#tra-la-la-lally

[curiouselleth]

I've seen a lot of posts talking about if the elves in the Silmarillion would tra-la-la-lally, so, should they?

Also if anyone has any strong opinions on where in I should put it, I would love to here them!

Little (oops it's long) explanation for Be He Foe or Friend and more detailed update on progress and eventual posting under the cut! (I'll make a dedicated post for explaining Be He Foe or Friend next)

It's a Silmarillion choose your own adventure book I'm writing! I've been tagging all my posts about it with "be he foe or friend". It starts in Valinor before the Darkening, and is written from the perspective of Lalwen, one of Finwe's daughters and a textual ghost. We know she went to Middle Earth with Fingolfin... but that's all we know. So it will read as if you are Lalwen, and at the end of each chapter, you will have to make a choice, for example (and this whole bit here is just a example, I am not using this one):

What do you want to do as Princess of the Noldor? and you will have 2 or 3 options, like joining the Court, heading projects in the city, (construction, socail programs, etc.) or serving (insert favorite/least hated vala here). Each choice is tied to a certain chapter, so if you choose to serve in the court, you would jump to the chapter "Finwe's Advisors are Annoying" rather than just going to the next page with the chapter "In the Halls of Aule".

In some later chapters where survival might be a question, I'm thinking it could be fun to roll dice to determine that, like if you were in the Battle of Unnumbered Tears you would roll a 100 sided die, and if you got 98 or above you survive. (I'm still kinda rotating how this part should work)

As of when I'm posting this, I have roughly 4 3/4 chapters written! (and I'm realizing I really should make a dedicated post explaining this 😅) I'm planning to separate this into separate books, with this first one ending shortly after the Host of Fingolfin arrives in Middle Earth (probably shortly after Fingolfin is crowned). It's working title right now is Blessed Lands and Colder Seas.

As of now I estimate 26 or so chapters in this book, but there are probably quite a few I can combine. But I will probably find that I need more chapters in certain parts so I can't say for sure how many. What makes this complicated is that, no you won't be reading 26 chapters. Because for each decision you make at the end of a chapter, there will be 1 or 2 other chapters for the other choices... and it all branches off so there really will be 6 or 7 chapters as you read through. (I am so sorry if this doesn't make sense I don't know how else to word it)

Now, when am I posting this and where? That is an amazing question that I would love the answer to if anyone knows... anyone? 😂 Okay in all seriousness, I think I will start posting once I reach the halfway point of this book, I will definitely try posting on ao3 (which I will link), and if there's interest, I can try posting here on tumblr too.

Okay well this is three times longer than I expected it to be, but I think that's everything, (for now!) Namárië!

[tathrin]

Hey, so do you ever stop to think about how the premise of Lord of the Rings being an in-universe book written by some of the characters who lived through that story means that they decided what parts and perspectives to use to tell that story...?

And when our authors weren't there to experience the events themselves, they have to rely on what they're told about them by the characters who were there, right...?

Okay so stop and think about the Glittering Caves.

We never actually go to the caves in the narrative. Tolkien LOVES describing nature and natural beauty, but we don't actually see the caves described "by him" the way we do other places. Obviously Gimli's words are Tolkien's, yes; but we only see the caves filtered through his words about them, after the fact.

When Gimli and Éomer and the other Rohirrim take refuge there, the narrative doesn't follow them. Obviously from a narrative standpoint this is to keep the focus narrow, and not to interrupt the battle-sequence with a long ode to the beauty of the caves, and to create tension in the reader who doesn't know if these characters are okay or not. Which all makes sense!

But think about it in terms of the book that was written in Middle-earth by the folk living there. Why DON'T we get to have a direct experience of those caves? Gimli obviously related several other parts of the story that none of the Hobbits were there to witness to them, and which were written into the books as Direct Events Happening In The Narrative (think of the Paths of the Dead scene, for one of the more visceral moments!). So why not the Glittering Caves?

Was it because they wanted to keep that narrative focus and tension, and so they didn't include his perspective on that part of the battle? Perhaps, that's certainly a possibility to consider.

But also consider: when we do hear about the Glittering Caves, what we hear is Gimli telling Legolas about the Glittering Caves. THAT is the part of that event that is considered of importance to include in the book: not Gimli's actual experience when he was in them, but rather the part where he relates that experience TO Legolas.

