This Is My Belated @officialtolkiensecretsanta Gift For @arlenianchronicles. Both My Laptop And My Phone

anyway I do think Smeagol could have been redeemed/rehabilitated if the story had played out differently

Cartographic Practices in Arda: Hobbits

[overthinking fantasy cartography series: Elves, Orcs, Dwarves, Hobbits, and Men]

o   We know Sam isn’t much for geography - “maps conveyed nothing to Sam’s mind” - but Frodo studied Elrond’s maps in Rivendell, as did Merry, and both made sense of them; so if hobbits do use maps, they may use similar techniques or representation practices to the Elves, and their maps would be mutually intelligible

o   Hobbits do not seem to travel much beyond the Shire, nor need to know much outside its borders. Merry and Pippin, however, who do travel quite a lot back to the south in the Fourth Age, could expand hobbit cartography and place the Shire within a broader political and geographic context. Whether this knowledge is spread among the hobbits more generally, hard to say

The sparse and stylized map given in The Hobbit might be a fair in-world depiction of the limits of hobbits’ grasp of geography, gained through rare instances like Bilbo’s travels

If Merry and Pippin do contribute to updated maps (Merry more likely than Pippin, I imagine), they might well incorporate mapping practices, place names, and territorial divisions according to the realms they serve (so, situating the Shire as an autonomous region within the reunited Arnor-Gondor realm, and adopting Men’s cartographic practices)

Such maps would be more useful to outsiders adding the Shire into their spatial conception of Middle-earth; I doubt they would be much used in the Shire itself

o   Hobbit cartography would relate to land use primarily, I think, mostly agriculture; towns and land tenure would also be noted, since their class structure seems based on land ownership (even though the mechanisms of land acquisition or means of wealth accumulation are murky - they aren’t feudal lords; they aren’t collecting tribute from workers, but plainly there *are* workers and landed gentry, so ??? how did that develop??)

Though, if property arrangements are fairly stable and inherited, and everyone knows which hobbits belong where, is it even necessary to make formal maps of this? Might not customary boundaries just be common knowledge and maybe marked on the ground itself, but hobbits wouldn’t need maps for it?

If they did make physical maps, there would probably be notations for social establishments – taverns, inns, etc. Beyond the borders of the shire, Bree might be the last place actually marked. Again, though, these are the kinds of spatial relations I think would be negotiated in real time through spatial practice, but not recorded cartographically

I suppose given the Sackville-Baggins’s coveting of Bag End, property disputes may be a thing, and being able to assert recorded land claims might be useful - so records of property ownership might be cartographically relevant

o   Beyond such record-keeping, though, I think hobbits wouldn’t really need or make maps unless engaging with outsiders – they know their territory, they understand the rules of ~property ownership~ (historically inexplicable as it is to me) and whatever implicit spatial boundaries or sites of importance exist across the Shire. There might be casually-made “maps” for basic wayfinding if one had to travel to a distant village, but I doubt anyone’s making the type of formal or standardized maps for territorial governance that might be used by a more established state and military - which the Shire lacks, of course (and good for them)

Turin and Beleg meeting again at the end of the world

thinking about Jet, as I often do, and thinking about how bryke really thought not only that vilifying the only organized resistance to the Fire Nation was a good idea, but also that making that resistance a group of mostly kids and teenagers and still painting them as horrible monsters was a good idea. We really don’t talk enough about how Jet is treated like an adult in the show. And to an extent, all of the kids in ATLA are doing things that they’re too young to do, but pretty much all of them except for Jet have their emotions and backstory explored. Jet gets one line about the Fire Nation killing his family. One line. He’s shown to be this mature, autonomous figure, a leader, taking care of a bunch of other people, and the show goes out of its way to make him both unlikeable and totally responsible for his actions in a way that a character like Azula (who is exactly as old as Jet) isn’t. I was thinking about this post, which talks about the little girl and how that draws on an old racist trope that depicts people of color violently resisting oppression as child-killers and makes real the “what about the women and children?” hypothetical, and it honestly just turns my stomach that bryke used another child to paint this group of mostly children as evil. The little girl gets to be a little girl and is protected, and her protection is used as justification for vilifying Jet. Jet and the rest of the Freedom Fighters don’t get to be kids. They don’t get to be good or morally ambiguous or even just naive. They already had their innocence robbed from them when the Fire Nation took their families from them, and bryke, instead of exploring them as the children they are, makes them out to be just as bad and just as culpable, if not more culpable, than adults who actively participated in imperialism (like Jeong Jeong and Iroh.) And then Jet’s “redemption arc” is him, the only Brown Freedom Fighter, dying violently for the cause. I don’t know, man, writing this post is making me cry, but Jet deserved so much better than that. Jet deserved to be a kid, and he had that taken from him both within the narrative when the Fire Nation burned down his village, and outside the narrative by Bryan and Michael. 

funny how Queen Elizabeth II is trying to make today all about her, when its LITERALLY my first day of school today🙄🙄

90% of arguments about media could just be solved by saying “different people like different things in their stories” and leaving it at that

Thinking about a re-embodied Maeglin looking up at the night sky and realising that it contains a star he never saw before he died. And one day he asks about it and hears how it's Eärendil and how he ended up up there

Thingol had the Silmaril the whole time he fostered Turin, right? Like, it was probably sitting down in his vaults somewhere and maybe sometimes he or Mablung would go have a peep to make sure it was still there.

But like. Turin. Smol baby. Bad luck charm. Walking doom magnet. Imagine if he’d gotten his hands on the shiny shiny jewel. How much chaos he could have started. The Tale of Turin Turambar and the Seven Sons of Feanor.

Nine rings were made for men. Seven for the dwarves, three for the elves, and one for the big guy himself. One, three, seven, nine. There is but a set of five missing to complete the sequence of odd numbers. I propose that this missing set of rings of power was gifted to a mysterious someone by their true love, along with a partridge in a pear tree (among other things). In this essay I will-

ive realised there isnt a huge market for shakespeare shit posts