In the forest singing sorrowless

in every wood in every spring there is a different green

[lesbiansforboromir]

@aro-ace-from-outer-space22 I'm moving this discussion to a different post because I feel bad for dragging OP into so many walls of text. For anyone who wishes to keep up, this is the post I'm replying too.

OUGH lots to get into here though. To begin, the 'religious interdiction' and the 'evil' are one and the same within the LotR universe. What I have said and what you have said are the same. What takes something from being 'bad' to being 'evil' is purely the presence of divine judgement. And when we discuss the profane within a middle earth context, we aren't talking about a cultural concept, we are talking about a factual force within the world itself. The reason the ring is corrupting is because it is a profane object. The 'evil' the ring is supposed to do is to claim the 'throne of the world' from Eru, it's rightful owner, and that action would be ontologically evil within Arda even if the RIng itself had no, or even positive, results. Which is why, when Frodo does claim the power of the ring and saves the world, his spirit is sickened to such a degree. Even though the act was necessary.

But what I would also say is that some of what you have stated is either not completely true within book canon, or is not a known truth to even the wise of middle-earth.

The ring does not radiate malice, for example! One cannot tell the difference between it and any other powerful ring, hence the need for Gandalf to spend so much time away dithering to figure out a proper test for it. It is also a misconception that the ring exudes a kind of corruption AOE, being in proximity to the ring does not corrupt you. As far as I can tell, if you come to want the ring, then it can exert some control over you that ranges from an altered mental state to actively taking control of your body and forcing you into action. But you do have to want it first.

Frodo, for example, is forced by the ring to put it on during the attack of the ringwraiths when precisely what Frodo wants to do is disappear, and he knows the ring can do that for him. He has no desire for the ring for the whole rest of the time it's been in his house, literal decades of his life. It's only in the moment when he has a reason to desire it that it's power can be brought to bare.

Boromir, similarly, is not effected by the ring until after his meeting with Galadriel and she quite explicitely 'tempts' him with it, leaving him confused and distrustful of his companions and the success of their mission. I can go into this in more detail but suffice to say there is no evidence of the ring's AOE corruption within the books.

I would also say that Gandalf is of course concerned about what the ring would do to him. Firstly, he is faithful by nature, Eru is his ultimate god, he experiences the same religious horror over the ring that Faramir does. He is also a maia, just as Sauron is, and many maia were persuaded to Morgoth's side even without the ring's influence. Saruman rolled over quite quickly about it. There is no greater inherrent resistance within maia against corruption than anyone else, and one could cobble together an argument that they're actually more at risk than most.

But about Faramir! I did not mean to imply that Faramir does not value his people at all, certainly he values at least the political and cultural entity of Gondor (as the last remnant of numenor) over his own life. My point was simply that Faramir values the people of Gondor less than he values obeisance before god. Which, it is to be understood, IS technically the ontologically correct opinion in the divine metalogic of LotR. It's just that there is no 'proof' of that being the case.

And, to that point, I do challenge the idea that Faramir has this definitive knowledge that the ring is inherrently corrupting and will inevitably bring ruin with it's use. Not only does Faramir not have any special knowledge of the ring whatsoever, this idea that the ring will corrupt any user is equally debatable among 'the wise'!

When Galadriel is describing to Frodo how one might use the ring, her warning is that Frodo is not skilled in the domination of others and therefore he would fail and be consumed. She does not say that consumption is inevitable. And again, clearly it is not so cut and dry since Frodo does take the power of the ring to curse gollum and saves the world in the process, even if he does also desire to keep the ring in the end.

My point being that if Galadriel is not certain of this fact, then Faramir surely cannot be given such definitive knowledge. And he indeed never expresses that this is the reason for his rejection. He says only that he will not use a weapon of the dark lord 'for [Gondor's] good and my glory', kind of clearly insinuating that good for gondor is possible in his imagination!

It is important to understand that I am rarely ever arguing for Denethor's justification vs Faramir's moral complexity from an 'ontalogically correct' standpoint. Within the narrative of the books the one true god exists and if we are speaking within that framework then it is impossible to make any critique of any action that is taken with the defense of 'the faith' in mind. Right and Wrong are entirely what Eru decrees them to be.