And I kind of just THOUGHT about that today.

And went HUH.

[thesummerestsolstice]

A very important update to my Maglor = Erestor, Finrod = Gildor, and Daeron = Lindir post.

They all take shifts as the Tra-la-la-lally elf.

Gildor thinks it's delightful and uses it as a chance to talk to all the valley's visitors. He actually uses some of his free time to teach Glorfindel some basic bard skills. Glorfindel is surprisingly into it.

Lindir refused to at first because he's composed full symphonies before, why should he spend his time on that, but then Gandalf accused him of being too afraid to improvise rhyming lyrics and the challenge was on.

Erestor just desperately needs some Tra-la-la-lally in his life. He's also re-learning to sing without making everyone around him experience the horrors. It's good practice.

Elrond, who arranged this, thought it was a master stroke because surely, if they have to talk to each other about Tra-la-la-lally duty, they'll realize, right?

They've all become pretty good friends over the years, and spend plenty of time together! They still have no idea.

Thranduil's gotten in on the betting pool. He's betting on it taking divine intervention.

[chiropteracupola]

my father has asked me to handle the dishes 'like an elf in tolkien.' pray tell what does he mean by that.

[a-lonely-dunedain]

oh I forgot to post about this on tumblr but I made a slight change to Ethedis' backstory. I've decided that her and Corunir actually knew each other years and years ago, before he went to Angmar and was assumed dead. I wanted them to have a longer history together, and saying they met in Rivendell earlier was a pretty easy way to do it!

So, bad news for Eth because it means she had to go years thinking her first Ranger friend died, but good news because he turns out to be ok! everything is fine! y'know, besides the fact that Corunir seems like a shell of himself when she finally finds him again- ok I really need to learn how to be nicer to my poor elf

[glathralvas]

i just spent 15 minutes drawing a spinning elf to see art improvement

look i know one is a dragon and one is an elf but look at the improvement

[tathrin]

Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed. — G.K. Chesterton.

I’m not sure exactly how to articulate it but—there is this bizarre base assumption i see from people discoursing about children’s media, and that’s the assumption that children are somehow unfamiliar with negative emotions. Like, maybe you’ve managed to completely forget your entire life before you turned eighteen, but kids spend a lot of time being hurt, and scared, and angry. A lot of people had terrible fucking childhoods, and a lot of kids are having terrible fucking childhoods right now. When i was a child, and i read books where bad things happened to kids, that was in no way shocking to me, i already knew bad things happened to children. It made me feel more connected to those stories, not less, and it made it more impactful when those child characters overcame it all in the end. That’s important for children. A lot of them are in desperate need of a little hope, and they aren’t going to get it from nothing stories with no conflict. They put conflict in children’s media for a reason

Also i see some of you handwringing over child protagonists going through, like, the most basic hero’s journey. Please, for the love of god, realize that you as an adult are going to understand children’s media differently than the actual kids it’s intended for. Because you’re all grown up now, you aren’t going to be able to relate to a child protagonist. You’re going to see a child in danger. The children the story is meant for are going to see a kid like them who is able to face hardship and triumph

[curiouselleth]

I'm trying to outline some new chapters for Be He Foe or Friend, (written from Lalwen's perspective, she was one of Finwe's daughters in some verions.) I'm just outlining with bullet points and scene descriptions. And. Well. Here's some highlights:

Many years pass happliy tra la la lally down in the valley-

High feast dododooooo

Oh what Feanor was summoned here oh boy

Oh uh hi Feanor not here to murder our brother are you?

Feanor trademarked snarky reply

Enter fingolfin

He goes a bit white but maintains poker face well

Uuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I don’t know how to transition this into the kinslaying

Battle scene battle scene kinslay oh eru help me figure out how to write this

These ones are notes I have on sections that I thought were kinda funny:

Problem section: between the killing of the two trees and the kinslaying (and probably the kinslaying too)

Beef up this area. Make it juicy. Make it angry make it hurt to read. Could also use more scene descriptions 

[tathrin]

I wish you would write a fic where it gives the Mirkwood pov. Just sort of inhuman and unique opinions about the kindly beings living “in you”, then Sauron and his folks squatting/infecting.

An answer to this ask prompt.

