penelopes-poppies - lots of Tolkien and autism, no actual poppies
lots of Tolkien and autism, no actual poppies

she/her, cluttering is my fluency disorder and the state of my living space, God gave me Pathological Demand Avoidance because They knew I'd be too powerful without it, of the opinion that "y'all" should be accepted in formal speech, 18+ [ID: profile pic is a small brown snail climbing up a bright green shallot, surrounded by other shallot stalks. End ID.]

293 posts

Latest Posts by penelopes-poppies - Page 5

3 years ago

if i could protect turin turambar from all the evil in this world i would


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3 years ago

I really hope the Amazon show picks a side in the Gil-Gadad debate. Just for the drama. I think it will be funny to watch.


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3 years ago

There’s some really disturbing stuff in The Nature of Middle-earth; I’m not sure whether these ideas were some of the ones Tolkien considered for how orcs were created, or if he saw them as something different, but he’s provided plenty of fodder for darkfic writers.

…it is recorded in the histories that Morgoth, and Sauron after him, would druve out the fëa by terror, and then feed the body and make it a beast…it [would become] an animal, seeking nothing more than food by which its corporeal life may be continued, and seeking it only after the manner of beasts, as it may find it by limbs and senses.

Jirt, that’s a zombie. It’s dead, non-sapient, still moving around, and only driven by looking for food. And typically created by an evil power through evil means. You invented Middle-earth zombies.

And worse, [Morgoth or Sauron] would daunt the fëa within the body and reduce it to a stupor of horror, so that it was impotent; and then nourish the body foully, so that it became bestial, to the horror and torment of the fëa.

This does seem like a mechanism for the creation of orcs. Morgoth takes an elf, overpowers the fëa so that it is no longer in control of the body, and then, well, the implication is that he feeds the body the flesh of elves or men to further torment the fëa. In the short term, the hröa is basically a beast under Morgoth’s control; over time, the fëa might become more active, but horrified, sickened, and twisted by the nature of the hröa and the purposes for which it has been used. It is evil because, outside of its control, it has done and been used for horrific things that it can’t process without becoming evil.

Brr.


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3 years ago

microdosing on being goth by wearing black jeans


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3 years ago

Just thinking about the absolute gut-punch that Elrond and Elros must represent to Maedhros.

The text is pretty clear that they take after Elwing’s line in looks, not Eärendil’s. There’s not another dark-haired, grey-eyed ancestor in the twins’ paternal line since Turgon. But Turgon also looks like his brother Fingon, and I think Maedhros would have seen that resemblance easily.

And what’s more, Elrond fully grown is supposed to look like his daughter, who looks like Lúthien. The first of many generations of her descendants who the sons of Fëanor destroyed. Dior, Eluréd, Elurín, Nimloth, Elwing.

And, of course, we cannot forget they are twins.

I can’t imagine what it must be like for Maedhros, seeing that. A neat summary of his sins; reminders of his most badly wronged victims all bundled up into one. And there isn’t a damn thing about it that he doesn’t see as his fault.


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3 years ago

I don’t know what little cat needs to hear this but. it is Not Dinner Time. you are not going to starve and it will be okay.


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3 years ago

This sword was made by the Elves and will glow blue when orcs are around. Green means it's fully charged, red means it needs a recharge. Blinking red means there's a software update.


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3 years ago

[ID: adult Zuko unsuccessfully encourages toddler Kya to eat a spoonful of veggies by opening his mouth and saying, "Aaaaaaaaaa." Kya, her mouth tightly closed and knowing that she's winning this battle, smiles at him. Adult Katara laughs in the background, left hand resting on her baby bump. All three of them are dressed in calm, earthy reds and blues. Katara and Zuko both have their hair half up in a bun, the bottom half left loose. Kya's bib has blue moons and red suns, and her features are a mix of her parents'. It is a happy, domestic Zutara scene.

End ID.]

