hi 👋 this is @bratman's tolkien sideblog, I follow & like from there even though I'm consistently more active here (whoops)
✧˖° she/her & 20s & irish & bi. very big music nerd, very ocean obsessed. my ao3 is thestarsunfurled
✧˖° my main interests are the Silmarillion and The Rings Of Power (elves elves elves elves elves)
✧˖° I am aware TROP is a widely debated topic and I am more than happy to engage with those conversations! BUT☝️pointless and needlessly combative arguments stress me out so if you disagree with everything I say and have just come to yell your frustrations I will most likely ignore or block you 🫡 no hate intended. on the flip side, if I reply to YOUR post where discussion wasn't wanted please know any offense wasn't intentional, if you let me know I'll go back to my lane <3
✧˖° my absolute favourite character is Elrond, closely followed by Celebrían. I count the entire subculture of the Teleri as my blorbos. I also love Elwing and TROP's Eärien
✧˖° not really a shipper but an enthusiastic Observer of Dynamics™ except for Celrond because those are my parents who birthed me. in that same vein I don't really take shipping seriously and find it fun to mess around with through a fanon lens, so please consider this blog a neutral + safe space for haladriels, elrondriels, celedriels and any other pairing on the board :) I firmly believe in judging someone's character before their fandom preferences and I don't put up with being nasty to someone just because those preferences are different. Nothing Is Ever That Serious, we're all people behind the screens, peace and love etcetera ✌️
✧˖° my queue isn't consistent + I'm slow to answer dm's and askbox + please consider any attempt to reach me as a monthly letter correspondence via carrier pigeon except the carrier pigeon has no sense of direction and the forest is on fire I Love You Though Please Send Me Your Thoughts I'm So Sorry I'm So Sorry + I block to personalise my feed and avoid things I'm not interested in while perusing main fandom tags so it's not a personal thing
The Rings of Power: Analysis
Colour Symbolism in Númenor
Faith As A Moral Obligation & Míriel's Disobedience
In Defense of Elrond
"Haladriel" As An Exploration Of Trauma And The Severance Of Self
Eärien: The Personification of Tolkien's Nameless Wives
Celebrimbor meets the newest member of the family.
read it on ao3
Caranil stretches and sighs. She still aches from birthing the babe, who even now squirms beside her, little limbs wriggling beneath her blanket as her face scrunches up in displeasure.
“Hush,” Caranil murmurs, lifting her child to her breast. The babe latches on, faster now than she did a day ago and the day before that, for which Caranil is grateful. She reclines against the pillows, watching her daughter’s little face.
Already, the girl-child looks just like her; the same ears, the same nose, even the same chin hiding beneath her soft baby’s flesh. The only thing that she inherited from her father are the wisps of pale gold atop her head, and even then, Caranil likes to think she detects a hint of red there.
Her maidservant peers into the room. “My lady? Your cousin is here. Lord Celebrimbor, I mean.”
She does not remind her that she only has one cousin, that though she had a great many uncles, her grandfather’s sins had been greater still, and her family has paid the price many times over. She and Celebrimbor are all that’s left of Fëanor’s kin…and now, of course, her little jewel.
“Why do you keep him outside? Bring him in,” she says lightly, pulling her shawl over the nursing babe.
Celebrimbor shuffles in, ducking his head like a shy child. In his hands, he carries a wrapped gift. She wonders if he brought a gift on the day she was born, but doubts it; her father had died less than a month before and her mother, it is said, wept all through the birth. That was not a day for gifts.
But today is, and she beckons Celebrimbor closer with a cry of, “Let me see what you’ve brought us!”
“I wasn’t sure what babies like,” he admits, setting the gift down on the bed. “I don’t know very many, you see.”
“Nor I,” she agrees. “In fact, this is the only one I do know.” She peeks beneath the blanket and smiles. “She’s almost done.”
“Oh, that’s alright,” he assures her quickly.
Caranil laughs. “You aren’t afraid of babies, are you?”
“Not at all.” But he rubs the bridge of his nose in a way that tells her he’s lying. “Where is your husband? I did not see him on my way in.”
“No,” Caranil says, shorter than she means to. “Gellon is out hunting.”
“Hunting?”
