A bit of a theory that Iâve struck on while rereading the start of FOTR. I think thereâs something guarding Rivendell besides the Bruinen. I think Elrond has taken a leaf out of Melianâs book.
There are some hints that the distance to Rivendell varies depending on who you are. Frodo starts approaching the Ford in late afternoon; he is in desperate need of healing, and is brought to Rivendell midway into that same night.
In The Hobbit, in contrast, the dwarves and Bilbo cross the Ford of Bruinen in the morning, and the sun is down by the time they reach Rivendell. Thereâs lot of references to the journey being longer than Bilbo would expect:
They came on unexpected valleys, narrow with steep sides, that opened suddenly at their feet, and then looked down surprised to see trees below them and running water at the bottom. There were gullies that they could almost leap over, but very deep with waterfalls in them. There were dark ravines that one could neither jump over or climb into. There were bogs, some of them green pleasant places to look at, with flowers growing bright and tall; but a pony that walked there with a pack on its back would never have come out again. It was indeed a mich wider land from the ford to the mountains than you would ever have guessed. Bilbo was astonished.
Then thereâs Aragornâs line when Merry asks him how far it is to Rivendell:
âI donât know if the Road has ever been measured in miles beyond The Forsaken Inn, a dayâs journey east of Bree. Some say it is far, and others say otherwise. It is a strange road, and folk are glad to meet their journeyâs end, whether the time is long or short. But I know how long it would take me on my own feet, with fair weather and no ill fortune: twelve days from here to the Ford of Bruinen.â
(By the way, it always amazes me, now Iâve noticed it, that the hobbits manage this journey - which Aragorn says would take him 12 days on the Road, with âfair weather and no ill fortune,â in only 14 days with Frodo severely injured, travelling mainly off the Road, and with some bad weather and wrong directions. Some of thatâs due to the extremely fast pace Glorfindel sets for the last twoand a half days, but itâs incredibly impressive.)
If anyone should know the distance from Bree to Rivendell, it should be Aragorn, a Ranger of the North fostered in Rivendell, who has probably covered that journey dozens to hundreds of times. And the Road is fairly straight; it shouldnât be hard for travellers to keep track of the general distance. And also, Aragorn only gives the distance to the Ford, not to Rivendell itself. What if the distance and difficulty of the Road from the Ford to Rivendell varies, based on how well a guest is known. Frodo is the Ring-bearer, in desperate need; he makes it there fast. Thorin & Company are vouched for by Gandalf, but are largely an unknown quantity; it takes them the better part of a day. Someone with hostile intentions might never find Rivendell at all, even after days of wanderings.
One thing it makes me wonder about though is Boromir, and particularly that the book mentions he arrived in Rivendell "in the grey morning", which personally I've always taken to mean in the very early morning, when there's some light but the sun may not yet be properly up and the dim light has that kind of greyish quality (granted that it's late November, so even with Rivendell being further south in Middle-Earth than my home in the real world, at that point the sun probably rises quite late so it may not mean as much as otherwise). Idk maybe that's just my reading of the text, but given that earlier in the chapter the morning is described as sunny, so the "grey" can't refer to cloudy weather, that's how the phrasing would seem to me, anyway.
And it's always struck me as a little bit odd in the sense that, for that to be the case, he would've had to either both start his journey very early that day (which, granted, in itself is plausible) and have been very close to Rivendell already when he started, or he would have had to push through the night without stopping to rest at all. And to me it's kind of, on one hand if he knew he was close enough to Rivendell to reach it that early, wouldn't he have known he was close, and rather pushed through in hopes of getting somewhere inside before the night was over, instead of spending it camped by the roadside in cold damp late November weather? But if he was so far from Rivendell as to have to travel the whole night through without stopping to reach it in early morning, then how would he have known he was close enough for continuing through the night, instead of stopping to make camp and sleep, to be worth it for reaching Rivendell faster?
But your point about the distance to Rivendell being different to different people in different times would make either of those more plausible, either being shorter than he thought to allow him to reach Rivendell in time to attend the Council (since Elrond implies that those who were in the Council had been called there by fate or some such power and were meant to all be there on that day to play their part in the events at hand), or being longer than he thought it would and forcing him to travel all night to reach it (since he was a stranger, unknown to Elrond and coming unexpectedly).
Or, idk, maybe none of this makes any sense to anyone but me, but, yeah.
