Tolkien Fan Meta and Headcanons

Here we collect meta and headcanons of all kinds with a goal of eventually organizing them in a website for everyone to read.

[tolkien-meta-library]

Welcome!

We’re working on categorizing these posts to put on a wiki, which is at: https://tolkienmetalibrary.miraheze.org/wiki/Main_Page

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[outofangband]

I love the idea of the Maiar existing on a wide spectrum of different forms and varieties.

There are Maiar who take on the forms of specific phenomena and might remain dormant or incorporeal when not appearing thus. Maiar might appear as (or leave behind) wisps, colors, smells, emotional or psychological or physical phenomena, flora and fauna, and even geography or dimensional spaces one can enter.

Maiar who take the form of currents or rain clouds or spots of light. Beech trees or climbing ivy or hummingbirds. Shimmering forms that distort space and time, or temporary inhibit the senses of anyone nearby.

They have vastly varying degrees of sentience (or at least what elves would view as sentience) and awareness and communication. Less complex forms can sometimes mean less complex existences, at least in the minds of elves and humans, but there is not a direct correlation.

Some Maia appear to present only aspects of an emotional and autonomous existence, for example appearing fully capable of humor through timing or context but not otherwise able to communicate. Many are mimics. Some can mimic facial expressions but not speech, or the opposite. Some communicate solely through music, through color, or imparting emotions.

[thereisnowind]

Alright one month since the first time I consumed anything related to Tolkien in all my two decades and some change of life, and I have to say nobody gives this man enough credit for how much of a fucking crackpot he was.

this is a long-ish unedited rant delving into pseudoscience I do not explicitly agree with but has fascinated me for a long time, and tolkien’s apparent interest in the same stuff

Yes, it takes a certain degree of insanity/genius to invent several languages and the entire (incredibly well crafted) mythos and history of a whole world. This is known. Everyone knows this. This is just scratching the surface. As I was doing a bit more research on older versions of The Silmarillion, I came across the lovely character of Ælfwine. 10th century Anglo-Saxon narrator stumbling upon Aman and bringing back its stories. He gets a lot of iterations as a framing character under slightly different names and circumstances. Anyway, knowledge of this guy eventually got me to The Lost Road, and then The Notion Club Papers.

Both of these works are Númenor-adjacent, both abandoned, both prior to the integration of Númenor into the greater mythos. Both of them are also about…pre-incarnative time travel. Okay bud. Notion Club is especially curious because it is an unashamed self-insert piece of himself and The Inklings. We get a main character plagued by nightmares of another time and world’s doom in the same fashion Tolkien described his own Atlantis nightmares. He learns of the language and culture and history of Númenor through these lucid dreams, is implied to be an incarnation of Elendil?? and of course…the work was abandoned as a fascinating little fragment.

Reading up on it immediately reminded me of something that has been sitting in the back of my brain for many many years and I kind of freaked out when I realized, and then confirmed it. It’s JW fucking Dunne. It’s fucking serialism at the scene of the crime.

There is a bizarre sect of people who seem to honestly believe Tolkien discovered and translated his manuscripts and that this represents their status as real actual history. These people do not know what a framing device is, but they’d probably like to know what serialism is!

JW Dunne was, from the outside, a decently grounded and scientific man. He contributed a fair bit to early aeronautical engineering. He had some great insights on fly fishing. And then he decided to get into philosophy, inspired by his own precognitive dreams, with the writing of An Experiment with Time. The gist of it is this: the linear experience of time and dimension is a result of limitations imposed by the consciousness. Dreams of certain kinds free us from that imposition. This is as bare bones as I can get it because if I completely described serialism in this post it would be its own website. Tolkien was influenced by these ideas in his pair of time traveling dream works, and to a degree, the movement of time within Lórien. This could well be a case of one man’s philosophical ideas being used as another man’s fictional device, but Tolkien himself was plagued by dreams of Atlantis that would become Númenor. His son had the same dreams. He certainly wasn’t translating a literal pile of mysterious scraps he found at Oxford, but he could have seen himself as translating his own dreams of a metaphysical but existent world.

All this to say there is a nonzero chance that Tolkien unironically believed his stories to be true to some universe and it was up to him to decode the things being beamed into his noggin and embellish them. Do I subscribe to this? Not really. Did he? Probably not. But I think serialism is really interesting, so did he, and I respect the hustle if Tolkien was indeed that special kind of unhinged.

and I also think it’s really funny that tolkien was perhaps a few degrees from being as insane as the conspiracy theorists who think he literally found and translated his works lmao

[nochd]

I may be able to shine some light on this.

