I was thinking about Aragorn’s stupidly long legs again and I think it should be canon that he regularly smacks his forehead into low door frames and stuff. Just somwhere in Minas Tirith there’s a loud thunk followed by a long string of Sindarin swearwords and Arwen is like “ah yes, here he comes, the King of Gondor and Arnor, the love of my life.”
Bree being one of the only settlements that is actually designed to accomodate both tall and short people is actually surprisingly easy for Strider, as he is like. Aha. Inclusive architecture. The presence of a choice of doorway heights signals to me that I must pay attention to which one I select!
Unfortunately, his increased awareness of his head directly corresponds to reduced awareness of his legs, and while he can brilliantly navigate his way to a good Lurking Corner in any given Bree pub without hitting his head on a single chandelier, he then stretches out his legs and wipes out two hobbit servers with glasses, a guy selling spectacles, the chandelier itself, and ultimately a percentage point of the local economy
Hence where he got his nickname. The barkeep chewed him out rather a lot and during the rant asked “what you need those long legs for anyway? What stridin’ about have you t'do?” The third time he tripped someone, he overheard the servers training each other for the strider’s legs.
If you’re not tall, I need you to understand this is absolutely a thing, and there’s a weirdly perfect height for doors to do that, and it’s LOWER THAN YOU THINK.
It’s when something is RIGHT above your eyebrows. Safely out of peripheral vision, and you thought you ducked, but didn’t duck far enough, OR you just weren’t paying attention and didn’t get the visual memo because WRONG SIDE FOR GOOD PERIPHERAL, and you go THUNK.
And it is NOT THE FEEL GOODS
The absolute WORST is a short door on STAIRS.
It’s tall enough on the stairs.
But when you step on the DOOR stair - THUNK - ducking miscalculated.
you guys are so annoying. why do i have to see discourse every year that’s like “was tolkien really a woke king or was he your conservative uncle?” the guy was a devout catholic and a genteel misogynist who maintained lifelong friendships with queer people and women, and this isn’t even paradoxical because that was part of the upper-class oxford culture he was immersed in. tolkien told the nazis to fuck off (and in doing so demonstrated a real understanding of what racism is and why it’s harmful, beyond simply “these guys are bad news because they’re who my country is at war with right now”) but his inner life was marked by internalized racism that is deeply and inextricably woven into the art that he made. he foolishly described himself as an anarcho-monarchist, and it’s kind of crazy to see people on this website passionately arguing that he likely never meaningfully engaged with anarchist theory, because…yeah, no shit, of course he didn’t. tolkien didn’t have to engage with most sociopolitical theory because as an upper-class englishman of his position, he was never affected by any of the issues that this theory is concerned with. what is plainly obvious from reading both his fiction and letters is that tolkien’s ideal political system was that the divinely ordained god-king would rise up and rule in perfect justice and humility; he didn’t want a government, he wanted a king arthur, even though (obviously) he was aware that outcome was impossible. why is it so hard for people to accept that he was just some guy! his letters aren’t a code you have to crack. no amount of arguing or tumblr-level analysis is going to one day reveal a rhetorically airtight internally consistent worldview spanning jrrt’s fiction, academic work, and personal writings, thereby “solving” the question of whether he was a woke king or your conservative uncle. his ideology was extremely inconsistent because, at the end of the day, he was just some guy.
You’ll all sleep a lot better when you realise that actually most people, rather than being purity in human form or evil incarnate, are in fact just some guy.
“This love for the memory of the countryside of his youth was later to become a central part of his writing, and it was intimately bound up with his love for the memory of his mother.” ― Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography
Author of my favorite stories and a comforting universe. And, without a doubt, the greatest inspiration for the writer I’ve become. I learned to tell my own stories through his.
I was just thinking of one of my favorite, less-famous quotes from him about writing, but had forgotten it was his birthday!
As for what to try and write: I don’t know. I tried a diary with portraits (some scathing some comic some commendatory) of persons and events seen; but I found it was not my line. So I took to ‘escapism’: or really transforming experience into another form and symbol with Morgoth and Orcs and the Eldalie (representing beauty and grace of life and artefact) and so on; and it has stood me in good stead in many hard years since.
