#second kinslaying

[lyragoth]

Queen Nimloth takes down Curufin

Since Tolkien gives us little detail about Curufin’s death, I drew this headcanon of mine where he’s killed by Nimloth :3

Zoomed-in faces below

[katarrinskey]

Brotherly grave Wanted to do something with a bit more thought behind it

[riding-with-the-wild-hunt]

what makes the doriathrin princes’ (presumable) death during the second kinslaying an event of such terrible fright and horror isn’t so much, i think, the explicit aspects—the material concerns of capture, abandonment, a slow and inevitable march towards doom, regret that comes too late; the cultural or moral distress caused by an act of violence inflicted by adults on children—but the implicit grounding of the fëanorian (or at least maedhrosian) reaction in at this point clearly dissonant notions of “laws of war.” maedhros’s disagreement with the followers of celegorm is not because elurín and eluréd were children and should have been kept safe, but because they were princes. in peaceful, supernaturally-protected doriath, there is no reason to conclude that people would have been abstaining from having families: it is unavoidable, then, to imagine that at the time of the second kinslaying, the princes were not the only children living in menegroth, and thus were not the only children to be killed there. only a hierarchic valuation of life allows eluréd and elurín to escape the fate of nameless and forgotten victims. maedhros’s remorse is both political—he can’t exactly avoid contemplating a hostage scenario (and yes, the taking of an enemy’s children is often significantly more complicated than this in medieval/pseudo-medieval contexts, do not bark at me)—and stupendously politically oblivious in that it completely, categorically fails to recognize any irony in the situation, or reckon with the reality that the fëanorian host got their start far outside the bounds of any notion of “ordered” warfare, contradictory as it may be to begin with.

[dwight2333]

[nighttimepatrons]

i dont even care if this makes sence at al

but it;s not about Celegorm being a wolf. it's him being a hound and eating you anyways. You know to fear when you meet the wolf, it's a wild untouched animal. It probably fears you as much as you fear it. And yeah it may kill you,, but it's a wolf. but the hound. the hound is the product of endless section for tameness, for pleasing, it's fur is soft as to invite touch. It is an animal that digs your freezing body from the snow, an animal that finds you when you are hopelessly lost. It is faithfulness made flesh.

but this hound, with soft fur, and sweet face, and sharp attentive eyes, kills your husband and now it will kill you

[angamaite-der-ritter]

The 2nd kinslaying is not a reasonable redirection of force to assuage the Oath because it was never meant to be; the 2nd kinslaying is a punitive military action aimed against a polity that has previously refused military cooperation, alliance & aid to the Fëanárioni and then proceeded to lay claim upon the Silmaril (whether Dior has a right to it or not is beside the question here). It affords no attention to self-preservation because it is not supposed to -- the Fëanárioni do not have the military power and resources to stage another attack upon Morgoth. Mutual self-destruction with the Sindar is preferable to an obviously doomed military action against Morgoth, because it is achievable, and results in successful punitive action against at least one acteur that transgressed their claim on the Silmaril and as such the Oath.

[maironsmaid]

Sing, oh world, of the wrath of Macalaurë, Feanaro's son, murderous, kinslayer, oath breaker.

@feanorianweek Day 2: Maglor (& Dior)

[balrogballs]

Hey Balls! I’ve been slowly reading your fics and having a great time, as one who came into the Silm slowly through adaptations, and I was really interesting to see how much you love Celeborn. I think it’s maybe the stuff I read but I always thought he’s too basic? Or not so interesting if not for his marriage to Galadriel. But The Cenotaph was just beautiful and I am eager to hear your thoughts on why you think he’s interesting, or if it’s just Celedriel you’re a shipper of. Thanks 💗

Hello, and thank you for your kind words, I loved writing The Cenotaph last year so I’m delighted you enjoyed it! Anyway I do like Galadriel/Celeborn a lot but I am actually a lot more interested in Celeborn himself as a standalone character. I’m not a massive ‘shipper’ on any front, for eg. Elrond is my main guy but I ship him with literally everyone. I’m also confused as to why I have gotten ‘why Teleporno tho’ questions more than twice now gang 🥲

Anyway so I turned this into a mini essay character study because of who I am as a person but TLDR: for me, Celeborn’s primary appeal is in being a figure of nobility who has clearly intellectualised and managed his historical grief without having actually dissolved it… who does certainly function in a world 7000 years removed from the razing of Doriath but is also a structurally occluded yet occasionally visible wound. Where he both impacts and is impacted by power yet seems ungoverned by the subcreative hunger that destroys almost everyone around him. I read that as him being the aftermath of the Kinslaying at Doriath, personified, and psychologically, that compels me a lot more than either bitterness overcome or bitterness wallowed in.

IE it’s not his goodness that interests me (I find ‘goodness’ a structurally unsound and somewhat uninteresting moral metric) but his prejudices, and what they imply about his character. My man truly is the legendarium’s greatest unread consciousness (not saying he’s unread, there are a few terrific fanworks centering him, I just think he’s generally received solely through the lens of his relationship with Galadriel, to his detriment…).

Anyway, like I tried to explore in The Cenotaph: to me he is more monument than man. Celeborn is one of the very few named characters who witnesses and survives a Fëanorian kinslaying as an adult AND carries that experience into the Fourth Age untouched by any re-embodiment mechanics, and I just find that, on an ontological level, so so so interesting. In the same way other revenants (basically a figure that should be gone by the logic of a forward narrative momentum, yet persists) like Galadriel and Elrond are interesting, but doubly so because of his status as an adult survivor of Doriath… we see so few victims of the violence of the First Age in general, but Celeborn being a witness, refugee and victim of elf-on-elf violence specifically is just really such an fun sandbox to fuck around in. 

