@gellavonhamster / gellavonhamster.tumblr.com
Ungoliant, the Mistress of Her Own Lust
Of the fate of Ungoliant no tale tells. Yet some have said that she ended long ago, when in her uttermost famine she devoured herself at last. JRR Tolkien, The Silmarillion
@tolkienhorrorweek day 1, prompt: seeth all things crooked
White Lady of the Noldor
My doodle for TRSB challenge. I wanted to draw two most unpropable Middle-earth characters together. So here is Lobelia Sackville-Baggins and Finrod Felagund ♡ I think their conversation topic is ancient tableware ♡
Well, more on this topic will be posted by @actual-bill-pots, who claimed this ♡
Sauron burning through Middle Earth in the Second Age, inspired by medieval millefleur tapestries and Tolkien's watercolor painting of Sauron
Reading the Silmarillion, the elves seem so active and full of life.They’re always doing things. When you get to the Lord of the Rings, they just seem so tired. Elrond holds a meeting and then he’s out. Galadriel has some guests stay with her. They’re so done. They just wanna leave.
the number of people in the top vs bottom pic is accurate too
A little drawing, I made of Thuringwethil and Sauron for @fall-for-tolkien 's Scribbles & Drabbles 2024 event! :)
There are many new books that are advertised as a groundbreaking "Found family of monster hunters!!!" and then I stare into the void because there IS an og found family of monster hunters in potentia, the Dracula one, but pretty much Every Single spinoff has decided to either villify them or erase them which legitimately is akin to erasing or vilifying The Fellowship of The Ring to uplift Sauron.
Worry not, it's related! To complete the comparison, I am expecting a Tragic Love Story between him and Nerdanel.
Nope, it's even better/worse - there's an elf OC, the self-insert of one of the authors, who is in love with him. Apparently she gets reincarnated every time she dies because she can't find peace away from him, or something like that. I haven't read that book myself, just heard about it a lot and read some stuff about it on the internet, so I'm not sure.
(The book in question is The Black Book of Arda by Natalia Vasilyeva and Natalia Nekrasova)
It’s been a while again since I drew the lady with the eternal tears ^^ I wanted to draw her in a more tarot card style this time
To anyone who believes fairy tale romances never happen in real life, may I remind you that JRR and Edith Tolkien met and experienced a forbidden love in their youth, and then were separated for five whole years because of his guardian’s rules that he could not date till he was 21, and she got engaged to someone else only because she assumed he’d forgotten her and lost hope that she could ever be with him, but then on his 21st birthday, he wrote her a letter saying he still loved her and wanted to marry her, she responded basically saying ‘if I’d known you hadn’t left me on the shelf, I would never have said yes to anyone else,’ then a week later she greeted him at the train station and then immediately dumped her fiancé, and they got married and she converted to his religion and danced for him in a flowering field far away from the trenches into which he was drafted, which left such an impression that he crafted an entire story about the most beautiful maiden in the world who danced in the woods and made enormous sacrifices to be with the man she loved, and they had four kids and remained faithful to each other and blissfully grew old together and their gravestones are now marked with the names of that same fictional couple that he created, who broke every rule and overcame every possible obstacle to be together and get a happy ending, who only did all that because he based it all on their own real love story.
Knowing all this has always made this bit of Beren’s song instantly reduce me to tears:
Though all to ruin fell the world
and were dissolved and backward hurled
unmade into the old abyss,
yet were its making good, for this—
the dawn, the dusk, the earth, the sea—
that Lúthien on a time should be!
Tolkien straight up wrote a poem that said “the world could end, but it wouldn’t have all been pointless, because she was in this world, however briefly, and that justified all the rest.” Kills me.
Who can outdo Wife Guy Tolkien? Dude was writing elaborate AUs where his wife is an impossibly beautiful magic-wielding immortal elf princess who fights Satan and wins to rescue her human boyfriend from Satan’s doom fortress. Flawless.
Final note: while they were dating, a favorite activity was to go to a local cafe with a balcony and throw sugar cubes into people's hats.
Bonus internet points will be awarded to anyone who actually tries this exercise before voting.
Assume you need to get the spelling at least somewhat close, and if a character has multiple names, only one counts. Also, if a character doesn't have a canonical name, I'm sorry, but "that guy's wife" doesn't count.
For reference, if you can name the 9 members of the Fellowship, the eponymous Hobbit and his 13 dwarf buddies, 3 prominent women, and the guy who runs the Rivendell B&B, that's 27 characters right there. And you probably also know the name of a dragon.
For further reference, Tolkien Gateway has 637 (!!) pages dedicated to Third Age characters. (Don't click that link until you've voted, of course)
Edit: Your humble pollmaker gave this a try, and got as far as 73 before deciding she was too tired to keep trying to remember dwarf and Silm names. If you also want to share (and don't mind people being incredulous at your having forgot ____), pastebin allows you to paste text and share it for free. :)
63
At that point I wrote Gandalf again because I thought I somehow forgot him.
And yeah I couldn't remember the name of the prince guy or Beregond for some reason.
So I was a bit of a cad and ticked 81 to 100
But now I need to actually do it to know and, quite fortunately so - my manager is out of sight.
153.
Okay I have problems and it's kinda official.
I need to live another twenty years purely to see what kind of bullshit the Tolkien estate gets up to with respect to The Silmarillion in 2044.
Context for non-dweebs: Unlike Tolkien's other well known works, The Silmarillion was published posthumously; Tolkien died in 1973, and The Silmarillion first saw print in 1977.
