Stars and Silver Swords @starsilversword - Tumblr Blog

swellbythewind

After the tale

Artist：___Ves

not my art but my commission.want to picture their life of exile

knucklecurve

filthy, filthy read

satan-offical

white boy, you are GAY.

dusky-shark13

Leo Valdez to Jason Grace

lowpawly

this is my impression of what it would look like if the toddlers at my job could make traumacore edits about me

lowpawly

alright by popular demand here is more toddler traumacore

enbyofdionysos

The Fellowship movie did Bilbo so dirty ☠️ I know they didn’t make the hobbit movies yet so they were trying to keep the focus on Frodo but:

Bilbo is friends with Aragorn and comes to his defense over Boromir rather than Legolas

Bilbo volunteers to take the ring to Mordor first so nonchalantly like an old queer professor on sabbatical volunteering to cover a 101 course and everyone at the council is honored by his offer

Literally not even scared or sad about it or anything — just straight up “yeah okay I see what you’re getting at, Lord Elrond, I’ll do it 💅 guess I’ll have to rewrite the ending of my book”

Bilbo doesn’t ask to see the ring again or make a go at Frodo but instead sings a sad little song out the window after giving him Sting and his mithril shirt

“it is my dwarf-mail that Thorin gave me” AAAH

Bilbo’s there when they leave Rivendell in the winter and tells them good luck like a worried little peepaw

Also the movie makes it sound like he never got to Erebor but HE DID and was traveling with some of the original company including Gloin who’s the only one who smiles when Bilbo volunteers to take the ring to Mordor

luxfuxxvii

WHAT?!???!??!?!

enbyofdionysos

fam, I have fantastic news for you which is that there is so much Bilbo content in Fellowship of the Ring it literally reads like fanfic sometimes but instead of fanfic it’s canonical lore about my favorite old gay would-be professor (I feel like you can tell Bilbo is Tolkien’s favorite)

in addition to these points here, there’s the fact that:

Bilbo writes and sings so many songs that many of the songs in LOTR are his — Pippin’s song is his walking song in minor key, Aragorn’s “prophecy” thing in the movie is a poem/song Bilbo wrote, the song Bofur sings in The Hobbit extended edition is a song Bilbo wrote that Frodo sings (and has a good voice, too!) in The Prancing Pony on a table to distract people

He also apparently taught Frodo and his friends the Misty Mountains song because they sing a parody of it that they Weird Al Yankovic’d to be about their adventure with the Ring when they’re starting their journey

Bilbo’s actually gone like 20 whole years between when Frodo last sees him on their birthday and when he sees him in Rivendell, and he’s been hanging out with Gloin and the boys the whole time

It’s also implied that he hangs out with the dwarves frequently after The Hobbit — they come to his birthday party and help him move out and when Bilbo leaves Bag End, he specifically says how excited he is to be on the road again “with dwarves!”

Frodo also thinks when they’re in Moria that he suspects he knew exactly how expensive the mithril shirt was Thorin gave him

catawampuscorner

I'm back on my Muppets LotR bullshit 💅✨

✨Patreon✨| Bluesky

echo-bleu

The tapestries made by the Aubusson manufacture based on the art of JRR Tolkien are currently exhibited at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris until May. @actual-bill-potts and I went there yesterday, they're so beautiful!!

These are all handmade tapestries, each is based on a Tolkien artwork (the Rivendell one has the facsimile on the right for scale).

Under the cut: group ID and bonus details

contact-guy

Did you know that JRR Tolkien wrote an unpublished epilogue to Lord of the Rings? It's achingly, beautifully wistful in the way that only Lord of the Rings is. I revisited it recently because I'm guesting on my friends' LOTR podcast, and THAT reminded me that I drew a comic of the epilogue back in 2021 (all text is entirely canon). Anyway I thought folks on this website might enjoy it!

kristorey

new neighbor’s causing problems. love the idea of Thranduil unintentionally dragging Elrond into a horror movie but Elrond is too devoted to let him deal w anything alone to mind, anyway we love scary things happening in the woods :)

also if thranduil were insisting he had a feeling the necromancer was sauron and that was always in the forefront of elronds mind the first meeting of the white council then gandalf confirming it is. going by book timeline not the cursed movie trilogy

ministarfruit

single dad thranduil struggling to parent baby nuisance legolas is so important to me

cy-lindric

Gimli & Legolas sketch that went too far

metamorphesque

The Lord of The Rings: The Two Towers, J.R.R Tolkien

emilybeemartin

I had a dream that Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli were solving a murder mystery in a giant mansion. Legolas kept eating popcorn.

emilybeemartin

Part II

aquitainequeen

Looking back on it now, I think that one of the strangest things about The Lord of the Rings is that either

Aragorn and Legolas managed to compose an absolutely epic lament for Boromir in the time it took to get Boromir’s body down to the river and arranged all nicely in the boat,

or Aragon just started singing on the spur of the moment and Legolas took over for the second verse while Aragorn quickly made up the third.

