A Silmarillion Nerd hiding somewhere under infinit

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[silm-somewhere-under-infinity]

Hi i'm Silm Nerd the some-number-below-∞ aka Sy.

Main blog @syaraan

Pronouns: (honestly I don’t really care at this point, i’m just another semi-anonymous nerd on the internet…)

Reason for this blog: I thought I should probably make a dedicated Silmarillion (and just general Tolkien nerd) blog so that I can keep things organized. 

Things you will see here from me:

Head cannons

What ifs

Random OCs and their stories

Poems (maybe)

Fanfics if I ever get around to writing them down (semi-unlikely)

Ideas for fanfics that I will probably never write

apparently art now?

Things that I will reblog here:

Cool Tolkien stuff

Awesome Tolkien stuff

The works and writings of brilliant people with a shared obsession with the writings of a (more genius than we will ever be) dead professor

[vrabia]

the silmarillion is wild because you read it and you're like huh okay, and then you read lotr and it turns out everyone's just going around doing their own thing while the surviving elves are living through the final chapters of a post-apocalyptic horror story

[vrabia]

rivendell's a pretty chill place, right? everyone gets along splendidly. dream retirement home et cetera. solid chance the guy you're having afternoon tea with has either survived or personally committed war crimes. also the reason it's so chill is elrond has this magic ring that makes it so the whole place exists slightly outside normal time

galadriel's been around since the beginning, like, for pretty much all of middle-earth's history you understand, she has Seen it all and despite what you may have been led to believe is at all times this close to snapping. also the reason lothlorien is so chill is she has this magic ring that makes it so the whole place exists slightly outside normal time

i can't emphasize enough how much of a post-apocalyptic horror story thranduil lives in. homeland destroyed and half his people massacred. has fucken sauron in his backyard and the spawn of the primordial beast that eats light puttering about on his lawn. a dragon lives next door. does NOT have a magic ring and is therefore obliged to rule over his murderforest in normal time

just so we're all on the same page here, legolas' day job before joining the fellowship was to hunt the spawn of the primordial beast that eats light and it's not like, a big deal or anything. he just has to do it. he's used to it.

'elves are leaving middle-earth and it's so sad :(' they have ptsd samwise.

[outofangband]

The existence of Ancalagon is horrifying in every way. To anything and everything he encounters and for himself.

Ancalagon is an anomaly. Far too large to live in any meaningful way. He was born to die in the War of Wrath and to take as much of the world with him as he could.

He is created from thousands of parts. He is erratic, fragmented. He is constantly in agony.

Dozens, perhaps hundreds died in his development. Elven thralls who were forced to aid in and die for the creation of a weapon meant to destroy their homes and people. Those some of his parts came from. Those who simply got too close.

Bones fracture when his wings expand, acrid blood falls from the sky, staining the rocks of Thangorodrim, long before Eärendil lands a single wound to him

His flesh and bones poison the earth, the sky, the water.

His entire existence is cruel and sad and painful and destructive.

[lotrandcats]

Maedhros at the end (I recently got an iPad and Procreate and am trying it out… but here is my first attempt at some Silmarillion art)

[rinthecap]

Day in the life of a blacksmith 😎

[avantegarda]

video game and film fandoms will come and go for me but the Silmarillion fandom will never die. because that book came out like 50 years ago and we're all still trying to figure out what the hell is going on there.

[hamletthedane]

Average Silmarillion fan:

[anattmar]

Fingon <3

[shadesfalcon]

J. R. R. Tolkien: no, my books aren't about the war I experienced. It's just a story

J. R. R. Tolkien's works: you cannot go home, war ends entire bloodlines, you are mourning the death of your brother alone, you dug into the earth and permanently scored the land, you cannot explain what you have been through, you cannot go home, "that wound will never fully heal. He will carry it the rest of his life", leaving the women behind does not save them, the young die first, you cannot go home, the parent will bury their child, you have lost the wives and you will never connect with them again, "how shall any tower withstand such numbers and such reckless hate?", you are not the same, you cannot go home, you can never go home, your father will only side with those he sees as worthy bloodlines and you cannot change his mind, it is more meaningful Not to kill, sometimes your sacrifice accomplishes nothing, you cannot go home

[lyragoth]

Thank you for all the suggestions <3

Here are some grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Finwë. The firstborn and their respective nephews/niece.

