Hi I've been exhausted lately but I finally finished some Middle-Earth cane designs for Disability Pride Month and they make me very happy.
Click for better quality, zoom in please I spent way too long on these.
I'm a cane user, and most fictional or antique canes really annoy me, because they're rarely actually usable or practical. So this is my attempt to design usable but still interesting canes for characters I have somewhat arbitrarily projected disability onto. For example, they all have padded handles and most have wrist straps.
Individual design ramblings below!
Nerdanel has some type of genetic chronic illness, I haven't decided exactly what yet. Her cane has metalwork decoration, and a locking hinge mechanism to allow it to fold, because one of my canes is folding and it's super useful. Those parts were made by Mahtan. The Fëanorian star carving and crystal section were later modifications, and I think Nerdanel would continue modifying it throughout her life.
I've drawn Idril with prosthetic legs post-Helcaraxë, and some people with prosthetics use canes or other mobility aids for extra balance. I also headcanon that her silver legs were made by Celebrimbor once he ended up in Gondolin, so before that she may have had lower quality prosthetics and relied more on a cane. Hers has an eagle carved into it (Thorondor maybe), as well as eagle feathers, ribbons, and her heraldry for decoration. Elenwë's name is also carved closer to the base as a memorial (hopefully I did the tengwar right).
Celebrían uses a cane in Valinor due to her injuries. Hers is mallorn wood with metal decorations. Specifically the snake and flowers reference the House of Finarfin. The snake is made of mithril, which i think would be popular for mobility aid details due to its light weight. Also, she got Celebrimbor to help her make it after she dragged him out of Mandos.
Elros' is the only one without a wrist strap because I unfortunately couldn't work it into the design well. He uses it due to a leg injury from the War of Wrath, mostly because I wanted Elrond to encourage him about it in a fic I never finished. The handle is a carved and painted seagull, the column shows fish, and the base has Eärendil's star.
Caranthir inherited Nerdanel's condition, the only one of the sons who did. He didn't start using a cane until they were in Beleriand, so his is a from-memory recreation of Nerdanel's, made with Curufin's help. It also has metalwork details and a hinge. The textile wraps were his own addition, and the claw and beads were gifts from Haleth.
Faramir was born disabled with chronic health issues (again haven't decided exactly what yet), but this wasn't publicly acknowledged by Denethor as it didn't "fit the image". He had very little access to mobility aids growing up because of this. Injuries from the War of the Ring certainly didn't help, and he started using a cane after that. His was given to him by Éowyn, and was made in Rohan, hence the horse. The blue fabric band with stars is a reference to the cloak he gave her, and the lower band was made using remnants of Boromir's horn as a way for Faramir to carry his brother with him.
☕️ + Rhun in TROP if you watched it because I think you’ll have a interesting take on it
send me ☕️+a topic for my take on it!
Hahaha I have indeed watched it and I’ve actually talked about the Gaudrim from TRoP here before, and yes I do indeed have a Take. Just a general note for the reader, please don’t take this as some sort of anti-show vendetta or wank or whatever, it really isn’t and I don’t even wank about adaptations on here, this is just my thoughts on this specific aspect, I have tagged the appropriate critical tags, and you can absolutely scroll if you’re not keen on reading it.
Anyway, the minute these riders came on screen, literally every single bit of pomp about the show’s progressive casting and representation flew right out of the window for me and turned it into unashamed diversity theatre. It was truly the moment that made me sit back and go “ah, this is an American production funded by the Amazon corporation”. Took me right out of the setting and plunged me into post 9/11 USA. Because I’m sorry just look at these fuckers. Forget Lawrence of Arabia, these are straight up elf-jihadis under the spell of Istari bin Laden… 😭
And one of the most interesting things I learned about these guys — the actors playing were actually a relatively diverse cast and clearly individualised… yet for some reason these anonymising masks were added in post-production.