So when I am defending Denethor's perspective, it is specifically his perspective. I am taking what Denethor knows, what Faramir knows and what Gandalf knows and judging their actions based on those things. None of them actually knows that using the ring would be definitely disasterous in a mundane sense, no one knows shit about the ring, it is a mysterious and profane object with very few certainties. No one has even seen it in 3000 years, there are no examples of someone using the ring and disaster abounding. Gollum's use of the ring, meagre though it might be, basically worked out for him in the sense that he was able to catch fish, murder orcs and eat babies out of cradles with really the only consequences coming to him quite slowly. And he certainly does not possess the skill of 'dominating the will of others' that Galadriel appears to think so important.

Which brings me to my 'that's not how the palantir works' side gripe. Denethor is not corrupted by the Palantir. Denethor has full control of his own faculties, the Palantir isn't doing shit to him, it is not a mysterious object and Sauron has no power to control Denethor through his use when Denethor is a 'rightful user' of the Palantirs and Sauron canonically isnt. Denethor can just set Sauron to ignore.

Denethor's will is broken when his last living son gets sepsis from a poisoned arrow. He does go up to the Palantir then, probably to try and find a glimmer of hope, but what he sees crumbles that hope and causes him to say 'the enemy has found it'. And though this is never proven, I am pretty sure Denethor saw a naked and chained Frodo at the top of Cirith Ungol since the timeline lines up perfectly and that would certainly be the sight to convince anyone that the ring has been found.

However, before that, Denethor is as he ever was. There is no corruption for Faramir to be privvy too. Before that single mental break of grief and despair (catalysed by completely real events and based on the only knowledge Denethor has at the time) Denethor is the same stalwart defender of Gondor that he has ever been. It is a film fabrication that Denethor's 'rule is failing'.

I will not get into my lack of surety that Gandalf would feel all that bad about Gondor's destruction, or my perception of his general lack of empathy or care for any of the ensouled creatures he is supposed to be caring for.

All I am here to say is that Denethor, for whom the duty of defending Gondor has been his entire life, whom has spent 90 years watching this country be worn slowly down by ultimate evil, whom has lost nearly everyone he loves to a war he did not start and cannot escape and that is explicitely a war of divinity itself, whom knows that Gandalf is a part of that divine, whom (extremely correctly) percieves Gandalf as someone who will hide vital information from him in order to try and control him, and who knows that Gandalf is angling to install a new King- 'With the left hand thou wouldst use me for a little while as a shield against Mordor, and with the right bring up this Ranger of the North to supplant me'<- exactly what Gandalf did!!- yes! it is reasonable to me for him to see Gandalf as a threat to Gondor and his son's life. It is reasonable to me that Denethor has 'lost faith' in 'the west', that he no longer believes in their irrefutably good intentions, that he no longer trusts Gandalf's begrudgingly bestowed wisdoms. Why should Denethor trust Gandalf that using the Ring would destroy him? The only answer is 'on faith'.

Yes, by the logic of what is ontologically true in Arda, Denethor is technically wrong. It would not have worked to keep the ring hidden in his vaults, using it at the moment of most direst need would have been a disaster because that is Frodo's destiny not his, Gandalf does not ultimately sacrifice Gondor in his pursuit of a divine victory and even if he had it would have been correct of him to do so because it is worth anything to keep Eru in his rightful place as ultimate authority over the world.

The point I am making is that none of these characters knew any of that. Boromir and Denethor and Faramir were expected to make the correct decisions based on faith, disregarding what their own experiences told them and trusting only in the west and it's (often callous, often concealing, often dismissive and actively seditious) messengers. Which I simply do not accept! It is certainly the atheist in me, but if the divine has demanded so much of someone, forced them to lose that much, and yet still has no sympathy for what grief resentment and despair can do, then I reject that divine on a purely moral basis. I find them unworthy of faith. And I find the characters whom could not keep that faith alive under such conditions extremely sympathetic and reasonable in their rejection.

[balrogballs]

I really don’t want to open this can of worms because Tumblr hath no fury like people called out on their political performativeness but it is literally driving me up the wall to watch people react to Serkis’ ‘keep Tolkien white’ commentary by insisting twice as hard that Tolkien would descend down to earth and dropkick the entire Republican party to hell or whatever, just because they want to ensure that a piece of media they enjoy isn’t seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkien’s ‘I hate apartheid’ valedictorian address being used as a ‘counter’ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.

