I really don’t want to open this can of worms because Tumblr hath no fury like people called out on their political performativeness but it is literally driving me up the wall to watch people react to Serkis’ ‘keep Tolkien white’ commentary by insisting twice as hard that Tolkien would descend down to earth and dropkick the entire Republican party to hell or whatever, just because they want to ensure that a piece of media they enjoy isn’t seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkien’s ‘I hate apartheid’ valedictorian address being used as a ‘counter’ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.
Except it’s only ever the ‘I hate apartheid’ line that’s shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:
If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.
Which is to say. This isn’t exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going ‘omg we relate’ and expressing what is a very, very mild ‘segregation is not great’ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.
I also think that some of the general surprise around ‘what do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?’ in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose one’s own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist it’s anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck… and then getting really Pikachu-meme ‘but they’re misreading it’ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with ‘I don’t see colour’ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.
I genuinely don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.
What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?
Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.
No, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.
There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very ‘get thee gone from my gate’ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.
Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkien’s own thoughts on military atrocity in general is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.
The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.
Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidental”, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.
Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible… casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge ‘scandal’ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politics™️, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.
I didn’t want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesn’t need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.
Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkien’s few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And it’s just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.
I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic ‘love’? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?
This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.
You can put actors of colour in Númenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.
So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.
But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and we’ll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkien’s world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.
Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.
We don’t need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting “keep the Shire white” Serkis soundbites and “hooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!” news cycles standing in for a conversation that hasn't actually started yet, and ngl buddies I have to say I personally will be biting people the next time I see yet another rendition of the same damn response-reaction cycle start again because everyone, both the conservatives and the left, wants the things they love to be a reflection of themselves, and will twist themselves into pretzels to ensure that remains the case.
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I'm on record with my conviction that a spoiler can't ruin a story if it's actually well-written so I might be biased here, but truly one of my favourite things tolkien does is, "this is elf mc elf face. he will die a tragic and painful death, even though he doesn't know it yet. anyway now that you know this crucial fact here's his story." and it slaps every single time. like yeah! exactly!!! mwah
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What if we were two sides of the same coin. What if i lived in your shadow all my life but found comfort in the darkness and dont know what to do once youre gone. What if youre the only person who understands. What if you have have no idea what i went through. What if we went through the same traumas but ended up with oposite conclusions about our suffering. What if i dont recognize you anymore. What if i see the ghost of my former self reflected through your eyes. What if it never had to go this way. What if this was the only way things were ever going to go
a funny thing about having a Problematic Blorbo is that you'll periodically come across a post along the lines of "um let's not forget that [Blorbo] is a bad person..." listing their various crimes, and if you have a modicum of intellectual honesty you find yourself nodding along and saying yeah it's true... but it's the greyness of their character that makes them so compelling... At the same time though you have a little Saul Goodman in your ear going "your honor in their defense: who cares like omfgggg who caresssssss like come onnnnnn"
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Regarding daddy issues, what's your opinion on Maeglin? His father trying to kill him, him being raised by Turgon, his uncle killing his father and having an attraction to Turgon's daughter, and Eol's "curse" that he will die the same way he did. He must have some daddy issues and some complicated feelings for Turgon, who I think spoiled him? Does Idril think Turgon would listen to Maeglin more than her?
I sat on this ask for a couple of days because unfortunately my answer is a little bit of a killjoy answer and this is partly because I've been thinking about the Of Maeglin chapter lately, thanks to two different scholarly works on incest in Victorian Britain I've been reading of late - in this case, the prominence of first cousin marriage amongst the Victorian bourgeoise, to the point that this form of marriage was considered somewhat nearly the ideal until the First World War at least. And which therefore is all the more striking for the whole "Eldar wed not with kin so near" thing that Tolkien inserts, considering that in every other respect, both the Silm and LOTR are heavily in conversation with a much older Victorian era Romanticism than Tolkien's Modernist contemporaries.
My very short answer to this is that I think that Maeglin has well. He has kid of a relationship defined by cross-colonial and racial politics issues.
My longer answer is that you need to look at the implied subtext of the relationship between Eol and Aredhel, which appears to be very weird once you start digging deeper, especially on the front of Elvish racial differences and relationships. Eol's dialogues at multiple points where he appears - in conversation with Curufin, in conversation with Turgon - draw very heavily on positioning himself as Teleri, the Noldor as oppressors who have taken away their rights to move about freely, who have seized their lands, who now dictate where they come and go as they please and who, crucially, have killed his kin. (He is married to a Noldo princess). His ban on Aredhel's movements specifically relates to a) movement in the sun and b) movement towards the Noldor & esp. the SoF. The very political nature of Eol's ban is reinforced again in this little speech:
But when he declared his purpose to Eöl, his father was wrathful. ‘You are of the house of Eöl, Maeglin, my son,’ he said, ‘and not of the Golodhrim. All this land is the land of the Teleri, and I will not deal nor have my son deal with the slayers of our kin, the invaders and usurpers of our homes. In this you shall obey me, or I will set you in bonds.’
