Today I am thinking about Fingon’s search parties for Turgon, Aredhel, Idril, and everyone else who went to Gondolin
I think that Gondolin’s isolation remains a sore spot between Fingon and Turgon for…a while.
because Fingon went from having his father and two younger siblings and niece to very abruptly having just his father, with a significant number of their people also missing, with no indication of what happened, and then while they’re fighting and dying (and mostly dying) Gondolin is apparently ignoring all of it. Which…would Fingolfin had still done his suicide charge if he knew that Turgon was still alive and that Gondolin still existed?
And then, on top of Fingolfin’s suicide charge, the Eagles pick up his body and Fingon’s done miraculous Eagle-based rescues before, he’s got to be hoping that the Eagles will take his father to Valinor for healing, but no. Turgon gets to bury their father and Fingon gets to try and figure out when to give up hope that he’s still somehow alive.
(And then there’s the whole Maeglin mess. AU where Aredhel runs into one of Fingon’s search parties while escaping from Eöl. Also, given the ways medicine progresses, there’s a decent chance that Fingolfin and Fingon’s healers have enough experience with poisons than Gondolin’s don’t to save Aredhel.)
So. yeah I think they’ll need to be separated at family dinners for a while afterwards.
Re: healing the poison… It is my firm personal conviction that Eol would not have been able to attempt to assassinate Maeglin / poison Aredhel anywhere but one of the hidden cities. If that confrontation takes place in any other city, I think Eol may have been frisk searched before the audience, and certainly too closely guarded to get the shot off. The fact that he had a poisoned weapon on his person while having an audience with the king, as persona non grata for offending the king’s sister… well. That would only happen in a place with a certain baseline presumption of safety that exists in Gondolin, and likely Nargothrond and Menegroth. But not in Barad Eithel or Himring. And Curufin may not strip Eol when he’s just passing through, but I think that changes if Aredhel is present, telling him her side of the story, and confronting the person she’s fleeing from.
In Turgon’s defense, Thorondor did tell Hithlum what happened to Fingolfin. He just saved the corpse for Gondolin.
It’s not only a weapon, it’s an obvious weapon—I know Tolkien says he concealed it, but the smallest thrown darts (that are used for killing things and not bar games) are maybe a foot long, and most darts are a good bit bigger—more like 4-6 feet. If we take into account that it’s also called a javelin, we’re looking at a weapon potentially up to 8 or 9 feet long. (Titian’s Venus and Adonis has Adonis holding a hunting dart if you want a visual reference. It’s not a subtle weapon.) If the dart is particularly small he might be able to hide it, but the smaller it is the less likely it is to kill or do significant damage. He might have concealed it magically, though, since he does do magic on more than one occasion.
It had to be a hidden city without contact with anyone else—it had to be one where their primary safety concern was secrecy more than anything else. Which rules out this happening in Nargothrond, actually: while hidden, it was never secret. Lots of people know where Nargothrond is, and the petty-dwarves had made an attempt on Finrod’s life, so while they might not be as strict as Himring, they’d still at least make sure Eöl was unarmed, I think.
Ah, what I get for going off of my memory without double-checking.
I just really want Fingon and Turgon to yell at each other about this. And to have uncomfortably tense family dinners for a few centuries.
The idea of Gondolin was to have somewhere to retreat to and survive, hidden places in case the Siege of Angband broke, but Turgon’s utmost secrecy and no one being allowed in means it can’t be a spot to retreat to, and at some point disappearing with a third of Fingolfin’s army puts a bit of the blame on you for the Noldor’s losses. And then to top it all off—sure Gondolin lasts the longest of the realms, but it’s undone by its own secrecy and it doesn’t last that much longer than the rest, so what was even the point?
Also: did Turgon actually enforce the no-one leaves rule before Eöl? He doesn’t with Aredhel, but she is his sister, and Húrin and Huor were explicit exceptions. Did Turgon kill people to maintain the secrecy? Because it’s implied that he was at least willing to.
