Songs of Their Deeds

I went ahead and wrote a retelling of the Silmarillion in the style of that post, it's on my main, go check it out.

[thelioninmybed]

for the patently untrue thing: (well, this one's not so much 'patently untrue' as much as 'a theory I really like but probably isn't very likely') Idril is Gil-Galad

Turgon falls with Gondolin in 510, making Idril, his daughter, the next High King. Unfortunately, aside from everything having gone to shit, the Noldor are hella sexist and don’t like the idea of a female monarch:

All these things he laid to heart, but most of all that which he heard of Turgon, and that he had no heir; for Elenwë his wife perished in the crossing of the Helcaraxë, and his daughter Idril Celebrindal was his only child.

Um. Excuse you. 

So after some fifteen years spent trying and failing to consolidate power in Sirion, Idril comes up with a plan just crazy enough to work. In 525, she sails into the West in the ship Eärrámë with Tuor and, supposedly, vanishes from the world.

In fact, she sailed to the Havens where, with Cirdan’s help, she adopted a new identity - Gil-Galad, Scion of Kings, Cirdan’s fosterling, Fingon’s son or maybe Orodreth’s, it’s not important, what matters is that whoever Gil-Galad is, he presents as male. 

Given the alternatives are Earendil (on a boat), Elrond and/or Elros (tiny babies), or Maedhros and/or Maglor (still busy scrubbing Sindarin blood off their hands), the Noldor are too thrilled to ask awkward questions like ‘why didn’t anyone mention this earlier?’

[suspected-spinozist]

let the gods intervene

for I suspect the heaven of our mad God 

might be a paltry thing, next to the heaven I’ll make of earth

when I am its immortal king.

- x  

i. Azu’d been chafing for the crown for the last forty years. It did not stop him from fighting for our father’s health with every ounce of his peculiar intensity, and it did not lessen his grief as our father, nevertheless, grew sicker.

Dying is ugly.

Fifteen years, the King had been in decline, fifteen years that had reduced him from a presence that drew every eye to a crumbling, clumsy one from whom courtiers politely averted their glance. A memory like a trap, my father had once possessed, though he’d set it loose on harmless trivia. He mistook me for my grandmother, for a doctor, for a courtier, and then ceased noticing me at all; Azulzir spent far more time at his side than I did, but in the last year the King only remembered his name twice.

He did not remember it on his deathbed. “Eärcalo?” he said instead, sometimes, when his words were intelligible at all; more often he seemed not to realize we were present. At first Azulzir tried to correct him. Toward the end he tried to appease him. 

“Eärcalo?”

“Gimilzagar”, Azu would say, our father’s intimate name, the one he’d abandoned on taking the crown. But the one Eärcalo, his brother, would have called him. “Are you well?” 

“No,” he’d said. “I am not well. Do I look it? Don’t lie to me!”

Words were hard to come by, in my father’s chambers, in the year that he died. No matter how little I moved or spoke I was always short of breath. Azulzir too, apparently, because he took a while to find the words. “You don’t look well.” He didn’t. The wrinkles had burrowed their way though his cheeks to leave deep creases. His skin was dry and all his teeth were false.

“You look the same as always.”

My brother smiled at him and did not say anything.

“Are you here to kill me?” His hands closed around Azulzir’s, tightly. I saw my brother flinch. There was still surprising strength in them. 

He swallowed. “Do you want me to?” 

A laugh. A harsh, husky, breathless laugh. “No. No. Azu –”

And I saw the delight and relief in my brother’s eyes, saw his hands tightened around the King’s reflexively, in gratitude -

“Azu,” he said, “I don’t want to die.”

In Anadûnê we do not believe that death is a blessing. That’s what the Elves teach us, when they descend from paradise to visit. I am not sure if all the Elves believe it, or if the ones who don’t are not permitted to depart the Blessed Realm’s blessed shores. The Elven gods keep their subjects on a short leash.

The Elves, who are deathless unless they choose to die, say that our unwilling death is a blessing. We, who watch our mothers and fathers through the bitter last decade, beg to differ. We, who research the workings of the body and the mysteries of the spirit, trying a thousand different things in the hopes that we’ll stumble  - through sheer reckless determination – across the one we need. 

We did not stumble across it in time. 

Azu tried, as I said, with all his terrifying will. There were a thousand doctors willing to sell us a remedy, of course, and some of them could even parade before us a dozen test cases on whom they claimed their remedy had worked. But there has been, for several hundred years, a prize purse of half the wealth of the Crown for the man who cures involuntary Death, and the brightest minds of centuries had beaten their brains against the question and come away without an answer. And died themselves. 

