It is easier to believe Elwing was welcomed by a distant sea than admit she was thrice exiled from her very own land. For the past makes no pledges of comprehension, and for people like Celebrían and Morwen and Finduilas and Elwing and oh so many more, trying to locate oneself in its narratives feels like grasping at reflections in disturbed water. I cannot tell you whether the Eldar truly believe such tales of transformation, whether turning into a bird as you hurtle off a cliff is something they can easily comprehend. But I can tell you this: across centuries, in countless rooms, people have vanished into explanations more bearable than the truth.

- she that was young and fair -

A technically still unfinished concept portrait of Elwing in Aman for Willa from my November batch of commissions (final version being commissioner-exclusive)… truly it isn’t every day you get an art order based on your own writing 🥺🫶🏽 my idea here was to just needle around with the ‘gilded cage’ idea of Valinor, which is often discussed with regards to the Noldor, yes, but I actually find Elwing’s experience of the place most interesting in that sense… but I will refrain from yapping here!

[one slot left for april turnaround]

Tolkien being like “and THEN Tuor—” who has already been raised by elves, escaped thraldom, and lived as a wild outlaw for some enrichment “—took his harp which he carries with him ALWAYS and also he’s quite skilled :3” like. I know you love your guy but have you ever heard of less is more.

WIP Wriday

Thank you very much for the WIP tags @curufiin @endless-natterings @yewfae ! IDK if this is an art WIP or writing WIP so have both, aka a concept sketch featuring gangly adolescent Elrond on the day he finds out his twin will choose mortality, and the corresponding flashback scene from this little ol’ longfic WIP. Tagging @nycterisg @melestasflight @thescrapwitch @leucisticpuffin @beatles4ever65 @annarobots if you’re keen!

Elrond found himself fixating on the way each swell looked like it was going somewhere until it reached the shore and simply dissolved, performing the same gesture endlessly without variation or purpose. Was that what awaited him? Years stretching forward identically, each one arriving with the suggestion of difference only to reveal itself as more of the pointless same? Refusing to decide was still deciding, he understood that. Inaction was slower violence, measured against the self. His brother had already decided. Elros would age, would die, would escape the world by letting it consume him. Elrond could do the same. Or he could choose the alternative: to be a permanent witness to their temporary lives, to love such bright little things while they lasted. Neither looked like living. And yet living looked like dying. Living sounded like hoofbeats, screamed like a woman hurtling off a cliff, tearing a seam in the world. Felt like two breathless boys, standing hand-in-hand in the split holding a ragged edge each, trying to determine which fall they could survive. Coming to the conclusion that it was their entwined fingers which would have to loosen from each other’s, if neither were to drown.

Elrond was certain of one thing. When you're born where the sinking shore meets the sundering sea and neither wanted you there because neither was where you were meant to be born, you learn that home is simply the place you happen to be standing when the next tragedy arrives. It was the first moment of foresight, as unlooked for as the others. All the worst moments of his life would happen upon such seashores, lukewarm sand drifting comfortingly beneath his dug-in heels.

This is not likely to be explained as well as I want it and I’m so sorry if it’s repetitive but I’ve been thinking so much about the parts of Aerin’s personality we do and don’t see and how that changes throughout the different versions of the Narn.

While we absolutely do get to see aspects of Aerin’s character in The Narn, we see that she’s brave, she’s selflessly loyal and she is kind, much of her character is hidden from us, in part by her because she has to.

The very nature of her position of forced marriage is that someone else is forcing her into a roll that she does not want and is abusing her when she does not obey or when she tries to fight against this role. I talked about this in my brief rant about Aerin and dehumanization but this makes it almost impossible for us to see her identity in full; Her sense of humor, preferences, her interests, her own loved ones…they do not fit into Brodda’s role for her and thus she is not permitted them. She is overtly punished for showing, for being, anything that Brodda doesn’t want but being forced to be what he wants is so dehumanizing and traumatic in itself. She’s so trapped and it’s so horrifying.

I think about this whenever I’m coming up with little things like details about her favorite animals, colors, that sort of thing. All these parts of her, that she must hold so close it hurts.

By the time she sets that house on fire there are plenty of people in Hithlum who have little to no memory of who Aerin used to be.

I was rambling in the tags of this post here about the moments of sarcasm and irony we see briefly in BoLT and I just think Aerin has so much suppressed anguish and rage and she has to hide herself under threat of violence.

I think she has these moments of sarcasm and bitterness and flippant, dark humor that are so startling to people who aren’t close with her. And it highlights how much people have forgotten of who she used to be and how she wanted to be.

Another thing that really sticks with me in BoLT (that I consider carrying over into the later versions) especially is so is that she's so adaptable, levelheaded and I don’t think this is entirely in spite of her trauma but because of it.
Even before that, when Morwen is planning to leave Hithlum, Aerin's response is to offer to watch Niënor. She adapts quickly and is so clever and she never should have had to be.

