Inter Sacrum Saxumque Stare

yall you cant just cut clean through a bone

fingon had to saw that sucker off

other variations i have seen:

1. strong-arm chopped off with a sword

2. cut through through the wrist joint

3. breaking the bones first and then cutting through the flesh wtf

Uh, why would you NOT go through the joint, that just seems like the obvious thing to do? Who the fuck thinks lumberjacking through the damn arm with a sword whilst airborne is a good idea?

Oh right, Fingon, carry on. 

I did a lot of research on this quite some time ago, because I’m a massive medicine nerd like that (not that that’s my day job or anything). It’s definitely easiest to go through the joint where the hand bones meet the wrist bones - least flesh and once you’ve addressed the outermost tendons, you could kind of “pop” the joint out with the right leverage on the blade. It’s called disarticulation.

Another method could have been to just take the thumb off and slip the cuff, because without the thumb joint most hands aren’t any wider than the wrist. There’d be some sawing involved, but through more meat than tendon (which is easier going) and the muscle is likely to be massively atrophied anyway, making it easier.

I’ve entertained that second option a few times because although what’s left of the hand is almost certainly dead and/or useless, it fits with one of the versions in HOME where Maedhros was maimed but didn’t lose his hand.

I like to think that Fingon did indeed do the amputation through the joint - and it was bloody difficult from eagle back, thank you - and then someone suggested ‘or you could have just cut his thumb off’ to him afterwards mostly just to watch the look on his face.

Another (sad) and incredibly morbid tidbit to consider is that the shackle that held Maedhros on the mountain may have made severing his hand off at the joint impossible as it may have blocked that option entirely.

Cuff your wrist in metal and try to cut it off at the joint, it seems really difficult to do if not impossible unless gravity pulled the shackle up past the joint as Maedhros sank towards the earth, exposing it enough to cut through (in which case he might have just been able to slip out and fall to his possible death).

The way how I personally always imagined this bloody, terrible necessary deed is Fingon seeing no option other than sawing him out of his shackle below his wrist, possibly up to a third of the way up his forearm. Maybe Fingon had time to tie a tourniquet with something (a hair ribbon perhaps?) before just going for it.

However since we don’t have definitive proof of anything and have multiple versions of the same story I would like to say any of this is possible. It is great to see people thinking about this though (parroting @simaethae)

honestly if you think about it there wouldn’t even be any need for a tourniquet. with his arm suspended above his heart for so long, all of the blood would have drained out not too long after being hung, and the arm would have died without the blood flow. I highly doubt maedhros could bleed at all when fingon cut off his hand, much less feel it, or really even move the arm ever again. even if you take freaky elf magic into account, several years suspended from one arm is more than enough to kill the flesh. fingon cut off the hand, and later the rest of the arm was removed to a) prevent the rot from spreading and b) to get rid of a useless hunk of dead, unfeeling flesh.