Just Some Dadko Dramatically Attempting To Fill Kya’s Daily Veggie Intake As Momtara Loses It In The

just some dadko dramatically attempting to fill kya’s daily veggie intake as momtara loses it in the background


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3 years ago

But I can’t talk about climactic sentences in Tolkien’s works without mentioning what is, in my opinion, one of the best things that has ever been written in the English language.

And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the City, a cock crowed. Shrill and clear he crowed, recking nothing of wizardry or war, welcoming only the morning that in the sky far above the shadows of death was coming with the dawn. And as if in answer there came from far away another note. Horns, horns, horns. In dark Mindolluin’s sides they dimly echoed. Great horns of the North wildly blowing. Rohan had come at last.

This is unparalleled. This gives me chills every time I read it. It may be my favorite quote in all of Tolkien’s works, except that choosing a favorite quote would be an impossible decision to make. It’s so inspiring. It’s so moving. It’s so heroic. And obviously, it’s a moment of pure eucatastrophe. Rohan had come at last.

And the moment that Pippin hears the horns of Rohan:

When the dark shadow at the Gate withdrew Gandalf still sat motionless. But Pippin rose to his feet, as if a great weight had been lifted from him; and he stood listening to the horns, and it seemed to him that they would break his heart with joy. And never in after years could he hear a horn blown in the distance without tears starting in his eyes.

I LOVE LORD OF THE RINGS SO MUCH


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3 years ago

i reread the commentary on Finrod Athrabeth and Andreth a while ago and I just “ Elves could die, and did die, by their will; as for example because of great grief  or bereavement, or because of the frustration of their dominant desires and purposes.” 

I see… so that’s why Feanor let Maglor go to music school lmao.


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3 years ago
Have You Ever Wished There Was A Comprehensive, Easy Access Resource Of Every Tolkien Character Ever?

Have you ever wished there was a comprehensive, easy access resource of Every Tolkien Character Ever? Look no further! Now presenting:

The Tolkien Legendarium Characters Masterdoc!

compiled by @arofili, @ambrorussa aka @welcometolotr, @jaz-the-bard, and @fingons-rad-harp, this spreadsheet contains - to the best of our ability - ALL 1100+ characters that Tolkien incorporated into (or considered for) his Legendarium! this resource is open to the public for perusal and use in your fan projects of all kinds, though its creators are fanfiction writers and we organized the doc with our craft in mind.

we have organized this database by character race/species and Age. each character has attached information on their name(s), cultural/familial affiliation(s), life dates (when known), associated places, textual source, Ages/timeframe of activity, gender, relative canonicity, and brief pertinent information - as well as a link to their page on Tolkien Gateway (our main source) where you can continue your research on any character you choose.

characters of ALL levels of canonicity are represented in this sheet. that includes the wacky, wild stuff from the Book of Lost Tales, as well as Frodo himself! our designations of “how canon” a character is are inherently subjective, and you are free to disagree with our rankings; with this categorization we hoped to give people an idea of what to expect upon exploring the characters yourselves. please consult our Key for information on how we made these decisions. this document is a jumping-off point for your own research!

if there’s something you’d like to sort for that we didn’t provide, you are free to make a copy and reorganize the spreadsheet however you would like. (however, we do ask that you only redistribute the original sheet.)

this sheet includes characters from every text written by Tolkien that we could find information about on Tolkien Gateway. we are only human, and are thus likely to have made some mistakes or missed some characters - if you think that’s the case, please let us know so we can update the document!

if you think there is a character missing, or you would like something added/redacted/altered, contact the sheet owner @arofili on tumblr or annaquenta#6263 on discord and we will consider your request.

in addition to Tolkien’s own characters, we have included some characters who only appeared in Peter Jackson’s film trilogy adaptations. we are open to including characters from other adaptations, but we weren’t familiar enough with those to add them to the document. if you desperately want to see an adaptation-only character in the document, let us know!

we hope this resource is helpful for Tolkien fans of all kinds in learning more about his characters both weird and wonderful! happy headcanoning!