In the 1930s, Tolkien's plans for the post-Númenorean Ages of Middle-Earth looked very different from what we eventually got. This was because he and C. S. Lewis had plans to write a collaborative science fiction world, which would incorporate Middle-Earth as its past and (what eventually became) Lewis's Ransom Trilogy as its present.

(It wouldn't have been Lewis's first collaborative fantasy world; that would be Boxen, the country of talking animals that he and his brother Warren Lewis invented together as children.)

Both Lewis and Tolkien tried their hand at time-travel stories which would have linked up the two continuities; neither one was completed. Tolkien's is The Lost Road, as OP mentions, collected posthumously in The Lost Road and Other Writings, which is Volume V of Christopher Tolkien's History of Middle-Earth. Lewis's, in a pleasing parallel, is The Dark Tower, collected posthumously in The Dark Tower and Other Stories by his secretary Walter Hooper.

Lewis for one had not given up on the idea by the time he wrote the final book of the Ransom Trilogy, That Hideous Strength, as evidenced by the fact that he has Ransom and Merlin (whoops! sorry, spoilers, Merlin gets dug up in That Hideous Strength, it's a whole thing) refer to Atlantis as "Numinor".

But Tolkien I think had long since washed his hands of the project by that point; I know he didn't like the fact that Lewis had given his Venusian Adam and Eve (in the second Ransom novel, Perelandra) the names "Tor" and "Tinidril", clearly plagiarized from Tuor and Idril in Tolkien's own Fall of Gondolin, and I have heard though I can't confirm that he referred to That Hideous Strength, accurately, as "That Hideous Book".

The fact that Perelandra and That Hideous Strength are perhaps Lewis's two most blatantly misogynistic works, and that (I gather) they're also the two which show the greatest influence from Charles Williams, and the fact that Tolkien attributed the gradual estrangement between himself and Lewis through the 1940s and 50s partly to Lewis's friendship with Charles Williams... well, I don't know enough about Williams's writings to advance any solid ideas, but those three facts jangle together in my head.

(You may have seen my thread on how Lewis's misogyny clashed with Tolkien's marriage as evidenced by the relationship between The Lay of Leithian and the Narnia book The Silver Chair.)

What does remain of the time-travel story in the Middle-Earth canon basically comes down to one single name: Eärendil. Eärendil with his Silmaril becomes the planet Venus, the Morning and Evening Star. In Old English the Morning Star is called earendel. In The Lost Road that word was to be a survival of the Elvish name.

What does all this have to do with Dunne?

Simple. The premise of The Dark Tower is that a couple of scientists at Cambridge have built a machine that projects visions of another time; they explicitly reference Dunne as the founding theorist of their discipline. According to Hooper's endnotes:

During the course of the Inklings meeting [where Lewis read the opening chapters of The Dark Tower to the group], and in a subsequent talk with Gervase Mathew... Lewis said he believed that déjà vu consisted in "seeing" what you -- you only -- had at some time merely dreamed.

So yes, the pre-incarnative time travel in The Lost Road (and the Notion Club Papers) does come from Dunne. But Tolkien's connection with Dunne was via Lewis, not direct.

I have to say... it's not surprising that an idea like Serialism would come from an engineer. Engineers are heavily over-represented among creators of entertainingly unhinged pseudoscience. I've seen this attributed to the fact that, whereas scientists are trained to think "What if I'm wrong about this?", engineers are trained to think "How can I make this work?"

[thereisnowind]

Absolutely juicy addition and light well shed upon the topic! Thank you dearly. I was aware vaguely of the Lewis-Dunne connection but hadn’t gotten chance to look into it yet, his involvement certainly ties a bow on things. I spent my childhood as a Lewis kid and never touched Tolkien for whatever reason but I feel like by chance I’ve perfectly primed myself to go insane over the ins and outs of it all. It’s like I have spent my life collecting all the pieces to create a perfect Tolkien shaped gap in my brain and Dunne and Lewis helped build it. There is something lovely about Eärendil being more or less the most steadfast feature in Tolkien’s work. As constant as the morning star itself.

[manicpixiedckgirl]

[theaudientvoid]

There are multiple chapters that are set in hospitals where the characters are attempting to recover from injuries that never fully heal. I must once again stress that my experience in WWI was perfectly normal.

[aro-ace-from-outer-space22]

There is a giant horrible mudplain full of unrecoverable and perfectly preserved dead bodies that the characters have to walk through in a land where the air is poisoned gas, and on a compLETELY UNRELATED NOTE: WWI WAS TOTALLY FINE AND NORMAL!!

