Odysseus Made Their Marriage Bed With His Own Hands. With His Own Hands

did i even draw hektor if he looks like he’s had a good night’s sleep in the last 10 years

Sauron actually did try to repent, according to Tolkien.

According to Tolkien, there was a time that Sauron genuinely repented and turned away from evil. He even confessed his deeds to the herald of Manwë.

In RoP the reason he was on that boat in the beginning is because he was on his way to Valinor to confess and repent before the Valar and be judged. I'm convinced he booked passage on that boat, then possibly summoned the Worm to destroy most of the ship once he drew closer to Valinor since no mortals would be permitted to accompany him to Aman. He was likely planning to float that raft, alone, to Valinor's gates.

Then he met Galadriel and ended up in Númenor, and decided to start a new life instead. Galadriel was the one who really pushed and pushed him back toward evil because the darkness (vengeance) inside her was that tantalizing.

Sauron totally "fell" for her. He started manipulating her after he abandoned his smithing post and agreed to return to Middle-earth. Everything before that was genuine, especially his desire to start anew.

Sauron genuinely wanted her to rule with him.

Fortunately, Galadriel said no. And that's a good thing, because Celeborn (her husband) is likely not dead. He needs to return to her, so that Aragorn, himself, may one day have an heir. (Because it's important to the entire lotr story... not because it's important for a woman to breed. Come on.)

Scenes from Homer by Janet & Anne Grahame Johnstone

Ancient Greek culture/mores for deceit and archery is like

Male-coded intelligence vs. female-coded trickery, FIGHT

Male-coded intelligent warfare (fighting from afar is smart and minimizes injury so you can do more of it) vs. female-coded fighting from afar because of trickery and cowardice in not standing up to close combat, FIGHT

Myth-wise, then you've on the one hand got all those female characters resorting to trickery to achieve their aims (Hera, Klytaimnestra, for example) = bad. And on the other hand you've got characters like Odysseus, where the deceit of the wooden horse, which would be the modern-day war crime of perfidy, is smart and good.

And you've got instances like an author writing a dialogue between Chiron and Achilles, where Achilles is scorning archery for being a cowards' method of combat and Chiron rebuking him that it's smart fighting. And in extension/connection, we've got Odysseus who is archery-coded (even if he does not do any archery in the war, at least in our surviving source(s)), and, in the Odyssey, using it to win the day, contra Paris, our ur-example of ~bad coward archer~

Hey friend,

Just curious about some greek retellings you like? I tried to get through 'Clytemnestra' by constaza casti but even the first few chapters felt so anachronistic and out of character I returned the book.

i love till we have faces by c.s. lewis. not encouraging to me that no one** has come up with anything better in that vein (that is, "more or less straightforward retelling from an overlooked female character's perspective") since a white english man in the 50s.

**no one i've READ YET, i should say

but if you step away from the formula of narrative fiction, there's good stuff! denis o'hare and lisa peterson's "an iliad" and derek walcott's "the odyssey" are both interesting plays. of course, my beloved hadestown. alice oswald's poems "memorial" (drawn from the iliad) and "nobody" (drawing much more loosely on the odyssey) are [kisses fingers]. in louise glück's poetry collection meadowlands, she uses the odyssey throughout as a way of exploring marriage and parenthood; it's excellent. the lost books of the odyssey is a short story collection by zachary mason; like most short story collections, i found it very mixed, but it has a few stories i've returned to again and again.

Electra ‼️‼️

ref : courage anxiety and despair: watching the battle (James Sant 1850)

Debated posting this for a while because. yknow. but i figured it was all artistic enough that it couldn't hurt to share. Odysseus and Penelope truly are the only couple ever tbh, i love how much they love each other <3 Referenced from "Paulo e Virginia" by Puttinati

my uni staged philoctetes and one of the best choices was to have odysseus walk in with a cigarette through the entrance directly beneath the "no smoking" sign

Filling a request on twitter for Hektor experiencing a moment of happiness, and really, isn't that what we all truly want?

A rare day with nothing more urgent to do than entertaining Polyxena

From The Odyssey Of Homer Engraved From The Compositions Of John Flaxman.