#the legendarium Tumblr posts

[atimefordragons]

GALADRIEL + NENYA RINGS OF POWER SEASON 2 SDCC TRAILER

[tolkienocweek]

Tolkien OC Week

A fandom event for OCs and underdeveloped characters in Tolkien's world!

This event celebrates both characters of Tolkien's world and our own characters that need more love, by creating and reblogging all kind of fanworks, like fanfiction, fanart, fanvideos, fancrafts, headcanons, playlists, edits, moodboards etc.

The event is modded by @yellow-faerie, @elamarth-calmagol and @stormxpadme and will take place between 25th August - 31st August 2024 for the fourth year running.

NSFW text entries are allowed and we’ll tag them accordingly when we reblog them, but please put them behind a “read more”.

We'll also be tracking the tag #tolkienocweek during this week!

*******************************************

Event schedule for 2024:

Day 1 (25th August): World Building

Create a fanwork about an original character, and use them as a jumping off point for worldbuilding. Share a dwarf from the far side of Rhun, consider the existence of an Aina before the creation of Arda, explore Rivendell from the point of view of an outsider, or tell us about the underground punk subculture of Gondolin.

Day 2 (26th August): Canon-OC Relationships

This year, it’s not just about romance. Today, explore a relationship between your OC and a canon character. Your character could be a lover or spouse of someone canonical, lf course, but they could also be a friend, sibling, teacher, servant, fan, or even rival!

Day 3 (27th August): Alternate Universes

Share an OC who isn’t canon compliant at all. Maybe you want to add a fourteenth member of Thorin’s company or give a reborn Celebrimbor children with a surviving and reformed Sauron. Or, maybe you want to do a crossover with your Star Wars OC or let your self-insert narrate a coffee shop AU. Go wild!

Day 4 (28th August): Gaps and Ghosts

Create a fanwork based upon a character that Tolkien either thought up and abandoned, such as Odo Took oe the characters of The New Shadow. Or, create someone he missed creating in the first place, like… um… just about anyone’s mother.

Day 5 (29th August): Non-Humanoid Characters

Middle Earth isn't just elves, Men, hobbits, and dwarves. Today, share a character who is something different entirely: an animal, a dragon, a Maia who doesn't take humanoid form, an ent or huron, or a creature of your own invention.

Day 6 (30th August): Background Characters

This prompt is all about people who are in the background of the action: the low-ranking soldiers, the servants, and the ordinary people living in extraordinary times. Or maybe you want someone who isn't so ordinary, like an advisor in the Council of Elrond who never made it onto the page, or one of the Maiar who sank the Feanorians on the stolen boats. Show us their view of the action!

Day 7 (31st August): Freeform

Did we miss something? Do you have an OC that doesn’t fit into any day, or did you want to do a second fanwork for one of the days? Today, create and share whatever you want, as long as it has to do with original or abandoned characters!

*******************************************

*******************************************

Since we want to celebrate creations about neglected characters all year long, the mods will occasionally reblog posts and fancreations about OCs and underdeveloped characters. If you would like to see your post on our blog, you're very welcome to tag tolkienocweek. Since tumblr's tagging system is often being faulty, don't hesitate to message us, too!

We are looking forward to see and share all the awesome work you come up with!

[tuurverheydepoetryandprose]

Just saw some evening-ruining takes and I gotta say:

It seems like a lot of the most recent and confidant dismissals of Tolkien’s work or key elements of it come from people who only know lotr via cultural osmosis at worst and the movies at best. There’s lots and lots of people making wild statements about Tolkien’s simplistic characters, binary morality, racist or sexist worldbuilding etc. without having read a single sentence written by Tolkien himself.

Honestly, would it kill you to read the source text? Would it kill you to read a person’s actual work before describing him like the most evilest of colonialist creators to ever exist?

This is getting absurd. If the “vibe” of a canonical work or even author doesn’t jell with them, some people seem to immediately resort to the language of irredeemable evil, inherently monstrous, problematic, must be erased from the canon etc.

Like, you must know you are being deceitful, and lazy, and incurious, and self-centred to always need your personal intuition about the general impression (not even actual content) of a piece of art to reflect some deep moral failing on its behalf and some moral victory on yours. This is ludicrous. Have we forgotten that stories are more than their adaptations? More than their receptions? More than their paratext?

The refusal of people to engage with anything in good faith is driving me up the wall. What are we doing to our culture? What are we allowing to be done to our minds? What have we done?

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

Smaug Fanart by Benjamin Sjöberg

[namedafterflowerstournament]

Botanic Tournament : Unspecific Flowers Bracket !

Round 3 Poll 1

Please respect the rights of independent creators and do not repost the art used in my polls without the artists' explicit consent

Round 3 Poll 1

The lovely Kaia, freelance artist and Tolkien fan, nicely allowed me to use the beautiful artwork of Lúthien they had made in this poll. Go see more of their gorgeous art at @kaia-art !