The Silmarillion fandom is genuinely insane. Like, you hang out on tumblr, read fic on AO3 and you think, yeah. Lots of people have read the Silmarillion. It’s Tolkien. Everyone’s read Tolkien. Barnes and Noble has a whole bunch of the HoME and also a bunch of books by people writing about the legendarium. This is mainstream, surely.
But then you actually touch grass and talk to normal people. Not even that, you talk to people who self diagnose as hard core Tolkien fans. And. None of them have read the Silmarillion. The Silmarillion is famously a book that nobody reads.
And yet. On AO3 The Silmarillion and Other Histories of Middle Earth has more works than The Lord of the Rings. Think about that. That’s baffling. It’s ridiculous. Like I realize that LotR fandom is split a bit by the movie, but still. The Silmarillion has almost four times as many fics as the LotR movies. Everybody has watched the movies!
I need to know what percentage of people who actually read the Silmarillion went on to write fic or draw fanart about it. Because it must be insane, surely. Like, I’m pretty sure the Silmarillion wins some kind of record in this department.
Thinking about the fanfic bell curve where on one end you have “Perfect, needs no improvement or elaboration” (LotR sits here) and on the other you have “So bad it’s no fun to even think about” with the middle being the fanfic zone. But I think there may be a secret fourth Silmarillion option. Which is a book that is perfect* but simultaneously non existent. It’s not even a real story! The language is super pretty and deeply incomprehensible (especially to people who, unlike me, were not raised from early childhood on both the Bible and classic literature). And it’s more of an outline and an abstract painting of cultural and world building vibes (not cultural and world building facts and information) than an actual narrative. There are story hooks galore. There are vivid and fascinating characters, but their lives are glossed over and you only get one or two paragraphs of prose that will reorder your brain chemistry and haunt you forever. There are countless more characters who only exist as names, the implication of whose existence is fascinating. All of this is deeply frustrating, both to casual readers who just want a Normal Enjoyable Book, and super fans who want All the Lore. But it is catnip to anyone who engages in transformative work.
*I am aware that not anyone who is a fan of the silm thinks it’s perfect
This … is remarkably true. Of course it also happens I have 318 pieces tagged with The Silmarillion and Other Histories of Middle Earth, and only 42 for LotR. And most of those are drabbles &/or poetry.
raises hand i’ve read it. The biggest stumbling block to reading the silmarillion is that people think you just need to sit down and read it. nothing could be further from the truth. do you actually sit down and read the bible straight thru? generally, no, people read it by books. that’s the silmarillion. you read the first chapter, then skip to the chapter of beren and luthien and then read about the fall of gondolin and… and… if you try to read it straight thru, you’ll not only get lost, you’ll get a hernia trying to lift all the allegory at once.
you can accuse good ol’ professor t of many things, but being readable (in the sense of any ‘standard’ novel) ain’t one of them. he’s dense and thick as a brick. take the silmarillion in chunks and digest them separately, you’ll get it then.
absolutely flabbergasting to see people who have so enthusiastically succumbed to despair. like okay denethor, but some of us are gonna actually face the armies of mordor in battle nonetheless.
But the funniest thing about this is that I think you’ve actually discovered the one single piece of content that could have simultaneously upset both J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis so bad that they are, as we speak, clawing their way out of the grave ready to fight.*
*whether they’re going to fight you or just each other is not clear yet, we’ll just have to wait and see.
This was so obvious when I realized it, but I think most people miss
it, because we’re so desensitized by D&D-style magic with immediate,
visibly, flashy effects, rather than more subtle and invisible forces
of magic. When Gollum attacks Frodo on the slopes of Mount Doom, Frodo
has the chance to kill him, but he doesn’t. Instead, he says:
Frodo: Go! And if you ever lay hands on me again, you yourself shall be cast into the Fire!
Frodo’s not just talking shit here. He is literally, magically laying a curse. He’s holding the One Ring in his hands as he says it;
even Sam, with no magic powers of his own, can sense that some powerful
mojo is being laid down. Frodo put a curse on Gollum: if you try to
take the Ring again, you’ll be cast into the Fire.
Five pages later, Gollum tries to take the Ring again. And that’s exactly what happens.
Frodo’s geas takes effect and Gollum eats lava.