Oh man I forgot he took a full THIRD of Fingofin’s forces with him, that is such a huge chunk of manpower(elf power?) and fighting forces just completely removed from the chessboard that is Beleriand. And it’s not like he only took non-combatants with him (which would have been a whole other problem of leaving everyone else unsupplied) seeing as a significant number of Balrogs got the beat down of their lives during the fall of Gondolin. I don’t have a map of Beleriand handy, does anyone know where he took people from when he made Gondolin? I don’t think they were frontline and so the Bragollach might have left them alone, but all those people might not have stayed exactly where they were, and if those forces had been deployed elsewhere when the Bragollach started……
As for Turgon killing people to maintain Gondolin’s secrecy, doesn’t he explicitly threaten to kill Eol if he doesn’t want to stay? I’m going yeah he’s killed people. Also, his execution of Eol was like, a state-sanctioned execution, not a heat of the moment tit-for-tat murder which implies to me that Gondolin has carried out state-sanctioned executions for SOMETHING in the past. Which given the whole kinslayer taboo among elves is BATSHIT WILD to me but I guess if you just push them off a cliff and they die from the fall that doesn’t count right?(/s) Or maybe he’s got a headsman who killed at Alqualonde and doesn’t care anymore. Details. Turgon’s totally killed/had people killed for threatening the secrecy of Gondolin.
Finrod definitely did better with Nargothrod being a fallback point than Turgon did with Gondolin, he even explicitly took people in when Celegorm and Curufin came to him after their territory fell. Didn’t end well for him, but, well, silmarills get involved and anything gets fucky. And while it was his death, it wasn’t the end of Nargothrod, which went to Orodreth for… idk how long exactly, timelines are not my forte. I do know it still existed to not send soldiers to the Nirnaeth but it also didn’t last much longer than the other Noldor strongholds.
I wonder now if Ulmo hadn’t told Finrod and Turgon to build their cities what difference that would have made in the geographical positioning of people in Beleriand, and how much/if it would have helped at all. I do wonder if Ulmo knew how long the cities would(n’t) last and if he did, why bother making sure they get made? Yeah they’re safe and cozy in their cities, but so is everyone else during the long peace (like 400 years). What’s the point? Ulmo’s a bro and I appreciate him trying, but what was his goal here?
Turgon first built Vinyamar in Nevrast—right on the coast. Not front line, though as you mention they might have moved around if they didn’t go to Gondolin, and if they had stayed in Vinyamar they wouldn’t have been impacted by the Bragollach, which primarily hit Ard-Galen, Dorthonion, and Thargelion. As it stands, however, the Bragollach was right on Turgon’s doorstep and he didn’t help. Angrod and Aegnor were ruling Dorthonion and died defending it. Finrod came to help, and Nargothrond is south of Doriath!
Eöl has the extenuating circumstance of also being a murderer when he gets pushed off the cliff. (Along with any other crimes Turgon wants to levy at him for Aredhel; certainly Curufin’s comment to Eöl indicates that the Noldor don’t see that marriage as legitimate and Curufin straight up says that Eöl isn’t their kin.) I definitely think execution is something that Turgon threatens, maybe it just…doesn’t come up ever…and Turgon doesn’t push people from cliffs just to keep things a secret. Maybe that’s the case. Hope is a virtue. He definitely does abandon them in the mountains though.
Nargothrond, Doriath, and Gondolin all survived the Nirnaeth and fell in that order. Nargothrond survived until Túrin showed up, so really they were just unlucky and got themselves tangled up in not one but two curses. Gondolin, meanwhile, was promised by Ulmo to last the longest of the Elvish realms, which it does by just barely beating out Doriath (which had gotten! involved! with the Silmarils!) before collapsing completely independently of the Silmarils. Like, of those three realms, two got tangled up in the Silmarils and Túrin before falling and the third…sort of got involved in Túrin via Húrin, I suppose, but that was Turgon’s own damn fault and required no input from Morgoth other than surveillance.
Maybe Ulmo foresaw Eärendil going to Valinor and knew they needed a Gondolin to have Idril and Tuor get married and reproduce in? Though Ulmo’s message via Tuor is “time to leave,” so who knows. Probably without Gondolin the people in Vinyamar would stay there and be reinforcements for Fingolfin’s forces in Mithrim during the Bragollach, and the city would fall to Morgoth after the Nirnaeth. Which…doesn’t change much of anything, actually.
