Here Be the Guild of Scribes.

In this blog, we write love letters to our favorite fandoms. Fanfiction writers ( Archive of Our Own @ https://archiveofourown.org/users/GuildofScribes and fanfiction.net @ https://www.fanfiction.net/u/9687980/Guild-of-Scribes) that got a tumblr for some odd reason... possibly to become apologists for our favorite characters.

[guildofscribes]

Here be what lieth within:

In this blog, we have hyperfixations.

This pinned thing is your fair warning that this nonsense comes in waves.

These hyperfixations vary. They come in streaks of posts and reblogs about one specific thing.

We also reserve the right to interrupt previously scheduled programming with the odd “Humans Are Weird” thing because the mushy stuff in the brain-pan says so.

Otherwise, very few things can break the queues… if that’s what they’re called anyway.

Ps. Will also answer comments and questions, it might just take time to rally the brain cell.

Anyway, welcome nerds! Enjoy the blog!

…or be miserable and hate it or whatever.

[speckofconsciousness]

The folks in Lord Of The Rings had it easy. For them, all the darkness, all the evil and malice and shadow, however dark they may be, concentrated into one single entity or a single evil immortal wizard. Evil persisted in Middle-Earth after they defeated Sauron the first time, because of Isildur not being able to let the ring go, and unbeknownst to him, he was already entrapped by it. But all along, the solution was right in front of them – destroy the ring, and all will go on to live happily ever after.

And yes, I get that the Ring was evil incarnate; it will bend any of its bearers to its will and poison their heart and minds. Only a heart that is unfettered by the desire for power and greed can truly carry it without being utterly destroyed by it. Even with that, when the Ring was destroyed, the shadow passed, for it was temporary, and goodness always persists over evil.  Those were the wise words of the elves, Gandalf and Samwise Gamji.

But that is so not it in the real world. Here evil persists. It persists in minute, irrelevant actions, passing remarks, or a roll of the eyes, and every time someone ignores someone else’s perils because it doesn’t affect them directly. Hate persists in people’s hearts, with love, often intertwined and often indistinguishable. Then it becomes not so simple as to destroy a mere ring. Then evil becomes not a fleeting, temporary inconvenience, but a fact of life, and to have hope becomes a constant battle against everyone and everything.  

[guildofscribes]

Gently, respectfully, you have a point though it be shy of the mark.

Still, it is very near.

In Middle Earth, the whole of Eä, The World That Is, has been marred to its roots by the meddling and corruption of Melkor before development en force by the workers of the Valar were sent to do their jobs to raise up the world into a thing that grows and thrives.

There is an ever-present spirit of malice that flows through the very bones of the world, that echos in the wood and rivers and the creatures, that wends and waits and whispers to the weakness in the folk to tempt them to cowardly evils.

The world is broken, almost before it began. The work to create all that was good had been foiled before it was begun. The world that did come to be was but a shadow of what it had been planned to be. The world cannot be other until it is Unmade and Remade by Eru Ilúvatar at the end of days, after the Last Battle.

That’s the thing. The world is corrupted, and the breaking of the grand seats of discordant and evil, selfish powers by the Good Folk who set themselves steadily against it for all of that place’s history, it wasn’t the final solution to evil and ills. That height of evil can and will still rise in the people who allow it in, though the fallen Vala will never rise again.

Tolkien stated it so himself.

There is no purging this spirit of evil from the earth until the Creator of it sees that it has come to the fullness of time, and called the Children that live there to safety, and then He unmakes and remakes the very essence of the world to that which He intended from the first.

The song must be played out first. It must unfold in the meter and time that it takes to let each note be.

Until then, the discord remains to corrupt the crooked hearts and minds. It cannot be purged by anything the Children can do. But that is not their burden. Their burden is to live as best the may in the meantime. To do what that can with the time that they are given.

The people after the Lord of the Rings had it easy.

The people in the Lord of the Rings teetered on the knife’s edge of every pre and First Age horror.