(Aredhel consistently wants to go towards the Sons of Feanor. There is something very interesting in this, considering both Turgon & Eol forbid this and each time, she begins by going towards them first.)
Maeglin, on the other hand, is drawn to his mother. Tolkien describes him as looking more like and being more like the Noldor in stature. There is a lacunae in the text there, but we might imagine that Aredhel saw this too and that Maeglin noticed this himself too, in the difference between himself and his father in appearance - and therefore, when Aredhel tells tales of Gondolin and her relatives to Maeglin, we get a sense of both desire emanating from him, but also the kind of envy which is familiar to the colonised/formerly colonised: "What hope is there in this wood for you or for me? Here we are held in bondage, and no profit shall I find here; for I have learned all that my father has to teach, or that the Naugrim will reveal to me."
There is a very interesting passage at the end of this chapter, which I think underlines this reading:
Yet he did not reveal his heart; and though not all things went as he would he endured it in silence, hiding his mind so that few could read it, unless it were Idril Celebrindal. For from his first days in Gondolin he had borne a grief, ever worsening, that robbed him of all joy: he loved the beauty of Idril and desired her, without hope. The Eldar wedded not with kin so near, nor ever before had any desired to do so. And however that might be, Idril loved Maeglin not at all; and knowing his thought of her she loved him the less. For it seemed to her a thing strange and crooked in him, as indeed the Eldar ever since have deemed it: an evil fruit of the Kinslaying, whereby the shadow of the curse of Mandos fell upon the last hope of the Noldor. But as the years passed still Maeglin watched Idril, and waited, and his love turned to darkness in his heart. And he sought the more to have his will in other matters, shirking no toil or burden, if he might thereby have power.
It's easy to get stuck on the treason of kin unto kin as pertains specifically to the Noldor, but just half a page before, we have this little note tucked away in Eol's curse to Maeglin:
"‘So you forsake your father and his kin, ill-gotten son! Here shall you fail of all your hopes..."
If you read the chapter closely, it becomes pretty evident that Maeglin sees Gondolin, he is very impressed with it, and then he wants nothing more than to be part of it, because it seems more elevated and greater than Nan Elmoth - which is forsaken, which is dark and which has run out of things to offer him by way of knowledge and also, power. Turgon looks on Maeglin and sees in him someone "worthy to be accounted amongst the princes of the Noldor". Maeglin pretty clearly leans really hard into this and as his father accuses him, eschews the Telerin part of his identity. This is all, again, deeply familiar racial politics.
It's also very interesting that Tolkien describes Maeglin's desire for Idril in terms of her seeming like the sun: "for she was golden as the Vanyar, her mother’s kindred, and she seemed to him as the sun from which all the King’s hall drew its light".
Earlier on in the chapter, when Aredhel and he come to the edge of Nan Elmoth, they see the sun and "desire grew hot" in Maeglin to leave Nan Elmoth. That is the point at which he makes his little speech above about "what do we have left here for either of us". Sunlight = Noldor = Gondolin = Idril. You might also argue that for Eol (and therefore Maeglin) the association is also a political one, given that the sun rose in Middle Earth with the arrival of Fingolfin's army, which is the point at which the Noldor seem to go from a shattered force, to one that establishes its own kingdom and which, in Eol's eyes, pushes them off their lands. Put together, Maeglin's desire for Idril is not merely only a desire for Idril i.e. sexual desire alone. Its also symbolic desire to possess Gondolin (the King's Hall), therefore to possess the great and lofty things that make the Noldor great and therefore, to possess that greatness and beauty himself.
On some level it is also political, because the point at which Maeglin is galvanised into action is the point at which Idril marries Tuor and has a son. There's a throwaway detail in Of Maeglin - "Maeglin would not remain in Gondolin as regent of the King" - that makes this more obvious (and also answers your question: pretty patently, yes, Turgon was listening to Maeglin more than Idril and placing him above her as political heir). Idril should be Turgon's heir and therefore his regent. Idril is his firstborn and is significantly older than Maeglin. But Maeglin's appearance places Maeglin above Idril in a system built on male primogeniture. However, when Idril marries and has a son, everything that Maeglin has built for himself essentially is at risk, because Earendil is then the heir to Gondolin and supplants Maeglin - despite being the son of a Man (inferior to an Elf) and Idril (a symbol of Gondolin, the Noldor, the things that Maeglin desires).
