not idle in grief

(request for Xylem on Patreon)

I danced around it for months, afraid that he would shatter if I said it, afraid that it would become true if I said it, afraid of course that it had been true since the beginning of time.

“We can’t kill a Vala.”

He did not shatter. If the fangs of fate snapped closed around us they did so very gently; the air didn’t move.

“We need to kill a Vala,” he said. 

“Yes. And we can’t.”

He stood up, shrugged a cloak around his shoulders, and stepped outside. I had all but interpreted it as a dismissal, but then he said impatiently, “well, are you coming?”

So I came.

the valiant never taste of death but once

(act i.)

(act ii.)

Three people had died so far. The first had fallen in a climbing accident on the south face into an ugly crevice three hundred meters deep. They’d tried a rescue. They’d tried for two weeks, even after she’d stopped screaming. The second and third had been on a scouting trip that had been caught in a terrible storm. The rest of the scouting group had not even realized they were missing members until they stumbled, blinded and dying, into camp. Arakáno had been on that trip. He had not laughed since, and worked twice as hard.  Three people had died so far and they kept going, kept scouting, kept hunting, kept digging. It felt wrong. Death felt like the sort of thing that should drag the stars to a halt in the sky. A life – a whole person, all those memories and fickle preferences and inside jokes and daring dreams – how could the world march on, after that? At least Finwë’s death had accompanied the end of the world. Every death ought to. 

silmaril

For the last few months @luminousalicorn and I have been writing Silmaril, a series of interconnected collaborative Silmarillion fanfics. Uh, if ‘Silmarillion fanfics’ is very loosely defined. There’s a space AU. There’s an Animorphs AU. There’s a Hogwarts AU (set in 1802!). There’s a grimdark Game-of-Thrones-parody AU. There’s a PMMM crossover and a genderswapped!MCU crossover and a small Fëanor who runs away from home and ends up in Star Trek (he’s the most well-adjusted Fëanor by a long shot.)

Writing Silmaril has been a ton of fun, and it has also been really clarifying about the way I think about, and write about, the Silmarillion in general.

In my fic here I like to take full advantage of all of the ambiguity Tolkien leaves in the text: he didn’t bother specifying when and how someone died? That’ll be an in-universe problem: it was politically contentious, witnesses had incentives to lie, historians couldn’t have interviewed anyone who was there. Where I can, I reconcile: I draw out how both versions of events which Tolkien considered could have taken hold as narratives. I leave the truth up in the air.

In collaborative fiction you can’t do that. 

How does the oath work? What’s at the edge of the world? People will go and check, so I had to decide. Can nukes kill Melkor? I had to make up my mind about that too (but I’m not telling; it’d be a spoiler). I like to leave it super ambiguous whether Maedhros and Fingon are dating, because they’re rarely the central focus of my stories and it’s fun to draw a relationship that is convincing from whatever angle you bring to it. In Silmaril they’re on screen far too much for ambiguity to be the most interesting take on them. (They’re totally dating. It’s not totally healthy.) 

LACE implies, but doesn’t technically say, that for Elves sex is marriage. Is that true? Usually I don’t need to know that. I need to know whether my characters believe it, but it almost doesn’t matter whether they’re right. But throw the world up against another one, and someone will certainly go check if that’s really how it works. (In Silmaril, Elf marriage is expectation-controlled; some societies believe that certain acts constitute marriage, and so in those societies they do, usually to destructive effect.)

 The Silmarillion is deliberately a collection of myths, a historical work, unreliable on its own subject matter, a blurring of legend and truth. Landing on it and running some experiments demands a wholly different angle on it. It has been amazingly fun, and I’m going to keep doing it, but I don’t think I want to borrow all the pieces for my writing where I’m less constrained. 

And there are some things that I get away with in Silmaril that I think would be bad writing without the crossover conceit; I’m more comfortable writing characters who are unreflectively racist, homophobic, sexist, gender essentialist, etc. (not to mention mass murderers) when there are other characters to call them out on it. I’m not confident enough in my ability as a writer to do that when there’s no one around in the story to disagree. And, like, I find the ‘sex is marriage’ thing gross and terrible, and have no interest in writing it except in contrast to societies that don’t have it. (But in that context it’s fascinating.)

Silmaril contains war and war crimes, occasional explicit content, and descriptions of Angband which some readers told me were even more horrifying than expected.

just you wait

being brilliant in mind and swift in action she ahd early absorbed all of what she was capable of the teaching which the Valar thought fit to give the Eldar... “You know,” my father said to me a hundred years ago, “there’s a way that some of the Ñoldor err. They think every problem in the world can be solved with enough cleverness. And they set themselves to solving it with a diligence and creativity that would be commendable – if not for the fact that not every obstacle in the world can be outsmarted.”

He might have been talking about his brother. He might have been talking about me. He might just have been talking, he does that. Either way I remember the moment, because I profoundly disagreed with him then and I still do now. 

Every obstacle in the world can be outsmarted, if you’re really genuinely smart. 

I took my masterwork examinations in mathematics in the late spring of 1399, at the age of 37. They had to build a special podium, as I was still not half-grown and too young to see over the normal one. I was not the youngest to receive a masterwork – that would be my uncle.

