Makalaurë in Valinor

(Probably pissed because Elrond has cut and dyed his hair without his consent >:O)

What I need right now is Elrond, after the third age, finding Maglor and taking care of him, insisting that yes, he is his father, that he should live with him, comforting him, and even insisting that he should sail with him to Valinor where his parents and brothers wait for him and everyone is happy and nothing hurt. 

A surprise gift for @playing-with-inks​ because we both are having some stressful weeks and she needs something soft as well.

(Love, I’m sorry, I’m not good at writing stories, I hope this is enough)

When the elves found out about the Ainulindalë and the fact that Morgoth’s evil was basically sown into the fabric of reality, how did that not lead to mass despair and suicide? Or does that actually explain Feanor’s crazy rebellion pretty well?

Ring details from ‘Portrait of a Noble Woman’ by Nicolas Neufchatel, c. 1567.

Silm Smut Week Prompts

How To Use Prompts

Daily prompts are never obligatory. You may use one, three, all (?!), or none. You may combine prompts from different days. You may ignore them and write whatever you want. 

Every day is named for a natural phenomenon, appearing in an order that echoes the chronology of The Silmarillion. Take these daily themes as you will. A setting? A vibe? A symbol? Imagery? The timeframe is not a prompt in itself, but use it if you want. 

Prompts/Suggestions are a handful of topics, tropes, kinks, ship and relationship types to consider for that day.

Word of the Day is a word to use in your writing or simply as inspiration!

Inspirations of the Day are quotes, images, or songs that you may use in any way that sparks your muse. 

Daily Prompts

Click the links to find each day's prompt collection!

Day 1: Wind (Ainulindalë)

Day 2: Mountains (Shaping of Arda)

Day 3: River (The Great Journey & Noontide of Valinor)

Day 4: Fire (The Unrest of the Noldor)

Day 5: Unlight (Darkening of Valinor)

Day 6: Forest (War and Peace in Beleriand)

Day 7: Sea (War of Wrath)

Stars that fall to earth, stars entangled in the waves of the sea.

Celegorm, detail

После смерти Магнуса я совершенно опустошена. Хочу спать круглые сутки и ни на чем не могу сосредоточиться. Попытки отвлечься рисованием в основном бесплодны, да и новых идей нет, только раскрашивать уже нарисованное и остается...

The Silmarillion

Was first published today (15 September) in 1977.

taking a stab at the whole valinor trauma rebirth tragedy thing

without getting into the various iterations of mandos throughout its development, the fact that it shares the etymological root with angband (angamando in quenya) or its use as both a prison/punishment place and as the temporary "afterlife" of elves, I think it should be obvious why "mandos cures everything" doesn't work for most people. it's simply narratively unsatisfying. we know that, technically, spirits are solitary in mandos and don't tend to interact with each other, and we know (iirc) that nienna does most of the healing work, when those spirits don't reflect on things by themselves.

healing in complete isolation might work one rare time, but it's otherwise simply not how healing works, how adjusting to a new life works. being way too in your own head is discouraged. healing all your traumas because a goddess did it via magic counseling gives, at best, uncanny vibes, at worst erases the struggle and journey of adjusting, with help, into the life you're actually living. so people either say that spirits can actually meet in mandos and figure things out among themselves, or subvert the narrative and have people come out of mandos either not truly healed or only partially so, and needing the real living feedback of society to exist within it again. a reading which allows mandos to still function as a recovery, but whose achivement is to "prepare" for the journey of spiritual healing, to bring elves back to a stage where they're able to face the circumstances that generated their trauma (aka the living, embodied world, and maybe more precisely even the people involved in it).

this barely touches on the grievances that dead elves might have with the guys who are running this show. this isn't just feanorian followers (or the exiles more at large) who renounced the valar's authority, it can also be the avari, who now either get valinor or they get valinor. it can be the falathrim, who wanted to go to valinor and lost the chance. it can be those sindar who were waiting for a full intervention from valinor, and it didn't come until earendil came around. it's hard to envision healing within a system when the system itself is what you take issue with. it requires a personal compromise, or an acceptance of the system's authority, and that's simply not always possible, nor can fanworks always easily tackle it — which is also why I think fics where living relatives "bully" or like, strongly entreat, the valar into releasing specific elves from death are popular. it's one way of giving that specific problem a solution, though it may in effect be unrealistic. it's less about realism (I for one don't believe the Valar would ever do that) and more about trying to find a way through wanting to see those characters heal without having to bend and accept the system and its authority.