And this made more so because Tolkien doesn’t actually show him as this kind of uber wise/accepting/divinely understanding being to the same extent as he does Galadriel and Elrond. Which is that from what little information we have about Celeborn, we know from two instances (him refusing to pass through Moria in the Second Age and his, er, interaction with Gimli during the Ring Quest) that this is a guy who absolutely does hold grudges across thousands of years, be they right or wrong or racialised, where he’s clearly seen to carry both Thingol’s prejudices as well as hold a grudge over the way Thingol died.

And I thought this is SUCH an interesting choice which I really do enjoy… because he is different from Galadriel (who was not exactly a big Fëanor fan and was opposed to his methods and Beleriand project to say the least, but was Noldo herself + exhibits several Noldorin nobility traits including the desire for lands to rule + crossed the Ice in pursuit of such) and Elrond (who, whilst a survivor of the worst kinslaying, would likely and understandably have a slightly warped perspective on the same in some way or the other, having been only six years old when Sirion was sacked + having then been raised in the household of and loved by one of the main perpetrators of said kinslaying). 

And yeah, I think his personality is really interesting when considered in this way, and is pretty underread in comparison to someone like Elrond, who on paper ie in the text of the main LotR+Hobbit books, has a relatively straightforward seeming personality, where the bulk of his fanon characterisation comes from reading him through the events of The Silmarillion. And I think Celeborn, when read through that same lens, is pretty interesting himself… like here you have a consciousness formed in and by the most catastrophic period of Elvish history who lost his homeland to kin-on-kin violence and yet chooses, repeatedly and clearly deliberately, to not only remain embedded in a world that has moved on without him but to take those First Age grievances with him! Not a triumphant survival but a haunted one! A constant reminder of historical atrocity! 

OK going into Butler-era gender trouble here but, a lot of Tolkien scholarship points out how female figures (eg Galadriel/Arwen/Lúthien) accrue a sort of mythical-magical significance while male ‘heroes’ are, er, heroised through martial and sacrificial death… and Celeborn (like Elrond in a different manner) does go some way to unsettle this. I wouldn’t really call him that much of a wife guy because wife guy tends to be a flattening of his character somewhat, but I will say that he’s a figure whose authority isn’t showcased through masculine plays of violence/questing/creation/sacrifice… and the readership… case in point here… seem a bit uncertain as to his position as a result.

Wherein—and Elrond seems to take a similar bent here on first glance but Elrond is pretty much reskinned as a full on loremaster by the Third Age while Celeborn is not—it’s a kind of masculinity that a legendarium focused on either ‘heroic’ or ‘villainous’ male elves, finds kind of difficult to accommodate. And so I do think the tendency of both fanon but also filmic adaptations to reduce him to a satellite of Galadriel’s more legible and spectacular authority is more of a reception issue than a textual issue… aka more an issue with what people expect of male elvish figures than an issue with Celeborn’s interestingness itself. 

I really enjoy timelag characters, ie subjects that inhabit a (temporal) position out of joint with the dominant historical moment, and while Elrond and Galadriel are ‘relics’ in a way, the both of them actively participate and influence ME’s current and future trajectories whilst Celeborn takes a backseat in some regards, wherein the main thing we see of him is his First Age attitudes (for instance, his reasoning for anti-dwarven sentiment is far more archaic than, say, Thranduil, who cites a far more modern conflict)… And I think this is why I always characterise him with Doriath in mind… and the way he’s always a remnant of Doriath in my works. From The Cenotaph:

And he understands, one day, reading about a current Gondorian succession dispute, that this is what Doriath took from him: not his life nor his sanity, but his ability to metabolise time, to let one moment give way naturally to the next. The Eldar move from Cuivenen to kinslaying to exile to war to return to the breaking of the world, each age swallowing the previous, but Celeborn remains in a single aperture, a single burning city stretched across three ages like a painting left too long in the sun. He cannot move forward because moving forward would mean leaving Doriath behind, and leaving Doriath behind would mean admitting that the children are dead and have been dead and will remain dead and my god how many cradles, how many cradles, and the horses, the horses, and what of the niphredil and —

He calcifies instead.

He becomes monument rather than man. Celeborn is used to calcification. He has had eternity to discover that he is the one thing in all of Arda that cannot be fixed, because he was born in Doriath and so to heal would be to lose himself entirely.

where be it in ME or Aman, Celeborn in the Fourth Age is almost a figure of pure anachronism, determinedly present in a world that has structurally moved past him and YET this is not presented as failure or tragedy in the conventional sense, just a slightly bittersweet fact. He is the last memory of Doriath walking around in an age that has no framework for what Doriath even was. 

And keeping with this, one of the legendarium’s central preoccupations (and the very evident theological implications therein) is corrosive subcreative ambition, the way a desire to shape the world as an individual, to leave an indelible mark, to make things that endure for the sake of endurance, tends to destroy almost everything it touches. Fëanor and the Silmarils, Noldor and their exile, Celebrimbor and the rings, Sauron, Melkor, the Eldar as an immortal race being bound to the breaking of the world, and Galadriel, by her own admission, carries within her the long shadow of exactly this desire.

If you read my stuff you know I take a broadly Foucauldian position with my elves as subjects of power ie formed and destroyed by their relationships to it.  But Celeborn holds power without being seen to be grasping at it, loses everything he has loved/built, repeatedly, rebuilds without compensatory overreach. Not because he’s simple or unambitious, he is still nobility obv and absolutely acts like it, but because somehow he seems to have arrived at (or, as I see it, was forced into, through the violence of what happened to Doriath) a fundamentally different relationship to both power and permanence. 

OK I will stop yapping but I hope this makes sense!!!