[kingercainedaddyissues]

Uh??? Tolkien did not claim that???

"One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead."

He talked about how WWI affected his writing all the time, he was not in denial for how it affected??? Am I missing something????

[alexseanchai]

https://www.tolkiensociety.org/blog/2017/09/tolkien-as-war-novelist-another-way-of-dealing-with-trauma-through-writing/

what Tolkien was adamant about, which has been confusing people for several decades now, is that he wasn't writing about World War Two

[beatrice-otter]

He was also very clear that he was not writing allegory. Now, some people are not very clear on what allegory means. "Allegory" and "symbols" are not the same thing. Allegory is a type of symbolism, but there are a lot of ways of doing symbolism that aren't allegory ... and a lot of people are kind of fuzzy on that. The way allegory is most commonly used in literary and religious analysis is that there is a direct, almost 1:1 correspondence between the literary figure and what it is standing in for.

So, for example, Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory of Christian salvation. It's sort of a novel? There are characters who do stuff? but also they are very one-dimensional. The main character is a guy named Christian--yes, really!--who is journeying from his hometown ("the city of destruction") to the Celestial City (heaven). There is not much subtlety to it. It is pretty much what it is. There is no slippage, no playing around with the theme, no places where the symbolism is ambiguous. John Bunyan, the author, is hitting you over the head every step of the way with the Meaning That You Are Supposed To Be Getting From The Story.

Not all allegories are that crude or simplistic; the Narnia books are also allegory for Christianity. They have a lot more subtlety to them and a lot more nuance, and there's a lot of stuff in there that isn't allegorical, but on the crucial matters there is still a 1:1 correspondence. Aslan is Jesus. He's not like Jesus, he's not a character that has some similarities to Jesus or takes themes from the stories of Jesus, he is Jesus.

Tolkien is not doing allegory. Tolkien is taking the material of his life--his faith, his experiences in WWI, his linguistic and historical knowledge, his favorite books--and using them as the building blocks of his story. The themes and imagery and symbols draw heavily from all of that, the characters and settings draw heavily from all of that, but they are too complex to be allegorical. There's a lot of symbolism! It's not allegory.

So, for example, let's take the Dead Marshes referenced above. Does the experience of walking through this muddy wasteland with corpses all around that are rotting but still look like people draw from Tolkien's WWI battlefield experience of dead bodies in the trenches? Of course it does! but there are also a lot of differences. These dead are not from the current war, they are from a previous one--they are a reminder of old conflicts, of the ways the systems and powers of the current war have not come out of nowhere, there is history here. There is meaning that is not drawn from the Somme. And they are also drawing from literary references Tolkien was familiar with--primarily William Morris. Modern readers don't get the references because we have generally not read The House of the Wolflings, but that doesn't mean that the references aren't there.

So people read Tolkien's insistence that he didn't write allegory, and take that to mean that he's saying there isn't symbolic and thematic references. And that isn't what he meant! And also, we focus so much on the thematic references to WWI and Christianity, and we miss most of the other references, which makes it seem like Tolkien's only drawing on WWI, when he's actually doing something more complex.

[strongholdinthedark]

@unnumbered-fandoms

[orions-mistletoe-arrow]

My favorite headcannon I have going for LOTR right now is that the elves that are still around by the time Frodo gets on the scene are the elvish equivalent of doomsday preppers.

I forget where I read it, but I'm pretty sure that at some point there were millions of elves on Middle-earth, and by the end of the third age, it's down to a few thousand, aka a very small portion. These are the elves that got told way back in the first age, "Hey, just so you guys know, you're totally welcome to come back and live in heaven now without any worries" and responded, "No thanks, we're good!" and then proceeded to not only hold to that but survived the next 7.000 years of bullshit including but not limited to:

Multiple continents sinking into the sea

orcs

dragons

balrogs

multiple wars with Sauron, a literal divine being

The rise and fall of several human empires

more orcs

wargs

a bunch of their territory being overtaken and burned to the ground

And all of their loved ones either dying or sailing, even though we know that grief can and will kill an elf

Like, you can't tell me that third age elves start showing up in the undying lands, where everyone has spent the last few thousand years basking in the magical equivilant of free therapy and probably have as many defence measures as a suburban coldesac, and aren't viewed as the most feral, twitchy, paranoid mother fuckers; held together by suspicion, stubornness, and at least 25 contingencies for every situation they've collectively encountered during their time in Middle-earth.