Ooooooh that sounds amazing. Anon, I absolutely love it. That's briliant. Altough...it sounds like it should be told by someone whose writing has a much more poetic bent than mine does, tbh.

Hey @sallysavestheday @katajainen I feel like this concept might be up one or both of your alleys perhaps...?

[silmarillion-ways-to-die]

This is a science fact.

Feanor would be a tra-la-la-lally elf if it wasn't for the doom

[millenariumhappinesstheorem]

Finrod: born to tra-la-la-lally, forced to sing in answer a song of staying resisting battling against power of secrets kept strength like a tower and trust unbroken freedom escape of changing and of shifting shape of snares eluded broken traps the prison opening the chain that snaps

[balrogballs]

Finding Celebrían

For Tolkien Meta Week — an essay on autofiction, archives, healing, and why I moved across the country after finding out Elrond Peredhel had a wife. Being an essayist irl, believe me when I say I was thrilled to see @silmarillionwritersguild have the personal essay form as a format for Tolkien Meta Week! Here's something from the heart - warning for discussion of cPTSD and (non explicit) references to violence.

When I first found Celebrían in a footnote, I wrapped up warm and followed, certain she'd lead me to where she truly lived in the text.

By that point, it had been a good decade or so since I first read Tolkien – I had been aware that Elrond had a wife, and assumed she was dead or hung up in some other cold meat locker alongside a procession of wives spanning literary history.

It was only years later that I properly came across her, and blinked, realising she was a cursory line which led to a footnote in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, one which referred to her torment in passing, meant to explain why the sons of Elrond and to an extent Elrond himself, were the way they were. 

Fridging was one thing, but torment was another entirely, I thought — and so casually! Tea and torment in the Third Age, tra-la-lally traumatised into "losing all joy" in Middle-Earth and leaving the year after, taking ship to Valinor and leaving behind a grieving family. It was simple curiosity, really, until it turned into a cold, familiar grasp: the clear-cut knowledge of exactly what sort of torment it would have been, that drove away the wife of a noble lord living in what was very clearly described as being one of the last great sanctuaries in a ravaged realm. 

But to understand why The Footnote stopped me in my tracks, I need to tell you about The Fields. 

When I speak of The Fields (which are of course not really fields and neither are they called The Fields anywhere but here), I refer to one of the most beautiful spots in the country. The Fields combined the peaceful pastoral with quaint urban charm, rustic without being remote, safe without being detached. I lived in The Fields for several years, and made a little life for myself that grew into something bigger. 

I had been an activist in The Fields — moved from scrappy student to card-carrying revolutionary — and I did it because I loved where I lived very, very much, enough to think I could kiss it better. And I was good, I was! I belonged on the stage in that sense, I was invited to panel after panel, talk after talk, and I stood on little podiums that grew alongside me. I knew how to carry myself, present myself, leveraged my palatability and conventionality in return for rights and bare-minimum environmental reparations. 

Such wonders, of course, came with a cost I hadn’t foreseen — an incident, a couple really, that tossed a diagnosis of cPTSD into my lap and turned my lovely home into The Fields. And because I had been so good at presenting myself and clambering on podiums with shiny hair, the incidents became the talk of the town, and I in turn very quickly became a subject, the walking, talking cost of resistance. 

A feature of cPTSD, one that sets it apart from PTSD, is the overarching dullness with which the emotional flashbacks grasp you. Not like being plucked off the surface of the earth by a monstrous thing, but rather drowning quietly in sludge you never realised was beneath your feet in the first place. There was never a thing that terrified me about The Fields, it was only ever a quiet, creeping mass taking over everything, and in being so — easy to ignore and disguise. 

I love The Fields, I told myself, even after. I loved The Fields, even though life had turned into air and static, and I had turned into an unfeeling thing. I lived in the middle of that little city but felt as though I was in a small hut on no-man's land, or a joint security area, suspended between towers. I couldn't stand the wonderful hills and valleys, so I tried my hardest to cling onto the reasons I loved them, tried to medicate them back into my heart with the forcefulness of a pacemaker. I shoved things down throats and up noses, walked back onto all those stages, turned myself into an electric hearse chasing a long-dead dragon. I would walk around The Fields on some nights, very cold and very young, the bleached bones left behind by something very promising. 

