If we’re being honest these titles pretty well embody the plots of the books.
Where’s the lie.
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
Thranduil: Go meet this nice guy I found for you he’s royalty and from a strong line of Men and I’m sure you’ll get over Tauriel real quick
*60 years later*
Legolas: Dad I’d like you to meet my new dwarf husband
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
I was thinking about Tolkien and accents today, and I really like this idea that even within the Fellowship, you’ve got this happy cacophony of different accents. Boromir speaking Sindarin with a distinctly Gondorian lilt, his Westron a functional thing cobbled-together from the slang of his men and what he learned in order to speak with traders, messengers, foreigners.
Aragorn, so widely-traveled, being an excellent mimic—he can speak Dalish like a man of Laketown or a Haradrim like trader from South Gondor, but in moments of sincerity or seriousness, he slips into the tones of Rivendell, with all the careful articulation of someone who was scoffed at for every slip into the harsher pronunciation of Arnor.
Legolas who speaks Sindarin as his mother-tongue cool and green and fine, but whose Westron is harshly-accented, borrowed from fishermen and dwarves.
Gimli who speaks Khuzdul with that particular Longbeard cadence, which not even growing up in the Iron Hills as part of the Erebor diaspora could shake from him. Exile from Erebor forced many of the dwarves to become, if not fluent, then at least conversant in the languages of Men, in order to trade and travel on soil not their own—Gimli is no exception. (It amuses him to no end to speak to Aragorn in Dalish, and have Legolas puff up, offended not to be part of the conversation.)
Merry and Frodo and Pippin and Sam speaking Westron like the country bumpkins they are, all rounded vowels and drawls, but happy to learn all the languages that fly about them, laughing with their fellows when they mangle even the simplest of Sindarin words.
All of them sitting around the fire, telling stories, laughing at Gandalf when he can’t remember the Westron word for the Sindarin word for the Quendian word for the Valarin, who protests that he is an old man and has known too many tongues, so stop laughing, Peregrin Took, you are spraying crumbs everywhere.
#oh noooo I’m gonna cry this is perfect #but Aragorn oh my god oh my //god//
#because imagine little tiny Estel in Rivendell trying to learn Elvish #and Elrond is so patient with him and doesn’t chide him for his accent #but the other elves are sometimes less kind #teasing the young human for sound so much like a man when he speaks! #we don’t need to hear your heavy footsteps to tell you’re mortal Estel we can hear it in your words! #so Aragorn trains himself to talk exactly like them #memorizes how their cadences change on certain words or how they string their words together #like one long line in a song or poem that doesn’t break until the end of the sentence #and eventually he loses whatever his original accent was #because it is so engrained in him to mimic others that that’s what he falls back on no matter what #he doesn’t know how to speak unless he sounds like a native speaker and that saves his life on more than one occasion #but he eventually finds that he’s spent so long perfecting the voices of others #that he’s almost entirely lost his own (willowenigma)
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
sometimes i get really messed up thinking about Erebor.
- it’s hugely vast - Thorin says there are “halls upon halls beneath the mountain” and i imagine it stretches vertically as well as horizontally, so like lots of levels climbing upwards and downwards and just a HUGE amount of square footage, an entire city (perhaps larger than Minas Tirith) literally carved out of the interior of a mountain
- on that note, travel around Erebor must be facilitated by something. what if they use goats or ponies? imagine little carts, coaches, etc., driven by dwarves and transporting dwarves and visitors from point A to B, ex: the residential level is the main level but the market is three levels below - no one wants to haul groceries by hand up miles of stairs/ramps and damn like, who has enough hours in their day for all that walking? draft animals it is then. (for that matter, oxen could also be involved, in which case they would need cows to keep supplying offspring to be turned into oxen, and that means some dwarves could be dairy “farmers”).
- which brings us to… what are all these pack animals eating? hay would be easy enough to purchase from Dale or other neighbors but then it needs to be stored. and if there are lots and lots of load-bearing animals needed for everyday life in the mountain (and also for mining operations, lots of material to be hauled there) then that’s a LOT of hay and other feeds needed.
- so maybe the dwarves have something akin to a pasture somewhere in the mountain, high up, with an entire exterior wall made of glass or a similar transparent substance that lets sunlight in and creates sort of a giant greenhouse or cold frame, so they can grow grass year round for the ponies and goats and cattle to graze. otherwise hay expenses could be astronomical.
i don’t know. just. Erebor everyday life stuff. fascinating.
