There are certain strains the songs always reach for yet never acknowledge. The Sindar are perpetually rooted: the trees know their king, the river comes when called, the girdle grows from the forest instead of enclosing the same. Ironically, the Noldor in exile are granted a similar ancestral fluency in mythic proportions, even by the scribes accused of being their greatest detractors. Finrod’s delving of Nargothrond is a harmonious communion with stone; the mallorn takes to Lothlórien like a native son returned. Whatever it is that the Eldar do to whichever landscape, the songs will declare it kinship. No such word exists for the rest of us. And so nobody knows why the line of Ulfang once chose the Foe, and kept choosing so.
UNSIGHTLY: PORTRAIT OF A PREFIX
In Third Age Gondor, a spy from Rhún writes an account of the Nírnaeth Arnoediad, chronicling the treachery of Ulfang’s host against the Union of Maedhros as he follows the historical trail of a posthumous epithet: the simple prefix ul, the Sindarin word for unsightly.
[T - 9000 words - Ulfang, Uldor, Caranthir, Maglor, Sons of Fëanor]
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Queen Rhaenyra had neither gold nor ships. When she sent Lord Corlys to the dungeons, she lost his fleet, & she had abandoned King's Landing fearing for her life without taking a single coin. Desperate & afraid, she wandered the battlements of the castle of Duskendale sobbing, becoming more sunken & haggard. She could not sleep and did not wish to eat, nor did she want to suffer separation from Prince Aegon, her last living son; day and night, the boy was by her side "like a small, pale shadow."
Queen Rhaenyra had neither gold nor ships. When she sent Lord Corlys to the dungeons, she lost his fleet, & she had abandoned King's Landing fearing for her life without taking a single coin. Desperate & afraid, she wandered the battlements of the castle of Duskendale sobbing, becoming more sunken & haggard. She could not sleep and did not wish to eat, nor did she want to suffer separation from Prince Aegon, her last living son; day and night, the boy was by her side "like a small, pale shadow."
I’m really not that interested in interrogating the rationality or morality or even the why of Elwing’s actions, because she was in possession of a cursed-sacred jewel on a thrice-cursed necklace. No one in possession of a sacred cursed jewel necklace would be willing to be parted with it, that’s just Cursed Object 101. “It was selfish and irrational to keep it” ok well what would you do differently with the Silmaril Nauglamir? And honestly the Silmaril being something that has an actual psychological hold on people (and even a will of its own!!) is part of what makes the story interesting to me
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The Ninth Saint to Serve the King Undying and her cavalier Ǫ̸̥̬̳̟̞̙̼̳͓̉͋́ṛ̶̠̰̘̤̯̹͎̫̈́̌̚t̸̢̡̧̢̛̛̘̘͎̝̪͉̅͆̈́̈̒̈́̿͘ú̴͉̳͊̀̇͠s̸̺̘̙͑̈̂͂̒̾͜ ̶̘̠͔͆̌Н̴̼͚̱͚̙̭̳̪̙́̐̄̈͌̚и̶̧̌̓̇͜г̶͔̲̼͖̙̳̒̀͌́͋͂͝͝е̴͓͈̲̌н̸̡̢̛̠͚̼̻͍̠̂͂͑̾̇͒̕͝͝а̴̠̪͌̈́̎̀̓̅̀̚͠д̵̭̬͓̠̫͓͓̝̹̍̾ͅ
feel like you could use that as well:
https://www.tumblr.com/nerdanelschildren/810881148381200384/for-the-record-im-a-hardcore-antifascist-and-this?source=share
since you like to have the most uncharitable and awful takes on the Noldor, apart from the ones you personally enjoy like freaking Maglor of all people
buddy i am fully including maglor in my "uncharitable takes on the noldor". his only redeeming feature is that he does 10% of repentance and doesn't even commit in the end. if this is about the maedhros post, which i'm p sure this is, you might be surprised to discover that i actually really enjoy maedhros in the hands of good writers and tolkien himself, that allows him to be more complex than a "responsible dad". i like it when characters do bad things. not enough people are letting maedhros do bad things. i am campaigning for maedhros to be allowed to do more bad things in fic. i am campaigning for this for all the feanorians, in fact, and the sindar and the teleri and the vanyar, because guess what! i like it when people do bad things in fiction because its fun and i'm here to have fun. i am going on the record to say i think we can make the noldor worse. i believe we can do this together. we can make them truly horrible and so so enjoyable and so so cathartic to read.