This makes sense to me! After thinking about it, I figure that Boromir crossed the Ford of Bruinen late in the day on the day before the Council, continued on for a little ways and then camped. And then set out early in the morning any found he was practically on the doorstep of Rivendell, despite having seen no sign of it the previous night. Which adds to his general sense of disorientation.
Honestly no wonder he was a bit in a grumpy mood in the Council, I'd be too if I'd spent the night camped in the wild in late autumn, woken up sometime in very early morning to continue my journey, and somehow found the destination right there almost no distance away at all when i could've sworn it wasn't so close yet the night before, lol
Has someone written the story where Sauron doesnât do all that swords in the dark art nonsense and just sends the Witch King to Hobbiton to file a lawsuit instead?
Itâs not a strategy that would work in any other jurisdiction in Middle-Earth but hobbit law does not recognize wergild and does have the right of first finder, with the time limit being the death of the original owner, which works out great for Sauron who never died (?)
The litigation comes down to âIs this Dark Lord fellow actually alive and if so can he prove itâ âhas he consistently been aliveâ âwhat is being alive, actually, when you think about itâ and â he been making a good faith effort to recover his lost property for the last few thousand yearsâ. Both very tricky to adjudicate, especially with the entire Shire peeking into the court room. The whole case eventually gets thrown out when a strange tall man abducts Frodo in the night but itâs quite the philosophical crisis in the meantime.
This is the closest I could come to what I imagine Imladris looks like, as I never seem to quite settle on a design, but I am delighted with how this turned out! Especially the stairs!
Inspired by; "The Secret Rendezvous" by Pierre Charles Comte
Support me on Ko-Fi; early access drawings + WIP + commission discounts
This event celebrates asexual and aromantic spectrum interpretations and headcanons of Tolkien's Legendarium.
Any creations about the aromantic and asexual spectrums are welcome! You can create edits, gifs, fanart, fanfic, fanmixes, and more! All versions of canon/fanon and characters are included, be it from the books, movies, TV, OCs, etc. Please tag your posts with #aspecardaweek AND @ mention this blog @aspecardaweek so that your work can be easily found. If you are posting your submission to AO3, we will have an event collection! This is not an event for generative AI works.
The prompts below are a guideline for the weekâs events, though you are not obligated to stick to them when participating. Theyâre completely optional, and more of a source of inspiration than a mandatory guideline. Feel free to explore them however youâd like; an explanation for each is given, but you can interpret them differently if you want to.
Day 1 / May 10th: Asexuality || Hope
Day 2 / May 11th: Aromanticism || Community
Day 3 / May 12th: Across the A-Spectrum || Loneliness
Day 4 / May 13th: Worldbuilding || Dragons
Day 5 / May 14th: Relationships || Linguistics
Day 6 / May 15th: Intersectionality || Found Family
Day 7 / May 16th: Freeform
This event was originally created by @arofili is being run by @astriiformes and @physicsandfandoms. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to send this blog an ask!
For further clarification, check out our FAQ, code of conduct, and prompts pages! Happy creating!!
More explanation of the prompts under the cut
DAY ONE: Asexuality
What characters do you see as asexual? Why? How does that impact their lives?
Alternative prompt: Hope
DAY TWO: Aromanticism
What characters do you see as aromantic? Why? How does that impact their lives?
Alternative prompt: Community
DAY THREE: Across the A-Spectrum
âAsexualâ and âaromanticâ are umbrella terms encapsulating a wide spectrum of identities. From grayromantic to demisexual, and aroace to lithromantic âthere are many other labels on the a-spectrum. This is a day for exploring those identities and the characters you associate them with.
Alternative prompt: Loneliness
DAY FOUR: World Building
How does acceptance and prevalence of aspec identity vary over both cultures and species?
Are all elves really baseline demisexual? Whatâs up with one third of dwarven populations focusing on their craft instead of taking a spouse? How do soul bonds work between elven couples who donât want to have sex? Did NĂșmenor get aphobic when they started distancing themselves from the Elves? Do aspec hobbits feel pressure to settle down and have large families?
Alternative prompt: Dragons
DAY FIVE: Relationships
Aspec people can have many different kinds of relationships, including romantic and sexual onesâ but some kinds of relationships are more unique and common to the aspec communities, such as queerplatonic ones. Today is a day for exploring all these different kinds of relationships!