Azulzir – an idealist, you know, able to recognize our father’s naïveté but not his own – had thought we’d solve it. I am not sure when it realized that we wouldn’t, not in time. 

When the doctors said that we were out of time, we were all beside him. The sun rose and my father stirred unhappily, cried out for water, stared unseeingly at the servants who rushed in to bring it. I suppose I was hoping for one last lucid moment. I did not get one. He lingered, while the Sun rose in the sky, and his breathing softened as the Sun reached her zenith and he had a terrible coughing fit as she reached the horizon. At dusk he stopped breathing.

My brother, our King, did not weep. That would have been improper. The chamber was crowded with witnesses. He took our father’s hands and said the words that have sufficed in place of prayer, here in Anadûnê for the last three hundred years.

“We were not made for death,” he said, “nor born to die.”

I took our father’s other hand. It felt unnatural already, going stiff and cold in mine. I glared at my brother. If he had given a long speech it would have been appropriate for me to match him, but he spoke only a few words, so I had only a few. “Death is the last work of the Enemy,” I said, “and to end it will be the greatest work of our people.” 

And then we all watched the new King.

It took him a moment. Longer than he should have waited, really. It is crass to look eager at your father’s deathbed, but weak to wait too long. I have better instincts for that kind of thing than Azu; usually he looks to me for cues, and we joke he’ll be a puppet-king, but today he was not looking for cues and I don’t give them where they won’t be heeded. Puppetting kings is about knowing where they won’t be pushed, even for their own good.

Eventually my brother stood. We exhaled in grateful unison, and I uncurled my fingers from my father’s. “The King is dead,” we said. “Long live the King.” A dozen voices in unison. Soon it would be a hundred. Soon it would be all the nation.

 Dying is ugly. What an odd rite of passage, for those who would be leaders of our empire. Azu told me, a few years later, that he was grateful for it. It meant that each of them took office by staring the enemy in the face.

ii.

“You should marry before you become King,” I’d said to my brother twenty years earlier, only a week before he met the woman who would become his wife. I cannot claim either influence or precognition, because I said it to him at least once a month. “If you think the candidates are intolerable now, imagine what they’ll be like then – and you’ll be busier.” 

If I’d met Arossë I’d have known instantly that she was an excellent choice, and then I could have claimed both influence and precognition. But he’d met her himself, at the university. The story had been satisfactorily romantic as it actually happened, or else they’d had the good sense to embellish it before it even reached my ears. She’d gotten into a screaming fight with the entire department of First Age linguistics over whether Pengolodh had mis-glossed several firsthand documents from Estolad, and whether they could instead be translated in a way that provided independent support for Andreth’s account of human mortality. The linguistics department at the university was stubbornly behind the times, both because the Andustalië took such interest in it and because the field had a stubborn prescriptivist tradition that entirely precluded engagement with the vernacular, which was where everything progressive was happening. 

At least, that’s what Arossë apparently shouted at the whole department, calling them willfully negligent cretins and calling linguistic prescriptivism the worst idiocy of all those attributed to Fëanor. At that someone had predictably called her a war crimes apologist and she had said that a society that treated the killing of Men as a crime a fraction as serious as the killing of Elves would name every one of us complicit in crimes ten times as terrible as Alqualondë and anyway murdering Elves wasn’t really that bad, they came back. The debate had been disbanded to give cooler heads a minute to prevail, and she’d burst out of the council chambers, happened on my brother, and vehemently made her case to him.

Later she’d claimed she’d had no idea who he was, and explained herself only because he seemed sharper than anyone inside, and more willing to listen. “Liar,” I said gently when I heard that part of the story, and she shrugged in careless acknowledgement. “It plays better that way. People want to believe that they could have stumbled by chance on the Crown Prince and seduced him with an impassioned rant about the value of mortal lives –”

- which they could, really, but it wouldn’t end in a marriage proposal unless they were of the line of Elros and of an extraordinarily powerful family - 

“I’d have married her anyway,” Azulzir’d objected, when I said this to him once. “I wanted her, and I’m honorable, and –”

“And we wouldn’t have let you,” I said, “you’re going to be King.”

 “You can have it,” he’d grumbled. My heart twanged. He shouldn’t say things like that. He didn’t mean them. Just because I’d never consider marrying for love when millions of lives rested on the wisdom and stability of my choices, just because I had the instincts that no centuries in court had managed to instill in him, just because his reckless and extraordinary intensity was better suited to a generalship, or a powerful advisory position – 

“It’s a very suitable match,” I said instead, “you’ll have to threaten to abandon your responsibilities over some other imposition.”

