the light of stars was in her hair

queer elves, personality systems, stubborn hope | occasionally nsfw | plural, transfem | violet_tides on ao3, liltalle.bsky.social on Bluesky, & liltalle on Dreamwidth

[communist-hatsunemiku]

Love this Miku so much... here is my take - googoogaga733

[michaelnordeman]

Eurasian bullfinch/domherre. Värmland, Sweden (28 April 2018).

[my-dailydreams]

[importantcatpics]

[thoughtkick]

“To love a person is to see all of their magic, and to remind them of it when they have forgotten.”

— Unknown

[tobermoriansass]

turning over the question of the silm unreliable narrator and the thing is for a text to have an unreliable narrator, it has to have internal contradictions or improbabilities that signpost its unreliability to us. one of the few places that this happens is in the leithian tale. the narrative very much illustrates to us how much of the heavy lifting luthien is doing in freeing beren from tol sirion, getting them into angband, putting morgoth to sleep and then getting out.

however, when this passage is narrativised later, at the start of the final chapter on earendil & the war of wrath, this is how it is told: "...which Beren had won and Lúthien had worn...".

in other words, luthien is reduced to a passive actor. someone who bears the jewel, but is erased from having played a substantial part in actually, actively winning it from morgoth. we actively do see a sexist bias playing out, in reaffirming the men transform the world, women give birth ("for the nissi the making of things new is for the most part shown in the forming of their children, so that invention and change is otherwise mostly brought about by the neri", LaCE).

given the direct contradictions in the description of how the silmaril was won in the beren & luthien chapter, we can point to this one instance of unreliability.

[lnsomma]

I've been thinking (read: monologuing at my husband over lunch) about the question of the Silmarillion's potential unreliable narrator lately as well, and I agree that it just doesn't bear the hallmarks of having one. Simply stating that Pengolodh is from Gondolin and therefore must be biased (the argument I usually see) isn't enough. What does Tolkien aim to show us about his world by using an unreliable narrator, and how is that evident in the text?

To me, it's not really that evident? There appears to be no differentiation between the narrator's voice and Tolkien's voice; I've read a bunch of Tolkien's letters and a lot of the notes in NoME or PoME, and while Tolkien re-considers issues as his work progresses which leads to occasional inconsistent characterization (e.g. the question of the Valar's fallibility and their changing role within the legendarium), he never seems to treat these questions as anything other than the objective truth of his world, and the conclusions he reaches are not altered by being included in this in-world history. There is no tension between what Tolkien sees as his world (keeping in mind his biases) and what the narrator tells us, if that makes sense.

There is nothing really internally inconsistent within the Silm itself, as you noted, and therefore, nothing revealed to us through the use of internal inconsistency. I mean! "Unreliable narrator" is a deliberate authorial choice that informs the interpretation of the whole story! There is a reason Faulkner's “Absalom, Absalom” has multiple narrators who obfuscate, change, question, and re-interpret the story of the rise and fall of the Sutpen family; in so doing, they make us question our understanding of the events as they took place as well. Questioning the retelling of the myth leads to questioning the entire structure underpinning the narrators' world; a critique of the American South told through the narrators' inconsistencies. There is nothing to reinterpret for the Silm; there is nothing revealed to us about the world, no underlying story, no deliberately missing or obscured facts hiding some unsavory overarching truth that I can see.

Wait an addendum - I think sometimes people may be mistaking unreliable narration in novels with an author mimicking actual lying/propaganda in written historical narratives? Thinking Suetonius or Giorgio Vasari here, embellishing to make current political patrons look good and their rivals horrible little gremlins in comparison. They aren't the same thing, although they may have similar presentations. I still don't buy it for the Silm as the narrator is just not that developed as an authorial voice separate from Tolkien and Tolkien didn't work on any other material that would suggest the narrator is deliberately lying. I mean, for historic work we can look to other contemporaneous documentation to see what we can corroborate or question, but we don't have anything like that created for the silm. There is nothing we can point to to say, for example, "Ah ha! Pengolodh was lying! Turgon is of merely average height!"and have that inform our interpretation of the story. Anyway it is 3am where I live and I have lost the thread.

[asteroidtroglodyte]

It’s too late to save the world

Ash trees sprout in cracks in the asphalt. The gutters collect leaves, which become soil, in which dandelions sprout.

There’s nothing you can do

A man plants an entire forest. A young girl teaches a drone to deliver saplings. The elderly volunteer to clean up radioactive waste.

You might as well give up

Wolves return to ancestral hunting grounds. Bison return to the prairie. Otters return to the kelp beds. Young oaks push roots deep into reclaimed farmland.

Who cares anyway?

Children draw pictures of flowers. Festivals are held for cherry blossoms and pecans and apples. A crowd cheers as the last line is cut away from the ensnared creature.