which also brings me to what comes after and the necessary divide, real or perceived, between people who were always in valinor and people who returned to life after conflict.

to put it simply, making sweeping statements about whether amanyar elves can understand the trauma of exiles and other reborn elves is not possible and in itself pretty silly. even the amanyar themselves don't perceive their experiences of trauma and the darkening in the same way! the teleri refuse to set foot in beleriand despite their own kin being there, and despite the fact that noldor and vanyar embark on a valar-sanctioned war. it's pretty obvious that their own internal experiences and cultural understanding of the darkening or of valar authority is still vastly different, that even going by the imprecise and generalising divide of clan, that trauma was processed differently. or not processed at all.

and then, would those who fight the war of wrath understand the trauma of a continent-wide collapse? yeah, surely in a sense they can, they live through it. but can they understand it from the point of view of a sinda who had lived in beleriand all their life and didn't simply come here with the understanding that this was war? who saw their home be destroyed slowly and painfully, and in the end, when the saving arrives, it's a saving with such an immense and heartbreaking price? maybe they can empathise, maybe they can't. the darkening, by the time of the war of wrath, is no viable term of comparison. even among the living, this isn't cookie-cutter.

so what of those who die and return? I think it's obvious, in the text itself, that someone can go through a death, real of metaphorical, return to their old home which has itself gone through some considerable trauma, and realise that no matter if both you and your home have changed, both have bled, you're still unable to readjust to it the way others can. other people who were with you in your journey can integrate, they find old friends and loves who help them in this. you can't. I'm obviously talking about frodo.

it's not the same for everyone and it will never be. and I do feel as though the reading of valinor being in itself unable to take back people who went through trauma is a push-back against the idea that valinor must inherently be blissful, healing, and perfect; but the text presents us many situations where the environment of valinor plants the seeds of dissatisfaction; the fact that it doesn't work as neatly as it seems is at the core of the early conflict in The Silmarillion (even without pointing out stuff like: troubled people, Frodo included, go to the gardens of Lorien in search of that healing and peace of mind that the rest of the land can't actually provide. it's just a land. it's mostly free of toil because there's literal gods providing things, but it's just a land). valinor is not perfect, but its status as blessed realm invites a certain unease in many readers. I believe this unease leads easily to cotradictory and equally extreme positions, ranging from "no one would or should feel out of place after rebirth" to "actually no one would understand the trauma of someone who died and returned".

plus, of course, the obvious: someone's trauma, collective or individual, and how people process it, doesn't somehow erase someone else's and how they process it. the two things can come in conflict with one another, but they're not, like, mutually exclusive.

There's a handful of notes on this going "well fuck you, do you know how hard it is to BE the speaker and not have anyone greet you?" and uh, yes, yes I do, because I did those stupid ass soft skills/resilience/insert other assorted nonsense workshops for schools for a living for a while, and I still agree with this.

The key to being an effective speaker is the ability to understand your audience. You need to understand people in order to build a rapport with them. And you need to build a rapport with them in order to effectively guide them from where they are, to where you need them to be.

So. Here is the situation from the perspective of the audience: this random person, whom they have never met before and do not care about, is being paid by employers/school powers that be to come speak on a thing. In other words, the speaker is the one benefitting from being there. Meanwhile, the audience has likely been ordered to be there, for no immediate, tangible benefit in return. It is early in the morning, they are sleep-deprived and under-caffeinated, they have a shit ton of stuff on their to-do list, they are unconvinced whatever the speaker is going to say is going to be of any use or relevance whatsoever, and so they see this talk as a waste of time that they could instead be spending on sleep or at least finishing off things that are actually necessary for work/school. And now this rando, whom I repeat, is supposed to be the service provider, whose presence is already a pain, is asking for even more effort on the audience's part by asking them to smile and be chipper. All before saying a single other word that might convince said audience that they are going to get any benefit whatsoever out of being there. Fuck that.

You gotta understand, you are not some rock star that people are already invested in and actively want to see. Those get to do the "scream! I can't hear you! LOUDER!" thing. The fact of the matter is, you are probably someone your audience has no interest in seeing, and until you give them a reason for wanting to be there, you cannot ask them for even more emotional effort. That's not going to endear them to you.

