What’s a food from your culture that u HATE #hatersonly

I expected Americans without another discernible cultural background to answer this with regional American dishes im getting taken out by people just saying stuff like “burger” and “mcdonalds”

Yeah, okay, I can see it.

And a few fun comments from the notes:

#the first fanfic i ever wrote was gollum inviting smeagol to a tea party#it was completely cracky and insane#i was like eleven .#so coffee shop is my vote @lolotr

#any love show is great#he's got so much potential for obsessive love @thedaughterofkings

#oh man i would LOVE to let gollum loose on a reality tv competition#something like 'survivor' or something where he can go ABSOLUTELY FERAL in all the physical contests#as well as having him in the confessional shit-talking his teammates and opponents as gollum#before talking much nicer about them as smeagol on top of all the backstabbing (possibly literally) @hobbitmajora

#what would Gollum's deamon be? would she change as his possession of the One Ring changed him too?#would she remain the same. the fragment of Gollum who cannot forget what they once were?#if she is not changed physically does she change internally in the saw way Gollum does#how long until she forgets their names too? does she ever?#does the One Ring corrupt her?#does it kill her?#because she is physically separated from Gollum does she age and die at the rate Smeagol would have with a natural lifespan?#does having the ring sever Gollum and his deamon?#is she there the whole time watching her beloved other half turn into something she no longer recognizes#but she can't leave because he is her too and she loves him#and she can't leave him alone in the darkness beneath the mountains#and sometimes he remembers her and sings her fishing songs and she'll tell him stories of their times in the sun#is she the remaining part of Golumn that loves him when he so very much hates himself#idk what her original name was but for a couple thousand years she's just been 'Precious'#chewing on the drywall @beck-a-leck

Coffee Shop AU

High School AU

Coffee Shop AU #2

Office AU

Reality TV competition

Coffee Shop AU #3

Fifty Shades of Grey AU

Bonus Pokémon AU because I'm not in either of those fandoms that were on the poll

A rest day isn't enough. I need one billion years alone in a crystal.

The tapestries made by the Aubusson manufacture based on the art of JRR Tolkien are currently exhibited at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris until May. @actual-bill-potts and I went there yesterday, they're so beautiful!!

These are all handmade tapestries, each is based on a Tolkien artwork (the Rivendell one has the facsimile on the right for scale).

Under the cut: group ID and bonus details

I’m curious about all my gaming followers: first Pokémon game, first Zelda game, and first Mario game in the tags?

brave hobbit

Finrod's gems are about politics not capital

I've seen an influx of posts on my dash over the last couple of weeks with some variation on "Finrod hauled jewels across the ice because he's a hedonist" or "Finrod brought all those gems because he was planning ahead to pay for stuff in Beleriand" and I'm so sorry in advance, but the soapbox is beckoning again.

The version of this I've seen most often has been that he is a metropolitan prince accustomed to operating within a transactional context and that he brings gems out from Aman to whatever awaits in Beleriand out of a shrewd calculation that he will need to buy things once he's there. And...maybe? But here's the thing. That is not what gems mean in the context of Valinor, nor is it the pretty straightforward explanation of Finrod's decision that we're given in the text.

So first off, let's talk about the gems themselves and what those would mean to Finrod in the context within which he decides to bring them out from Valinor. Contrary to the premise that gems are understood to be a source of capital by the princes of Noldor, the two references we have to how they saw their own gems are as follows (emphasis in all quotes is mine):

The gems of the Noldor, then, are not seen as a source of wealth or bartering leverage, nor is there any indication in the text that they used them as such. In fact, the first (and only) reference to gems as wealth in the context of Valinor is when the narrator tells us of how Melkor looks with jealousy upon all the Firstborn:

Pivotally, it is not until after this that we are given any reference to the Noldor themselves seeing their own gems as anything other than a beauty of the earth that was to be shared freely. And even then, that language is only used of Fëanor's disposition after the lies of Morgoth have circulated and he begins to "love the Silmarils with a greedy love."