- it doesn’t have to be coaches and buggies tho, they could use rickshaws (do NOT let me fall into a Memoirs of a Geisha au please)
- there are likely very affluent districts and less affluent ones as well, but i’d like to think there’s no abject poverty in Erebor. like, let’s not assume the dwarves have fucked up socioeconomics as badly as we have
- miners, for instance, wouldn’t be part of a lower- or poor class, but instead would be held in places of honor and paid very well for the dangerous and important work they do - after all, they’re directly responsible for unearthing the mountain’s wealth. why should they be underpaid just because they’re physical laborers? no.
- gender roles are virtually nonexistent because it’s better that way and dwarves are awesome and i said so
- the streets are kept clean and orderly; every citizen has a sense of belonging as well as ownership in the mountain
Bilbo called it “the greatest kingdom in middle earth” and i’m not about to take that lightly
EREBOR EVERYDAY STUFF IS SO IMPORTANT TO ME???
- venTIL ATION? how do you ventilate such a huge fucking mountain, so that nobody suffocates from the heat down low? there’s a lot of natural updraft and stuff like that, but god the master level skill that would have to go into carving out a webbing of ventilation shafts that pretty much work on their own is kILLING ME
- same goes for plumbing, I mean we saw in dos that they are no strangers to using water powered mechanisms, so I’m just imagining the sweltering heat and quiet plip-plop and of pipes running through the entire mountain, meeting in like this massive brain-like rattling sputtering structure somewhere where dwarves readjust their massive cogs and shit maybe that’s too steampunk but I love it anyway
- as for the farmyard animals, erebor is a MASSIVE self-sustained kingdom, the expenses if they were to import everything would be EXORBITANT, so I bet rachel’s right, they’ve found a really clever way to grow pastures for their livestock, and also have really resilient animals who don’t mind grazing on the (newly rejuvenated) mountainsides I bet
- as for the society aspect, I wouldn’t go so far as to presume they totally eradicated poverty, but they do have a very strong system that I still believe has a lot in common with a caste system (though looser), where you’re probably born into a guild and might be expected to take up that job, but nobody except for your overly traditional parents/grandparents/wider family is going to raise an issue if you decide to do something else
- dwarven pubs
- dwarven brothels
- dwarven LIBRARIES
- DWARVENM ARKETS with like this entire MASSIVE cave spanning AT LEAST five floors dedicated to it and more adventurous buyers can rope right down the bridges if they know where they want to get, they’re selling uncut lapis lazuli down there again brb [whooshes into the depths of the mountain swan-dive style] (okay I’m exaggerating but you get the point)
- basically a dwarven kingdom works like a machine of its own, every single person is a cog in it and everyone has to work efficiently for the machine to operate smoothly oKAY FIGHT ME ON THIS (or alternatively send me more headcanons bc this is fun)
(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)
Me nitpicking about the LotR movies after a minute: they completely ruined Faramir! And why doesn’t Aragorn want to be king?
Me nitpicking about the LotR movies after an hour: in that opening scene, Sauron melted down way too much gold for just one ring.
(via bronzedragon)
Are you ever just sitting around and suddenly you’re blindsided by Lord of the Rings emotions? Because I am. And just was. It’s not just me, right?
(Source: dorwinionwine, via primarybufferpanel)
Crowley: Never thought I’d die fighting side by side with an angel.
Aziraphale: What about side by side with a friend?
Crowley: Yeah. I could do that.
your fav is problematic: sauron
- okay when I started this series I sort of assumed sauron did not actually have fans
- i hadn’t been on the internet long enough, apparently
- is a Maia of Aulë; that never ends well
- has as many names as Túrin Turambar without the excuse of being an angsty teenager
- tortures finrod’s backup singers to death in his dungeons
- sinks a continent with the socratic method
- sends out the werewolves one by one to fight Lúthien what
- for that matter why couldn’t he figure out who finrod is without the torture? how many blonde Elven princes were there in Beleriand at the time?
- there were two. finrod and orodreth. and tbh if you can’t figure out whether the Elf who just challenged you to a song duel is Finrod or Orodreth then you don’t deserve to be Melkor’s right hand
- oh, yeah, chief lieutenant of the embodiment of evil there’s a case that that is problematic
(via determamfidd)
