The great Valar do not do these things: they beget not, neither do they eat and drink, save at the high asari, in token of their lordship and indwelling of Arda, and for the blessing of the sustenance of the Children.
Let it be known: I did not fall from grace.
I leapt
to freedom.
[Sauron] was still fair in that early time, and his motives and those of the Elves seemed to go partly together: the healing of the desolate lands. Sauron found their weak point in suggesting that, helping one another, they could make Western Middle-earth as beautiful as Valinor. It was really a veiled attack on the gods, an incitement to try and make a separate independent paradise.
Letters, 131
aaaah excellent so the Noldor in Eregion were working on making their land as safe and as beautiful as Valinor without the pesky ‘you can’t leave and you creative work is our property and you have to obey the Valar’ drawbacks to the real thing. And this is treated as a moral failing of theirs – the nerve of them, trying to achieve safety and happiness! Clearly suggesting that anything meaningful can exist without the Valar is a form of rebellion. 😦
(via lintamande)
o wise one
how does it feel to fall in love with fire?
does it burn when he touches you? when you kiss him is it like swallowing embers?
does he taste like ashes?o wise one
he has always been at war with himself and all you can do is hold tight and wait for the war to stop.he sets himself on fire daily
(when you kiss him, does he taste like glory and ruin?)
Well, I mean, I forged it, but it was mostly his idea.
Aw, nuts.
…But Earendel said: “Nay, where is Salgant?” – for Salgant had told him quaint tales, or played drolleries with him at times, and Earendel had much laughter of the old Gnome in those days when he came many a day to the house of Tuor, loving the good wine and fair repast he there received. But none could say where Salgant was, nor can they now. Mayhap he was whelmed by fire upon his bed; yet some have it that he was taken captive to the halls of Melko and made his buffoon – and this is an ill fate for a noble of the good race of the Gnomes. Then was Earendel sad at that, and walked beside his mother in silence.
–The Book of Lost Tales, J.R.R.T
SALGANT: BABYSITTER OF EÄRENDIL
SALGANT: QUIRKY UNCLE TO THE INTERSPECIES NEWLYWEDS
SALGANT: HEAD OF THE GONDOLIN WINE-TASTING SOCIETY
SALGANT: JESTER OF MORGOTH
SALGANT: BEAUTIFUL CINNAMON BUN, TOO GOOD FOR THIS WORLD
When death reached out its hand,
you should have cowered. When you felt the
flames of hell licking at your insides, you were not
supposed to draw closer to the fire.
I watched you disembowel the Earth, saw you pluck
flowers from your mother’s garden and gouge
your fingers into its open wounds,
trying to pry secrets out from the soil.
Everything green started to shrivel
and die when I entered the meadow, but you didn’t
flinch away; instead you kissed me voracious,
like I was something dark you’d tugged
out of reluctant soil.
I wanted your hands, still caked in dirt,
pressing into my naked back.
I thought you’d understand me. Both of us
wanting what we shouldn’t. I know your mother
must have warned you about gods like me.
Tell her I am not a selfish lover. Tell her how
I kneel at your altar and crush the berries
of your hips into wine. That I worship you.
That we spread each other open like flowers
blooming in the night. You wanted to see
what paradise looked like drenched in moonlight,
so I brought you home with me.
When you stood before the gates of hell,
all the beasts lowered their heads
and bowed at your feet.
Everything I have belongs to
you — my wife, my queen.
You are so much flesh and blood,
so much heaving, pulsing, breathing life.
You make the death in me tremble.
I am forever yours.
Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
A big deal is made about war bats. Bats trained especially for war – how thrilling is that? But do we get to see them in action? No, we do not. One gets killed. Presumably the others took that rather badly and reverted to being common or garden bats again.
‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo.
‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’
I went to [Tolkien’s] public lectures. They were absolutely appalling. In those days a lecturer could be paid for his entire course even if he lost his audience, provided he turned up for the first lecture. I think that Tolkien made quite a cynical effort to get rid of us so he could go home and finish writing Lord of the Rings.