Second, let's talk about the fairly straightforward explanation for Finrod's actions that we are given in the text itself.

(I know I've talked about this a couple times in ask answers etc, but I want to give it its own standalone post because this never ceases to frustrate me.)

Necessary for understanding the explanation the text gives us is to situate it within the events that preceded it. Key among these is this section of Fëanor's speech to the Noldor:

Whatever the intent of Fëanor's words, they would undoubtably have been heard by Finrod and those others who opposed the march as a call to discard their past, the life and love of Aman, and their loyalty to the Valar. And consequently two pages later we are told that Finarfin and Finrod "carried thence memories of the bliss they had forsaken, and some even of the things that they had made there they took with them: a solace and a burden on the road."

So for Finrod to bring "more treasures out of Tirion than any other of the princes of the Noldor" was not a shrewd economic calculation, but a direct refutation of his uncle's rallying call. He was refusing to be severed from the past, refusing to name their time in Valinor as bondage to be dismissed and forgotten, and refusing to count what they made there as loss in order to gain mastery of Arda. He was carrying memory out from Valinor, not currency.

Furthermore, the memory he carries as his solace and burden is the memory of love and friendship, of wholeness and joy. Finrod grew up as Olwë's grandson and the jewels "strewed upon the shores and scattered in the pools" of Alqualondë were the beaches where he played, the fountains where he splashed as a child. The gems of the Noldor, far from being a quick way to pocket some cash for the road, were for him the visible symbol of the houses of the Eldar living in friendship and not division. (And how bitter that burden must have become when he continued on after the kinslaying at Alqualondë, those strewed stones of friendship now a shoreline washed in blood.)

Having these same gems later placed within the Nauglimir thus becomes a furthering of this same political statement. Whenever it sits about his neck, it is a visual reprimand of two of Fëanor's assertions in his speech atop Túna: Finrod receives it as a symbol of partnership and co-creation between two races, once again beauty that is shared freely, the gems within it once more a symbol of friendship rather than mastery; and it serves as the tangible representation of Finrod's remaining love and allegiance to memory and to the Valar.

He carries the gems out from Valinor in hope - the same hope that he embodies throughout his life, in his friendships in Beleriand, in his love and care for the Edain, in his eventual sacrifice: what I have is my neighbor's; what I love, I give.

Comparative Sizes of Beleriand and the Lands to the East

I put this together as a resource for my own writing awhile back and at first just stared at it in utter bewilderment. Is Beleriand really this small?! It seems like the answer is yes, and I'll give a quick explanation as to why below.

So I've seen quite a few reblogs of this describing Beleriand as everyone being squashed in on each other, but even though it looks quite small in comparison to all the lands referenced in LoTR, Beleriand is actually a very good size. Besides which, if you look at the complexity of how many of the First Age events overlap and weave together (think how many times people run into each other in the course of the story or how quickly people are able to move between locations), it would be fairly impossible to do in a space that was larger than what we're given here.

For example, if we contextualize this with something that would have been very present in Tolkien's mind as he was worldbuilding, the UK is 300 miles across at its widest point (far less than the widest section of Beleriand) and yet the Heptarchy operated within these confines:

Beleriand with an extended mileage legend for comparison:

So if we think of the realms of the Noldor as being similarly situated with Fingolfin as a kind of Bretwalda uniting them, then the (relative to LoTR) small size of Beleriand makes perfect sense.

Coming back after drafting this to note that @foiazoli had a similar idea today and put together a whole grid with which to calculate square mileage, which adds some really fascinating extra comparison details. You should take a look at that also!

Comparative Sizes of Beleriand and the Lands to the East

I put this together as a resource for my own writing awhile back and at first just stared at it in utter bewilderment. Is Beleriand really this small?! It seems like the answer is yes, and I'll give a quick explanation as to why below.