On further reflection:
All the other people in the franchise who were offered the Ring declined to take it because they were wise enough to know that if they used its power – and the pressure to do so would be too great – they would be subject to its corruption.
Frodo uses the power of the Ring to lay a geas, and then five minutes later at the volcano’s edge, succumbs to its corruption. The Ring has gotten to him and he can no longer give it up. Because he used its power.
On further further reflection: I’d have to read the section again, but I recall that after throwing Gollum off and laying the geas, Sam observes that Frodo seems suddenly filled with energy again when previously he had been close to dead of fatigue. He hikes up the mountain so fast he leaves Sam behind – and doesn’t even seem to notice that he’s left him behind.
Could he have been drawing on the Ring’s power at this point in the story?
At this point in the story we’re relying on Sam’s narration, and Sam doesn’t know what’s going on in Frodo’s head, so it’s hard to say for sure.
Having used it once, after spending so long holding out against it, was that the breach in the dam?
Which means that the moment that Frodo succumbs to temptation is not the moment at the volcano – it was already too late by then. The moment he is taken by temptation was when he used the power of the Ring to repel Gollum.
If so, this ties in neatly with discussions I’ve seen about how Tolkien subscribes to a “not even once” view of good and evil – that in many other works it’s acceptable to do a small evil in service of a greater good, but in Lord of the Rings that always fails.
Re-reading Fellowship of the Rings, and I got to this passage in Lorien:
‘I would ask one thing before we go,’ said Frodo, ‘a thing which I often meant to ask Gandalf in Rivendell. I am permitted to wear the One Ring: why cannot I see all the others and know the thoughts of those that wear them?’
‘You have not tried,’ [Galadriel] said. ‘Only thrice have you set the Ring upon your finger since you knew what you possessed. Do not try! It would destroy you. Did not Gandalf tell you that the rings give power according to the measure of each possessor? Before you could use that power you would need to become stronger, and to train your will to the domination of others.’
In other words:
Frodo asks Galadriel, herself carrying a Ring of Power, “Could I, hypothetically, use the power of the One Ring to do something magical aside from turning invisible?” and Galadriel replies, “Yes, hypothetically, you totally could, assuming the magic you want to do involves laying compulsions on others, but I strongly recommend against it, because it would fuck up your brain.”
This was in the first book. At the end of the third book Frodo uses the Ring to fuck Gollum up, forcing him to throw himself into lava if he disobeys Frodo’s commands.
Talk about a chekov’s gun.
Got to this point in my re-read and uh. This was a lot less subtle than I remembered it.
‘Down, down!’ [Frodo] gasped, clutching his hand to his breast, so that beneath the cover of his leather shirt he clasped the Ring. ‘Down, you creeping thing, and out of my path! Your time is at an end. You cannot slay me or betray me now.’
Then suddenly, Sam saw these two rivals with other vision. A crouching shape, scarcely more than the shadow of a living thing, a creature now wholly ruined and defeated, yet filled with a hideous lust and rage; and before it stood stern, untouchable now by pity, a figure robed in white, but at its breast it held a wheel of fire. Out of the fire there spoke a commanding voice.
‘Begone, and trouble me no more! If you touch me ever again, you shall be cast yourself into the Fire of Doom.’
Then the vision passed and Sam saw Frodo standing, hand on breast, his breath coming in great gasps, and Gollum at his feet, resting on his knees with his wide-splayed hands upon the ground.
…
Yeah.
Interestingly, I feel that there is another layer to this, and that is Frodo’s mercy (mirroring “the pity of Bilbo” which Gandalf said would prove significant) at play, tangled up in his use of the Ring and the chain of events that would play out.
Frodo is sparing Gollum’s life here, and shaping that into his curse. He is only cursing Gollum—can only curse Gollum—as an effect of this mercy; if Gollum were dead, he could not be cursed by Frodo or the Ring; his survival makes the curse possible and serves as payment for the curse: they are in effect making a bargain here, wherein Golllum’s life and his sentence of dying in the Fires of Doom should he take the Ring again are as one, a package deal, which Gollum “accepts” by retreating with his life.
Then, once Frodo comes to Mount Doom, he cannot cast the ring into the fires; the Ring has him in thrall, since he has used it. Now into the picture again comes Gollum, whose greed for the Ring has surpassed his love of his own life—even having been cursed with death should he touch it again, he craves it and demands it for himself, taking it from Frodo by force.
