Would you mind doing the Tolkien meme for Fëanor?
Feanor is my all time favorite Tolkien character, so, no, I would not mind!
1-3 things I enjoy about them
Gosh. I…I can say a lot about Feanor. Consider yourself duly warned. (I shall try to restrain myself somewhat.)
I like that he basically throws everything into everything he does. Dude does not have a halfway setting. Creation, devotion to his family, having a fight with said family, how to react when an evil god kills your father and destroys paradise…For all that the common perception of him in fandom is of a bitter and destructive person, he has always read to me as a person of almost boundless enthusiasm for the world around him. His joy and his grief, and yes, his rage also, are all dialed up to eleven, and that’s a solid chunk of what makes me like his character so much.
I like that he was one of very few, if not the only, Noldor who never had traffic with Melkor, and that he slammed his door in his face. That was one of the most beautiful moments in the entire canon.
I also really like the way he died; that in ten days he and the forces he’d landed with managed to rout…basically Morgoth’s entire forces (thus kind of saving literally every elf still in Middle Earth and not living in Doriath, which probably explains why the Feanorians were so popular with the northern sindarin really), and then ended up dying because he’d gotten too far ahead of the rest of his army persuing a force of balrogs. Like. The balrogs were in retreat. How. And then spontaneously combusting because he had to dial his death up to eleven as well as the rest of his life.
Something interesting about them based on tenuous circumstantial evidence
Uh. This one actually proved quite challenging, because while I have a great many thoughts about Feanor, I…don’t think most of them are very circumstantial? I have thoughts based on what I think is pretty solid evidence, and then I have headcanons. But we get a lot more canon about Feanor than most others, so…
One theory about him based on circumstantial evidence that is commonly accepted as canon, but which I think is straight up wrong, is the idea that he’s stuck in Mandos till the end of the world? But I wrote a whole long post about why I think that’s not the case a while ago, so I shan’t repeat myself.
Hrm. Based on the timeline of when he got married and how many kids he had, I think his oldest son is quite likely to be older than several of his siblings? but that’s really more an interesting thing about Maedhros.
IDK, people can ask me questions about Feanor till the cows come home and I’ll probably have thoughts on them.
A question I have about them
I don’t know if it’s a question so much as I would really have loved to see him get to meet the dwarves. I think they would have loved each other. Also, there’s a non-zero chance that Feanor is familiar with Khuzdul (spent a lot of time with Aule, who invented it, while having an obsessive interest in languages) which would just add to the situation.
My preferred version, if there is more than one version of their story (or part of their story)
Oh, as with most things, canon Silmarillion, though I do supplement with bits of HoME, notably the Shibboleth, and the Statute of Finwe and Miriel.
Toss up! I love love love his relationship with his wife, but I did already go into it at length when I did this meme for Nerdanel, so I will instead nominate his relationship with Fingolfin. Honestly these two would have been largely unstoppable if they’d worked together, which is presumably why Melkor worked so hard to ensure they didn’t.
How would they react to Tom Bombadil
Feanor is a true polymath; he’s obsessively interested in everything, as near as I can tell. I rather suspect the same would hold true here.
Optional: Something about them that I think people forget
I think people forget that the Finwean family was not always at odds. Even once Finwe had remarried; the text, irrc, specifically says that there wasn’t strife in the house before Melkor did his thing to try to engender it. I’m entirely certain that he and his siblings loved each other– that’s why what happened was a tragedy. I mean, There was pain in the household before Melkor, that’s what he was working on, but…
When he was the equivalent of about…five years old, his mother, whose death everyone agreed was his fault (I mean, the Valar straight up said so in their legal decision on the topic. Granted, they were talking causality and not moral fault but why do I suspect that’s not how the five year old heard it.) decided to stay dead forever because his father wanted more children.
I don’t actually judge Finwe for wanting to remarry; if Miriel did, indeed, want to stay in Mandos forever, that’s her choice, and he has his own life to live. But dude, you’re immortal, you will not loose your virility, or get too old for kids. You could have waited until your kid was an adult. It was a lot to put on a five year old, and then when an evil god shows up later in life, there are all those sore places they can poke at.
Feanor was (canonically) more upset that his father had been killed than that the silmarils had been stolen, and you know, I rather suspect that when Fingolfin arrived from crossing the ice ready to punch his brother in the face, he was similarly upset to find that Morgoth had killed his brother as well as his father. More fic where the members of this family love each other, is what I’m saying.
Also, on an entirely unrelated note, given what we know of his work, I rather strongly suspect most of it wasn’t done in a forge.