LINK TO THE DOCUMENT: tinyurl.com/TolkMasterDoc


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3 years ago

broke: din knows nothing about the skywalkers and who they are

woke: din knows about leia but only that she’s the one who killed jabba the hutt


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3 years ago

I thing sometimes cats don’t actually know what specifically they want – they’re just generally dissatisfied, so they stand there yelling “I YEARN” on the off chance that you’ll be able to do something about it.


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3 years ago

my life has been comedy hell for the past 48 hours. so this tiktok zoomer used my email address to sign up for a tiktok account. how tiktok allowed them to do this, i have no idea. aren’t real, respectable social media sites supposed to force you to validate the email before it is used? smh. but i noticed this about a week or so ago. i sent tiktok a ticket telling them to take my email off to no avail. okay, so after receiving the 20th tiktok notification in my email i decide to take matters into my own hands. i reset the password on the account and logged in to make it stop.

then, i posted a tiktok telling the user to POST THEIR EMAIL IN THE COMMENTS so I can change the account ownership over to them. sounds simple enough, but it is here that i truly learned the failure of the american education system. the original user and their friend posted hysterically about how they were going to “text tiktok” to get the account back, i’m a hacker, their username only has letters and numbers in it, how did you change the password, etc. i explained, over ten times, simply and nicely, that this person signed up with my email, and i simply need them to read the instructions and post their email so i can change the account ownership.

whoever is raising zoomers have failed. mfers can’t even read anything more complex than a tiktok caption anymore. stop letting these ipads raise your children or i will call copmala harris. this is the living result of politicians defunding public education. anyway. after an hour, i suppose the two and a half braincells they share rubbed together and an email was provided, but the email is already attached to another account!

i realized this absolute child prodigy signs up for tiktok accounts with emails they have no control over and she makes new accounts when she needs to reset the password. she’s in Fr*aking high school and by that age I know yall have to use your email for stuff. wtf. like this is some shit i’d expect my over 70 year old internet savy-less grandmother to do, and not even she does this! Anyway. Maybe I will receive a functional email at some point today. They are probably asleep because they need to wake up early to attend the grade school that is not teaching them how to read. 😎🔫 WAIT NO THEY ARE NOT IT IS THE WEEKEND. 😎🔫


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3 years ago
‪happy Christmas To My Favourite Story Of All Time‬

‪happy christmas to my favourite story of all time‬


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3 years ago

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.


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3 years ago

Dancing under the stars and calling clients while lightly bouncing on the trampoline are not mutually exclusive with adulthood.

Don't deprive yourself of joy because you think maturity is being serious and worried all the time.


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3 years ago

AITA for trying to get back at someone who double-crossed me?

I (ageless, existed before time, F) had a deal with a skeevy guy (also ageless, though not as much as me, M), and it went sour. I want to preface this by saying that none of what I did was technically illegal, just morally questionable if you're of a certain disposition- I most definitely wasn't what anyone had in mind when writing laws. And a girl has to eat.

Anyway, I'll back it up for context. He'd been formerly estranged from his family (also ageless) who moved across the ocean to make a nice gated community after he wrecked their first home and made his own dark abode there, which they were fine with until Children entered the equation. Not my deal, personally, but to each their own. In fairness, that lot are pretty caring (gross), so it makes sense that they'd go far for these kids, saying he'd be a bad influence. Not my business, either, but I will say that they were right.

He reunited with them after they dragged him to their place, and said that he was sorry, which they accepted and let him have free run of it. This is when he contacted me and asked if I'd help him do a job, and he promised me anything I wanted in return. I didn't take him at his word, of course, but even what I'd be able to get on my own would have been a sweet deal. His sister-in-law (selfish) has these two insane trees, that only grow there, and I wanted to get my hands on them. I'm a fiend for fruit, and syrup, you see, but there was no way for me to get in alone. I'd had my eye on the place for a while, and I knew I needed help to get in. So I agreed to be a distraction while he did his thing.

