Rain

tolkien: no go ahead i want to hear it

cs lewis: they fucking suck

Tolkien: what do you mean

CS Lewis: I just. you describe a lot of trees.  are trees that important

Tolkien: just you fucking wait. trees are SO important.

Believe this man.  He owns atlases of Middle Earth, the complete history of Midle Earth (leatherbound), and has read the books at least 150 times.  Also: speaks elvish.

Could I pretty please ask for a bit of an AU, where, instead of Bristlefrost, it's Hollyleaf beating Ashfur's behind a second time? I always thought that would have been extremely funny 🤭

[ID: Post by tumblr user tanoraqui

it's just hard not to think about the fact that in 1915, JRR Tolkien went to war not with but certainly in the same army and many of the same battles as his 3 best school friends, all nicely upper class young men who had never known much loss, and only he and one other came back alive - and a couple decades later, he wrote a book in which 3 nicely upper class young men (and one very excellent gardener) who have never known much loss go to war together, or at least they start out together, and they all come home alive. (Though one cannot bear it, and does not stay.)

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Original post by @tanoraqui

[ID: Post by tumblr user midydoof

What more it wasn't just losing his friends, he was a commanding officer of a battalion of working class men. All farmers and miners from the same area of Lancashire. He felt affinity for them, but wasn't allowed to socialize between the ranks due to military protocol and he hated it.

"The most improper job of any man... is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity."

I don't think it was even 6 months later that he contracted trench fever and was sent home.

His entire command was wiped out in one charge shortly after, the majority of a whole countryside's youths slaughtered while he survived. Youths who were brave and steadfast, but thought of as lesser than their superior officers while still being the ones carrying the actual battle. Youths who deserved fellowship, respect, and above all to go home and dance with their own Rosie.

"My Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognised as so far superior to myself".

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Original post by @midydoof

[ID: Post by tumblr user brigwife-deactivated20240426

crying because an elf prince, dwarf lord and a fucking king of men dropped everything and ran over 100 miles with barely any rest, to rescue a couple of halflings (who were worth nothing outside the shire, and functionally little more than a burden) because they were their friends.

screaming and throwing up because the golden boy of gondor, the steward's eldest son and his pride and joy; noble heir of the house of húrin, sacrificed his life for those self-same halflings

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Original post by brigwife-deactivated20240426

[ID: Screenshot of tags from tumblr user indelen

merry brandybuck, pippin took, merry and pippin, also pippin is underage he's basically still a kid, and merry is not much older then him, so they saved like the hobbit equivalent of a 17 and a 19 year old, who out of love for their childhood friends and family enlisted into a massive bloody conflict with them, and instead of abandoning. them to die their commanding officers went through hell and back to resue them from behind enemy lines, you can really tell sometimes that Tolkien has seen some serious fucked up shit in WWI and it remained with him, and we wrote a story where the people did better then what he witnessed, i know he didn't like people analyzing. his work through that frame too much but … i mean what's there is there, Tolkien really said friendship is magic and ohana means family, and you are responsible for the people you command and it is your duty as a leader to rescue those who follow you into battle, This fucking story man

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Original tags by @indelen

[ID: Post by tumblr user thethermocline

The more despair I endure in life, the more I love Frodo. I'm just. I'm so glad that Tolkien wrote him like that. He was a hero and it broke him. He was given too much to carry. The circumstances were dire, everyone was doing the best they could, and Frodo tried so hard, for such a good cause, and he...broke. And the narrative has pity for him, the characters show him kindness. Even after victory, his hurts did not heal, and it isn't considered his fault. He must go to the undying lands, to seek out peace there. In universe, he is forgiven for being human - don't be pedantic - and his great torment is recognized. He fell. He could not have done it alone. He is still a hero.

And, I think that's important.

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Original post by @thethermocline

[ID: Post by tumblr user dduane

Tolkien endured a war that broke its combatants this way... and it was a LONG time before "ordinary people" back at home forgave the combatants for what was widely perceived as a lack of heroism-even cowardice-when the broken came back. He was able to view that scenario with compassion long before most of British society was able to, because he'd been in it with the ones who broke.

"Fantasy" writer, huh.

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Original post by @dduane

[ID: Post by aragornsrockcollection

The hobbits in LotR, every 5 minutes: Our adventure is not like we would have liked at all, it's not fun exciting like Bilbo's was.

Bilbo, who has been telling the bedtime story version of a story whose tragedy still haunts him: Ha, Ha, Ha, right...

Screenshot of tags by tumblr user adhd-edward-teach

not a single one of them like.. processed that bilbo changed aspects of his story, the hobbits: bilbos adventure was so fun and stress free.. why cant ours be like that, gimli; who actually got an acurate recount of the journey from multiple sourses: what the fuck are you kids going on about?