I have disobeyed worse than you

The world does not die on my watch

[wolfythewitch]

Giggling over the idea of Odysseus convincing Achilles to go to war via The Other Side from the greatest showman

[sunshiney-rea]

I see your “seasoned, intelligent mentor persuading spry young powerhouse to seek higher meaning in life” and raise you:

Achilles was already glory-hungry when the Trojan War rolled around because prophecy and legacy and yada yada. He wasn’t even bound by the promise of the Greek kings to protect Helen’s marriage, he just wanted to win some war trophies and cement his honor as a Greek hero.

ODYSSEUS was the reluctant one. He was the one who orchestrated the pact between the kings, but that was before he started a family with Penelope. He tried to dodge the draft that he himself had instated as a security measure.

Ergo: Achilles would be the one to convince Odysseus to do his duty with lofty dreams of battle glory, while Odysseus knows he has too much to lose if he fails.

[wolfythewitch]

It's based on this

[liltalle]

I see your post-Homeric sources, and raise you:

Spun out of those sources (which I hadn't read the basis for, thank you), Maya Deane writes a whole-ass novel reinterpreting Achilles as a trans woman, and it is BEAUTIFUL.

Intricate historical detail (Assyrian umbrellas, international cuneiform), stunning syncretic re-mythologization of the gods, deicidal fury...

The society of the kallai, "the beautiful ones", the trans women in their refuge on Skyros is such touching representation for me, and Achilles in her own arc is magnificently bloody in the paradoxes of transness. Meryapi (my best girl) speaks 12 languages and learns to talk to dolphins. It's a great time.

I highly recommend. (Bookshop link)

[empress-em-kaldwin]

[liltalle]

remember you can always make your protagonist a lesbian with some kind of psychosis

[dazeylily]

get more egotistical. become vain. be angry. stuff it down their throats. every slight should fuel you. burn.

[bunmyr]

Trans women arent allowed to do anything, least of all want. That much bigots make sure to drill into us, but they are wrong, and you must claim the life you dream of, by any means nesscary, both for you and for all those who were never given the chance.

[empress-em-kaldwin]

laugh in society's face. put your feet up on their table. know in your heart that they should scrape and beg and die for the privilege of your company. you are a gift they do not and could never deserve.

[astronicht]

I was DMing a friend yesterday about how the lotr films (imo) do a great job of making Gondor look vaguely Carolingian — I was kind of holding it up as a positive example of intuiting and extrapolating on what Tolkien might have meant when doing adaptations — but said I wasn’t personally sure whether Tolkien was pulling from the Carolingian Empire or maybe the very shaky papacy further south or Visigoths or something. Or all of it!

Anyway then I settled in for my evening pop-nonfiction read, and got to find out why I’m always mixing up the Merovingians and Carolingians, a thing I will never do again. Bc yes they were two ruling families, but one was originally the fucking… stewards. I mean mayors. Haha.

(From The Private Lives of the Saints, Janina Ramirez, 2015. pp. 346-7)

Several points:

- I KNOW I made a post back in Rohan about how it’s very nice and wholesome that Tolkien wrote a fix-it for the brutal sack of the Saxons (Rohan*) by the big post-Roman southern kingdom but I didn’t know how thoroughly he did that. He really said what if Carolingians Gondor and Saxons et al Rohan bonded together to fight evil 💗 instead 💗

- So I don’t actually think Tolkien goes 1:1 with characters and historical figures, but I’m weeping at the idea that Boromir was a sort of Charlemagne but stuck in an AU where Charlemagne touches a magic ring and dies (despite being cool ☹️)

- Alternatively, it was actually Charlemagne’s dad who made a deal with the pope (NO idea on this one lmao good luck everyone) and seized power. Which would make Boromir something of a… potential.. Pippin figure.

Like he’s not, it’s not 1:1! But each Tolkien character does sometimes feel like an avatar of 3-5 medieval characters in a flashing and beautiful and strange palimpsest, while still utterly being themselves and not a symbol etc. it just so happens that you could, I guess? Make this argument for Boromir if you really really wanted to. Or Faramir! Charlemagne really tried to be both brothers, actually, which is— oh it’s fascinating again. Damn.

- Final incredibly important question: Wh at constellation was on Aragorn’s sword. I need to know the constellation on Aragorn’s sword immediately.

*I sound increasingly insane the further I get in these books but as… as established in previous posts there’s no English Channel in Tolkien’s world so Rohan is sort of the Saxons, Doggerland, and the Angles, Jutes, etc (English kingdoms), running up to Wales (the hill people + where Aragon goes on a Wild Hunt). God it’s so ancient aliens sounding but I cannot disavow any of this at this point.

[absolutelynotclassicusernam-blog]

This is so cool. I'm a little bit stuck on the fact that Pippin is not Pippin.