Can you see why I stopped still at Appendix A, at Celebrían? I tried to follow her, and see where her story began, and what wonders it would end in, because if Celebrían's story ended in wonder then maybe, there might be a chance, perhaps….. 

It would be easy, I thought, I was a writer, a journalist, a researcher - I trained in asking questions and knowing things, even sticky, stunted, back-of-the-throat things that you'd rather not catch sight of in a mirror. The History of Middle Earth book sets were ordered, fresh copies of all the old texts, magnifying glasses held over Unfinished Tales. 

I’d been so certain I would find her. That Celebrían would ramble across page after page, legs dangling over the edge and an indolent expression fizzing on her face. She would be stubborn and glorious and righteous in her fervor to change the world. I would find her in the flesh, and then no longer would I stand in The Fields each night, hollow-eyed, self-haunting spectre holding myself thrall to a single series of events in what has been, objectively, a lovely, loving life.

But a full month went by, and all I found was footnote after endnote after cursory mention, almost all of them clothing her in torment, growing stiff and sharp against the tooth of the page: vicious, like a blade angled backwards. For Celebrían and I, the richest text in the world turned into a landscape of loss. 

What a wonderful, rich, textured world you have!

All the better to swallow you whole, my dear. 

I couldn't find her in the story. I spent weeks and weeks on her, and I couldn't find her in the story and by then I had already fancied myself and Celebrían to be counterparts, like if she laughed, I would laugh too, like if she ran, then I would run too, and if she was lost, then… well. I suppose it shows the power of an enduring text. I had a PhD, at that point I had just gotten my publishing deal through, I'd spoken on all those podiums and done all those real-world, adult things, and still I was not immune to the indulgent tether of a good old self-insert. And then it turned out we were not counterparts but rather more akin to co-morbidities, that The Footnote and its friends were all I would ever know of Celebrían. 

It was summer, I remember, but my hands were cold — autopsy-fingers, my partner called them. Archive-fingers, autopsy-fingers, scrabbling around to find nothing, no indication as to how Celebrían's story truly ended and why I was the person I was. The texts shifted uneasily under my hands, like the Professor himself was turning out his pockets and shrugging, reminding me that it was neither Celebrían's nor my story, not really. Pointed me back to The Footnote like it was a pacifier, and still I turned in circles like a dog chasing its tail, looking for other instances of her name. I found nothing. I began to fear that I had wasted my life.

The Footnote started to blur across weeks, and soon it turned itself into My Footnote. The one I had found, a year or so before the hunt, in a fantastic, recently published book that spoke about activism in The Fields, where I came face to face with myself. But there, I hadn't been standing on a podium or being interviewed or writing pressure pieces or anything I had really, truly done, but I was instead a single footnote — condensed into the things that had happened to me, as opposed to the things I had made happen. As the months went on, I looked for references to myself in new books, newspapers, magazines — and I would find myself, but in the same scrap of footnote, wearing the same costume of torment, tragic poster children of a violent world. 

I sat there looking at the thousands and thousands of pages in the legendarium, the stack of books on things I had worked upon, statutes I had pulled down and little laws I had changed. And then at the scraps of Celebrían and I, reduced to scribbles and crossing outs in the margins. It was like we never lived at all. It seems a rather childish reaction, perhaps, to not finding the story you want in a book you bought. Still, that afternoon, when I put down the last page of HoME I had access to, I crawled into bed and stayed there for a very long time, trying very hard to not touch even the bedclothes around me.

But I think that was always what drew me to her, that absence. I didn't find myself in Celebrían, but in the footnote that gestured to her presence. It wasn't that I understood her so much as I knew how to decrypt the desperate scratches left behind by someone who drowned on dry land. That was how she and I were truly alike: people who wanted to change the world, or a little part of it, and did, did something good — and had all of it forgotten, crammed into a footnote read with a tender, pitying fret. 

But that's not canonical, is it? Yes, her absence shaped the story of the Ring War in certain regards. But who said Celebrían, Celebrían the Person, not Celebrían the Footnote — had ever changed anything, let alone the world in which she lived?

Simple – I did.