What really got my goat about all this is the fact that it is SUCH a DEEPLY unnecessary portrayal, so clearly reactionary War on Terror propaganda, that the only way I can read it is as a deliberate decision, without even a shred of allowance for ignorance, because once again, the advertising for the show literally uses its own progressivism as a hook. Because there was literally no need to do this shit. Like you have to go out of your way to do something like this. Tolkien is notoriously not-good with race, and the Easterlings were the perfect example of that. The Jackson films aren’t great with race, and the Easterlings were the perfect example of that. TROP is self-admittedly aware that neither Tolkien nor the films are good with race and that the Easterlings are the perfect examples of that, decided to shoehorn them into the narrative as the ‘Gaudrim’ and… somehow made them worse.
I chat at length under the cut re: US exceptionalism, protestant ethnics, war on terror logic, desert-spaces, and why exactly this plotline was so galling to the point I had to rewatch those scenes like “???” and how it frankly just put a bad taste in my mouth for reasons way beyond Tolkien adaptations or lore… sorry this turned into an essay haha but it’s so you don’t think it’s just me blindly criticising something because I don’t enjoy it or interpret it differently.
So firstly imo what’s crucial here is understanding that the desert riders don't simply represent post-9/11 anxieties… their inclusion in that form outright reproduces the securitisation logic of the War on Terror. And this isn’t me forcing a progressive read of an adaptation that never claimed to be righting racial wrongs, because the entire Adar plotline with the orcs (as much as I am a bit iffy about certain aspects there) was proof that the writers are perfectly aware of how fantasy can think about populations constituted as "life to be protected" versus "life disposable to violence."
The first problem for me here is how the show constructs the riders as a collective rather than as individuals. Again, a clearly deliberate choice in a piece of media where half the characters are straight up OCs, many of them well fleshed out and elaborated upon. You have an entire plotline about Harfoots and Stoors with a full new cast of characters, and yet you never even see the riders’ faces, never hear their individual stories, never witness any internal differentiation or dissent within their ranks, only an instance of collective disagreement with their leader. Sure you can say ‘this might come later’ but looking at the narrative trajectory, I simply do not think so and even so, literally every other in-group has been depicted at length already.
And this depiction of racialised populations as a collectively violent mass, this coding through ‘swarm’ and ‘horde’ aesthetics has a very trackable genealogy in colonial discourse about non-Western peoples lacking individuation. Anonymised people of the global south, etc. The riders answer only to Blue bin Laden, are not positioned as a nation-state enemy to be negotiated with or defeated militarily in conventional terms… Gandalf doesn’t treat with them, he treats with the wizard. The riders are simply a band of terroristic agents in an area very clearly representing ‘the Orient’, who are willing to kill children over a payment dispute with their boss, a kind of illegible viral threat that requires ‘divine’ counterinsurgency in the form of Bombadil and Gandalf. The lack of faces under headscarves worn in a style blatantly similar to representations of Arabs + them literally wearing fucking skull masks (edited on them in post!!!) isn't just dehumanisation fyi… it's the visual articulation of an enemy that cannot be comprehended as human through the liberal USamerican 21st century frameworks of personhood the show deals in. Just look at the very name they’re given! Gaudrim, ostensibly from the Sindarin gaud (machinery, contrivance, according to TG)!!!
Anyway this is where Lawrence of Arabia / Gandalf of Rhûn comes in, the savior figure and an example of a particular technology of power at work… elven and Maiar magic is benevolent even when violent, operates in service of life (healing, protection, nurture). Meanwhile, the desert riders' power (through their connection to the dark Istar) is necropolitical from the jump, oriented towards pure destruction.
This isn't a morally neutral "corruption" narrative or a general black-and-white fantasy portrayal of good and evil… this takes the Oriental horde tendencies of the Easterlings from the source text and gives it a contemporary, worse, face. In a show where everyone from a random orc extra to literal Sauron is presented as redeemable or at least not ontologically ‘bad’, the elf jihadis are given no such humanity. Even their doubts are to do with honour and payment. And the thing is, for a production claiming a racial progressivism that sets it apart from its predecessors… this not a unique portrayal! This is the logic of War on Terror American exceptionalism!
