I Was Thinking About How One Of The Defining Features Of Both Fëanor And Fingolfin Is Anger. It’s

i love the silmarillion cause it starts with a group of deities chilling to lo-fi beats and it gets progressively more intense like at one point an elf literally fights off a werewolf with his teeth and it's not even the most dramatic thing that happens

Damn I just realized that since the Rohirrim didn’t read or write (wise but unlearned, writing no books but singing many songs) that means Eowyn couldn’t read or write and since she marries Nerdboy McGee who loves reading and writing more than anything you can your bottom dollar one of the first thing that happens in their courtship/marriage is Faramir and Eowyn wholesome tutoring sessions in the Minas Tirith library (!) 

god i hate how aesthetic-obsessed we have become. i'm not talking about cottagecore or dark academia or any of the other -cores, i'm talking about everything being so glossy and pretty and perfect and smooth and one-liner hot takes and feel-good own-the-conservatives progressivism and Top 10 Company Tweets We Laughed At and ring lights and young vloggers with pastel-perfect colour-corrected lives and carefully curated messy title cards and perfect montages being called "photo dumps" and bookstagrams or booktoks or bookblrs who buy every book they read, not a library edition in sight and "that girl" and this is how you age when you're unproblematic and glow ups and "clean" "inclusive" beauty and earth tones and minimalism and filming random people without their consent and definition of the self through consumption of goods and ggrgehwrgehrgehrgehrgehrrerg

Can I please ask for your top five theories on why the Ringwraiths become so much more powerful over the course of the LotR trilogy? By the end of the books a single Ringwraith holds an army of 6000 men in paralysing dread from a height of a mile, they're dismaying hosts of men, etc. And in the beginning, they're easily defeated by "jumping behind a tree," "pretending to be in a different room," "getting on a little boat," "man with a stick on fire," etc.

hmm ok

1) their power depends on how physically close they are to sauron/mordor

2) they consciously weren’t unleashing their full power early in Fellowship bcos it didn’t seem worth it when they were just dealing w hobbits

3) they just woke up from a REALLY long nap and it takes them a while to fully come ‘online’

4) their power just waxes & wanes sometimes

5) hobbits are their One Weakness 

No offense to people who function properly but I’m different

finally got around to paint my favorite golden haired boy

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)

a librarian’s hoard

[ID: Digital illustration of a red dragon surrounded by their colorful hoard of books. A worn, blue scarf wraps around their neck, and a pair of gold glasses sits on their snout, held in place by a gold chain. The dragon’s lair resembles a huge, airy library with multiple levels of bookcases, tall mountains of books, and floor-to-ceiling windows revealing open sky. Decorative gold chains drape across the space. The dragon smiles as it holds a small book in its mouth, stretching to offer it to a distant human standing atop a book tower. End ID.]

so there’s that version in which Miriel leaves for Lorien and dies a bit later… consider; preteen Feanor inventing embroidery and weaving machines in an attempt to give his ailing mother the ability to create something back even if she no longer has the strength to.

For Feanorian week, Miriel Serinde, in whose arms began the burning history of Noldor.