"And so they stood on the walls of the City of Gondor, and a great wind rose and blew, and their hair, raven and golden, streamed out mingling in the air."
latest finished commission, where i had the opportunity to go with my own vision of the characters, and here's what i landed on... they may look like squares but i know they freak4freak in their hearts etc.
And for you, Frodo Baggins, I give you the light of Earendil - our most beloved star. May it be a light to you in dark places when all other lights go out
Can we please talk about how the most criminally underrated comedic aspect of the legendarium is the length of Elros’ kingship. Like bro caused the funniest succession crisis known to mankind when he died because his son, who was almost 400, abdicated on the spot because he was too old and passed the kingship to his own son right.
Which implies that abdication due to age was absolutely a possibility. An option, in fact. One which Elros clearly didn’t take up. Why? Because in my book, motherfucker was having way too much fun. Bro watched his son start to hobble around the place and was like ‘yeah but I like fucking and dining and wining and hunting, I’m keeping the crown, sucks to be you, major loser’. He gives me young Robert Baratheon vibes right. I know my beloved himbo was drinking to excess every night and streaking nude through the courtyards with his hunting buddies while Elrond learned to play depressing tunes on the harp and pulp herbs or whatever the fuck he was doing back in Middle Earth. I know Elros laughed like 20 times a day. I know you could hear him from four streets away. I know he had like 30 illegitimate children because his wife probably didn’t live even half as long as him. At least 30. I know his sneeze was audible from the moon.
Anyway just imagine being Vardamir and being like ‘dad is it my turn for the crown now?’ every fifty years and your dad just lifting a finger and going ‘no 😇☝🏻’. And you have to tell yourself not to take offence at this because your dad grew up in like the worst time to grow up ever and had the most traumatic childhood and was practically orphaned by six. Like of course he wants to spend his dying days drinking and dancing right. Unfortunately his dying days last 400 years long. I tell you this, in my mind, the only reason why the Númenoreans canonically have a tradition of abdicating a few years before their death is because final-stage Elros went down in history as the most irritating monarch to exist.
Because even though his children and some other descendents lived to 3/400 etc, even the longest reigning ones only spent like 150 years on the throne at most. Not so with Elros. Elros’ ass was parked firmly on the throne for four hundred years straight. And Númenor is canonically a swift-advancing society right. Four hundred years is a wacky amount of time. In terms of technological advancement at least. Imagine Queen Elizabeth the First was still kicking around on the throne right now. Imagine her managing Brexit and having to do a TikTok dance to get tourists into Buckingham Palace. Imagine the President was still George Washington. Imagine George Washington having to deal with ChatGPT and taking publicity photos with Beyoncé. Imagine Emperor Jahangir encountering a Big Mac.
And it’s even funnier with Elros because this guy wasn’t just raised by elves, he was raised by—due to kidnap-adoption circumstance—the fucking Noldor of all elves. Not just any Noldor but a son of Fëanor, freshly departed from the courtly halls of Aman. They invented the world ‘nostalgia’ when the guy who wrote the dictionary took one look at Maglor Fëanorian. What’s more, he grew up in what was the most devastating war the world had ever seen. So I am sure that Elros’ views are somewhat archaic at best. He makes your extremely conservative grandpa sound like Che Guevera.
Oh, and elves are technically hardier etc, so any time there’s a shortage in Númenor this guy is literally out here saying ‘let them eat cake’ and genuinely means it well, because he, Elros Tar-Minyatur, has on multiple occasions survived by eating one small bite of cake a day. I just know that in the last fifty years of his reign, he blanket vetoed every single workplace hazard control measure because he thinks ‘health and safety has gone mad’. He doesn’t see the point of paving a road. He tries to outlaw whatever the Númenorean version of a miniskirt is and his daughter has to literally threaten him out of it. The whole ‘dancing bears’ thing happened because the wrong people caught Elros and his hunting buddies having yet another post-hunt cock measuring competition and afterparty at the ripe young age of 250 and the royal PR team had to come up with something. And does his language shift and adapt to the needs of society? Absolutely not. In his last decade, 80% of his vocabulary is considered a slur.