As in, our violence is regrettable but necessary, protective, ultimately life-giving; their violence is pathological and must be eliminated. The show literally cannot imagine the Gaudrim as having legitimate grievances or complex motivations, their only disagreement with their leader being a basic argument over compensation and the loss of ‘honour’ for these former kings. They follow the dark wizard because *checks notes* they're just like that 🤪🤪🤪
Vulnerable to extremism and prone to fanaticism. Like, you know…
Ok moving in to spacial politics, because the desert is doing some heavy lifting lmao… and this isn’t much of a difference from book canon, in which there’s a general lack of information about the Easterlings at large, their general coding and desert setting being enough to fill in the blanks in a, well, Lawrence of Arabia sense. The adaptation takes this and dials it up to 2000, with perfect awareness of how exactly a desert setting functions in post 9/11 visual cultures, ie as an “everywhere war” space (Derek Gregory term iirc), where it’s simultaneously nowhere (outside civilisation, beyond the polis) and everywhere (the frontier or boundary requiring vigilance and intervention).
Contrast this with how Lindon, Númenor, Eregion and Khazad-dûm are shown in the adaptation: spaces of architecture, culture, history, law, hallmarks of sovereignty and civilisation… there was even that bit at the end of the second season where Elrond cries out about the burning of Celebrimbor’s books and centuries of research. Not so with the Gaudrim. These guys emerge from this vacantly violent desert space, existing in a state of exception from the other groups… the only culture and lifestyle seen in the desert belonging to the Stoors, who ostensibly leave the desert at the end. There's no room for understanding Gaudrim culture as legitimate or any proof of their position in a meaning-making system. Meanwhile, the elves' devotion to the Valar, the dwarves' relationship to Aulë, even the Harfoots' folk traditions, are all treated as enriching cultural practices.
And Gandalf’s journey was made fun of by critics as faux Lawrence of Arabia for a reason! Because it is! It’s a narrative of penetration into an ungovernable space, Bombadil’s oasis (don’t get me started oh my fucking god) and Gandalf’s presence the only instances of order/knowledge/‘proper’ magic as opposed to chaotic dark arts. This is textbook civilising mission stuff filtered through counterinsurgency logic!!!
Again, this isn’t Tolkien’s Orientalism reproduced uncritically, this is a deployment of those tropes in a specifically USAmerican sense. I think it was Rey Chow who coined the phrase “the protestant ethnic”, but it basically describes how liberal multiculturalism insists on cultural and ethnic differences being performed in legible, consumable ways. And so it is here! The "good" diversity in the show (Black elves, dwarves of colour etc) operates within palatable Anglo frameworks: they all wear clothes recognisable as ‘typical Western fantasy’ costumes with a Byzantine/Southern European influence, they speak RP English, all except the proto-Hobbits have Sindarin as a common tongue, they all participate in courtly politics (dwarves) or engage in traditional militaristic pursuits (Adar), value individual achievement but act in the interests of a legible cause. And the cause might be ‘evil’, eg with Sauron, but it’s comprehensible: they all are depicted as people who think of themselves as righteous. Their racial difference is epidermal, their cultural logic is functionally Western.
The riders, by contrast, are illegibly Other: their dress, their language, their social organisation all mark them as outside modernity. There’s no ‘fantasy robing’ here, they’re what ChatGPT would spit out if you asked it to make you a fantasy jihadi, and their motivations are ‘compensation’ and ‘put under a curse of the flesh’. And crucially, the show never does the work of making them legible as it does for its other populations, makes no effort to translate their difference into something even approaching complex subjectivity.