 “Don’t,” Arossë said, cheerfully. “I want to be a queen.”

I think my brother was slightly hurt at that, as he’d spent his whole life frolicking in the polite fiction that women threw themselves at him for his looks and charm. But he had at least the good sense not to show it, and to stop halfheartedly offering me his office whenever it inconvenienced him.

iii.

It would have been predictable for jealousy to arise between the two of us, so I went to lengths to avoid that. If I threw Arossë into new responsibilities a bit carelessly, it was because it was in our mutual interest for me to know the limits of her capabilities. 

“Your mother does all this?” she said, once.

Azulzir forgot sometimes, but I never did, that the open secrets within the family were genuine secrets outside them. My father’s brother Eärcalo died before he could take up the crown. My father would never had any part in it, would have given his own life protecting the crown prince. My mother had thought Eärcalo ill-suited for leadership.

They hadn’t looked, while investigating. We sing of Lúthien, we sing of Idril, we sing of Elwing; it is a cultural fascination elevated to a devastating blind spot. We believe beautiful women incapable of evil.

“Yes,” I said, “my mother does all this. You won’t be alone, though, you’ll have me.” 

She took it as a threat. Which was good. I wanted Azulzir in power and I was not in fact her enemy, but if she trusted me she was too trusting. The university did that to people: it taught eloquence, taught the dance of intellectual freedom with treason or blasphemy, let the nobility glide near various forms of radicalism, grow out of them, and grow into leadership with the compassionate pragmatism of the better sort of ex-revolutionary. Azulzir’d grown into himself in university. Arossë clearly had, too. But spending too much time around sincere people made you believe in sincerity, and in court sincerity paid its dividends in futility. Hollow, failed exertions of power. I’d seen enough of them.

Arossë did not trust me, which was wise.

I dressed down on her wedding day, though I was not done assessing her capabilities, because spiteful childish jealousy was not what I was trying to cultivate between us. She wore a dress modeled off the great golden sculpture of Andreth in the city square. It was an excellent choice, politically and aesthetically. My brother was enraptured.

Andreth, people murmured, who the Elves had desired. Arossë corrected them whenever she was given the chance. Andreth, wise-woman, who had written our stories, who’d made her voice so fiercely known that a thousand years later, as Anadûnê started to piece together our history, we’d still been able to hear us. Andreth, the first to tell the Elves the truth: the brevity of our lives was not a gift, and they need not keep pretending that they envied it. 

“You should have predicted,” I said to her later, “that they’d leap the other way. Andreth who the Elves desired – that is the story everyone knows, and the one that will spread the fastest. You cannot be subtle with messages that don’t suit peoples’ preconceptions. It’s on you, if people don’t read you the way that you want to be read. And Andreth died childless.” 

She was still radiant with the delight of a bride fresh from the most luxurious honeymoon an empire could provide. She glared at me, but with no intensity. “You really are a scold.”

“If you only take advice from people who make you feel good about yourself –” 

“Azu,” she said, “debates public perception and the implications of various subtle décor choices with me but also acts as if he likes me.”

“I like you,” I said impatiently, “that’s why I’m telling you this.”

 “It’s on you if people don’t read you the way you want to be read,” she mimicked me, toying with a stray curl. “Lominzil, I don’t mind the testing, but is there anything that would convince you I’ve actually passed it?”

“When we cure death and my brother rules the world forever,” I said instantly.

“No,” she said. “Then you’ll be more maddeningly jealous of him than ever.” 

“I’m not jealous of him.” 

“When we cure involuntary death and my husband rules the world forever,” she said, “he’ll find another ambition easily. They come to him like breathing. I don’t understand people whose ambitions could be fulfilled. I have no idea who you’ll be afterwards.”

I was breathless for a moment. “No one,” I said, “has ever told me that the problem with that particular ambition was that it was too limiting, and once fulfilled would leave me at loose ends.” 

She kissed me before leaving. Her dress was some stunning translucent fabric, her hair tumbling loose of its pins as if even her stylists were struggling to keep up with the pace of hairstyle-destruction of lovers on a honeymoon. She was wearing expensive southern perfumes. It could have been sisterly, but wasn’t.

I decided I wasn’t sure if I’d put too little effort into ensuring we were not rivals, or too much of it. She danced away into my brother’s arms.

iv.

Azulzir’s finance minister spoke Adûnaic in council meetings with barely a trace of an accent, but whenever the conversation turned from currency it became obvious that he was badly out of his depths. The words for hobbies, for humor, for storytelling, for family – those had evidently not been covered in his crash course on the vernacular, and without them he was visibly discomfited. I enjoyed it, not at all guiltily. For two thousand years that was how it had been for anyone raised on the tongues of Men. 