[astronicht]

If it helps, Pippin is probably also Pippin. A lot of the archetypes and wide-lens society stuff and yes bits of stories themselves are pulled directly from early medieval sources and worked into his ridiculous beautiful whole, yes, but in my experience of Tolkien people are always allowed to be people, and if they’re an echo of other characters and histories then they’re echoing five other echoes at once, which sometimes overlap with their neighbors. Like real people do.

But he definitely also simply let Pippin be Pippin. You can be, I think, fairly sure about that? Because Charlemagne’s dad’s full title was: Pepin the Short

[astronicht]

They could have kept Sam going “but I can carry you!” and then a page later saying “I don’t know where we’re going” in the movies. Lord of the Rings is about grief! But most importantly it is an absurdist comedy. About grief. Hope that helps.

[astronicht]

Comedy cancelled! Frodo just recited something resembling a galdor at Gollum but WHILE holding the ring that Gollum swore on that WAS previously wergild and I need Neil Price’s 432 page “The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia” to even begin to understand how fucked we all are here.

[astronicht]

Finding out that in the books Frodo says he doesn’t recall the taste of food or water nor grass NOR the moon and stars. Moon and stars rep… human needs… Left out of the films and I get it but haha I just have extremely strong feelings about the right to see the night sky. Idk man I was happy JRR included that in his basic list of things. I got a little thoughtful about it. And then five paragraphs later Sam throws his pots and pans away but down a gorge so Gollum can’t find them and I stopped intellectualizing and just got upset

[anghraine]

Speaking of the poll and the Stewards' background etc, I think the funniest part of the whole "well obviously Húrin of Emyn Arnen was of royal origin..." thing is that this is never explained in LOTR proper. So Pippin is just like, "hmm, Denethor looks a lot like Aragorn for some reason. And I feel like he has some kind of weird kinship with... Gandalf?"

And that would be a lot in itself, but it's wilder because Sam had the exact same reaction to Faramir, to the point of contrasting Faramir's wizard vibes with Elvishness as if it's something distinct from that, but there's no explanation, beyond it being some sort of maybe Númenórean thing.

Pippin at least has the advantage of Gandalf's vague explanation that Denethor has a fundamentally different background than Théoden that gives him certain powers and prestige. Tolkien's intent was for this to indicate that Gandalf doesn't know the details of Denethor's family history and doesn't really need to; he can tell Denethor is a descendant of Elros because it's just kind of written all over him and Faramir, as Gandalf sees things.

Now, it makes sense that nobody is going to get into this with hobbits because they have much more important and urgent matters at hand and there's no reason for most characters to suppose people of this unknown species would care at all, or possibly even have the context needed to get what "royal origin" has to do with "weird similarities to Gandalf." So instead the hobbits just receive these passing hints of some connection that no one bothers to clearly explain.

But the thing is, the hobbit protagonists are super enthusiastic about 1) Elves, 2) Gandalf, and most importantly, 3) elaborate genealogical charts.

Pippin would probably love an infodump about Melian and Lúthien's eldritch adventures and how Denethor and Aragorn are related to them and each other. It's just that no one in LOTR ever explains that wizards are Maiar, or what Maiar are, or that Gandalf and Sauron and the Balrog are all the same kind of being, as was Lúthien's mother, and sometimes her remote descendants still have that bit of Maia about them and it makes them strange and wizardly.

This is not a criticism of LOTR as written btw; it would not actually be interesting to most of the original audience of LOTR as a novel. But I think that in-story, the hobbits themselves would be thrilled to know that their pal Strider and the scary old Steward and, in a way, Gandalf are all related in a way that could be more or less charted out according to standard hobbit genealogical templates if they had enough paper and time.

[orcbara]

i swear to god if people don't start understanding that responding to doylist critique of a piece of media with watsonian exonerations is not an actual rebuttal

[orcbara]

somebody saying "hey i don't like that the only gay man in this story is a weird pervert and it portrays gay sexual promiscuity as a moral failing and character flaw" cannot be rebuked by arguing about how the character's backstory or personality traits explain their behaviour. the choices made by a writer are all fundamentally mutable; somebody saying an author's choices should have been different is not going to be persuaded by an argument that takes those choices as immovable fact

[justanisabelakinnie]

[ulmondil]

I agree basically with the concept of period- and station-accurate assholery written into characters, but I also think there’s a place for the character who rejects the norms of their time and location (or attempts to in some way), as those individuals and groups have always existed in some capacity. like I guess what I’m trying to say is it’s also a pet peeve of mine to point at a historical figure and go “well he couldn’t help it that’s just what people were like at the time” whilst there were other people of a similar social location who were not Like That. so I think there’s a place for some of that in historical fiction, done realistically and not merely in an attempt to assuage discomfort or avoid genuine reflection upon the conditions of the time, complicity, etc. we can’t allow real people the excuse of time and place for abhorrent actions nor benefitting from the pain of others and so nor should we allow characters in fiction the same. am I making sense