My Celebrían was a complete nutcase. I wrote her as a daughter born to a borderline-squirrel of a wood elf, who herself hated small creatures with a passion. I had her take off her shoe and beat earwigs to death, had her talk the ear off a perpetually grieving mother, irritate a kinslayer into planting a pine forest, and threaten the High King with a shovel. She would shove cotton in her ears to block out her husband's snoring, and put four teaspoons of sugar in her tea. She bribed her sons to dispose of a snake, and demanded magical healing for a little scrape on her forehead. 

I cut her into familiar shapes: the shape of someone who spent months unable to bear the slightest touch, whose loved one slept on the floor beside the bed, clinging to a listless hand dangled off the side. The shape of a small house in a forest, and the shape of a wonderful ending, in which she truly did change the world in all the ways she could. I don't know, if I'm being honest, whether Celebrían changed me, or if I changed her. Whether change was an instant or a process, whether this version of almost-Celebrían mattered to anyone but myself. I knew one thing though — my Celebrían is a thousand footnotes long, and counting. 

Footnotes, like most things in the archive, are of course caging things: keeping unpalatable violence in the past, or at least elsewhere, keeping the here and now good and quiet. It's easier to outsource healing and rediscovery to other places, to archives and museums and books and Valinor. Was being a footnote a punishment? What’s worse, being pickled wrongly or never being pickled at all? Was this yet another installment of the cautionary tale stretching all the way through time and reality from Celebrían to me; footnotes about women who held themselves thrall to the memory of violence, who lived as well as they could, till they couldn’t? Would it have been better if she never existed at all?

I don't know. All I know for certain is this: at some point between finding Celebrían and writing her, I moved out of The Fields and across the country.

It had been a long time coming. But for years, I had thought I would weather living in The Fields because even after the Torment, the Footnote, the Diagnosis, I never felt a disconnect from the place, because I was still extroverted and irritating and fizzing with the desire to stay in the Fields and love it, as I had always done. And then suddenly, I wanted to run.

It wasn't as if Celebrían burned The Fields down, leaving me there to watch flames eating its flat, starless sky. But what she did was this: carefully take off my rose-tinted glasses, and say run —- this earth has swallowed you whole. 

I had assumed it was my fault, my attachment to The Fields, that I was looking at things wrong, that I was maintaining unhealthy attachments to sites of trauma, prioritising the wrong perspectives, the body keeps an atlas and all that. But Celebrían did not call me crazy. Celebrían was not the kind of person who would ever call you crazy. She was the kind of person who would lay in a wide-open field beside you and ask you what you were looking at. 

And when you say "oh, just up at the big sky", she wouldn't probe. She would know exactly what you mean when you didn't say "-- because there is nothing ahead of me", and she wouldn't say a word about how the ground around you was soft with decay, reeking like a corpse, that you were caught in the straggling grass of its hair. 

She would instead shrug, wink, and point you towards Gollum, because of course she would. She would tell you that Tolkien, ever the Catholic, had drawn out a perfect depiction of what might have happened if Lazarus was left in that cave. And then she would say, run, for god's sake, girl, run, and you would. I did!

How stubbornly we all cling to the idea of staying fixed until being fixed, to the idea of a ready-made Valinor to sail to if we do well enough at life, stay still enough in the margins! How faithfully we believe that if you spend enough time being a very, very good cracked vessel, maybe one day you might feel the quiet triumph of bearing water again. Celebrían, not the Celebrían of The Footnote but my Cel, the manic pixie freakshow of Imladris, said shut the fuck up and run. That it was no use hungering for the impossible and thumbing listlessly though footnotes, and to instead run, and run, and start digging a garden at the ground you come to a stop at because it is only in new soil that something gentle could unfold unbidden. That as time passes, you will belong less and less to the ground you left behind and more and more to the ground you walk upon, to the new trees and new hills around you, to those who love you still.

Run! she said. How alive you looked, hunting for me. How badly you craved my story. See? There are still stories you crave. You are still human enough to crave. Run! 

I think many of us who love this brief, inexorable footnote of a Celebrían, whether we read her or write her, are bound by a similar truth: that in her we caught sight of something within ourselves. All around the world, these tiny, unflinching mirrors in Appendix A and the rest, tie together and create a hundred different Celebríans, all part of the same thread, each version carrying its own burden, though rarely do we ever acknowledge it in each other. It's a quiet nod, an unspoken connection, a reminder that we are all more alike and less alone than a cursory footnote might imply.