It was a minor state dinner. I had nearly skipped it, and Arossë, though at my brother’s side, was clearly absent in spirit. The conversation was dominated by the gregarious new governor of Umbar, who spoke Adûnaic natively and was clearly delighting in the advantage it gave her over the Armineleth old guard. Everything was playing out exactly as Azulzir – no, Ar-Adunakhor now, the first King to take his name in Adûnaic instead of in Quenya - had intended it. The change in the official language of court from the Elven to the Adûna tongue had been hailed as a populist move and condemned as a sacrilegious one. The Elves had arrived with vague threats from their gods and departed in a flurry of foreboding words delivered with the bored, smug superiority that only Elves could muster. Their departure conveniently weakened his political rivals. The shakeup at court conveniently made it more meritocratic than it had been in several generations, as his advisors naturally filtered themselves for ability to read the writing on the wall and learn the damned vernacular.

It was embarrassing, really, that it had taken his decree to make it so. In what kind of country could the nobility not even understand the language of their subjects?

 “My liege,” the governor of Umbar said, and with a scraping stir the room came to attention, “our people have received your rulings with joy, and saw me off on this journey in hopes of still a greater boon –”

So she wanted money. The King should probably at least pretend to pay attention, but I didn’t need to; I let my face settle into bland, unreadable dignity, and my mind wander to more interesting topics. The governor of Umbar wanted money. The governor of Gondor wanted money. The governors of the nation proper wanted money, too, and had the stronger claim, since it was their fiefdoms Ar-Adunakhor had disrupted so thoroughly and their families whose legacies and power base and life works he’d set adrift in one mild procedural stroke. He could afford to accommodate all of them financially. He probably couldn’t afford to do so politically. They said a King set the pattern of his next two hundred years in his first five.

 “If that’s true,” I had said to him as we’d choreographed the coronation, “yours will be eventful times.” 

“I hope not,” he said, because it sounded wise. We both knew it wasn’t really true. He itched for troubled times. Anadûnê itched for them. Two thousand years of slow unfurling in the carefully trimmed garden of the gods, paradise just outside arms’ reach. People started to itch. 

“Kings in particular,” I’d teased him, “Being unaccustomed to not getting what they want.” 

The Kings of this nation had not gotten what they wanted, any of them; if they had, they would still sit the throne.

“It would be the war to end wars,” the governor of Umbar said eagerly, and I wretched my attention back to the abundant food and overeager company that was making this dinner so stifling. 

“I hope that’s not supposed to tempt me,” the King said severely. I kept my face unreadable. Ambitious didn’t mean warmongering, but the governor needed to figure that out for herself if she was going to be valuable here.

But her eyes lit up. “You’re a historian, Your Grace. Tell me, do you think Sauron’s gone forever? Are you confident the Valar won’t decide again that Morgoth’s served his parole? Have you ever asked yourself –”

“I am not sure the weapons for a war against Morgoth or Sauron would bear much resemblance to the ones we’d use to pacify Umbar.”

“Ironworking,” she said, “is not a weapon but the idea by which all weapons are devised. Same with the printing press. Same, if you permit it, with these railways – and with the mechanism that powers them. Your grace – this is something Valinor will never have.” 

Now we were listening. 

“The continents of Middle-earth,” she said, “are older than Anadûnê, older than Valinor; they were formed before the first and greatest of the wars of the Valar and Morgoth.  Years beyond counting, thousands of thousands, passed in that time, beneath the pillars of the old world, and creatures roam it whose bones, turned to stone by the times, we are now uncovering. The plants of that time have been compressed into firestone, which burns for days. Nothing in Anadûnê – nothing in Valinor – has that kind of energy density. And so the steam engine could only have been invented in Umbar. But now, my liege, we can bring it here.”

 Arossë was easy to read, and was listening as if the words were raindrops reaching the lips of someone dying of thirst. I glared at her. It would give the King a weaker hand in our negotiations, and now the governor was turning her presentation towards the most receptive member of her audience, ignoring the King himself.

He coughed, gently, and she embarrassedly snapped back toward him, still talking a mile a minute. “It’s not speculative, your grace. It works. Scale will take time, the locals are dreadfully slow at building them, but it will be possible, when we’re done, to reach Mithlond from Cuivienen itself in two days.” 

Even Azu permitted some delight to escape onto his face, at that. “How much?” 

