Idril Is The Only Person Who Thinks Turgon Is Funny

god i hate how aesthetic-obsessed we have become. i'm not talking about cottagecore or dark academia or any of the other -cores, i'm talking about everything being so glossy and pretty and perfect and smooth and one-liner hot takes and feel-good own-the-conservatives progressivism and Top 10 Company Tweets We Laughed At and ring lights and young vloggers with pastel-perfect colour-corrected lives and carefully curated messy title cards and perfect montages being called "photo dumps" and bookstagrams or booktoks or bookblrs who buy every book they read, not a library edition in sight and "that girl" and this is how you age when you're unproblematic and glow ups and "clean" "inclusive" beauty and earth tones and minimalism and filming random people without their consent and definition of the self through consumption of goods and ggrgehwrgehrgehrgehrgehrrerg

One thing in Lord of the Rings I’ve found extremely relatable lately is how the hobbits react to apocalyptic horrors by focusing on the mundane details of their day.

“Looks like we’re on a hopeless journey into Hell in the middle of a world-ending event where everything we know and love will be destroyed. What are we going to have for breakfast today, Mr Frodo? :D”

this looks like love

~ This was Beleg’s knife. It was more beautiful than any knife he had seen before, the blade covered with intricate designs of leaves and stars and the crossings of rivers and trees.

‘This looks like love,’ his father would have said. He said that about beautiful things wrought with care: knives and swords, baskets, shawls, quilts, jackets. His broken harp. Túrin still didn’t know what it meant. Not entirely. ~

***

Túrin woke to find himself alone. Beleg’s bed was made up, so were the others'. He got up and washed. He was close enough to Menegroth that there was no real danger if he did not run off alone. He drank sweet water and ate lingonberries and cheese and bread.

Beleg had not woken him early, so he would not study to hunt that day. Beleg had let him rest. Perhaps Beleg had gone to hunt without him. Túrin stepped out onto the small porch of the cabin in his nightshirt.

There Beleg sat, making arrows.

‘You’re awake,’ he said. Túrin nodded. He sat cross legged beside Beleg and stared at the sun. It was midday.

‘I slept a long time.’

‘You were tired.’

Túrin nodded again. He bounced his fingers on the bruises on his knees. He liked how his fingers felt as they bounced off his skin. Beleg did not ask him why he did it or call him strange. Túrin swept his hands up and down, turning his hands in the air, so that his fingers came down first facing his knees and then turned from them, again and again.

‘Do I go back to Menegroth today?’ he asked. He reached for mint leaves from the ground and pressed three into his mouth.

‘No,’ Beleg said. Túrin turned his face up to the sun.

‘When then?’

‘In two days.’

‘And then you will go far afield?’ Túrin said. ‘For all the winter?’ He let his hands fly again, bouncing off his knees. He chewed the mint leaves and swallowed their taste.

‘Not for all the winter, I don’t think,’ Beleg answered. ‘I would miss you.’

Túrin stopped bouncing his hands to pick mint leaves for Beleg. He handed them to him. Beleg took them and nodded his thanks. He ate them and kept making arrows.

‘Do you want to speak of which you dreamt?’ Beleg asked.

‘No,’ Túrin said. He waved his hand, letting it spin at his wrist. ‘I think everyone was dead. I was dead.’

Beleg patted Túrin’s knee gently. Túrin brushed the spot when Beleg had pulled his hair back. He didn’t like the lingering touch that seemed to tingle on his skin, even from those he loved. He tried to do it when Beleg wasn’t looking. He had brushed off his father’s touches and kisses. Sometimes he let his mother’s stay, but it agitated him to have a part of his skin even a little wet or a bit different from the rest. He didn’t know why being touched left an impression of the touch on his skin, but it did. He had asked Beleg if he could feel a touch after it was gone. Beleg had said yes, but he hadn’t been bothered by it.

Túrin looked at the yard. It was green and damp. Mud was spreading though. It must have rained a little when he slept. It was quiet, and it smelt like cold rain. Soon the leaves would change colour.

‘Are we alone?’ Túrin asked.

‘Yes,’ Beleg said. ‘The others left last night. They are needed farther North.’

‘Where you will go.’

‘Yes, where I will go.’

Túrin shoved his bare feet down onto the ground. It was soft enough that they sunk a bit into it. It was cold. The grass tickled his skin. Túrin stood and took a large step into the yard. His foot sunk down again, the ground giving a bit beneath him. He walked the yard around like that, in long strides, watching his feet leave impressions in the wet earth, feeling the cold of it.

He liked that the grass was green and not brown. He liked that the ground was wet and not frozen. He ran back to the porch and stood on it with his muddy feet.

‘Wash up,’ Beleg said. ‘You can’t go inside like that.’

‘I know.’ Túrin stood on his tiptoes to touch the very top of the porch where the two slanted roofs met each other.

Beleg patted his leg. ‘Wash. Then put some clothes on. Thingol and Melian will not be pleased if I bring you home ill.’

Túrin wrinkled his nose but threw some cold water from the rain barrel onto his feet and wiped them clean with a rag. He went back inside and came out dressed and with shoes on.

‘Don’t you look darling,’ Beleg said. Túrin had put this underneath ‘strange things that Elves say to each other and sometimes to you but that don’t need a response’ so he tramped off without a response to pee.

He came back to Beleg after and stared at his muddy footprints on the porch where he had been sitting. Beleg gave him a pointed look. Túrin wiped them up with the same rag and hung it over the side of the rain barrel to dry. He sat down again and took the knife that Beleg gave him.