I am by no means a particularly great speaker, but I can tell you now that I have gotten far more immediate rapport and engagement by simply going "hello hello, morning, how is everyone?" and then when I get the predictably unenthusiastic mass groaning and grumbling, and unenergetic "morning"s back in return, replying "heh, big mood. It's final project season innit; how sleep deprived are y'all? --yeouch, intense, well I'll try my best to keep this as painless as I possibly can; I'm here today to talk about--" etc etc. Simple, sympathetic, and while it's not the most energetic and enthusiastic thing in the world, it puts me on "their" side and opens a connection that I can build on for the rest of the talk, instead of instantly making my audience feel 10x more tired and hostile.

If you are not a speaker being paid to be there, but are instead someone giving a presentation for an assignment or presenting a paper or whatever, then I've found that being sincere and a little self-deprecating, possibly just a tiny bit vulnerable works pretty well: "Oh god, so full disclosure, I don't speak very often and I'm sweating bullets right now, and also I tend to babble like a bullet train when I'm nervous so if at any point you cannot understand me please ask me to slow down, but I have a thing I need to present, and I think it's pretty cool, and hopefully you do too." Your audience has probably been in your shoes before, and are now inclined to be nice to you out of sympathy.

In both cases, it's about understanding your listeners and where you stand in relation to them and using that to build that initial connection. You cannot demand connection; it never fucking works.

Reblog if you’re 30 or older

This is an experiment to see if there really are as few of us as people think.You can also use this to freak out your followers who think you’re 25 or something. Yay!

…Older. :)

*Way* older than 30….

Way older 🎉🎊🪅

Older here too XD 3 more years and I'll leave this decade altogether lol

I like to imagine that the Leaving of the Elves is felt in ways no mortal could have predicted. Their magic, their presence was woven into the land. As they trickle out of middle earth, the magic dims and begins to fade. It's hard to describe. It's a sense, as if the air itself has changed. The flowers don't seem as bright, don't bloom for as long, seem somehow more fragile. Crops don't taste quite as good. Petty nuisances, like early frost or bugs getting into pantries, occur slightly more often. Trees no longer grow as quickly, nor as tall. The world itself seems... diminished. Those who are born afterwards have no way to understand what their elders describe, but it passes on into myth and folklore. In the future, scholars and historians will argue about whether this dimming was literal or simply metaphorical, a way to express the mourning for an entire race. ("Even groups that hated the elves recorded it as factual, that the world was less without them! Surely that must mean - " "Have you actually read this? I have my doubts. 'And behold, upon the passing of the elves they left behind a sun both weaker in wintertime and yet stronger in the summertime, and all of nature grew less in their absence.' Poetry and metaphor if ever I've heard it! Even an enemy would be hard pressed to mark the extinction of an entire race via suicide callously. It doesn't mean the taste of the crops literally changed, do you hear yourself.")

A few groups even have come to believe that the elves had stolen something, or else laid a curse.

Anyway, I'm imagining that images of elves would be used to invoke luck, or as symbols of a good harvest. Or fertility.

I will say if you think elwing actively chose the silmaril over her children and jumped without sparing them a worried thought then I answer to you, she's right. fuck them kids. against the moralisation of characters and their actions as if they were real people and we needed to call social services on elros and elrond in actual real life.

honestly, Luthien and her descendants don't own the Silmaril because she fought for it or because of weregild or whatever. the weregild situation in the Luthien drama is the weapons of Curufin that Beren takes from him; that's the payment, the weregild, the gold you pay for a wrongdoing. it's Angrist and Curufin's other weapons. not the Silmaril. you need to understand that Tolkien says super explicitly that the Silmaril ownership system is morality (and therefore religiously) based. he declares super clearly, black on white, that the sons of Feanor had right to the Silmarils before that right is forfeited because of their deeds, that presumably meaning Alqualonde's theft of ships and ensuing fight already. that right is forfeited, not as payment, but inherently, metaphysically, which Tolkien also reinforces by having the Valar, authority of Eru in the embodied world, bless them so that only clean hands can touch them. but mind you, what clean and moral hands means is completely arbitrary. the dwarves don't burn for killing Thingol, Beren doesn't burn for killing the dwarves. am I meant to read, say, the dwarves' overreaction to an insult as justified killing, then? as moral? it's okay if they kill someone because he's not giving them what is theirs? it's not possible to construe this narrative unless we understand that its fate is simply not a force of balanced moral judgement, but a force with a specific aim, and it's not possible to make of the story an even field because of it. fate is such that Beren can cross through the girdle; Melian cannot keep him out. in short, the Silmaril's ownership is not a consistent external logic, it's an internal morality that hinges on religious exceptionalism and fatal, near-authorial say-so. remember that Glorfindel is reembodied early explicitly because he aided the divine plan in saving little Earendil: religious favoritism and authorial say-so are a thing (they're the same thing. this is a story, nothing exists that the author doesn't decide. that the in-story divine plan corresponds with the story the author wants to tell and therefore pushes forward with the deus ex machina, that makes it ultimately nothing but Tolkien's say-so). remember also, however, that the final fate Tolkien envisions for the Silmarils is the liberation of their light to remake the world. the imbuing of their beauty for everyone to share. and whatever my opinions on that, it's miles better and a much more apt fate than whatever hoax a rigged religion-based sort of moral ownership represents.

