queer things going on in bag end

Hi! This is my Tolkien-Specific blog. He/Him

[naruthandir]

Hi!! This is @lyxthen 's Tolkien sideblog.

I draw and write sometimes.

I haven't watched the Peter Jackson movies, or any other adaptation, for that matter, and I don't plan to. I love the Howard Shore score though, I listen to it often.

Some Tolkien-Related interests I have are fantasy worldbuilding, linguistics, mythology and religion, folklore, and oral storytelling. Other fantasy books I like are the Earthsea Cycle by Ursula K. Le Guin and (unfortunately) The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss.

Some of my unrelated interests are anthropology, non-avian reptiles, insects, baking, and internet/fandom culture and history.

Thank you to all the people that reblog my art and put nice things in the tags. I highly appreciate it.

[moompl]

Imagine the guilt and despair Bilbo went through in regards to Frodo and the Ring. The idea that he had unknowingly subjected a person he loved to this enormous and all consuming evil that would leave a permanent and painful mark.

I can’t fathom being Bilbo and seeing this wonderful and happy boy that I helped raise voluntarily offer himself for a task that will surely end in his death. The worry he undoubtedly felt from the moment Frodo spoke those seven words to when his boy was in his sights again.

Only to it wasn’t his boy anymore. At least not the curious and carefree one that Bilbo remembered. The Frodo that came back from the quest was a hollowed out shell of his former self and if Bilbo had been more lucid at the end I just know it would have destroyed him.

[outofangband]

Elven word of the day, 419/?

Half from Sindarin

Meaning “seashell” 🐚🐚

This word is derived from syalmā, a word for shell, conch or the great horn of Ulmo.

It further derives from the root syal meaning resound, likely referring to the phenomenon of holding a shell to your ear and hearing rushing sounds like the ocean. I think it’s such a cool and poetic root.

Hyalma is the Quenya cognate.

[recursivewitch]

I've never read Homestuck but there's a type of media that I call "a Homestuck" and I think it's a useful categorization. The main criteria are:

long enough that the time investment is a serious barrier to entry

irrevocably changes your personality

brings something genuinely unique to the table. there is no real substitute for reading/playing/watching it in its entirety

Fate/Stay Night is a Homestuck. Worm is a Homestuck. When They Cry is a Homestuck.

Undertale has cultural impact similar to a Homestuck at first glance, but the fact that it's a pretty short and accessible game means that you don't get the particular mix of sunk cost fallacy and an intimate experience with a piece of media that results in you needing to connect with others who have already put in the time investment. You can buy your friends Undertale and expect them to play it if they're not too busy; telling a friend to read Homestuck is giving them a quest that, if accepted, will spark an odyssey. to read someone's Homestuck is an act of love without true equivalent.

[itsme-loof]

cheek kisses before marriage!?!? those scandalous hobbits!!

[shiremade]

you’re the apple of my eye

[frodo-in-a-fez]

u know for years i’ve been on the frodo is gay train but lowkey i think he might just be bisexual and really picky. like yeah hypothetically he would shag a lady hobbit women are awesome however his standard in a romantic partner is samwise “i made a promise” gamgee and literally nobody else is going to live up to that ever. except for galadriel i think she stopped him in his tracks. and rosie cotton. obviously.

[hacvek]

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

[olyia-stories]

@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this

[dragonpyre]

I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset

[serinos-kitt]

What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know

[dragonpyre]

Mordor.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!

[serinos-kitt]

So what is a rain shadow?

[lethalbutterfly]

Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.

[roach-works]

this is because, as clouds are forced upwards by rising land, they cool and dump their rain. so the side of the mountain facing the ocean (or an inland sea, or a great lake) gets all the rain as the clouds are squeezed out, and the opposite side gets nothing.

my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.

so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.

the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.

also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:

it's right at the edge of that snowbelt. and you see way more cities west of it than east, too.

[beatrice-otter]

#but again. mordor looks like that becaue sauron made it#and he's an ass

On a Watsonian level, sure.

On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.

I don't know enough meteorological history to know when white people figured out about rain shadows and added it to geology classes, or what would have been taught about volcanoes and such. But any education Tolkien got on the subject would have been in childhood/adolescence; his college education focused on the liberal arts, not the sciences, and his professional study was linguistics and the middle ages. So anything Medieval and earlier European authors wrote about he had a pretty good chance of knowing about. But not much exposure to modern science. So his science knowledge was probably limited to "what English schools taught at the turn of the 20th Century."

[whetstonefires]

I mean, it's true he didn't know about plate tectonics, but he did know what mountains look like, and that it's not normally That. And it wasn't his style to break that kind of norm without cause.

LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)

Mordor is a rectangle because Sauron is an asshole.

[beatrice-otter]

#the rain shadow thing otoh was undoubtedly total ignorance#but those mountains were made as the fortress of a demigod#too steeped in evil to understand beauty#it's *supposed* to look like something that Shouldn't Exist#like quite often this is something that happens in worldbuilding yes#things are arranged Wrong because a person doesn't grasp the underlying logic#but mordor is a bad example for the same reason it's an obvious one#it's So Very Wrong because it was designed to be wrong#to give you a bad feeling with how much it shouldn't look like that#if he just wanted it unapproachable on all sides it could've been in a caldera formation it didn't *need* corners#the corners were a choice#tolkien's job involved lots of looking at maps and things okay#meanwhile people whose lives revolved around the weather generally knew where the rain happened#long before it was formalized into 'rain shadow effect'#people not having The Science doesn't mean they don't have eyes and brains

[maryellencarter]

I wrote an entire paper in college analyzing the geology of the Misty Mountains and to a lesser extent the White Mountains (the Misty Mountains are easier because we get a cross-section via Moria). One thing I discovered that still knocks me for a loop when I think about it is:

Moria is the only place in Middle-Earth where mithril is found, right? That's kind of a big deal. So, why? What makes that location so special? Is it just random?