My favorite examples of feral, hyper-vigilant behavior include:

Elrond: Security clearance; sure, Turgon may have threatened to kill anyone who tried to leave his hidden city, but he also took an entire army out of and back to the city at once, and then also didn't realize that his own nephew snitched on where the city was. His security protocols sucked. Meanwhile, Elrond had hundreds of strangers coming in and out of Rivendell for over 3,000 years, at one point completely surrounded by enemies and full of nothing but a bunch of refugees, and Sauron still never found it. You can't tell me that he didn't have at least 25 security checkpoints on the way into his city(sorry, house-that means it's private property, right?), even if you didn't know they were there.

Galadriel: Paranoia; This woman was magically keeping track of everyone she knew and even did it often enought that she knew what to look for of those she couldn't directly track (gandalf) and looking into their minds and testing them. All while having Sauron constantly clawing at the walls of her mind, at least for a few years

Thranduil: Spite; it was basically only his sheer audacity holding his nuclear bunker- cough cough- sorry, I meant vast underground halls together, while his next-door neighbor was some cursed ruins, a dragon-infested dwarf kingdom, and evil, man-eating, car-sized spiders on his front lawn.

Haldir: he blindfolded the fellowship when they tried to enter his city (super secret hideout), need I say more?

Multiple examples of groups of elves jumping out of trees fully armed and ambushing anyone who wanders into their territory. And while the characters seem surprised to be ambushed, they don't seem surprised that elves ambush people in general, leading me to believe this is normal behavior.

In summary, while the elves in the LOTR and the Hobbit seem all chill and fun, I like to imagine them as the crazy raccoons of the elvish family trees that wandered in 5 hours late.

[tamilhobbit]

😂

[warrioreowynofrohan]

A bit of a theory that I’ve struck on while rereading the start of FOTR. I think there’s something guarding Rivendell besides the Bruinen. I think Elrond has taken a leaf out of Melian’s book.

There are some hints that the distance to Rivendell varies depending on who you are. Frodo starts approaching the Ford in late afternoon; he is in desperate need of healing, and is brought to Rivendell midway into that same night.

In The Hobbit, in contrast, the dwarves and Bilbo cross the Ford of Bruinen in the morning, and the sun is down by the time they reach Rivendell. There’s lot of references to the journey being longer than Bilbo would expect:

They came on unexpected valleys, narrow with steep sides, that opened suddenly at their feet, and then looked down surprised to see trees below them and running water at the bottom. There were gullies that they could almost leap over, but very deep with waterfalls in them. There were dark ravines that one could neither jump over or climb into. There were bogs, some of them green pleasant places to look at, with flowers growing bright and tall; but a pony that walked there with a pack on its back would never have come out again. It was indeed a mich wider land from the ford to the mountains than you would ever have guessed. Bilbo was astonished.

Then there’s Aragorn’s line when Merry asks him how far it is to Rivendell:

“I don’t know if the Road has ever been measured in miles beyond The Forsaken Inn, a day’s journey east of Bree. Some say it is far, and others say otherwise. It is a strange road, and folk are glad to meet their journey’s end, whether the time is long or short. But I know how long it would take me on my own feet, with fair weather and no ill fortune: twelve days from here to the Ford of Bruinen.”

(By the way, it always amazes me, now I’ve noticed it, that the hobbits manage this journey - which Aragorn says would take him 12 days on the Road, with “fair weather and no ill fortune,” in only 14 days with Frodo severely injured, travelling mainly off the Road, and with some bad weather and wrong directions. Some of that’s due to the extremely fast pace Glorfindel sets for the last twoand a half days, but it’s incredibly impressive.)

If anyone should know the distance from Bree to Rivendell, it should be Aragorn, a Ranger of the North fostered in Rivendell, who has probably covered that journey dozens to hundreds of times. And the Road is fairly straight; it shouldn’t be hard for travellers to keep track of the general distance. And also, Aragorn only gives the distance to the Ford, not to Rivendell itself. What if the distance and difficulty of the Road from the Ford to Rivendell varies, based on how well a guest is known. Frodo is the Ring-bearer, in desperate need; he makes it there fast. Thorin & Company are vouched for by Gandalf, but are largely an unknown quantity; it takes them the better part of a day. Someone with hostile intentions might never find Rivendell at all, even after days of wanderings.

[fangirl-erdariel]

Oh this is genuinely an interesting point!