There are several relationships in Tolkien's works that could easily be read as queerplatonic, including Frodo & Sam, and Legolas & Gimli. There is also an interesting footnote in The Nature of Middle Earth which describes something like a queerplatonic relationship and provides some Quenya words for it.
Alternative prompt: Linguistics - Many of the terms for aspec identity come from root words of Latin, can you postulate translations for aspec terminology in any of Tolkien's languages?
DAY SIX: Intersectionality
There is more to a personâs life than just their orientation. Outside of fantasy species, how does being aspec interact with a characterâs other identities and experiences, such as race or disability or religion? Whatâs the impact of a characterâs aspec identity on their gender or other orientation labels? Today is a day for exploring the intersections of the aspec experience with other aspects of identity.
Alternative Prompt: Found Family
DAY SEVEN: Freeform
Post about something aspec related not yet covered in the topics this week, or return to a prompt you have more thoughts about! Alternatively, we have some additional prompts for inspiration that did not quite fit into the other days.
Recommend a fic, meta post, etc. that includes aspec identity.
How would a particular character respond to allonormativity / amatanormativity? What kind of amatanormativity / allonormativity have they faced?
What is a particular characterâs relationship with their aspec identity Is it a big part of their life?
Post about an aspec characterâs family, either found family, or blood relations. Does their family support them? Does their family (or society) have expectations of marriage and children of them?
Post about aspec community (symbols, cultural practices, mentorship and friendship with other aspec characters) within the context a culture within Tolkien's Legendarium, or take a character and post about what parts an aspec community they would resonate with in a modern Earth AU.
iNaturalist user SamGardener is an MVP of identifying flowers, grasses, and herbs, and adding little notes suggesting how to use them in cooking. His accuracy record for Shire-local plants is matched only by Strider2931, whose record is perfect in nearly every category and biome and the popular is that heâs an AI.
I get why itâs easier due to time constraints and the comfort of a modern audience, but the lotr movies recontextualizing Sam and Frodo as good friends at the beginning of fellowship rather than master and servant does SUCH a disservice to their relationship and completely steam rollers over the inherent class divide that is an implicit point of tension throughout the books.
Sam is the only lower class hobbit of the main four and as such he holds himself at a distance from the others, and puts themâespecially Frodoâup on a pedestal. From birth, Sam has grown up in a world where heâs less than the gentlehobbits. His father tells him heâs reaching above his station for learning to read, no his purpose is to serve his betters. And the other hobbits arenât immune to this mentality. Iirc thereâs scene in fellowship where where pippin treats Sam more like a pack mule than a friend.
Even in Mordor, Sam constantly refers to Frodo as his master. They are at the end of the world and they are STILL not equals. Sam clings to that normalcy of the Shire but that normalcy entails holding onto a world where heâll always be less than Frodo. Again and again he sacrifices his own safety and comfort for Frodoâgiving the last of the water to Frodo, refusing to eat, literally planning to kill himself when Frodo is âkilledâ by Shelob.
We can talk all day about Sam Gamgee and devotionâa devotion that IS genuineâbut you miss a lot when you donât factor in the hobbitsâ unequal social status. This is something that they do overcomeâIâd argue they return to the Shire as equals. Hell, Sam subsumes Frodoâs social status when Frodo leaves the shire. One of the draws of their story to me is watching this superficial master-servant relationship grow into a very genuine love and friendship between equals.
The class divide is uncomfortable. It was always uncomfortable, and at the end of the day I feel the movies lose so much by shying away from that discomfort.
LotR using a translation framing device to get out of having to drown the reader in constructed languages for characters that are supposed to be mundane to the viewpoint, but also being written when it was from the perspective of someone who was genuinely handling translation at the time, leads me to the admittedly silly sentiment of "you couldn't write lord of the rings today -- because that's not how modern literature approaches the translation of proper nouns"
if tolkien wrote his books today, he couldn't have called him gandalf the grey!*
*: because it was obviously important to him that the books represent a translation of authentic texts from another world and another time, and while it would have been perfectly conventional in his time as an academic for books translated into english to find a way to represent the meaningful components of their names with equivalents that were likely to be more familiar to the reader, this convention has been largely phased out and replaced with a preference for transliteration. assuming he wrote the books today and pursued this same reflection of his academic interests in his creative ones, it would ring inauthentic to not represent the languages he describes in this way
The light-hearted Arwen headcanon reply I made awhile back periodically cycles through my activity bar. That's fine, but for some reason, my mind associates it with a far more melancholy Arwen headcanon I also have.
