ink & stars

—Me, writing the opening scene of the Harrowing to see if I could pull off a Sauron POV after I'd already written Anastasis

Hello, everyone! Are you grumpy because it's Monday? Want to see Maedhros have a weirder day than you?

I have written a fucked up Maedhros/Sauron oneshot. Featuring:

Blinded Sauron

Maedhros at the end of his tether

Silmarils

Threats of fealty

A hefty list of content warnings

You can find it here, and here is the summary:

This is such a good question and so so hard to answer because all stories arise from whatever particular cocktail of circumstances is causing perturbations in my brain at the time, BUT

1. Reading @thearrogantemu’s In Full Measure I Return To You, something like a year or two years before I actually did any of the writing. Some stuff takes a while to percolate through my brain.

2. Having spent, at that time, uhhhhh seven years? Reading about theology and the history of Christianity? That is a Lot of theology and religionstuff to read and you can Not escape having it affect the ideas that come out of your brain if you read that much of anything.

2a. Having spent uhhhhhh seven years reading spectacular amounts of theology that I disagreed with, specifically (Augustine can fight me in a parking lot)

3. I was spectacularly, DIRELY stressed and overworked. This tends to produce Coping Projects.

4. I was also living apart from my spouse for most of the year. This produced critical levels of Yearning Across The Sea in my system which I hope will never be replicated. (Also visible in: Lost And Found/Fear Me Not/that whole situation)

5. I REALLY needed to see Frodo and Celebrimbor have a real, serious conversation about All Of That, and once I sat down to let them do it, the implications…implicated. In great abundance. Until suddenly I was elbows deep in the Harrowing with only a vague idea of how I’d gotten there.

@fancyfrogg my opinions are too numerous to go in a comment

He was an influential formulator of the doctrine of Original Sin, and I tend to find his take on it—all humans are inherently too sinful to be good without God; babies who die unbaptized cannot go to heaven—very unpleasant.

I find his opinions about babies morally reprehensible in general. He argues that babies are fundamentally bad/sinful and produces, as evidence, the fact that they manipulate everyone around them to do their will by crying. What else are they going to do, buddy? They're babies???

He's very much on board with the "Women should be submissive and obedient to their husbands" thing, which is not unique to him by any means, but it sure is annoying.

He's an ascetic who believes that most earthly pleasures, joys, and enthusiasms are distractions from God at best and terrible perversions at worst. I do not ascribe to this belief. Under many circumstances that would be his problem, not mine, but he's one of the most influential church fathers in the early history of the church and I live in the United States, which is deeply culturally influenced by Christian asceticism. So he's kind of made it my problem.

He's an incredibly deep and reflective thinker with many genuinely beautiful ideas that I do want to engage with, and his Latin prose is incredibly skilled and beautiful. Which means every time I want to splash around in his yearnings and his thoughts on people and his relationship with God, I have to wade through all of the above to do it, thereby generating a current of animosity that is much more persistent than it would be if I could just be like "Wow, what an asshole" and write him off like I do with people like John Chrysostom.

Chapter 56 of the Harrowing: Counting Debts

Here is a new chapter of the Harrowing! In this one, as promised, Annatar and Maedhros talk about their feelings by arguing about whether to get into an argument.

Also there is Fingon POV. And Maedhros POV. And a look at what was going on with Maedhros right after Chapter 50!

@aran-morinorea tagged me to share a snippet, so here is a bit of the First Age Maedhros/Sauron oneshot I've been fiddling with in my limited spare time:

In the box there are two Silmarils. Fragments of the setting from the Iron Crown are still clasped around them, as if Sauron did not have time to do anything other than break them off and run, and Maedhros thinks of the hallowing that lies on the Silmarils: no evil thing can touch them without being burned. Which is probably why Sauron is not touching them. "A peace offering," Sauron says. "All I ask is that you hear me out. Hear what I have to say, and the jewels are yours, to do with as you will. What use have I for cursed gems?" He smiles, and there, in that smile, Maedhros sees the aftermath of Sauron's breaking: the jagged edges, the desperation, the razor edge of madness that has been running under every word he has spoken. Sauron says, "It isn't as though I can see them, after all." There is no heart beating in Maedhros’s chest. There is only the Oath, uncompromising and eternal, and there, cradled between Sauron’s two hands, is the answer to it. When he searches for words, he finds nothing; when he reaches for strategy, there is none. There is only the deep black current of the Oath, pulling him forward, ever forward, toward Sauron.

The good news is that the next chapter is now written enough that I can sloooowly edit it!