By every bourgeoise English definition, Maeglin should marry Idril and that would be the ideal marriage, closing off all political challenges for the throne of Gondolin and keeping it in the family. However, because this is Tolkien, the driving theme is not the realpolitik or bourgeoise values, but concerns Maeglin's libidinal desire to possess "Noldorness" and to do so by possessing Gondolin and to do that by possessing Idril - i.e. Maeglin's will to power. (Ofc, will to power is the animating force between incestuous marriages amongst the English bourgeoise, in retaining control over and consolidating estates; but that is immaterial because Tolkien does not believe in economics, unfortunately, or he does so only when its strategic to whatever idea/point he's trying to drive home). Ergo, I think, "the Eldar wed not with kin so near", when many of the Sindar marriages are littered with marriages occurring within the third degree of consanguinity and um, considerably closer in terms of broader kinship/affinity structures (e.g. Aragorn being, more or less, Arwen's foster-brother, though again, Tolkien puts his finger on the balance and conveniently has her staying with Galadriel for many decades through Aragon's coming of age; though it still has troubling implications viz. relationality to Elrond). THE POINT BEING that "the Eldar wed not with kin so near" serves as a moralistic symbol within the text to suggest that Maeglin's will to power over Idril via marriage is immoral not only because the will to power over an individual via marriage/kinship is wrong, but because it contravenes Elvish law of marriage as well (i.e. if we followed the same principle viz. C&C's violent approach to Luthien but subtract the question of consanguinity from the equation, Maeglin only would commit "wrong" when he attempts to force Idril into marriage; Tolkien wants us to know that Maeglin's desire is wrong right from the start, but cannot serve it to us in straightforwardly moralistic terms and therefore, the incest taboo also serves as cipher to demonstrate the wrongness of Maeglin's desire right from the get go)
So I don't know that his feelings for Turgon are complicated, or that daddy issues are his main problem. I think they're pretty straightforward textually. Maeglin is the half-Teleri, half-Noldor son of Aredhel (friend of the sons of Feanor, who tells Maeglin stories of them) and Eol (kin of Thingol, high kin of the Teleri) who is brought up between these two clearly politically and racially polarised individuals, is filled with a sense of rejection of home for being lesser compared to the tales of Valinor & Gondolin, desires to possess Gondolin, is acknowledged as worthy of possessing Gondolin by Turgon and then seeks to legitimate all of that by possessing Turgon's blood daughter and heir. (There are a lot of parallels to be made in this reading, of Maeglin and Caliban in The Tempest). Turgon substitutes for his father's authority, because Turgon is judged by Maeglin to be a more superior individual and therefore, a father he would like to possess - as a half-Teleri, half-Noldo child who looks more Noldo than Teleri. Clearly Maeglin resents his father's control, but he also rejects his father's perceived "lessness" - the first treason of kin unto kin, which lies in Maeglin rejecting his Teleri heritage and deciding to lean only into the Noldor part.
Maeglin clearly has a much closer attachment to Aredhel, that may stem from so many potential sources (his perceived racial inferiority drawing him to the "greater" parent; his shared place of relative powerlessness as a child and her as a woman under a clearly very patriarchal model of fatherhood viz. Eol's argument that Maeglin is "his" since he is his father) but which finally manifest in a desire to only acknowledge his Noldor heritage. If you read the text closely, it seems more like Aredhel's influence has a lot more to do with the shaping of Maeglin's desires as a child - and it does make you wonder how exactly she related the tales of Gondolin and her brothers and her cousins. It is also interesting, as I said, that she gravitates towards the Sons of Feanor (even above Fingon!) - which suggests at least some kind of affinity there, whether that is in terms of sharing their politics, or at least being willing to overlook those politics in favour of having a good fun time with male relatives who have no authority over her / whose authority she can reject without incurring censure. Whatever it is, her narration clearly positions Gondolin as aspirational and it all gets tangled up within Maeglin's broader desire for freedom and for more than Nan Elmoth's limited borders (and associations) have to offer him (and, probably, some of the thrill in pursuing the forbidden). Honestly, Turgon and Idril are pretty incidental, I think, in Maeglin's actual emotional landscape because everything he does in relation to Turgon and Idril are pre-formed by whatever the hell was going on in Nan Elmoth between Aredhel and Eol.
TL;DR: Maeglin may have some daddy issues, but crucially also, he has mommy issues out the wazoo and its those mommy issues that actually serve as the catalyst for the way the tragedy of Gondolin finally plays out. But beneath those mommy issues are, well, Noldor issues because any sense of racial superiority of the Noldor is ultimately one that has come cooked up by the Noldor themselves and most likely, on a deeper level, from the Sons of Feanor.