And so what this kind of simplistic racialised portrayal of these anonymised people who blindly ‘serve’ every evil that comes around does is naturalise ‘intervention’ as a permanent necessity in places like Rhûn and Harad… a position that the books carry uncritically into the Fourth Age. The Easterlings aren’t a one-time-threat to be defeated, they’re a population perpetually susceptible to radicalisation. Such a region doesn’t call for militaristic defeat but for population management, not the winning of a single war but the maintenance of indefinite security operations. The Westerly men and elves cannot just fix the ‘problem’ of Harad/Rhûn and leave, their presence is permanently necessary… from the First Age to the Fourth, world without end…
Sound familiar? 🤡🇺🇸🇦🇫
And let's be clear about what gets disappeared in this framework: any possibility of understanding the riders as responding to actual material conditions or histories of domination. Even in Tolkien's texts (and this is saying something!!!), there are at least hints that the Easterlings and Haradrim have been conquered, deceived, or coerced by Sauron… that their enmity toward the West might have explanations beyond simple evil. The Rings of Power forecloses this entirely. The Gaudrim riders appear racialised and threatening from the outset, with no backstory that might complicate the good guys/bad guys binary aside from a flesh-curse inflicted by a single character… just like all the other ‘simplistic’ reasons for the Easterlings’ evil across the legendarium, it is weak on its own and clear as day when viewed as a pattern. And I’m sorry but imo this is identical to how War on Terror discourse severed terrorism from any connection to US foreign policy / economic imperialism / support for authoritarian regimes.
The terrorists hate us for our freedom, not because of anything we did to them. The Haradrim serve darkness because they're vulnerable to evil, not because they have historical grievances.
Finally, there's the question of rehabilitation and redemption: who gets offered the possibility of real internal change? Galadriel can be consumed by vengeance and find her way back. Isildur can be an arrogant dickhead and learn humility. Sauron gets a whole seduction-and-corruption arc that grants him psychological depth. Adar and orc-rights are a major plotline. But the Gaudrim are either threats to be eliminated or victims to be saved, with no middle ground where they might be political actors making strategic decisions within constrained circumstances. This is the fundamental violence of how a ‘terrorist’ is constructed in the post 9/11 imagination, ie not as a political subject with agency, but as either monster or dupe, either evil mastermind or brainwashed footsoldier. Either way, not fully human in the way that grants political legitimacy.
What all this, and the muted reaction to it aside from the people who already talk about race in Tolkien, told me was just… how deeply the biopolitics of the War on Terror have been naturalised into our reception of a story, the way tons of people who praise the show for its surface level representation and hold themselves as somehow more antiracist than the rest for such a veneration, only acknowledge the Gaudrim’s depiction as a blip in otherwise progressive narrative… at best.
And this isn’t me saying that people who don’t let this portrayal impact their entire reading of the show’s progressiveness are bad people or aren’t media literate or anything like that. It’s actually more telling of how the binaries of civilisation versus barbarism / savable versus disposable populations / benevolent intervention versus illegitimate unruly resistance have just… become the default settings for how we imagine good versus evil. IMO it isn’t that the Gaudrim are a problematic representation in a single show… it’s that they're purposely symptomatic of an entire apparatus of racialisation that reconfigured how post 2001 USAmerican cultural production imagines difference itself. And slapping some diverse casting on the package doesn't interrupt that apparatus, it just makes it an easier pill to swallow.
What stands out to me about the Mitch McConnell thing is just how little anyone around him actually cares for him as a person.
He goes down, ends up in a coma or brain dead, on life support, genuinely never coming back and even if part of him did he would be in agony from his cpr injuries. The best thing is to let him go.
But its not convenient to. His own *wife* runs away to China so they can't *make* her do the right thing and allow him to pass. She doesn't love him enough to override the political posturing. His own family is letting his abused half alive carcass get played with like a political doll while he's trapped in purgatory, as close to undead as one can be.
Not one of his colleagues or even any of his immediate family gives a single shit about him at all beyond what they can use him for. Its so grotesque I almost feel pity.
I really don’t want to open this can of worms because Tumblr hath no fury like people called out on their political performativeness but it is literally driving me up the wall to watch people react to Serkis’ ‘keep Tolkien white’ commentary by insisting twice as hard that Tolkien would descend down to earth and dropkick the entire Republican party to hell or whatever, just because they want to ensure that a piece of media they enjoy isn’t seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkien’s ‘I hate apartheid’ valedictorian address being used as a ‘counter’ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.
Except it’s only ever the ‘I hate apartheid’ line that’s shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:
If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.
Which is to say. This isn’t exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going ‘omg we relate’ and expressing what is a very, very mild ‘segregation is not great’ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.