One thing it makes me wonder about though is Boromir, and particularly that the book mentions he arrived in Rivendell "in the grey morning", which personally I've always taken to mean in the very early morning, when there's some light but the sun may not yet be properly up and the dim light has that kind of greyish quality (granted that it's late November, so even with Rivendell being further south in Middle-Earth than my home in the real world, at that point the sun probably rises quite late so it may not mean as much as otherwise). Idk maybe that's just my reading of the text, but given that earlier in the chapter the morning is described as sunny, so the "grey" can't refer to cloudy weather, that's how the phrasing would seem to me, anyway.

And it's always struck me as a little bit odd in the sense that, for that to be the case, he would've had to either both start his journey very early that day (which, granted, in itself is plausible) and have been very close to Rivendell already when he started, or he would have had to push through the night without stopping to rest at all. And to me it's kind of, on one hand if he knew he was close enough to Rivendell to reach it that early, wouldn't he have known he was close, and rather pushed through in hopes of getting somewhere inside before the night was over, instead of spending it camped by the roadside in cold damp late November weather? But if he was so far from Rivendell as to have to travel the whole night through without stopping to reach it in early morning, then how would he have known he was close enough for continuing through the night, instead of stopping to make camp and sleep, to be worth it for reaching Rivendell faster?

But your point about the distance to Rivendell being different to different people in different times would make either of those more plausible, either being shorter than he thought to allow him to reach Rivendell in time to attend the Council (since Elrond implies that those who were in the Council had been called there by fate or some such power and were meant to all be there on that day to play their part in the events at hand), or being longer than he thought it would and forcing him to travel all night to reach it (since he was a stranger, unknown to Elrond and coming unexpectedly).

Or, idk, maybe none of this makes any sense to anyone but me, but, yeah.

[warrioreowynofrohan]

This makes sense to me! After thinking about it, I figure that Boromir crossed the Ford of Bruinen late in the day on the day before the Council, continued on for a little ways and then camped. And then set out early in the morning any found he was practically on the doorstep of Rivendell, despite having seen no sign of it the previous night. Which adds to his general sense of disorientation.

[fangirl-erdariel]

Yeah, probably!

Honestly no wonder he was a bit in a grumpy mood in the Council, I'd be too if I'd spent the night camped in the wild in late autumn, woken up sometime in very early morning to continue my journey, and somehow found the destination right there almost no distance away at all when i could've sworn it wasn't so close yet the night before, lol

[celebbun]

Rejoice, children, for I have decided that an unhinged rant is in order

I have come to the conclusion that, despite what much of the fandom would like to think, Legolas is, in fact, not a prince. My reasoning to back this up is based on two main pillars: the Woodland Realm’s monarchy system and Legolas’ lack of royal title throughout the books.

In regards to the Woodland Realm/Eryn Galen/Eryn Lasgalen: it was founded when Oropher and Thranduil arrived at the Greenwood with a handful of people and integrated into Silvan society, with the Silvan later making Oropher their king. Now, I can’t find the exact passage that describes Oropher becoming king. It’s not in the Unfinished tales of the Appendix B of The Return of the King; it might be in The Peoples of Middle Earth, but I can’t find a pdf of it to save my life. However, the Tolkien Gateway describes his ascension as him being “taken up by the Elves of the wood as their king” and “taken by the Silvan Elves as their lord” in the pages for Oropher and Mirkwood, respectively. The Thranduil page also uses very similar phrasing.

The implication here is that the Silvan chose Oropher as king, rather than he declaring himself as such, which led me to think that this could very well be taken as Oropher being elected king; and therefore the Woodland Realm would have an elective monarchy. In regards to Thranduil being king after Oropher, I’d chalk it up to a mere coincidence. After Oropher’s death at Dagorlad, Thranduil led Greenwood’s armies for almost the full 7 years of the Last Alliance, so it’d only make sense if he were the one  elected as the next king.

In an elective system, only the person who’s elected holds the title that they’ve been elected for, so there is no Royal Family, or titles adjacent to that of king. In the case of Oropher becoming king, only he would hold a royal title, which means Thranduil would be the son of the king, but not a prince. Later, that same pattern would repeat itself when Thranduil is elected king. Legolas is the king’s son, but that doesn’t grant him any titles or authority.

In fact, Legolas’ lack of titles is something that stands out quite a bit in the books. Despite him being introduced as the son of Thranduil, he’s never once called a prince, and his parentage is never acknowledged by any other character. Even when Aragorn introduces him in Rohan, he does so by calling him “Legolas of the Woodland Realm”, once again ignoring who his father is, and foregoing any weight or influence of name dropping the Elvenking. Sure, it can be argued that in this instance, Aragorn wasn’t sure of where Rohan stands in regards to the war, so revealing Legolas is the child of someone important might be risky, as well as that he emphasised the Woodland Realm to differentiate Legolas from the elves of Lothlórien, whom the people of Rohan distrust; still, it’s quite interesting.