And honestly it makes her burning of the house, that “patience will break at the last” even more devastating because of that

(Also this all started out because I wanted to make a post about Aerin and her dark humor and irony and now that must be another post because it became this)

My desire to do some environmental writing collided with my spike in Elwing-feelings, so have this little ficlet about Elwing and her sons, and why, unlike most of the Eldar and surprisingly for someone who can turn into a bird, she prefers sea-caves to treetops, plus some Sirion worldbuilding. She! Was! So! Young! Also her just talking at birds (my beloved little freak) was developed from @rana-temporaria post about Elwing just being a little strange, as a result of her upbringing…

Enjoy/suffer as always, general warning for war/kinslaying mentions! 😇

The Sonorous Dark

The key to the caves of Sirion was knowing which tide pool refilled first. It served to mark the entrance through barnacled rocks into something that felt, for a few brief years, like eternity: salt-damp, shadowed, and anointed with saltwater instead of blood. The caves opened properly in summer when the sea pulled back far enough, and they became Sirion’s caves: the favourite playhouse of Elwing and her sons (for of course, she joined them in every game, and had twice as much fun playing two-versus-one), Elrond still small enough to need lifting over the deeper pools, Elros already arguing with whatever little creature lived inside them.

The three went every day the tides allowed it, with the boys permitted to play wherever they wanted. That is, only if they abided by the mischievous cave-echo that announced it was time to go home a thousand times over, a legion of bossy little poltergeists chasing the children out into daylight to find it was only ever Elwing of Doriath, standing at the mouth of the cave with her hands on her hips and a cheeky grin on her lips. 

When they played in the caves, they were not Elrond-Elros-Elwing. They were three refugee children pretending to be ordinary children, feral in salt-stained clothes but with their foremother's watchful eyes. Up and down the shoreline, caves like these were claimed by Sirion's young to play in: designed, occupied, defended by children who understood that space you could call yours was temporary, that you took it when you found it and could lose it any time. Privacy was sacred because it was rare, so the caves were spread far enough that you never encroached on another family's small territory, especially those from the first wave of refugees, those from Gondolin, who'd arrived before you.

They stretched along the coast toward the delta, away from the city proper that had been built on ruins, where the adults were kept busy rebuilding what had been razed, their sorrow safely hidden from their youngest members who were equally hidden while they founded their cave-kingdoms. The soil was deep and dark and wet in those caves, fertile ground in a place where no plant was meant to grow. The children of Sirion thrived in its resinous possibility.

Keep reading

A little companion piece to this. Listen, I just think Elros and Elrond deserve to be the worst kids ever seen. It's called karmic comeuppance 🤷🏽‍♀️

----

"No!" Screamed the erstwhile lordling of Sirion, "I hate you!"

"Yes," said Maglor, attempting to smile through gritted teeth, "you have made that abundantly clear and I must say, I'm not feeling all too fond of you myself at the moment."

Unfazed by the threat of Maglor's antipathy, the boy continued to spew forth an – honestly impressive – string of expletives featuring several sharp objects, many barnyard animals, and a number of unhelpful suggestions concerning Maglor's genitals.

Where did he even learn this? he marvelled for a moment at a particularly clever turn of phrase before remembering the boy had spent all his life prior to his...relocation in the company of sailors. By his side, his brother continued to regard Maglor with a silent sneer of haughty contempt only somewhat undercut by the smears of cream that clung to his upper lip like a faux-mustache – the remnants of his breakfast. It made him look uncomfortably like Fingolfin.

Though Maglor could now tell the Sons of Elwing apart with some reliability, he did not know their right names for the recalcitrant wretches refused to divulge that information. El-something he was sure – the line of Thingol had many flaws but imagination did not number among them. One of the twins was a biter though, and the other a scratcher, and so that was how they were called by the residents of the fortress. It was, Maglor was reasonably certain, Scratcher who now unleashed upon him a barrage of abuse – poor, unsuspecting fool that he was – for the sin of suggesting the boys learn their numbers.

Turgon was laughing at him from somewhere inside the Halls of Mandos, he just knew it. I hope the rats are gnawing on your bones, Maglor thought viciously in his dead cousin's direction. Meanwhile, his blasted descendant was somehow still going.

"...son of a shit-licking, piss-drinking, sister-fucking..."

Perhaps, he mused sourly, the cruel servants of Celegorm had the right of it.

"Listen here," he interrupted, cutting off Scratcher mid-tirade, "I have no great desire to spend my precious time teaching you arithmetics either, but for all the crimes my dear, departed cousin Turukano would lay at my feet, I would rather not add a failure to teach his great-grandchildren their sums to that list."

Scratcher screwed his face up in an unimpressed moue and spat out, "I don't care about Turukano and I don't care about you." Hopping off his chair, he grabbed his brother by the hand and turned to stomp off but not before delivering a parting shot. "You're ugly."