I held up my part of the deal; I was what some might call hangry, and none of his useless family managed to stop me. I marched right up to those trees and had myself a perfect fruit course. Meat and wine provided by the kids who'd thought they could stop me, it was a full charcuterie. They saw my side of it eventually. Anyway, after all that, I was bloated but still hungry- you try starving for millennia and see how you like it-, but it was time to make our escape, and for me to get my payment. The guy shows up at the rendezvous spot and we get away clean. Turns out he'd gotten what he wanted, and offered me payment from that. The usual, a bunch of gemstones, which I take for myself as a snack, and then three beautiful jewels. Three- and when I say beautiful, I mean they're the best things I've seen in my entire life. So I told him, you know what, I'll take those as payment. To be honest, I could've gone for all three, but I figured I'd start small. And he didn't want to give it to me, which is bullshit, because he said I could have anything. Anything means anything.

Anyway, he refused and I never got them. Seriously, it was close; I almost had him beat and wrapped up for later before he called his friends to ambush me and escape like a coward. Whatever, I made him pay for that at least, he cried like a baby.

I don't feel bad about it, I think I'm in the right here, but I was telling my kids this and it's all "mom, what's wrong with you, how could you do that to him" and "mom, seriously?" and "mom, where's dad, did you eat him too?", which seems unreasonable to me. So I thought I'd ask on here.

Tl;dr- this guy tried to cheat me and I attempted to eat him, AITA?0


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3 years ago

Bilbo Baggins has ADHD! It says in the first chapter of The Hobbit that he didn’t remember things well unless he wrote them down! – Absolutely! He also:

randomly bursts into song

is driven by his emotions and impulses

took like 70 years to write a book

his mind works in ways that other people don’t follow easily

talks too much and has no idea that his listeners aren’t into it because he’s so into it

h y p e r f i x a t i o n


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3 years ago

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-


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3 years ago

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


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3 years ago

look: our neanderthal ancestors took care of the sick and disabled so if ur post-apocalyptic scenario is an excuse for eugenics, u are a bad person and literally have less compassion than a caveman


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3 years ago

this looks like love

~ This was Beleg’s knife. It was more beautiful than any knife he had seen before, the blade covered with intricate designs of leaves and stars and the crossings of rivers and trees.

‘This looks like love,’ his father would have said. He said that about beautiful things wrought with care: knives and swords, baskets, shawls, quilts, jackets. His broken harp. Túrin still didn’t know what it meant. Not entirely. ~

***

Túrin woke to find himself alone. Beleg’s bed was made up, so were the others'. He got up and washed. He was close enough to Menegroth that there was no real danger if he did not run off alone. He drank sweet water and ate lingonberries and cheese and bread.

Beleg had not woken him early, so he would not study to hunt that day. Beleg had let him rest. Perhaps Beleg had gone to hunt without him. Túrin stepped out onto the small porch of the cabin in his nightshirt.

There Beleg sat, making arrows.

‘You’re awake,’ he said. Túrin nodded. He sat cross legged beside Beleg and stared at the sun. It was midday.

‘I slept a long time.’

‘You were tired.’

Túrin nodded again. He bounced his fingers on the bruises on his knees. He liked how his fingers felt as they bounced off his skin. Beleg did not ask him why he did it or call him strange. Túrin swept his hands up and down, turning his hands in the air, so that his fingers came down first facing his knees and then turned from them, again and again.

‘Do I go back to Menegroth today?’ he asked. He reached for mint leaves from the ground and pressed three into his mouth.

‘No,’ Beleg said. Túrin turned his face up to the sun.

‘When then?’

‘In two days.’

‘And then you will go far afield?’ Túrin said. ‘For all the winter?’ He let his hands fly again, bouncing off his knees. He chewed the mint leaves and swallowed their taste.

‘Not for all the winter, I don’t think,’ Beleg answered. ‘I would miss you.’