That’s a wonderful map, thank you for that and the timeline assistance. I never realized how far away Vinyamar and Gondolin really are? That’s a little bizarre actually, that while trying to go into hiding Turgon would risk moving across so much open land where other elves (various Sindar I imagine) could see them and tell someone where they had been seen and what direction they were moving in. I assume Turgon had a specific type of terrain in mind to build Gondolin in and then had to go find it, seeing as beaches really don’t lend themselves to hiding cities in.
Which actually brings me back to your original point about Fingon looking for everyone who went missing, and wondering if he was just straight up looking in the wrong place. Like, you start with everyone’s last known location of Vinyamar and work outwards, and would he consider that Turgon would take that many people that far? But moving that many people is going to leave a trace, barring divine intervention (which is on the table here via Ulmo, but ignoring that for a second) so okay, Fingon goes to Vinyamar, starts looking, finds signs of mass migration of people, follows it, follows it, follows it, how far can he follow? Does he wonder for years afterwards, if only I were a better tracker I could have found them, I could have helped? How long does it take for that to sour into “They abandoned me. And father. And the war and vengeance and everything else we came to Beleriand for.”
Going back to map-induced realizations, yeah Vinyamar is not strategically placed to do anything other than provide backup during the Bragollach but you’re right that Gondolin totally is in the thick of it! If you had marched out of your hidden city and come to your father’s aid maybe he wouldn’t have suicide-charged Morgoth out of despair, Turgon. Then again, he’d have to deliver the news about Aredhel, so maybe that would have happened anyway. Or he could have (maybe) marched across to the pass of Aglon after Aegnor and Angrod fell (or before) to help close that up. I think it’s said that Meadhros managed to retake that area, but not Maglor’s gap, so if Turgon sent at least some people to hold one pass Maedhros could turn around and hopefully close the other one again.
Maybe I’m being optimistic about how Turgon coming out of hiding could have fixed things, but dammit Gondolin BOTHERS me. I want him to be narratively rewarded for breaking the secrecy of Gondolin because the actual silm doesn’t reward him for keeping it.
Today I am thinking about Fingon’s search parties for Turgon, Aredhel, Idril, and everyone else who went to Gondolin
I think that Gondolin’s isolation remains a sore spot between Fingon and Turgon for…a while.
because Fingon went from having his father and two younger siblings and niece to very abruptly having just his father, with a significant number of their people also missing, with no indication of what happened, and then while they’re fighting and dying (and mostly dying) Gondolin is apparently ignoring all of it. Which…would Fingolfin had still done his suicide charge if he knew that Turgon was still alive and that Gondolin still existed?
And then, on top of Fingolfin’s suicide charge, the Eagles pick up his body and Fingon’s done miraculous Eagle-based rescues before, he’s got to be hoping that the Eagles will take his father to Valinor for healing, but no. Turgon gets to bury their father and Fingon gets to try and figure out when to give up hope that he’s still somehow alive.
(And then there’s the whole Maeglin mess. AU where Aredhel runs into one of Fingon’s search parties while escaping from Eöl. Also, given the ways medicine progresses, there’s a decent chance that Fingolfin and Fingon’s healers have enough experience with poisons than Gondolin’s don’t to save Aredhel.)
So. yeah I think they’ll need to be separated at family dinners for a while afterwards.
Re: healing the poison… It is my firm personal conviction that Eol would not have been able to attempt to assassinate Maeglin / poison Aredhel anywhere but one of the hidden cities. If that confrontation takes place in any other city, I think Eol may have been frisk searched before the audience, and certainly too closely guarded to get the shot off. The fact that he had a poisoned weapon on his person while having an audience with the king, as persona non grata for offending the king’s sister… well. That would only happen in a place with a certain baseline presumption of safety that exists in Gondolin, and likely Nargothrond and Menegroth. But not in Barad Eithel or Himring. And Curufin may not strip Eol when he’s just passing through, but I think that changes if Aredhel is present, telling him her side of the story, and confronting the person she’s fleeing from.
In Turgon’s defense, Thorondor did tell Hithlum what happened to Fingolfin. He just saved the corpse for Gondolin.
