#tolkien2

[catilinas]

im reading war of the jewels. it says the grey annals explicitly are taken from ‘annals that were made in doriath’ (which is already ??? because a few pages later it says the sindar didn’t really write things down… oral history ig.) and sure bits of it were edited/compiled later in sirion but i am sooo curious about the pre-sun TIMEKEEPING because it is formally annalistic but like. what are they basing the length of a ‘year’ on if they don’t have magic trees/The Sun yet??? ig the boring option is ‘melian knows how long a valian year is’ but there is still the issue of how to reckon that. also its boring and i am a fan of problems caused by ainur time blindness. animals have seasonal behaviours like hibernation but would those be happening without seasons??? arbitrary water clock shenanigans? they’re building the clock of the long now in menegroth. can you measure time based on the growth of lichen or something??? variable novae??? once the sun existed did they recalculate/retcon time??? thingol so into the language ban that he didn’t bother with stopping the noldorin calendar from becoming dominant? and even there: did the hosts of feanor and fingolfin end up on different calendar systems while separated from one another? ‘ohhh who is going to be the high king’ WHO CARES. which CALENDAR are you using??? or on a smaller scale: how long was a day in doriath reckoning, pre-sun? when the sun arrived did they all get mega jetlagged because their circadian rhythms were doing something completely different. they’re using tree rings. they’re using cicada periodical cycles. i have no fucking clue

[catilinas]

thinking about uh. not answering and being silent as a particularly pointed form of rudeness in a culture that named itself after the ability to speak

NUANCE HOWEVER.

i just skimmed every use of the words ‘silent’ and ‘silence’ in the silm (i acknowledge there are other ways of describing this that i will have missed. they are for the reread). yes there are the passages above but there are also a lot of times where

a) the valar in particular will be silent, in thought or sometimes wonder

b) the text specifies mandos being silent, with the implication that There Is Doom He Is Not Saying On Purpose

c) other characters are silent while they think. they do reply after thinking for a bit. in some of these passages they might be pissed off and rude and Also thinking though.

but also look at this:

you could say the silence accompanies the death. you could say to not respond is to be as one who is dead. you could pessimistically [thinking of the silences of ajax and dido] read the silence of death as a deliberate rudeness of miriel towards finwë. you could say fëanor models his responses of silence on miriel.

also this:

which i categorise as a Silence Due To Thinking. but like. the mental image of melkor showing up at fëanor’s house and saying all this shit and fëanor just gives him a silent autism stare IS really good

[catilinas]

he can’t keep getting away with this. and by ‘he’ i mean tolkien and by ‘this’ i mean. the roots of random invented words being borrowed from ancient greek

[catilinas]

tuor/ulmo’s message vs turgon’s response (book of lost tales version)

i am maybe just a sucker for bitchily replying with an unfavourable variation on the original speech. but there is very noticeable repetition and the variations Are interesting insight into how turgon views the valar. and the second criticism (that they hid valinor not to keep out evil, but so they wouldn’t have to hear about it) does actually fit with how manwë specifically acts in book of lost tales!

in that. there is a trend in the bolt version of manwë (who imo is a much more interesting character. weird guy) to try to prevent discord at all costs, regardless of like. fairness or actual resolution. like ‘if there is an argument it is the act of expressing discontent that is bad’ e.g. here

where melko deliberately sows discord among the noldoli, they notice this and don’t like it and plan to complain to the valar, melko anticipates this and complains first, and manwë exiles everyone involved. lmao. (there is iirc also another passage that i remember but can’t find bcs my copy of the book is at home. rip!)

[catilinas]

do you think eärnur the thirty third king of gondor and mardil the first ruling steward of gondor ever explored each others bodies

[catilinas]

elendil’s palantir livestream of the empty ocean

[catilinas]

reading beren’s final couplet here and clapping and cheering yessssss he is managing to quote the narration of the proem. that’s pretty cool. [becoming dvd normal] this is because he is influenced by melian, who has Narratology Powers. [becoming dracula (dvd normal)] we have to make the titular ‘release from bondage’ of the lay of leithian metanarrative also

[catilinas]

post that is a reminder to myself. something i am interested in and will be keeping an eye out for in HoME is like. i guess the ethics of translation??? idk i am kind of surprised (and it might be due to just not having read enough) that across lotr + the silmarillion there are numerous times where languages are political / languages are banned etc. but i cannot think of one instance of Plot Relevant Mistranslation. Translation Used For Evil. am i missing something obvious. the best ive got is a sense of disapproval towards loan words used by orcs in rotk and like. they are not the only ones to use loan words.

on one hand tolkien obviously loves languages and one of his main characters is bilbo, who does translation for fun, so i do not think he would have a take like ‘the act of translation necessitates changing the source text, which is evil’.

on the other hand there is the tower of babel and the contentious history of translations of the bible / whether it is possible or right to try to translate the source text of ‘the word of god’, which i would expect to have some direction of influence.

on the third hand (oversimplification) but a lot of how tolkien does evil involves change/distortion(/deception) (the nefarious ovid?) and that sure seems like an interesting place to introduce some translation arguments

???