At this, Maglor could no longer hold back an outraged squawk.

"I am not –" he began, incensed, voice trembling with deep-rooted offense, but was interrupted before he could continue.

"and," the boy's eyes shone with malicious relish, voice brimming with the vindictive triumph of one who knows they are about to land a killing blow, "you sing bad."

The ensuing shriek could be heard for miles.

Idril and Eowyn, though. Idril is one of the earliest characters that Tolkien invented, and he loved her so much that he HAD to work her into LotR and make his self-insert character fall in love with her.

Tolkien started writing “The Fall of Gondolin” in the trenches and continued while he was in the hospital and recovering from trench fever. It’s the origin story of the whole Legendarium. And Idril is at the heart of it.

The correspondence between Idril/Turgon/Maeglin and Eowyn/Theoden/Grima is pretty obvious. But the finer details in “The Fall of Gondolin” prove that Tolkien had been brooding over the themes of Eowyn’s story for a very long time.

He was haunted by the idea that few of the women of Gondolin would have survived:

“Now the number of women was few because of their hiding or being stowed by their kinsfolk in secret places in the city. There they were burned or slain or taken and enthralled, and the rescue-parties found them too seldom; and it is the greatest ruth to think of this, for the maids and women of the Gondothlim were as fair as the sun and as lovely as the moon and brighter than the stars.”

Burned or slain or taken and enthralled: these are the same horrors that are in Eowyn’s mind when she confronts Aragorn:

“All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honor, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more.”

“The Fall of Gondolin” immortalizes the heroic deaths of Glorfindel and Ecthelion, but the fates of the women and children are unspeakable and their names are forgotten. Idril is the only exception. She fights “like a tigress” against Maeglin when he drags her by the hair and tries to kill her son, and she wears chainmail and fights just like the men:

“She herself would bide, said she, nor seek to live after her lord; and then she fared about gathering womenfolk and wanderers and speeding them down the tunnel, and smiting marauders with her small band; nor might they dissuade her from bearing a sword.”

“Nor seek to live after her lord” is really interesting. Is this the precursor of Eowyn’s suicidal ideation? I’m struck by how Idril thinks of herself almost as Tuor’s knight rather than his wife. Instead of escaping with her 7 year old son, she decides to die in battle along with her lord.

Tolkien was very critical of the medieval concept of Courtly Love, which involved a knight serving and almost worshipping a goddess-like Lady. What got his heart pounding was the older ideal (glorified in Beowulf) of a man’s devotion to his liege-lord. In the 1930s he even wrote a long narrative poem about Lancelot regretting his affair with Guinevere and longing to return to King Arthur’s service. The poem is unfinished, but apparently it was supposed to end with Lancelot completely rejecting Guinevere and attempting to sail west to reunite with Arthur in Avalon. 👀

However, Tolkien never says that only men can have this type of bond: Idril and Luthien are willing to fight and die for their loves; they are not passively waiting to be saved and worshipped.

Idril is married to Tuor, but she wants to be his knight. Eowyn realizes that she actually wants to be Aragorn’s knight after thinking that she wanted to marry him. Do you see how Tolkien was just gnawing on this idea for years and years???

How does Eowyn tell Aragorn she loves him? She says she wants to be one of his soldiers and love him the way they love him! Faramir points this out to her: “And as a great captain may to a young soldier he seemed to you admirable.” At that moment everything clicks and she accepts Faramir’s love, having clarified her feelings about Aragorn.

I mean, it’s easy to get these things confused, right?? Remember this extremely romantic scene between Faramir and Aragorn:

“Suddenly Faramir stirred, and he opened his eyes, and he looked on Aragorn who bent over him; and a light of knowledge and love was kindled in his eyes, and he spoke softly. ‘My lord, you called me. I come. What does the king command?’”

Of course Faramir understands Eowyn’s crush on Aragorn! He’s crushing on him too!

Eowyn gets to have Faramir as a husband, and they both get to have Aragorn as their king. As Faramir says, “….you and I have both passed under the wings of the Shadow, and the same hand drew us back.” Eowyn claims her relationship to Aragorn as her “liege-lord and healer,” and he FINALLY addresses her as “thee,” returning the intimate form of address that she had used earlier: “They go only because they would not be parted from thee—because they love thee.” In his letters, Tolkien said that he didn’t think Eowyn’s feelings for Aragorn changed much. Eowyn’s feelings are meant to be complicated and confusing, that was on purpose!

I haven’t even touched on the way Tolkien talks about Eowyn in boymode: “Dernhelm was less in weight than many men, though lithe and well-knit in frame”—lithe and well-knit? haha ok.

IDK what else to say, so have a picture of Mulan and Shang:

(guy who heard that she needs to romanticize her life but got it confused with eroticize): migraine light sensitivity is just another type of sensation play when you think about it