[guildofscribes]

(Shrieking and wailing and sobbing and weeping to myself because there is still hope. There is sun beyond the mountains. The day has not ended for the last time. Morning comes after the night. It is dark, but the darkness cannot last always. Tolkien was right. He was right. The stars burn brightly just past the clouds. Dying here is not inevitable. Let us go to find the sun. There will be brighter days ahead. We will live to see them. We will survive sorrows and pain and live in the sunshine in peace. Pain does not mean death. We will see the morning of the third day when help comes over the hills. We will see the bright morning again. We will pass through this darkness and grief and heal and live and do good things. Come on! Get in losers! We’re going to find the sun! Tolkien said we could! We’re going to find that bright day! We’re going to make it, we will not be defeated by sorrows and despair! Injury to the spirit does not mean death. There is healing beyond the end of the dark days. There is hope on the horizon. Come with me! We’re going to find the sun!)

[outofangband]

I’m just always thinking about the first elves at Cuiviénen who were taken by Melkor…the families who found their mothers or sons or cousins gone in the dark, the first prisoners of a fortress they barely had a language to describe. The elves who remained trapped under the earth until they had no more memory of Cuiviénen than the descendants of their kin. The memory of those early days and the beauty of those waters and the stars forever tainted by these vanishing and unknowable horror becoming an unspeakably gruesome reality when Utumno is razed (even as Angband still remains and elves remain trapped there)

The earliest days of the existence of elves, for some, was agonizing horror or grief with no answers.

I made this post awhile ago about the primal fear in the early days of the elves and how many words for fear there are in their languages and it made me think about how many Quenya words for fear relate specifically to flight or fleeing and again and again I just think about Sador’s line, “it may be that we fled from a fear of the dark, only to find it here before us with nowhere left to fly but the sea”

I’m still working on a conclusion for this honestly, I just think so much about how this fear has shaped both the elves and the humans of Middle Earth and what it means for their cultures and identities.

[guildofscribes]

Thinking about these elves who got taken and trapped forever away from the stars and all the beauty of the world that inspired the language of the elves that were not taken into dark places… but instead of the wide world around them informing their developing language, it would be darkness and fear and suffering.

It poses a strange problem to my mind, because elves are good folk.

But what do good folk do when they are trapped and isolated and lost under the earth? How much careful gentleness did they cultivate? How many words did they create for the nuances of darkness and shadows and fear, for monsters and dark things that crawled the tunnels, what crafts did they teach to themselves under the earth? What sweetness did they pull from an environment of stone? What hope did they clutch close in their songs and poetry?

Instead of the stars and the waters and the trees and birdsong and all green and growing things being the delight of their eyes, they had caverns and stone and darkness and terror for company.

But elves are still good folk.

So what was their answer for hope in spite of darkness and tragedy?

[outofangband]

Kind of continuing my thoughts from a couple weeks ago on the unnamed elves who escaped Angband through the mines. I’ve been thinking about the unnamed elf who helps Gwindor escape by smuggling to him a knife. I talked about the theme of hope in these dark places with regard to that here but I’m thinking more specifically about this figure.

We don’t know their name, their background, their fate, or how they got the knife. We don’t know how or why they chose to smuggle it to someone else or why Gwindor in particular. Perhaps it was a chance encounter. Perhaps it was part of a larger plan of resistance.

We do know that they were imprisoned in the forges of Angband which itself brings so much horror; being enslaved and forced to create weapons that will be used to strike down your kin, to attack your home, forced to use skills taught to you and passed down and cherished that are now being twisted by someone who wishes to destroy that knowledge entirely.

I wonder what happened to them. I wonder if they ever got out. I wonder what if anything they had to go back to if they did.

[guildofscribes]

This calls to my mind the phrase that “Elves do not suffer evil willingly” that has come up over and over again in discussions about the race.

Tolkien himself wrote that their hatred of orcs burned within them, that their “enchantments” on blades that turned blue in the presence of orcs were strong and came from this place of abhorrence toward the abominations that they saw the fell creatures of Morgoth to be. The elves hate all of the dark works that have been wreaked upon Middle Earth. He wrote that elves were “good folk”, almost like this is a constant in the world. The sun rises, the moon sets, the stars burn, and elves are good folk.

