feel free to ignore but i always associated namo more with fungal aspects of decay as death is his wheelhouse and melkor being more about thermodynamics and changing of matter-states. but melkor being the genesis of fertilizer is delightfully ironic.
I quite like that too! I’d love me a mushroomy Námo *3* It’s definitely a property they might share too.
I have definitely written about Melkor teaching the Noldor about thermodynamics, and had Fëanor chip in like “cool story bro I figured out how to make diamonds myself like, last century” and Melkor was “>:U”
Maybe biology? As in how an elf works on the inside which you can’t know unless you’ve opened a couple of them up. I mean – That’s knowledge that should be technically terrifying but also sincerely useful
Holy shit you’re right X’D fuck me, that’s actually perfect. There’s no one to dissect in Aman so if they ever have to do surgery or set a bone or something their medical knowledge is WAY behind their knowledge of say, metallurgy. I mean, they’re immortals who don’t age or get sick except in ~spirit~, so it’d be of limited use in the first place, BUT, hey man, when you break your leg falling off a horse or have a little forge accident, knowing how blood and bones and organs work is probably pretty valuable! 😀 Just don’t ask him how he knows!
“…And this is the liver. It’s probably the tastiest of the organ meats”
“Come again?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
For that matter, knowledge of decay and decomposition might be something Melkor has a unique handle on that wouldn’t be readily taught elsewhere in Valinor. This might lead to them finding out about, say, fermentation, or fertilizers– both good and useful things!
Maybe biology? As in how an elf works on the inside which you can’t know unless you’ve opened a couple of them up. I mean – That’s knowledge that should be technically terrifying but also sincerely useful
Holy shit you’re right X’D fuck me, that’s actually perfect. There’s no one to dissect in Aman so if they ever have to do surgery or set a bone or something their medical knowledge is WAY behind their knowledge of say, metallurgy. I mean, they’re immortals who don’t age or get sick except in ~spirit~, so it’d be of limited use in the first place, BUT, hey man, when you break your leg falling off a horse or have a little forge accident, knowing how blood and bones and organs work is probably pretty valuable! 😀 Just don’t ask him how he knows!
“…And this is the liver. It’s probably the tastiest of the organ meats”
It’s hard to imagine the Valar expressly banning any knowledge, even dangerous knowledge like sword making, but maybe certain trades or lines of inquiry became taboo amongst the Elves, even unlawful. Certainly the Valar wouldn’t stop the Elves from deciding amongst themselves that Melkorish Activities were no longer acceptable.
I’d give my left leg to know what information Tolkien thought Melkor was giving the Elves during that time; my guess is something related to ~the tainted realm of Science oOooOoOooO~ but what variety, I don’t know. They already had Aulë teaching them metalworking and mining and smelting etc., and the rest of the Valar were there to teach their specialties. Melkor’s contribution might have been to explain things in more depth than the other Valar. I could also see him giving more information about the Spring of Arda than his brethren, and spreading a less accepted telling of the Ainulindalë from his perspective– definitely biased, but not without truth. He might just have been teaching them crazy sex positions, who knows. And that is why double-reverse-upside-down-cowgirl is forbidden in Valinor to this day…
Oromë is another one I’m having to write for a project, so I’ll hit up that UUUUUNNNNNGLLLLEEEEESSSSSSS *bew bew bewwwww*
I fucking love Ungles and I’m happy to report that I have some Bonafide Eldritch Headcanons™ about her.
Canon wants us to believe that she’s a corrupted spirit from Ëa who joined Melkor but then fucked off because that’s how spiders do. I AM NOT CONVINCED. You can’t have your “Melkor is the mightiest of the Valar and Valar are exponentially greater in power than Maiar” cake and …. have….a spider eat that cake.
So, in so much as Ainur are beings derived from Eru’s thought, Ungoliant is not a Maia. She’s not a Vala. She’s not one of the Ainur at all. Ungoliant is something Melkor ran into when he was searching the outer darkness for the Secret Fire, which only Illuvatar has. The Void is at least as old as Eru, being timeless. It is vaster than He (if one can even use size as a metric for measuring infinite cosmic entities), though empty. It is the birthplace of all potential, the void that must be in order for things other than it to exist. It is ready to quicken around any particle of matter and form pearls of chaos that expand infinitely and succumb to entropy just as quickly as they form. It is a writhing, frothing, sightless, soundless, Nothing that devours itself in perpetuity.
Melkor was not made of matter when he ventured into the depths of the Void in the beginning, and did not stir the ancient darkness when he passed through it. But he did speak to it– told it about the world that was to be made, of his part in the making of it. And the Void listened in its own fashion, forming around the Idea that had been planted into it and growing. All the Nothing in the universe can fit into the back pocket of a quark, so the resulting consciousness was both very small and very big; just a grain of sand that could expand as much as anything that was put into it. And that Thing waited around in the deeps of the void until Melkor came into the outer darkness a second time–this time pissed off, and nursing a sore cheek from where Tulkas punched him, and he said “hey, want to come fuck things up?” And it said “ssssssss” and crawled up his sleeve.
