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Originally Posted by Galadriel55
OMG. I have never realized this before. This is... mindtwisting. And it makes the disappointment of the Nirnaeth so much more personal for Maedhros. I wonder if that's what pushes him over the edge to the point where he allows himself to be convinced by his jerk of a brother to proceed with the Second Kinslaying - or even what lays the seeds of bitterness and mistrust that prompts him to reject Eonwe's summons and attempt to steal the Silmarils after they are recovered? "I thought that perhaps you were not so coldhearted, and would help us in a righteous cause, I thought you sent us a sign that we should have hope - but that was so false hope and wishful thinking..." Oh. My. God.
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It's almost as though Tolkien actually thought his characters' motivations through...!
(No, actually that is surprising, for the Silm; the number of times he rejigged random bits of the story gives very much the opposite impression.)
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Originally Posted by Galadriel55
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Yep, that's lovely.
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Originally Posted by Galadriel55
So, saying that... I think my favourite is "I will fight to hold/claim once more that which is mine!".
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Well, you're singing it! That's the one I landed on, too, with a slight preference towards "claim".
Quote:
Originally Posted by Galadriel55
I love the birch trees! Brethil or no, they are wonderful! (But good to know that we are actually still very much in canonical land.  ) |
The beauty of Middle-earth is that Tolkien created such a broad and deep setting that you can always wriggle
anything into being canonical. I could've gone field, hills, river or swamp and still found somewhere to fit it. (Possibly even better than Brethil would have been Tasarinan with the willows, but eh, I like birch.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Galadriel55
I think it's a BOTH song, to be fair. The set up is Beren dreaming about Luthien, but her part is indeed her leaving Doriath as a direct response (foreseeable conequence?) to the two previous pieces. "And she will follow only him" - as, indeed, she does. But then Beren starts singing and it's like he's glimpsing Luthien far away in a dream, without realizing what she's singing, only knowing that she is there, because he thinks that he's seeing a vision of her from the past, from before Thingol caught word of them ("that night when in your love I rejoiced"). I agree, it didn't sound to me like Luthien really has a vision in this song, but if we wanted to make it about dreams on both sides it wouldn't be wrong to link it to her dreaming that Beren is (will be?) in trouble. The Zong timeline seems to be a little different from the Sil/Lay timeline, I suppose to make the songs flow and integrate better. Or, can it still be stretched, as you say, as pushing one dream forward and one backward in time?
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Yeah, that sounds about right. It might be interesting to compare the Zong timeline to the Lost Tales version, and see if it matches up a bit better.
(Utterly unrelated: good grief, I've just discovered the
3-volume edition of HoME, which sounds frankly terrifying!)
hS