A breakthrough in Tolkien fandom interpretation!

[elvenpiratelady]

I have wrought two conflicting canon points about Celeborn into a mostly seamless if you don't look very hard timeline!

I should give credit where credit's due: this was all due to one of coppertone 's posts, in which we got around to comparing cracky Silm OTPs (she ships Caranthir/Angrod). And I mentioned that I liked the idea of Celeborn/Luthien.

Yes, I did say Celeborn/Luthien. Don't go away, please, I can explain it all.

What we know about Celeborn: he's a Sinda. He pwns. He's married to Galadriel. He lives in Lothlorien. He's a prince of the Nandor who's lived on the eastern side of the Misty Mountains since the dawn of time.

No, wait, he used to live in Doriath, and he's the grandson of Thingol's brother Elmo (YES I KNOW XD), and he went east with Galadriel.

So here we have two majorly conflicting character backstories about an important canon character. In the Silmarillion, he's in Doriath, and in LOTR he's a Nandor Elf in Lothlorien and always has been. (Second Age is more complicated, but boils down to Not Letting Annatar Into Lothlorien (And Celebrimbor, Stop Hitting On My Wife Or I Cut You).) The fact that we're not sure when Galadriel went east either doesn't help things, but here's my story of Celeborn:

Once upon a time, Celeborn was sweet on Luthien. You know how it goes: they're young and carefree, it's the Age of the Stars with nary an orc in sight across all of Doriath, Thingol and Melian aren't keeping a very strict watch on their daughter. There's probably a lot of dancing under starlight involved. Celeborn writes very bad poems, Luthien turns them into Disney-esque songs.

And then Thingol finds out. (Probably tipped off by Daeron, showing that old habits die hard and that Luthien really needs to learn not to trust everyone she meets.) Melian's all 'o_0... is this how all Elven romances work?'; Elmo's feelings are unknown because we don't know where he is, and Thingol's ready to chop Celeborn into tiny pieces and set fire to them for daring to recite really, really awful love poems to his precious daughter.

And then Luthien intervenes, bats her eyelashes at her father and calms him down. Celeborn gets exiled from Doriath and spends the next two ages hunting orcs with the what-will-be Lothlorien Elves, his youthful love affair gradually fading to a distant memory. Luthien goes back to the woods and dances, but now she's dancing alone under the stars, just waiting for another partner. Eventually Beren* wanders in and the whole fiasco happens again, proving that nobody in Doriath learns from their experiences...

Thingol: Cousins, psychotic minstrels, and now a mortal. She must have been off dancing when the ability to pick a good husband was being handed out.

...and they go off to get the Silmaril &etc.

The First Age ends, Doriath is destroyed, Galadriel passes over the Ered Luin, and Celeborn lets the past go and they become the most awesome couple in Arda.**

That's my version of the events, anyway. (NB: this is what happens when I don't have enough things to think about.)

---

*And I can imagine Celeborn getting so freaked out about THAT. He'd be all 'wtf, Thingol lets his daughter marry a grubby mortal but not me?' and probably goes to Valinor just to yell at him.

GHOST OF BEREN (WHO HAS BEEN SUMMONED BY GALADRIEL'S TRIAL RUN OF THE MIRROR*** OR SOMETHING, FUCK, I DON'T KNOW): At least my children didn't end up with three eyes.

CELEBORN: Yeah, but yours had a beard. That's worse.

**Don't ask me to explain the other story about Celeborn being a Teleri and Olwe's grandson. That's just the same problem with a different woman. And C&G are second cousins in the published Silm, so it's not that much of an improvement...

***Which deserves its own post, because suddenly there's a magic mirror, presto, and nobody knows where it came from! (I guess it is magic. Magic A is Magic A.)

Comments

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

IF HE ISN'T, THEN HIS FANGIRLS CERTAINLY FIT THE BILL.

(You don't think being hopelessly in love with the most beautiful creature to ever walk the earth and being too afraid to ever confess to her, and then watching her fall in love with a mortal, go off into dangers untold and eventually leave Doriath forever and die is sufficient to make him psychotic? He's made of stronger stuff than I thought, then.)

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

WELL, AT LEAST I NOW HAVE AN EXCUSE TO MEET DR MATURIN AND TELL HIM ALL MY WOES.

(You're right - pyschotic is far too aggressive. I can imagine Daeron being the sort of inmate who is no trouble at all - he just sits in the corner and sobs quietly, with occasional escape attempts. I'll take 'obsessive personality', 'depressive' or 'too much black bile', if we're going by the old Greek system. XD)

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

But see, the difference between Stephen and Daeron fangirls is that Stephen can sew people back together if you ask nicely. But since you're Stephen, I really don't know why you're going around cutting people - just makes more work for yourself and gives you less time to collect animals. XD

Stephen or Jack? Now see, I really don't know - because Jack can be by turns courageous, rash, impatient, pragmatic, endearingly thickheaded, or completely oblivious to problems that the rest of the crew can see a mile away (see, for example, Marshall's desperate crush on him). And the crew call him Goldilocks. And Jack, moreover, does not have an ounce of guile in his body - he rarely hides things, takes everything at face value, and his default emotion appears to be unbridled joy in life. And he's pudgy. :D

And then there's Stephen - snarky, cello-playing, confused, Irish, cynical, hurting Stephen, with his bleak thoughts and coded writing and grasp of seven billion languages and utter inability to swim and landlubber tendencies and Classical knowledge and geeky knowledge about the natural world and jaded worldview on politics after the failed rebellion.

