Gamling and/or Helm Hammerhand depending on your preferences/available time!
Thank you so much! ♥️ I picked Helm only because my thoughts about Gamling share some major strains with my previously posted Erkenbrand takes (unsurprisingly because they are related in my head). So here’s Helm!
First Impression: From the hints of him in the main text and a surface reading of the Helm section of the appendices, he’s an absolute legend! Amazingly strong, incredibly brave, a sacrificing king who led his people through a disaster and suffered right alongside them.
Impression Now: The more I’ve read the Helm story and really parsed the words and dynamics, the less impressive I find him. A lot of Helm’s legend breaks down under more scrutiny and reveals the ways that he was perhaps thin-skinned, impulsive, xenophobic and foolhardy. That sounds harsh, and I do still have a ton of respect for the way that he led his people while they were besieged in the Hornburg, but the lead-up to all of that is less positive in my book now.
Favorite Moment: Stalking enemies through the snowy dark, striking them down with your bare hands, and creating the legend that you’re a supernatural-style wraith who could kill people with fear alone? Still pretty badass.
Story Idea: I’d love to write some of the pre-canon relationship between Helm and Freca to chart their long, slow estrangement from friends and allies (Freca was on Helm’s council, after all!) to eventual bitter enemies. That’s very generalized, but it’s the core of the idea.
Favorite Moment: I kind of feel like my “Impression Now” answer for Helm is my unpopular opinion of him. People love that guy, and I sometimes feel like I’m raining on everyone’s parade when I pop up to say, “Actually, I think Helm felt threatened by Freca’s popularity and independent power base and so he took an opportunistic moment to get rid of him and then blame it on Freca’s alleged mixed heritage to justify things on a nationalism level.”
Favorite Relationship: It is the relationship between Helm and Freca that I have the most thoughts about, though, of course, as someone who writes a lot about grief I’m also very interested in how Helm related to his two sons and how he reacted to their deaths.
Favorite Headcanon: Long before War of the Rohirrim, it had been my HC that Helm’s daughter and Freca’s son actually loved each other, and Helm went nuclear on Freca because he was trying to avert a match that he was opposed to out of his dislike for Freca. That being said, I do also like an aro/ace daughter of Helm as envisioned by WOTR.