She flinched and did not answer. “And some people think we could fly with them. They haven’t worked out how, yet, not exactly, but it ought to be possible, there are a few proposed plans and perhaps if we combined the best elements of each – we’re calling it Project Eagle.” 

A stir around the table, more forceful than the one prompted by the extraordinary implications of the project itself. The great Eagles were the servants of Manwë, lord of the airs, king of all the Elven gods. To build a mechanical contraption that would mimic the flight of birds was practically to demand his wrath. To call it that –

Arossë laughed. “Someone values their cleverness too highly, and their life too lightly.”

“Let the gods intervene,” said the King. 

[thranduilmylove]

Canonical Supernatural Abilities of Tolkien’s Elves 1/?

“Elves can walk atop the snow (Legolas, Fellowship of the Ring) and have remarkable cold tolerance (Legolas, Fellowship of the Ring, and the host of Fingolfin, The Silmarillion).” - @lintamande x

[plaidmax-deactivated20200708]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Rating: M

Word Count: 6420

Warnings: psychological torture, gaslighting, dubcon, 

Summary: The thing about suffering is that after enough time, you learn to anticipate it. Maedhros is rescued, but he does not escape.

A/N: Written for the lovely and talented @piyo-13! I love you like it, dear!

The dreams are not sent to him every night, but that is a part of their design.

Maedhros dreams of the beating of wings. The sound and motion rises over and then crashes down over him like a wave. The pounding of surf. The smell of smoke. A familiar song and a familiar voice. It is not a happy dream, but that in itself is a comfort. The only pleasant dreams Maedhros has these days are those sent by Sauron himself. There is some strength to be found in knowing this pain is wholly his own.  

He dreams of his rescue, of the dull devouring agony that has come to define his life cut short with a series of short hacking blows. He observes the dream with interest, even as his body is lifted in Fingon’s arms and borne away on the backs of eagles. After being hung on the wall for so long, his chest has lost the ability to breathe or speak normally. Fingon mistakes his hacking, brutal laughter—rescued on the backs of eagles? Could anything be more preposterous?—for sobs of relief. Maedhros tries to correct him, to explain to the dream-figment that these delusions have long since lost the ability to torment him, but all that makes it past his lips are choked fragments. Fingon smooths his hair down and urges him not to speak. Maedhros lets his head loll to the side, ignoring the spike of pain that shoots through it, in order to watch the spires of Angband become miniature, and then become nothing. He imagines he can see his own body pinned to the highest cliff, clinging to it like a pale twisted root. He would wave goodbye to himself, but it seems this dream has lost him a hand.

Read on AO3

[piyo-13]

HELLO PEOPLE DO YOU WANT TO CRY FOR ALL ETERNITY??? Then look no further than reading this fic :“”“”“’’D (i read it like 5 hours ago and i’m still crying)

[simaethae]

hi. do you think sauron and celebrimbor would get along if they met in valinor? i just need silverfisting where no one dies.

what do you mean, anon, i have totally written celebrimbor/sauron fic where nobody dies :)

(alright, alright, but if you meant “non-horrifying” you should be more specific…)

So - I assume you mean the AU where Sauron decides to stay in Valinor rather than join up with Melkor, right? (The timelines in canon don’t work at all, I’m afraid.)

Keep reading

[sumeriasmith]

Okay, firstly and most importantly, holy shit you should definitely write this thing. You know how many happy AU fics we have for the Trash Ship? We have none. There aren’t any. The closest to happy fics for these two assholes are your Stockholm fic and your mind control fic, and, um, well.* (Sauron at least is happy in both of those? That’s half the battle, right?)

But now you have me thinking about this AU scenario, and trying to figure out how it would work. My first thought is that, assuming he’s still got the same basic personality he had in canon, only he maybe noticed that Melkor was a hot mess and not really the best way to accomplish his goals…? But I think the general Noldor platform “do thinks actively to accomplish goals” is way more likely to appeal to him than “sit around in Aman”; he really doesn’t like passive solutions to problems.

But like, in canon, one of the things I think draws them together so much is that they both have things in their past they want to make up for/surpass, and they’re both really committed to the idea of working to make the world a better place. In this scenario, the first wouldn’t really apply, but the second… We know Feanor’s general frustration at being stuck in Aman was echoed by a lot of other people. It was a position of growing popularity even before the Trees went out. Mairon and Celebrimbor strike me as the sorts who would absolutely egg each other on more and more towards that position. Think of the things we could do! Of the greater scope for our work!  Think about half the world that doesn’t even have light! …etc.

