Caldar Greencloak

Hudson Williams, #1 Shane Understander

I think Shane was a character who, soon as I read him, made all the sense to me. I felt immediately a kinship and an ownership over Shane. I was like, “I need to be the only person to tell this story. I get it. I want to be the person to be Shane and I want to spend time with him.” [x]

(sources below)

Bilbo takes the Arkenstone, knowing it's a theft against his friend, but then he takes it to the Elvenking and gives it to him for peace. And then Thranduil follows his example to trade it back to Thorin, for peace. Mirrors of Feanor and the Nauglamir and I don't even know what else because I'm not that well up on the First Age - but brought into being by one little hobbit standing at the brink of other people's wars.

And then it builds a path toward the fate of the Third Age. Because if Bilbo hadn't been able to renounce the Arkenstone then, I don't see how he would have escaped the Ring sixty years later.

They didn't talk about it.

Nacho woke up the next morning with a hangover. Mike made him drink more water and eat some toast, then loaded him into the car to pick up Jesse.

Mike kept looking at him like he wanted to say something. Finally, in the driveway outside Jesse's house, he said, "You know—”

"I know," Nacho cut him off. He knew Mike meant well, but he just didn't want to hear it.

"Yo, what happened to you?" Jesse asked when he got in the backseat. "You look like shit."

"Thanks, Pinkman," Nacho said with a roll of his eyes, deflecting the question as easily as a punch.

Mike drove them to a neighborhood right by the airport. It wasn't far from where Nacho had grown up in the South Valley, and just as shitty.

"So what's the deal?" asked Jesse. "What are we doing here?"

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:

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