Except it’s only ever the ‘I hate apartheid’ line that’s shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:

If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.

Which is to say. This isn’t exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going ‘omg we relate’ and expressing what is a very, very mild ‘segregation is not great’ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.

I also think that some of the general surprise around ‘what do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?’ in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose one’s own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist it’s anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck… and then getting really Pikachu-meme ‘but they’re misreading it’ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with ‘I don’t see colour’ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.

I genuinely don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.

What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?

Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.

No, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.

There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very ‘get thee gone from my gate’ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.

Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkien’s own thoughts on military atrocity in general is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.

The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.

Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidental”, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.

Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible… casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge ‘scandal’ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politics™️, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.

I didn’t want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesn’t need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.

Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkien’s few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And it’s just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.

I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic ‘love’? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?

This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.

You can put actors of colour in Númenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.

So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.

But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and we’ll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkien’s world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.

Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.

We don’t need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting “keep the Shire white” Serkis soundbites and “hooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!” news cycles standing in for a conversation that hasn't actually started yet, and ngl buddies I have to say I personally will be biting people the next time I see yet another rendition of the same damn response-reaction cycle start again because everyone, both the conservatives and the left, wants the things they love to be a reflection of themselves, and will twist themselves into pretzels to ensure that remains the case.

[tolkienminorityy]

white people can accept dragons, magic, elves (with a language very similar to arabic), and hobbits (who are literally described as brown-skinned if you actually read the books), but draw the line at people of color. lord of the rings isn't historical. it's fantasy. fantasy is for everyone. fantasy does not equal white. tolkien would have absolutely been for including all peoples in his works. he was a humanist at his core and adapted his works accordingly as he grew. white supremacy has no place in fantasy. especially in a story like lord of the rings.

bring this back :,)

[peasant-player]

"..And as she knelt before him her tears fell upon his feet like rain upon stone; and Mandos was moved to pity, who never before was moved, nor has been since."

-Of beren and Luthien

[kosmogrl]

this is so cool!!

[kosmogrl]

[viralfrog]

[fvngus]

I'd like to believe this is how it all started.

[galedekarios]

🔥🔥🔥

[outofangband]

Thinking about elves and color.

Elves being able to see spectrums of color that humans cannot. Shapes in the dark, the colors of movement, of water, of different forms of light.

Elves who can primarily see at night or in the depths of a forest, who experience disorientation in bright or open spaces.

Elven languages canonically have many roots related to green. I imagine some languages with hundreds of words for green, the green of light through trees in the morning, of frail ferns unfurling in the dawn of spring, of the metallic greens of raven’s or starling’s feathers, of a sickly pallor or dusty lichens.

Forms of color blindness that don’t exist among humans or are more common among elves; inability to name or distinguish colors, only seeing shades of grey, temporary color blindness arising from extreme stress or sensory deprivation.

Synesthesia in general is more common among elves and many forms involve color; smells or tastes as color, sound as color, the music of the world, in the water, felt as color. Pain or grief as color. Communicating color through ósanwë.

I just really enjoy playing with elven senses and I think there’s so many possibilities here

[sotwk]

I believe Theodred was wiser and more incorruptible than either Theoden or Eomer, which made him more dangerous in Saruman's eyes.

And we don't talk about that enough.

[from-the-coffee-shop-in-edoras]

YES! Hard agree!! And if we look at the story from a logical perspective, where Saruman is a rational actor who only makes choices he perceives to be in his own self interest, it is clear as day that he does see Théodred as the biggest threat. If he thought he could dominate Théodred in the same way he did to Théoden, he would have. And if he thought Éomer would be harder to contend with as leader of Rohan, he would have killed him and left Théodred in place rather than the opposite. Saruman makes a lot of mistakes and clearly suffers from hubris, but he’s not dumb. If he looked at Rohan and concluded Théodred was the one who had to go, there was a damn good reason for that.

Unfortunately for Saruman, Éomer turned out to be a much more formidable opponent than he imagined, though even that is due to Théodred in significant ways since Théodred played a major role in raising Éomer after his parents died. So, yeah, people should never underestimate Théodred!