To find Celebrían, I had to write her. And in turn, she wrote me in her image. I look at her now, as she is in my head, and there Celebrían is neither alive nor dead. No, what is most clear in my mind is a girl in a dusty wing mirror, a life packed into boxes, sunglasses sliding down her nose. One hand sandwiched in an ordnance map, prying the pages open, hurtling at a perfectly legal speed down an M-road, The Fields growing smaller, and smaller, and smaller in the rearview mirror. Not gone, not truly, but invisible to the naked eye, unless you know exactly where to look. A grain of sand in a bucket of water, a single, sad-looking fish half-buried on a tropical beach. A finger to the past, a wave from a window, a footnote in an appendix. 

[silmarillion-ways-to-die]

"Oh, what are you doing, And where are you going? Your ponies need shoeing, The river is flowing! Oh, tra-la-la-lally Here down in the valley, ha! ha!" – Elves of Rivendell, The Hobbit

“You are more worthy to wear the armour of elf-princes than many that have looked more comely in it.” – Thranduil, The Hobbit

“May your shadow never grow less (or stealing would be too easy)!” – Thranduil, The Hobbit

"A Elbereth Gilthoniel, silivren penna miriel. 0 menel aglar elenath!" – Elves of Rivendell, The Fellowship of the Ring

"Such is of the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere." – Elrond Halfelven, The Fellowship of the Ring

"Farewell, and may the blessing of Elves and Men and all Free Folk go with you. May the stars shine upon your faces!" – Elrond Halfelven, The Fellowship of the Ring

"Yes, they are elves, and they say that you breathe so loud they could shoot you in the dark." – Legolas Greenleaf, The Fellowship of the Ring

"And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!" – Galadriel, The Fellowship of the Ring

"In this phial is caught the light of Eärendil’s star, set amid the waters of my fountain. It will shine still brighter when night is about you. May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out." – Galadriel, The Fellowship of the Ring

"Get thee gone from my gate, thou jail-crow of Mandos!" – Fëanor, The Silmarillion

"...neither law, nor love, nor league of swords, dread nor danger, not Doom itself, shall defend him from Fëanor, and Fëanor's kin, whoso hideth or hoardeth, or in hand taketh, finding keepeth or afar casteth a Silmaril." – Fëanor and His Sons, Morgoth's Ring

[cycas]

I voted Nerdanel. Nerdanel IS my blorbo, in the sense that I love her and have written stories about her. But I also feel like she's being wrongly described as 'not obscure'.

The tra-la-la-lally elves are in The Hobbit, a book that passed 600 million copies sold in 2021 (that's 600 million, not including figures for the legions of unauthorised overseas editions and pirate editions of the book.) It's everywhere. It's never been out of print.

The tra-la-la-lally elves appear twice: when Bilbo arrives in Rivendell the first time, and on his return visit. They get three songs, all written out in full, AND other dialogue.

Nerdanel gets three mentions in the Silmarillion (sales a respectable but much more modest 150 million), and one of those mentions is just 'husband of Nerdanel' and is really about Feanor.

There is one full sentence that's actually about her, not her children or her husband, and it doesn't include anything about her art or her appearance or her friendship with Indis.

That information is only in Morgoth's Ring, the tenth volume of the History of Middle-earth, and I can't even find sales figures for that, but it's definitely been out of print, and the initial print run when it came out was only about 5000.

So I would say in terms of actual published content, Nerdanel IS obscure. Unlike the tra-la-la-lally elves, which arrived among us fully formed, with their art written out for all to see in 1937, most of the information about Nerdanel was published in bits and scraps in the 1990s'. And we never get to see her work, and barely hear her voice.

I think people in Silmarillion fandom on Tumblr do talk about Nerdanel more than the tra-la-la-lally elves nowadays.

I think a lot of that is down to enthusiastic fans who have dug through the obscure material and successfully lobbied to bring attention to the women of the Silmarillion!

But I sometimes feel that the Silm fandom on Tumblr is just not aware how infinitesimally tiny it is compared with the vast great big giant Storm Giant sized figure of The Hobbit.

Obscure Tolkien Blorbo: The Final!

