Hyphens, En Dashes And Em Dashes

Realizing that a lot of my "emotional oversensitivity" as a child was actually me not being able to distinguish between joking/sarcastic and serious tones

Fic idea:

There is a hall of waiting for men in Mandos too, right? For them to wait for their loved ones before they go on together? (If I made that up it’s just the fic premise now, but isn’t this where Beren was chilling when Luthien came for him?)

Anyways Elros figures out while he’s waiting for his kids that he can use his Descendant of Luthien powers to pop over to the Elvish side and meet all the dead elvish relatives he wouldn’t get a chance to know until the breaking of the world otherwise.

He realizes most of them are either gonna be there forever cause they demonstrably Can’t Get Over Their Shit, or Valinor will end up a burning pile of rubble as they are released and forced to face their shit whilst alive.

This is a problem because Elros knows his brother craves family, and while they both accept he and his twin cannot be together forever in life or death, he expects these layabout relatives to get off their dead asses and start making up with each other, so when his brother ends up in Valinor, whenever that may be, he has a loving supportive family that isn’t dragging him in a hundred different directions.

Cue dead Elros playing life (death?) coach to a bunch of dead elves. Some of them are conscious enough it’s like having a normal conversation. Some of them are in soothing or disturbing dreamscapes, with various degrees of awareness of where they are, what they’ve done, and what has happened since they died.

Helpful sidekicks include:

- Soon to be released Glorfindel!

- Finwe, cause he’s sick of his family being idiots and sad his BFF Elwe isn’t talking to him.

- Elros’s extremely argumentative wife, who’s a little confused, but she got the spirit.

- Namo very deliberately Not Helping, because they are Breaking Rules, but who keeps giving them hints like “It would be a shame if you dragged this person’s soul by it’s metaphorical ear to talk to that person’s soul, which of course is interfering which is Bad, I hear.”

- A maia representative sent by Nienna (who thinks this is brilliant). It’s a Maia who really loves elves, and is really interested in how to get them to stop self sabotaging with their own stupidity, and yeah. It’s Gandalf.

Pervading questions:

What happened to Dior and the first set of Peredhel twins?

Where are the Feanorians? Did they really get sent to the void?

Why would anyone want to live forever dealing with this nonsense, is Elrond a martyr or just an idiot. It’s just Finwean family drama? forever?!?!Elros is very confident he made the right choice.

I’ll definitely write this outside my head >>

so there’s that version in which Miriel leaves for Lorien and dies a bit later… consider; preteen Feanor inventing embroidery and weaving machines in an attempt to give his ailing mother the ability to create something back even if she no longer has the strength to.

Okay I think I know what it is. Jee is like an eagle. Totally stunning from side view. Derpy from front. It's the shape of his hair and nose, I think????

well… you are right! but… this is not a nice thing to say to our lieutenant and poor hawky!

Whenever I read LotR and reach the battle between Eowyn and the Witch-king, I get the impression that the reason why the prophecy loophole works isn’t that the Witch-king is unkillable except for some illogical weakness nobody had thought about yet for misogynistic reasons, but that the Witch-king himself derives so much of his power from the fear he instills in others and from his own belief that he is unkillable. Eowyn doesn’t fear him, because she doesn’t fear death. When she twists his words right back at him, she’s not trying to exploit a prophecy loophole, she’s just making a play on the double meaning of the word «man» with fairly standard battlefield bravado.

But, crucially, it gets the Witch-king wondering if there might be an actual loophole in the prophecy. He starts doubting his own invincibility. There’s no logical reason why a woman might be able to kill him if a man cannot, but prophecies are tricky things. What if …

And this is what undoes him, in the end. This last minute doubt. The Witch-king, deep down, believes that Eowyn can kill him, thus making it possible for her to do so.

SO

‘Fin(-dë, -ë)’ means hair in Quenya right? And I’ve often thought that was a little silly, like Tolkien straight up named the most important family in the Silm after ‘Hairy Guy’, and the names just got weirder when translated out after that. Why did the man do this? He knew what ‘Fin’ meant, it wasn’t an accident, and he was so meticulous and purposeful in his naming.