Túrin stopped bouncing his hands to pick mint leaves for Beleg. He handed them to him. Beleg took them and nodded his thanks. He ate them and kept making arrows.

‘Do you want to speak of which you dreamt?’ Beleg asked.

‘No,’ Túrin said. He waved his hand, letting it spin at his wrist. ‘I think everyone was dead. I was dead.’

Beleg patted Túrin’s knee gently. Túrin brushed the spot when Beleg had pulled his hair back. He didn’t like the lingering touch that seemed to tingle on his skin, even from those he loved. He tried to do it when Beleg wasn’t looking. He had brushed off his father’s touches and kisses. Sometimes he let his mother’s stay, but it agitated him to have a part of his skin even a little wet or a bit different from the rest. He didn’t know why being touched left an impression of the touch on his skin, but it did. He had asked Beleg if he could feel a touch after it was gone. Beleg had said yes, but he hadn’t been bothered by it.

Túrin looked at the yard. It was green and damp. Mud was spreading though. It must have rained a little when he slept. It was quiet, and it smelt like cold rain. Soon the leaves would change colour.

‘Are we alone?’ Túrin asked.

‘Yes,’ Beleg said. ‘The others left last night. They are needed farther North.’

‘Where you will go.’

‘Yes, where I will go.’

Túrin shoved his bare feet down onto the ground. It was soft enough that they sunk a bit into it. It was cold. The grass tickled his skin. Túrin stood and took a large step into the yard. His foot sunk down again, the ground giving a bit beneath him. He walked the yard around like that, in long strides, watching his feet leave impressions in the wet earth, feeling the cold of it.

He liked that the grass was green and not brown. He liked that the ground was wet and not frozen. He ran back to the porch and stood on it with his muddy feet.

‘Wash up,’ Beleg said. ‘You can’t go inside like that.’

‘I know.’ Túrin stood on his tiptoes to touch the very top of the porch where the two slanted roofs met each other.

Beleg patted his leg. ‘Wash. Then put some clothes on. Thingol and Melian will not be pleased if I bring you home ill.’

Túrin wrinkled his nose but threw some cold water from the rain barrel onto his feet and wiped them clean with a rag. He went back inside and came out dressed and with shoes on.

‘Don’t you look darling,’ Beleg said. Túrin had put this underneath ‘strange things that Elves say to each other and sometimes to you but that don’t need a response’ so he tramped off without a response to pee.

He came back to Beleg after and stared at his muddy footprints on the porch where he had been sitting. Beleg gave him a pointed look. Túrin wiped them up with the same rag and hung it over the side of the rain barrel to dry. He sat down again and took the knife that Beleg gave him.

This was Beleg’s knife. It was more beautiful than any knife he had seen before, the blade covered with intricate designs of leaves and stars and the crossings of rivers and trees.

‘This looks like love,’ his father would have said. He said that about beautiful things wrought with care: knives and swords, baskets, shawls, quilts, jackets. His broken harp. Túrin still didn’t know what it meant. Not entirely.

‘This looks like love,’ he said, for maybe Beleg knew the answer.

Beleg studied him. Beleg’s face was ancient but barely lined. It was his eyes that made it ancient. They were like the night sky and all the stars in it – maybe just as old, or maybe younger, but not enough that it would it matter to Túrin when he thought of the ages of the world.

‘Yes,’ Beleg said. ‘Care is love.’

Túrin said no more.


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3 years ago

@prekliata-bryndza I realize what gets to me about Elrond as specifically the minstrel of Gil-galad. Obviously I have thought about Maglor teaching him, but many people have already created works on this topic better than I can. Actually this makes me think of a scene I have had in my mind for quite a while but haven’t written yet. I imagine near the end of the War of Wrath, a ship full of refugees fleeing a sinking Beleriand lead by Elros at the front steering, and I imagine Elrond at the back singing to comfort the children and the hurt and the weary, and this is how I came up with a concept of this role that Elrond fulfills first beside Elros in practice and then beside Gil-galad officially that is more than knowledge and wisdom — the close companion of a king whose role is less decisive but less constrained than a king’s, therefore providing a balance to kingliness that Elros and Gil-galad and their peoples value and need.