And the cherry on this cake? The cherry on this cake is the fact that, once again canonically, my guy Elros was pretty young and spry until he was literally dying. And I assume that meant he also looked pretty young and spry because there’s no way for a human body to look 500 years old. So imagine sitting in at the royal council trying to, idk, bring forth the idea of indoor plumbing and the crankiest old man stands up and gives a speech about how in HIS day people just shat in a pot under the bed and emptied it the next day and HE’S five hundred years old so CLEARLY it’s not going to kill people to not have a sewage system. “I pissed in a pot the day I was born and I pissed in a pot this morning, and I’ll piss in a pot on my deathday” and you can’t even go ‘okay grandpa time for bed’ and wheel him out. Because he’s 6’4 and built like a brick shithouse and has the smoothest skin you have ever seen. ‘Grandpa’ would put you in a fucking headlock if you tried to wheel him to bed. ‘Grandpa’ is your king.
Also the fact that he just randomly decided to die at 500. My personal headcanon here is that that was the morning he woke up with his first hangover ever. He has spent 400 years drinking and fucking and eating enough for ten people and one fine morning he wakes up with a mildly dry mouth and a slight headache. Motherfucker marches off to his son’s room, throws the door open, fucking yeets the crown onto his head, and promptly lays down to die because a world in which he, Elros Tar-Minyatur, is subject to a mild hangover, is not a world which he, Elros Tar-Minyatur, wishes to occupy.
Think about that. The Peredhel line, mired in tragedy, sunk neck deep in mortal consequences and political suicides and passive endurance. And this one guy, who one hundred percent had a fuckchair that he used to his dying day, who chose to die when he did purely because his life was fucking great and he wanted to go out on a high.
What a hopeful mythos!!!
What I’m trying to say here is, we have so much wonderful fiction about Elros the Menace as a child, yet not nearly enough conceptions of Elros the Menace as an adult. I know that the entirety of the palace in Númenor tried to bell him like a cat by the time he reached 450. His ministers would draw straws every year to see which one of them had to crawl up to the palace and beg him to abdicate. And each time, he would say ‘lol no’ except he wouldn’t even do that, he would make his pet monkey do it. Because he has a small pet Capuchin monkey to which he taught sign language. Because he’s a peacetime king and is 499 years old and he was born in a war and if he wants a pet monkey to speak for him, then by god will a pet monkey speak for him so you better fucking address Elros Tar-Minyatur’s pet monkey as your royal highness or get executed for treason at dawn.
me: actually if i was going to handle silmarils i no longer have any right to because i killed people and shit, i would simply not touch them bare handed. i, being an intellectual who knows that these stones burned the innards of a literal werewolf, a creature whose own stomach acids probably had the same corrosive effect as lava, am perfectly aware that my silly little tummy (which throws tantrums about dairy) is no match. a silmaril would give me instant stigmata. carve a perfect tunnel through my flesh. i, being clever and possessing the ability to look up at the sky, am equally aware that eärendil’s newest labret piercing being visible to the naked eye from the stratosphere makes it pretty clear that the thing is probably very bright. as bright as a star. neil armstrong walked on the moon in a space suit. he did not wank off the stars in his birthday suit. all things considered, i, unlike maedhros fëanorian who spent the first 500 years of his life eating hot chip, specialising in himbodom, lying, and not educating himself on basic physics, i would be trotting away peacefully from eönwë’s camp, my silmarils clenched victoriously in
mine and nandika’s last braincells: “what if vogue gondor existed and did an editorial on eowyn’s marriage to faramir?” I did the art, the lovely @lissar did the amazing article which you can read down below :>
my version of dior eluchil, mostly headcanon, for this blog <3 sorry in advance for my handwriting + tumblr's quality reduction
i was inspired in part, and very very much, by @aamuusva whose dior is absolutely beautiful and the reason my dior has curly hair--so please go check their art out!
latest instalment in the Hot Elves By Balls™️ series features Finrod in an outfit I would probably actually kill people to wear… commissioned by the wonderful @justdrowthings, whose brief for this portrait included the phrases “peak why do we talk about ANYONE when this guy exists” and “major art directive - break me”, and agreeing entirely, I was only too happy to oblige 😌😌😌
“He knew now why Beregond spoke his name with love. He was a captain that men would follow, that he would follow, even under the shadow of the black wings.” lotr: the return of the king; book v, chapter iv
“…though she had always heard that love was a surer route to the people's loyalty than fear. If I am ever a queen, I'll make them love me.” asoiaf: a clash of kings; sansa vi
My study project. I have always dreamed of making an animation based on The Silmarillion and I also really like Tomm Moore's cartoons. And I think the book's tone and cartoon style would have worked really well together.
snowghoul
germansingergirl
romaincrisis
stormborns
gummygunk
turnnoffyourmind