That’s some Cyrano de Bergerac wizardry right there.

absynthe--minded

Consider: Aragorn and Legolas had a generic lament all worked out with Mad Libs-style blanks for relevant personal details, just in case someone kicked the bucket and nobody else was down for singing their death song

fargreencountryswiftsunrise

OR

We take the fact that The Lord of the Rings is multiple of translations before it gets to the reader and is, in fact, made up by a later author and they just did some sort of haiku.

beradan

oh no Boromir

he is very dead what do

put him in the boat

whetstonefires

I can absolutely buy that Legolas made up verse two while Aragorn was singing verse one, and that Aragorn’s education was long on ‘spontaneous poetry to suit the occasion.’

Consider, it’s likely there are a couple existing templates for elegies in terms of tune, so they just needed words, and if ‘dialogue with the winds’ is also a common poetic device, the song basically just requires plugging in some suitable rhymes. Aragorn could totally hack that together in the time it took to pile up all the orcs’ weapons and arrange Boromir nicely in the boat and all that.

The wild part to me has always been that they chose to sing as Denethor. Legolas didn’t even know Denethor, and Aragorn knew that Denethor disliked him personally.

maglor-still-lives

Aragorn and Legolas share broad elvish music practices, but from wildly different cultures, so it’s possible that the style of their verses did not match up at all

ach-sss-no

i just recently reread this and i noticed another wrinkle

‘You left the East Wind to me,’ said Gimli, ‘but I will say naught of it.’ ‘That is as it should be,’ said Aragorn. ‘In Minas Tirith they endure the East Wind, but they do not ask it for tidings.

i know the thing is that the east wind comes from mordor and they’re leaving it out for that reason. but this also sounds like

gimli: you left a verse for me but i’m not doing it aragorn: no no no we didn’t leave a verse for you. we don’t want you to do a verse. we’re good

rohirric-hunter

This song was almost certainly a Gondorian lament, with, as someone else suggested, mad-libs style openings for personal details. Aragorn would have known it due to his time spent in Gondor or possibly written it himself in the Gondorian style – he would have used something appropriate to Boromir’s culture at any rate, not something random. Most likely Legolas made up the second verse while Aragorn was singing the first, but a verse was not left for Gimli because it’s less likely he would have the cultural knowledge to compose something appropriate. Legolas shares a language and a number of cultural values with the Gondorians that gave him a window that Gimli just wouldn’t have had.

That being said, I imagine Aragorn didn’t really intend for Legolas to start singing either, he just kind of did and it would have been more disrespectful to pick a fight about it so he went with it. Legolas’ verse has this interesting equating of the sea with death, which makes sense for him, as an Elf who was probably born in the third age. Everyone he ever knew who went to the sea probably never came back, and the concept of Valinor is probably more of a theoretical to him than to many older Elves. Sailing probably seems more like the Doom of Men to him than it really is.

This is, however, not really a cultural concept that Gondorians are likely to share, with their multiple coastal cities and specific history regarding the sea. The foundering of Númenor, while clearly still alive in their cultural memory, was still the event that led to the inception of their nation, and in other poetry regarding Gondor, such as the song about the Palántiri that Gandalf sings to Pippin, it is treated as a beginning, and not an end.

TL;DR: Legolas’ verse is a little bit off, culturally speaking, and most likely Aragorn intended to sing the whole song himself, but just kind of rolled with it when Legolas got involved.

emfyre

@sweetshire said prev tags sooo

#elves are absolutely the sort of people who WOULD spontaneously make up songs like that tho #and have the innate sort of music-in-their-souls thing where even a silly flibbertigibbet like legolas could absolutely jump-in like that #and follow someone’s lead even when they start singing in an utterly unfamiliar style and concept #half the conversations in mirkwood are probably spontaneous songs rather than talking #(remember the tra-la-lally elves in the hobbit? elves just do this shit) #(the world was formed from song and elves are tied to the world more than anyone else they are music and music is them yadda yadda) #and aragorn is both a: well-travelled enough and b: familiar enough with elves in general to be unsurprised when legolas jumps in #because OF COURSE he does? he’s an elf and someone is singing a lament for a shared friend OF COURSE HE SINGS TOO? that’s what you DO

#did aragorn deliberately leave an opening for legolas to take the second verse because he knows enough about elves to know he probably woul #or was it a surprise that he just rolled with? idk #but it honestly fits both those characters very well that they would do this like this #(gimli could ABSOLUTELY make up spontaneous songs like this too; but dwarf-songs are very different and probably have more rules) #(at least more rules than wood-elf songs which are probably pretty willy-nilly compared to gondor’s cultural structures) #and the fact that aragorn’s verses sound like something Traditionally Gondorian and probably are drawn from existing frameworks #while legolas’s goes more towards the sea (the sea! he hasn’t even heard the gulls yet and already it’s seeping into his songs! my HEART!) #is exactly the sort of depth and nuance of language i expect from tolkien tbh

tags via @tathrin

#tolkien #song