I was the youngest to receive my second, in 1406, in history, and the first to have three by the time I came of age.  I’d have had it a year sooner if I hadn’t focused on athletics because I was finally tall enough to have a shot in the annual running games and I wanted to win that before  my majority put me in the same bracket as men who had a thousand years on me. The third one was in chemistry.

“What are you chasing?” Angaráto asked me when I asked him what he advised I take on as my fourth.

If most people had asked that I’d have told them to shut up and go join the orcs in Utumno, so elaborately they wouldn’t realize that was what I’d said. Because most people followed that up with “you’re a beautiful young woman, there’s a lot more to life than learning” or the more straightforward “your father married at your age” or the abominable “it’s unbecoming of a princess…”

so I’m really far from being a member of Beren’s fan club (pointlessly. escalating. the. Dwarf-Sindar war. by ambushing and slaughtering fleeing people.) but I really disagree with the character interpretation that it was abusive or manipulative of him to recruit Finrod for the Silmaril quest.

Like, yes, if someone has taken an oath that forces them to do whatever you ask of them, asking them to betray their other obligations and walk to certain death is a deeply wrong thing to do. The fact you’re also planning to walk to certain death doesn’t make it okay. But that’s not at all what’s going on here.

Finrod’s oath to Barahir was an oath of “abiding friendship and aid in every need to Barahir and all his kin”. It did not obligate him to do whatever Beren asked. He could have chosen to, say, convince Thingol to let the marriage happen, or give the newlyweds land in Nargothrond, or talk Beren out of the quest, or aid and supply Beren on the quest while advising against it. Finrod chose to accept the quest and go with Beren, but the oath definitely didn’t oblige him to do that and so Beren can’t be said to have coerced him into it. Even if we go with an interpretation of Tolkien’s world where oaths are impossible to break, the idea that Beren has the balance of power in this relationship is wrong. 

But once Beren realized the magnitude of what Finrod was sacrificing to help him, shouldn’t he have reconsidered and come up with a plan that didn’t throw Finrod and Finrod’s loyalists’ lives away? No! Because he had absolutely no way of knowing that was what they were doing! He knows the enemy is scary, but he’s gone toe-to-toe with it a thousand times and is still alive. I don’t think he realizes that they’re walking into their graves for him. I actually expect Finrod would have tried to keep that from him. And Finrod has a plan that sounds plausible (what does Beren know about the capabilities of Elves?) 

Beren is new to having other people around, to having obligations, to the ways people interact with each other. He’s been through hell a dozen times over. It’s simply not plausible that he understood the dynamics of what happened in Nargothrond well enough for it to make any sense to blame him for worsening it, or for sticking with his plan once people told him what it would cost them. Does he have a bad understanding of the world? Yes. Is his continued adherence to the quest (especially later, when he runs away from Lúthien to finish it), at enormous risk to the lives of the people who keep trying to protect him, a major character flaw? Yes!

But he didn’t manipulate the people who died for him. They made their own terrible life choices all by themselves.

so I was thinking yesterday about Maedhros and Maglor’s final recorded conversation, in which they debate whether to make a suicidal attack for the Silmarils or turn themselves in.

the striking thing about that conversation is that Maglor has the much stronger argument. “‘If none can release us,then indeed the Everlasting Darkness shall be our lot, whether we keep our oath or break it; but less evil shall we do in the breaking.’ Yet he yielded at last to the will of Maedhros,..”

and it’s like: why? if the Everlasting Darkness didn’t move him, if he was resigned to eternal damnation already, if Maedhros’s plan was rather obviously death-by-host-of-Valinor and Maedhros doesn’t even seem to have said anything to justify it, what persuaded Maglor?

but now I think there’s an obvious answer: Maedhros didn’t say this - probably wouldn’t ever have said this - but he was unwilling to be taken prisoner. By anyone, under any circumstances. He’d much rather die than be chained up again, for any reason, and so turning himself in was never ever an option, and as soon as Maglor realized that of course he stopped asking.

I was talking with someone the other day who asked why Elves never invented gunpowder weapons. 

(The Doylist reason is that Tolkien hated industrialization and technology; there’s a reason literally all his villains are ex-Maiar of Aulë or else unusually engineering-inclined. Elves were supposed to be Good, in general, and therefore wouldn’t have used modern weaponry, the horrors of which Tolkien had seen firsthand. Though in fairness to him, he does not seem to have been under the impression that the wars of Beleriand had any less staggering a human cost for being fought with sword and bow.)

But there’s a reason that only depends on in-universe information, and I actually think it’s kind of interesting. 

Longbows were much better weapons than early guns. They had a much higher firing rate, they were more accurate (especially over long distances), and they were much easier to manufacture and supply. The reason guns swiftly took over as the weapon of choice was because longbows required a lot of skill and training to use properly, and when Europe was raising (mostly civilian) armies for its wars, they didn’t have time to train recruits into expert archers. Anyone can use a gun. So guns, despite their inferiority, took over. (Armor was also more effective against arrows than bullets, but I don’t think orcs were armored, so it’s hard to imagine this consideration coming into play in Middle-earth.)