~ Maeglin has the same haircut as his father. He wears light colors as an homage to his mother, and he resembles Fingolfin. ~ Those who are familiar with my Galadriel will understand Celebrian’s annoyed expression.

[eri-pl]

Passive voice, more active passive voice and translations and early Silm chapters

There's a sentence in the Silm that has always irked me. Something along the lines of "Eru had always loved Manwe more than Melkor". Which... I won't go into a full discussion, because I'm not that educated, but even if I could get what Tolkien was thinking there... Sir, it still makes your idea of God sound like a toxic parent. Sir.

[And yes, I do like Melkor a lot which may impact my reding of this, but it may be the other way around too: I tend to like the characters whom the narrative does dirty in my eyes, in a way that I find jarring.]

So I've always handwaved it as "Pengolodh wrote this because of the well-known Manwe:Melkor::Feanor:Fingolfin comparision, it's basically saying 'Finwe should have chosen Nolofinwe as his heir, not Feanaro'".

But. I was thinking about Latin and something came to my mind: so originally this was written in Quenya, or even went through Valarin (Manwe explaning his backstory to some Maiar -> the Maiar talking to Elves -> Rumil -> Pengolodh).

And I don't remember how it goes in English, but even if in English it's active voice, maybe the original was passive voice (s in: "Manwe was more loved..."). And

IDK how Quenya does it, but maybe it does it like Ltin, or maybe Valarin does. And Latin does passive voice in a way that sounds (to me at least) more active.

Linguistics aside with examples: In English, you say "the dog is seen", and in Polish you say "pies jest widziany" but in Latin you say "canis videtur". No "is" in this sentence. Not [subject] [is] [adjective-like verb form], but [subject] [verb for of "receiving the activity"]

And to me, this sounds like the "-tur" is something more actively done, like the dog is actively working to be seen. Especially that some verbs sound like this in their active forms, eg "loquntur" [speaks/talks] sounds like a passive voice but isn't.

So. If we can assume that originaly that remark was "Manwe had always more [doing the thing that's 'being loved'", like he'd always been more open to being loved... yea that's a tautology.

I don't know if Quenya does passive like this, and my feeling that this is more active is unfounded in anything except language intuition, but whatever. I will now HC that at least Valarin (of which we have nearly no information) has an active passive voice meaning "actively receiving the action" and this is how it was originally explained (probably by Varda tbh, Manwe would not gloat like that) and then it went through translatons and the meaning was lost.

[galileosballs]

This interview with Ncuti Gatwa crossed my dash again, and I was reminded of how much I like it. Because it makes the rare Third Argument for representation in fiction, the argument I think is the best, and I'm always happy to see it. I quote:

At times, Gatwa’s casting in those projects has been dismissed as an exercise in ‘box-ticking’. Gatwa scoffs. ‘First of all, you don’t know anything about me. Secondly, tick fcking boxes! People need to be fcking seen. What are you going to do, tell the same stories? Have the same people fronting things for all of eternity? Representation and inclusivity and branching out… it enriches us all. How embarrassing. You people with your tiny mindsets – open a book, look out the window and then f*ck off.’ (source)

What do I mean by the Third Argument? Well, I'm not sure I've ever made a post about this directly, but as far as I can see it, there are three main arguments for greater diversity in popular media. The first two are the most common, and they go like this:

It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see people like them on screen. That is, the beneficiaries are marginalized people.

It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see and learn about people who are not like them through art. That is, the beneficiaries are non-marginalized people, who then (hopefully) pass on the benefit by treating marginalized people better.

These two arguments are the source of a lot of debate here on ye olde tumblr. Despite both being arguments for representation, they pull in different directions. What counts as 'good' representation for the purposes of Argument 1 often would not be good for the purposes of Argument 2, and vice versa. Authentic versus sympathetic. Ugly or over-sanitized. You see this debate play out constantly. It's really hard for a piece of - say - queer media to do both at once.

But these debates tend to leave out Argument 3, the one that Gatwa is making above. And that argument cuts through a lot of this debate.

3. It is good for media to be diverse because art needs variety. The beneficiary of representation is art itself, absent any social effects that may or may not be present.

For this argument, diverse stories are intrinsically good. It is good to make art that's not just the same thing you've seen a hundred times before. Putting the kinds of people who don't often make it into mainstream media into your art is an extremely efficient way to make that happen. It's not the only method, but it's a really good method.

