#first age

by ethanray (@ethanray)

Eärendil thinks about his family while sailing home

General, No Archive Warnings

by AnnaRobots (@annarobots)

Long had Aredhel desired to see again the light of Gondolin, its fountains in the sun. She wished not to die closed up in a room of sickness.

General, Major Character Death

by AnnaRobots (@annarobots)

Gil-galad, star of my sky, pearl of my shores. My fall, my fëa.

Teen, Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

by Cor-belle (@i-did-not-mean-to)

A snapshot of Irmo at work.

Teen, No Archive Warnings

by octopus_fool (@ridiculoussquid)

She looked at his still, pale face, contemplating.

Teen, Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

by sallysavestheday (@sallysavestheday)

Caranthir considers what lies beyond the Ered Luin.

General, No Archive Warnings

Is because while Annatar was in Ost-in-Edhile stirring up trouble and seducing talented smiths into helping him forge his Rings of Power, he set about neutralizing his opposition not only through manipulation of the current situation in Eregion, but also historically.

No one noticed at the time, because it's not like there was a palantir-wiki repository of One Official Historical Narrative that he edited on the sly one night at 3am. He was subtle at it, playing the long-game over years: whispering in an ear here and sneaking around a library there, substituting forgeries and absconding with old papers, scribbling edits and shuffling pages, commissioning bards for new songs with increasingly divergent narratives, and...and...and...

And there were a lot of more pressing things to deal with at the time than a few bards and scholars coming up with weird new takes on old events, or misplacing some scrolls, or transcribing the wrong name into a few places. These things happen, it's annoying but it's not like it's on purpose or anything....right?

(And when it was on purpose it had always been the "added drama so it sounded better"/"wanted it to rhyme"/"personal bias"/"inspiring-slash-defaming propaganda-slanting" sort of changes — no one had ever conceived of a targeted campaign on this scale before.)

Then afterwards there were a lot of things going on, and a whole bunch of stuff was lost when Ost-in-Edhil was sacked, and everything else happened with Númenor and Mordor and all, so it didn't really stand-out until centuries later when someone sat down and tried to sort things out so they could bring along a "cohesive historical narrative" of major events in Middle-earth when they sailed to Valinor, and realized hey that's weird, that's not how I remember it going...

And by then, so many of the participants were dead, and so many primary/secondary sources on those events had been lost or "creatively edited" (both in good faith and bad) that it was impossible to trace back any particular distortion to a specific source and lay blame for it — or even to realize that there'd been anything done deliberately to lay blame somewhere for.

And so the erasure of the bulk of Galadriel and Celeborn's deeds from recorded history remains one of Sauron's most successful endeavours. It's just that nobody knows about it.