[maenefa]

Ok, so if Eowyn wants to die in battle to avoid a worse fate at the hands of the enemy, why is it so easy to miss that??? Why does Tolkien misdirect us?

I could write a whole essay on Tolkien’s love of understatement, of meaningful silence, of “glimpses of untold stories,” but let’s focus on Eowyn for now.

Tolkien creates a suffocating bubble of silence around Eowyn. It’s brilliant and horrible and I love it and I hate it.

Faramir tells Eowyn what he thinks about her motives: “You desired to have the love of the Lord Aragorn…. But when he gave you only understanding and pity, then you desired to have nothing, unless a brave death in battle.” And Eowyn doesn’t correct him! She just looks at him silently. And she declares her love for him during this scene.

Eowyn is often described as “frozen” or “cold,” and it’s clear that she has to hide her true feelings a lot of the time. Tolkien REALLY hits us over the head with the silencing of Eowyn in the Houses of Healing, when all the men are staring at her unconscious body and wondering why she was so unhappy. Eomer is positive that her crush on Aragorn was the problem; Aragorn doesn’t want to take the blame. Finally Gandalf speaks up:

“My friend, you had horses, and deeds of arms, and the free fields; but she, being born in the body of a maid, had a spirit and courage at least the match of yours.”

And then he says this:

“My lord, if your sister’s love for you, and her will still bent to her duty, had not restrained her lips, you might have heard even such things as these escape them. But who knows what she spoke to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all her life seemed shrinking, and the walls of her bower closing in about her, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in?”

Gandalf has just made the most openly feminist statement in the novel (aside from Eowyn and her “burned in the house” speech), but he follows it by saying that Eowyn has private thoughts that he cannot or will not explain. It is up to the men to decide if they want to know more. Eomer is deeply struck by Gandalf’s words and silently rethinks his entire life with Eowyn.

And then Aragorn has a truly infuriating bros-before-hoes moment: he breaks the uncomfortable silence by reassuring Eomer that yeah, maybe Eowyn’s crush on him was actually the problem after all. Just a minute earlier, he had denied responsibility for Eowyn’s despair. But he hates to see his friend, his brother in arms, feeling shamed. So he jumps in to rescue Eomer from his negative emotions. And Eowyn is RIGHT THERE, silent and unable to defend herself.

We already know that Aragorn is reluctant to know more about Eowyn’s problems. During their confrontation in Dunharrow, Aragorn dodges all of Eowyn’s attempts to make him see her point of view.

“A time may come soon,” said he, “when none will return. Then there will be need of valour without renown, for none shall remember the deeds that are done in the last defence of your homes. Yet the deeds will not be less valiant because they are unpraised.”

And she answered: “All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honor, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more. But I am of the House of Eorl and not a serving-woman. I can ride and wield blade, and I do not fear either pain or death.”

“What do you fear, lady?” he asked.

Neither Aragorn nor Eowyn want to talk about what will happen to her if the enemy wins; this is why there is so much misdirection about Eowyn’s motives! Aragorn glosses over the atrocities that are likely to happen and tells Eowyn she can have a heroic last stand, as a treat. Eowyn is infuriated by his poetic vagueness and spits out this horrifying image of being burned alive—but then she fiercely insists that she is a warrior and fears neither pain nor death. She doesn’t want to perform feminine vulnerability to get Aragorn to listen to her. Eowyn is proud and dignified, which makes it especially painful when she resorts to kneeling and begging Aragorn to let her fight. As she tells Faramir, she desires no man’s pity.

I have to give a shoutout to @balrogballs, who has written about this subject extensively:

The cultural fantasy of the female victim of violence often traps women in an unyielding present tense, positioning them as symbols of sentimentality. These women are objectified and become sites of social intervention, their suffering the focal point of external pity and mourning. The narrative demands their pain be witnessed, but rarely offers a way forward, reducing them to objects for emotional consumption rather than subjects of their own story.

This is exactly what Eowyn is trying to avoid. She wants to be remembered as a hero, not a victim.