I also think that some of the general surprise around ‘what do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?’ in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose one’s own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist it’s anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck… and then getting really Pikachu-meme ‘but they’re misreading it’ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with ‘I don’t see colour’ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.
I genuinely don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.
What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?
Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.
No, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.
There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very ‘get thee gone from my gate’ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.
Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkien’s own thoughts on military atrocity in general is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.
The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.
Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidental”, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.
Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible… casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge ‘scandal’ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politics™️, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.
I didn’t want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesn’t need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.
Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkien’s few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And it’s just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.
I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic ‘love’? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?
This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.
You can put actors of colour in Númenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.
So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.
But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and we’ll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkien’s world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.
Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.
We don’t need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting “keep the Shire white” Serkis soundbites and “hooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!” news cycles standing in for a conversation that hasn't actually started yet, and ngl buddies I have to say I personally will be biting people the next time I see yet another rendition of the same damn response-reaction cycle start again because everyone, both the conservatives and the left, wants the things they love to be a reflection of themselves, and will twist themselves into pretzels to ensure that remains the case.
...with a snippet from my WIP Gil-galad rebirth in Valinor / malicious (and strange) compliance with son-of-plothole fic!
The concept from Tolkien's notes in LaCE/NoME of rebirth rather than reembodiment is something esoteric I think deserves poking with a stick as the implications are delightfully messy (to the point that in Tolkien's last writings a few months before his death he decided it caused too many problems and should be thrown out. But no! The complications make it interesting!!!)
Gil-galad is currently known by the name Fingal in this fic, having been reborn to Finrod & Amarië's daughter, Berinya (OC). Amathorn is another OC, who was Gil-galad's chief guard since (his first) childhood.
When Fingal's hands were busy, his mind seemed to wander back to Middle Earth. Typically it was something pleasant, singing a song that he did not fully know the words to but did his childish best to fill in what was still veiled. Occasionally it was outright adorable. Not long ago Amathorn had seen him drawing a river and valley that looked suspiciously like the Bruinen and Imladris while sing songing "Elrond, Elrond, Elrond" as he coloured.
This was not either of those cases.
One moment Fingal was on the floor, drawing the leaves they had seen today when he froze and dropped the pastel. He sat up abruptly, eyes wide and flicking across the room until he came upon Amathorn in the doorway.
"Amathorn," he began, and his voice had lost the childlike quality. "We have not set aside enough stores of grain for winter!"
Fingal got to his feet, hands clasped in front of him they way they had as an adult, as High King, when he was distressed and trying to hide it.
Amathorn crossed the room, scooped his little body up, and bent again for the abandoned paper and colours.
"Fingal," he said, placing deliberate emphasis on his new Amilessë, "there are no shortages of resources in winter here in Aman. The seasons are not that extreme. And even if they were, that is not for you to worry about little Star."
Fingal, although he was much more of a miniature Gil-galad at the moment blinked a few times, and then shook his head. He rubbed at his eyes.
Amathorn handed a green pastel back to him once his hands came away from his face. The child stared at it for a moment, and then grabbed for his paper and squirmed from Amathorn's arms. He flopped back on the floor, but just stared at the leaves on the page rather than continuing to draw.
Amathorn sat beside him, and rested a hand across his tiny shoulders.
"Did you remember something?" He asked.
Fingal would not look at him for a long moment, but his eyes started to well up with tears.
"There was always so much to worry about." He said, his voice small.
"There was," Amathorn agreed. "But not anymore. You are safe in Aman now. No wars. No scarcity. No responsibilities."
Fingal's little face turned up towards him.
"Who takes care of everything then? I didn't - I didn't - Elrond never wanted to," he paused, glancing around conspiratorially. "Elrond never wanted to lead."
Amathorn leaned in closer and kept his voice soft. "Elrond never wanted a crown. He is perfectly content to lead from Imladris. Círdan is taking care of the Havens and helps the Lindon Council when they need it. You need not worry about any of that. You are here to be a child again, remember?"
Memories and moods of Middle Earth had bubbled to the surface before in Fingal, but unlike in the past, this was not dissipating from him quickly. He seemed frozen.
