galadhir

Managed to actually do some fannish stuff yesterday and the result is that chapter fifteen of Oak and Willow is up on AO3.

In which Galadriel, exiled to Sirion once Thingol heard about the kinslaying, and sick of being treated like a traitor/dangerous political hot potato by her cousins, receives an unexpected - but very welcome - visitor.

Oak and Willow Chapter 15

Only one more chapter to go and this one will be done. After which I think I will edit all the individual chapters together so it can be listened to as an audiobook.

Thought I would make a list of all the things that bug me about RoP, because I need to vent to someone.

1. Male elves with short hair. Why is this really annoying? Because Tolkien went to the trouble of saying that their long hair is a sign of vigor and beauty for them. Finrod, Fingon, Fingolfin are all high Noldorin lords, and even their names revolve about how beautiful their hair is. In other words having long hair is very important in elvish culture. Why sacrifice that for no good reason?

2. Why do Celebrimbor and Gil-Galad look so much older than Galadriel, when in fact Celebrimbor is about the same age as her (?) and Gil-Galad is her nephew? And specifically, when canonically, elves do not show signs of age until they are absolutely ancient. Is this like 'oh no, how will they look properly authoritative if we don't make them middle aged?!' What about 'elves are immortal and beautiful' is so hard to understand? And why exactly are we not allowed to have beautiful elf lords but it's so vitally important to have beautiful elf ladies? (We know why, but I'm still rolling my eyes.)

3. How the f*#k does Gil-Galad have the authority to force Galadriel to go back to Valinor, when she is an Exile and her inability and the other Noldor's inability to go home is a huge, HUGE, important plot point throughout the Silm and LotR both. Way to completely miss one of the overarching tragedies of the entire Noldor people.

4. What is this nonsense about the elves all being about to die or forced to go back to Valinor without mithril? See above about how their Exile and their Oath is still making that completely impossible. Also, mithril is a precious metal that is more beautiful than silver and harder than steel - that's enough for it to be politically important and something that people covet. Way to turn it into yet another magical item and somehow absolve the elves and the dwarves both of the responsibility of their greed.

5. I mean there is a lot of stripping of the Silmarillion elves magnificent jerkishness. It's a different book from LotR and the Silmarillion elves are proud, ruthless, dangerous, sometimes murderous, but you would not know it from this series, where they all behave just like LotR elves.

6. There's no acknowledgement that there are different kingdoms and kinds of elves who are in strained diplomatic relations with each other. Where is there any awareness of the kind of politics that is going on in the Second Age?

7. Where is any awareness of what the beef between the elves and dwarves is actually about? Is it really better to present it as some kind of irrational prejudice, rather than the result of elves having hunted dwarves for sport in the past, and dwarves having sacked Doriath and killed King Thingol fairly recently? I know that introducing that would complicate the whole "elves and dwarves are all good people!" thing, but complication is what you get when you choose to tackle the Silmarillion, which is essentially Tolkien's Game of Thrones.

8. Argh! How is it that Celebrimbor, who is a master smith, doesn't know how ores work? For goodness sake, people, make some attempt to depict forging accurately in a story where smithcraft is also a huge plot point.

9. Galadriel was in effing Lorien when the three rings were made.

10. Forever sore that we did not get the story of Celebrimbor usurping the rule of Eregion from Celeborn and Galadriel that we should have got, which lead to Galadriel and Celebrian fleeing Eregion through Khazad-Dum to go and prepare a refuge in Lorenindorinan. While Celeborn stayed in Eregion and was on hand to fight Sauron when he revealed himself and came against Eregion with an army and the body of Celebrimbor impaled on a pole as his standard. Instead we get this wishy-washy crap where the entire army of Numenor decides to go and rescue a small village in (what will become) Mordor, despite the fact that nobody on the spot has even asked for aid.

Am I less annoyed now that I've got this all out? No, not really.

Here is a series of blogs by an actual historian talking about the many things that annoyed him