Nerdanel vs One (1) Rivendell elf who sings tra-la-la-lally

Nerdanel:

Nerdanel, called The Wise, was the wife of Fëanor, and known as a great sculptor. She refused to follow her family to Middle-earth in the revolt of the Noldor.

Best known as the woman who looked at the hot mess that is Fëanor, went “is anyone going to marry that?” and did not wait for an answer, Nerdanel is also so much more than just the beloved wife of Fëanor. Most notably, she is a sculptor (apparently a male-dominated field in Noldorin society) - her statues are so life-like that the friends of the depicted would go up and talk to them! She is also wise enough to land the epithet Istarnië, which means Wise One, and she is the only person Fëanor ever listened to, which borders miracle territory. Although when she married the pretty young crown prince of the Noldor, people said she was not good-looking enough for him, Fëanor begged to differ, as they had seven kids together, which is the largest amount of kids any Elven couple ever had. There must have been a lot of passion there (or maybe they just really wanted a daughter?). Although Nerdanel always seemed to have wise counsel for her husband, apparently she did not put up with his, as she was close friends with Indis, his stepmother he did not like. Unfortunately, their marital bliss did not last; when Fëanor pulled a sword on his half-brother Fingolfin (Indis's son) and was exiled, she did not come with him and instead stayed with Indis. This is often seen as her inventing divorce, although a more boring reading could simply suggest she disagreed and did not fancy accompanying him (LaCE does say Elven couples could keep separate households for extended periods of time). She also did not think about coming to Beleriand with him after he swore his terrible oath, although she did beg for him to leave her at least one of her kinslaying spawn sweet adorable baby boys (preferably the one she very ominously tried her hardest to name The Fated as a baby). I suppose the resulting, kind of permanent, separation, could definitely count as divorce.

she is a sculptor and an artisan so skilled that Feanor’s love for her competed with his own love of craft and creation. She raised seven sons and pleaded for their fates with Feanor because of how much she loved them and even though she loved him too, she stuck to her own beliefs and refused to leave Valinor….she’s so girlboss and she said you can go be a tragic archetype but our children don’t deserve that and also I will stay right here. We love a woman who refuses to give up her joys and her home even for a man she loves and ESPECIALLY since it was Feanor….the strength of her will is insane. I love her.

One (1) Rivendell elf who sings tra-la-la-lally:

One of the Elves of Rivendell who sing tra-la-la-lally in The Hobbit.

This one specific elf sings tra la la lally with the rest but he is slightly off key and the other elves bully him for it

they’re SILLY!!! We need NEED more silly elves!! Like who are these weirdos just hanging out in the trees of Rivendell? Did they know the dwarves were coming and gather their friends to specifically climb those trees to sing nonsense at them? Do they just normally sit there and sing about every little thing they see? Is this a traditional Rivendell thing or are those elves just really strange? I’m obsessed with them they’re everything to me. Elves are oft portrayed as being Too Serious in this fandom and silly elves need rights too! Silly elf rights!!!!

Final masterpost

[roprot]

Okay

I didn't think I'd ever do this but there are so few RoP memes and places of joyful discussion out there that it made me return to tumblr. I've been a quiet fan ever since the show started but there are no places to be silly about it, ffs just LET ME HAVE MY PRETTY GIFS No, it's not prestige drama. Nah, I don't mind the lore changes. Yes, I'm pro diverse casting. The elves are elfy enough for me with all their pettiness and various lengths of hair — PJ just made us default to copypaste Vulcans (Tra-la-la-lally & Fa-la-la-lolly anyone?). Amazon evil, professionals behind the show I'm neutral about. What I DO love about the show is that I get colourful high fantasy cheese with moments of true beauty and absolutely no SA /oversexualisation/grimdark in between. Geez, RoP makes me HAPPY. I mean, it feels so sincere it's awkward at times. But after these past years... decades... of cynical media I feel like we kinda need that. I need that. Also yes, Galadriel slaps. As does Hannatauron and Elrond and Celebrimor and Disa and Durin and Elendil and Berek and— Anyways, low-effort blogging ahoy, hello all and give me your nice things pls <3

[wilwarin-wilwa]

what if the tra-la-lally elves were part of a larger cultural movement that aimed to slow down or oppose the collective fading of the elves by deliberately behaving youthfully and engaging in childish displays of joy and mischief