MILESTONE CELEBRATION ⭐ TAR-MIRIEL + AQUARIUS requested by @echoofthemusic
And last of all the mounting wave, green and cold and plumed with foam, climbing over the land, took to its bosom Tar-Míriel the Queen, fairer than silver or ivory or pearls. Too late she strove to ascend the steep ways of the Meneltarma to the holy place; for the waters overtook her, and her cry was lost in the roaring of the wind.
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, “The Downfall of Numenor”
[ID: An edit for Tar-Miriel from the Tolkien Legendarium. It consists of 10 images mainly in white and cyan shades.
A young black woman in side profile
Beams of light underwater
A pool with white flowers in it
A white text field reading “Tar-Miriel” and “jewel-daughter”
Incarnate pillars
A blue-green gemstone
A light-skinned person holding on to a rock in a stormy sea
A brown-skinned person wearing a white dress, with curls falling down their back
Funny and cute young E/E we talked about for you to save plus one bonus:
Eärendil and Elwing learned elvish and mannish histories under a wise-woman and had a class debate on the benefits and costs of immortality and mortality.
Elwing argued for the greater benefits of immortality from an elvish perspective while Eärendil argued for the greater benefits of mortality from a mannish perspective. They were tying and couldn’t wrap it up, so Eärendil let Elwing win, but she wasn’t happy he did that, so they had a little fight and made up the next day.
As teens Eärendil and Elwing attended meetings to foster the relationships between the camps. Eärendil got distracted during a long meeting and started sniffing Elwing’s hair, daydreaming in its fragrance, when suddenly he sneezed loudly. After an awkward moment of silence, Elwing said, “Oops, we’ve got a seal in the room.” Everyone laughed. Eärendil laughed at himself while burying his head in his arms in embarrassment. Elwing gently ruffled his hair, sea-scented seal fur she called it.
Eärendil and Elwing moved to a new house by the sea after their wedding. They couldn’t come to a consensus on how to paint the house so ended up each starting to paint their own ideas from one corner of the house. Evranin and Meleth went to check on them, and there was Elwing at the front of the house, painting it one color and pattern, and Eärendil at the back, painting it a different color and pattern, but they both insisted on the house looking amazing when finished. Finally, their designs converged on one wall surprisingly well, so much so it was the most beautiful wall in the entire house. Seven years later, Elrond and Elros dreamed their first dreams in their cradle, in the room of beautiful convergence.
I had forgotten about the sneeze one aaaaaa 🥺😭😭💕💕💕💕💕 WE ARE SCHOLARS....
Seven years later, Elrond and Elros dreamed their first dreams in their cradle, in the room of beautiful convergence.
I love this line so much... My original social interpretation El & Eara are too noble to do their own chores, but I like this idea and especially this image so much that I'm instantly changing that.... A house by the sea as their personal project & they want to be as involved as possible... Plus the idea that each begins on a different end and just does whatever they want and in the end it actually works out -- feels so right for them dbhjdfngf 🥺🥺🥺
hmmm, and yet I don't recall him having anything to say about Aragorn's attractiveness... does that mean Aragorn is an uggo?!?
Sort of, lol! Aragorn cleans up nice on multiple occasions (and Denethor is noted as attractive and strongly resembles him), but in his ragged graying wilderness man persona, he’s ... well, there’s a reason that the hobbits decide that he would probably “look fairer” if he were actually trying to deceive them. :P
echoofthemusic said:
Sorry that was annoying, I’ve not considered this detail before & it’s very funny
Finrod talking about when Men study a thing “it reminds them of some other clearer thing” makes me think elves have a sense of mystery around the possibility of this place beyond Arda human spirits come from and go after death, like soul aliens, not as lordly in Andreth’s view but curious like learning about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. I wonder if one who chooses mortality for its own sake, besides wanting to escape Arda Marred, is drawn to that place as the destination of escape.
I headcanon this as a big part of Elros's choice tbh! Though I like to think of his choice as being somewhat an emergent property of different tangles too, like 'only thinking about/valuing this so deeply and personally in the first place because of this-world deep affinity to Men and the concept of numenor and the war of wrath' etc.
but also I think this is also a lot of how Eärendel (in the BOLT, distinct from Eärendil in the published Silm) is portrayed, albeit much of his actions are also subjected to many circumstantial confounding variables (a mainstay of Tolkien that is really good imo). he’s very Human but also his perspective is i think different from pure humans in part bc of his peredhil status
So sorry I haven’t answered yours yet! I’ve been busy and distracted but it’s so interesting!Yes, mermaids also make me 😍😍 I’m too into fairytales aaa…little prince playing with little mermaids who later save him from shipwrecks…It’s funny because Tolkien said once, “I don't like allegories. I never liked Hans Christian Andersen because I knew he was always getting at me.” I remember really liking Andersen’s fairytales as a kid, but haha I see why!