[lanthanum12]

My top ten elves are: Maeglin, Meglin, Lomion, Morleg, Manfrið, Malind, Morlin, Targlin, Glindur, and Malindo

[goodshipophelia]

messing around with block print designs for the star of fëanor (the goal is a tryptich representing the burning of the ships at losgar)

[rinthecap]

Legolas chilling under the sun

[velvet4510]

It took the Ring two seconds to make both Isildur and Gollum claim it as their own.

It didn’t take much longer for it to make Bilbo do the same, as he kept it as the key “trick up his sleeve” during the Quest for Erebor and never considered harming it.

But in 17 full years and 6 months, it couldn’t make Frodo claim it. It took being inside Mt. Doom, the place where its power was absolute and drowned out all othere, to get Frodo to claim it.

Inside Mt. Doom, no bearer can resist the Ring. They will inevitably claim it there. But literally ALL of the other Ring-bearers who ever claimed it did so outside of Mt. Doom.

The Ring never needed to apply its utmost, Cracks-of-Doom-level pressure to make any previous Ring-bearer claim it. Frodo was the only one who resisted it so long and so well that it had to force itself upon him and break him just to get him to regard it as his own.

Frodo Baggins is the strongest mortal in the Third Age of Middle-Earth and no, I am not accepting questions at this time.

(Remember our beloved Samwise Gamgee never claimed the Ring, and didn’t have it long enough for it to really sink its teeth into him as deeply as it did into everyone else. I’m talking about those who actually claimed the Ring at some point in their lives.)

[rohirriiim]

I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again

@lotrweek 2024 — day 3: the green earth in the daylight ↳ the shire

[suzannahnatters]

Last night I remembered another of my favourite Tolkien wifeguy facts.

So in Western mythology we've often personified the Sun as masculine and the Moon as feminine. Off the top of my head: The Sun is associated with purity, reason, scholarship, illumination, constancy, dragons, gold, and masculinity. On the other hand, the Moon is associated with darkness, silver, impurity, flux, change, uncertainty, fickleness, and femininity.

You can see all this imagery being adopted, eg, in the Mozart opera THE MAGIC FLUTE, in which a benevolent scholar wizard (with solar imagery). straight up kidnaps the daughter of the evil, passionate Queen of the Night so that she can be properly educated in Enlightenment rationalism, purged of all those icky feminine night/lunar influences, and turned into a good submissive little wife for the scholar's young disciple. Guys the music slaps but the story is SO gross and misogynistic.

Anyway, what does this have to do with Tolkien? I'M SO GLAD YOU ASKED.

In Middle-Earth, Tolkien does a GENDERSWAPPED Sun and Moon. The Sun is She, the Moon is He. And, like, it's not that he just thought "oh how can I make this mythology Different" - he really thought this through. In THE SILMARILLION, Tolkien tells us that the Sun and Moon are two vessels made from the last flower of Telperion and the last fruit of Laurelin, the Two Trees which once gave light to Valinor. Two Maiar were chosen to pilot these vessels. The pilot of the moon is Tilion, a hunter of Orome, and the pilot of the sun is Arien: "Arien the maiden was mightier than he", a spirit of fire whom I strongly suspect to be an unfallen Balrog.

Now, just as in our world, the Moon in Middle Earth has a reputation for waywardness and unreliability. Because, get this, apparently Tilion falls in love with Arien: "But Tilion was wayward and uncertain in speed, and held not to his appointed path; and he sought to come near to Arien, being drawn by her splendour, though the flame of Arien scorched him, and the island of the Moon was darkened."

And I just. Here's Tolkien, standing up in the face of centuries of unveiled misogynistic symbolism and saying, "oh, we've got two celestial entities, one of which is powerful and bold and glorious, and the other famous for being kind of lame in comparison? SOUNDS TO ME LIKE A SWAGLESS LOVER BOY ABANDONING HIS DUTIES TO WORSHIP HIS GODDESS. I MEAN OBVIOUSLY. WHAT ELSE COULD THE EXPLANATION BE"

[prying-pandora666]

I will never be over that Tolkien wrote Maeglin the way he did. A victim of abuse, isolated from others since childhood, watched his father try to kill him in front of everyone, watched his mother take the blow and die in his stead, and then stuck living with a stranger who happens to be his uncle, in a city his father always told him was emblematic of the Noldor’s hubris that had led to their suffering.

Imprisoned in Gondolin like he was in the forests of Eöl. Alienated and isolated now by the nature of who he is and how different he is on sight. Pining unrequitedly for his cousin, a taboo he knows he shouldn’t cross and yet desperate for someone to call his own.

And even after ALL THAT, the moment Maeglin tried to force himself on Idril, Tolkein wrote him getting thrown out a window.

And that is just… legendary.

Tolkien really said “I don’t care what your sob story is. Incels get yeeted!”

Lessons to live by.

[mandhos]

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

The Battle of Five Armies by Alberto Dal Lago

[elena-kukanova]

Faramir

the way I pictured him when I read Lord of the Rings back in '96.

sketchbook, graphite, A5

[theworldsoftolkein]

Éomer & Éowyn - by Fatharani Yasmin