Though Tolkien had shown drafts of The Silmarillion to publishers during his lifetime, there are substantial differences between those drafts and the book that was actually published. It's been a matter of great interest – read: nerd drama – in the Tolkien fandom exactly how much of the published Silmarillion is really the work of J R R Tolkien, and how much of it is original authorship by his son Christopher.
The Tolkien estate has historically maintained that The Silmarllion is all J R R Tolkien, and that Christopher merely acted as an editor, because "by J R R Tolkien (edited by Christopher Tolkien)" is going to sell better than "by Christopher Tolkien (based on the work of J R R Tolkien)".
If The Silmarillion really is 100% J R R Tolkien's work, and Christopher Tolkien was merely an editor, then – since J R R Tolkien died in 1973 – the whole thing will enter the public domain on January 1st, 2044 in all life-plus-70 jurisdictions (i.e., most of the big ones, including the US).
If, however, any major part of the published Silmarillion constitutes original authorship by Christoper Tolkien, then the term of copyright would instead be calculated based on his date of death in 2020, pushing its earliest possible entry into the public domain in life-plus-70 jurisdictions back to January 1st, 2091.
Thus, there exists the possibility that the Tolkien estate might be able to preserve their ownership of The Silmarillion by arguing that they've been lying the whole time about Christopher Tolkien not contributing any original authorship to the published work.
Would it work? Probably not – but it'd be fun to see them try!
Beren: Don't kill me, I have a wife!
Sauron: You think I care about that?
Beren: Huh? Oh no no no, this isn't a plea for mercy. It's a warning.
Sauron: Wha-
Lúthien: (busting in with a dog and a can-do attitude) ARE YOU READY TO DIE?!
Okay, so a thing about Tolkien's Middle-Earth is that, for elves and other beings of comparable metaphysical stature, the "distance" between an act of will and its tangible result is shorter than it is for mortals. The universe is just more inclined to play along with how they want it to work, which is why they're not lying when they claim not to know what magic is even though the products of their craftsmanship are by any reasonable standard supernatural – they just make stuff, and it works the way it does because that's how they intended it to.
This has a number of fun worldbuilding implications, like inventors having tangible authority over things crafted using their techniques, regardless of who does the actual crafting, because they literally willed the principles which allow those techniques to work into being, or the fact that when powerful beings die, sometimes stuff that depends on techniques they invented stops working. However, there's a bigger implication that that's generally gone unaddressed:
Elves can't do science.
Like, it's straight up impossible. A Tolkien elf cannot construct and carry out a meaningful experiment of any sort – it'll always works the way they expect it to, but only for that particular elf. Confirmation bias is an insurmountable barrier.
I want to read a story about the elf who figures this out and it bothers them terribly.
I’m gonna propose “I guess you haven’t read the silmarillion then :/” as a default response to anyone not understanding a reference to something obscure. even if it’s not remotely Tolkien related. I want to build up a perception that perhaps the sum total of human knowledge is contained in the silmarillion
He learned his lesson
Nah you guys don’t get it. For all that Gandalf complained about Pippin, he better than anyone else knew that Pippin was absolutely crucial. Pippin accomplishes a very impressive feat: not only does he manage to see something in the palantír (most hobbits would perceive nothing, as these stones were designed for use by high elves), but he manages to close his mind against Sauron. That is a seriously impressive feat of ósanwë given Pippin’s youth and almost total inexperience. The only clue Sauron manages to glean from the meeting with Pippin is that he is in Meduseld: which Pippin probably did not even directly give to him. Pippin did not tell Sauron his name, so Sauron is led to believe that Pippin is Frodo. I remind you, in the books, the Good Guys manage to trick Sauron, by making him believe that Aragorn has claimed the One Ring. They can only do that because of Pippin’s ridiculous feat of ósanwë. Far from sabotaging the mission, he is the one who allows it to succeed (albeit, not on purpose). This is why Sauron doesn’t think anything is fishy when Aragorn wins the Battle of the Pelennor Fields by controlling ghosts: that would be consistent with the idea that he is using the One Ring. Which Sauron believes that Pippin brought to him. This is why Sauron pulls out his old “play nice and weak” card from his Númenor days. He first of all believes that Aragorn is a lot more powerful than he actually is, and secondly thinks that the Ring is beginning to affect him.
He should perhaps have remembered that Aragorn is named for Fingolfin. Fingolfin’s mother-name, Arakáno, would properly be translated to Sindarin as “Aragorn”. Most people would not show up to an enemy fortress with an army they knew was far too small, and start a battle they knew they would lose. But Fingolfin famously did exactly that.
When you read the line “fool of a Took!” It is important to understand that in the context of Gandalf calling himself a fool on several occasions. Galadriel too sees beyond the veneer of foolish naivety in Pippin. She gives him and Merry belts that almost definitely were once her brothers’. A golden flower on a gift from Galadriel can only be a golden lily, the sigil of the House of Finarfin. Galadriel, while all hell was breaking loose in Tirion, raided her brothers’ rooms and took their belts from when they were little kiddos, hauled them across the Helcaraxë, and then held onto them for three Ages before giving them to two hobbits she just met. Merry, of course, is comparable to Angrod and Aegnor: his great deed is done in a moment of beserk rage, and it is a feat of strength. This then implies that she is comparing Pippin to Finrod. That’s one hell of a complement coming from Galadriel: but as I just pointed out, entirely warranted. Pippin manages to reproduce Finrod’s feat of radio silence, in the face of torture by Sauron. Which again, is extremely impressive given that Pippin is far younger and less experienced than Finrod was.
You see me <3
You're invited to tag other unresolved questions, I'd love to do another round and then with questions people actually think about!