“But what about the queen?” No queen. “Oh, but Thranduil had a child, so he must have had a wife!” Why? Because you believe in the myth of the nuclear family? Can a single man with not a drop of mental health not raise a child alone as though it’s his emotional support crusty white dog? He even followed the guidelines: adopt, don’t shop. “Oh, but the movies!” The Hobbit movies have dealt irreparable damage to Thranduil’s character and nothing they said matters to me. I was in this fandom before they came out, I remember the glory days of Thranduil’s tag on Tumblr and AO3 and, yes, I’m bitter.

Anyway, even if Thranduil were married to whatever “heart of gold, died tragically” OC the fandom has lined up, she wasn’t voted in, so no royal title for her.

But yeah, Legolas isn’t a prince, he’s just some guy who happens to have a very powerful dad and no authority of his own.

[celebbun]

"But couldn't Legolas be elected king in the case of Thranduil's death?" No, Legolas is a dumbass

[whirlception]

elves have eyelids. however elves also notably sleep with their eyes open. narratively this serves to freak out humans hobbits and dwarves which i think is incredible. however on the speculative biology side i think it would be very funny if elves had a full functioning nictitating membrane (ie clear under-eyelid) like alligators and beavers and birds that activated when they slept to protect + prevent drying of their otherwise open eyes.

and if it was fully voluntary, what would it mean socially for an elf to blink their under-eyelids? like would it be catty and rude of them? or would it indicate they think the speaker is so dangerous they don’t want to let them out of their sight?

[silmalope]

For day one of @tolkienfashionweek , headcanons on the evolution of (elf-friendly) fashion and fána among the Valar :)

[sparrow-olli]

When people watch the Lord of the Rings movies and question why the Nazgul are unwilling to go into the water, I'm always the crazy one yelling, "THE MUSIC OF THE AINUR IS ALIVE IN THE WATER!"

And it is said by the Eldar that in the water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance else that is in this Earth.

Ilúvatar's music is basically existing in its second purest form in the water?? Of course, the evil guys aren't going anywhere near that.

Also, Ulmo is scary. The one Valar vibing in middle-earth's seas at all time? Yeah, I wouldn't risk it either if I was an evil creature.

[thetiredprometheus]

When Maedhros comes back from Thangorodrim, the sun burns him. It burns him like it burns orcs, burns him like he is one of Morgoth's fell monsters. And sometimes he thinks that the sun must be able to recognise the darkness in him, the fact that he truly is not so different from the other creatures of Angband that he slays. It's only centuries later that he realises: oh, gingers just do that

[happyperle]

The feud between Nolofinwe and feanor must have shaped Maglor's personality a lot.

He is Feanor's second son.

In a way while Maedhros's was more than feanor's heir and his mini-me, maglor could have had all of Feanor's anxieties around younger siblings and perhaps Nolo's perceived treachery unconsciously projected unto him.

So maglor shaped himself as Maedhros's most loyal supporter, the most non-threatening spare to ever exist, from small childhood to the bitter end.

He became what Feanor thought Nolofinwe should have been,a full brother in blood, dutiful, steadfast and devoted. His brother's trusted right-hand man, his second who knew his place and didn't aspire for more.

[lesbiansforboromir]

God talking about magic in Tolkien you know I thought I kinda had it settled in my head, I’d accepted it’s kind of rare and unknowable nature you know? But then I reread Concerning Hobbits and like…

There’s a sentence that basically says ‘Hobbits didn’t study magic because they just didn’t go in for that sort of thing’ which fucks me up royally because it gives us two pieces of information.

- Magic can be studied 

- Hobbits COULD have had magic but they didn’t want it

I’ve been assuming that Magic’s some inherent thing that requires a process of making and some element of mysticism and a little Valar influence thrown in but no! No apparently you can just read a book like… this isn’t HoME stuff this is Lord of the Rings secure 100% accepted canon material that we now have to just deal with! This means fucking Pippin could have been a Wizard if he’d studied hard enough! We have to process that! John! Did you ever think of that?! 

[explorersaremadeofhope]

also, Dwarves have magic. apparently. they can put curses on things. he just.. casually threw that one out there and never mentioned it again.

[lesbiansforboromir]

Yeah!!! Like the Shire just has a bunch of stated ‘clearly magical’ toys all about the shop. Like! What!