Which is to say…I am a million percent certain that in any universe where these two are close at the time of the Darkening, Mairon joins the Noldor. (*Also*, fwiw, in this universe he doesn’t have a Dark Secret™ which might cause him to hold back, and I invite you to consider, if you will, what canonical evidence we have for how Maia behave when they get really attached to someone.)

…but hey, in this version of reality, Curufin is way happier about his son’s terrible husband than he is in canon?

(Also I bet he can beat a balrog in a fight. Just sayin’.)

*I am making @arrogantemu write a happy AU, but she has to finish the horrifically depressing not-AU first, so you should still totally write the thing.

[simaethae]

(…come on, Celebrimbor is totally happy in the mind control fic. Sauron made sure!)

(what if i just. took six months off work to write fanfic. that sounds like a great idea that could surely have no impact on my bonus or promotion prospects whatsoever.)

So, I really like all this but where I differ is that I don’t think Mairon would be very optimistic about the Noldor’s prospects of success? I mean. The Noldor mostly know Melkor as that guy who got imprisoned in Mandos and then spent a while in Valinor covertly encouraging social dissension; Mairon probably thinks of him more as the Power who was strong enough to wage war against all the rest of the Valar on his own.

Which is to say, I think Mairon would be sympathetic to the Noldor’s general goals, but his attitude post-Darkening probably involves a lot more This Is Dumb And You’re All Going To Get Yourselves Killed?

He’s just not up for letting Celebrimbor go off and get himself killed without trying to do something. And - come to think, even if he knows better, I suspect he would get reluctantly drawn in by the sheer level of vision and determination the Feanorians are bringing to bear at this point? And he would, I agree, be naturally drawn to action rather than just hanging around behind the Pelori tacitly ceding Middle-earth to Melkor.

…I expect he cheers up a bit once he runs into Melian, who has after all been doing a pretty effective job of holding off Melkor and Ungoliant more or less on her own, tho :)

[sumeriasmith]

See, what we need is rich patrons who will pay us to sit around producing fic and fanart. Thus improving the world. Because what the world needs most is more Sauron/Celebrimbor fanworks.

Mairon definitely wouldn’t engage in the Finwean family hobby of flinging self face first into Morgoth; unlike elves, I don’t think doomed courage and what not strikes him as intrinsically admirable. And further agreed that I think he’d have a much more accurate idea of Morgoth’s actual power.

I think he’d likely be a lot more strategic about what he was trying to do and how than the elves were, for sure, but I think we have to posit that if he didn’t join Melkor in the first place, it’s because he decided Melkor’s methodology wasn’t going to be effective. And honestly, the most likely reason for that, I think, would be noticing that the effect on Melkor of what Melkor’s been doing is one of diminishment. I mean, in the first war, all the Valar together couldn’t win until Tulkas came down to help. In the War of Wrath, Morgoth got taken down by Eonwe and a bunch of elves. Even assuming other maiar were there, no Valar were. He spent most of the first age hiding in his own basement!

I don’t think it’s inconceivable that Mairon + Melian + Feanor (going with the assumption that Mairon manages to keep his grandfather-in-law from dying) and a degree of strategy and cunning might actually be able to stand a chance against Melkor. But even if not, nothing about Sauron leads me to suggest he’s great at cost/benefit analysis when he wants something.

[thearrogantemu]

Why do you do this to me; I’m just trying to lurk peacefully when you come along and give me ideas…

I am so on board for all of this. If Sauron - well, Mairon in this instance, I suppose - didn’t defect to Melkor before the count of time, he still has those attributes that drew him to Melkor in the first place and I think that means he joins the Revolt of the Noldor. He likes their determination, he agrees with their goals, but he is *really* not on board with the idea of the Oath. If someone hurts you, you hurt them back! You don’t threaten yourself with existential annihilation! Who are you trying to impress?! (And then Celebrimbor points out that he himself did not swear this oath, and Mairon cheers right up and they head off to rescue his grandfather before he *really* gets himself into trouble.)

And yes, between the Noldor and their sponsor-maia in the domain of Making Things, and the Sindar and their sponsor-maia in the domain of Growing Things, the Eldar may stand a pretty good chance to hold out against Morgoth for a while! But that can’t possibly mean that all we had to do to solve the War of the Jewels was get Sauron on the other side?

So. Consider this. After this timeline’s equivalent of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad - the catastrophic event that breaks the military might of the Eldar and makes apparent that no, all the force of Middle-Earth is not going to avail against Morgoth - Mairon does what he does best. He surrenders. He switches sides. He offers himself to Morgoth - it’s become clear that he’d thrown his lot in with the losing team, but if that job offer from so many ages ago is still open, imagine what he, Morgoth, could do with him at his side - not just with his skill and power, but with his intimate knowledge of the Noldor strategy and defenses.