"Come," Amathorn decided. "There is still time before lunch to go put our feet in the stream and look for pebbles to give to your mother. What do you think of that?"
Fingal nodded slowly, but did not move.
"Come on," Amathorn deliberately picked the child up again precariously and tossed him in the air before catching him in a better grip, attempting to jar him out of whatever this was.
Typically Fingal would giggle and clap at being thrown, and ask for it again and again. He did not even smile.
Perhaps the cold water would help.
This was reminding Amathorn more and more of what he had heard Elrond say about how traumatic stress presents itself long after the events take place.
"I died. I think - no, I know. I died, and that is how I came here?" He blinked up at Amathorn.
"Yes, my Star. But you do not need to dwell on that now."
"No! I died! I died! I - I -"
Berinya rushed into the room, no doubt having felt her child's distress. At the sight of her, Fingal burst into tears.
"I died! I really died! I don't remember why!"
Berinya reached for Fingal and Amathorn handed him over. She cuddled him close to her chest, kissing his cheeks and making soothing noises.
It struck Amathorn how unfair it was to have her trying to manage this. How unfair it was for any of them, including Fingal to be suffering through this. He stepped closer to them, taking a little hand, still very soft with childhood, and kissed the palm.
"You do not need to remember that right now. Your memories are veiled for a reason. You previously seemed to recall something of Mandos and what he said to you. Does that help calm you?"
Fingal gave a few more hiccuping sobs.
"Mandos said I would not remember much at first. That it would come back later as I got older. He said - oh!"
The child slumped in her arms.
"Fingal? Fingal!" Berinya cried, shaking him gently and slapping lightly on his body. Amathorn's heart dropped. Berinya was on the floor with him checking for a pulse, and Amathorn joined her, checking breathing. He felt exhalation coming from both his mouth and nose.
"His pulse is strong," Berinya said and relaxed minutely.
"His breathing seems clear too," Amathorn leaned in as Berinya leaned back and put an ear to his chest, listening to tiny lungs. "Yes, his airway sounds normal."
Amathorn sat up, and Berinya put her hand across Fingal's forehead, reaching for his fëa. "He is just- he is only sleeping. He is not unconscious, he did not faint or anything of that sort."
"Strange," Amathorn said, feeling better. "But I will take it."
Berinya ran her hands over the child's body again, checking for unseen injury.
"I suppose we should put him to bed," she said hesitantly.
"I think we would be well within reason to stay with him while he sleeps."
Berinya tucked him in, with his plush Aeglos next to him and Elrond-the-plush-bird in the crook of his arm. She stepped back with a sigh. Amathorn placed a hand on her shoulder and squeezed.
"I am sorry-" he began, but was interrupted by a sharp knocking on the front door.
Berinya looked at Fingal and then back at him, clearly not wanting to leave her son.
"I will go see who it is," he suggested. She nodded.
Amathorn was not sure who he expected to be at the door, but it was not a Maia.
"May I come in?" She asked.
"Um, yes?" Amathorn made a snap judgement to what Berinya would likely want.
The Maia marched past him to Fingal's room. He followed, catching Berinya's startled gaze towards their visitor. The Maia smiled sadly at Fingal, and bent over to touch his forehead.
Fingal's eyes closed. Berinya gasped.
"Peace," said the Maia. "He is unharmed. The veil was growing too thin, my Lord Mandos is working with the help of Lord Irmo to restore those defences. His fëa is strong, and burns very hot. We were unsure how much his lineage may affect the process of rebirth." She smiled, "the little scamp is just causing some mischief. My Lord is seeing to it. He will not remember more than he should when he awakes."
"His lineage?" Berinya asked.
The Maia turned back towards her, cocking her head. "Not all has been revealed to you yet, daughter of Finrod. Or to him. That time will come, but it is not today." She looked back at Fingal's sleeping form, nodded satisfiedly, and vanished.
Berinya looked at Amathorn.
"Do you know…?"
"I do not. Is he the first Finwëan reborn?"
"I believe so. But that doesn't seem like it would affect -"
Amathorn shook his head. "I would not think so," he agreed.
