#aglarond

So: Elvish marriage is, we all know, a very simple thing that you don't need much...let's say ceremony to complete, wink-wink.

Dwarven marriages, on the other hand...! Well, let's just say that Durin's folk know how to throw a fancy shindig, yeah? Plus, there are the contracts. Oh, are there ever contracts! Can't have a marriage without proper contracts. No contract, and it's just a fling (even if lasts over a century), everybody knows that who knows anything.

And these sort of flings are lovely and can be very fulfilling, and many a dwarven family-unit has been based entirely upon such long-term flings; but without a contract to account for the merging (or not) of your crafts and your work and such, well, it's not a marriage, is it? Of course not.

So one day, Legolas discovers that while he's been calling Gimli his husband for like thirty years now, according to dwarven cultural standards, they're not actually married!

Gimli isn't bothered by this, and never has been, because everyone knows that he and Legolas are Together(tm), and he knows that elves consider the idea of a public "marriage ceremony" to be pretty weird, also. And it's not like there's any shame about these sorts of "flings" in dwarf culture, so everybody in Aglarond is content with the status-quo of having an unmarried lord who's known to be attached to a strange elf, and they respect that relationship entirely (even if most of them still find the fact that Legolas is an elf pretty odd).

(Also, Legolas is is going to live forever, while Gimli still assumes at this point that he'll be bound by a normal dwarven life-span, so of course from Legolas's perspective their relationship must inherently seem like a short-term affair, anyway, even if neither of them like talking about that fact...)

So Gimli's perfectly happy with their elvish-marriage. Lots of dwarves never get married at all, it's nbd.

Except Legolas doesn't see it that way. How unintentionally selfish of him, to have only wed Gimli according to the standards of his own culture, and not that of Gimli's people as well! He had no idea, but now that he knows, he must set about fixing it at once!

And that's the story of how the entirety of Rohan got roped-into helping a Wood-elf plan a dwarf-style wedding ceremony as a surprise for the Lord of Aglarond.

Needless to say, the "surprise" aspect of it doesn't last very long—just long enough for many and varied hijinks to ensue—which is good, because A: you can't really negotiate contracts without representatives of both parties involved and B: as well-intentioned as he is, Legolas has very little idea of what a dwarven wedding actually is or how to throw one.

But by gosh, is he going to try!!!

(Fortunately Gimli finds Legolas's earnest intentions endearing even when he's completely off-base about just about everything, so he looks at the near-debacle of what Legolas and his bewildered human assistants have done so far and declares it all to be extremely sweet.)

Even more fortunately, once he realizes that it matters to Legolas that they be wed in dwarf-fashion—because Legolas thinks it matters to Gimli—Gimli takes charge of the rest of the arrangements, which also means acquiring the help of a bunch of competent dwarven friends and advisors, now that the rest of Aglarond know what's going on much to the relief of Éomer and the Rohirrim who are now off the hook for anything but attending the resultant party.

Which is how we end up with Thranduil being invited to a dwarven marriage ceremony in the Glittering Caves of Rohan along with the entire royal family of Gondor and the elvish colony of Ithilien and a whole bunch of Hobbits.

He thinks the whole idea is ridiculous, of course (they've been married for years, everyone knows it, why are mortals so weird about this stuff?), but he goes along with it because it seems to matter to Legolas, even though Thranduil gets rather offended by the notion of signing contracts on behalf of his son, and has to be talked-down from interpreting that as a mortal insult by the combined efforts of Aragorn, Arwen, and Faramir.

But mainly he's just irritated that they couldn't have gotten their shit together earlier and done this before Bilbo left, because his Hobbit bestie loves a good party, and he's going to be so pissed in like four or five hundred years when Thranduil crosses the Sea and tells him about it.

(Also the party would have been way more fun with Bilbo there to make scathing commentary, and Thranduil is grumpy not having him in attendance. What's the point of declaring your favorite Burglar an Elf-friend if you can't pull him out for your own personal entertainment at parties!?)

Anyway the whole thing is a disaster, of course, because half the people involved don't actually understand what the fuck they're supposed to be doing or what half of it means, but.

But it's lovely, also.

And the Glittering Caves have never glittered quite so brightly as they do when Gimli and Legolas say their vows at last (even if Legolas's Khuzdul pronunciation is atrocious! fortunately Gimli finds that endearing, too, although the elder dwarves all wince terribly). Even the bright crystal casing that forms the centerpiece of the great hall, the one that Gimli spent five years carving until it was just right, the one that holds those three long golden hairs he's always waxing so euphoric about...

Well, even that shines brighter than usual, that day.

And far across the Sea, someone looks into her Mirror, and smiles.

So rather than to imagine they were completely out of their depth as King and Lords after the war of the ring I cling to the belief that they were very bizarre to be around but that it was a conscious choice because they could not be arsed.

🇺🇦 《(...) За той час Леґолас виконав обіцянку, яку він дав Ґімлі, й навідав разом із ним Сяйливі печери: і, коли вони повернулись, ельф тільки й мовив, що Ґімлі єдиний здатен підібрати слова, щоб описати те диво》

Glittering Caves Aglarond

HIIII HELLO MORE LONELY KING LORE !! If you liked my last post here’s more sketches and another video (there are two more I still need to post but here’s the one that followed the previous video)

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It is completely up to how you wanna read or write the AU, cause even I myself and torn between the reincarnated Gimli logistics or just have be missing for x amount of years. But the updated idea so far is that there will be a Telemachus! Aka their kid Florí.

AGLAROND, or the GLITTERING CAVES, the extensive grottoes and caverns beneath the mountains around Helm’s Deep.

Originally the caves were simply used as a place of refuge and storage by the Rohirrim, the men of Rohan; their true extent was only discovered during the battle of the Hornburg. Gimli the dwarf, one of the defenders of the Deep, was the first to realize the great beauty of these natural caverns with their fantastic gems and veins of precious ores, and their fluted and twisted pillars of white, saffron and pink that support the roofs and are mirrored in the still pools of Aglarond.

History has it that at the end of the War of the Ring, Gimli settled here with some of the dwarves of the Lonely Mountain and became known as "Lord of the Glittering Caves." Under his guidance, the dwarves pursued and developed their traditional skills. Among other services to the men of Gondor and Rohan, they forged the new steel and mithril gates of Minas Tirith.

(J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers, London, 1954; J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King, London, 1955; J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, London, 1977)