But, these elves were taken into dark places away from light and free air.

They were broken and pressed into the mind-battering work of making weapons that were sure to be used to kill their kin.

This one elf had a chance to take a knife, which I assume was a huge risk, and then he gave it away. He might not get another. This action may be traced back to him and he will suffer for it.

It’s been too long since I read this book, I don’t remember the whole story of Gwindor, nor do I remember much about this escape.

I do remember thinking the last time I read it, that it must have been very long, very hard, very complicated work to twist an elf into an orc, if that is indeed their origin. And I remember thinking also, that this elf must have been a very good example of his race, very wise, and kind. Seemingly, they must have managed this in the most difficult kind of spite, that he would be a decent person in this cursed place. It is very hard to keep yourself kind in the places of cruelty and fear and violence. But this one did. Nameless, unknown by any outsider but Gwindor here, but still honorable.

Elves are, after all, good folk.

[outofangband]

I really love the quote that some elves “can make the things of which they sing appear before the eyes of those that listen”.

It makes sense given the place of music in the weaving of the universe and I find it so poignant given all the stories of loss in The Silmarillion and even in later ages for the elves…

Lands lost to war and time appearing fleetingly in the voice of singer who may not even remember them themselves. Faces woven from notes and chords.

One of my elven words of the day awhile ago was lengwë meaning yearning, desire for what is absent or lost” and this made me think of that.

Those gifted in these songs cannot bring back Beleriand, cannot undo the loss from battle or captivity or other grief. But this pain that is so deeply shared among the various elven peoples can for the length of a song become lighter than air.

There’s a lot of potential for art and culture as well as battle and I want to make a follow up but I’ve just been thinking about this one aspect

[guildofscribes]

This makes me think of how Bilbo and Frodo speak of talking to elves, that elves are a little confusing and would rather demure than offer straight advice.

Perhaps it is because elves know very keenly how powerful language is.

[lovesodeepandwideandwell]

!

[lovesodeepandwideandwell]

LORD OF THE RINGS DAY

[freenarnian]

happy sauron defeated to all who celebrate

[songpasserine]

I love seeing wildly different takes right next to each other on my dash

[junk-thunder]

i've survived far worse. i've also died to far less though so who knows

[guildofscribes]

Glorfindel, probably.

[gehenna-checklist]

I like to imagine a scenario where humanity just never developed energy guns and has stuck to kinetic weaponry forever and at some point some alien species thinks about messing with the wrong apex predator species.

Alien 1: "Captain, I assure you, our ships can't be breached by anything weaker than a concentrated proton beam. They barely have lasers. We'll be fine."

Alien 2: "Sub relativistic projectile incom-" gets hit by a railgun shell at mach fuck

[guildofscribes]

The failsafe of humanity’s approach to War:

“Throw hard/sharp stuff really hard, really fast, and there’s a velocity at which nothing is safe.”

And in a paraphrase of someone whose job was to carry and run a M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (a.k.a. The Saw), “There is a volume at which 5.56 will saw through whatever the target is hiding behind, and it’s the gunner’s job to make that happen.”

Humans made incendiary bombs, and then decided to make one out of knives because why not just carve up your target like the Christmas goose instead of cooking him like pudding.

When throwing fire at something doesn’t have the desired effect, a Rod from God at the speed of Mach-fuck should do the trick.

Break it down to the simplest kind of violence that humans have used since the Beginning, and they’ll probably make it out okay. Just throw something hard and sharp, really, really fast.

Who’s gonna’ expect a rail-gun in space, in the age of plasma weapons and shield technology?

Like, humans might have the photon torpedos, the plasma weapons, all the lasers and cool stuff… but they also have kinetic, wireless hole-punchers that some people specialize in giving long-range lobotomies with, set completely aside the people who do that same thing with whole ships. And they’ve been using these sorts of weapons for a lot longer. From the atlatl to the Really Big Gun, humans have been figuring how to throw hard stuff faster and harder. From sports to war, people have been working on how to throw stuff harder and faster and better and more accurately for the whole of their existence. You haven’t even seen how creative a human can get with a “gun” until you’ve been sniped by a 5-inch A.P. projectile from a ship 60 miles away. (Am I conflating nautical and space warfare and future and present weapons systems? Yes. Don’t worry about it.)

