IT WILL ALL END IN DOOM

This is my Tolkien sideblog that I’ve run since 2014 where I store all my favourite lotr/silmarillion things. And I def never used this blog to roleplay as mandos as a teenager that would totally be weird 😅

[ereborslionheart]

tolkien fans are insufferable because you’ll agree to watch the movies with them and then seven hours in they’ll say “omg my favourite character is about to appear!” and it’s a fucking siege weapon

[rohirric-hunter]

[shadetree-salesman]

I will not stand by while Grond, Hammer of the Underworld is slandered in such a way! 

[venowyn]

I thought tumblr was safe from Grondposting

[thespectacularspider-girl]

GROND!

[the-everything-man]

GROND

GROND

GROND

GROND

GROND

GROND

GROND

GROND

GROND

[transmechanicus]

[randomtechpriest]

GROND GROND GROND!

[error-404-fuck-not-found]

grond is when you gotta change discs on the extended edition. grond signals snack breaks and a refill of the wine. grond is an omen of good fortune and some respect should be put on his fucking name

[tachyon-at-rest]

Behold GROND: the realm’s biggest hibachi grill.

[theeclectickoalastudent]

I shall always reblog GROND!

[sindri42]

GROND

[vivian-violet]

GROND!

[tanoraqui]

“why am I so deep-down convinced that my worldbuilding will only feel truly fleshed out if it’s backed by a timeline and map of key geopolitical events?” I ask as I write Tolkien fic.

[vicrathis]

[frodosweetstuff]

Sam married Frodo in my book.

[therealharbingerofdevastation]

Since Gandalf smokes weed and Radagast does shrooms, I have a theory that each of the wizards represents a drug. Saruman is cocaine.

[poorquentyn]

It puzzles me when people cite LOTR as the standard of “simple” or “predictable” or “black and white” fantasy. Because in my copy, the hero fails. Frodo chooses the Ring, and it’s only Gollum’s own desperation for it that inadvertently saves the day. The fate of the world, this whole blood-soaked war, all the millennia-old machinations of elves and gods, comes down to two addicts squabbling over their Precious, and that is precisely and powerfully Tolkien’s point. 

And then the hero goes home, and finds home a smoking desolation, his neighbors turned on one another, that secondary villain no one finished off having destroyed Frodo’s last oasis not even out of evil so much as spite, and then that villain dies pointlessly, and then his killer dies pointlessly. The hero is left not with a cathartic homecoming, the story come full circle in another party; he is left to pick up the pieces of what was and what shall never be again. 

And it’s not enough. The hero cannot heal, and so departs for the fabled western shores in what remains a blunt and bracing metaphor for death (especially given his aged companions). When Sam tells his family, “Well, I’m back” at the very end, it is an earned triumph, but the very fact that someone making it back qualifies as a triumph tells you what kind of story this is: one that is too honest to allow its characters to claim a clean victory over entropy, let alone evil. 

“I can’t recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I’m naked in the dark. There’s nothing–no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I can see him with my waking eyes.”

So where’s this silly shallow hippie fever-dream I’ve heard so much about? It sounds like a much lesser story than the one that actually exists.

[sophiamcdougall]

+1 You know how Frodo leaves Sam with the legacy of the quest - the job of bearing witness to what happened - and the duty to finish and protect his writings? Tolkien lost all but one of his friends in WW1. He was founder member of a literary club at school - the TCBS. There was a larger group and a core of four. They all stayed friends, they kept writing and sharing their work with each other. And they were almost all killed. One of them, Geoffrey Smith, wrote this to Tolkien in 1916. My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight – I am off on duty in a few minutes – there will still be left a member of the great T.C.B.S. to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon.  […] May God bless you my dear John Ronald and may you say things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them if such be my lot. And that was his last letter. There’s something eerie about the way he seems to have pegged Tolkien as an eventual survivor.  Sam’s survival (and his emergence as the true hero of the book) are beautiful because they’re suffused with loss, because they’re not the grand conquering heroic narrative that on some level was “supposed” to happen.

[vulgarweed]

Tolkien possibly only survived because he got trench fever - a particularly nasty disease carried by lice - and got sent home because he was desperately ill. Considering how the rest of his unit fared, it probably saved his life. Unpleasant and unglamorous, but if not for that, we wouldn’t have LOTR. I’m sure survivor’s guilt was a factor - as was a sickening sense of dread when “The War to End All Wars” didn’t, and his son went off to WWII.

TLOTR has some of the type of valorization of war that you find in the Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature that JRRT loved and studied and taught because he loved that style and it’s deeply fitting for cultures like the Rohirrim, but it’s also full of the slog of war, the waste and tragedy, and the irrevocable damage that even victorious survivors carry for the rest of their lives. Frodo’s symbolic “death” is also resonant for survivors of what was called “shell-shock” then and PTSD now.

I mean, it’s not Game of Thrones. It’s not gritty in the same way. But the protagonist of LOTR was minor gentry from a backwater nobody’d heard of, and the REAL hero who saved the world by saving him was his gardener. All the great kings and queens and lords and ladies in the story are background characters compared to the story of the little people. Literally little people, but symbolically too.