That was the excuse, anyway; anything to get away after another one of their fights. She isn’t worried; he always comes back, and they always love each other the more after they make up, but it can’t go on like this forever, not now that they have a little one to think of.
“Yes,” she says, as though husbands regularly go hunting when their wives are abed with a newborn. “So, what did you bring us?”
“Oh, yes, of course!” Celebrimbor carefully unties the silk wrappings, revealing a beautiful gold bird encrusted with blue and orange sapphires sitting on a branch of golden apple blossoms. The bird is beautiful enough, but then Celebrimbor reaches down and turns one of the apple blossoms and the bird begins to sing.
“Oh! It’s wonderful, Celebrimbor!” She beams at her cousin, feeling like a child exclaiming over his inventions again. “You are sweet, to bring me something so beautiful.”
“It was the least I could do,” he insists, but she suspects he went to more than his usual effort to craft something so canny . “After all, it’s not every day one meets a new member of the family.”
“No, it is not,” she agrees, pulling up the neck of her gown. “And you’re going to do it properly.”
The chuffed smile slides from his face. “I beg your pardon?”
“You,” she explains, moving aside her shawl and holding out the babe, “are going to meet your new cousin. Properly.”
“That’s really–” he starts to protest, but Caranil is already pushing the babe into the crook of his elbow, wrapping his arms around her just so.
“There. Celebrimbor, meet your cousin Mirdania.”
“Mirdania,” he repeats, staring down at the little bundle with wide eyes. Caranil knows without being able to see that Mirdania is half-asleep, her little mouth puckering as she searches for her mother’s breast out of habit. Caranil watches Celebrimbor, sees his own lips twitch in imitation of the babe’s. It makes her want to cry. Everything makes her want to cry these days.
“My goodness,” he says, staring down at his little cousin. And then again, “Well my goodness.”
“What do you think?”
He shakes his head slowly, as though afraid any movement might wake Mirdania, but she’s far too milk-drunk to notice. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a babe this small before.”
“Nor have I,” Caranil admits. “She’s so small, and yet my belly was so big.”
“I remember. You knocked my creasing hammer into the furnace.”
“And I wasn’t even near to time.”
Celebrimbor rocks Mirdania gently, ignorant of the wide smile on Caranil’s face as he reaches for the bird and turns its appleblossom key. The kingfisher begins to sing, and Mirdania’s eyes fly open, staring up at Celebrimbor.
“Hello, Mirdania,” he breathes.
She blinks with the bluest eyes he’s ever seen. He can tell she’s trying to focus on him, her newborn eyes fighting sleep to see, but when he touches the end of her nose with the tip of his finger, her eyes droop shut in defeat.
“She will sleep for a while now,” Caranil says, taking her from him.
“Oh…what a pity,” Celebrimbor says, watching in disappointment as his cousin puts Mirdania in her cradle. “I do so love babies.”
Happy Mirdania Week! Starting off strong with my favourite niche pairing in the Halls of Mandos 💪
This fic will be cross-posted to my ao3 soon.
Day 1: Gold
@mirdania
The fall of Nargothrond began as slowly as the scattering of pebbles down the face of a mountain, heralding the inevitable plummet of an avalanche. It began like the groaning of a tree before its felling, the swoon before the faint, the gasp before the shattering of glass—or so sang the minstrels. There were some that might deem it natural to seek to embellish such miseries, just as there were others who were just as like to protest softening the blow of real misfortunes. But it is not the sentimentalisation of tragedies in song that doom people to repeat their histories. What child learns blindly to be wary of fire at a parent's behest, and not in the precise moment they reach out and grasp the flame with both hands?
It was these same children—tall though they may be, aged though they may appear—that were quickest to name the elves wise, though they knew not the depth of the damage they caused in the fires of their own youths, or that anyone in Arda might be deemed wise, had their souls been set inside them with a hardiness to endure those first trials and a longevity to survive the thousand that followed.
Mirdania felt her surroundings bleed away in the same instant she recognised them for what they were—the kiss of cool limestone against sun-warmed flesh, the impossible vastness of fertile earth dotted with bushels of wild holly, the brilliant stretch of sky canvased with a golden dawn, the sweet rushing of the river Glanduin, glittering like a chest of sapphires… then the world shattered like glass, cutting her into ribbons of flesh and memory.
