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This is a Jirtpost blog. I am not a bot, I am an adult, and I believe that every time Aragorn takes a shower an angel loses its wings.
I'm always up to bullshit with @aragornkingsmusk, and made his icon.
TAG NONSENSE CLARIFICATIONS:
i’ve made something cursed
if you need someone to remember you, just know, i remember it all
is this anything
Im bawling
Reblog if you too wish Boromir was your dad.
all the trees are good and useful. well, except the briar. fuck that guy
STOP talking shit about different trees Yew is used for BOWS Ash for BARRELS Oak can be used for POSTS Pine can be used for SOMETHING ELSE Briars Elms shelter BIRDS
I know I talk pretty regularly about Faramir's weird command over animals, both because he's my fave and it's cool, and because it's just such a strange detail. But I've also been thinking for awhile about some less direct but still intriguing quotes about how he relates to animals.
So, the usual ones first. Here's Beregond, describing Faramir getting his horse to run towards five Nazgûl while the other horses are fleeing:
‘They will make the Gate. No! the horses are running mad. Look! the men are thrown; they are running on foot. No, one is still up, but he rides back to the others. That will be the Captain [Faramir]: he can master both beasts and men.’
Then there are nameless soldiers in Minas Tirith, watching the orderly part of the retreat across the Pelennor:
The watchers held their breath. 'Faramir must be there,’ they said. 'He can govern man and beast.’
(For context, the ancient Númenóreans he takes after could summon particularly beloved horses by thought alone.)
But also, back in TTT, we heard some interesting details that may be pertinent. Firstly, there's Faramir himself, speaking to Sam:
'Were I as hasty as you, I might have slain you long ago. For I am commanded to slay all whom I find in this land without the leave of the Lord of Gondor. But I do not slay man or beast needlessly, and not gladly even when it is needed.'
And when Anborn reports glimpsing the creature that turns out to be Gollum, he says to Faramir,
'You will not have us slay wild beasts for no purpose, and it seemed no more, so I tried no arrow.'
I think the suggestion here is that it's not standard policy for them to avoid killing wild animals, but a command from Faramir specifically. And he's clear here that he doesn't kill animals for any purpose other than necessity.
And I mean ... if I could get nervous animals to run straight towards Ringwraiths, I'd probably feel weird about killing them, too. But it all does fit together very neatly.
This also has the best tags ...
Thank you very much!
Reblogging purely because I'm always entertained that the single character with the "powerset" most similar to Faramir's seems to be Queen Berúthiel, and I amuse myself thinking about it sometimes.
I'm just imagining Boromir (age 12) telling Faramir (age 7) about the story of Queen Berúthiel and going on about how she could communicate with cats
Faramir, who has befriended eight different mousers in the tower and knows three of them are currently curled up under his bed: ok [shh stay where you are, don't meow, you'll have to leave if anyone notices, be quiet]
Boromir: she could command them to do her bidding
Faramir, unimpressed: ok
Boromir: she would send them around the city to watch everything and everyone, and could see in the cats' minds what they'd noticed and use all that knowledge for evil
Faramir, nervously focused on the cats, struggles to multi-task between listening to Boromir and a vague awareness that one mouser is confused about not purring but pleased in cat fashion about outwitting some dogs and having a Climbing Adventure earlier that day and another left paw prints in the Steward's chamber: ok
Boromir: but she actually hated them and tormented them, too
Faramir: WHAT
The Pyre of Denethor is both more and less dramatic in the book than in the movie. In the movie they actually have Pippin personally pull Faramir out of the burning pyre, which is extremely cinematic, but in the book Gandalf arrives before the pyre is lit and rescues Faramir before that can happen, and actually has time to have a big argument with Denethor about whether or not he has the right to commit suicide before he actually does it. This is because of a character who doesn’t appear in the movie - a city guard whom Pippin befriended the day before the battle is alerted to the situation by Pippin, and he comes and actually physically prevents Denethor’s servants from bringing him torches until Gandalf can arrive.