[silver-grasp]

The dwarves of yore made mighty spells/ while hammers fell like ringing bells 

[explorersaremadeofhope]

You don’t even need to go back to yore! Good ole jirt just casually mentions in passing in ‘the hobbit’ that thorin’s company buried the troll gold and put lots of spells over it (I said curses by mistake up there but the book has ‘spells’) and then kept traveling. Like…wait. Jirt. Pls.

[cycas]

To my mind that’s an attractive thing about magic / enchantment /spells in Tolkien.  It’s not a huge ‘wow look at that’ worldbuilding thing.  It’s subtle and part of the world itself, so that you barely notice it.  Magic in Middle-earth is almost like electricity: it does a lot, but people don’t stand around hitting each other with mains electrical cables, or say things like ‘I shall use my electricity to contact you from afar!’.  Because it’s built-in and normal (I think we are seeing this transition with the word ‘internet’ too: I think it’s a word less used than it used to be, because now it’s intrinsic.  We don’t ‘look on the internet’ any more, we google or check FB or go on Wikipedia or discord…).  The words are artfully used too: look out for where he uses ‘spells’  ‘enchantment’  ‘magic’  ‘sorcery’  ‘wizardry’  ‘curses’ : all of these have different etymologies and that relates to exactly how Tolkien uses them.  

I don’t think Pippin could easily become a wizard, exactly, because that’s a word that began with the meaning ‘philosopher or sage’. It’s more or less the same as the term ‘The Wise’.  Sam Gamgee picks up an air of ‘Gandalf, of wizards’ about Faramir, and Faramir suggests that perhaps he sees something of Numenor.  

But Pippin probably *could* learn to do things that hobbits would call magic, or spells. In fact, in Lorien, when Sam says that he’s interested in the Elvish rope, one of the Elves helping to load the boats says it’s a pity he hadn’t mentioned it earlier since they would have ‘taught him much’.  Given that we later see the rope shines against the sudden dark that came over Frodo, and came when Sam called it, it might well be that if Sam had learned rope-making in Lorien, it would have included things that he would call spells.  But no doubt the Elves would just call it ‘making ropes’.  You can see it might be difficult to find a tutor in magic if everyone you ask about magic goes : ‘no idea. I hear these other guys can do all sorts of mysterious stuff, but it’s all just basic ropemaking here.’ 

[bailesu]

The thing which is really innate is power level; but Tolkien’s magic is to a large extent, magic tangled up with *making* and *growing*.  Things that everyone who has the Secret Fire of Anor in them can do.  I expect that things which Hobbits wouldn’t consider magic is part of how the Shire grows enough food to be able to basically eat six times a day.

Any creative act is, to some degree, an act of magic, formalized or not, in Middle-Earth.

[outofangband]

Thinking about the more uncanny magic of the Girdle of Melian

Melian served in the gardens of Estë which are within Irmo’s domain and I’ve long had the thought that a similar magic that surrounds the gardens of Lórien is imbued in the Girdle.

I imagine the outskirts of the Girdle as disorienting, its borders mostly invisible though with some distortions of light in places that you can see if you look closely.

Strange lights can lead you astray and stepping upon certain rocks or patches of moss can render you witless, like in faerie stories of creatures that take the shape of plants or stones to bewitch unwary travelers who trod upon them

There does seem to be basis in canon for this too; in The Children of Húrin, when young Túrin and his guardians, Gethron and Grithnir, make it to Doriath, they are able to enter the girdle however they become “enmeshed in the mazes of the queen”. They would have starved if they hadn’t been found by marchwardens.

I’ve speculated before on the strange and dangerous effects of Ungoliant and her spawn upon the Ered Gorgoroth and Nan Dungortheb, the mountains and valley where she was said to live in Beleriand, on how pools of water become poisonous and stinging webs snare victims and even the geography itself is haunted. I think the Girdle, located just south of Nan Dungortheb, should have its own uncanny, sometimes terrible power.

