Zooming around invisible becoming increasingly infuriated

[bunn]

My Fëanor story I wittered about previously has now morphed from just being the tale of Dead Fëanor zooming around invisible becoming increasingly infuriated, through How to Fill up 42 Years of War of Wrath, through to: Hey, while I'm at it, I could try to answer my various questions about the latter end of the Silmarillion, specifically:
1) Maedhros: WHY? (this has been my number 1 question from the Silmarillion since I was ?13, I think)
2) Where the hell is Celebrimbor?
3) Apart from the breaking of Thangorodrim, what are Elrond and Elros up to, and given their seemingly unpromising foster-parents, how come they grew up so well-balanced?
4) Gil-galad, Galadriel and Celeborn: what were they up to?
5) Who sank which bits of Beleriand, and did they have to?
6) What are the strengths and weaknesses of the Vanyar as a fighting force?
7) Whither the Dwarves of Belegost?
8) Whither the Sons of Bor (remnant) given that they are not Edain?
9) Can you get ships up the Brandywine river, and if so, how far?
10) how does the economy of a dwarf-city interact with the surrounding agricultural area?
11) ETC.

65,000 words and still there is absolutely shedloads of War of Wrath to go, AND I still need to decide what to do with Dead Fëanor, who is now frivolously bantering with Gandalf and bloody-mindedly refusing to be in a story with a proper ending to it.

Normally I can never write anything this long or anything like this fast, and to be honest, I never thought I would or could write Tolkien fanfic at all. It is all most odd.

Comments

[hhimring]

Wow! That's a lot of questions and the Silm fandom has been trying to answer some of these for quite a while...
I've already mentally pre-bookmarked your fic for when you start posting it (although it sounds like it might take a while to catch up with if it's 65k and growing). Including Zooming Feanor, of course!

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I suspect that this is the kind of thing where there are a million possible answers, and we all have a slightly different subset of answers that we are prepared to entertain at all. Because it is all Really Important Damnit, and Other People Are Wrong. :-D

I really like your Maedhros characterisation, as you know, but it makes Question 1) even harder to answer for me, at least in a way that I find entirely and fully convincing.

And for me, the idea of a redemption for Feanor is all bound up in Question 1 and Question 1 requires at least Question 3 and probably also Question 2.

It is ridiculously long. I would certainly think twice about reading something that long, unless from an author who I felt very confident I'd want to spend that long with...

I have wondered about breaking it up, but it's all a bit interwoven to untangle.

Hphm. At least I'm enjoying writing it!

[hhimring]

Oh, I wasn't surprised you want your own answers--just that you're trying to answer all those at once. But as you know I'm a very bitty writer myself.
Thank you for your comment about my characterization of Maedhros. I'm aware that it's a very personal response. In fact, I think "Why Maedhros" might not really be the same question for everyone who asks it, even although it may sound the same--it seems to depend very much on where you're coming from.
(I haven't tried to redeem Feanor--so far, I barely even dare to write him.)

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Yes, I suppose you are right about views of Maedhros. I'm sure there are people who assume he's just murderous through and through, and that arguing with Feanor at Losgar and forswearing the oath and having actual friends and restraining his brothers were minor glitches or political manoevers and Elros and Elrond have just risen above a bad start.

Obviously those people are Just Wrong. :-D

As for Feanor: I find the parallels with Morgoth and Sauron fascinating. Tolkien, you have THREE LUCIFERS! Is that not a tad excessive??

But the third is not like the first two, because he loves his dad and has a family, and is cut off before he can fall very far (at least if you compare him to Morgoth or Sauron he does not fall so far. He should take the entire blame for Alqualonde, though.)

And also in the background there is Finrod and this idea that the Elves are an Unfallen race, unlike men, which strongly suggests to me that Feanor *should* be redeemable.

There's a long tradition of sympathetic Lucifer to raid!

[timetiger.livejournal.com]

Although I am not steeped in this lore, I'd like to say I'm terrifically impressed by 65,000 words.

I'm also relieved to find out it isn't you who's zooming around invisible and becoming increasingly frustrated!

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I know there are plenty of people who write that much without thinking about it, but I am emphatically not one of them :-D

I am filled with a feeling of LOOK AT ALL THE WORDS. WHERE DID THEY COME FROM???

[timetiger.livejournal.com]

:o)

[anna-wing.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. I started a little bit of fluff about Melkor being turned into a cat, and mission creep had pretty much set in by the end of the third chapter.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

And how!

(is cat-Melkor going to come back into it, or is he just too busy snoozing?)

[timetiger.livejournal.com]

:o)

[topum.livejournal.com]

I understand very little in this post but I can very much agree with the last sentence because of it ).

[bunn.livejournal.com]

:-P

It would be an awful dull world if nobody was odd!

At the moment it is quite nice to escape from the news into another world for a short while, even if apocalyptic things are also happening there, at least there are no orange men with tiny hands being peed on.

[anna-wing.livejournal.com]

I've decided to let Arrogantemu do Feanor-redemption. Your questions are very good ones. The answers that I more or less settled on for my own fics are as follows:

1) Maedhros: WHY? (this has been my number 1 question from the Silmarillion since I was ?13, I think)

Macbeth syndrome: "I am in blood stepped in so far, that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go oe'er".


2) Where the hell is Celebrimbor?

With his great-aunt Lalwen and the survivors of Dor-Lomin, fighting orcs.