This was Beleg’s knife. It was more beautiful than any knife he had seen before, the blade covered with intricate designs of leaves and stars and the crossings of rivers and trees.

‘This looks like love,’ his father would have said. He said that about beautiful things wrought with care: knives and swords, baskets, shawls, quilts, jackets. His broken harp. Túrin still didn’t know what it meant. Not entirely.

‘This looks like love,’ he said, for maybe Beleg knew the answer.

Beleg studied him. Beleg’s face was ancient but barely lined. It was his eyes that made it ancient. They were like the night sky and all the stars in it – maybe just as old, or maybe younger, but not enough that it would it matter to Túrin when he thought of the ages of the world.

‘Yes,’ Beleg said. ‘Care is love.’

Túrin said no more.

Westron names that are Anglicized instead of translated 

Bilba - Bilbo 

Bophîn = Boffin

Bunga = Bungo

Tûk = Took

Westron names that are translated instead of Anglicized 

Banazîr/Ban= Samwise/Sam

Galbasi = Gamgee

Hamanullas = Lobelia

Hlothran = Cotton

Kalimac/Kali = Mariadoc/Merry

Labingi = Baggins

Maura = Frodo

Ranugad = Hamfast

Razanur/Razar = Peregrin/Pippin 

Zilbirâpha = Butterburr

A combination of the two

Brandagamba = Brandybuck 

Me: I'm not one of those Autistics who needs noise-canceling headphones (/nm); regular noise levels don't bother me like they do some people

Also me: *puts in earplugs to vacuum* *world goes quiet* THIS IS BEAUTIFUL I'M BUYING NOISE-CANCELING HEADPHONES RIGHT NOW

I'm going to learn to make lactose free, extra spice eggnog. I'm done with the super sweet stuff with just a hint of nutmeg that they sell at my grocery store. A small sack of nutmeg is no longer worth enough to set you up for life!!! Give me more!!!

If anyone wants a fic with this, I liked Drag0nst0rm’s Scion of Somebody, Probably on ffn

best Gil-Galad lineage headcanon is that he’s not descended from any of them, he’s a pretender to the throne and that’s why his story keeps changing

I have a lot of Thoughts about the framing of classic fantasy stories that are actual specific published works as Ye Olde Folktales of no particular origin. especially given the most common modern understanding of “original fairytale” as “didactic story intended for children”

(same goes for stories where the most common modern understanding of the story is based on one particular published version)

like. I don’t know. Beauty and the Beast owes a lot of tropes to earlier tales that occupy the nebulous ~folklore~ space we usually assign it to, but the actual story itself is a novel. a full-on fantasy novel intended for adults, with a known author (Gabrielle Suzanne Barbot de Villenueve), published in a definite time and place (1740 France)

the most popular modern version of Cinderella- with the fairy godmother, glass slipper, single ball, and so on -was written in 1697 by Charles Perrault. that’s not the oldest known version of the story, and DEFINITELY not the only one out there, but it’s the one that most informs our cultural ideas about what Cinderella is. in the west and honestly, in most of the world

(luckily most people know by now that The Little Mermaid started life as a story written by a particular author. but it sometimes falls prey to these misconceptions, too)

this is all really hard to articulate, but it just feels weird to say “Beauty and the Beast was meant to teach girls to accept arranged marriage!” when you wouldn’t try to sum up, say, The Fellowship of the Ring so neatly. or “well, in the ORIGINAL Cinderella, birds peck out the stepsisters’ eyes!” when that comes from a version published in 1819- over a century after the version we’re most familiar with today

I think it also takes away important context when analyzing these stories, to completely sever them from the very specific points in history that created them and make them seem the product of a murky, generic Olden Time™ that never existed

Saw this on Instagram and I couldn’t agree more.

[ID.: two screenshots of a Mashable article. The text reads, "That discovery was almost entirely manual, made possible by the all-consuming, boundless energy of adolescence without any algorithmic design. 'We are in this place of culture, where so many people expect algorithmic understanding,' says Brennan. Tumblr might be the place for you to go out and find yourself, but 'TikTok basically comes to you,' says Zuccarelli, because the algorithm 'knows everything about you.' To compete in the recommendation algorithm arena, Tumblr would need to ask its users for more information about who they are and what they like, something it historically has rebuked in favor of anonymity. At the time of publishing, Tumblr reports that there are 9.4 million daily posts on the platform, compared to 84 million in 2014. But with the rise of '90s and early 2000s nostalgia among Gen Z, a revival of the platform seems possible. In January, D'Onofrio said that half of the platform's active users and 71 percent of its new users are Gen Z. Kahle who, at 25, is a zillennial, says attracting Gen Z and getting them to stay 'may come down to the product.' For example, Kahle says 'if Gen Z's attention span is whatever percent shorter than millennials' then the recommendation algorithm needs to be used to churn out content way faster.'"

End ID]

Not that I disagree with OP, but I'd reblog a lot more fanart and other images if more people put image descriptions. Making your posts more accessible means more people can reblog them!

/nbh /nm

if you’re a new tumblr user from tiktok or IG or something and only like posts and dont reblog them yeah people will think you’re a bot and block you but you will also make this website actively worse. they want “algorithmic” users like you, served recommended posts through likes, not people who just follow each other and respond to the direct chronological feed. there is a reason this website is still better than the rest, even with all its problems, do not ruin this