bunn | Entries tagged with silmarillion

I made this for Starspray's story An Evening in Tirion
I've played slightly fast and loose with the lighting, but I wanted it to be evening rather than night, so, this is an attempt at a sunset through a partially stained glass window, casting a warm and very directional light on their faces.

I don't feel I got this quite right, and it was one of those paintings where you keep fiddling with it and it still isn't quite right. In the end, I messed about with it in software as well. I should know better than to try to do complicated things with watercolour pencils: I'm definitely better with acrylics!

It's taken me a while to complete this: arrival of puppy proved timeconsuming.

After part 1...

Pan out from the quest for the Numenorean Prince Irimon to a wider scale:the great unknown lands in the East of Middle-earth, for there are many forces moving as Sauron's plans begin to fruit and grow, in Raku, across the great grassy Plains of Alcar, in the great Harad desert and as far south as Ibavi. We moved to a Huge Map, where we could see the many forces moving.

( Read more... )

Late is Better than Never
Anairë, wife of Fingolfin and mother of two High Kings, goes out at last to war. 1472 words.

I seem to have failed on the posting things here front for a while - when it comes to written things anyway, so here is a quick list.

Lands of the March : Maedhros, Amrod & Amras talking about who gets which lands and why.

Cool Water on a Hot Day : I'm quite proud of this one: Torhthelm, Feanor & Nerdanel meeting in Anglo-saxon Essex: a Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son and Silmarillion fusion. Because why not! :-D

Heroic Hearts ; Maedhros makes his first visit back to Hithlum after leaving for the March of Maedhros. Fingon offers a gift.

And then I added a chapter to: The Lands of Weeping and of War : which is my 1937 Silmarillion ending story, where Maglor hangs out with Elrond instead of wandering off along the shore alone.

And a chapter to A New Road or a Secret Gate, which is Elrohir adventuring around Beleriand Risen. With Feanor, Amrod, Amras & tentacles.

Feel a bit guilty about those last two because normally I don't post stuff until I have an ending in mind, and those two I'm not at all sure where they are going. Oh well!

Quenta Narquelion otherwise known as the story of Ghost Feanor and the War of Wrath is finally complete! I think I started writing it in October 2016, blimey.

It's 119547 words, and a lot more tragic and epic than I had originally envisaged. I'm very proud of the final battle with Ancalagon the Black and the Winged dragons, which I'd always had difficulty imagining in detail. I was stuck on that for ages till Pp suggested thinking of it as a sort of Battle of Britain analogue, with the Dragons as huge bomber type things, range limited, and the birds and Earendil as small and fast - though sort of flipped, since the dragons are defending and the birds are attacking.

I never thought I could write a story that long and on that kind of scale, and now I have, so I am rather pleased with myself.

I wrote a couple of other things too:

The Eldar That Were Faithful : About what Nerdanel & the women of the Noldor were up to while the Silmarillion was going on. This is a direct response to one of the last chapters of Quenta Narquelion, where Maglor wonders what their mother has been doing.

and in a different world to QN: Seashell Songs : A few scenes of Maglor after the death of Maedhros, written for B2MEM 2018. Maglor threw the Silmaril into the Sea, but that wasn't the end of it. Maglor makes soup, counts spoons, makes songs and finds a way.

(I don't know when I became such a Maglor enthusiast. I had no firm opinions on him until I wrote a couple of scenes where he appeared in QN, and suddenly he took on a life of his own! )

I have just finished writing Ch 20 of Quenta Narquelion, otherwise known as 'Ghost Feanor whizzing around Beleriand' (though I've only posted up to chapter 18 so far. The whole thing is 117041 words and 23 chapters long, which is by far the single longest thing I have ever written. Chapters 19-23 still need final checks, edits and revision, but still, the plot is all written and I think it reads reasonably well. I originally had hopeful plans to write the whole thing before I started posting it so I could leave it and re-read it and give it final edits... but oh well. At least I finished it, and have managed to post a reviewed and edited chapter every week...

I don't know why why or how this happened, but I still feel an enormous sense of nebulous achievement.

(No painting this week, because I've got three things that I'm working on, and none of them is quite finished yet. )

I made some trees!

