sheepfilms
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
★
No title available
RMH
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Discoholic 🪩
dirt enthusiast
AnasAbdin
shark vs the universe
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
No title available
DEAR READER
Andulka
will byers stan first human second
styofa doing anything
Jules of Nature
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
d e v o n
No title available
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Canada
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Canada
seen from Sweden
seen from Germany
seen from Ireland
seen from Australia
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Malaysia
seen from Finland
seen from United Arab Emirates
seen from Ireland
seen from Malaysia
seen from Italy
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
@arda-marred
There flying Elwing came to him, and flame was in the darkness lit
The design of the white flowers beneath Eärendil's feet originates from the small white blossoms blooming on the plains of Gondolin.
not my art but my commssion.
Artist：翻滚小狗
Arwen + Aragorn <3
I can't resist the 'but actually' here....
Many Tolkien scholars consider the earliest glimpse of what would become his legendarium to be in the form of the poem, ‘The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star’, which Tolkien himself dated to September 24, 1914.... right at the start of World War I.
This would make Tolkien only 22 years old when he began writing about Middle-earth.
See the below link and/or John Garth's seminal biography Tolkien and the Great War for more details on how Tolkien's early scholarly interests and his experiences as a young man during WWI contributed to and shaped his works.
It is 100 years since Middle-earth began. The earliest glimpse of any character or situation from his mythology was in a poem, ‘The Voyage o
CANNOT take credit for these, my sister in law made them. Behold.
I recently finished a reread of LOTR, and in all the (often reductive) discussions of the influence of WWI on the trilogy, there's one conspicuous motif in the books that I don't think I've ever seen. And that is: leaders being driven by madness to war, and the desire for power and dominion over others being itself a kind of madness. Interestingly, Denethor's blinkered isolationism is a kind of madness too. There's a lot there!
I realize that "unfortunately a lot of world leaders were kind of insane and a lot of people died about it" is -- obviously -- not a framing of this historical conflict now. But the folly of political elites leading to destruction of life and livelihood on a massive scale was absolutely a popular framing of it in the interwar period. Cf. the novels of James Hilton. Or for that matter, arguably, the Women's International League.
Anyway. I also don't see a lot of discussion of the other WWI-informed motif that struck me most forcibly on this reread, which is: sometimes you have to break laws to save lives, and it does not matter if they are civil or military laws or how culturally important they are. Smash them to bits, if it means saving lives.
Earendil to Elwing: Impressions from Vingilot
Hoping to see you shortly, dear, but just quickly jotting this down while the impressions are fresh.
I have seen the backside of Tilion! Oops, no, that didn't come out as I intended it to... What I mean is: I have seen the dark side of Ithil, the side that we couldn't see from Middle-earth, and of course it is not dark at all, although there are some more burn marks on that side, too.
Yes, really, I just sailed past Tilion and his Ship Flower, cool as a cucumber...
no nuance you have to decide
would jeeves have succumbed to the one ring?
no, he would diminish and go into the west and remain a valet
yes, he can't resist such power (burn bertie's ugliest trousers)
the ring has no effect on him, tom bombadil style
4 days left in the most important 'thoughts had just before going to sleep' poll I've ever made
"Well, Jeeves," I said, "That seems to be that."
"A consummation greatly desired," Jeeves agreed.
"The forces of darkness vanquished, the rightful king upon his throne, and all that. And, even more importantly, Tuppy Glossop disengaged from that horsy female and returned to the bosom of my cousin Angela."
"Indeed, sir."
"Rather a shock running into the Reverend Aubry Upjohn riding that fell beast, what?"
"I though you displayed great alacrity in relocating to that ditch in the nick of time, sir."
Far below us, the molten lava did a rather spirited impersonation of boiling soup. I mopped the p. off the b. with a handkerchief I'd improvised from an orc loincloth. I had been to some deuced uncomfortable country estates in my time, don't you know, but at least there one had been able to toddle downstairs and pour oneself a quick W. and S. as needed to stiffen the sinews. Galadriel's Buck-U-Uppo was excellent at vitalizing the limbs to forge on the last dreadful mile and all that, but it lacked the comfort that speaks to the soul.
I contemplated the glowing river. "Redirecting the army of Aunts to that Isengard place was a stroke of brilliance, I thought."
"You are too kind, sir."
"Still, all things must end, as they say. Travel is broadening to the mind and all, but it is past time to attend the call of heart and home. Among other considerations, I think something took residence inside this mithril shirt somewhere around the Morgul Vale and has been wandering about biting hither and thither ever since, and I am filled with the desire to strip it off and do battle with the blighted thing."
"Understandable, sir."
"I heard rather a good one the other day: Sing hey! for the bath at close of day that washes the weary mud away! -and by Jove if I don't think they were on to something, Jeeves."
"It is undeniably felicitous to be surrounded by the comforts of home," he assented, and yet I couldn't escape a certain sense of firmness about his gaze.
I sighed, for I knew what he wanted. Well, I mean, I'm all for taking a firm stance and not being trodden on in one's own home and all, but as far as rallying around to save the young master goes, none could have rallied more greatly than Jeeves. If a little firmness was the price I had to pay, well, so be it.