It’s not only a weapon, it’s an obvious weapon—I know Tolkien says he concealed it, but the smallest thrown darts (that are used for killing things and not bar games) are maybe a foot long, and most darts are a good bit bigger—more like 4-6 feet. If we take into account that it’s also called a javelin, we’re looking at a weapon potentially up to 8 or 9 feet long. (Titian’s Venus and Adonis has Adonis holding a hunting dart if you want a visual reference. It’s not a subtle weapon.) If the dart is particularly small he might be able to hide it, but the smaller it is the less likely it is to kill or do significant damage. He might have concealed it magically, though, since he does do magic on more than one occasion.
It had to be a hidden city without contact with anyone else—it had to be one where their primary safety concern was secrecy more than anything else. Which rules out this happening in Nargothrond, actually: while hidden, it was never secret. Lots of people know where Nargothrond is, and the petty-dwarves had made an attempt on Finrod’s life, so while they might not be as strict as Himring, they’d still at least make sure Eöl was unarmed, I think.
Ah, what I get for going off of my memory without double-checking.
I just really want Fingon and Turgon to yell at each other about this. And to have uncomfortably tense family dinners for a few centuries.
The idea of Gondolin was to have somewhere to retreat to and survive, hidden places in case the Siege of Angband broke, but Turgon’s utmost secrecy and no one being allowed in means it can’t be a spot to retreat to, and at some point disappearing with a third of Fingolfin’s army puts a bit of the blame on you for the Noldor’s losses. And then to top it all off—sure Gondolin lasts the longest of the realms, but it’s undone by its own secrecy and it doesn’t last that much longer than the rest, so what was even the point?
Also: did Turgon actually enforce the no-one leaves rule before Eöl? He doesn’t with Aredhel, but she is his sister, and Húrin and Huor were explicit exceptions. Did Turgon kill people to maintain the secrecy? Because it’s implied that he was at least willing to.
Oh man I forgot he took a full THIRD of Fingofin’s forces with him, that is such a huge chunk of manpower(elf power?) and fighting forces just completely removed from the chessboard that is Beleriand. And it’s not like he only took non-combatants with him (which would have been a whole other problem of leaving everyone else unsupplied) seeing as a significant number of Balrogs got the beat down of their lives during the fall of Gondolin. I don’t have a map of Beleriand handy, does anyone know where he took people from when he made Gondolin? I don’t think they were frontline and so the Bragollach might have left them alone, but all those people might not have stayed exactly where they were, and if those forces had been deployed elsewhere when the Bragollach started……
As for Turgon killing people to maintain Gondolin’s secrecy, doesn’t he explicitly threaten to kill Eol if he doesn’t want to stay? I’m going yeah he’s killed people. Also, his execution of Eol was like, a state-sanctioned execution, not a heat of the moment tit-for-tat murder which implies to me that Gondolin has carried out state-sanctioned executions for SOMETHING in the past. Which given the whole kinslayer taboo among elves is BATSHIT WILD to me but I guess if you just push them off a cliff and they die from the fall that doesn’t count right?(/s) Or maybe he’s got a headsman who killed at Alqualonde and doesn’t care anymore. Details. Turgon’s totally killed/had people killed for threatening the secrecy of Gondolin.
Finrod definitely did better with Nargothrod being a fallback point than Turgon did with Gondolin, he even explicitly took people in when Celegorm and Curufin came to him after their territory fell. Didn’t end well for him, but, well, silmarills get involved and anything gets fucky. And while it was his death, it wasn’t the end of Nargothrod, which went to Orodreth for… idk how long exactly, timelines are not my forte. I do know it still existed to not send soldiers to the Nirnaeth but it also didn’t last much longer than the other Noldor strongholds.
I wonder now if Ulmo hadn’t told Finrod and Turgon to build their cities what difference that would have made in the geographical positioning of people in Beleriand, and how much/if it would have helped at all. I do wonder if Ulmo knew how long the cities would(n’t) last and if he did, why bother making sure they get made? Yeah they’re safe and cozy in their cities, but so is everyone else during the long peace (like 400 years). What’s the point? Ulmo’s a bro and I appreciate him trying, but what was his goal here?