(This is funny, I was literally talking about this the other day with my wife because of some communication issues regarding (what we perceive as) the difference between metaphor and allegory... (I was precisely saying I hate metaphors but don't mind allegories 😂😂) )
I loooove more fairy-tale-esque interpretations and versions of the legendarium... My self indulgent headcanon is that all of them exist in universe, some in the form of weird bastardized oral traditions that were compiled sooner or later by a scholar & can be found in one of the vast libraries of Númenor 😌 but then we lose them all in the third age
It's not mermaids and the style is evocative of old English poetry rather than fairy-tales, it might not be your thing, but there's this short fanfic about Earendil's three sailors that is one of my favorite pieces of Tolkien fic: https://elwing.tumblr.com/post/623375882280714240/driftwood
Ok I realize: no further aid to Gil-galad —> little to no Eriador tree hacking on native lands for 205 years. Gardener or not, Ancalimë deserves a namesake tree to grow up with. 😉 Maybe Erendis influenced her in this but sadly didn’t get to see. 😭 But your 🥺 is making me soft…Both trees are named for the elven grandma and a queen? Nimloth-Ancalimë and Nimloth-Míriel. Elf-Dúnedain trees that inherited the Half-elven heritage and the spirits of Eldar women and Edain women of old.
I was about to say I had trouble imagining them naming the White Tree that grows from Isildur's sapling the same thing they called the previous White Tree, but then... I imagined Isildur and people in his family slipping and calling her that just out of custom, and... 🥺 You know what.... 🥺🥺🥺🥺 okay uwu I can see that!
Listen, this Ancalimë thing got my heart in such a grip, I keep thinking of Ancalimë going to the royal garden when she wants PEACE, seeing the White Tree that blooms at night and thinking about how she has no pair... Reigns alone in the garden... Ancalimë is a fun character because she contains so many contradictions, it's interesting to think that for all she seems to be really into queenship and ruling, she retains a love for aspects of her youth; I bet she retreated to the garden when she needed time to herself. I wonder if she would have more trees planted there! She's Emerwen, so I think of open lands good for shepherding, or at very least more of a love for meadows. How big is the royal garden? Is it something like the gardens of Versailles, with smaller thematic gardens? Is there a grove of trees somewhere, or around Nimloth? Or is Nimloth in plain sight? For some reason whenever I think of it, I think of elevated gardens, but the more I think about that the less it seems feasible... Now I'm thinking of the different things that were planted in the Garden and how it must have looked accross the ages and rulers and their families and friends!I bet Míriel was very interested in its upkeep, whereas someone like Ciryatan probably didn't give a damn, or had non-native plants put around. Adûnakhôr has every elven specimen besides Nimloth removed 🤪
Imagining that Middle Earth's forests never knew more peace than in the period from Ancalimë to Telperien, lol. But then CIRYATAN and the Guild of Venturers probably go all out, we never get anyone like them again :///
Ok I LOVE our unintentional osanwe because I was JUST fawning over Carina Nebula, the first photo in your reblogged James Webb Telescope post! I was googling and thinking, so carina is latin for the keel of a ship and Carina constellation is part of the ship-shaped Argo Navis constellation inspired by, as you know, Jason and the Argonauts, so basically Carina Nebula is in a cosmic ship…doesn’t that remind you of I Vene Kemen? Earendil sails there to explore the ocean landscapes and he’s on a tiny spaceship sailing in an enormous space ship (matryoshka ship your and Aerlinn’s collection braincells <3 <3)
awww this is absolutely what eärendil is doing! and hear me out:
Called the Cosmic Cliffs, the region is actually the edge of a gigantic, gaseous cavity within NGC 3324, roughly 7,600 light-years away. The cavernous area has been carved from the nebula by the intense ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds from extremely massive, hot, young stars located in the center of the bubble, above the area shown in this image. The high-energy radiation from these stars is sculpting the nebula’s wall by slowly eroding it away. - quoted from here
you know how people make miniature models of things they love? Varda makes giant models of Arda (or maybe they are miniatures to her)
the celestial mountains in Carina are one of her love letters to Manwë
they look like the Pelóri and the gaseous cavity beyond them looks like Ekkaia, that's why eärendil likes to go there
Girl there literally isn't a single time I watch this movie when I don't cry at the end... I rewatched it last week for the first time in over ten years thinking it wouldn't hold up & ended up in my wife's arms sob-crying 😩