End screenshot of tags

Using you summing up my thoughts perfectly as an excuse to say:

Tolkien's choice here was absolutely commentary on the way the false glory of war was sold to his generation before they were shipped off to die in WWI.

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Original post by @aragornsrockcollection

PROPAGANDA:

[Reigen]

"Not me, Sans needs this guy preggo, also he needs that child support to sustain the business mhehehdhehejjehehr."

Reigen propaganda from last season

[Jesus]

"So that he will understand women’s pain and stop periods and make pregnancy hurt way less. JESUS CHRIST NEED HIM PREGNANT POLL FOR WOMENS RIGHTS 2026!"

and his ‘uncle’ just HAPPENS to have a VERY good ‘friend’ that ALSO has black/very dark brown hair and the brightest blue eyes you’ve ever seen. . ?

Sean: .....yes. absolutely

Elijah: 100 percent.

The Shire is excellent farming country, with consistently good weather, and only one tough winter in living memory; hobbits like to produce large families; they’re resistant to disease, rarely violent, and encounter few dangers. It is usual for hobbits to produce many children, so that (for example) Bilbo and Frodo are unusual in both being only children, with no siblings, and not having children of their own. All of this should point to a population that increases every generation if not doubling outright. Young people (and their ideologies!) should rapidly outnumber the old with an ever-increasing effect and impact on society. However, the Shire has a surprisingly stable history; it never seems to increase or decrease greatly in population, and the bell curve of age seems… demographically balanced? There certainly isn’t a conflict from rising young bloods challenging the middle-aged reactionaries; there’s no unemployment; there are no housing crises or waves of emigration, or even a tendency for young people leaving home to marry. Meanwhile, not only does the Shire not suffer from internal pressures, but it remains obscure and hardly noticed in global politics.

What makes sense here is that adult hobbits form a loose group. Four parents in a polycule, between them all, may produce four children. All four parents claim to have four children. An outsider would assume this meant the adults had eight children.

Hobbits therefore are not especially fertile or fecund. They simply have large families. Much of their interest in genealogy is due to the complex relationships of blood-kin, hearth-kin, love-kin and pledge-kin, who must all be carefully tracked and measured - not just because you need to make sure that you don’t climb into bed with an un-permitted degree of blood-kin, but to track family alliances and carefully quantify the precise level of thoughtfulness to put into the proper present to gift your father’s lover’s lover (too much implies a degree of intimacy that might upset the polycule.)

Thus, while a hobbit matron may tell a startled dwarf that she has seven sons, she might only have borne five of them herself, and have one hearth-son by her wife, and a pledge-son of her first husband’s. There are between three and four fathers involved at various stages of production, from conception to pledge-duty, but there is debate about the precise number of fathers, as one child was festival-conceived and therefore provisionally pledged to the Brandybucks until more distinctive paternal traits should materialise. It’s expected that four of the sons will be uninterested in women, and their contribution to family life will be in raising hearth-children and pledge-duty. However, this level of detail is normally negotiated later in conversation, as a mutual overture of friendship. So she’s just clear and simple: yes, certainly, she has seven sons. Yes, they’re all hers. Yes, that’s fairly normal - yes, hobbits like big families. How big? That’s really hard to say! Well, about thirteen hobbits live in her house… er, she has forty-three nieces and nephews. Yes! She has nine siblings, that’s correct, but some of them are still babies themselves..

In this way, a bewildered dwarf might assume that hobbits are absurdly fertile, producing an average of seven children per couple, at an absurd pace.

When in fact, with about half of hobbits never bearing biological children, the population of hobbits is pretty much always the same.

Tl:dr, hobbit population works perfectly well, both internally and in the perceptions of outsiders, if the majority of the Shire is gay, they’re all polyamorous, and they all firmly claim to be parents of high numbers of children. Of course Frodo fathered Sam’s kids - he named them! They were pledge-kin but not hearth-kin, as Frodo needed a lot of quiet and stability in the home.

In short, all of the hobbits enjoyed achieving even larger families on their adventures, legally and without argument or debate. It’s free real estate. If nobody else is going to sibling these losers, we will. (The condensation of so many entanglements at once also legally made Pippin his own father-in-law.)

Gandalf never explained.

Inheritance follows parent-child pledge as the primary consideration, with matrilineal descent as the secondary. Pippin would have been bewildered to gradually understand that Denethor held his two sons in such odd and different standing :-/ hobbits don’t recognise kingship so it would’ve been very upsetting and disappointing to Pippin to understand how Denethor stood in position of sworn-father to a whole city of people without even being slightly fair to his younger hearth-son. Aragorn is demonstrably much better dad-material and therefore had Pippin’s vote. Pippin, by virtue of being an excellent father-in-law to a spectacularly promising young son-in-law, also considered himself a better candidate for king of Gondor than Denethor, by outranking him in Dad Competence - but was too busy by the time he realized this to point this out .