down into the heart of the mountains. He is still pursued, and so he does not stop- not until he comes to a wide, high-roofed chamber with a shallow, ice-cold stream cutting through it. He hears the voices beyond it too late, and sees the Angmarim waiting there only when they round the great, pale green stone that rests in the center of the great chamber.

“Claghórd! Deal with him!” And- oh that was Ásachal, wasn’t it? What exactly has he wandered into here?

But he has little time to ponder it, with the Warlord before him and his pursuers behind. He draws a heavy dagger from beneath his stolen robes. It looks pitifully small beside the greataxe that swings for him.

---

The old rooms repurposed as cells in the higher levels of the tower are cold and empty, and he takes what solace he can from the fact that he’s alone. The cold gets into him too quickly without the heavy Angmarim robes; his shoulders and wrists ache with it, even without the chains they haven’t yet bothered with.

They are still fighting over what to do with him. He might laugh to find them proved so thoroughly fractured, but he is cold and getting colder, and they have shown no great desire to care for their prisoner.

Some must want him interrogated, he’s sure. He thinks that the obvious choice, but the High Priestess had wanted him killed out of hand, and the gardeners had spoken of promising experiments, and at least three other influential sorcerers had sent messengers to stake their own claims. He is not consulted, naturally.

He has had time to consider the great stone in the depths, and he does not care for the conclusions he draws.

It had not been unlike the Stone of Erech, massive and smooth and heavy with a sort of presence that is not easily described. He had believed it only the presence of the Dead, in Gondor, but Esterín had described it similarly even after their departure, and had said it was not unlike the stone locked in the ice-canyons of Forochel.

Small wonder that Ásachal was so dismissive of Olcrith’s experiments with the purple gem.

He is glad Esterín escaped- hopes she did, that she has taken the stolen stone and all that they learned and sent word to their friends and allies- but the presence of an intact Vandassar he dearly wishes she could have learned of first.

Servants of the fractious factions of the Iron Crown come to see him. They ask him the same questions. He gives them all different answers, and wonders if it will do any good at all if they are sharing so little with each other already. One brings down a staff with some glinting purple jewel that glares at him like an angry eye. Another brings a different staff, one that calls up visions of the dead behind her and only sits outside his prison and watches him until he squirms beneath the eyes of friends long gone and a slow, suffocating pressure that closes around his chest.

What that one wants he never does learn, left insensate in the freezing room until some other group of Iron Crown acolytes with pale silver threadwork on their purplish robes prod him awake, hissing at him to be silent or suffer their displeasure.

“It’s clear,” one of their number hisses down the chilled halls. “Hurry.”

He stumbles as they go, cold and numb and still half-lost in a world swimming with the faces of the dead- Lorniel and Areneth and Palandur and more, so many more. By the time he is pulled around a corner and wrestled into a too-large robe like that of the Angmarim around him he has mostly come back to himself, for all it still feels half a dream.

“Are we sure about this?” one of them asks nervously.

“Quiet,” another hisses. “Ugarad said we have some use for him at Bagud-dum.”

Not a single encouraging word in there, Corunir thinks with just a touch of wildness. He lets them drag him through the halls to yet another hidden door that lets them out into the cold wind of Câr Bronach, the stars bright above them and the Drearspire above lit by the haunting blue dead-lights. They keep to the shadows of the tower as long as they can before breaking for a tall spur of rock where they stop, panting, and watch the tower nervously, though no pursuit comes. Corunir sighs deeply.

“Quiet, you.” And because he is still off enough that the dead-lights of the fortress catch and hold his eye too long and light-headedness catches him when he turns too fast and the cold’s teeth are still lodged deep in his bones, he does as he is told. Maybe when we are further away, he thinks, and lets the nervous Angmarim lead him through the Sorrowglen.

It must be near dawn when they stop their halting flight near the pass to the Welkin-lofts, looking about with tired, anxious eyes. For a moment he has no hint as to what they have seen, wearier even than they, if more accustomed to it.

There is static in the air, a building charge that tastes of something familiar and greatly welcome. She should be well away from here, he thinks, and at the same time I am glad she’s not. The Angmarim draw into a tight clump, spells of their own on their lips, and he takes his chance.

There’s less strength than he would like in the blows he throws at his nearest captors, but their exhaustion and surprise makes up for it. Two of them stagger and it’s just enough of a window for him to shoulder them aside and run. Lightning blasts the ground behind him, scorching the ground black and throwing splinters of stone in all directions. A familiar figure steps, sparking, from behind a stone and he can only laugh in desperate relief.