Once guns were the weapon of choice there were, of course, lots of resources on all sides dedicated to refining and enhancing them. It took a long time. I looked up estimates of when a gun that was significantly better than a bow was first produced, and found estimates between 1837 and 1860 - so, more than two hundred years after everyone switched to guns. 

Developing weapons that are quick to teach to a mostly unskilled civilian force isn’t a problem that Elves would have had, I don’t think. They seem to learn things faster than we do, they live forever (and had rather few children in Beleriand) and they’re stronger, which is one of the major constraints on using a bow. Certainly there wouldn’t have been any significant advantage to guns until they started allying with or making vassals of the tribes of Men - and once that began to happen, we were less than two hundred years from the bitter end. Even if the Elves had immediately recognized the need for unskilled ranged weapons, and set to working on them, they would have run out of time long before inventing anything that paralleled the weapons they were already using. 

And without Men as allies, it’s not clear they ever would have developed guns. Two hundred years of research and development is a lot to put into a type of weaponry that’s strictly inferior in every way to what you’re already doing. The deadliest weapons of our time might never have come around in a world that had an endless supply of skilled archers. (And in a world where Elves and Men were at odds for some reason, Men would have switched to gunpowder weaponry while Elves stuck with what worked - only, three hundred years later, to be unpleasantly surprised when the first machine guns were developed.) 

At least in the First Age, Tolkien’s preference to keep his good guys to older weapons seems quite justified. Good luck explaining why Dwarves don’t have artillery, though.

AU I desperately want to read but am very much the wrong person to write:

Morgoth doesn’t steal the Silmarils after the Darkening, just leaves for Middle-earth. It’s the Teleri who want to go to Middle-earth and fight him, because it’s their family - Olwë’s brother - who are going to die if no help comes. They need the Silmarils to have any chance of winning (I always figured that the Silmarils could be used to bind Morgoth or something, and thus the obsession with recovering them) and Fëanor, of course, refuses, and Galadriel decides to steal them anyway, and of course disaster ensues and they are banished but they meet a much warmer welcome on the opposite shore. There’s no Oath. Their aim is to protect people, and it changes their tactics, but ultimately they’re all doomed for the same reasons (though Aegnor/Andreth works out this time, because Aegnor has a completely different perspective on a lot of stuff).

the valiant never taste of death but once

(act i.)

act ii.

They ventured out, in that first month, only a few hundred yards onto the Ice. People were going to die – Findekáno knew it, Nolofinwë knew it, the host now dug in on the shores of Araman knew it very well. But no one has died yet, and in a way it paralyzed them, waiting for it. They inched along the sheer ice faces and rolled logs across to test where it can bear the weight and were painstakingly, excruciatingly, careful. 

Climbing the ice was not in fact particularly difficult – not as difficult as Findekáno had imagined it, certainly. They had broken down the wagons into thick ice picks. You lit a fire at the bottom of a cliff and left the ice picks in it, to absorb the heat, so later they would slide like butter into their positions on the cliff. You stood there and held them, heat eating its way through your mittens and hand, and waited for the ice to freeze again around your new addition. And then you climbed down, grabbed another, climbed up, did it again. They were testing the best pick shapes and the best distances; the cliffs on the lip of Araman were studded with climbing holds, and with climbers.

“At this rate -” Findekáno said to his father -

“It would take us ten Years,” his father said grimly. “We won’t proceed at this rate, we learn more every day.”

the valiant never taste of death but once

@emilyenrose was my 1500th follower and so gets a fic of her choosing; she asked for something with Fingon. This is a complement to and one man, in his time, plays many parts; it covers the same time period but the other host.

                                                           act i.

Elves could see eight colors, depending how you counted them. A prism split them, always in the same order: on one side the far-red that hot things gave off, the color of living things in Endorë’s dark. Then red, then orange, then yellow, then green, blue, violet, then true-purple. Flowers were often true-purple because bees could see it best.

That these were the only colors the Elves could see had been unknown to Aulë until the Noldor had advanced the study of light far enough to describe it, and then it had been a source of delight and astonishment to him. To Aulë there were a thousand colors visible when a prism split, hundreds to the side of far-red and hundreds on the other side of true-purple, colors that the stars spoke, colors that the Eldar could not see. The  range of light that Elven eyes captured was just a tiny sliver of the true thing; the whole was vast beyond comprehension.

It was dark now, and the only color was the far-red of shivering Elven bodies and the distant pinpricks of cold and unforgiving stars. The fire on the opposite shore had long since burned down and out. Findekáno had not moved since it had, but in the long night his thoughts had already hit all their notes - grief, anguish, hatred, betrayal - and now circled idly around this, around colors.

His skin was going grey with cold, but that barely registered. His breath kept clouding his view, then dissipating in Araman’s harsh winds; every time he imagined he would see something different on the other shore. Every time he saw nothing at all. 

Even if they now regretted it, which they assuredly did not, what would he see? It was too late. The ships had burned.

anyone want to go in with me on a print of Silmarillion t-shirts?