Here Be the Guild of Scribes.

And yes, I get that the Ring was evil incarnate; it will bend any of its bearers to its will and poison their heart and minds. Only a heart that is unfettered by the desire for power and greed can truly carry it without being utterly destroyed by it. Even with that, when the Ring was destroyed, the shadow passed, for it was temporary, and goodness always persists over evil.  Those were the wise words of the elves, Gandalf and Samwise Gamji.

Still, it is very near.

In Middle Earth, the whole of Eä, The World That Is, has been marred to its roots by the meddling and corruption of Melkor before development en force by the workers of the Valar were sent to do their jobs to raise up the world into a thing that grows and thrives.

There is an ever-present spirit of malice that flows through the very bones of the world, that echos in the wood and rivers and the creatures, that wends and waits and whispers to the weakness in the folk to tempt them to cowardly evils.

The world is broken, almost before it began. The work to create all that was good had been foiled before it was begun. The world that did come to be was but a shadow of what it had been planned to be. The world cannot be other until it is Unmade and Remade by Eru Ilúvatar at the end of days, after the Last Battle.

That’s the thing. The world is corrupted, and the breaking of the grand seats of discordant and evil, selfish powers by the Good Folk who set themselves steadily against it for all of that place’s history, it wasn’t the final solution to evil and ills. That height of evil can and will still rise in the people who allow it in, though the fallen Vala will never rise again.

Tolkien stated it so himself.

There is no purging this spirit of evil from the earth until the Creator of it sees that it has come to the fullness of time, and called the Children that live there to safety, and then He unmakes and remakes the very essence of the world to that which He intended from the first.

The song must be played out first. It must unfold in the meter and time that it takes to let each note be.

Until then, the discord remains to corrupt the crooked hearts and minds. It cannot be purged by anything the Children can do. But that is not their burden. Their burden is to live as best the may in the meantime. To do what that can with the time that they are given.

The people after the Lord of the Rings had it easy.

The earliest days of the existence of elves, for some, was agonizing horror or grief with no answers.

I made this post awhile ago about the primal fear in the early days of the elves and how many words for fear there are in their languages and it made me think about how many Quenya words for fear relate specifically to flight or fleeing and again and again I just think about Sador’s line, “it may be that we fled from a fear of the dark, only to find it here before us with nowhere left to fly but the sea”

It poses a strange problem to my mind, because elves are good folk.

But what do good folk do when they are trapped and isolated and lost under the earth? How much careful gentleness did they cultivate? How many words did they create for the nuances of darkness and shadows and fear, for monsters and dark things that crawled the tunnels, what crafts did they teach to themselves under the earth? What sweetness did they pull from an environment of stone? What hope did they clutch close in their songs and poetry?

Instead of the stars and the waters and the trees and birdsong and all green and growing things being the delight of their eyes, they had caverns and stone and darkness and terror for company.

But elves are still good folk.

We don’t know their name, their background, their fate, or how they got the knife. We don’t know how or why they chose to smuggle it to someone else or why Gwindor in particular. Perhaps it was a chance encounter. Perhaps it was part of a larger plan of resistance.

We do know that they were imprisoned in the forges of Angband which itself brings so much horror; being enslaved and forced to create weapons that will be used to strike down your kin, to attack your home, forced to use skills taught to you and passed down and cherished that are now being twisted by someone who wishes to destroy that knowledge entirely.

Tolkien himself wrote that their hatred of orcs burned within them, that their “enchantments” on blades that turned blue in the presence of orcs were strong and came from this place of abhorrence toward the abominations that they saw the fell creatures of Morgoth to be. The elves hate all of the dark works that have been wreaked upon Middle Earth. He wrote that elves were “good folk”, almost like this is a constant in the world. The sun rises, the moon sets, the stars burn, and elves are good folk.

But, these elves were taken into dark places away from light and free air.

They were broken and pressed into the mind-battering work of making weapons that were sure to be used to kill their kin.

This one elf had a chance to take a knife, which I assume was a huge risk, and then he gave it away. He might not get another. This action may be traced back to him and he will suffer for it.

It’s been too long since I read this book, I don’t remember the whole story of Gwindor, nor do I remember much about this escape.

I do remember thinking the last time I read it, that it must have been very long, very hard, very complicated work to twist an elf into an orc, if that is indeed their origin. And I remember thinking also, that this elf must have been a very good example of his race, very wise, and kind. Seemingly, they must have managed this in the most difficult kind of spite, that he would be a decent person in this cursed place. It is very hard to keep yourself kind in the places of cruelty and fear and violence. But this one did. Nameless, unknown by any outsider but Gwindor here, but still honorable.

It makes sense given the place of music in the weaving of the universe and I find it so poignant given all the stories of loss in The Silmarillion and even in later ages for the elves…

Lands lost to war and time appearing fleetingly in the voice of singer who may not even remember them themselves. Faces woven from notes and chords.

One of my elven words of the day awhile ago was lengwë meaning yearning, desire for what is absent or lost” and this made me think of that.

Those gifted in these songs cannot bring back Beleriand, cannot undo the loss from battle or captivity or other grief. But this pain that is so deeply shared among the various elven peoples can for the length of a song become lighter than air.

Alien 1: "Captain, I assure you, our ships can't be breached by anything weaker than a concentrated proton beam. They barely have lasers. We'll be fine."

“Throw hard/sharp stuff really hard, really fast, and there’s a velocity at which nothing is safe.”

And in a paraphrase of someone whose job was to carry and run a M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (a.k.a. The Saw), “There is a volume at which 5.56 will saw through whatever the target is hiding behind, and it’s the gunner’s job to make that happen.”

Humans made incendiary bombs, and then decided to make one out of knives because why not just carve up your target like the Christmas goose instead of cooking him like pudding.

When throwing fire at something doesn’t have the desired effect, a Rod from God at the speed of Mach-fuck should do the trick.

Break it down to the simplest kind of violence that humans have used since the Beginning, and they’ll probably make it out okay. Just throw something hard and sharp, really, really fast.

Who’s gonna’ expect a rail-gun in space, in the age of plasma weapons and shield technology?

Like, humans might have the photon torpedos, the plasma weapons, all the lasers and cool stuff… but they also have kinetic, wireless hole-punchers that some people specialize in giving long-range lobotomies with, set completely aside the people who do that same thing with whole ships. And they’ve been using these sorts of weapons for a lot longer. From the atlatl to the Really Big Gun, humans have been figuring how to throw hard stuff faster and harder. From sports to war, people have been working on how to throw stuff harder and faster and better and more accurately for the whole of their existence. You haven’t even seen how creative a human can get with a “gun” until you’ve been sniped by a 5-inch A.P. projectile from a ship 60 miles away. (Am I conflating nautical and space warfare and future and present weapons systems? Yes. Don’t worry about it.)

But yeah.