I imagine that Arwen and Faramir necessarily had to have a good working relationship given Aragorn's frequent absences in war and Faramir's responsibilities as regent. I like to think Arwen and Faramir actually got on very well and became out-of-this-time eldritch bros over the years.
But, also, Faramir ages slowly in the way of the DĂșnedain. One of the reasons that Gandalf was concerned about Denethor was because Denethor showed signs of aging in, uh, his 60s, and characters repeatedly remark on how premature his signs of age are when he's in his late 80s. This wasn't even unique to the special throwbacks according to Tolkien; his family in general aged slowly.
There is no indication that this would hold true for Ăowyn, though. (Yes, even considering her partial descent from the princes of Dol Amroth; even if it made a difference in her lifespan, which is nowhere stated, the princes typically didn't live as long as the Stewards and particularly not as long as Faramir.) Eventually, even though Faramir is older than Ăowyn, there's going to be a point where Ăowyn is visibly aging and it's far slower on his side. And eventually, she'll die of old age, with a grief-stricken Faramir (who ... like, has some silver hair) staring down what's likely to be ~20+ more years.
And while Arwen's story isn't identical (she barely outlives Aragorn), and she doesn't fully grasp how devastating the reality will beâin my headcanon, she sees all this occur, and realizes at some level that it will happen to her. It'll take longer. Aragorn himself will age after the fashion of the DĂșnedain rather than the Rohirrim. But fundamentally, this will be her fate.
Thank you! We don't know it affected Arwen, but to me it's part of the punch of the two pairingsâwe're given so little for Aragorn/Arwen and then the most elaborated romance in the whole book is Ăowyn/Faramir, and I've always felt like there's a certain ... somewhat scaled-down but actually quite analogous quality about Ăowyn/Faramir that hints at the Aragorn/Arwen dynamic (with Ăowyn as the Aragorn and Faramir as the Arwen, of course!) in addition to how it works for itself.
And, of course, we're told multiple times that members of the House of the Stewards of the Faramir and Denethor type come across less as similar to Elves than as similar to Gandalf, a Maia like their ancestress Melian, and that their descent from Elros (ergo LĂșthien -> Melian) is essentially imprinted on their faces to Gandalf and a reason that he correctly concluded Denethor showing signs of aging in his 60s meant something was wrong. Boromir has a distinct quality of beauty mentioned many times which a) Legolas found striking enough that he eulogized him in song as "Boromir the Fair" and b) Faramir is described as strongly sharing to the point that it remains distinctively marked in his face even as he lies dying and feverish.
Also, more ephemerally: while the vast majority of Tolkien's characters get the dark-haired/grey-eyed/strikingly pretty Edith look that he transparently preferred, I think it's interesting that iirc only three characters are described specifically with both raven hair and bright clear grey eyes: FĂ«anor, LĂșthien, and Faramir.
And of course Arwen is famously reminiscent of LĂșthien despite being quite different in personality (IMO she is far more like Melian than LĂșthien and also her life and its end mirrors Melian's much more closely). So I can imagine Arwen looking at Faramir with bits of silver in the raven hair and the shadow of Melian in his face as he mourns Ăowyn, a wife over a decade younger than him now dead of old age and entombed far from her birthplace, and getting one of those prophetic flashes of insight her peoples are prone to. Just knowing what awaits her.
(Honestly, I feel that as Ăowyn nears the end of her life and after she's gone, Arwen sometimes has to force herself to even look him in the face. She does; they're still friends and political allies, but. Yeah.)
This is the closest I could come to what I imagine Imladris looks like, as I never seem to quite settle on a design, but I am delighted with how this turned out! Especially the stairs!
Inspired by; "The Secret Rendezvous" by Pierre Charles Comte
Support me on Ko-Fi; early access drawings + WIP + commission discounts
I based the Northern DĂșnedain dress mainly on ancient Turkic peoples of the Eurasian Steppe and Late Romans, since I see Arnor as the Western Rome to Gondor's Eastern Rome, but the Northern DĂșnedain have long been nomads in a cold climate. There's also a bit of medieval Egyptian and Iron Age Baltic influences.
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