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Originally Posted by Huinesoron
That's lovely!  I really liked the invocation of the burning at Losgar, which I hadn't caught in the written lyrics; also the two Tolkien lines, "O King" and "Above all shadows". |
^.^ The whole thing was a little bit of a "how many direct references to the like 3 paragraphs of text describing this story can I fit into the lyrics", but of course those two lines were the raison d'etre for the whole thing. Some of the others got warped to fit into the rhythm, and the reason O King fits perfectly is that it was the first line written. Above All Shadows though is just a lucky coincidence.
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Originally Posted by Hui
(My own headcanon is that "In western lands beneath the sun" is in fact the song sung by Fingon and Maedhros; it doesn't make the blindest bit of sense, since even in the Round World setting there was definitely no sun in Valinor in their childhood, but it pleases me. ^_^)
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There is definitely a parallel there - call it Tolkien reusing Sil ideas for TA stuff, or Sam somehow divining the spirit of this same thing that happened two Ages ago, or that the only logical thing to do (apparently) when you're lost while looking for a friend deep in enemy territory is to sing as loud as possible. But the two stories got cemented in my head as versions of the same "Platonic form" after
this riddle. It's the same event with a TA hobbit and a FA Elf take on it.
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Originally Posted by Hui
The plea to Manwe done this way got me thinking about how the pair would have seen the intervention: the first indication either of them had had that the Valar hadn't entirely forsaken them. (Er... other than Anar, of course!) It makes me wonder whether they would have kept it as a private miracle, or spread it about to give their people hope.
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That... is a very good question. My first instinct was to say that surely the secret must have leaked out somehow, because it's gotta be a known fact, and neither bloke survives the FA to pass on the tale to the future generations. But then I thought that what is written in The Sil is not necessarily "common knowledge", neither of the FA nor of future Ages. And even if it is the legends that descended down from the ancient times, how much of it is true versus how much was added on to fill in gaps or for special effects? Maybe there was no Eagle at all and some inspired bard just decided this would make the tale more interesting. What I dread most of all is that this train of thought is about to derail straight into the dark pit that has "canonicity" spelled in big letters over it, and that is not where I want to go.
But for an in-story and in-character answer, I almost wanna say that they would not reveal the entire story right away. I feel like the pair of them coming back and bragging that Manwe sent them an Eagle would actually not give people hope, but false expectation or confusion, like the Valar are inconsistent parents who can't decide how they want to punish the kids. Or, as a better equivalent, it would create a little murmur of discontent along the lines of "Why didn't they send the Eagles to Mord... erm, Angband to help us with finishing the job". I think that the line of "you are punished and on your own but we still love you and you are never truly entirely on your own" is a very fine one to tread, and the message can get garbled in the telling. I think what might be the more likely retelling is a vague but very firm "Manwe answered our prayers... and so we're here". And perhaps over time more of the story came out. Perhaps Fingon recounts it after Thorondor brings back Fingolfin's body. Or perhaps Maedhros recounts it after Fingon's death. This is totally unfounded on any textual evidence, this is all headcanon.
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Originally Posted by Hui
Movie Maker is... yeah. I wound up downloading a version from about 2008 to get it to work right for the Zong (before I switched to whatever I'm using now). Ummm... Wikipedia claims that the "paid version" is actually a scam, though the only scam elements are 1) asking you to pay and 2) making it hard to install the 2016 version of the software, which kind of sucked anyway. |
Huh. Perhaps the word "tampered" would have deterred me from downloading it, but it was from Windows store app thing and not from the internet browser, so maybe my computer's safe? If I also read up on this before doing it, I would have noticed that the intro paragraph offers an alternative product that my computer should already have installed. :/ I don't do tech very well, as I'm sure you've figured out by now...
As an aside, is it a bad thing that I've been searching Youtube periodically this week to see if any new clips came up after Sunday's performance? (They haven't, none that I've found)