I always assumed it had something to do with the Elves and their hair thing, BUT- I was going through some old Latin textbooks and guess what vocab word I’d forgotten?

‘Caesaries’, which means ‘hair’. As in the likely root for the family name ‘Caesar’, of Julius, Augustus, etc. fame. As in ‘Caesar’, the word historically translated and used to mean ‘king’ all across Eurasia for thousands of years.

Tolkien named the House of Finwë after the House of Caesar.

tired of the whole movement that’s people saying ’i read 200 books in a year’ and reading as a means of boasting and hardcover books being bought and never read after the instagram picture and most booktubers reading and recommending the same books and poorly written books selling fast because they have pretty covers and tropes people like and authors on twitter being afraid to say anything serious out of fear of being divisive and the whole let people enjoy things dialogue every time someone expresses that they think something is written shittily as is their god given right to form an opinion as a reader without randos on the internet taking it personally because OMG someone else didn’t agree that this book is good!? TIME TO ESCALATE THINGS TO RIDICULOUS LEVELS 😤😤😤 and also i’m tired of book influencers setting up this false dichotomy between victorian classics or modern pulpy romcoms while vastly ignoring the existence of classics written by people of colour and people from non first world countries

[ID: screenshot of tags reading, "and the fact that it was invented by a hobbit who knocked the head of an orc straight off. And the orc's name was Golfimbul." End ID]

sometimes i think about how tolkien said golf exists in middle earth and then just never mentioned it again ever

What do you think would happen if Zhao was stopped from killing Tui? Yue would probably stay in the NWT and marry Hahn like you said, but again Sokka would probably try to persuade her to stay with him. He probably wouldn’t be able to convince her enough, but if he did, what do you think would happen?

I'm gonna be real with you: I think it would be very boring and unsatisfying. I think a lot of other people think so too, because every time I see a "Yue leaves the North Pole" concept, unless it's like a conflict-free modern au, Yue's character is altered from how she's shown in canon. They make her more adventurous, or more of a romantic, because as she is, she doesn't add much to the group dynamic. If the show was paced more like Game of Thrones or Harlots, more based in smaller scale machinations, more following characters' introspection, then maybe there would be something to work with. But in something so action-heavy (and I think we sometimes forget just how action heavy it is due to how often lots of action means just okay writing), a character with no interest or skill in combat doesn't mesh well long-term.

From a writer pov, Yue joining the group as it's shown to be in canon is pretty inefficient storytelling. There's nothing she could really bring with her canon personality and back story that isn't already there with Aang's connection to the Spirit World as the Avatar or Toph coming from a wealthy family. Not to mention that with her being the oldest of the group (Sokka is 15 during the events of the series, while Yue is introduced as being 16 years old, making her about a year older than him) any of the "innocence of the world" that people would wanna play with would have her come off as a bit ditzy when actual 12-year-olds in the group are shown to be more streetwise and worldly. Yue isn't a bad or poorly written character, in fact I think she's one of the most interesting minor characters in the entire franchise, but she wasn't written with the intention of being part of Team Avatar so it's no wonder she doesn't fit well among them.

So, yeah, I don't know because I don't care enough about this concept to give it any thought. An AU where Yue is sent to study statecraft or philosophy or similar topics under King Bumi's tutelage or where she has post-war peace talks with Mai representing the Fire Nation or where she goes on her own journey separately from the group with her own entourage, running into familiar faces and keeping a log of her experiences; it would be a lot more contrived, but the quieter, gentler, more introspective atmosphere it would allow would suit her much better than her staying put while the others fight their way through active war zones and bring her along.

Names for Nandor

I don’t like the term Nandor and I’ll explain why after I explain a little about the etymologies of Tolkien’s Elvish. There are three different timelines to know about when talking about it; internal, external and publication history. Internal History is the history of Tolkien’s languages in-verse. So when Paul Strack (and I will be following his example) says “primitive,” “ancient,” “archaic” or “old,” he is describing the languages history in-verse. External is how Tolkien’s languages changed throughout his life. So when Paul Strack describes a language as “early,” “middle,” “late,” “earlier,” and “later,” he is referring to the external development of Tolkien’s Languages. Publication history is self-explanatory in that it’s the order that information about Elvish languages was published to the general public.

