Couldn't Agree More. It Has All The Beauty And Whimsy And Terror One Could Want.

One of my favorite German artists from the Weimar era is Jeanne Mammen. My favorite painting from her is this 1928 watercolor of lesbians at a masked ball.

Inktober 2023

Day 16 - The Master and Margarita

'So, she used to say, she had gone out that day carrying those yellow  flowers for me to find her at last and that if it hadn't happened she  would have poisoned herself because her life was empty.'

(Mikhail Bulgakov "The Master and Margarita")

antarctic exploration is so funny because you read about the endurance expedition and it’s a zany adventure with a lovable stowaway and trials and tribulations that show the indomitable nature of the human spirit without a single man lost and it ends in a thematically resonant and meaningful way with a fitting and beautiful conclusion and then you get to the belgica and the crew are running away constantly, they frame the cook for his own beatdown and get him fired, the beloved moral-boosting chipper ships boy literally falls off of the boat and drowns before they even GET to antarctica, the commandant and the captain are deliberately freezing the ship in ice to protect their beautiful belgian honor, they’re constantly falling into crevasses, and the ships pet penguin dies in what i cannot stress enough is the most narratively ominous and portentous circumstance on the morning of their imprisonment in the ice. the doctor was literally imprisoned for fraud.

Nelyafinwe Maitimo Curufinwion (Maedhros Feanorion), when he was still young and happy in Valinor. I don't know why but I have always pictured him with short hair.

Quick sketch (about 30 min) on infinite painter.

Fëanor Lives AU

Inspired by comment-tags on my poll about whether Fëanor or his sons were worse, I’m going to try to theorize what would have happened if Fëanor hadn’t died within a few weeks[1] of landing in Beleriand.

First, there’s the question of whether, even if he had survived Dagor-nuin-Giliath, he would have survived until Fingolfin arrived. There’s a decent case to be made for no. His sons are fairly rudderless and inactive after he dies and Maedhros is captured, and don’t do a lot between that point and Fingolfin’s arrival; that would not have been the case if Fëanor had lived. (Setting aside the possibility of “he lives but is too severely injured to do anything,” just because it’s not what I’m interested in here.)

I don’t see him just sitting in Hithlum (even if Maedhros was captured, and I don’t see that happening either if Fëanor had lived; it feels like another product ofhis sons’ disorientation in the wake of his death). And considering his mindset from his speech in Tirion and Oath through to the point where he dies in canon, I can see him throwing his army against Angband until a large part of them are dead, and potentially until he himself is dead. Given that they successfully take out pretty well the entire orc-army in Dagor-nuin-Giliath (“Ten days that battle lasted, and from it returned of all the hosts that [Morgoth] had prepared for the conquest of Beleriand no more than a handful of leaves.”), they might have even made it into Angband. This isn’t Morgoth as of the Dagor Bragollach or Nirnaeth Arnoediad, when he’s got dragons and the accumulated armies of 400 years; at this point he’s got balrogs and Sauron and some other Maiar and a fortress and some kind of reserve forces. Morgoth may be best off retreating enough to lure them into into Angband, and then capturing or killing them when they’re in the dark, disoriented, separated, in mazelike tunnels.

So that’s one possibility: that by the time Fingolfin arrives, Fëanor and much of his forces are dead or captured. The ‘captured’ possibility lends itself to interesting AUs by itself.

In any possibility where Fëanor does survive until Fingolfin arrives, but has realized he can’t defeat Angband on his own, I feel like there’s an extremely high likelihood of another Kinslaying then and there. Not primarily because the elves who crossed the Helcaraxë are angry with him, though they certainly are, but because we’ve seen Fëanor in this position before: with a determined sense of what he wants to do, without the resources to do it, and with someone else denying him those resources. That was Alqualondë. Given the mindset Fëanor has displayed all through the Return, he would see it as Fingolfin’s usurpation standing between Fëanor and the forces he needs to conquer Angband (and would not recognize that the other elves’ total unwillingness to accept him as king is associated with him stranding them at the far end of an icy wasteland, more than with Fingolfin specifically, and that killing Fingolfin is not going to get them on-side). This battle would be fairly brutal, with a lot of bad blood on both sides; it would be very amusing to Morgoth, and pretty well put an end to any chance of an equivalent to the Siege of Angband ever coming to pass.

(I know there are plenty of fanfics where Fëanor survives and Fingolfin recognizes him as king. I just can’t see this happening; not only because of the very justified resentment, but because Fëanor’s decisions have been uniformly terrible, and not abandoning his people to that kind of terrible leadership was the main thing motivating Fingolfin to join in the Return at the start. In the extremely unlikely event that Fingolfin did, I don’t see most of the Noldor who crossed the Helcaraxë following him rather than breaking off under Turgon or someone. The reason why Maedhros’ abdication is so crucial in canon is because it’s the only thing that’s ever going to enable the Noldor to form a united front.)

So yeah, I have to agree with the people on the poll who said it’s probably for the best that Fëanor didn’t survive longer. What he would have done if he had been alive during the later parts of the Silm feels like a moot point because I can’t imagine a scenario where he survived but events were otherwise similar to canon. He’s a force of nature; he makes the narrative different, it’s what he does. It’s why him setting everything off and then suddenly dying makes for such a great story.

[1]: I’m making an educated guess.The Fëanoreans travel up the Firth of Drengist and into Hithlum, start setting up camp by Lake Mithrim, and are attacked by orcs before they can finish making camp; the battle against the orcs, Dagor-nuin-Giliath, lasts 10 days, and Fëanor diesat the end of it.

Rumors of his death were much exagerated. 1hr sketch. May finish it decently in the future

One of the most unhinged couples in rock history.

JohnandYoko from a screenshot of "Get back" where they looked VERY cryptid-like.

Quick sketch of Fedyor and Zoya from Shadow and Bones. We all love the Little Palace family.

Inspired by this fic by @yototothelalafell

Ereinion Gil-Galad, son of Fingon, Idril and Earendil in the Havens of Sirion. First meeting.