Tolkien embroiders this theme very cunningly by having Faramir give Eowyn a cloak that belonged to his mother, Finduilas, who died when he was five. Faramir thinks the cloak is “fitting for the beauty and sadness of Eowyn,” which has a deeper meaning that he probably does not intend. Finduilas is also the name of an elf maiden from the Silmarillion, who was captured by orcs and killed with a spear. In Tolkien’s work, both Finduilases exist mainly to provide tragic backstories for male protagonists. Oh, and Arwen’s name was originally Finduilas as well. To be a Finduilas is to be beautiful and passive, and to die tragically. A fate that Eowyn rages against.

(The Finduilas thing becomes even more absurdly cryptic when you recall that only Tolkien knew about the tragic connotation of the name at the time LotR was published. But he did this kind of thing!!! Recall Elrond and his warning against oaths.)

I have always wondered why Eowyn didn’t challenge Faramir when he informed her that she was suicidal because of Aragorn. Perhaps she simply wanted to put the whole nightmare behind her.

But the most painful silence, to me, involves Theoden. Gandalf reveals that Wormtongue was planning to rape Eowyn, and Theoden says nothing. Eomer grabs his sword and has to be restrained from killing Wormtongue, but Theoden actually offers Wormtongue a second chance to prove his loyalty:

"Do you hear this, Wormtongue?" said Theoden. "This is your choice: to ride with me to war, and let us see in battle whether you are true; or to go now, whither you will. But then, if ever we meet again, I shall not be merciful."

This betrayal of Eowyn happens so fast that it is easy to miss. None of the characters comment on it, and the narrative moves on. There’s something horribly realistic about a powerful man with a beloved image casually offering a second chance to a sexual predator and everyone, including the reader, being unable to process what is happening.

The silences in Eowyn’s story come from the male characters and from Eowyn herself. Theoden and Aragorn want to avoid talking about the type of violence that threatens her, and they ignore her desires. Eowyn doesn’t want to be trauma porn; she resents having to explain herself. And this silence offers readers the freedom to empathize with her, like Eomer, or to fall back on sexist explanations, like Aragorn.

[herawell]

Éowyn is a better person than me because if my uncle and adoptive father failed to protect me from his advisor sexually harassing me, spared that man’s life, and offered him a place in the army, the place in the army that I was denied for being a woman, after I had spent five years nursing my uncle back to health and performing the other thankless womanly duties of his court, no way in hell would I have stood between him and Satan’s right-hand man.

Tolkien never touches on Éowyn’s justified anger at her uncle over Gríma Wormtongue, other than a line about her looking at Théoden with “cool pity”, which is yet another indication he’s not the feminist king fandom makes him out to be.

[torchwood-99]

It would be him calling Eomer "the last of that house" that would do it for me. Especially when you consider that Eowyn had just spent five years in a living hell looking after him because it was her duty as a member of "that house".

"You stand before my liege lord and kin!....well, sort of, sometimes he says I'm his kin. At least, when Hama says I'm a member of his family he doesn't disagree so that's kind of something I suppose?"

[lesbiansforboromir]

@aro-ace-from-outer-space22 I'm moving this discussion to a different post because I feel bad for dragging OP into so many walls of text. For anyone who wishes to keep up, this is the post I'm replying too.

OUGH lots to get into here though. To begin, the 'religious interdiction' and the 'evil' are one and the same within the LotR universe. What I have said and what you have said are the same. What takes something from being 'bad' to being 'evil' is purely the presence of divine judgement. And when we discuss the profane within a middle earth context, we aren't talking about a cultural concept, we are talking about a factual force within the world itself. The reason the ring is corrupting is because it is a profane object. The 'evil' the ring is supposed to do is to claim the 'throne of the world' from Eru, it's rightful owner, and that action would be ontologically evil within Arda even if the RIng itself had no, or even positive, results. Which is why, when Frodo does claim the power of the ring and saves the world, his spirit is sickened to such a degree. Even though the act was necessary.

But what I would also say is that some of what you have stated is either not completely true within book canon, or is not a known truth to even the wise of middle-earth.

The ring does not radiate malice, for example! One cannot tell the difference between it and any other powerful ring, hence the need for Gandalf to spend so much time away dithering to figure out a proper test for it. It is also a misconception that the ring exudes a kind of corruption AOE, being in proximity to the ring does not corrupt you. As far as I can tell, if you come to want the ring, then it can exert some control over you that ranges from an altered mental state to actively taking control of your body and forcing you into action. But you do have to want it first.

