In Pursuit of Sehnsucht

Have you ever thought that there is a version of you somewhere living in a misty woodland, welcoming weary travelers inside to share a simple meal, exchanging good stories and laughter, translating tomes of forgotten lore, keeping your garden and crafting all you need with your own hands, and creating art to uplift the souls of those around you? This space exists to nurture that version of you. Welcome, traveler. Come rest a while.

[creepish]

[fluentisonus]

legolas but i've been looking at too much late medieval art

[cronchy-dumbass]

[aragornsrockcollection]

The hobbits in LotR, every 5 minutes: Our adventure is not like we would have liked at all, it’s not fun exciting like Bilbo’s was.

Bilbo, who has been telling the bedtime story version of a story whose tragedy still haunts him: Ha, Ha, Ha, right…

[aragornsrockcollection]

@adhd-edward-teach

Using you summing up my thoughts perfectly as an excuse to say:

Tolkien’s choice here was absolutely commentary on the way the false glory of war was sold to his generation before they were shipped off to die in WWI.

[othellho]

julian de narvaez piranesi illustration i will think about you every day for the rest of my life

[adhd-merlin]

asexual galahad not understanding what's so hard about keeping a vow of chastity

[karrova]

Robert Burns

Sir Galahad

[vooruitmariek]

March to Camelot 4: divine - the Fisher King and the Holy Grail

'Truly,' said the girl, 'this is of great significance. You are to learn the truth about the lance and the Holy Grail.' Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval: The Story of the Grail, translated by Nigel Bryant

[grendel-menz]

fairy girl

[rubylith-art]

Thinking about THE GREEN KNIGHT recently

[mortiscausa]

I'm open for private commissions again! If you're interested just email me at [email protected] or fill out this google form letting me know what you want and I'll get back to you with a quote. Prices vary depending on the complexity of the work, but generally starting from £90+ for simple character illustrations without backgrounds, and from £250+ for full illustrations.

Please note these are private commissions, so not for commercial use.

[mortiscausa]

Have some extra expenses coming up this and next month so opening up for sketch commissions as well! £40 for a full body black and white character sketch, same email/google form as above.

[retroscifiart]

Art by J.R.R. Tolkien

[mortiscausa]

march to camelot 2026 prompt #1 reign

[rubylith-art]

Thinking about THE GREEN KNIGHT recently

[femme--deer-deactivated20260430]

Picture from the Photographer Kalynn Youngblood, in her series Staged Portraiture and Documenting daily Black Life.

This is all I need in my life.

[penny-anna]

Legolas pretty quickly gets in the habit of venting about his travelling companions in Elvish, so long as Gandalf & Aragorn aren’t in earshot they’ll never know right?

Then about a week into their journey like

Legolas: *in Elvish, for approximately the 20th time* ugh fucking hobbits, so annoying

Frodo: *also in Elvish, deadpan* yeah we’re the worst

Legolas:

[penny-anna]

~*~earlier~*~

Legolas: ugh fucking hobbits

Merry: Frodo what’d he say

Frodo: I’m not sure he speaks a weird dialect but I think he’s insulting us. I should tell him I can understand Elvish

Merry: I mean you could do that but consider

Merry: you can only tell him ONCE

Frodo: Merry. You’re absolutely right. I’ll wait.

[penny-anna]

#legolas’ hick accent vs #frodo’s ‘i learned it out of a book’ accent #FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

Legolas: umm well your accent is horrible

Aragorn: *hollering from a distance* HIS ACCENT IS BETTER THAN YOURS LEGOLAS YOU SILVAN HICK

Frodo: :)

[storywonker]

Frodo: Hello. My name is Frodo. I am a Hobbit. How are you?

Legolas: y’alld’ve’ff’ve

Frodo, crying: please I can’t understand what you’r saying

[ramshacklefey]

Ok, but Frodo didn’t just learn out of a book. He learned like… Chaucerian Elvish. So actually:

Frodo: Good morrow to thee, frend. I hope we twain shalle bee moste excellente companions.

Legolas: Wots that mate? ‘Ere, you avin’ a giggle? Fookin’ ‘obbits, I sware.