Today I am thinking about Fingon’s search parties for Turgon, Aredhel, Idril, and everyone else who went to Gondolin
I think that Gondolin’s isolation remains a sore spot between Fingon and Turgon for…a while.
because Fingon went from having his father and two younger siblings and niece to very abruptly having just his father, with a significant number of their people also missing, with no indication of what happened, and then while they’re fighting and dying (and mostly dying) Gondolin is apparently ignoring all of it. Which…would Fingolfin had still done his suicide charge if he knew that Turgon was still alive and that Gondolin still existed?
And then, on top of Fingolfin’s suicide charge, the Eagles pick up his body and Fingon’s done miraculous Eagle-based rescues before, he’s got to be hoping that the Eagles will take his father to Valinor for healing, but no. Turgon gets to bury their father and Fingon gets to try and figure out when to give up hope that he’s still somehow alive.
(And then there’s the whole Maeglin mess. AU where Aredhel runs into one of Fingon’s search parties while escaping from Eöl. Also, given the ways medicine progresses, there’s a decent chance that Fingolfin and Fingon’s healers have enough experience with poisons than Gondolin’s don’t to save Aredhel.)
So. yeah I think they’ll need to be separated at family dinners for a while afterwards.
Re: healing the poison… It is my firm personal conviction that Eol would not have been able to attempt to assassinate Maeglin / poison Aredhel anywhere but one of the hidden cities. If that confrontation takes place in any other city, I think Eol may have been frisk searched before the audience, and certainly too closely guarded to get the shot off. The fact that he had a poisoned weapon on his person while having an audience with the king, as persona non grata for offending the king’s sister… well. That would only happen in a place with a certain baseline presumption of safety that exists in Gondolin, and likely Nargothrond and Menegroth. But not in Barad Eithel or Himring. And Curufin may not strip Eol when he’s just passing through, but I think that changes if Aredhel is present, telling him her side of the story, and confronting the person she’s fleeing from.
In Turgon’s defense, Thorondor did tell Hithlum what happened to Fingolfin. He just saved the corpse for Gondolin.
It’s not only a weapon, it’s an obvious weapon—I know Tolkien says he concealed it, but the smallest thrown darts (that are used for killing things and not bar games) are maybe a foot long, and most darts are a good bit bigger—more like 4-6 feet. If we take into account that it’s also called a javelin, we’re looking at a weapon potentially up to 8 or 9 feet long. (Titian’s Venus and Adonis has Adonis holding a hunting dart if you want a visual reference. It’s not a subtle weapon.) If the dart is particularly small he might be able to hide it, but the smaller it is the less likely it is to kill or do significant damage. He might have concealed it magically, though, since he does do magic on more than one occasion.
It had to be a hidden city without contact with anyone else—it had to be one where their primary safety concern was secrecy more than anything else. Which rules out this happening in Nargothrond, actually: while hidden, it was never secret. Lots of people know where Nargothrond is, and the petty-dwarves had made an attempt on Finrod’s life, so while they might not be as strict as Himring, they’d still at least make sure Eöl was unarmed, I think.
Ah, what I get for going off of my memory without double-checking.
hey netizens! i’m not sure how many people are aware, but youtube’s been slowly rolling out a new anti-adblock policy that can’t be bypassed with the usual software like uBlock Origin and Pi-Hole out of the gate
BUT, if you’re a uBlock Origin user (or use an adblocker with a similar cosmetics modifier), you can add these commands in the uBlock dashboard to get rid of it!
reblog to help keep the internet less annoying and to tell corporations that try shit like this to go fuck themselves <3
Where do I copy-paste these to? “My filters”? “My Rules”?
‘my filters’! if you look closely you’ll notice the format is different between the two pages. the (website)(##)(additional text) format goes in filters
Szeth gentle parenting Nightblood is so fucking funny man
Vasher interacting with Nightblood:
Nightblood: you should destroy evil!!! You never do that!
Vasher: if you don’t shut the fuck up I’m locking you in a closet forever
Szeth interacting with Nightblood: what do you think I should eat for dinner sword-nimi? The souls of the evil? A good suggestion, but I was thinking maybe sandwich
Laws and Customs of the Eldar,
full text from
The History of Middle-earth: Morgoth’s Ring. This essay written by J.R.R. Tolkien, with
commentary by Christopher Tolkien, includes information on the elven
life cycle and marriage, roles of men and women, Noldor naming customs,
the fëa and hröa, death and rebirth, and the complex
matter of Finwë & Míriel & Indis. Whether you want to write
‘LaCE’-compliant fic or not, it’s interesting reading.