It’s basically the same thing he does to Ar-Pharazon in canon - seeing that destroying this threat would be difficult if not impossible, he makes his way into his confidence and gets him to destroy himself.

Celebrimbor doesn’t know that’s what he’s doing. None of the Feanorians do - if Morgoth is going to trust Sauron, the betrayal has to be real. And it is,  and the things that Morgoth demands as proof of his loyalty are the sorts of things that cannot be forgiven. Sauron - becomes Sauron, essentially, only in this universe he knows what that means. He does the things that Morgoth asks of him, and does them well, because he always had that capacity in him.

This, obviously, breaks Celebrimbor’s heart (and possibly his psychic integrity, depending on just what intimacy with one of the Ainur entails). He knows him, he knows that he had this potential in him, and the logic that Sauron offers - there’s nothing noble about fighting a losing battle, who are you trying to impress?! is so familiar, so horribly plausible. It does occur - only as a possibility - that Sauron might be playing a double game. But he can’t possibly afford to believe that, even wanting that to be true is an insult to the people that his friend has betrayed, and so he fights Sauron with everything he’s got, the best that he can hope for being that one day he can ask him why.

Morgoth’s fall, when it comes, looks just like self-destruction. And Sauron is not about to insult people by attempting to claim credit for it. He did what he could do to defeat Morgoth, and it worked, but he isn’t the one who can say whether or not it was worth it. He’s not interested in justifying himself (and since this is Sauron, that’s a remarkable piece of moral growth right there.) And he certainly can’t look any of the Eldar in the face after what he chose to do. But he does come to Celebrimbor one last time. To see him alive, to tell him that he’s sorry.

Celebrimbor was prepared for the apology, because why wouldn’t Sauron attempt to switch sides again, now that he was defeated? (He was not really prepared to see him again at all, but then, how could you be?) What he wasn’t expecting, however, is for Sauron not to ask for anything, not to offer anything, just to turn around and simply leave. So then he starts investigating, and eventually the truth becomes apparent, and he goes to track him down and bring him home, and that, mesdames et messieurs, is a happy AU.

[textsfromthesilm]

image credit

[simaethae]

Accidental essay time again: I was thinking about my characterisations of Feanor and Celebrimbor and their differences, and started writing this out to help myself think it through, and it got substantial enough to seem worth posting. I reserve the right to change my mind about any or all of this as I go on, though :)

(did I mean to be working on fic instead? oh well)

So -

Where I start from is: Feanor and Celebrimbor have a lot of the same basic traits, but expressed very differently. Feanor grew up - kind of isolated, without any family except Finwe and Finwe’s complicated feelings of love and grief and guilt; whereas Celebrimbor grew up as the baby of a large family of intelligent quarrelsome personalities who loved him and were interested in him but did not necessarily always have much time for him.

Finwe loved his son deeply but did not, I think, always understand him very well. Feanor’s fundamental assumption tends to be that he is on his own and cannot rely on other people (they might go away and never come back and you might never know what you did wrong, why you weren’t good enough).

Feanor also - not entirely unjustifiably - tends to assume that he is more intelligent than the people around him and that when they disagree with him it is because they do not understand him. (This is not helped by the fact that he is not very good at explaining himself, tbh - he makes a lot of intuitive leaps that he thinks of as obvious when they are really not.)

Celebrimbor, on the other hand, has always had to accommodate himself to other people in a way that Feanor has not. He has things that are important to him but he is capable of letting things go in a way that Feanor has trouble with - if he really disagrees with someone he is liable to go quiet and sarcastic about it rather than getting into a fight with them. Which is to say, he has also managed to surprise people by being pleasant and easygoing right up until they run into an issue he really cares about, at which point he turns into a brick wall of “no”. :)

This is the way I think of it:

Keep reading

[psychopompious-blog1]

I’m always vaguely disappointed when Turgon is portrayed as completely intolerant of the Fëanorians, because like, yeah he hates them… But he showed up at the Nirnaeth, despite all expectations that he wouldn’t. If he despised them so utterly I think he would have been about as helpful as, say, Orodreth. Both of them have very personal reasons to dislike the Fëanorians, but Turgon it seems is more willing to put his personal issues aside for a greater cause. (Although, I admit, part of that might be because Turgon still had one living brother at the time, and Orodreth didn’t. Still!)

This is probably just my fondness for teeth-clenched teamwork speaking though.

[onehandedly]

Premise: take this with a grain of salt because I’m the first person who must admit not to be a Turgon’s expert.