if this bothers you so much a) block and ignore me and b) i at least have the courtesy not to put a single one of my posts in the tags, which is more than the average luthien and elwing hater is capable of extending at any given time in this fandom. pipe down.
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see people keep asking me to write the prayers au instalment in which comrade maedhros and co visit england but i always refuse purely because it would just be. like. boring right. zero stakes. the racism of 1977 britain would have no impact on the comrade. because yeah sure the guy may be small to medium fry in the indian political gangstersphere. there, he may simply be a piranha in an ocean of sharks. but in the british gangster space, he is a shark in a goldfish bowl. he would be a monster truck against an army of frogs. you might think oh, surely you could do something with his attitude to/command of english. i could not. this is a man who, despite gil galad’s best efforts, has never once felt an inferiority complex about his english. quite the contrary. he finds it the most amusing thing in the world. some officer would tell him to speak proper english and the comrade would giggle politely, and then hold him underwater until he drowned. like i said. zero stakes.
you know where you should be asking me to send him though. for peak comedic gauntlet. not 1977 britain, but 1977 italy. why? because in 1977, the top running show on italian television, in fact top ten across many european countries, was the historical pirate show sandokan, starring green-eyed indian actor kabir bedi as the eponymous malaysian pirate, sandokan.
now. speaking in-universe, this guy in this getup is the closest we will ever get to a faceclaim for comrade maedhros. he may not wear a traditional turban but he often does wear some kind of head covering or scarf. he wears eyeliner in this exact way. he literally just looks like this. he looks like this because the sandokans of the world look like this. the whole point is that the comrade looks like this. every single box of sexy dangerous evil mysterious orientalist fantasy-nightmare of the european imaginary is checked here. and the italians of 1977, frothing at the mouth over sandokan yet deprived from him because the actor lives not in milan but in bombay. do you think a single italian in 1977 knows the difference between an arab-coded kozhikodan muslim, and a half-french actor from bombay? nay, to them, he would be sandokan in the flesh. comrade maedhros arriving in 1977 italy would be just the plotline of the german book/film er ist wieder da in which adolf hitler wakes up in modern germany and the german people turn him into a major comedy star, except instead of hitler it would be some random ass orientalist pirate character and instead of comedy star it would be wwe prizefighter.
but man the comedic potential of this is elite and this is what you should be asking me to write. because you know the best part? the comrade would not find british racism or just general brit weirdness surprising at all, because he knows a lot about them (derogatory) due to the whole cultural imperialism situation. however, being a man who almost exclusively consumes mainstream american b horror and action film/tv, he would have no fucking clue who sandokan is. he would have no clue why people are stopping him in the street and taking pictures with him. he would genuinely just assume the italians have elected him as the new pope. for no reason whatsoever than the fact that they, unlike everyone else, realise what a fucking great pope he would make. he’s also conservative enough to assume that every european man is gay so he would also probably think he has realised his life’s dream and has been elected global gay president.
and when he does find out? when he does find out about sandokan? believe me when i say he would gladly play into it. he would fly to bombay, kill kabir bedi, take the role, naturalise himself as an italian citizen, and there would be 45 seasons of sandokan. finnu would set himself up in milan and fritter away the remnants of the bishop’s estate on handbags in every colour possible. they would then bring the rest of the family over. maglor would establish himself as the most in-demand gigolo in italy, living out his days in the lap of the richest women of venice and using his ill-gotten gains to shower elwing in gifts, a practice which she rightly encourages. curufin would find a desk job in intesa sanpaolo, and caranthir would start up a deliveroo precursor and underemploy his fellow migrants. celegorm would join the mafia and never be heard from again aside from wanted posters. they would live the diasporic dream.