[ieatwormsandtheytasteverygood]

ok so ignoring for a bit that im really out of it (and thereby not the most coherent), all im going to say is that the silmarillion fandom REALLY needs to learn more mediæval history. and im not meaning the military stuff, not really. im meaning the cultural details that were very much something that tolkien was aware of (and incorporated into his texts).

taking children as hostages (whilst not really a moral thing, but this isnt about the morality of any of it) was not done for the same reasons necessarily as it is today. hostages were often means of guaranteeing non-aggression (or alliances, or tribute) between two nations, or of fostering good relations between the two by having one of their children be raised amongst another culture. on that last note, that was often done as a means of ensuring (vaguely) successful marriages, such as how sigismund, hre, was raised in the hungarian court & culture, to ensure the success of his marriage to mary of hungary (this was quite convenient as he later became king of hungary de jure uxoris but thats not rlly relevant). whilst somewhat different to hostile hostage-taking, fostering has also been very common throughout history, and even happened cross-class in some places (like ireland, where iirc the eldest sons of irish rulers were often fostered with common families, so as to increase the phenomenon known as "compassion"; though tolkien took little, if any inspiration from irish history, and most parallels found are from the welsh & the norse often having similar customs and/or mythologies to the irish).

holding nobles to ransom was afaik mostly done to adults, usually hostile knights, after the advent of chivalry in europe.

the point is, children were not held to ransom, and it does not once state that the sons of fëanor ever held elrond & elros to ransom. they were hostages, likely as some means of discouraging gil-galad from pursuing military action (though lets be real, gil-galad likely lacked communications w/ the sons of fëanor at that point, given the whole "morgoth controlling all the land" thing), but mostly because it was What Was Done with prisoners of war that were children. this would've meant that e&e were treated well, as they were wards of the house of fëanor (as this is what hostages were), and would've genuinely been treated almost as well, if not just as well, as maedhros & maglor's own sons (not that they had any but yknow). it makes sense in the context of this that "love grew between them", as this quite frequently happened in such situations, even when the hostages were more poorly treated (see: james i of scotland & his relationships with henry iv & henry v of england, and how his loyalty to his kidnappers [this was a kidnapping situation, not a legal example] eventually resulted in the scottish nobility murdering him bc he fought against scottish soldiers on the behalf of the english, in france).

furthermore, the sons of fëanor had zero reason to hold them to ransom. gil-galad & círdan likely lacked the resources to care for their own people, let alone the fëanorian host (which likely was larger at this point than is implied, as the text itself only ever seems to mention the soldiers, and even were the fëanorians a roving military band, they would've had huge numbers of camp followers, both by necessity, and bc any sane elf/man/dwarf in late-stage beleriand would be hanging out with the biggest army they could find). and whilst it's uncertain if they knew that elwing was alive (and they wouldve known next to nothing abt eärendil), what they did know was that she 1) had previously refused to negotiate for the silmaril, and 2) if she were alive (this suspicion only being possible bc let's be real, a river delta does not have deep water; they wouldve found her body quite easily), she almost certainly was too far away for them to communicate with at all. also, if she were dead, they couldn't negotiate with her. on account of her being dead. the sons of fëanor wanted the silmarilli, and elrond & elros were not a viable means of getting any; and they were not stupid enough to think that they would have been. also, again, the text never once states that they were held to ransom.

uhhh tl;dr: hostage did not mean the same thing in mediæval times as it does today, precisely, and it is never stated that elrond & elros were ever held to ransom. they were wards of the sons of fëanor, albeit illegally acquired wards.

[cilil]

One of my favorite "flavor" kind of things to imagine about Arda was always the underlying presence and echo of Ainurin music in the very fabric of reality. We get some of this in canon with the whole thing about the Elves being able to hear echoes of the Ainulindalë in water specifically and Ulmo speaking through it, so that's where I got it from.

For most inhabitants of Arda, this is entirely unnoticeable. Even when it comes to Elves and water it takes a lot of focus and practice to perceive these echoes, and things get harder when they try other elements or when it's other people trying it (Ainur, of course, excluded. They can perceive this stuff everywhere without issues, unless a more powerful Ainu is actively veiling something).

However, when the fabric of reality begins to break down, the echoes become easier to perceive. My favorite thing to imagine - and the reason why I thought about this in the first place - is that when Arda is in its final hours and everything is falling apart, everyone, even the most mundane mortals with no magical abilities, can hear the echoes of the Ainulindalë clearly; especially the final chord with which the world ends.

[outofangband]

I think it’s worth mentioning that balrogs are said to be not just as beings of fire but of shadow and darkness too. Their hearts were fire but they were cloaked in darkness is how they’re described. Indeed their most significant fire related aspect are not their bodies but their flaming whips.

It’s been wondered how exactly balrogs could ambush someone but I think they can, especially before the rising of the sun and moon. They appear to move in shadow, only revealing their full form in battle.

I like to imagine them materialising out of the black rocks of coastal Beleriand under night to face Fëanor and his sons, half melted into the shadows of the trees where Maedhros and his host are to meet the emissary from Angband…