I'm halfway through your trsb fic (the one I've been eagerly waiting for since you dropped that little snippet) and *of course* I'm completely rapt. I still need time to gather my thoughts into something coherent for a proper comment, but I couldn’t wait to tell you how much I’m enjoying your Maglor. He’s everything I needed to read, and I just couldn’t hold back until I’d formed said coherent response to tell you how perfect he is.
I feel like I should say something clever here but I’ve got nothing. Maybe I should ask instead? I’d love to hear your thoughts about Maglor as a whole. I keep stumbling across bits and pieces of your ideas about him but I don’t have the bigger picture yet (probably because I still need to read things like sisyphus?)
I don’t know. I’m stunned. What I *do* know is that this Maglor, always standing on the borders yet heavy, is everything. I guess this might not even be worthy of an ao3 comment but I really needed to get it out. It's not coherent and I'm ashamed - all I know is I need to bite him (he bites; I'm proud of him - I need to bite him back). Does that make sense.
It makes perfect sense because I too wish to bite Maglor at all times!!!!! Anyway THANK YOU, I'm glad you are enjoying the fic!!!! I have one million thoughts about Maglor at all times, so I will try to make this as cogent as possible (a lie)
Its very difficult to explain how much of how I write Maglor is influenced by the fact that long before I published any fic, I had like 10k words of extremely detailed notes about what the Finweans would be in a modern AU and I had Maglor as a has-been rockstar who is financially dependent on his weapons manufacturing and arms dealing family, whose politics are on the whole more liberal on theirs, and therefore, being the sort of type who would do the equivalent of land acknowledgements but for the Teleri's stolen ships. This sort of contradictory mix of earnestness and insincerity born out of a sort of unwillingness to fully engage with the scope of violence that finances his cushy lifestyle. He even had a grammy award winning anti-war album. But uh, I'm going to try and articulate it in a way that isn't just drawing on these very specific "types".
Maglor as a whole, to me, has a few key character moments that basically define him for me & which I have tried to sort into a sort of grand unified reading of Maglor -
1) The shibboleth detail that Maglor was a poet - in the Silm he is also described as a bard. Putting these two together, I think of Maglor as both a narrativiser but also an observer. Not only is he participating in events but he is also arranging historical fact into narrative, as he does with the Noldolante, to produce a certain meaning. The poet bit also comes with the explicit direction that he paid attention to linguistic changes in Middle Earth unlike his brothers, who were "too occupied in wars and feuds".
2) Composer of the Noldolante - ok like... I joke that the Noldolante is the Apocalypse Now of the Noldor, but lowkey... its fascinating that the Noldolante presents the Kinslaying at Alqualonde specifically as being about the fall of the Noldor! There's a very specific act of narrativisation that is taking place there and I keep circling around what it means to lament the act of violence, not for its victims, but for the fall it leads your society to. (Ofc, this is not very extraordinary: the Vietnam war genre is...basically built on this idea.). But to return it to the Elves, there is the possibility of solipsism, a kind of selfishness that allows for blindness. But there's something in the Apocalypse Now comparison in that, its a film ostensibly about the degrading horrors that war drives American soldiers to - and yet, it can't help drawing on imagery that do end up making war look sexy. One thinks abt Francois Truffaut re. war films. Solipsism curtailing even the ability to successfully lament the devastation of the First Kinslaying? Or a warning that fails, because the ambiguity of the lament fails to drive home the moral point of a Fall? Was it really a Vietnam war film, or was it the Modest Proposal of its time? I love the ambiguity of possibility re. what the Noldolante is actually meant to be.
3) Adopting the twins "and love grew" - To me, this is the point at which Maglor's rejection of the terms of his Oath really starts to show. The Oath promises vengeance, retribution and violence on anyone who possesses or holds the Silmaril. Not the twins, but as balrogballs observes here, the Silmaril would very much have passed on to them as an heirloom, if Elwing hadn't jumped into the sea with it. More broadly, its an active rejection of nihilistic violence as the only thing that Maglor et al are capable of and an active attempt to do something differently. This ultimately proves to be (somewhat) fruitless.
4) His last two conversations with Maedhros - which I've written about extensively over here (so I won't go over it again), but tl;dr: Maglor both hopes, but Maglor provides an almost spiritual counterbalance to Maedhros there. These conversations also interest me because I always wonder: who recorded them? Who passed this on to historians? Was it Maglor himself?
5) Maglor is the one who probably moves the Feanorian camp south of the Mithrim - once the other Noldor arrive in Beleriand. This one fascinates me, considering the tensions that very much to accelerate after this arrival. It strikes me as the move of a man who is trying to make a conciliatory move and also trying to avoid bloodshed. The only time, perhaps, besides adopting the twins, where he is in a position to make this decision and enforce it - otherwise being contradicted by forces greater than him, or by Maedhros.
6) Going into permanent mourning by the sea after casting the Silmaril away - simultaneously the most passive-aggressive fuck you to Feanor and a sort of poetic justice that the last surviving son of Feanor, the one who got a Silmaril, threw it away; rejected the chance to become a "lord" of "Unsullied Light" and instead chose to be a mist-haunting shadow-folk mourning by the sea. At the very end, Maglor is able to walk away, even if too late. More thoughts on what this implies here.
On the whole, the image I have is of a man who is a pacifist, who seems to genuinely dislike the violence that they're participating in, is capable of recognising its corrosiveness to even himself let alone the destruction elsewhere, is extremely clear-eyed about where all of this will take them & where they're all headed, but is incapable of really walking away from it and is therefore caught in a permanent dissociative state about it (one which he occasionally uses to produce works like the Noldolante). And to me the question is always, why? Why does he stay? Every fic I write ft. Maglor is an attempt to answer that question in various ways lol. In this one the answer was "well what if leaving Maedhros behind on Thangorodrim meant Maedhros knew he could always hold it over his head forever and ever to test his loyalty to Maedhros". I believe this poisoned their relationship in some ways & if it was manageable, I always think of the last conversation where Maedhros essentially forces Maglor into doing something that he doesn't want to do as something that might have really broken something between them. Either way, that festering resentment emerges in Maglor's sarcasm, the blithe way he goes for the kill with what he knows will hurt Maedhros most (he's a very good observer!), his rare attempts to stand up for what he knows is right, retreating to appreciation of the beautiful things as a means of escape from the painful ugliness of what he is doing over and over again, who self-consciously invents roles for himself to inhabit and play to so he can reconcile the contradictions of the life he's forced to live.
The flip side of it is that taking the Silmarillion as "history" seriously, I'm always thinking about who told about those two conversations & Maedhros' suicide and I think there's something delightful and grotesque in Maglor being the one who attempts that act of hagiography - to present Maedhros' decision as inevitable, as stemming not from a deliberate choice, but the terror that Manwe couldn't reach Eru and Manwe wouldn't speak for them, and therefore that in some ways Manwe bears some blame for not making it clear that the Valar would have shown mercy if asked. Maglor, ofc, is excluded from any blame; whether in acting in restraint, or even attempting to walk away, or, as I personally headcanon, slipping up and telling Maedhros I told you so. Maglor, always making things a little more beautiful, profound and narratively resonant than they might have actually been. Always narrativising, always composing away, always looking with the artist's eye and only very very rarely slipping and saying something real and true.
IDK if that makes sense, but it probably helps to know that my Maglor playlist both has The End by the Doors, Coward of the County and With One Look from the uh Sunset Boulevard soundtrack.
In conclusion: MAGLOR!!!!!
