also that whole tale of aragorn and arwen thing where he saw her in the woods at twenty and fell instantly in love and it’s very beren and luthien? lies.
aragorn decided he was going to marry arwen when he was like, six.
and everyone thought it was just the cutest thing, baby estel with his little crush on the great immortal evenstar, and everyone would tease him about it relentlessly and he would get so mad, and pout, because how dare they doubt his word.
(arwen spent a lot of time biting back smiles and nodding very seriously when aragorn brings this up with her. no, estel, I do not know why they are laughing perhaps they have remembered a particularly funny joke.)
and then aragorn grows into this gangly teen and oh my god can you imagine being a pimply greasy teenager around fucking elves it’s a wonder he has any self-image left. His voice breaks every other word and the laundresses are beginning to wonder if something is wrong with the sheets because estel keeps washing them himself and aragorn wants to die, god, arwen is never going to marry him if he stays all elbows and skinny knees and he can’t even look her in the eye anymore without blushing, eye contact is probably something to look for in a husband–
(arwen, who never had to go through puberty because elves don’t do anything so undignified, tries to comfort him by saying she likes his blemishes. aragorn gives her a look of such utter, miserable despair that she starts laughing.)
(this is a mistake. he spends the next three weeks nursing his wounded ego and refusing to see her.)
estel is twenty when he asks for her hand. he is lean, slender and fair as a new tree, and so arwen does not feel guilt in kissing his cheek and gently refusing. he is still green, he will weather greater storms than this–and he takes it as he should, clasping her hand and swearing to ever be her loyal friend.
they write to each other–when she is in lorien, when he wanders with the rangers of the north, fights alongside gondor, travels to distant lands. it is an inconstant tie–he is rarely afforded time enough to put pen to paper; she is reserved so as not to encourage what may not be. (she signs her letters always, your friend. She likes him too well to be cruel in this.)
the years pass. his weariness and strife creeps onto the page, and she sends him tokens to fend off the darkness–leaves from lothlorien, the ribbon from her hair, snippets of poems. it is not enough it is never enough I am sorry, she writes.
his reply is gentle: you are enough. do not stop writing.
(she carries that letter tucked inside her sleeve for a long while, like a talisman–though against what evil, she does not know.)
she is in the house of her grandmother when a familiar voice calls out to her: my lady luthien!
this is when arwen looks up, sees aragorn–broad of chest and rugged, still wearing his battered mail, with one hand balanced lazily on the pommel of his sword. All the trees of caras galadhon are gold but he is shadow and silver, kingliness resting lightly on his shoulders–
I write. I swear to God. I actually love writing fanfic. BUT, and here’s the catch, I have a ton of trouble coming up with short fic ideas. Short anything ideas, really. The most memorable example is that one time I decided to write how I thought someone being able to see the future would pan out, just a few pages of character study, dicking around with super powers, nothing fancy. Smash cut to a year and a half later, I’m wrapping up my 350 page novel and staring dismally at my 200 additional pages of worldbuilding. And it’s always like that, it gets so out of hand.
SO. My solution to that is this. If you have a craving for a specific pairing that you know I ship, shoot me a prompt and I’ll throw together a short fic for you and post it. I’m trying to unwind after finals, so it’ll be good for me, and you’ll get fic, so it’ll be good for you.
“Which author would you want to bring into 2015″ is such a hard question to answer I mean you could watch Arthur Conan Doyle despair over everything Sherlock Holmes within the last century or you could present Douglas Adams with an iPad
I would quite like to unleash Dickens on the Tories.
imagine William Shakespeare in the age of social media. 24/7 supreme dick jokes and the world celebrates.
Victor Hugo vs Twitter’s 140 character limit
Okay but Oscar Wilde on Instagram
Give Asimov an actual real robot
Show Lovecraft a mixed-race president and watch him shit himself in fear and anger
Introduce Mark Twain to Stephen Colbert, preferably in front of a live audience
I’m so sorry, but this just looks like a rip from a rap video.
I’m fucking sobbing. Aragorn looks like he’s fighting off a bee before he swoops in to tackle someone. Legolas punching the air like he’s celebrating too early. The dude who’s creeping after Gimli like he’s gonna be an easy target and Gimli charging like a battering ram to crush his kneecaps. Gandalf serenely ignoring all this.
Apparently John Rhys-Davies aka Gimli did not fuck around with that poncy “not hitting the stunt men” shite..so that poor bastard probably did get speared by an armoured dwarf…
“Thus it came to pass that of the Ainur some abode still with Ilúvatar beyond the confines of the World; but others, and among them many of the greatest and most fair, took the leave of Ilúvatar and descended into it. But this condition Ilúvatar made, or it is the necessity of their love, that their power should thenceforward be contained and bounded in the World, to be within it for ever, until it is complete, so that they are its life and it is theirs. And therefore they are named the Valar, the Powers of the World.”
Still my favorite story from the Lord of the Rings set: Viggo Mortensen bonded so much with the horse he rode in the movies that after filming was over he bought it from its owner. If that doesn’t warm your heart I don’t know what could.
don’t forget that he also bought arwen’s horse for her stunt rider when she couldn’t afford it awww
also sort of relevant viggo also bought the horse that costarred with him in the movie hidalgo and subsequently took the horse (tj) with him to the red carpet premier.
Also most of the Riders of Rohan are actually women because when they put out that call mostly women showed up with their horses and the costume team just stuck beards on them.
if this isn’t the best post i don’t
also just lest we forget: Viggo literally slept with that horse.
Anonymous asked: Okay so you mentioned kind of missing Tolkien and I've been on a bit of a Tolkien kick lately ('lately' she says as she scuttles deeper into the horde of Tolkien marginalia beginning to resemble a small mountain) and I was wondering if you had any thoughts on dwarves. I know the Men of Gondor are more your thing, but I was struck by sudden curiosity.
look, the beauty of Tolkien is that, as far as I know, he is the only creator who firmly maintained, all his life, that filling in the blanks of the world he had generated was actually an act mirroring divine creation. (He called this “subcreation”—as human beings, we are made in the image of the divine creator, and therefore, we are driven to replicate creation on a minor scale. Tolkien wholeheartedly loved fanfiction, in a way I’ve never seen in any subsequent content-creator.)
but
I love dwarves!!!!
I love dwarves particularly, because tolkien dismisses them in the context of a numnber of stereotypes, and actually this opens the door for the way fandom has taken then and run with what if dwarves are super jewish. maybe that’s because I follow @goodshipophelia and @swanjolras and @silentstep but the reclamation of very jewish dwarves is beautiful
(thorin harp-player as david springs to mind)
and honeslty to this day, my favorite idea about dwarves is @silentstep’s conception that “mountain” refers not just to the idea of a physical mountain, but everything that lives inside it, all the songs and stories and philosophies, that “mountain” is shorthand for community the way “Judah” or “people of the tribe” does in more modern Judaism
it leads to so much articulation and fictionalization of Judaism and I love that, everyone one should have a fictional articulation of their religion, it allows for so much more freedom than would otherwise be.
Also, I love the idea of thorin fictionally composing the lord of the rings alternative to song-of-songs, so. that’s something, right???
If Aragorn had had a choice in the matter, he would have sent three companions to Mordor with Frodo: himself, Sam, and Gimli.
Rereading LotR for the first time in a couple of years and rediscovering yet again how poorly Gimli was treated by the films. His first ever line in the book is “faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens”. He is continually shown to be loyal, strong, eloquent, and kind. I wish we’d had more of that in the films.