[lotrreactionmemes]

The fact that Orlando Bloom (Legolas) and Andy Serkis (Gollum) both said that they based their performances in Lord of the Rings off of cat behavior really shows you the sheer range of what cats are like

[hallsofmandos]

Have you all watched Verilybitchie's youtube essay they just released on queerness in the lord of the rings??? I am obsessed with it I can't stop thinking about it I want to share it with everyone that I meet

[thethirdromana]

I don't know if this was obvious to everyone else, but I just realised that one of the reasons why the Hobbit is so effective as a children's book is that while Bilbo is an adult, the skills that make him a hero are all those of a child.

By human standards he's child-sized, which makes him unobtrusive and light on his feet. He can slip by unnoticed where bigger people can't.

He's good at playing games, and even cheats (successfully!) in a way that - let's face it - is not so different to how children try to cheat at games. He's polite in a way that's fully comprehensible to children (rather than, say, being able to perform courtly manners). He's quick-witted, but the trick of keeping the trolls talking is also one that would be achievable for a child.

He doesn't have magic powers, he's not a great fighter, and he's not some kind of Chosen One. There's not much that he does that couldn't be done by a ten-year-old, but the story shows just how valuable all those skills and traits are. It's very empowering.

[sparkysomething]

isn’t it weird how toxic masculinity is still a thing when the aragorn/boromir forehead kiss should have obliterated it back in 2001

[noldolante14]

Not gonna lie, Elrond probably has the BEST case of Dad Lore™️ that has ever existed.

Like one day Elrohir is just helping wrap bandages or some shit and offhandedly mentions a cave he found and Elrond just goes off on a mini tangent of a cave he slept in with Maedhros when he did CPR for the first time and ate an orc raw or some shit. Elrohir just looks at him like ?????? And Elrond never mentions it again.

Arwen will be talking about dwarven trade routes and he will just be like “oh I’m pretty sure that’s where I delivered that dwarven baby after we hid from goblins back in the second age” and then no one knows what’s going on.

[foone]

PRO OR ANTI SHIP DNI

IF YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT A SHIP IS, DNI

NO BOATS

FUCK YOU IF YOU LIVE ON AN ISLAND. YOU STAY THERE OR YOU TAKE A PLANE

[overthinkinglotr]

I think the reason so many LOTR ripoffs fail is because they make their Aragorn analogue the main character, when the entire point of Aragorn is that he’s “the person the villains think is the main character, but is Not.”

Aragorn seems like a traditional King Arthur style hero— he has huge Main Character Energy because he’s supported by destiny, by bloodline, by all these magic artifacts and prophecies, and etc etc. Frodo and Sam are Just Some Guys. Aragorn recognizes that Sauron understandably thinks he’s the main hero of this story ….and he pretends to believe it too, spending the entire series using himself as a diversion to prevent Sauron from seeing Frodo and Sam.

Aragorn’s whole thing is that knows he seems like the Main Hero of this legend to people who don’t know better —- but he also knows that he isn’t, and that his role is just to keep Sauron’s eye on him in order to protect the people around him.

And it works! Sauron is so fixated on defeating his Legendary Destined Archenemy with Extreme Main Character Energy that he completely overlooks the two ordinary little guys who were the real threat to him all along.

[all-chickens-are-trans]

@tiny-steve sksjslslsk you are SO right

[speedlimit15]

why didn’t gandalf just carry the ring to mordor himself with these tongs

[speedlimit15]

like i’m picturing him being really careful and looking at it and carrying it exactly like this while walking or riding through the woods and across rivers and up mountains and through valleys and he doesn’t drop it even once except at the very end where he tidily drops it into the volcano. frodo sam and the crew and even gollum wholly undisturbed. sauron can’t find him bc of the meditative aura surrounding him which is generated by his immense focus on not dropping it

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

World's most tense egg and spoon race

[green-great-dragon]

this somehow became the funniest thing on earth in my head and I had to draw it so

[singsofecho]

Legolas after his dad tells him he needs to go to Rivendell to tell Elrond and Aragorn they lost Gollum

[maja0678-deactivated20241209]

How people that did not read the Silmarillion see Silmarillion fans and their lovely conversations:

Silmarillion fans are like: "No your reasoning is completely incorrect because Tolkien wrote in his 293383782th version of the Lay of Leofingolfearielien that Folblorfindriel was NOT at Nargothrondiath during the 344th year of the First age so you are completely wrong."

And the other one replies with: "but in the earliest version, hobbit Blorbingus created light and hit Moringotto with a stick, and the man Berengornambar helped him. So that explains why I thought yhat Folblorfindriel was in fact at Nargothrondiath during the 344th year of the First age."

"But I am completely sure that Fëanofinwëdrielsfinwë said that Fongofonfin died fighting for his peoples freedom, ect ect ect..

[petaltexturedskies]

I sit beside the fire and think of all that I have seen, of meadow-flowers and butterflies in summers that have been; of yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that there were, with morning mist and silver sun and wind upon my hair. I sit beside the fire and think of how the world will be when winter comes without a spring that I shall ever see. For still there are so many things that I have never seen: in every wood in every spring there is a different green. I sit beside the fire and think of people long ago, and people who will see a world that I shall never know. But all the while I sit and think of times there were before, I listen for returning feet and voices at the door.

J.R.R. Tolkien, from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

[geddyqueer]

guy whose never read the bible before, watching supernatural season 5 for the first time: wow this is just like in the silmarillion

[geddyqueer]

crazy… this guy “lucifer” fell to earth just like melkor…