Gandalf’s argument with Denethor is interesting, as with all of the other dialog between them - Gandalf tells Denethor that only “heathen” kings kill themselves and their family members when all seems lost, but “heathen” kind of doesn’t have a lot of meaning in a world without Christianity. The companion speculates that he meant people who don’t recognize Eru/people who worship Sauron or Morgoth by that term. This actually goes a bit against the way Tolkien has been worldbuilding these cultures so far, as they are mainly based on the Anglo-Saxons and their contemporary Germanic cultures, and those guys were all about committing ritual suicide to reclaim honor. But Tolkien was a Catholic, and as such, would have considered suicide a sin. It’s not the only place Christianity came into the narrative - the entire conception of Eru as a singular creator who is the only being capable of creating true life is also a Christian concept. As discussed in my replies to rorylgilmore, there’s also dialog about Aragorn in this argument that in the movie was awkwardly transplanted to the very first meeting of Gandalf and Denethor, which makes Denethor seem kind of paranoid in general, whereas in the book when he says this he’s at the end of his rope and is looking for reasons to attack Gandalf.
In the movie, when Pippin tells Gandalf what is going on with Denethor, he immediately puts him on his horse and runs off to deal with it. In the book he is reluctant to leave his position of managing the battle and says that if he leaves to save Faramir, other people will die. When he comes back from dealing with Denethor, he looks out from the city and seems to see the death of Theoden and says something that implies that he perhaps could have saved Theoden if he had been able to be there instead of having to deal with Denethor. He doesn’t blame Pippin or Denethor though, but Sauron - Denethor’s madness was caused by his use of the palantir, through which Sauron allowed him to see exactly what he knew would make him lose hope, and Gandalf considers this an attack by Sauron just as much as the actual battle that is going on.
After the battle, there’s a great sequence in which Aragorn personally heals Faramir, Eowyn, and Merry (Eowyn and Merry have had something Nazgul-related happen to them as a result of stabbing the witch-king). To go back a long time to the first half of the Fellowship, just after Frodo was stabbed with the morgul blade Aragorn tells Sam to look for “athelas”, and then when he doesn’t understand, gives it the name “kingsfoil” and Sam exclaims that that is a weed. This was a nod to this part of the story in Minas Tirith - although Aragorn did actually treat Frodo with athelas in the Fellowship in the book, he already had some and actually claimed that it didn’t grow at all in the area where they were. But in Minas Tirith, he actually does have to ask the herbmaster for athelas and (in typical Tolkien fashion) the guy gives him a long speech about all of its different names in the various languages and how it has no medical properties whatsoever and then finally says that he doesn’t have any, so they have to go find someone who does. Some other minor characters say things to the effect of that there is some mythology surrounding the idea that it had healing properties when used by the kings, but there hasn’t been a king in Gondor in a very long time… Then Aragorn uses it to heal Faramir, Eowyn, and Merry, and spends a lot of time with Elrond’s sons healing the other people who were injured in the battle. Faramir seems to recognize that Aragorn must be the king immediately after he is healed (it’s not clear how - maybe the mind powers I discussed earlier? maybe he recognized the healing powers somehow?) and then the rumor that the king has returned and is healing everyone circulates.
The companion says that Aragorn’s healing power is not just a power of the kings, but is actually inherited by all descendants of Luthien. Luthien was the Elf half of the first Elf/Man pairing that started the lineage that eventually resulted in Elrond and Elros, Elros being the first king of Numenor. I believe Luthien was also the daughter of a Maia, which would explain where this power came from. So, it’s not just Aragorn that has this power, but also Elrond and Elrond’s sons (who were helping Aragorn heal people) as well as all the kings of Numenor, Gondor, and Arnor. In fact, if you remember, Aragorn was actually not able to completely heal Frodo back in the Fellowship, and he had to be brought to Elrond to receive full healing. There’s a quote somewhere from Aragorn saying that Elrond is the most powerful descendant of Luthien and thus has the most of her powers.
There’s kind of a funny moment just before this happens when Aragorn tells Imrahil (who is the brother of Denethor’s deceased wife, who takes command of the battle while both Denethor and Gandalf are busy) that although, yes, he is the king, he is going to camp outside the city while the war is still going on because he doesn’t want to cause internal strife with Denethor, and Imrahil is like, yes, as a relative of Denethor I can tell you, this is a great idea, please do that. Of course, by the time this conversation takes place Denethor is already dead, so it turned out to be kind of a moot point.