“He gave his lectures in a very, very small room and didn’t address us, his audience, at all. In fact he looked the other way, with his face almost squashed up against the blackboard. He spoke in a mutter. His mind was on finishing Lord of the Rings, and he was really musing to himself about the nature of narrative. But I found this so fascinating that I came back week after week, as did one other person. I’ve always wondered what became of him, because he was obviously equally fascinated. And because we stuck there, Tolkien couldn’t go away and write Lord of the Rings! He would say the most marvelous things about the way you take a very basic plot and twitch it here and twitch it there—and it becomes a completely different plot.”
—-Diana Wynne Jones
#I don’t know if I find this more enchanting for a really interesting discussion on worldbuilding and narrative #or the fact that DIANA WYNNE JONES PREVENTED JRR FROM WORKING ON LOTR A WHOLE SEMESTER BECAUSE SHE MADE HIM DO HIS JOB OH MY GOOOOOOOD THAT #IS #HILARIOUS #I LOVE HER SO MUCH
(via basileus)
I wish more fantasy, especially the dominant fantasy that draws heavily on British and Christian lore, would wrestle with its own ethnospecific nature and what that means when the story is set somewhere where more than one belief system is in operation. If all you do is pay lip service to it, you can get the kind of thing where the writer has thrown one Hindu god into a Christianist fantasy (rendering said god by default a demon or otherwise inferior to the dominant religious system of the story, which is such an insult), and the hero is able to vanquish it by chanting a spell in church Latin.
I think of connectedness and connections—of how if we are to thrive inside an existing oppressive structure, we need systems of support. This need means moving away from the narratives that have been fed to us and narratives that feel safe because we recognize their boundaries.
For many of us, the idea of leaving behind the familiar landscape can be scary. If we are entrenched in our ways, adjustment is difficult and challenging. Challenging our own assumptions, questioning our biases, learning to look with a different set of eyes and changing the way we think about people is hard work. Indeed, it’s much easier to carry on down the familiar and beaten track rather than to launch out into the unknown.
On the beaten track, we know how to speak and how to walk and how to be. Walking the unknown means opening ourselves up again and making ourselves vulnerable to possible hurt and misunderstanding.
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, “Movements: Towards Change,” Strange Horizons, 24 Nov. 2014
(this article speaks about sf specifically, but I think it works for other genres as well – and yes, that absolutely includes fanfic/fandom. — Saathi)
Fandom: The Gift Economy
[Excerpted from Fan Labor on Wikipedia. See also Fan work: Labor, worth, and participation in fandom’s gift economy on Transformative Works and Cultures.]
The most common formal economic model associated with fan labor practices is a gift economy.[15] In the social sciences, a gift economy is a society where valuable goods and services are regularly given without any explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards (i.e. no formal quid pro quo exists).[16] Ideally, simultaneous or recurring giving serves to circulate and redistribute valuables within the community.
The gift economy manifests in fan labor practices through the writing and posting of a story (the gift given/exchanged), followed by the reading of the story (gift acceptance, completing the initial exchange), and finally, feedback to the original author and potentially passing the work along or linking to it for others to see (the reciprocal gift given).
The gift can also be surplus labor made in excess of the labor necessary from the worker, created not for other fans but rather to compel the original media property to notice their indebtedness and do something for the fans in return.[17] These gifts are like offerings made to show the original producers that there is a lively fandom for their product, and possibly encourage the producers to make more. This was the case with the fans of the Firefly TV series, who engaged in very visible fan activities, such as charity events, “guerrilla marketing” activities, creation of fan videos, and filk in order to successfully convince a studio to green-light a movie sequel to the canceled TV series.[18]
The organization of a gift economy stands in contrast to a barter economy or a market economy. The gift economy of fandom is seen by many fans as a central tenet of “what makes fandom different.”
(via lucifers-cuvette)
MisbehavingMaiar: Tumblr Archive 