I've seen various stitched together maps of the First and Second/Third Ages, but the primary ones I've encountered still end up with the distance measurements not quite reflecting what we have in the text or map legends.

Without going into too many of the tedious bits, the basic overview is that I put this together by superimposing the maps in Photoshop, aligning Himring and Tol Himling, then drawing this out till the two iterations of the Ered Luin crossed. The primary thing here was ensuring the distance between Himring/Himling and the Ered Luin remained the same in both places.

There were various other details as well, but the key factor for determining whether this was feasible was to check whether it held up when comparing the numerical distances we are given as well.

This is simplest on the map of Middle-earth in the Third Age, since the official map was kind enough to provide a mileage legend. However, the Beleriand map was not nearly so forthcoming. So off we go to everyone's favorite chapter of the Silmarillion (Of Beleriand and its Realms) where we find that East Beleriand is described as being

If this is 100 leagues, then we can convert that to roughly 345 miles and move that rasterized line down within the same file and line it up with our mileage legend from the map of Third Age Middle-earth (scaled as shown in the first image). Which gives us this:

Almost spot on!

Which, I'm not going to lie, really shocked me. I expected to find that this was wildly off since I've always assumed these maps to be fairly equal in my head. But no, it seems that all the epics of the First Age really did happen in an area no larger than Eriador.

One last image that I find interesting is isolating just Beleriand from this stitched map while retaining the water's tint so you can see the approximate whereabouts of the new shorelines would have ended up.

So I ran across a (not particularly pleasant) conversation about my writing on someone else’s post the other day in which it was put forward that the correct way to frame Bëor’s wife was to erase her entirely and make his sons his nephews; also heavily implying a lack of creativity on my part (and a lack of commitment to the authenticity of Finrod and Balan's relationship) for not having utilized this "much easier solution that changes nothing much but allows for way less cringe".

I vented to friends and just moved on and tried to ignore it, but this particular aspect of the commentary has been bothering me so much that I'm going to take a moment for my own peace of mind to briefly address it here.

Bëor's wife is not a problem to be solved

The majority of women in the Silmarillion already exist as textual ghosts (Bëor's wife included). Why would the story be better served by eliminating her existence? One of the strengths of Silm fanfic that I've consistently appreciated has been the commitment to lifting women from the margins of the text and fleshing them out with full, complicated, and detailed identities. Her unspoken presence in the text is an opportunity to draw another woman forward into the narrative, not an excuse to erase them even further.

Furthermore, we know of Bëor's wife because of the existence of Baran and Belen. This suggested approach holds that they thus create a "problem" within the text for this particular story and the simplest solution should be to take her children from her and give them to someone else, all so that her husband can be free to fall in love without the encumbrance of her existence. Which leads me to the next issue.

Bëor's wife does not need to be erased to make Finrod/Bëor ok

The implication in these comments was that she needed to be scrubbed from the narrative in order for Finrod and Balan's relationship to be authentic or "monogamous." I'm not even going to get into the second part of that (which is...sure a take) but the authenticity of a relationship or the depth of someone's love is not determined by whether this is the only person they have ever been in love with. To be perfectly frank, that sounds more like the purity culture slop I was fed growing up than it does like the desire to uplift and enhance the queer relationship in the narrative that the op seemed to indicate was their intent.

It matters that the House of Bëor are the actual descendants of Bëor

This is a key point in the arc of the Silmarillion itself, but focusing just on what this means within a Finrod/Bëor context, it matters that the House of Bëor - who are consistently loyal to Finrod, who sacrifice to save his life, and for whom he eventually sacrifices his own life - are the offspring of the man for whom he crossed wisdom and wedded despite the chasm of sundered fates. They are how Bëor lives on even after Finrod's irreparable loss. Caring for them - dying for them - is a large part of how he carries Balan forward with him through the years of solitude and how he remains true to his love long after they are sundered.