Something I just remembered, re: insertion of Christianity into this story where Christianity doesn’t exist, is that back when there was that discussion of Tolkien using archaic English on purpose because he felt it suited the characters and wouldn’t make sense to use modern English, an example he actually gave was how having characters in a world without Christianity make references to the Christian god would be out of character and weird. But Tolkien did, in fact, add Christian elements to LOTR, where Christianity doesn’t exist, as you can see in this segment, and the fact that Eru is, for all intents and purposes, the Christian god.
Someone PLEASE tell the Witch-King of Angmar that this little hobbit genuinely thinks it’s anyone’s guess whether or not he’s literate. PLEASE.
To be fair, it is anyone’s guess. Literacy is not some sort of baseline qualification for kingship. Even if Angmar was a realm that put great stock in the written word (and we don’t know that), that doesn’t mean every single inhabitant is literate. Literacy is a specialist skill. Kings can afford to hire (or, in the case of Angmar, enslave) specialists if they need them.
Incidentally, if the Black Riders can read, we do not know whether they can read Shire-style Westron. Maybe they just know Sauron’s adapted Black Speech Tengwar mode and a little Sindarin on the side. WHO KNOWS.
Besides, at this point Frodo doesn’t even know who and what the riders are. For all he knows, they could be trained monkeys or enchanted clouds. He doesn’t even know if they’re sapient.
Also, I’m pretty sure at one point it is mentioned that the riders use their horses to see (just don’t remember whether this is before or after the above quote).
If that is indeed the case, and is mentioned prior to this scene, it is not unreasonable to assume that the riders cannot read by virtue of not being able to see the lettering.
Now picturing a rider holding a note in front of their horse and trying to make sure it doesn’t bite it
Oh my gosh, the rabbit trail tracing going on here is delightful
It really is. And yes, it is completely reasonable for Frodo to have no idea whether the Black Riders can see at all, read, read his language, etc., and simultaneously, I find it hilarious to imagine the Witch-King of Angmar finding out about this Doubt. …Especially if he was literate in life but would not (for any of the available reasons) have been able to read the note.
Oops, the previous one looks not OK and I checked the largest size of the image upload…yeah, mine one is definitely excessive.
So the back-up plan is to cut each character separately and put them into new canvas which are under the maximum size. The new one may looks a little bit confuse I’m sorry about that _(:з」∠)_
Hi everybody i am a Chinese Silmarillion fan named Angel1802, and i just struggled hard to get on tumblr. Updating some of my pictures about Lord Elrond, hope you like them.
im really amazing myself with my choices of reading material this year… think i’ve exhausted the readily available stores of good/tolerable ygo fanfic and i dont feel like returning to actual books yet. so i am now embarking on a re-read of “A Long And Weary Way” i.e. +400k of detailed wilderness porn featuring Aragorn son of Arathorn having the worst time of his life dragging Gollum kicking and screaming across middle earth. It’s just my two fave characters undergoing unrelenting suffering and tedium and hating each other for 86 chapters. ive selected this as my cheeky summer chick lit.
i enjoy this fic because while it is extremely well-written with an impressive level of realism, there are no character arcs per se… it starts off with aragorn enduring the hardship and frustration of a decades-long, fruitless search for gollum. and then the hardship and frustration just accumulates exponentially from there. aragorn does not really learn or grow from any of this and gollum does not get any more sympathetic over time. they do not bond. it’s just episode after episode of both of them having an absolutely shit time, rendered with great detail and skill, and this is deeply compelling to me
every time Rivendell has a council meeting it’s called an elrondez-vous
Partner and I have been rewatching The Two Towers for the first time in a long time.
anyway, one thing that has always been weird for me is Eomer giving Hasufel and Arod to random strangers, just like that. Just giving them away, two horses, to a trio of foreign travelers he just met and had suspected of being spies.
like. what? This is Rohan. Horses are the thing you value above all else, I don’t care if their riders are dead, even if their riders don’t have actual heirs somewhere to whom ownership would pass (or Rohirric inheritance law works differently and ownership has somehow defaulted to their éored’s commander, IDK), you’re still a calvary force planning to see a lot more battle in the near future, chances are high you’re going to end up with horseless riders who’ll need them.
this time I actually processed the fact, though, that Eomer believes they’ve inadvertantly killed two innocents, prisoners of the orcs, the beloved companions of these travelers.
