Tag: about melkor

It’s been a million years since I trotted out this headcanon

So let’s talk about how Melkor physics work in Wesley!verse:

Melkor is genderfluid– dark, glittering, gender fluid spilling all over the place, oh my god.

Whenever he changes shape, and whenever he makes something for himself out of himself– including his clothes, Grond, and the Iron Crown (which I think I had a different headcanon for originally but fuck it, this is way better), anything that needs to be able to change/size to match the rest of him, he achieves by manipulating his essence in a way that looks like magnetized ferrofluid.

He’s a very goopy boy, my Melkor. When he’s not actively trying to emulate having a fleshbody (and even sometimes when he is), he frequently dissolves, grows spikes when emotional, and gets drippy when depressed. The drips and spikes can extend, harden, or grow crystalline like ice when he wills it, and then fall into shapeless liquid again when he stops thinking about them.

In the beginning, this essence looks like molten gold or lava, but the longer he stays physically bound in Beleriand, the more oily and tar-like his transformations become. His body starts to look brittle and spiny, with bits of him crystalizing and hardening and chipping off as he gets less flexible. But liquid gold is still what he’s known for, and his go-to aesthetic for as long as he can still achieve it. (There’s a reason Gold is attributed to Melkor, why Glaurung is gold, why dragons are lured by gold and love it so much, why Sauron makes his Ring out of gold, and continues to associate gold with his Master. In my mind, the statues of the Giver of Freedom are gold, the floors of Utmno were gold, the throne of Angband began as gold.) 

Melkor’s blood, and really anything that detaches from him, reacts sporadically for a bit before sizzling into the ground. Every part of him is chaotic and generative– in my HC this is the origin of many unaccounted for creatures in Middle Earth like trolls that don’t really breed and aren’t a “corruption” of anything, they just sort of sprang out of Melkor’s teeth that got knocked out in fights with Tulkas or whatever. The results aren’t consistently biological or sentient or necessarily anything other than, like, brief cornstarch experiments, but leftover Melkor-bits are always interesting.

….I like to think that “can’t create anything new that didn’t originate with Eru” just means “can’t create new stuff out of nothing, but can still definitely make weird monsters out of my own body parts and children.”  

Anyway, the main takeaway of this post is: Ferrofluid. I enjoy science experiments far, far too much and will use any excuse to utilize weird fluid dynamics in character designs.

♫♩Hells made of iron and hot Orodruin,

Bright golden temples and dark ferrous fluid,

Mind-reading dragons and powerful rings,

These are a few of my favorite things… ♬ ♪

I was reading the silmarillion and there’s something that seemed unclear. Why couldn’t Morgoth change his form, like others of his kind? The Ainu describe their bodies as being like clothing, that they can discard at will, and the only exceptions I can think of, The Istari, chose to be limited.

This is described better in the HoME volumes than it is in the Silmarillion. 

Essentially, the reason Melkor loses his ability to change forms is because he invests so much of himself in earthly matter. 

 The Ainur are creatures of pure spirit whose visible forms are just extensions of their thought, which they can change at will. The more they engage with earthly matters, and the more of their power they put into the world, the more they are bound to it and are subject to its laws. (If I remember correctly, Tolkien includes eating, drinking, loving, having children, etc., as some of the other ways an Ainu can become more earthbound, besides directly infusing their power into things like Orcs). 

This is why one of the volumes is titled “Morgoth’s Ring”, coming from the quote where Tolkien explains that, like Sauron who invests his power into the One Ring in order to gain power of the world, Melkor invested himself in Arda, making Arda his “Ring”. This is why he becomes so fragile and hides away for most of the Silmarillion; most of his power is invested in Arda, “marring it” as they call it, and therefore what is left of him is severely weakened and subject to the laws of matter– i.e., he can be hurt, captured, Sung to sleep by elf witches, etc. 

According to Tolkien, Melkor put some of himself in ALL the matter of Arda. He talks about how the material world is suffused with a “Melkor-ingredient” (which is the funniest fucking thing I’ve ever read with my eyes, but w/e) making it inherently corruptible, subject to entropy, and the ravages of time. By contrast, matters of the spirit remain incorruptible at their core, unable to be altered except from within. But spirits are generally attached to a flesh body, and the body can be manipulated with fear and lust and temptations, etc, so having power over the material world helps one gain power over people’s spirits by extension. 

This is why both Melkor and Sauron put vast quantities of their innate power into objects and creatures, giving them immense power over the world even while it limits their mutability and makes them vulnerable. 

Hope that helps! 🙂

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