3) Apart from the breaking of Thangorodrim, what are Elrond and Elros up to, and given their seemingly unpromising foster-parents, how come they grew up so well-balanced?

Idril and Tuor seem to be a very functional and stable couple, so perhaps it was simply a genetic predisposition. I believe Elrond travelled in the East, where presumably he learned about how to get along with different kinds of people.

4) Gil-galad, Galadriel and Celeborn: what were they up to?

In my mental time-line, Galadriel and Celeborn went east over the mountains during the Siege of Angband, and were in Eriador building up the Elvish settlements there throughout the rest of the First Age.

5) Who sank which bits of Beleriand, and did they have to?

My version of the Valinorean Expeditionary Force had nuclear weapons. Possibly also antimatter ones too.

6) What are the strengths and weaknesses of the Vanyar as a fighting force?

Strengths: They're all stoic, fearless, superhumanly skilled and disciplined martial arts masters (Donny Yen but blond).

Weaknesses: Lack of numbers and general unhappiness about having to go back to Middle-earth and become murderers themselves?


7) Whither the Dwarves of Belegost?

City a mess, but they mostly survived, thanks to the excellence of their engineering.

8) Whither the Sons of Bor (remnant) given that they are not Edain?

Fled east of the Blue Mountains and survived there. Became Breemen?

9) Can you get ships up the Brandywine river, and if so, how far?

I can't remember if Tolkien ever said anything about its navigability. Depends on how big a ship would be, I suppose. Surely navigable by smaller boats, with portage around fords. Don't drink the water near the Withywindle.

10) how does the economy of a dwarf-city interact with the surrounding agricultural area?

Dwarves surely had the concept of money.

I assumed that much of the Hobbits' external trade was actually with the dwarves in the Blue Mountains. So presumably there was something similar with the Elves of Beleriand, and with whatever settlements of Men and Elves there were in Eriador.

11) ETC.

Me too.

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

5 and 6 seem connected. Vanyar see a lot of orcs coming. Vanyar don't really like to get their hands dirty. Vanyar have access to enormous amounts of power. Vanyar sink the lands around orc host to eliminate the problem at no emotional cost (no, *I* didn't kill them, the big waves and newly-arrived 500-foot-deep sea killed them. *My* hands are clean. 500-foot-deep seas are good for cleaning hands...).

After all, who would want that particular bit of land? Quite apart from it being mere Beleriand rather than a real place like Aman, it's all muddy and messy instead of having beautiful jewelled roads and carefully tended meads and so on. Ugh. Done the place a favour.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

... I think they are connected. Hmmm

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

It also explains the dismay caused by the unleashing of Black Ancalagon and his cohorts. If your standard operating procedure is to flood the ground around enemy hosts before having a celebratory cup of tea, the appearance of flying enemies has got to be a bit disconcerting.

Bilwe: "Look! An enemy host"
Bobiel: *Yawn* "OK, break out the usual spells. Now, are we out of camomile again...?"
Bilwe: "They've flown right over the flood! They're nearly here!"
Bobiel: "Er, what? Oh. Er. Actual fighting. Damn, this is a teaspoon not a sword. Which end do you hold again? Where did I leave my armour...?"
BOTH: "Earendil! Earennnnndilllllll!!!!"

[bunn.livejournal.com]

'damnit this is a teaspoon'

Although I found something that says the Vanyar use spears rather than swords, which might actually tie into the 'not wanting to get hands dirty' thing.

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

Talk to Philmophlegm about polearms - "Camomile Teaspoon" may well turn out to be some sort of guisarme/glaive.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

1) see, I can just about buy that for Macbeth, given that he has Lady Macbeth and they are both kind of stuck in it and she's very resolute. But there's nobody urging Maedhros on after Doriath apart from Maedhros, it appears. And he does start wading back, then he turns around. That seems odd to me.

2) I wish Lalwen was in the Silmarillion! But I think I probably have too many characters already.

3) Are you Ulmo?

4) See, I really want to have Galadriel being dragged back to Doriath by Celeborn and finding it full of dragons, to add context to that moment in LOTR when he's rude about the Dwarves re-awakening evil in the mountains, and Galadriel says something along the lines of 'who wouldn't want to visit their ancestral home even if it was full of dragons'. It's like the epic marriage version of 'remember that time you thought it would be a good idea to...'

5) They must have something pretty potent, but I feel that maybe Sauron or the Balrogs did too.

6) It hadn't occurred to me that reluctance would be an issue. Good thought.

7) I concur ;-)

8) That was my thought, but after much rummaging I concluded that the Breemen are probably mostly left-behind Edain, like the Rohirrim. I think they might be the Lossoth. Or another bunch to far east to appear in LOTR / Hobbit, of course.

[sally_maria]

I suspect it's not helpful at all to say that I would happily read thousands of words of your Dead Fëanor frivolously bantering with Gandalf?

When it comes to question 1, I suspect at least some of your answer is going to depend on just how binding you see the Oath as being - does it just have moral force, or is it actually compelling them in some way.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I didn't even invite Gandalf! I only invited Galadriel. She went and brought friends and family!

(and for some reason now I can hear Movie Pippin: Don't talk to it! Don't encourage it! Alas, Dead Fëanor doesn't need much encouragement... )

I'm going with the Oath being powerful, semi-sentient, and bound up with Dead Fëanor. It's the only way I can make sense of the whole forswearing, torment, attack thing, let alone the very peculiar 'no you can't - yes you can' behaviour of Eonwë.