For representation to be 'good representation' according to Argument 3, all it needs to be is interesting. A story you haven't heard before, at least not in that medium. That which counts as 'bad representation' by the lights of this argument are stock characters, like the Eternally Patient Mother, the Gay Best Friend, the Wise Black Advisor. Perhaps there was a time in which these characters were new, but that time has long passed. There's no art in pulling a bog-standard character trope off the shelf. Show us a new kind of guy. The world is infinitely diverse. You're not going to run out. Telling the same stories with the same voices for all eternity, as Gatwa says, is boring. Even if there was nothing else wrong with it, this would be. Art isn't supposed to be boring.

And that's why Argument 3 is my favourite. I do want the world to be a better place, of course, and I think art is a part of that. But the main job of art is to be good as art. And diversity in all aspects of the production of art makes art better.

[tathrin]

The next story I am Definitely Not Writing: a fic where Legolas and Gimli make it all the way to the Undying Lands before they realize that in addition to loving each other more than anything else in all of Arda, they are also in love with one another (this is less a realization on their part and more an assumption that just about everyone else in Aman makes on sight, and eventually they hear about it and go oh...dang...maybe...? and Legolas's mom facepalms forever) and hey what if they got married, then...?

Only the thing is, while an elvish marriage is very simple and requires literally nothing but the folks involved deciding to do it (and no, Thranduil is not allowed to demand that Gimli fetch some priceless jewel from the Fëanorian section of Tirion in order to prove himself worthy of Legolas's hand, although he tried very very hard to convince everyone that it was a great idea) a dwarven marriage is an elaborate ceremony, requiring the participation of both a dwarven officiant and several members of one's kin to perform the various elements of the ceremony.

...all of which are in short supply in this land of elves and valar.

Except. well. there aren't any other dwarves in Aman...but what there is, is the guy who made the dwarves. And he is VERY fond of Gimli. So when he learns that Gimli is kind of moping about the fact that he can't marry Legolas in dwarven-fashion, Aulë ENTHUSIASTICALLY volunteers to be the officiant and to set everything up and arrange just the BEST DWARVEN WEDDING EVER...

Because, you know. he's never actually been to one?

Gimli is stricken with horrified shock to realize just how much his own Maker has missed out on interactions with his beloved dwarves over the years, and immediately agrees to this plan (even though he knows it won't be a real dwarven wedding without his family there; but he'll swim back to Middle-earth before he says one word about that anywhere that Mahal can hear! he is going to do everything in his power to make this the best wedding ever for the sake of his Maker, dammit!).

So he gets to work crafting all the necessary accoutrements (with enthusiastic help from Celebrimbor and all his other elf-smith friends that Gimli has acquired since coming to these shores which is, let's be honest, quite a few) and carefully teaching Legolas all the necessary Khuzdul phrases and ceremonial steps that they can do to mimic as much of a proper wedding as they can without anyone else to help...

And when the big day comes, Aulë is vibrating so hard he's on the verge of setting off seventeen different earthquakes across the island, and not even Yavanna can get him to relax. Gimli and Legolas arrive to the appointed place, and find that they aren't alone: Aulë has invited Celebrimbor, too, seeing as he's the only elf in Aman who has actually participated in a dwarven wedding before with makes him the local expert as well as the closest thing to "kin" that Gimli is going to find on these shores...except.

Well, Mandos might be in charge of elvish souls, but dwarves? They belong to their Maker. And if Mahal decides he wants to...well, who is going to stop him from waking some of them up early, before the breaking of the world? Especially if he doesn't ask permission first. So when Gimli and Legolas hesitantly walk into this foreboding stone chamber, eerily close to the Halls of Mandos, wondering wtf is going on and have they offended the valar somehow and are they in trouble and if so how bad is it...?

Well, turns out Gimli will have kin at his wedding after all.

Mahal can't bring any of them back to life, not without the intervention and permission of Eru and probably Mandos too; but as long as they're in his halls, he can wake anybody he wants. So soon there is a great crowd of bewildered but enthusiastic dwarves gathered around Gimli, as he tries to explain what the heck is going on to a whole passel of relatives and friends, some of whom died even before the Lonely Mountain was reclaimed and don't even know how the Battle of Five Armies ended, let alone the whole thing with the Ring and the Fellowship...