Aragorn: *laughing too hard to walk*

[reformedkingsmanagent]

@ghostriderofthearagon

[cryptidscrypticcrosswordclub]

dYinGggGggg…

[whetstonefires]

i mean, honestly it’s amazing the Elves had as many languages and dialects as they did, considering Galadriel (for example) is over seven thousand years old.

english would probably have changed less since Chaucer’s time, if a lot of our cultural leaders from the thirteenth century were still alive and running things.

they’ve had like. seven generations since the sun happened, max. frodo’s books are old to him, but outside any very old poetry copied down exactly, the dialect represented in them isn’t likely to be older than the Second Age, wherein Aragorn’s foster-father Elrond started out as a very young adult and grew into himself, and Legolas’ father was born.

so like, three to six thousand years old, maybe, which is probably a drop in the bucket of Elvish history judging by all the ethnic differentiation that had time to develop before Ungoliant came along, even if we can’t really tell because there weren’t years to count, before the Trees were destroyed.

plus a lot of Bilbo’s materials were probably directly from Elrond, whose library dates largely from the Third Age, probably, because he didn’t establish Imladris until after the Last Alliance. and Elrond isn’t the type to intentionally help Bilbo learn the wrong dialect and sound sillier than can be helped, even if everyone was humoring him more than a little.

so Frodo might sound hilariously formal for conversational use (though considering how most Elves use Westron he’s probably safe there) and kind of old-fashioned, but he’s not in any danger of being incomprehensible, because elves live on such a ridiculous timescale.

[whetstonefires]

to over-analyse this awesome and hilarious post even more, legolas’ grandfather was from linguistically stubborn Doriath and their family is actually from a somewhat different, higher-status ethnic background than their subjects.

so depending on how much of a role Thranduil took in his upbringing (and Oropher in his), Legolas may have some weird stilted old-fashioned speaking tics in his Sindarin that reflect a more purely Doriathrin dialect rather than the Doriathrin-influenced Western Sindarin that became the most widely spoken Sindarin long before he was born, or he might have a School Voice from having been taught how to Speak Proper and then lapse into really obscure colloquial Avari dialect when he’s being casual. or both!

considering legolas’ moderately complicated political position, i expect he can code-switch.

…it’s also fairly likely considering the linguistic politics involved that Legolas is reasonably articulate in Sindarin, though with some level of accent, but knows approximately zero Quenya outside of loanwords into Sindarin, and even those he mostly didn’t learn as a kid.

which would be extra hilarious when he and gimli fetch up in Valinor in his little homemade skiff, if the first elves he meets have never been to Middle Earth and they’re just standing there on the beach reduced to miming about what is the short beard person, and who are you, and why.

this is elvish dialects and tolkien, okay. there’s a lot of canon material! he actually initially developed the history of middle-earth specifically to ground the linguistic development of the various Elvish languages!

[bowditch]

Legolas: Alas, verily would I have dispatched thine enemy posthaste, but y’all’d’ve pitched a feckin’ fit.

Aragorn: *eyelid twitching*

[linguisticparadox]

Frodo: *frantically scribbling* Hang on which language are you even speaking right now

Pippin, confused: Is he not speaking Elvish?

Frodo, sarcastically: I dunno, are you speaking Hobbit?

Boromir, who has been lowkey pissed-off at the Hobbits’ weird dialect this whole time: That’s what it sounds like to me.

Merry, who actually knows some shit about Hobbit background: We are actually speaking multiple variants of the Shire dialect of Westron, you ignorant fuck.

Sam, a mere working-class country boy: Honestly y'all could be talkin Dwarvish half the time for all I know.

[sainamoonshine]

Pippin, entering Gondor and speaking to the castle steward: hey yo my man

Boromir, from beyond the grave: j e s u s

[esser-z]

Tolkien would be SO PROUD of this post

[runiaimperii]

It got better

[peaceheather]

there may come a day when i do not reblog this post, but it is NOT THIS DAY

[thedruidsforest]

Milestone moment: My next book is up on Goodreads!!!💚

Stone and Leaf, The Queensdaughter Trilogy #2, publishing on August 15th! This book has been WAY too long coming, but my late 20's were a lot more tumultuous than I expected...but that's life. I am so, so excited to be on these final steps, and to share this book! The series is really starting to cook.

[thedruidsforest]

The cover art is absolutely *chef's kiss*