mitchie ✮

ive been sick for a while so excuse the messiness

now available as a print under the cut! (AAAAAH thank you guys so much for the lovely words!)

Listen, listen, there are many weird and puritanical things about the way Tolkien writes about elf sexuality. But this is just absolutely hilarious and gives the opportunity for sooo much funny shit.

I really wished I knew who originally made the post, but I just had the screenshot on my phone to snicker with my sister about.

Lindir (Maglor in disguise): wow

Elrond: no actually we'll throw it into a volcano

But someone lowborn - still educated, still familiar with the stories. Faithful or not. Lifespan lower than the upper class, but longer than other humans - but that doesn't matter - thousands of years is a long time. The Roman Empire was more recent than this guy.

Because imagine the founder of your nation and its first king, who was told to have been born as the son of a bird and a star, lived to be 500, and who died 2000 years ago. Just. Has a sibling. Who is still running around. You can go visit him. You can! He's very friendly. He wrote the medical book your healers study from. He updates it religiously every other decade. You don't hear from him often because he lives fairly secluded from society and seems to prefer a quiet life but every few hundred years something batshit insane happens and he's right there. At the center of things. Pretending to be a background character, as if Sauron didn't look warily at him expecting him to turn into another Lúthien incident. Maybe he's shy?

You are a sailor. You meet him on one of your journeys to Middle Earth.

they are only there some of the time or at certain entrances (possible but prosaic, includes the potential for tra la la lallying as shift work)

elrond’s magic has some kind of built-in warning system and they cleared out to avoid potential danger (plausible and realistic considering that i don’t think team tra la la lally is either interested in fighting or skilled in emergency response)

the changing political climate and increased danger around rivendell resulted in all tra la la lallying activities being moved inside the valley (which begs the question of where, and if they just manifest barbershop quartet style beneath guests’ windows)

elrond didn’t know about it until bilbo unwittingly mentioned the experience over dinner, and all roadside tra la la lallying was brought to an end (either petering out without the allure of secrecy or simply by the power of elrond’s consternation)

the whole thing was contrived solely to troll the dwarves (elucidates the standout conformity of only these elves to historic ‘tree-dwelling hippies’ stereotypes)

bilbo fully made it up (this was revealed when merry and pippin cheerfully asked elrond when the tra la la lallying would start, and elrond said ‘gesundheit’)

Like most fantasy stories I read/see have a privileged ruling class whose day job is to either do politics or be idly wealthy. And then you have LOTR and the Silmarillion, where the kings and princes and queens are constantly identified by very traditionally lower-class job. Fëanor and Celebrimbor’s defining trait is their smith work. Elrond and Aragorn are constantly referred to as capital H Healers. Bards like Maglor or Daeron or Luthíen seemed to be a point of pride for their families/cities.