The horses aren’t a gift. They’re weregild.
Oh, one of the other things about NOME and part-Elvish beardlessness: Tolkien says something to the effect that the beardlessness is one of the most enduring part-Elvish traits. You’ll get people who aren’t really very Elvish, but if there’s any amount of Elvish blood left, they’ll still be naturally beardless. And he particularly associates this with the House of Elendil’s descent from Elros, with a whole explanation of why that applies to the House of the Stewards also.
The short version is that Húrin of Emyn Arnen, while not a direct-line member of the royal house, was descended from Anárion and a recognized kinsman of King Minardil, which was part of the reason he was appointed to the Stewardship. We’ve known this was rattling around Tolkien’s head since POME, but it’s very clearly laid out in NOME in order to explain that Boromir and Faramir are Elrosians through Denethor and therefore beardless (+part-Elvish through Finduilas as well).
The thing I’m thinking is … it’d be interesting if there was some kind of, hmm, cultural cachet around beardlessness? I know a lot of people are really into bearded Dúnedain, but if natural beardlessness is one of the most lingering marks of royal ancestry, it seems like it’d be kind of loaded, esp in Gondor. Has it affected the Gondorian aesthetic? Is it some Gondorian value of punk for a young man to grow a beard, or pretend to? Are there ever any misunderstandings with, say, the Rohirrim re: age/status/etc?
I do suspect that, although beardlessness ultimately derives from Elvish ancestry, the fact that in most cases it comes through the royal line would lead to it being more associated with Númenórean royalty than Elves per se. Gondorians care a lot more about Elendil than Turgon.
[IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A screenshot of an email containing text from The Lord of the Rings, where Merry is telling the other hobbits about the Old Forest. A highlighted section reads, "They do say the trees do actually move, and can surround strangers and hem them in. In fact long ago they attacked the Hedge: they came and planted themselves right by it, and leaned over it. But the hobbits came and cut down hundreds of trees, and made a great bonfire in the Forest, and burned all the ground in a long strip east of the Hedge. After that the trees gave up the attack, but they became very unfriendly. There is still a wide bare space not far inside where the bonfire was made."]
Well, here's a detail that sticks out to me as Pretty Interesting from the email newsletter LotR read-along going on right now. (Yes I'm a couple days behind, that's how these generally go for me.)
I don't know exactly what conclusions I'd draw from it (and if anyone else has ideas, please add on!), but it does feel significant in light of the entire Saruman/Isengard/Fangorn/Ents/Scouring plotline(s) later on? Like I think much tends to get made of the Shire as somewhere fairly idyllic/idealized/nostalgic in relation to the role of Industry and Technology™️ in LotR/Tolkien more broadly, so then... what sort of complications to that theme come up when we hear about hobbits of the Shire doing such a similar thing to Saruman's treatment of Fangorn, to their own nearby semi-sentient forest? (And for that matter, way way before Isengard's industry ever is introduced, in a context of "this forest is genuinely creepy and not something we want encroaching on our living areas" that give the reader the impression that this cutting and burning is thoroughly justified.)
On the other hand... to an extent could this suggest a symbolic-reparation angle to Merry and Pippin later building a relationship with Treebeard and helping take down Isengard? (Not in the sense of that being their intention, I don't mean; more in a narrative echoes sense.) It feels like an interesting possibility to me, the idea of part of Merry & Pippin's growth involving coming into a perspective that directly contradicts actions their ancestors (generally speaking) took to safeguard the borders of the Shire, especially since iirc they end up taking on leadership/authority roles when they return.