The Silmarillion Writers’ Guild
Character of the Month Biographies are great, comprehensive
summaries of what Tolkien wrote about a particular character, complete
with quotations and references, with some commentary. They’re written by many
different contributors so they differ from one another but all are useful
when you want to learn about a character.
Henneth Annun character bios contain less commentary but there are lots of them, including for minor characters, from the Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The Hobbit and LotR. Bios include facts and quotes about the characters.
Apparently Celegorm and Finrod were the same character at one point earlier in Tolkien’s works and honestly it explains so much about the things I found odd/strange about Beren and Luthien/The Lay of Leithian in the broader context of the Silmarillion.
I find the idea of this proto-Celegorm/Finrod being forced to choose between two simultaneous and contradictory oaths to be extremely compelling. In a way I’m kind of sad that Tolkien didn’t stick with it, but I also love both Celegorm and Finrod as characters independently and it’s hard to imagine the Silmarillion without Finrod proper. However this definitely explains where the werewolf throat removal idea came from.
I attached the article by Dawn Felagund from the Silmarillion Writer’s Guild below.
i want to write whole paragraphs in response to this and am holding myself back but the crucial thing is it isn’t just HIS jugular that the knife is held to!! even without the secondary effect of weakening the fight against Odium’s forces, their bond is implied to hold hostage the habitability of Roshar itself
The Stormfathers continued existence is so fucking important to Roshar, if he becomes a deadeye, like. Game over. everybody is fucked. But if he does nothing, they might be all fucked anyway! And he gets approached by Gavilar and Dalinar of all fucking people, these motherfuckers wouldn’t be my first, last, or ever choice for bondsmiths good god. Gavilar has fingers in every pie, double-crossings all over the place, any spren of his would not live long. And Dalinar pulled the mother of all about-faces after Evi’s death which is a good thing, mostly, but any spren considering him would have that in the back of their brain like. He has the potential to completely flip what he cares about and how he’s gonna do everything and fuck anyone in his way. Are you really gonna risk it?
And then you remember. THE STORMFATHER HAND-PICKED THESE MOTHERFUCKERS TO GIVE THE VISIONS TO. He’s making his own toxic mess, this is toxic-for-toxic, reap what you sew, etc etc.
thinking about a fic in which Maedhros, kinslayer thrice over, haggard wreck of an elf, having lost all hope and purpose casts himself into a volcano—
and wakes up as Prince Maitimo, eldest son of the eldest son, safe and sound in Tirion-upon-Túna, with Treelight streaming in through his window.
Maitimo trying to convince Fëanor [not to threaten Fingolfin / keep the Silmarils hidden / not trust Melkor’s whisperings / etc], trying to make it better and avoid the Exile, and of course it turns into an argument, because when has Fëanor ever been easily convinced of something against his will, and Fëanor accuses Maitimo of favoring Nolofinwë and Findekáno and forgetting him
Maedhros, who once gave everything to the Oath, shouting I am your loyal son! with such force that Fëanor actually stops to listen
Maitimo hasn’t properly argued with Fëanor since he was an elf-teenager and they had a screaming match over his friendship with Findekáno that lasted multiple years and nearly burned down the house. It was awful, everyone hated it, they both said things that they regret and mostly didn’t mean, and Maitimo has consciously avoided arguing with his father ever since. (Losgar was a reprise of that fight.) Maedhros, on the singular hand,
His spirit does still burn like a white fire within, but it’s not a constant thing—Estë, Vairë, and Nienna (because this is their scheming, lbr) have muted his memories of Beleriand, so the spirit-burns-like-white-fire-within as-someone-returned-from-the-dead aspects are similarly muted. If he’s calling on those memories, he does become more Maedhros and less Maitimo and gets increasingly more terrifying, but most of the time he’s just a little more intense than he used to be. That way it a) doesn’t immediately reveal to the other Valar, Melkor included, what they’ve done, b) doesn’t terrify all the other elves too much, and c) doesn’t drive Maedhros absolutely mad, which would be counterproductive to the goal of healing.
op i had to pull out your tag about our favourite adrenaline junkie 😂
conversely, of course, Maedhros/Maitimo sees Fingon being vibrant and innocent and ALIVE and gets super protective
I’m right and should say it.