That said I do not think his participation to the Nirnaeth or Orodreth’s (for that matter) were mainly linked to them liking the Feanorians or not. I mean: in Orodreth’s case it is true he had reasons to resent the Feanorians, but he also owed Curufin his life, contrary to Turgon. I think the discriminant was that there was a vote in Nargothrong. There the population, scared by recent happenings and, conceivably, Curufin’s own speech, chose not to send the army, even though a part of it went nonetheless. In the Gondholidrim’s case they were under different circumstances, and so had less reasons to be scared in the immediate. So there I tend to see political reasons at work rather than personal ones.

That said: I do think Turgon resented the Feanorians quite a lot, but his reasons to found a hidden city lied, again, elsewhere and were complex and layered. Summing them up in a way that, in my opinion, doesn’t do the character much justice: he didn’t wish to be where he was, and he craved to go back to his Valinorean past. As for snapping at Maedhros pointlessly though: I completely agree with you. Turgon isn’t painted as someone who would behave so. His “topos” is the just ruler whose “darker” (for lack of a better term) declination, instead of snapping, broods.

[hereff]

Ha, i agree with you here, especially about Turgon’s feelings towards the Fëanorian. I tend to see that he do resent them a lot for various reasons, however he certainly not the type who go on childish rampage and starting fights without reason. 

I’ve written my thoughts (not my most eloquent writing, so beware before readin) on the way Turgon deal with his problem before, and to sum it up it’s very very out of character for him to openly show his resentment and acting thoughtlessly. Whether you like him or not, despite his isolationist policy Turgon has shown again and again to be really great at making friends and understand the importance of allies. Never once in the book Turgon mentioned to express his anger (even to Eöl who insulted him, he still tried to treat him graciously at first), he rarely let his vulnerability shown, because after all he was a skilled diplomat and King so he actually behaves like one instead of the childish backwards brat that often shown in fanfic as a foil to his perfect siblings and cousins.

[birdsandcandles-deactivated2016]

No but talk to me about how elves born in the second and third age thought of feanor, talk to me about how to him he was probably more legend than historical figure talk to me about how men probably thought of feanor and his family as legends and as time went on and the elves left feanor became more myth than legend, talk to me about scholars debating whether or not he and his family existed

talk to me about how views of feanor shift over time how he goes from a warning to something to aspire to, to a a warning again talk to me about the controversy surrounding his legend was he a hero who wanted change for the betterment of his people or merely a rebel who sought to wage a war? Talk to me about the finweans and all of their impact on the history of arda

and the deeds we shall do will be a matter of song until the final days of Arda

[em-niwa]

’ hey. hey. heeeyyy-’ Turin and Beleg sketch. Someone fell asleep before the story was finished. 

[weird-things-first]

Sauron and his precious wolves. 26.8.2014. WIP.

Sometimes one just needs their own time.

[toherrys]

Fëanor for feanore

Second of the art giveaways, at long last. I’m SO SORRY it took this long!

[finduilas-faelivrin]

Tuor and Voronwe Approaching the Echoriath of Gondolin by KipRasmussen

[mothofb]

Thingol and Melian from tonight’s Livestream <3

[toomuchlemons-deactivated202007]

Feanor & Celebrimbor

commissioned by curufinwefeanaro

[simaethae]

So, at an even more speculative tangent to this post, I was thinking about the Akallabêth (can I take a moment here to say how much I love the Akallabêth), and:

Then behind locked doors Sauron spoke to the King, and he lied, saying: ‘It is he whose name is not now spoken; for the Valar have deceived you concerning him, putting forward the name of Eru, a phantom devised in the folly of their hearts, seeking to enchain Men in servitude to themselves. […] But he that is their master shall yet prevail, and he will deliver you from this phantom; and his name is Melkor, Lord of All, Giver of Freedom, and he shall make you stronger than they.’

Let’s just take a moment to be clear that Sauron is a lying liar who lies, okay?

But - look at that language. Worshipping Eru is being enchained in servitude. Melkor is linked to freedom. It’s the righteousness-as-obedience thing again from completely the other angle.

I bet Sauron would think it was really funny to tell the Númenóreans part of what he thought was the truth in a way that was completely misleading and awful. Doing the right thing and being obedient to Eru are the same, so doing the wrong thing is freeing yourself of servitude to Eru. Melkor, breaker of axani, is the giver of freedom. Cast off your enslavement to silly laws like “murder is wrong” and “torture is bad”. Hah.

[toomuchlemons-deactivated202007]

|| Feanor + 9?

ok, i try :D

more looks like Feanor self-burn :B