Slowly, slowly, awareness clothed the nakedness of her soul. She was alone and dwarfed by the scale of an ever-expanding darkness. The air here was hot and dry, and somewhere in the distance a ticking sounded out at a pace she perceived slightly quicker than it ought to be. Ivory vines materialised from the void to cage that noise, then muscles corded around them—strong limbs, long and tough from years of hard labour, and joints that met the back of her shoulder, faintly dotted with sunmarks like a deer's hide. The ground beneath her tilted, then steadied.
A vast hallway lay in front of her, dim and shadowy—and empty, save for her, though she was not quite herself yet. The walls were panelled with red mahogany and adorned with exquisite tapestries that seemed to shift in her mind's eye if she did not turn her focus to them. A thought came to her that she might have been able to recognise the scenes they depicted once.
To her left, a woman of mighty disposition crowned in a golden garland raced along a road of sand, pursuing a foul silhouette with eyes like caverns of flame, pitiless and eternal. Further ahead was a gleaming pool circled by trees, threaded with rich blues and laced silvers; inside, two magnificent swans writhed in pain beneath the tortured gaze of an elderly prince. The black swan had a human head, and its companion was without wings, and in its attempt at flight had drowned. The next tapestry showed her a city in ruin—a great white seabird wrestling a mole with a greedy, gaping mouth, and a noble lady whose body was pierced with thorns, yet did not bleed.
The images lifted a veil from Mirdania's eyes, and suddenly she knew these stories for what they were. Her hands trembled as she reached out to touch the first tapestry, fingers tracing its silhouette. It came toward me, breathing, reeking of death…
Whatever state of unawareness she had woken from, she wished to return to it.
Gathering her skirts, Mirdania turned and ran. The tapestries seemed to stretch on for miles as she crossed the stretch of the room, weaving through the nonsensical pattern of sudden turns and corridors. They were occasionally interspersed by doors set at regular intervals on either side of the hall, each one closed with a latch left unlocked. She ignored them all, though as soon as she took note of them, her thoughts seemed to sharpen and memories rushed towards her unbidden—the stench of rot and gore permeating the air of her fair city, the masses of orcs bloating the empty riverbed. Her mentor's face, once proud and kind, twisted in desperation as he reached for her—a push or a pull? Each memory was piercing.
The fall that had wracked the air from her lungs. Her vision blurred. A sneering face looming over her, the glint of metal, a dull throbbing in her abdomen she scarcely felt.
The hem of her dress caught in her foot, and she fell forwards with a cry, catching herself against the wall. The ticking in her chest stuttered as she pressed her open palm against the surface of the wood—this door felt older and rougher than the rest, and seemed to thrum in response to her touch. Without understanding that she had made the decision to open it, Mirdania stepped through.
It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the rush of brightness that assailed them. She had appeared in the midst of a forest—tall birch trees surrounded her, their trunks seeming to bend towards one another as if cowering from some unseen threat. Bodies littered the ground. For a moment she seemed to recognise their faces—the smiths she had spent centuries beside, the elfling girl who had lived in the dwelling beside hers, and Malendol, his kind eyes still and unseeing—but in a heartbeat their features had slanted into strangers'.
Mirdania glanced behind her but could not see the door she had come through, nor any sign to show the strange halls had been anything more than a dream.
The wind carried a gentle song from somewhere in the near distance, where the woods opened up into a clearing. Entranced, she set towards it, though the clearer it became the less she seemed to understand its words—she caught whispers of a great kingdom under a mountain, a betrothed who had returned half-whole. Soon she discovered its source to be a lady clad in a beautiful dress as gold as the long locks of hair she wore unbound around her shoulders. She was sitting in the grass by the shore of a small river.
The golden lady did not stir when Mirdania approached, settling on the grass beside her.
Man táre antáva nin Ilúvatar, Ilúvatar
enyáre tar i tyel, íre Anarinya qeluva?
"Did my singing wake you?" She asked.
Mirdania shook her head slowly, a little taken aback at being spoken to. Somehow, she felt less real than the remnants and wraiths she perceived around her. "No, my lady. I believe it drew me here, though from where I came I cannot say."
"You were asleep," the lady said. Her voice was thin as gossamer, gentle as silk. "Or dreaming. You may ask the silent watchers when you leave this place, but I do not believe they know the difference. There is so much they cannot understand, three for everything they do. You will see."