Thus we see the Ring’s power divided against itself—it has defeated both Frodo and Gollum, and its defeat of Gollum inspires Gollum to fight Frodo for it, invoking the curse. And thus Sauron, who has it, now, by virtue of both its erstwhile Bearers falling under its (and therefore its Lord’s) sway, is cheated out of it by the effects of Frodo’s act of mercy.
Frodo spared Gollum, and used the Ring’s power to set a curse, and when Frodo faltered, it was Gollum whom he spared who took the Ring from him and invoked that curse, falling into the Fires of Doom and, due to the same greed that defeated Frodo, taking the Ring with him.
If there had been no sparing Gollum, there would have been no curse, and Frodo would have had the task Isildur failed at—destroying the (beautiful, useful, lovely ring)—set before him alone, and he may have succeeded, or he may have failed, or he may have tarried too long in the struggle for Sauron’s destruction to come in a timely fashion, or the resolution and the Ring’s destruction may have hurt him far beyond the loss of a finger.
Instead, there was Gollum, in thrall to Sauron yet doomed by Frodo, to take from Frodo both the Ring and the burden of destroying it. Frodo, in his mercy-tinged use of the Ring, effectively shifted the impetus behind the Ring’s destruction from himself to the doom laid on Gollum—and Sauron’s hold over Gollum made it a near certainty that the doom would come to pass: Gollum would die, and not surrender the Ring, and thus the Ring would fall with him into the fires of Mount Doom.
And Frodo … like Indiana Jones in the Chapel of the Holy Grail, could avoid falling himself by either a willingness to let go, or the presence of a loved one to hold him back. Or, y’know, Gollum deciding to bite rather than just grab. A few more options here.
This really hearkens back to old Celtic mythological geasa, and how so often someone dies because of a forced contradiction of a geas’ rules. A geas essentially allows for an easy setup of a no-win situation.
The warrior-poet-king Cú Chulainn was, eventually, brought down because he was bound by a geas. His geas was to never eat the flesh of a dog (I believe by Culann, but I’m not sure on that). Well, he got served some dog stew. He couldn’t eat it, because it was dog. But he couldn’t not eat it, because that would be extremely rude, according to cultural custom at the time - a custom so strong, it might as well have been a geas on its own. Either way, he was breaking a geas’ rules, and this magically weakens him before an upcoming battle. He - and his charioteer and horse - are slain
So, yeah, this all tracks with how geasa work. Gollum had such a strong desire for the ring that he, quite literally, had no choice but to attack Frodo for it. But, in doing so, he contradicts the geas Frodo laid upon him, and so falls.
Just came across this while reading The Two Towers:
[Frodo to Gollum]: “’I did not mean the danger that we all share,’ said Frodo. ‘I mean a danger to yourself alone. You swore a promise by what you call the Precious. Remember that! It will hold you to it; but it will seek a way to twist it to your own undoing. Already you are being twisted. You revealed yourself to me just now, foolishly. Give it back to Smeagol you said. Do not say that again! Do not let that thought grow in you! You will never get it back. But the desire of it may betray you to a bitter end. You will never get it back. In the last need, Smeagol, I should put on the Precious; and the Precious mastered you long ago. If I, wearing it, were to command you, you would obey, even if it were to leap from a precipice or to cast yourself into the fire. And such would be my command. So have a care, Smeagol!’”
i love how Gandalf invested in Hobbits in year one and has been pushing them ever since. Thorin, i hear you need help with a breaking and entering. Can I recommend one of these little cunts? Silent as fuck, trust me. Elrond my dude i know you’re skeptical but these four chucklefucks just transported a weapon of mass destruction all the way here. Theoden, you’ve gotta get yourself a hobbit man, I’ve got a spare one here. Denathor you big prick, take a hobbit - literally this is the bottom of the range but listen to him sing. Beautiful little bastard.
The mileage on this one is totally normal Elrond. Hey speaking of can I park him here for a while
In “Unfinished Tales” there’s a section where the Fellowship gets Gandalf to tell his side of the story about how he recommended Bilbo to Thorin’s company and this is literally how it went down:
There were just so many great additions to this post that I had to put them all in one place.
ALT