And Legolas and Celebrimbor are standing near the entrance watching fondly, Legolas weeping around a great big smile and Celebrimbor torn between joy for Gimli and his own ever-bitter sorrows and then...

"Khelebrrimbor?" calls a deep dwarven voice, in a thick Khuzdul accent, and Celebrimbor stiffens like he's just been shot.

Suddenly there's a ruckus as a very burly dwarf is shouldering through the crowd, and Celebrimbor stumbles forward and throws himself at Narvi with a wail, and it's at least ten minutes before anyone can get a coherent word out of either of them (although it takes considerably less time to catch the gist of Narvi's lecture about how dare you and lucky he's already dead, or I'd have a gift for him he wouldn't forget in a hurry and what were you thinking???).

Legolas gives Aulë a very pointed raise of his eyebrows, and Aulë shrugs around an unabashed grin. "Who in all the ages of the world is more of an expert on marriages between elves and dwarves than the two of them? I am a craftsman, Greenleaf; of course I would want to make use of their skills and experience in this endeavor. Nothing more to it than that."

Legolas hums noncommittally, but his eyes are dancing.

Mahal ignores him and steps forward to start the wedding. It takes even him three tries before he can shout loud enough to be heard over the tumult and get everyone's attention, but eventually he gets them all to quiet down enough for the ceremony to begin. Not everyone in attendance is entirely thrilled by the prospect of Gimli marrying an elf (that elf) but no one is so cross that they walk back into their dreams of stone to avoid it, which Gimli chalks up as a victory.

(Legolas's terrible Khuzdul pronunciation doesn't help, but the very enthusiastic way he praises Gimli when the ceremony reaches that point makes up for a lot. By the time he finally runs out of words, a few of the more recalcitrant attendees have changed their tune about him. The fact that he's so good at weaving the required braids doesn't hurt, either.)

There aren't nearly enough refreshments for a crowd that size afterwards, of course, since Gimli and Legolas weren't expecting anyone but themselves and Aulë to be there; but that doesn't much matter, because 90% of those in attendance don't have the sort of corporealness that would allow them to eat the dwarven delicacies that Gimli spent all morning fussing over anyway. (That doesn't stop some of his more elderly relatives from scolding him for not following their recipes better.) They're solid enough that you can hug them or kiss them, in the case of a certain former smithlord of Eregion or get half-knocked off your feet by their congratulatory backslaps, but they aren't alive. They're still the dreaming dead...it's just that for the moment, they're dreaming in a bit more wakefulness than usual.

In the end it's not what one would call an orthodox dwarven wedding, no; but it's a lot closer than Gimli thought he would get, and since he's hardly an orthodox dwarf, the small tweaks and oddities of their strange situation don't bother him in the slightest.

As for Aulë, he's never been happier.

And if it takes a long, long time for Celebrimbor to finally leave (and if he tries to devise a way to prop the door open on his way out)...well, Aulë is enjoying himself far too much to do anything but pretend not to notice. Even when Námo clears his throat at him very pointedly.

Twice.

And then again. And again.

"Aulë...!"

[nadiajustbe]

I love how the Lord of the Rings books keep reminding me that Frodo Baggins is still a little local aristocrat and also incredibly, almost astonishingly educated. And he also, intentionally or not, has no problem with showing off all about it.

One of the first things he does after meeting the elves on his way to Crickhollow is greeting the elves with the longest possible phrase in quenya, an action which equally shocks and entertains them, because no other hobbit in the group (even the higher gentry, such as the Tooks and the Brandybucks) know any other language but Westron. And he countines to do that during the whole evening, wishing them a good meal and throwing casual phrases, despite everyone knowing westron incredibly well. He does that yes, partially out of sheer respect, but also I believe he also does it just because he can. He knows this language no one else in his little company does, why not speak it, really?

Or, at the Pracing Pony, when the other inhabitants of Bree ask him why is he traveling so far to and beyond Bree, and instead of saying something about far visits or changing the topic altogether this absolute nerd of a hobbit goes and tells them that's he's interested in history and geography and he also wants to write a book. More than half of these words are not even in the local vocabulary (as said by the text itself) but he doesn't care.