(Also, a bit of direct wording that strikes me - Merry says the trees "attacked" the hedge, but just hanging out there and leaning over doesn't feel very attack-ish to me? Something something biased perspectives and storytelling and who controls a narrative (it's probably not feral trees). Maybe they did certainly do something more threatening too; we don't actually know! But still - curious and indicative of some common hobbit attitudes, most likely.)
Prophecy vs. Instructions
Years ago, I read something, I think from the Tolkien Professor, about the description of how the back door of Erebor will open: “Stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks and the setting sun with the last light of Durin’s Day will shine upon the key-hole.“ And I remember that he said that this was a prophecy, not instructions. It was not “do these things and you’ll see the keyhole”. It was “when these things occur, the keyhole will become visible, so you’d better be there waiting”. It’ll appear whether you’re there or not and whether you take any action or not. It’s a description of the future, not a list of things to do. And that’s stuck with me ever since.
It can be hard to understand prophecy since we’re stuck in linear time, going one direction only. And we’re very attached to the idea that we can control our fates. That’s one of the great fallacies shown in Greek myths: people think that if they just do something differently, the prophecy won’t come to pass. But its not a matter of if. A prophecy is a description of things that will happen in the future. Actually, I think that Greek prophecies takes into account what someone will do because they hear it. Maybe (probably) Oedipus never would have killed his father and married his mother if his parents hadn’t heard the prophecy and tried to get rid of him. After all, it only happens because he doesn’t know who they are. Maybe a Greek prophecy only becomes accurate the moment it is heard by another person.
It’s not so different in the Lord of the Rings. What I really want to talk about here is people misinterpreting the prophecy of Glorfindel concerning the Witch-King: “not by the hand of man will he fall”. (Yes, the Witch-King did interpret this incorrectly, probably on purpose, when he said “no living man may hinder me.”) LotR fans and non-LotR fans alike see this as a case of prophetic loopholes. A man didn’t kill him, a woman and a hobbit did. (Or just a woman, if I remember correctly, in the movies.) They got around the prophecy! Right?
Some of the problem is probably that a lot of people don’t even know the original prophecy, since it’s hidden in the appendices. I remember this comic: https://existentialcomicsfeed.tumblr.com/post/617913794901032960/eowyn-kills-the-witch-king where two philosophers debate the validity of the loophole, discussing the prophet’s intent, without ever mentioning that the prophet is alive and well and is presumably going to meet Eowyn for himself in a few months when he shows up for Aragorn’s wedding.
Here’s the thing: Glorfindel was not giving instructions. He did not tell us to go out and find a warrior who was not a man to kill the Witch-King. If that was a thing, then he could go kill the Witch-King himself, considering he’s an elf. Or he could send Galadriel or movie!Arwen. A prophecy doesn’t create the future. By speaking this prophecy, Glorfindel was not making the Witch-King impervious to any weapon held by a man. He was not blessing the Witch-King with some sort of invulnerability or immortality. Why would he do that? No, he was describing the future.
The Witch-King will fall. He explicitly says so: “will he fall” not “may he fall”. That means it is going to happen eventually. Someone is fated to destroy him. It was already determined that someone would destroy him when Glorfindel said those words. He is just saying: “That person is not you. In fact, that person is not a man. Who are they? I don’t know, it’s going to happen a thousand years in the future, I’ll find out then.” (Or maybe he did know all along that it would be a mortal princess from a kingdom near Gondor and just never bothered to tell anyone. I mean, if you look at that comic, it’s pretty clear that nobody bothered to ask him.)
“Not by the hand of man” isn’t a loophole. It’s just something that doesn’t make sense when it’s first said but makes perfect sense once the prophecy comes true. That’s how prophecies work. Its other purpose is to set up one of the best comebacks of all time, which, if I read Glorfindel correctly, he would be delighted by.
Postscript for Silm fans: the Doom of Mandos is the same way. It’s a prophecy, not a curse. More specifically, it’s a warning: this is what will happen if you continue down this destructive road. He’s not cursing them to die in Middle Earth, he’s just saying it’s going to happen if he goes there. He also isn’t the one who makes them the Dispossessed. That happened when Maedhros gave the crown up to Fingon. Mandos just said it would happen. He sees the future, but he doesn’t create it.