Frodo, for example, is forced by the ring to put it on during the attack of the ringwraiths when precisely what Frodo wants to do is disappear, and he knows the ring can do that for him. He has no desire for the ring for the whole rest of the time it's been in his house, literal decades of his life. It's only in the moment when he has a reason to desire it that it's power can be brought to bare.

Boromir, similarly, is not effected by the ring until after his meeting with Galadriel and she quite explicitely 'tempts' him with it, leaving him confused and distrustful of his companions and the success of their mission. I can go into this in more detail but suffice to say there is no evidence of the ring's AOE corruption within the books.

I would also say that Gandalf is of course concerned about what the ring would do to him. Firstly, he is faithful by nature, Eru is his ultimate god, he experiences the same religious horror over the ring that Faramir does. He is also a maia, just as Sauron is, and many maia were persuaded to Morgoth's side even without the ring's influence. Saruman rolled over quite quickly about it. There is no greater inherrent resistance within maia against corruption than anyone else, and one could cobble together an argument that they're actually more at risk than most.

But about Faramir! I did not mean to imply that Faramir does not value his people at all, certainly he values at least the political and cultural entity of Gondor (as the last remnant of numenor) over his own life. My point was simply that Faramir values the people of Gondor less than he values obeisance before god. Which, it is to be understood, IS technically the ontologically correct opinion in the divine metalogic of LotR. It's just that there is no 'proof' of that being the case.

And, to that point, I do challenge the idea that Faramir has this definitive knowledge that the ring is inherrently corrupting and will inevitably bring ruin with it's use. Not only does Faramir not have any special knowledge of the ring whatsoever, this idea that the ring will corrupt any user is equally debatable among 'the wise'!

When Galadriel is describing to Frodo how one might use the ring, her warning is that Frodo is not skilled in the domination of others and therefore he would fail and be consumed. She does not say that consumption is inevitable. And again, clearly it is not so cut and dry since Frodo does take the power of the ring to curse gollum and saves the world in the process, even if he does also desire to keep the ring in the end.

My point being that if Galadriel is not certain of this fact, then Faramir surely cannot be given such definitive knowledge. And he indeed never expresses that this is the reason for his rejection. He says only that he will not use a weapon of the dark lord 'for [Gondor's] good and my glory', kind of clearly insinuating that good for gondor is possible in his imagination!

It is important to understand that I am rarely ever arguing for Denethor's justification vs Faramir's moral complexity from an 'ontalogically correct' standpoint. Within the narrative of the books the one true god exists and if we are speaking within that framework then it is impossible to make any critique of any action that is taken with the defense of 'the faith' in mind. Right and Wrong are entirely what Eru decrees them to be.

So when I am defending Denethor's perspective, it is specifically his perspective. I am taking what Denethor knows, what Faramir knows and what Gandalf knows and judging their actions based on those things. None of them actually knows that using the ring would be definitely disasterous in a mundane sense, no one knows shit about the ring, it is a mysterious and profane object with very few certainties. No one has even seen it in 3000 years, there are no examples of someone using the ring and disaster abounding. Gollum's use of the ring, meagre though it might be, basically worked out for him in the sense that he was able to catch fish, murder orcs and eat babies out of cradles with really the only consequences coming to him quite slowly. And he certainly does not possess the skill of 'dominating the will of others' that Galadriel appears to think so important.

Which brings me to my 'that's not how the palantir works' side gripe. Denethor is not corrupted by the Palantir. Denethor has full control of his own faculties, the Palantir isn't doing shit to him, it is not a mysterious object and Sauron has no power to control Denethor through his use when Denethor is a 'rightful user' of the Palantirs and Sauron canonically isnt. Denethor can just set Sauron to ignore.

Denethor's will is broken when his last living son gets sepsis from a poisoned arrow. He does go up to the Palantir then, probably to try and find a glimmer of hope, but what he sees crumbles that hope and causes him to say 'the enemy has found it'. And though this is never proven, I am pretty sure Denethor saw a naked and chained Frodo at the top of Cirith Ungol since the timeline lines up perfectly and that would certainly be the sight to convince anyone that the ring has been found.