I found a paper that had just been published *that year*, 2011 or 2012 as I was writing it, that studied the locations of precious-metals mines in the Pyrenees, the similarly long skinny mountain chain that divides Spain and France. This paper discovered that where there was a bend in the mountain chain, from one of the continental plates having an awkward corner in it that got subducted under the other plate, that had dug deeper into the mantle and caused precious-metal-bearing ores to flow up to the surface in ways they didn't do anywhere else in the Pyrenees.

There's a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring where one of the hobbits -- I don't have my copy handy or I'd get the direct quote -- asks why they can see the Misty Mountains ahead of them at one point if they're still heading south from Rivendell, and it's explained that south of Caradhras (which you may recall is the surface mountain under which Moria runs) the mountain chain bends and runs southwest instead of due south for a while.

Tolkien had absolutely no way to know *why* this particular feature of a mountain range was associated with intrusions of rare and unique metal ores, but he had gone backpacking in mountains enough to know How Things Should Look.

(And as prev excellently points out, when Jirt made screwed-up geology it was very much on purpose. Mordor shouldn't be square! Mount Doom shouldn't be doing any of the things it does! A composite volcano shouldn't even have especially hot lava! Even the Gulf of Udun, the circular feature at the upper left corner of the square, shouldn't be like that -- perfectly round features should be impact craters or calderas, not The Mountains Just Do This In A Suspiciously Convenient Way. These are all the way they are because Sauron forced them to be, in defiance of the laws of nature. Remember, he's akin to Balrogs and was a Maia of Aulë -- he's a volcano spirit in many ways.)

[sunflowergardens-world]

Amazing work by the LoTR fandom, as always.

[mysteryteacup]

This also serves as an excellent example of why worldbuilding needs - more than realism - to be cohesive and work with the themes of your story.

[depsidase]

[do-not-u-dare]

Stole this from somewhere but i think it’s appropriate

[riding-with-the-wild-hunt]

thinking about a celebrían who absolutely does find healing and renewal of joy in valinor and goes with a thrill in her heart and a grin on her face to kiss her babies and jump into her parents' arms and climb her husband like a tree welcome her dearly-missed spouse only to find no children and no father and a tired mother whom the light practically shines through and a husband who cries when they get in bed together... thinking about a celebrían who digs in her heels like she did once before and puts her fists up at sorrow and does for elrond with all her heart what he did for her with all of his because if she could make the long long journey back to herself then her husband is damn well coming too

[eincline]

Carcharoth by Anato Finnstark

[sungodjasmine]

life is so hard right now i'm drawing samfro kissing to cope

[jururenu]

Frodo

[the-zenith-calls]

My favorite scenes in the LotR books are the ones where Legolas has vital information and just decides it's not important to share.

Like when Gandalf spent literal PAGES trying to figure out why the vibes were off in Moria and Legolas chimes in with just "it's a balrog :) that shit's evil :) we're so fucked :)" like what do you MEAN you knew already and just didn't tell him??

Or at the beginning of Two Towers when Aragorn thinks there's something nearby so he puts his ear to the ground to listen, and then like 10 minutes later is like "hmmm i hear horses" and Legolas is just like "mm yep. there are 105 blond bitches with spears" like you just let your friend put his face in the dirt and you can SEE them??

Legolas please gain a sense of urgency

[knives-in-the-dishwater]

It's because legolas hasn't spent enough time with non-elves to remember that they don't know what he knows.

gandalf is scratching his head in moria, and legolas is thinking "oh man, the wizard noticed something off *besides* the obvious balrog that we all are aware of??"

"I wonder what aragorn is listening for? must be hard to hear, what with all of the horses. How many horses are there, actually? 1... 2... 3..."

[taavicleric]

"What do your elvish eyes see?" is Aragorn saying, as politely as possible, "Because the REST OF US are at a significant disadvantage, Prince Dipshit."

[sailooorm]

Plum!💜

[incredibly-cold]

Celegorm would dress like a cowboy if he knew about how cowboys dress

[incredibly-cold]

Hang on I have to go draw something

[incredibly-cold]

Sketch version bc idk when or if I will get around to a better one

[recursivewitch]

I've never read Homestuck but there's a type of media that I call "a Homestuck" and I think it's a useful categorization. The main criteria are:

long enough that the time investment is a serious barrier to entry

irrevocably changes your personality

brings something genuinely unique to the table. there is no real substitute for reading/playing/watching it in its entirety

Fate/Stay Night is a Homestuck. Worm is a Homestuck. When They Cry is a Homestuck.

Undertale has cultural impact similar to a Homestuck at first glance, but the fact that it's a pretty short and accessible game means that you don't get the particular mix of sunk cost fallacy and an intimate experience with a piece of media that results in you needing to connect with others who have already put in the time investment. You can buy your friends Undertale and expect them to play it if they're not too busy; telling a friend to read Homestuck is giving them a quest that, if accepted, will spark an odyssey. to read someone's Homestuck is an act of love without true equivalent.