Having explained that, my first issue with the term Nandor is that no one in-verse uses it, except for some Noldorin Historians in Aman and knew nothing about what happened to the group after they refused to cross Hithaeglir, and they could only remember that the leader was named Lenwë (WJ). This is like Washington Irving’s “A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus,” where Irving uses sources to write an adventure story framed as a historical biography and now Columbus “discovered North America.” And that’s not even my biggest issue with the word Nandor.

My biggest issue with using Nandor is it’s etymology and internal history. As many people know, the Quenyan word Nandor means, “those who go back.” (SI). This is supposedly referring to how this group refused to cross Hithaeglir. That bits not what I have an issue with… Nandor is derived from the root (n)dan- which describes the reversal of an action or to undo something. The full definition from the War of the Jewels, is “…indicating the reversal of an action, so as to undo or nullify its effect, as in ‘undo, go back (the same way), unsay, give back (the same gift: not another in return).” (n)dan- itself is derived from the primitive form ndando, which means “one who goes back on his word or decision (WJ).” And that last bit is why I hate Nandor. It’s implying that “these are people who will go back on their word, and will flake out at the slightest misfortune.” Words and meanings change, of course, but would a race that has a long memory, loves to give names and plays with language for fun, really not know what they were doing naming their kin that?

Here’s a list of alternative terms;

Danwaith (S.) this was used by the Sindarin lore masters, though sometimes they confused it with Denwaith. This is formed from the words [dan] and [gwaith], which becomes [waith] later in Sindarin. [Gwaith] refers to a group of people and [dan] means “back to,” so the name means “People who go back.” Lenwë (Q.) is the leaders Quenyan name, but his other name is Denweg, hence the confusion. Danwaith, as far as I can tell, is a carryover from when Denweg’s name was Dan, which I’ll get to in a moment (WJ). This term is used to describe those who initially did not cross Hithaeglir.

Dana (Nan.) This is actually from Tolkien’s Middle period (external), and the only Middle period one I’ll go over, so I wouldn’t recommend using it, But I’ll give a quick overview. During this time, the leader of the Dana was named Dan (or Dân) and this is what the Dana called themselves. However, as you might recall, in-verse, (n)dan- come from ndando, so it’s unlikely that they’d refer to themselves as that. It’s other forms are Danas (pl.) and it’s angelized version Danian (LR, WJ, PE). This term is used to describe those who initially did not cross Hithaeglir.

Lindi (Nan.) This is the one I use to refer to the whole of the clan. When the Lindi first came into Beleriand, they called themselves Lindai, which is the old Teleri clan name (Lindâi -> Lindai -> Lindi (Nan) or Lindar (Q.)), but it had become Lindi in their tongue (WJ). Derived from the Sindar or directly from the Lindi, this is also what the Noldorin exiles used. This is derived from the primitive Elvish word lindā meaning “sweet sounding.” The singular is probably Lind (WJ, PE). 

Lindil (S.) After the Sindar recognized the Lindil as kin, they adopted the name Lindi and gave it the form Lindil or Lindedhil (WJ). This is used to describe the Elves who followed Denethor to Beleriand.

Laegel (S.) This term later replaced Lindil among the Sindar. It means “Green-Elf,” which is a familiar term for us all! It’s plural is Laegil and it’s class plural is either Laegrim or Laegel(d)rim (WJ).  This is used to describe the Elves who followed Denethor to Beleriand. Green-Elf is also used to describe them.

Laiquendi (Q.) This is the Quenyan translation of Laegel. It was translated by the Noldor, though it was not used very much (WJ). This is used to describe the Elves who followed Denethor to Beleriand.

Tawarwaith (S.) This term translates to “Forest (tawar) People (gwaith),” and is a term used to describe Silvan Elves. (UT)

Galadrim (Nan.) is a collective plural that means “Tree-People,” and is used to refer to the Elves of Lórien. The Sindarin equivalent is Galadhrim

Silvan (Eng.) Alt. Sylvan. This is used to describe Elves who never made it to Beleriand, but may have stayed in the Vale of Anduin or settled elsewhere. Other non-Elvish words to call these Elves include, Wood-Elves, Woodland Elves and East-Elves.

First draft commentary