However, before that, Denethor is as he ever was. There is no corruption for Faramir to be privvy too. Before that single mental break of grief and despair (catalysed by completely real events and based on the only knowledge Denethor has at the time) Denethor is the same stalwart defender of Gondor that he has ever been. It is a film fabrication that Denethor's 'rule is failing'.

I will not get into my lack of surety that Gandalf would feel all that bad about Gondor's destruction, or my perception of his general lack of empathy or care for any of the ensouled creatures he is supposed to be caring for.

All I am here to say is that Denethor, for whom the duty of defending Gondor has been his entire life, whom has spent 90 years watching this country be worn slowly down by ultimate evil, whom has lost nearly everyone he loves to a war he did not start and cannot escape and that is explicitely a war of divinity itself, whom knows that Gandalf is a part of that divine, whom (extremely correctly) percieves Gandalf as someone who will hide vital information from him in order to try and control him, and who knows that Gandalf is angling to install a new King- 'With the left hand thou wouldst use me for a little while as a shield against Mordor, and with the right bring up this Ranger of the North to supplant me'<- exactly what Gandalf did!!- yes! it is reasonable to me for him to see Gandalf as a threat to Gondor and his son's life. It is reasonable to me that Denethor has 'lost faith' in 'the west', that he no longer believes in their irrefutably good intentions, that he no longer trusts Gandalf's begrudgingly bestowed wisdoms. Why should Denethor trust Gandalf that using the Ring would destroy him? The only answer is 'on faith'.

Yes, by the logic of what is ontologically true in Arda, Denethor is technically wrong. It would not have worked to keep the ring hidden in his vaults, using it at the moment of most direst need would have been a disaster because that is Frodo's destiny not his, Gandalf does not ultimately sacrifice Gondor in his pursuit of a divine victory and even if he had it would have been correct of him to do so because it is worth anything to keep Eru in his rightful place as ultimate authority over the world.

The point I am making is that none of these characters knew any of that. Boromir and Denethor and Faramir were expected to make the correct decisions based on faith, disregarding what their own experiences told them and trusting only in the west and it's (often callous, often concealing, often dismissive and actively seditious) messengers. Which I simply do not accept! It is certainly the atheist in me, but if the divine has demanded so much of someone, forced them to lose that much, and yet still has no sympathy for what grief resentment and despair can do, then I reject that divine on a purely moral basis. I find them unworthy of faith. And I find the characters whom could not keep that faith alive under such conditions extremely sympathetic and reasonable in their rejection.

[seracadash]

[itspapillonnoir]

GALE DEKARIOS — [9/?]

[thedwarrowscholar]

The Gates Are Open

After much thought and consideration, I have decided to make a permanent change to how the Dwarrow Scholar project operates. Effective immediately, all Dwarrow Scholar Neo-Khuzdul lessons, grammar resources, and educational materials, both past and future, are now completely FREE for everyone.

Over the years, this project has grown far beyond what I originally imagined. What began as a personal fascination became a community effort involving learners, readers, researchers, and Tolkien enthusiasts from around the world. Because of that, I have come to believe that the best and only future for this work is one where it remains freely accessible to everyone who wishes to learn from it.

My goal has always been the preservation, development, and sharing of Neo-Khuzdul. By removing all paywalls, I hope to help ensure that this work remains available to both current and future generations of learners.

Patreon will remain the primary home of the course, with new lessons, downloads, grammar files, exercises, dictionaries, and supporting materials continuing to be released here. In the coming months, I will also begin releasing the lesson videos publicly on YouTube, allowing even more people to discover and learn the language. Furthermore, the website itself is currently undergoing an overhaul, which will include the addition of nearly 100 new and updated documents.

To everyone who has supported this project over the years, thank you. Your support helped fund the research, hosting, software, lesson creation, videos, voice actors, artwork, website development, and countless hours that made these resources possible. Quite simply, much of what exists today would not exist without you.

This work has never truly belonged to me alone. It has become part of a wider community of learners, enthusiasts, and friends, and I am incredibly proud of what we have built together.

The gates are open, and they shall remain open.

Ever at your service,

The Dwarrow Scholar

[berensreverie]

LOTRO horses :)