Please note I am not placing any responsibility on Aredhel or Idril for Maeglin's actions, or trying to excuse his actions by pointing to the elements of racialisation present in Maeglin's story; I am simply trying to describe how these pieces fit together and also suggest that Eol and Turgon are far less important to Maeglin's story than Aredhel is as his mother and as the person who seems (or is implied textually) to have done a lot more of the emotional caregiving.
thinking about that “pissing elves off by claiming I fought in the wars of their empire 1000s of years ago” post and about that seeming like a tuor thing to do, and about him still not being quite 40 when he got to sirion. idril’s like “maybe just don’t make the fact that you’re still the equivalent of an elvish toddler the first thing out of your mouth ok?” and tuor goes “got it 🫡🙂 anyone else around here miss the starlit shores of cuiviénen? 🚬😔”
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so does everyone from menegroth have some kind of burrowing instinct or is it just my husband
(2 notes)
🦋 wilwarintrouble
☘ wildwooddancing Follow
hang on. i've been in eregion since the fall of nargothrond. where on iluvatar's green earth did this ereinion kid come from and how is he also the king of the sindar now
🍂 leafmealone Follow
look he's the first competent leadership most of us have had in I don't know how long so we don't ask too many questions. also the ainur seem to like him so I guess that's a mark in his favor
☘ wildwooddancing Follow
well I didn't vote for him
🪺 bombadillocore Follow
strange men with wings distributing crowns is no basis for a system of government!
(23.2k notes)
because you follow #ereinion gil-galad
🫅 ladyoflindon Follow
SHIELDMAIDEN
chapter: 4/??
pairings: erenion x fem!reader
warnings: minor gore
a/n: some of y'all need to CHILL OUT. I know Ereinion is young but I'm NOT promoting problematic age gaps. y'all are the ones deciding to read this. smh. anyway. sorry it took me so long to write this. lots of irl stuff. you get it
synopsis: you wake up in a healer's tent after being grievously wounded during the war of wrath, and you aren't alone
contents: fluff, kissing, 2nd person POV, injured!reader, soft!ereinion, getting together
oh so when eönwë flies it's "majestic" and "graceful" but when I give it a shot it's "going to get me killed" and "just not physically possible, tyelpe"
(43 notes)
🌳 wandercurious
🌞 freckledsunshine
opted to sail for valinor but have never been on a ship before. idk how it'll go. will keep y'all updated
🌞 freckledsunshine Follow
seascik
(3.2k notes)
🦾 silversmithin
🌧 belegayer Follow
now that gondolinposting and havensposting are dead what do we think the next niche memes are going to be
🌠 onlystariseetonight Follow
i mean given the physical and cultural isolation of previous niche blogging communities, I could only guess nogrodposting
⚒ khâzad-official Follow
TUMUNZAHAR MENTIONED!!!!! 💪🔥🔨❤🔥⛰⛓💎💪
#i for one look forward to it #queuezdul
(97 notes)
🪷 gigglingwillow
🦭 palantears Follow
i feel like no one has really seriously considered my suggested solution of tulkas, aulë, a big ship, and some grappling hooks tied to really long ropes. like it doesn't even have to be the whole continent. just the good bits
(34.6k notes)
🦋 wilwarintrouble
🐸 anfroglith Follow
apparently there's a call out for loremasters. and I must say. if daeron's alive. he has the chance to do the funniest thing ever right now
#need him to show up randomly with a fully composed anti-noldolante fr
(11 notes)
🍃 treetime
🦎 kethemtari Follow
actually Beleriand is still around it's just that only those who are pure of heart and have the faith to step on the sea as if it were land can live there now
🌘 tyelpendil Follow
op it's not working :(((((
🦎 kethemtari Follow
that's because being on this website automatically disqualifies you from being pure in heart. deactivate and try again
lord of the rings is a fun place to fandom because there's so many options to obsess over no matter what your interests are, but because of that it's also a humbling reminder that different people like different things and that's ok.
like, for me the heart and soul of lotr is the hobbits, and it always bemuses me to see how underrated they can be in fics or fandom like?? you have these funky little fuckers who are really brave and kind and loyal but also have oddball forms of government and eat and party a lot and get into scrapes and have all these hobbit pals and there's all sorts of shipping options and they have interesting nuanced social politics and second breakfast and pipeweed and they give presents on their birthday instead of the other way around so they're always getting presents and they're hilariously weird about their family trees and they led full-scale guerrilla warfare against these bastards who invaded their homeland but also all they want to do is chill and have nice gardens and probably judge vegetable growing competitions and have pretty dances
and instead people are getting super invested in basic-bad-boy-bitch sauron? huh. fair enough. the world is indeed a rich tapestry.