They were both at a loss for further words.
This fic has the prologue posted on AO3 so far, with the much longer fic in progress. You can subscribe to the series here if you're interested! It is a very esoteric answer to son-of-plothole + lots of examination of all the weirdness that would come with rebirth.
getting characters into world-endingly intense codependent queerplatonic relationships is literally what life is all about. it is literally what we were put here on this earth to do
Bonus points if a franchise hires you and you go in knowing you'll have to write the friendship break up eventually, but it's okay because you get to share the agony with thousands of people.
...with a snippet from my WIP Gil-galad rebirth in Valinor / malicious (and strange) compliance with son-of-plothole fic!
The concept from Tolkien's notes in LaCE/NoME of rebirth rather than reembodiment is something esoteric I think deserves poking with a stick as the implications are delightfully messy (to the point that in Tolkien's last writings a few months before his death he decided it caused too many problems and should be thrown out. But no! The complications make it interesting!!!)
Gil-galad is currently known by the name Fingal in this fic, having been reborn to Finrod & Amarië's daughter, Berinya (OC). Amathorn is another OC, who was Gil-galad's chief guard since (his first) childhood.
When Fingal's hands were busy, his mind seemed to wander back to Middle Earth. Typically it was something pleasant, singing a song that he did not fully know the words to but did his childish best to fill in what was still veiled. Occasionally it was outright adorable. Not long ago Amathorn had seen him drawing a river and valley that looked suspiciously like the Bruinen and Imladris while sing songing "Elrond, Elrond, Elrond" as he coloured.
This was not either of those cases.
One moment Fingal was on the floor, drawing the leaves they had seen today when he froze and dropped the pastel. He sat up abruptly, eyes wide and flicking across the room until he came upon Amathorn in the doorway.
"Amathorn," he began, and his voice had lost the childlike quality. "We have not set aside enough stores of grain for winter!"
Fingal got to his feet, hands clasped in front of him they way they had as an adult, as High King, when he was distressed and trying to hide it.
Amathorn crossed the room, scooped his little body up, and bent again for the abandoned paper and colours.
"Fingal," he said, placing deliberate emphasis on his new Amilessë, "there are no shortages of resources in winter here in Aman. The seasons are not that extreme. And even if they were, that is not for you to worry about little Star."
Fingal, although he was much more of a miniature Gil-galad at the moment blinked a few times, and then shook his head. He rubbed at his eyes.
Amathorn handed a green pastel back to him once his hands came away from his face. The child stared at it for a moment, and then grabbed for his paper and squirmed from Amathorn's arms. He flopped back on the floor, but just stared at the leaves on the page rather than continuing to draw.
Amathorn sat beside him, and rested a hand across his tiny shoulders.
"Did you remember something?" He asked.
Fingal would not look at him for a long moment, but his eyes started to well up with tears.
"There was always so much to worry about." He said, his voice small.
"There was," Amathorn agreed. "But not anymore. You are safe in Aman now. No wars. No scarcity. No responsibilities."
Fingal's little face turned up towards him.
"Who takes care of everything then? I didn't - I didn't - Elrond never wanted to," he paused, glancing around conspiratorially. "Elrond never wanted to lead."
Amathorn leaned in closer and kept his voice soft. "Elrond never wanted a crown. He is perfectly content to lead from Imladris. Círdan is taking care of the Havens and helps the Lindon Council when they need it. You need not worry about any of that. You are here to be a child again, remember?"
Memories and moods of Middle Earth had bubbled to the surface before in Fingal, but unlike in the past, this was not dissipating from him quickly. He seemed frozen.
"Come," Amathorn decided. "There is still time before lunch to go put our feet in the stream and look for pebbles to give to your mother. What do you think of that?"
Fingal nodded slowly, but did not move.
"Come on," Amathorn deliberately picked the child up again precariously and tossed him in the air before catching him in a better grip, attempting to jar him out of whatever this was.
Typically Fingal would giggle and clap at being thrown, and ask for it again and again. He did not even smile.
Perhaps the cold water would help.