There is a good deal more I could go on about, but I did say this would be brief, so I should leave it there.

the fellowship as roommates:

frodo: probably one of the best roommates out there. keeps to himself, tidy, does his laundry quickly and doesn’t leave it in the wash for a week. the company he keeps inviting over are weird though and you wish he’d stop obsessing over his jewelry. there’s a ring dish by the sink he’s always being funny about.

sam: he has to stop bringing plants home. the amount of dirt where there shouldn’t be is getting ridiculous. will make bread for the household though, and that makes up for it. does his dishes and all the dishes in the sink frequently and genuinely enjoys the task. took over the decoration and homemaking instantly.

merry: has a massive candle collection that would be fire safety issue. it not, however, a fire safety issue because merry never lights them. he has discontinued yankee candles and various limited edition scents. it’s his pride and joy and he doesn’t ever want to burn them because he wants to keep them forever. once pippin lit his maple-bacon soy wax triwick 1998 and merry went nuts. aside from that, pleasant company.

pippin: his parents pay for his rent because he couldn’t be bothered to pay it on time, and the tooks really, really wanted their son out of the house. do NOT go in his room. has not done laundry ever and does not plan to. keeps dirty dishes in his hamper and under his bed. keeps buying new forks thinking you won’t notice.

boromir: pays his rent a day early. handles the bills and finances and just tell you how much you owe. very respectful about your space in the fridge. does his best to be quiet past 9pm. he does, however, carve wood over the carpet and splinters have become an issue. he vacuum’s but it’s seriously becoming a problem. also keeps inviting these weirdos over who try and eat all your food.

aragorn: keeps tanning hides in the living room. is never home because he’s always at his girlfriends place. brought a dehydrator into the mix and the house always smells like meat because he’s making jerky. he will share it though, which is nice:

legolas: is mildly afraid of the bathroom. keeps clogging the drains with copious amounts of shed hair. uses your shampoo when he thinks your not looking. eats all of the good food, and small bites out of pretty much everything. tracks dirt all over the carpet and has a thing for fairy lights.

gimli: historic weaponry is NOT home decor and why the hell would you keep it over your bed. he has to have his own bathroom which he keeps very specifically (the amount of products he uses for his beard is unreasonable). generally tidy, gets weird about organizing things by color and type and would rather you let him do it.

gandalf: hardly a roommate. sometimes you wonder if he still is living with you and then he’ll show up after months of ghosting you with a random horse and a new-differently colored hat. and he will explain more about the hat than the horse. no, gandalf, we can’t keep a horse in the bathroom. our landlord will find out. please shut up about your new hat.

gollum: fresh fish keep being left on your counter on the first of each month. they’re very much someone’s goldfish that keep going missing. once, a parakeet was left in your sink. your lost socks keep reappearing on your couch. sometimes shiny rocks and coins are placed next to your phone at night. four months in there’s a scratching in your walls and this fucker pops out. he’s been living off of your scraps for nearly a year and thinks you two are best friendsies! <3 he tries to plea that he’s being paying rent. someone call the cops. (sam comes over and shoo’s him out with a broom. it’s frodos weird friend from college.)

send this to everyone

dont send this to anyone

send this to someone

send this to your accountant

send this to the government

send this to your homies

send this to independent people

send this to aging people

send this to ghosts

send this to people who eat food

Wait hang on pause I glossed over it before but dhawan!master was on earth for seventy seven straight years? He saw his own run as prime minister. Wh

I think Mr Saxon randomly got an egg chucked at him during a speech one time and then the date rolled around for Spymaster and he had a realization & absolutely booked it to a grocery store