I'm particularly pleased with this technique because Colin the Art wasn't sure if it would work with acrylics (he and most of the class use oils, which are slower drying and can be melted with white spirit.) I had a big pot of tar gel, which I reckoned might help, so I decided to experiment, and I was able to completely paint this landscape, including spattering with water and getting the paint to flow when the canvas was tipped, then scrub all the paint off and start over with a different scene. (The first thing I tried was a seascape which I decided didn't quite work...)

I really like the idea of using the white of the canvas to show through and create transparency and I'm definitely going to do that again. I was less keen on the idea of using textured wallpapers and scrunched plastic to make marks in the paint: I found that rather uncontrollable and couldn't get the results I wanted. But painting dark and using gels and water and a palette-knife to create shapes I like, and also using a bit of splodging with a wet rag.

Earlier this week I tried (yet another Silmarillion) painting of Maedhros & Maglor in Valinor, visiting their small cousin Fingon (I decided that Maglor is a little older than Fingon, though not much.) They are doing bubble enchantments. This actually looks much better in real life, whereas the more abstract tree painting above was a lot easier to photograph. I wonder if I should have tried a different lens.

( Read more... )

Oh, and while I am noting Things Made, I thought I'd finished writing my Return to Aman series about Maglor and Elrond after Lord of the Rings, but since I'm still procrastinating about writing the last chapter of Quenta Narquelion, I ended up writing an extra beginning section for Return to Aman instead, Remembrance of Time Long Past. Elrond retrieves Maglor before leaving the Grey Havens. Galadriel is unimpressed, and the hobbits are oblivious.

My admiration for Tolkien's map-making skills has been greatly enhanced by my own efforts to make maps of Beleriand. It's way harder than it looks!

I've made two attempts now: This is the first one, for chapter 8 of Quenta Narquelion (my Ghost Feanor story)

And this is a War of Wrath map for Chapter 12: In Armour of the Elder Days.

(Yes, I know I've missed the 'g' in Angband! I can't see a non-obvious way to fix it and I can't bear to re-draw it, so it's staying like that. Digital mapmaking would be SO much easier.)

And also to the Hobbit.

And you may well ask: but bunn, why did you write a happy ending to the Silmarillion? And why is it 41291 words long? Did you have nothing better to do?

I have no answer to these questions and am avoiding your eyes.

The House of Fëanor : Little Pity

Written very fast: An Invitation (Not in Golden Ink) : (gen, 2457 words). Bilbo Baggins, leaving the Party and the Shire behind him sets off once again upon the road with Dwarves, and encounters old friends upon the way. I wrote this as a treat for Lunarium in the Innumerable Stars exchange.

I like the way that Bilbo simply decides that he's going to leave the Shire. Not for a quest, not because he has to, not because his relatives in the Shire are not perfectly worthy people in their way, and not even with a plan about where he's going. Just: OK, I've had enough of this! I'm out! And he ends up in Rivendell, which I think is an excellent demonstration that sometimes just being prepared to walk out and go somewhere else is a good move.

But I noticed the other day that connecting the dots, Bilbo leaves Bag End with Dwarves and goes off to visit Gildor Inglorion before he leaves the Shire. I wondered how the dwarves felt about that, and when Bilbo decided that Rivendell was where he was going.

Written very carefully: Faithless Is He That Says Farewell When the Road Darkens (gen 12692 words). The War of Wrath lasted for forty-two years. It was neither a swift nor a certain victory. Here, in the middle of that great war, Celebrimbor, Elrond and Elros meet and work together. Elrond and Celebrimbor have complex feelings about the House of Fëanor. Elros, not so much.

This was my Innumerable Stars exchange assignment, and I was a bit alarmed at first because I had matched the request on only this one group of characters, so there was no option to write anything else, and I had not worked out what I thought Celebrimbor did during the War of Wrath. But I like the eventual result. This is the first thing that I have completed and shared that uses my War of Wrath Timeline & Maps!

(Obviously more people read the swiftly-written treat than the carefully-worked-out assignment during the anon period of the exchange. This is the immutable Law of Sod. )

"bleh! What have you done to the beautiful dialect of the smilarilion? You've trashed it and made it modern! That is a travesty, and no true fan of tolkein would do this. I reject this work."
-- an unregistered user on archiveofourown

I love this comment so much that I am seriously considering getting it printed on a t-shirt. I keep reading it again and it makes me fall over laughing again.