I am absolutely sure half of these moments is less so him being intentionally prideful and more so him absolutely and genually not taking into account that these folks might not know what the details of geography are or why he has to research it. Which honestly makes it even better.

Frodo Baggins is quite literally the smartest guy around and he has no problems with it being known.

[hmcraft-art]

The Nazgûl and the Ring (2017)

[skinofalien]

[highlyrelateablegoblin]

My genuine NEED for people to understand that Shelob is not “just a giant spider” cannot be understated.

That is the last known living child of the being of the abyss that destroyed the trees of light you’re referring to. That’s not a spider it is a demigod of an unfathomable evil beyond Sauron’s BOSS.

And SAMWISE FUCKING GAMGEE scared her off.

[orions-mistletoe-arrow]

My favorite headcannon I have going for LOTR right now is that the elves that are still around by the time Frodo gets on the scene are the elvish equivalent of doomsday preppers.

I forget where I read it, but I'm pretty sure that at some point there were millions of elves on Middle-earth, and by the end of the third age, it's down to a few thousand, aka a very small portion. These are the elves that got told way back in the first age, "Hey, just so you guys know, you're totally welcome to come back and live in heaven now without any worries" and responded, "No thanks, we're good!" and then proceeded to not only hold to that but survived the next 7.000 years of bullshit including but not limited to:

Multiple continents sinking into the sea

orcs

dragons

balrogs

multiple wars with Sauron, a literal divine being

The rise and fall of several human empires

more orcs

wargs

a bunch of their territory being overtaken and burned to the ground

And all of their loved ones either dying or sailing, even though we know that grief can and will kill an elf

Like, you can't tell me that third age elves start showing up in the undying lands, where everyone has spent the last few thousand years basking in the magical equivilant of free therapy and probably have as many defence measures as a suburban coldesac, and aren't viewed as the most feral, twitchy, paranoid mother fuckers; held together by suspicion, stubornness, and at least 25 contingencies for every situation they've collectively encountered during their time in Middle-earth.

My favorite examples of feral, hyper-vigilant behavior include:

Elrond: Security clearance; sure, Turgon may have threatened to kill anyone who tried to leave his hidden city, but he also took an entire army out of and back to the city at once, and then also didn't realize that his own nephew snitched on where the city was. His security protocols sucked. Meanwhile, Elrond had hundreds of strangers coming in and out of Rivendell for over 3,000 years, at one point completely surrounded by enemies and full of nothing but a bunch of refugees, and Sauron still never found it. You can't tell me that he didn't have at least 25 security checkpoints on the way into his city(sorry, house-that means it's private property, right?), even if you didn't know they were there.

Galadriel: Paranoia; This woman was magically keeping track of everyone she knew and even did it often enought that she knew what to look for of those she couldn't directly track (gandalf) and looking into their minds and testing them. All while having Sauron constantly clawing at the walls of her mind, at least for a few years

Thranduil: Spite; it was basically only his sheer audacity holding his nuclear bunker- cough cough- sorry, I meant vast underground halls together, while his next-door neighbor was some cursed ruins, a dragon-infested dwarf kingdom, and evil, man-eating, car-sized spiders on his front lawn.

Haldir: he blindfolded the fellowship when they tried to enter his city (super secret hideout), need I say more?

Multiple examples of groups of elves jumping out of trees fully armed and ambushing anyone who wanders into their territory. And while the characters seem surprised to be ambushed, they don't seem surprised that elves ambush people in general, leading me to believe this is normal behavior.

In summary, while the elves in the LOTR and the Hobbit seem all chill and fun, I like to imagine them as the crazy raccoons of the elvish family trees that wandered in 5 hours late.

[armenelols]

If I might add, concerning Rivendell, in The Hobbit, Gandalf struggled to find a path there. He would have gotten there soon enough even without the aid of tra la la lally elves, but nonetheless, according to the elves, Gandalf and the company were a bit out of the way of the path.

Gandalf. Who has been to Rivendell a shitton of times, probably. Gandalf struggled to fimd his way in.

And in LotR, Elrond clearly controls Bruinen in a way to deter intruders

The siege of Rivendell by Witch-King's armies during wars with Angmar lasted 50 years. Rivendell is a house, not a fortress, and it lasted half a century.

Elrond has very successfuly barricaded Rivendell against enemies. He, cannonically, had the above mentioned 25 security checkpoints