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3 years ago

I'm approaching parenting age and I've been thinking back on all the stuff I put my parents through as a kid. Only thought now is "oh no, God help me"


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3 years ago

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)


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3 years ago

Cartographic Practices of Arda: Men

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

o   Men might seem like the most straightforward group to analyze, but they’re not. Why should we assume that humans in Arda use the same cartographic practices that we do? For that matter, who is “we”? Cartography is not a set of objective and universally or historically standard techniques; it is not an exact science; the modern maps treated as real or correct maps are not the one true way to represent space. Tolkien’s Edain may be based on Western Europeans, but they’re still fantasy, and there’s no reason that their cartography should look like Western Europe’s

Further, Western European cartography wasn’t standardized in terms of techniques or even units of measure until early states began to want visual representations of their territory that would make them more easily taxed and managed, especially as enclosure policies took off, market forces became increasingly dominant, and controlling a standardized populace became an important goal of government

o    Western cartography is also deeply intertwined with maps as a colonial and imperialist tool, which impacted the development of mapping practices, the lands those maps reflected, and the ways in which space was imagined. I think that governing, planning military operations, maybe taxing the populace, and carrying out various expansionist programs would be the activities in Middle-earth driving cartographic development among Men, similar to Europe, but it’s not inevitable at all that the maps they make for such things would look the same. Maybe they could make maps of layered symbols rather than mimicking on-the-ground spatial relations, or paintings whose details correspond to geographic referents, or physical models of space a la Polynesian stick charts (although I do think there’s an artifacts-have-politics argument to be made about which cartographic practices are most conducive to certain uses and conceptions of space, but I digress)

o   But presuming Men do make maps in the same vein as those found in the books (though I should say I don’t take those as being real in-world maps, per se), what would they map? And how would they map it?

Starting with the Edain and the kingdoms they founded, since their influence is so centered in LOTR, I think their cartography would develop as a formal practice in Númenor, and prior to that, they might use the maps of Elven realms of which they were vassals, or might create their own spatial navigation techniques, not necessarily cartographic

Likely, considerable influence of Elvish cartography on Númenórean maps would carry over to Gondor and Arnor. While Elves might only need maps as reference for memorization, or for military strategy planning, I think Men’s reproduction of and reliance on maps would increase greatly, especially during the colonial age of Númenor and the realms they established. Cartography could become a more established discipline; populations could be managed more effectively, at least under the more competent rulers; similar to early-state-formation Europe, you could see cartography as an increasingly important tool of state 

(this is a long one, so the rest is under the cut)

Keep reading


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3 years ago

The case against Finrod revisionism 

I’ve always been frustrated by what I see as bad-faith interpretations of Finrod’s character. You don’t have to like him or find him interesting, but it bothers me when people make claims about him that don’t make sense. When it comes to Finrod, they usually follow a similar pattern, something like: ‘I thought Finrod was good the first time I read the Silmarillion, but now I think he’s bad.’ ‘I thought Finrod was a friend of Men at first, but now I think he actually looked down on the Edain and treated them poorly.’ ‘Finrod comes across as a perfect good guy in the Silmarillion, but what if he’s secretly manipulative and evil?’ That’s what I’m calling Finrod revisionism. This is not a callout post; I’m just giving my reasons why ‘Finrod is actually evil and the Silmarillion is lying to you’ is not a take that does it for me. I think it’s entirely fair to criticize Finrod. He’s not perfect and if he were I think he would be less interesting (more on that later). I just do not vibe with interpretations of his character that paint him as someone who intentionally sacrificed the Edain in battle, someone who committed genocide against the Petty-dwarves, or someone who held prejudiced views, and I think those interpretations are unsupported by canon. This is a long post, so I’ll put it under the cut.

Continua a leggere


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