But yeah.

Nobody expects rail-guns in space fights.

[torchwood-99]

Eowyn was depressed and needed more friends and more happiness in her life, so Tolkien gave her a friend and called him "Merry".

(and he made him travel size, which is actually plot relevant).

[hicscribere]

some cuties for all of us

[tanoraqui]

we should all appreciate that Legolas and Gimli both, immediately post-canon, do the ‘leaders of small nation-states’ equivalent of buying houses next door to Aragorn’s so the three of them can remain besties for the rest of their shared lives. #thethreehunters

[guildofscribes]

They literally said, “I walked across the world with you on the faint hope that the Evil That Has Haunted Everything for the last Age and a half could be defeated, and now we’ve done that, I gotta’ be able to come and say hi whenever. Because it’s important. For my mental wellbeing.”

[ach-sss-no]

"What do they say?" asked Gandalf and Thorin together, a bit vexed perhaps that even Elrond should have [discovered the moon letters on the map] first, though really there had not been a chance before, and there would not have been another until goodness knows when. "Stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks," read Elrond, "and the setting sun with the last light of Durin's Day will shine upon the key-hole." "Durin, Durin!" said Thorin. "He was the father of the fathers of the eldest race of Dwarves, the Longbeards, and my first ancestor: I am his heir." "Then what is Durin's Day?" asked Elrond. -The Hobbit

here's my new headcanon, Elrond Peredhel who's been alive thousands of years and sits around all day in a giant library knows full well what Durin's Day is but he just saw both Thorin and Gandalf throw a tantrum that he found the moon-letters and Elrond Peredhel who's been alive thousands of years and has twin sons sighs to himself and says 'okay I need to make them feel important and thorin is obviously passionate about Durin, I'd better pretend not to know what Durin's Day is'

[astriiformes]

Frodo may be Bilbo’s actual adopted nephew, but Merry and Pippin are his younger cousins, and Sam is his old gardener’s son whose family he clearly has a soft spot for and who he taught to read and write, and Gimli is the son of one of his old adventuring friends, and Legolas is, similarly, the son of the Elvenking who named him an elf-friend, and we know Aragorn is canonically his friend as well, who he very possibly could have met as a small child in Rivendell when he passed through, so really, like 7/9 members of the Fellowship are people he can employ weird elderly relative (or the honorary equivalent thereof) energy on if he wants to and I think that’s very powerful.

[penny-anna]

the fellowship is 7 people who Bilbo Baggins can employ weird elderly relative energy onto PLUS 1 person who can employ weird elderly relative energy onto Bilbo Baggins PLUS Boromir.

[cunked]

[thelxiepia]

[windwenn]

*ugly crying* no no im fine why would you ask me this

[psstwantsomecheese]

Kinda hard to explain but there's just something about the character deaths especially the Noldors' that make total sense in The Silmarillion. Like of course the Spirit of Fire who could never be truly content with what he had would burn to death whilst ensuring his sons would continue his legacy of vengeance. Of course Finrod friend to all no matter the divide bleeds out in a dungeon defending the love between elf and man. Of course Fingon famed for constantly taking risks eventually runs out of luck and gets buried in the mud like any other common soldier. They may all be doomed but the way it manifests in each character is calculated and perfectly tailored and the only way it was ever gonna end

[eloquentsisyphianturmoil]

Legolas saying ‘this city needs more trees’ is actually so valid. Not only from an environmental and social well-being point of view, but Gondor has one very important tree with very few fellows and therefore restricted access to nutrients, so the extended mycorrhizal network more trees would provide actively enhances the welfare of the white tree and symbolically the spirit of the nation. In this essay I will

[guildofscribes]

Um, so… where’s the essay?🥺