Machado de Assis, definitely. His writing is just amazing and so beautiful! Just look at the beginning of the "Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas" book:
"To the worm who first gnawed on the cold flesh of my corpse, I dedicate with fond remembrance these Posthumous Memoirs"
Wonderful!
12. what do you think about English translations of your favourite native prose/poem?
I'll be honest with you, I never searched for English translations. But, I'm totally okay with it. It's a great way to spread Brazilian literature to other people❣
I really appreciate your post about Maedhros’ hand. It helps clarify for me how to write Maedhros, since I like the idea of situationally-useful prosthetics (but I’ve never really liked the magical replacement angle - I’m not an amputee, so it can’t be wish fulfillment for me, and I don’t want to portray him as a tragedy bc that’s demeaning). I was wondering was your take was on how Maedhros feels about his right hand? I personally headcanon that Maedhros is a pretty pragmatic guy. I don’t necessarily think he feels too badly about not having a right hand; he initially asked Fingon to kill him, so his amputation is maybe a testament to how Fingon refused to give up on him? Like, if he can fight well with his left hand, and maybe uses simple prosthetics for tasks, i don’t necessarily think he would choose a purely aesthetic prosthetic or seek a highly advanced magical limb. Again, thank you for opening this blog, you offer a nuanced opinion that I don’t necessarily have as I am able-bodied.
Thank you! I appreciate that 😊 I have many many thoughts so get ready for a long post :P I like your suggestion about him associating his amputation with his rescue, like a physical mark of how much Fingon loved him and how far he was willing to go. I have some similar thoughts about that and how Maedhros actually ends up feeling quite good about his stump. I’m going to break this up so that it’s not all a gigantic wall of text.
This is all personal headcanon, and it overlaps with some of my favourite Celebrimbor headcanons too!
~
Waking up in Mithrim:
Maedhros doesn’t go through the same stages of shock and grief that a lot of people do when they suddenly become disabled. When he woke up in Mithrim, his hand was honestly nowhere near the top of his list of priorities. His injuries, both mental and physical, were extremely grievous. Not everyone’s sure of the full extent of the internal damage, and whether he will ever heal again. A lot of the healers don’t think he’ll be able to walk. He’s also been through so many pain and bodily damage that his hand just feels like yet another part of him that has been stolen, along with his dignity and his ability to sleep without nightmares. Maedhros isn’t even particularly coherent when he wakes up, and it actually takes him a few days before he’s with it enough to realise that his hand is gone and isn’t going to grow back or something.
In another situation I think he’d feel awful and have a lot of negative emotions, until he grew to process it and went through that journey. But he’s so grateful for how much he does recover, when he thought he never would, that the hand feels like a small thing.
~
Prosthetic 1:
Curufin is the first person to make Maedhros a prosthetic, and I usually think that it didn’t happen until Maedhros had made a lot of progress on his psychological recovery and to some extent physical recovery. It’s a very basic (although beautiful and expertly crafted of course) body-powered hand with some movement in the fingers. However, it takes a lot of time to get the issues worked out. Maedhros isn’t quite strong enough to handle the movements yet, and it’s also painful for him to wear.
Then there’s his various trauma responses. Just the pressure of the prosthetic around his wrist can set him off sometimes. But the worst is that at this stage Maedhros still keeps falling asleep all the time, and when he wakes up with two hands he thinks that the rescue was a dream and he never left Angband. Cue breakdown. Repeatedly. In the end, it takes a long time before Maedhros really starts trying to use the prosthetic.
(Although I did write a dark oneshot about Curufin gifting a prosthetic.)
~
Feelings:
Maedhros’s feelings shift a lot at first and get pretty complicated for a while. I think it’s a big source of frustration for him when he’s trying to retrain and relearn how to perform basic tasks, but he picks up skills with his left hand very quickly. By far the thing that annoys him the most is trying to cut up his food (I’m not sure exactly what kind of cutlery the Noldor use, but let’s just say this is still a problem!) until his brothers devise hand attachments, and later different cutlery, that allow him to eat independently.
I think later it becomes a symbol to him of everything he survived. He can look down at his stump and think Morgoth couldn’t keep me and he’ll never have me again. It also takes on a similar symbolic significance for his followers and many others who see it, because it shows the strength of this lord and the proof of his survival. That then comes to symbolise the perseverance and survival of the free peoples of Beleriand in general, that they will not be beaten down, and proof that Morgoth can be overcome and lose.