Now, it may seem irresponsible to bring the sentient equivalent of a black hole into the realm of matter and just let it go hog wild, but Ungles is only as powerful as what you put in her. She devours light and matter and energy and creates darkness and sticky void-webs that eventually sort of clog up her ability to intake more of those things; this is why her dens are isolated wastelands of Scary Shit and darkness, because once she’s devoured everything in the area, nothing else can easily get in, and going OUT takes too much energy for her when she’s starving. So she’s not too much to handle if you’re the mightiest of the Valar, or even a sufficiently powerful Maia or Eruhini.
However, when you let her drink two full trees’ worth of Vala Juice, you’re in for a bad time.
–Just for kicks, here’s a crusty old unfinished story-board experiment of the Tree Incident–
In terms of personality, she’s pretty straightforward; she knows what she wants, she can never have ENOUGH of what she wants, and she doesn’t trust Melkor any more than Melkor trusts her. She’s not especially malicious (except when someone Wrongs Her and then gives her a chance to get even)– just predatory by nature and aware of her own otherness. She’s very intelligent; I imagine she picks things up from whatever she eats, and she’s been around a very long time and eaten a LOT of things. She can feel amusement, anger, anticipation, greed, hunger, interest, wariness, hatred, fear, and possibly even a distant affection for any of her daughters that are strong and clever enough to avoid being eaten by her long enough to grow up and spread to Middle Earth. She’d still eat them if given the chance, and they’d probably eat her if they could figure out how– but that’s just how the spider do.
She also diminishes with time; the more she eats, the more personality and self-awareness she has, and the longer she starves the more she reverts to being a mindless consuming force. She acknowledges a certain affiliation with Melkor– he was the one that facilitated her coming to earth where she could Eat Things in the first place, giving her awareness of the world. But spiders are fairly self sufficient from the get go; she doesn’t need anyone to nurture her or teach her anything, and she doesn’t feel obliged to show continued loyalty to someone just because they seeded her into the universe. Especially not Melkor, who would be the first to say they didn’t owe each other shit for just existing.
She views Melkor as the hand that feeds, and also the hand that forgets to feed her, and sometimes denies food to her even though it promised to feed her, and also the hand that would probably taste ssSSsssooo good if it ever got accidentally stuck in a web.
So elves tend to tell their tales through songs but how about a dance. Maedhros dancing to explain/express his time in Angband and Fingon swears he saw Mae’s right hand that he have chop(ped) off. (yeah i took a bit of liberty with today’s theme)
Since I’m still figuring out Finrod in a fic, I’ll go with Ecthelion. 🙂
Ecthelion I imagine is a fairly serious and campaign-hardened soldier with a very dedicated battalion serving under him. He is well-liked because he is straightforward, practical, and conscientious of the needs of both his people and their objectives. He has a reputation for bringing back everyone alive, and not elevating himself above the means of his soldiers even though he is a lord.
As warden of the gate he is in a unique position to deal with matters outside and inside of Gondolin, a position demanding discretion as well as unwavering loyalty to the laws of the city; his scouts report all who come near the gate whether they seem innocent or no. He has seen his fair share of spies with friendly faces, and he does not budge for whim or sympathy. He has earned the utmost confidence of king Turgon, and can be trusted with the well-being of Gondolin and its continued secrecy.
He has a somewhat stoic demeanor but he is not without good humor or levity; the reason his folk march to the music of flutes and pipes is because Ecthelion took up the instrument as a hobby (professing himself to be of modest talent even for a beginner) and when his friends and subordinates found this out, they decided to join him with woodwinds of their own as a show of support. Soon they had the equivalent of a marching band that met and practiced in their free time, becoming a beloved mascot for the House of the Fountain.
He is fond of indulging Eärendil, who likes his glittering armor and tasseled cape, but does not let him play with the sword even though Baby Ear promises to keep it in the sheath. He likewise has a warm disposition towards Tuor, who he remembers always as the earnest-faced youth with the touch of Ulmo upon him, standing proudly before him at the gate despite his shackles and road-worn cloak.
He takes a cold but professional stance with Maeglin, who he frequently encounters on the outskirts of the city and the exploring the mountains. The young elf’s propensity for straying dangerously into unprotected territory is a constant source of tension between them– the perimeter is under Ecthelion’s sole authority, but he cannot forbid another Lord to do anything without the approval of the king, and the king is often more lenient with his nephew than perhaps he deserves. He is sympathetic to Maeglin’s troubled circumstances, but is always swift to remind him of the law.
He has a gruff, soldierly friendship with Rog, who he feels a certain solidarity with as another “working” lord. They’ve both seen and experienced the worst of the enemy, and their politics are similar because of it.