people from the rest of europe would travel to see the comrade, and he would cheerfully pop out of his balcony in a robe and wave to people. like the pope. whom he now has a pitched rivalry with. he would make finnu, born a roman catholic, regularly swear allegiance to maedhros and denounce the pope, and finnu is very fucking confused because surely the whole point of the good friday procession debacle 30 years ago was that it ended in him doing exactly that. anyway. then the italians would elect him as president, obviously, and he would declare italy a marxist caliphate. and the rest, as they say, is history, told in the textbooks about the italy-america jihad of 1985.
forget the frigid touch of london, my friends. this is what you deserve. this is what he deserves. it is what we all deserve.
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I’m always thinking of Morwen’s line about not believing the elves could overthrow Morgoth.
It’s so simple and so final and she’s right. She says that until the other Valar decide to intervene, “how could even the elder children overthrow one of the powers”. In the end, that is exactly what needs to happen at the end of the War of Wrath, decades after Morwen herself is dead.
And it makes her pre Nírnaeth conversation and her farewell to Húrin even more sad and dread inducing. Húrin says they ride with greater hope than ever before and she knows as strongly as anything else that it’s a losing battle.
I do think the right way to think about the Mirror of Galadriel is that it‘s the equivalent of an entirely home-built computer tower, with chips that are only barely legal for civilians to buy and wires that look like a rat’s nest but are actually hyperoptimized for efficiency, and a homemade OS in a coding language she invented, and cybersecurity that would make the CIA cry, and also some judiciously applied superglue and/or gorilla tape, made in their home office by someone who helped invent the internet at DARPA in the 60s.
And that a Palantir is, comparatively, a MacBook Air.
The Palantiri are like an unbreakable network, but is restricted to seven devices with no log-in security. When Minas Ithil fell to Sauron, the Palantir kept there was lost to Mordor, and that's how Sauron got to Saruman and Denethor.
By contrast, Galadriel's mirror is more or less like the OP describes, but it's more of a homemade civilian effort by someone who is aware of the dangers of the internet and surveillance state, and has created and coded her machine to avoid that. It's not as effective or as good as the original versions (the Palantir are older and were invented by Feanor, her uncle, the premier craftsman born in all the world for all time), but it's absolutely safe and trustworthy, unlike the brilliant prior network and devices that have since been coopted by the Enemy.
Remember, magical "tech" is moving the opposite direction as technological development. The older stuff was made by people with greater powers and greater insights, and is far superior. This even goes for the world's light. Originally, there were the two Lanterns, and when Morgoth destroyed them, the Valar made the Two Trees in Valinor. After the Trees were killed by Morgoth & Ungoliant, Yavanna, the Vala who made them, said she was unable to make new ones, because a craftsman peaks with their greatest work and then can never duplicate it. She sought to use the last of their light, trapped in the Silmarils, to restore them, but Feanor refused for the same reason, that the Silmarils were his irreplaceable master work. So the Valar exerted all their power on the carcasses of the Trees and were able to make one treat give forth a single blossom and the other a single fruit, which they used to make the sun and the moon, respectively. So the sun and moon themselves are third generation knockoffs.
The Elves peaked at the outset and have been declining for all of their known history. Our concept of technological advancement and societal progress is because we are Men, who are made to go the other direction. The Silmarilion and Lord of the Rings details the intersection of the decline of Elves and the beginning of the rise of Men. But what that means is that Galadriel's "tech" is a lesser level. The Palantir are not the more common, more circulated technology, in the sense of being cheaper and lower quality, rather they are the perfected and finished tech, and Galadriel's Mirror is the homemade knockoff. In a sense, Lothlorien, like Imladris, is a survivalist compound that is off the grid, and is only able to evade the tyrannical dominion of the surveillance state thanks to a device (Nenya & Vilya, respectively) held over from a prior age, with advanced code they can't possibly replicate.