#....hang on does this mean he lived through The Year That Never Was too#he Knows he's not going to remember it#that doesn't make him feel any better when martha shows up going 'hey let me tell you about the one amazing guy who's going to save us all'#he ends up accidentally giving martha an impassioned speech about how she's the one actually fighting to make things better for everyone#while that bitch the doctor does nothing at all#also he's Never going to give martha the attention and admiration she deserves!! no he's not projecting. shut up.#you know what what if he just kills himself and then doesn't have to live through the rest of the shitty fucking Saxon Year (x)

I was rereading bits of the Lay of Leithian over breakfast (like you do) and today it stood out that when Finrod is at his best in the battle with Sauron, it's when he brings in the dual visions of home: the home he has built in exile and the home of memory in Valinor:

The Silmarillion: Chapter 19 "Of Beren and Lúthien" (emphasis mine)

But! While one of these is what we expect - Nargothrond, the home built of his longing and vision - the home in memory is not Tirion. It's Alqualondë, with its sand of pearls beside the sighing Sea.

In Finrod's moment of greatest trial, caught in a battle he knows he can never win, he sings a vision not of Tirion and its dynastic power, but of Alqualondë where Finarfin fled for peace and where presumably his son found the same.

Faced with a conflict of power, he reaches for peace.

And by doing this, he turns his immediate defeat into something hollow - while Sauron is said to have mastery here in their duel, it is Finrod who ultimately triumphs. For in the Leithian, the Release from Bondage, victory is achieved through sacrifice and not through power: Huan's sacrifice of loyalty and life, Beren's sacrifice of his body (Erchamion) and his life as well, and the overarching sacrifice of Lúthien's own life and fate, which both serves as their own personal triumph and lays the foundations for the victory and redemption of the Three Kindreds at the end of the Age. And Finrod's sacrifice is key among these - laying down his power, his authority, and his life both for Beren individually and also for the Edain as a whole.

Sauron's power may dominate and subjugate, but it is through Finrod's peace that hope grows to fruition and gil estel rises.

OP soooo true but u cant leave this in the tags

hobbies include: close reading the Redwall series to answer my most burning questions. such as:

- can I replicate any of these delicious-sounding foodstuffs and would they in fact be delicious if I was able to

- corollary to the above: are we just supposed to read “oat cream” and “nut cheese” every time we see the words “cream” and “cheese”? I think so. bc if not, what tha hell are their livestock animals

- what is Society like? I don’t think we ever see a Mouse City or even Mouse Town though we do see castles and obviously an abbey. are we supposed to believe that most creatures are either in wandering bands or these societies based around a single structure (castle/abbey?)

- they appear to have an idea of what currency is (the bad guys always want treasure — maybe just to have, not to sell? but less ambiguous is some dialogue I just read, “acorn for your thoughts?” “you can have them for free”) but again, we never see anyone using money or making goods for the market. is this after the fall of Mouse Capitalism? are the bad guys (the idea of rat pirates gives me a headache, vis a vis the political/economic systems needed to power piracy) raiding preindustrial mouse societies for treasure/meat?

- corollary to the above: the abbey creatures have oats and wheat but we don’t see anybody farming or trading for farm goods on a large enough scale. is the abbey “orchard” really a like an indigenous forest farm of mixed foodstuffs? is that possible if you live in the same place the whole year or only if you travel each season? I have to do some googling

- both the lack of mixed-species families and the idea of mixed-species families give me a headache. has a squirrel never fallen for a handsome otter? what is the culture shock like if you marry into a subterranean mole family?

- this is the least “important” question but this read through I’ve been desperately trying to figure out What Size Everything Else Is. i’ve come to the conclusion that everything other than animals are at mouse scale, given that they can make seaworthy vessels their own size (a mouse sized vessel with real-world-sized waves seems impossible) and pick and eat apples and plums. but so far it seems like they’ve avoided mentioning how tall trees are — like a person compared to a tree or a mouse compared to a tree?

[standing outside of brian jacques’ grave with a megaphone] most societies that have had large scale ships and shipping have needed to develop a concept of insurance. is there Mouse Insurance

There is a redwall cookbook op!