The tension between “I know Fingon is a great warrior and valiant and he can handle himself” and “Findekáno is alive and unscarred and I am going to keep him that way” gets complicated by two things. First, that Findekáno is the sort of person to go and do dangerous shit because he’s bored, and second, that Maedhros is the only person that knows that Ungoliant is lurking in Avathar, and he needs her to get found before she and Melkor make friends. For this, he needs…well, a valiant adrenaline junkie to go explore Avathar and notice the giant spider there.
to be fair, Huan was always Tyelkormo’s Adult Supervision as far as Maitimo was concerned, but yes. Previously Findekáno and Findaráto might have qualified as Adult Supervision, but now they are definitely not. This is why Maedhros is going on the Spider Hunting Camping Trip with them when usually he wouldn’t. And why he’s about to invent the child leash.
The goal: go camping in Avathar, find evidence of a giant spider to bring to the Valar, and get Tulkas to fight it.
The reality: Maedhros has to tie them all up so that they don’t try to fight the giant spider themselves. Someone definitely gets badly hurt. On the plus side, they definitely have proof of a giant spider…
(Sidebar: does Maedhros know what happened to Aredhel? Maeglin was at the Nirnaeth, but Gondolin arrived late and the Feanorians were already betrayed by that point, and I don’t think Maedhros was really on speaking terms with the rest of the family afterwards.)
Ah, but you assume that Maedhros would show visible signs of injury during a battle! He absolutely doesn’t because it’s fine, it’s not that bad, barely even a scratch, and none of the others are expecting any of them to get seriously hurt so they don’t notice until, back in Tirion, Maitimo doesn’t join them for dinner and they find him unconscious at his writing desk in a pool of his own blood with a poisoned wound that dissolves the stitches put into it and makes bandages disintegrate.
#getting bit by ungoliant must suck immensely#he needs intensive treelight and possibly a visit to lorien#(his bed is placed next to miriel’s for maximum Cause Pain To Feanor)#maedhros -@eleneressea
OK but you know who that’ll hit harder than Feanor? Finwe.
Well, to cause even more pain and trauma: it is my headcanon that Maitimo’s craft is fiber arts, like his grandmother, so he’s not found dead collapsed at his desk…but at his loom, like Míriel was.
Oh no! Unlight-tainted bloodstains all over an almost-finished piece! Adding insult to injury!
Makalaurë volunteered to go drag Maitimo out of his room for dinner, then shouted for help and brought the whole house running, so everyone’s got a nice dose of trauma from seeing their brother/son pale and lifeless in a pool of his own blood. Nerdanel was the only person to be even mildly functional because Fëanor was frozen in place and the kids were all panicking, so she sent Makalaurë out to tell Finwë, and got Tyelkormo and Curufinwë and Carnistir to pick him up and move him to the bed, and sent the twins out riding to get a healer, and then basically collapsed under her own weight and the weight of her grief and worry.
At which point Fëanor unfroze and went into his workshop and pulled out a prototype of his latest project, a method to intensify and store Treelight, because Treelight is healing and there’s something distinctly Wrong with that wound.
And while that is a Silmaril, it’s not been hallowed yet, so all it can do is stave off the Unlight and keep it from unmaking Maitimo’s hröa, it can’t actually get rid of the infection.
ALT
![words of radiance excerpt: 'Life before death!' Dalinar shouted. 'Strength before weakness! Journey before destination!' / I AM THE SLIVER OF THE ALMIGHTY HIMSELF! the voice said, sounding angry. I AM THE STORMFATHER. I WILL NOT LET MYSELF BE BOUND IN SUCH A WAY AS TO KILL ME! / 'I need you,' Dalinar said. [end transcript] 'I need you' is highlighted yellow.](https://64.media.tumblr.com/bd31682e36b33fb136c60eb3c9d3ebce/7b1c0695ec5838cf-f8/s500x750/2d175051424d95677bf970beec2f8a7981b616f9.jpg)