Mirdania's fingers twisted in the blades of grass beneath her, seeking an anchor. Something about her made her heart seize painfully in her chest. "How long have you been here? Can you… is someone keeping you here?"
The lady's smile was sad. "You need not worry of a jailer. I was enthralled by one, long ago—a man with eyes so dark you could fall into them and re-emerge on the other side of eternity. But by then, everything else had fallen away."
"I was enthralled by such a thing, too," Mirdania said softly.
Her head tilted a little, in the manner of a curious cat. Mirdania found that words came to her easier now, and stung less under the weight of the lady's lack of judgement. She remembered her life in the same instant that its fragments spilled from her tongue—the kingfishers that heralded noon had come to her city, her Eregion… late nights sketching concepts for ornaments and jewels, the gratifying blisters on her hands after hours of toil above the flames of the forge. The faint scent of yellow pansies and cornflowers they planted in spring, the laughter of her people reverberating from the courtyard. The pitiless stare, endless caverns of flame.
In return, the lady spoke of her home—aching memories of an underground fortress delved into the banks of an ancient river, which traced a sloping path to the glistening springs for which she had been named. She spoke of the royal gardens she used to tend, the white blossoms that grew no more after the sinking of Beleriand, the ease in which smiles curved at the corners of her father's mouth. She spoke of the slow creeping doom that she had been blind to, captivated as she was by the accursed mortal whose ill fortune seized her by the throat. When she recounted the feeling of a spear piercing her chest, Mirdania's hand subconsciously drifted over the echo of her own fatal wounds.
The two sat together in silence. Somewhere in the distance, a songbird took to flight.
"I will stay for a while," Mirdania promised. "And then we will leave this place—together."
Rewatching RoP with my family and forgot how intensely sick the dynamic between Celebrimbor and Annatar makes me. It's genius. It's brilliant. Honestly most of the show sucks but the scenes between those two in particular are so good. My brother made multiple comments about how stupid Celebrimbor was for falling for Sauron's obvious manipulation multiple times, but honestly it's SO realistic. When you are in an abusive relationship, you can innately know that something is wrong and yet stay because they are the only ones who truly know/understand/care about you.
What really hit me though was the scene where Celebrimbor notices the mouse returning and marks his candle to keep track of time. That is so. fucking. realistic. For me, it got to the point where I had to record conversations and write down the exact words said to me because otherwise I would be gaslit into thinking I somehow misremembered or made them up. The desperation for physical proof that something is wrong when everything looks to be right was genuinely such a great inclusion that many stories centering victims of abuse miss. In most cases, somebody is there to save the abused person. An outside perspective recognizing the manipulation of the abuser and giving the abused the strength to leave or straight up pulling them out of the situation themselves seems to be the norm in media. But in reality? The abused is much more likely to be alone. The people around them only see the perfectly-crafted image of the abuser and one-by-one leave the abused even more isolated. The only one who saves Celembrimbor is Celebrimbor himself.
So yeah, Sauron's manipulation was "obvious" and "heavy-handed", but in real life it usually is. Most abusers don't have to be geniuses. Their abuse is out in the open and easy to identify. The problem is that they cultivate a personality that makes it easy to wave off the red flags for both the abused and bystanders alike.
After the War of Wrath, Maglor cast the Silmaril into the sea and left his people behind. He wandered alone along the shores of the world, accompanied only by the tides, the birds, and his unending songs of regret.
hey guysss so unfortunately the rumors are true and im leaving the narrative. Buttt the good news is my absence will create such a gaping hole in your lives that it will become a sort of presence itself, and so in a way it will kind of be like i never left! But i am. Leaving just to be clear.
"Vairë the Weaver is his spouse, who weaves all things that have ever been in Time into her storied webs, and the halls of Mandos that ever widen as the ages pass are clothed with them."
I think we'll see Sauron force industrialism in Mordor to strengthen his forces so I hope his armour and the orcs' gear look a little bit futuristic, not enough to look completely alien but enough to contrast with the other races (especially the elves!!!) whose technology is indistinguishable from the beauty of craftsmanship, like Arondir's tree guardian chestplate or Elrond's which is basically a tribute to his whole lineage vs Sauron's sleek, black and brutal spiked gauntlets
