— Václav Havel

Tolkien Pinup Calendar Bracket Round 2

Finwe vs Sauron (Rings of Power)

(art by @fil3t)

Propaganda under the cut ↓

Gandalf faces Durin's Bane

Last minute submission for @tolkienhorrorweek and Happy Halloween!

I saw a poll the other day that made me think about Finrod, because people were (correctly) criticizing the instinct to reduce him down to a pretty, shiny, no-thoughts, certified kissboy. Which he isn’t—but it’s also become a stereotype because it’s a flattening of a much more nuanced representation of Beleriand era Finrod as someone for whom the plumage is a tool and a threat display, who intensely overinvests himself in the people around him because somewhere in the back of his mind is the knowledge that everyone here is doomed (him especially). I think the exuberance and easy attachment and delight in what is beautiful now can be in character when it’s underpinned with wisdom so sharp he keeps cutting himself on it. There are some distinct depressed philosophy student vibes to the Nargothrond period and if there’s one thing a philosopher can do it’s tactical psyche-preserving hedonism.

Carved this for Halloween this year but I thought I’d post it for @nolofinweanweek!

Fingolfin v. Morgoth, very much inspired by this piece by @gvalesthedumb!

And a daytime shot, for more pumpkin and less fires of angband:

i just think it's funny if the Second Ever petition for remarriage after the death of a spouse is from nerdanel and indis and the valar have to be like "alright we know the sample size is real small here but it's kind of strange these are having a common denominator"

I'm not in this fandom but I am a big fan of sloppy drama, so I am dying to know what this post is about.

ooh, okay, let's see how well i remember the legendarium!

so tolkien elves are immortal*: when they get super injured or sad, they have to go hang out in the afterlife for a while, and then they come back. they are also monogamous.

but when feanor (the vriska of tolkien) was born, his mom miriel was like, oooof gestating this guy took everything out of me, he's just a lot, i'm going to just lie down and go to the underworld. like, it wasn't not-suicide. miriel used to be a seamstress and she saw a bit of the future, as most of tolkien's faves do.

so then feanor's dad, king finwe, was very sad and was the world's first single dad probably. and then he fell in love with blonde arty indis, from the neighboring kingdom of blonde artiness. elves are monogamous, but the gods gave him permission to remarry because his first wife was hanging out in the underworld. so indis was his second wife and gave him arty and reasonable sons.

feanor (the vriska of tolkien) (also the lydia deetz of tolkien) haaaated indis and her blonde artiness and also her sons.

this hatred and additional daddy issues eventually snowballed to a point where feanor invented nationalism, started a war, and fled paradise. his dad, king finwe, went with him and got battle-killed! so once king finwe was retired to the underworld, miriel was ready to come back from the underworld. there was no risk of elf bigamy because finwe, the guy with two wives, was dead.

fandom likes to interpret this as a tragic ot3 which can only exist if at least one of the three people involved is dead at a time. it helps that miriel canonically says she loooves indis.

but! more to the point! feanor had a hot sculptor wife - i imagine she is butch, what with all the sculpting - and although they were initially happy, she didn't like his nationalism and the blasphemy and general self-destructiveness. so she stayed behind when feanor fled paradise. and then she moved in with indis, her estranged husband's beloathed blonde arty stepmom.

so i think op's proposition is twofold:

Today’s the day

It’s the day!!

He definitely did, but since the whole book is supposed to be a translation of something he found and not something he personally wrote, they’re switched for the audience’s convenience. There’s a lot more to it, but here’s a chart of Shire months from the appendices at the end of RoTK. Elves and men are different, but there was no handy chart.

Happy… [squints] Winterfilth, everybody

I’ve reprinted this Smaug risograph a few times now and I’m really digging the HOT fluorescent orange on brown paper in this batch 🤌 These have been restocked and are up in my shop!

go to the mcdonald’s drive-thru and order one black coffee for yourself and nothing for the medieval christian poet that you’re guiding through hell

I'm sorry, but other than the egg one, all of Bilbo's riddles suck so bad. Gollum is coming prepared with five lovely, deeply disturbing little riddle-poems. They're guessable. They rhyme. They've got clear well-defined answers like 'time' and 'fish' and 'darkness'. The answer to one of Bilbo's riddles is literally "Fish on a little one-legged table, man at table sitting on a three-legged stool, the cat gets the bones" which is outrageous. That's not a thing. And then the actual winning riddle of the contest (albeit accidentally) is 'what does Bilbo have in his pocket?' which is obviously unfair. So I'm sorry, I know he's disgusting and a creature of the dark but Gollum should have won that contest fair and square and the story should have ended there and that is why you need an impartial referee to uphold a minimum quality level for your riddle contest lest you be robbed and ultimately die in a fiery death because of it.

(All art used with EXPRESS permission from the artist)

Come back to the Valley

@imladrisweek : day seven

Elrond and Estel

Also, Happy Hobbit Day. There are no Hobbits here, but both Elrond and Aragorn enjoyed (suffered) plenty of time with them, especially Bilbo.

Revisited my design for Orome the huntsman of the Valar :)

Also thought I’d lean into that one time I joked his horse Nahar is actually a unicorn