And since guarding the retreat of Turgon from the Nirnaeth Arnoediad together, he has had a ~*close*~ friendship with Glorfindel– a captain with perhaps more academic knowledge and less field experience than he at the time of the battle, but no less valor. Glorfindel demonstrated impeccable form, steely discipline, and unexpected hardiness despite his youth that impressed and earned Ecthelion’s loyalty (they are both of balrog-slaying mettle, after all).
She startles, completely off-guard in the safety of Imladris. Swiveling to give a bewildered look at the bird taking a rest in the tree behind her, she pauses to also make a slow check of her surroundings. Nobody is around, though, and while there are plenty of open windows in the House, she doesn’t see any silhouettes lingering as though awaiting a response to something.
Confused and curious, then, she twists and snaps open the capsule, shaking out the note within to read. She tenses immediately, breath catching. You fucking nosy– how the hell did you even-? Reading through the note and chewing on the inside of her cheek, she exhales noisily. Fine.
Glancing up at the magpie uncertainly, she tucks the note and capsule away, hiding them in the water-pouch-turned-alcohol-pouch at her hip. A waste of perfectly decent wine, but it is the only place she can think to hide the evidence until she gets back to her quarters.
Pausing as she turns to wander down a path further from the waterfall, she looks up and whistles a short little melody at the magpie. “I’ll sing for you when I have a reply,” she whispers to it, then quickly makes her way among the trees.
The Red Star, the Great Eye, and the Third-Age Astronomer: Theories and Headcanons
The world is bent, the morning star of Eärendil guards the Door of Night, and a red star on the southern horizon shines brighter as the October moon wanes… What happens to the stars of Varda’s heaven now that the earth is globed?
At the top of Barad-dûr, both in its original and reconstructed state, there is an astronomical observatory. The “Great Eye” of Sauron can be two things: it can refer to the power of Sauron’s intense concentration upon the lands of Mordor, sometimes merely the sensation of being watched, and other times manifesting as a physically oppressive or compelling force; and less frequently, when the the winds are right and the smog and volcanic ash clear to allow a rare view of very top of Barad-dûr above the clouds, it can refer to the glinting lens of an enormous telescope.
When his shade is not busy micromanaging the troops, or searching for the One Ring, or haunting the palantir, Sauron is charting stars. Specifically, he is interested in the one red star that is only visible when the light of the star of Eärendil is on the far horizon. The red star is much dimmer than Rothinzil, and when the two share the sky it is scarcely visible. It is considered a bad omen in the western lands, though only the Edain know why– the star of Eärendil and the red star became visible in the heavens at the same moment at the closing of the First Age, one set to guard the other in an asynchronous orbit. They do not call the red star by any other name, but it is written in the annals of old Numenor that this is the last ember of Morgoth, imprisoned in beyond the walls of the world in the timeless Void.
Sauron’s monitoring of the star began in the Second Age. During his reign as god-king of Mordor and Harad, the first citadel of Barad-dûr was not merely a fortress but a grand palace, the seat of power and a repository of wealth and knowledge. A great observatory was built upon its highest tower, accessible to the scholars and astronomers of Harad, whose knowledge of mathematics and astronomy was rivaled only by the star-charters of Numenor. During the Second Age, it seemed to Sauron that there might be a direct path from Numenor into the uttermost West, and beyond it the Door of Night through which his master was banished. Though impossible for one such as him to pass undisturbed into Aman, there might yet be a way to distract the powers that be long enough for a spirit to examine the portal…
But whatever his plans had been for the invasion, the outcome was inconclusive. Numenor and the direct route to the West was destroyed along with Sauron’s body, and shortly after, the observatory at Barad-dûr.
The Third Age progressed for many slow and frustrating centuries before Sauron was able to rebuild some semblance of what was lost to him. Lacking all but a shade of his physical body and much of his native power in his missing Ring, he sulks and plots a long campaign from his tower, alone.
It is during this isolated period of observation and tracking, that he determines there are actually two sets of stars: one set that represents physical suns and planets that appeared after the world was globed, and those of Varda’s heaven as it was in the beginning. These two spheres have a complex, subtle interaction that represents the alignment of the Old Arda and the New. The stars of Varda’s heaven drift and grow dimmer as the Third Age progresses, perhaps due to the waning of the elves.
When the last of the Elves sail into the West, and the Age of Men truly begins, the Straight Road will likely dwindle from existence entirely, untethering Middle Earth from Aman completely. As much as he looks forward to the departure of the Elves, Sauron fears this eventuality; the Elves are the sands in an hourglass that marks the end of his ability to send aid to his Master– if the Straight Road vanishes, so too does his access to the Door of Night.
The celestial spheres do not frequently intersect in his favor; the red star only rarely appears without its guarding satellite while positioned where the Straight Road points to it like the needle of a compass. He does not have his Ring, which he needs in order to have the strength to make a final assault on the West, and there are foes at his very doorstep causing an endless barrage of distractions. But if he could just find his Ring, there might still be a way forward. If he could just focus without interruption for a moment, he could finally thread the eye of the needle, before it shuts closed forever.
MisbehavingMaiar: Tumblr Archive 