#crowingses

[clouds-of-wings]

I’m feeling kinda evil and want to create a pan-Germanic anti-Esperanto. Just take the most annoying and difficult features from each Germanic language and create a super complicated and frustrating language, taking in each case the vocab that is the most false-friend-y or else has a totally different etymology than the word each neighbour language uses.

It will have the 2 different conditional moods, the complicated comma and capitalization rules of German; the random pronunciation and the 10 different meanings for each word of English; the 98453 vowel sounds of Danish, the grave accent and weird use of definite adjective/noun forms of Swedish; the general grammatical complexity of Icelandic; the random Hebrew imports of Yiddish (also to piss of the Nazis who might want to use it); it will definitely have ð, þ, ö, ä, ü, å, ø and ß. Having ø and ö is especially fun since they’re basically the same letter, it will be completely random where you have to use ø and where ö, but if you mix it up you’ll call someone’s mom a rabid chipmunk.

I love the way Swedish massacres French words (enquête -> enkät, wonderful! sauce -> sås, great!) and makes everyone wince, I delight in the way Swiss German makes you use certain verbs twice if they accompany other verbs. My language will have all of those features. Capital letters will be written in Old German Kurrentschrift, lower case letters in Anglosaxon runes.

[clouds-of-wings]

I think Galadriel refused to give Fëanor her hair because she didn’t want him to be able to sequence her DNA. It was probably a real possibility that he could have done that, given that he’d already invented Arpanet and artificial gemstones. He might have done it. And then what. Sequencing her brothers’ DNA? Eärwen’s DNA? The DNA of random Telerin friends that Finarfin brings along when he visits Finwë? Doing statistical analysis to find out the weaknesses of the Teleri? Developing the ideal anti-Teler weapon that capitalizes on them missing a gene mutation that gives the Noldor a slightly higher tolerance for mustard gas and less runny ear wax? Nuh uh. Galadriel nipped that in the bud. She said no and made sure everyone heard about it. No chemical warfare intel for King Nerdgasm.

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I realized last night that since Elves can’t get physically ill, they wouldn’t technically have to cook the animals they hunt before eating them. And considering what Finrod was able to do to a werewolf with his bare hands... Elves killing a prey animal without weapons and then eating the still-warm flesh is not unrealistic. Maybe it’s even a socially accepted way of snacking and the Elves have to get used to the idea first that humans consider it somewhat disturbing.

Just imagine. Finrod has just met Beor and company a few days ago. Everyone’s enamored with the strange, golden creature who can play music like no one else and who a lot of humans canonically thought was a Vala at first. And then he just catches a robin out of the air one day with a movement that’s almost too fast to see, cheerfully cracks its neck and starts eating it (minus the feathers I hope), all the while infodumping about Nargothrond’s gem mining practices. And they suddenly wonder why they hadn’t noticed that his teeth somehow seem longer and sharper than their own.

[clouds-of-wings]

So why are Tolkien elves immune to illness but not to poison, as Aredhel’s death by poisoned javelin shows? I suppose their immune systems must simply be maxed out..? So their white blood cells have superpowers but their livers and kidneys do not..? Is anyone here a medical expert and can speculate on how the body of a being would function who’s immune to illness but not poison?

Or has that post already been written? Can someone link me to it? Really interested in acquiring more headcanons about elves and their weird physiology.

(I also find it interesting that elves can be physically harmed by heartbreak and the mental effects of enslavement and trauma (see Gwindor) - arguably both are like a “poison for the mind”, so it’s a parallel.)

(edit: someone reblogged this with a great reply that explains why elves are vultures, or at least that’s how I choose to interpret it!)

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Only 15 hours after I first saw and reblogged this ( @locaven ), I see the above video in my feed. Human nature strikes again.

(Here’s the video btw)

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Me: Haha, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”, what a funny title for a musical series!

Me, half an hour later: oh god she actually IS crazy

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Broke: In Zeiten von Corona kann man ja gar keinen Urlaub mehr machen!

Woke:

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I saw a post about how the song battle of Sauron and Finrod was “true Norwegian black metal (TNBM hereafter) against radio pop”, and, despite my well-documented opposition to making Melkor and his gang cool, I half-agree. Sauron could be black metal, but Finrod can’t possibly be pop. I definitely still think that Melkor represents radio pop, of the most repetitive, boring and commercial variety, but Sauron is different. Sauron started out as a non-corrupted gifted smith, he’s known for shapeshifting into trve animals like bats and werewolves, he’s a magician - I could see him start out as black metal that then, under Melkor’s corrupting influence, slowly becomes less and less artistic and creative. Sauron and TNBM also fits culturally, seeing how this scene is known for satanism (known as Melkorism in Tolkien), authoritarian political views (to put it nicely), as well as destroying beautiful buildings and torturing/killing people to “rebel against the Christian god” (Eru).

However, there’s no way someone as eccentric and adventurous as Finrod could be commercial mainstream pop. I’m gonna take a page out of TNBM’s history books and say Finrod is closer to death metal. According to Varg Vikernes (one of the greats of the TNBM scene of yore, who called himself Count Grishnackh, after the orc captain who captured Merry and Pippin, and Burzum after the word for darkness in the Black Speech), the whole reason why the Norwegian black metal scene in the 90s was like that culturally - and the early 90s were the time when all these tropes we know about TNBM today had their heyday - was that it was a reaction to how death metal musicians were “so very socially responsible” with their lyrics about environmentalism, war and peace, etc., which I could see Finrod sing about too. Central TNBM figures mockingly called some death metal bands “life metal” for this reason and threatened to kill them if they came to Tol-in-Gaurhoth Norway.

So maybe Sauron plays (initially underground, later boring and commercial) black metal and Finrod plays some kind of experimental folky melodeath (this song comes to mind, plz draw Finrod with a moraharpa and earn my eternal love). Finrod fell before the throne because his ears were bleeding from the terrible, predictable melodies. He was nauseated by the trite clichés and the grimdark eviler-than-thou poserdom. Because let’s be real, you don’t beat a musician like Finrod by playing something good. That just invigorates him. You drain him of his strength by forcing him to listen to the most annoyingly bland stuff you can come up with. Sauron’s early work would have meant a fair duel between the two. Sauron’s later work was unbearable to Finrod.