Thank you for saying this ♥️

I also agree with you on all accounts! And I love your tags XD

Regarding the Silmarilli moral ownership, another take might be, and it's my own pov tbh, that the hallowing is purely made against Fëanor and his sons. So it doesn't matter if Thingol obtained it through theft, that dwarves have shed blood, it doesn't matter if Beren has killed as well; they aren't Fëanorions, so they're safe.

I know that this simplifies the hallowing to nothing but spite against the house of Fëanor, but honestly I don't believe in the authority of the valar for shit nor Eru's overall 'benevolence', Tolkien might have intended them to be above such pettiness, but ...

So, I wonder, if Celebrimbor was to hold one of the Silmarilli, would he burn too or would he be considered morally innocent by the in-story logic?

Look, I love Maglor.

Maglor makes me feel things.

I am firmly in the camp that Maglor is the Most Gentle Feanorian, he hates violence, he sees the wrong in all they do, he has an immense amount of empathy.

And don’t you see… this does not make him The Best Feanorian, morally superior to his brothers, pure and good.

This interpretation… kinda makes him the WORST of his brothers?

Maedhros stands aside when the ships burn. He believes abandoning their cousins and people is wrong and takes a stand no matter how futile. Maglor doesn’t. Maglor burns the ships.

We don’t know that Maglor thought that was wrong, we don’t get his perspective in that part of the story. But once we start getting his perspective we get him arguing against the final acts of murder that would retrieve the Silmarils, with full knowledge that it is a bad thing to do… and then doing it anyways. I think Maglor knew burning the ships was wrong.

If you interpret Maglor this way… he doesn’t come out looking good. At least Curufin and Celegorm had conviction that attacking Doriath was right. Going along with it knowing it’s wrong is WORSE. It’s FUCKED UP.

Maglor, in many ways, is a coward. Not when facing the enemy, but when facing his brothers, or his father. He may have had the most of Nerdanel in him of his brothers, but he didn’t get her spine, her ability to say “no this is wrong” to someone she loves, and step away. I even think Maglor’s “no this is wrong” was internal until the very end, when he only had his closest brother left.

There is a period where Maglor is in charge, after Maedhros’s capture. And a lot of people headcanon Maglor having a lot of guilt over his inaction in this time. I agree he has a lot of guilt over it (I think guilt and conflicted emotions drive almost everything Maglor does) but I also think this is the BRAVEST AND MOST CORRECT MAGLOR ACTS IN THE ENTIRE FIRST AGE. The Noldor should absolutely just be seeking to survive at this point, trying to rescue Maedhros would get them all killed. Inaction is the correct call here, despite pressure to do otherwise.

And also, I can’t remember if I made this up, but I have a memory of Curufin and Celegorm both clamoring for Maglor to give up the throne in favor of Celegorm, who is absolutely a more decisive leader in line with what their father would have wanted. Fending this off would be the only recorded time when Maglor stood firm against his brothers.

Some people portray Maglor taking in Elrond and Elros as an act of defiance against Maedhros, to which I say… why? Maedhros frantically searched for Elured and Elurin to save them, he clearly was very against the murder of children, and Maglor has exactly zero instances of putting his foot down against Maedhros.

Tl.dr. Maglor having the most developed moral compass of the feanorians, far from making him a perfect angel, actually mixes with his actions and inactions to make him INCREDIBLY flawed in a completely unflattering way, and I think that’s fascinating.