This was reminding Amathorn more and more of what he had heard Elrond say about how traumatic stress presents itself long after the events take place.
"I died. I think - no, I know. I died, and that is how I came here?" He blinked up at Amathorn.
"Yes, my Star. But you do not need to dwell on that now."
"No! I died! I died! I - I -"
Berinya rushed into the room, no doubt having felt her child's distress. At the sight of her, Fingal burst into tears.
"I died! I really died! I don't remember why!"
Berinya reached for Fingal and Amathorn handed him over. She cuddled him close to her chest, kissing his cheeks and making soothing noises.
It struck Amathorn how unfair it was to have her trying to manage this. How unfair it was for any of them, including Fingal to be suffering through this. He stepped closer to them, taking a little hand, still very soft with childhood, and kissed the palm.
"You do not need to remember that right now. Your memories are veiled for a reason. You previously seemed to recall something of Mandos and what he said to you. Does that help calm you?"
Fingal gave a few more hiccuping sobs.
"Mandos said I would not remember much at first. That it would come back later as I got older. He said - oh!"
The child slumped in her arms.
"Fingal? Fingal!" Berinya cried, shaking him gently and slapping lightly on his body. Amathorn's heart dropped. Berinya was on the floor with him checking for a pulse, and Amathorn joined her, checking breathing. He felt exhalation coming from both his mouth and nose.
"His pulse is strong," Berinya said and relaxed minutely.
"His breathing seems clear too," Amathorn leaned in as Berinya leaned back and put an ear to his chest, listening to tiny lungs. "Yes, his airway sounds normal."
Amathorn sat up, and Berinya put her hand across Fingal's forehead, reaching for his fëa. "He is just- he is only sleeping. He is not unconscious, he did not faint or anything of that sort."
"Strange," Amathorn said, feeling better. "But I will take it."
Berinya ran her hands over the child's body again, checking for unseen injury.
"I suppose we should put him to bed," she said hesitantly.
"I think we would be well within reason to stay with him while he sleeps."
Berinya tucked him in, with his plush Aeglos next to him and Elrond-the-plush-bird in the crook of his arm. She stepped back with a sigh. Amathorn placed a hand on her shoulder and squeezed.
"I am sorry-" he began, but was interrupted by a sharp knocking on the front door.
Berinya looked at Fingal and then back at him, clearly not wanting to leave her son.
"I will go see who it is," he suggested. She nodded.
Amathorn was not sure who he expected to be at the door, but it was not a Maia.
"May I come in?" She asked.
"Um, yes?" Amathorn made a snap judgement to what Berinya would likely want.
The Maia marched past him to Fingal's room. He followed, catching Berinya's startled gaze towards their visitor. The Maia smiled sadly at Fingal, and bent over to touch his forehead.
Fingal's eyes closed. Berinya gasped.
"Peace," said the Maia. "He is unharmed. The veil was growing too thin, my Lord Mandos is working with the help of Lord Irmo to restore those defences. His fëa is strong, and burns very hot. We were unsure how much his lineage may affect the process of rebirth." She smiled, "the little scamp is just causing some mischief. My Lord is seeing to it. He will not remember more than he should when he awakes."
"His lineage?" Berinya asked.
The Maia turned back towards her, cocking her head. "Not all has been revealed to you yet, daughter of Finrod. Or to him. That time will come, but it is not today." She looked back at Fingal's sleeping form, nodded satisfiedly, and vanished.
Berinya looked at Amathorn.
"Do you know…?"
"I do not. Is he the first Finwëan reborn?"
"I believe so. But that doesn't seem like it would affect -"
Amathorn shook his head. "I would not think so," he agreed.
They were both at a loss for further words.
This fic has the prologue posted on AO3 so far, with the much longer fic in progress. You can subscribe to the series here if you're interested! It is a very esoteric answer to son-of-plothole + lots of examination of all the weirdness that would come with rebirth.
[Image ID] screenshot of a tiktok by @/uyenniverse depicting a girl wielding her cane as if she's going to hit you with it, the text overlaid reads "when someone is making fun of my cane so I lowkey decide they should just join the club:" [End ID]
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