Slowly I undid the old school tie from around my neck. It was harder work than one would have thought; as if it could hear what was rattling around in the old brain, the ring that was threaded on it put in a last surge of effort in the gleaming and enticement department, filling my mind with heady visions: Freddie Widgeon gnashing his teeth as I sank yet another dart into the bullseye, Aunt Agatha wreathed in tears and begging my forgiveness for ever having misjudged me, Jeeves gazing admiringly as I displayed my newest waistcoat for his edification…
It was the last that broke the spell. Cursed objects of all-consuming power were all well and good in their sphere, but there were limits, don't you know? And yet I hesitated. "You don't think I could slip it on and just have a quick total domination of the world before I toddle around to the Drones for a stiff one?"
Jeeves gave a gentle cough of reproof. "I think you will find it for the best, sir."
It was a wrench, but one could not deny the man had earned it. With a heavy hand, I held the ring out to him. "Take it, then. You will know what do with it, I'm sure."
He took it from me with the sort of shimmer that showed he was exceptionally gratified. "Thank you, sir."
I watched as the ring fell from his hand into the depths below. It hit the lava and rested there for a moment before slowly sinking beneath the glowing surface, and as they caught fire I almost felt that the Old Etonian colors glowed brighter in approval. That Wooster, they seemed to say: not much in the brains department, but he gets the job done.
Outside, there came a hideous wailing as of something ages old abruptly losing the power which bound it to this mortal plain and all that, which I took as our signal to leg it down the nearest drainpipe before things got sticky. The road goes ever on and on, what? Yet I paused there, at the end of all things, because some things have to be said.
"No, thank you, Jeeves."
current status.
Éalá Éarendel Engla Beorhtast.
(Image courtesy of the NASA Gallery)
I knew I was going to get emotionally walloped by this scene, given my reread feelings about the arc for Aragorn and the hobbits, but!!! I had forgotten that, in this formal assembly in their honor, Frodo and Sam are so glad to see Aragorn that they break out of a musician-flanked procession to run to him. And that, enthroned between Imrahil and Éomer, Aragorn is just... delighted to be greeted by protocol-indifferent hobbits shouting his nickname! They're friends and they love each other so much!
This is to say nothing of the fact that he has saved their lives, as we are informed by Gandalf, or that he has very clearly commissioned -- written??? -- a heroic ballad for them because he knows Sam loves songs. I just...! But really the most satisfying bit might be that Frodo and Sam see him utterly transformed from the grim and wary Ranger who helped them learn to camp effectively, and immediately and with joy say oh Strider it's you!
what she says: i'm fine
what she means: j.r.r. tolkien based luthien the fair, THE most beautiful, wonderful, brave, amazing, loved woman middle earth had supposedly ever seen and ever will see, on his wife, edith. dark-haired, gray-eyed edith, who just looked like a person. a regular person. she was a regular person, not a deathless elf maiden, but to tolkien, she was the most beautiful woman in the world. and she was, because he loved her. his love made her beautiful. he wrote to his son after she died "but the story has gone crooked, & I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos." grief is the price of love. anything that is loved is beautiful.
"I never called Edith Lúthien – but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while). In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing – and dance. But the story has gone crooked, & I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos."
Get yourself someone who will put you into their seminal work as one of the most powerful and beautiful people to ever walk the earth, the prototypical love story of your fiction, a woman who bested Dark Lords and moved the unmovable gods to tears.
I’ll never get over it. Never.
From a letter to his son, in 1972
I never called Edith Lúthien – but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief pan of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while). In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing – and dance. But the story has gone crooked, & I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos.
I will say no more now. But I should like ere long to have a long talk with you. For if as seems probable I shall never write any ordered biography, someone close in heart to me should know something about things that records do not record: the dreadful sufferings of our childhoods, from which we rescued one another, but could not wholly heal the wounds that later often proved disabling; the sufferings that we endured after our love began – all of which (over and above our personal weaknesses) might help to make pardonable, or understandable, the lapses and darknesses which at times marred our lives — and to explain how these never touched our depths nor dimmed our memories of our youthful love. For ever (especially when alone) we still met in the woodland glade, and went hand in hand many times to escape the shadow of imminent death before our last parting.
And their graves
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.
𝘐 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘧𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 𝘧𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘨𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥 𝘢𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘦
Glaurung is actually The antagonist of all time. Wingless Dragon. Hypnosis eyes. His superpower is shit-talking people. He showed up to Cause Problems for Túrin and by god he did it fantastically. Does getting one last truth bomb in to Ruin Everyone’s Life. Genuine icon no one is doing it like him.
maedhros AGAIN!
Saw the stupid Tolkien vs GRRM meme on twitter again and had a thought that everyone brings up how it isn't true because Martin has Dunk, Brienne and other stuff but no one ever brings up how Tolkien also wrote a book about a guy who kinda sucks and fucked his sister
Well yes, I know that. I mean, I didn't know that he read it as a child. It was also a joke.
I am a little confused about what you are arguing against, I guess? Are you saying that asoiaf and Children of Hurin shouldn't be compared because Turin's incest has roots in literary tradition while incest in ASOIAF is there "for no reason"?
Oh! I wasn't trying to argue...I just find that era of Tolkien's life very interesting and it's one of the main focuses of this blog. Apologies if it came across negatively! Just thought it was amusing that Tolkien had his own very Tolkien-ish inspo for that element of the story. ^.^