It gets more complicated with that in certain situations. Thingol looks on it with scorn. He thinks it ironic and just that the samd hand that killed many of his kinsmen has been cut off. At the same time, Thingol is quite a bit better at dealing with disabilities when it’s his own people!
Some of the tribes of men, and certain Petty Dwarves, have their own connotations around loss of a hand. In some Mannish tribes a warrior has their hand cut off if they shame their people. For Petty Dwarves, it’s a punishment for stealing. So the initial responses to Maedhros’s amputation aren’t always good; but they generally improve once people learn Maedhros’s story.
~
Collecting prosthetics, and thoughts on Celebrimbor:
Eventually Maedhros ends up with a whole lot of different prosthetics, but he has a few favourites. Two of them are passive; one made by the dwarves and one made by Curufin. (That one has so many attachments it’s like a Swiss knife. Maedhros thinks this is incredibly funny.) One is a body-powered prosthetic with a tiny pinch of magic sprinkled in, and it’s by far the greatest hand that he’s been given. It’s made by Celebrimbor.
I know that Celebrimbor is supposed to be his father name, and that fanon often makes Curufinwe his father name instead and Celebrimbor his mother name. But third option; Celebrimbor is his epesse, Silverfist, given to him by his loving uncle because of the incredible prosthetic he made. Celebrimbor spends a great deal of time and love making a hand that isn’t just perfect, but perfect specifically for Maedhros.
Celebrimbor grows to love his work, especially his discussions with amputees and all of the different peoples of Arda, who have their own perspectives and have developed solutions to the disability issues in their communities. (In the Second Age he works with Elrond on collecting and sharing that knowledge so that everyone can benefit.)
It’s part of how his close collaboration with the dwarves begins, because he spends a lot of time talking to them about their experiences and solutions. Dwarves have a very high number of limb disabilities and also have a lot of disability sub-cultures!
Celebrimbor grows to spend more time working on prosthetics, and in fact becomes well known for them long after Maedhros is dead. He branches out into other areas of assistive devices and also works on brand new concepts like devices that bring comfort and help with PTSD. He (and most of the other Gwaith-i-Mirdain) are hugely passionate about urban planning and making the Best and Prettiest Coolest most Functional City, using mad algorithms to decide things like road layout. But part of his interest in urban planning also involves accessibility.
The hand that Celebrimbor made for Maedhros is irreparably damaged at the Nirnaeth. After that, Maedhros ends up only having the one that Curufin made for him. No-one’s quite sure what happens to it in the end, although Elrond knows that Maedhros still had it the last time that Elrond saw him. He thinks of it often, and the way that it felt stroking his hair.
Elrond is a healer, and Celebrimbor’s devices are incredibly useful for many patients. But Elrond never looks at the ones that bear a Feanorian star. He never really forgets.
I love finding out that the Pern books were as formative for other folks as they were for me! Returning to them as an adult, I think the whole thing smacks of gender in a way that I wish McCaffrey had leaned into harder, I can’t articulate it but it’s just very Queer to me (the special weyr culture of blues and greens that exists only in my head). - (Main blog for tol-himling/Lorinand_Lost)
YES! God I read the Harper Hall Trilogy first and Dragonsong was incredibly formative for me - I have prob read the scene where Menolly finds the fire lizard nest and the scene where she gets rescued during threadfall and taken to Benden like 23456789 times. That was my chosen one fantasy; I wanted to escape my life of sea hold drudgery and outrun Thread halfway to Nerat and get picked up by a dragon gdi!! And then Mirrim impressing Path and becoming a greenrider by accident and Jaxom impressing Ruth was big time wish fulfillment for little me.
Then I read the first 3-4 adult books way too young over and over and was very eyes emoji about mating flights lmao. But yeah, there was a lot of queer stuff I think- I was never into Pern fannishly (when I was first reading them it was def pre-internet, at least for a kid) but I definitely got a vibe from the blue/greenriders and I feel like it would be super interesting to think about transness in that universe (and Ruth is kind of this ??agender dragon in a way iirc at least in the beginning? He and Jaxom are kinda queer coded imo in the way they disrupt the weyr system, but I haven't reread the books in prob 10 years so I am rusty.)