I can't possibly choose between them - they're both so awesome. Out of the crew, though, I like Mowett the poetry-sprouting midshipman the best. XD

[sheiannasherra.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... makes sense to me. *grin*

Seriously, this is the problem you run into when heirs insist on publishing incomplete works, especially when they have been revised numerous times. I'm sure JRR Tolkien* never intended these writings, with their numerous changes, to ever be released.

*as opposed to Christopher Tolkien and any other heirs that might continue to drag out tattered notes that JRR left behind - "Oh wait! I found something else that da jotted down on this cocktail napkin!" or whatever cocktail napkins are called in England - because he didn't realize that they would be cannibalized. (I find myself wondering if he's somewhere in the Undying Lands muttering to himself "I knew I should have burned those notes!")

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

On the contrary, I am very much obliged to Tolkien's heirs for publishing his notes, unfinished and perhaps erroneous as they may be. (And I guess none of us will know how erroneous until we meet Tolkien ourselves, and it's a bit of a moot point by then.) Without the posthumous publishings, we'd have LOTR, The Hobbit, and nothing more - no Silmarillion, no Unfinished Tales, no HoME. So I'm very grateful to them. And I like the inconsistencies, because they make for good plotbunny material, and give the impression that this is not a perfect story but a series of incomplete myths, and that Tolkien is the scribe jotting them down for preservation.

And even WITHIN the canon, I can imagine the Elves purposefully telling multiple versions of a story just to mess with their audiences.

For example,

CELEBRIAN: So how did you meet Father, Mother? Was it in Doriath, or Alqualonde, or even in Lothlorien?

GALADRIEL: Well, dear, it's been that long that I honestly don't remember very clearly.

CELEBORN: I can't say I remember it that well either.

GALADRIEL: We'd certainly both drunk enormous amounts of wine...

CELEBORN: I didn't even know her name until the morning after...

CELEBRIAN: o_0!

[dracoena.livejournal.com]

LOL. Tolkien asked for it. We all know he did. :P

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

Tolkien loves his cracky OTPs as much as the next writer. :D

[morethmusing.livejournal.com]

*Looks suspiciously at El* Have you been drinking the IPA again?

Hah - I love it! And hey, you can just about get away with first cousins once removed (if you talk fast and they have a license...)

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

Depends - what's IPA?

And then there's the other version of the story where Celeborn's the grandson of Olwe (making him Galadriel's cousin) and they plan to sail to Middle-earth, but then the Feanorians go all bloodthirsty and they sail anyway. I guess they thought Middle-earth was more... amenable to their relationship. XD

[morethmusing.livejournal.com]

IPA = Isopropyl Alcohol

Ah yes: the other, other story... I think Galadriel just put a load of spoof out there to keep the trash press of Middle Earth confused!

[lethe-lloyd.livejournal.com]

The above being the reason that I *read* The Silmarillion and UT, - and mostly base everything on those books, and *look* through HoME. Yes, I read it, but I don't want to slavishly follow it. There are interesting nuggets, but Tolkien, that myth-builder, was a damn compulsive note-maker, which is understandable, but no-one's mind is so orderly that they never contradict themselves, and at times, fail even to reach an agreement with themselves - as above.

He never got around to taking out the Sun and Moon myth, it would have involved a massive rewrite, but he did comment that that sort of thing does " not work any-more. " I assume he meant it does not work in a world where we know about the Solar System, the Age of the Earth, the sun, etc. Still, I use the old, " Parallel dimension, mate. " get out, and it works for me. d;-)

It's enough reading UT and getting two different parentage's for Amroth, or reading the Silmarillion for 15 years and then finding out that Gil-galad was not Fingon's son and it was a mistake.
Piss off. He's Fingon's son when I write him. It's more poetic.

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

Since I'm more focused on the Silm and UT than LOTR now, I tend to follow their canon rather than LOTR canon. I haven't read HoME at all, since I can't find it. D:

There are interesting nuggets, but Tolkien, that myth-builder, was a damn compulsive note-maker, which is understandable, but no-one's mind is so orderly that they never contradict themselves, and at times, fail even to reach an agreement with themselves - as above. Yes, and the inconsistencies I find interesting more than annoying, because they enhance the impression that this is a series of myths, possibly taken down at great haste, rather than a perfectly constructed fantasy.

Hmm. I rather like the Sun and Moon myth. (And I'm doing geology, and I like the idea of the continents moving around from their positions in the Third Age.)

In the case of Amroth's parentage, you could argue that Malgalad and Amdir were two names for the same Elf - or that Amdir was his father, Malgalad his mother. I also follow the Gil-Galad son of Fingon line, and the Orodreth son of Finarfin. (Although my muses are notoriously meretricious in that regard, and will probably give me plotbunnies with the other versions of those characters just to be difficult. XD)

[lethe-lloyd.livejournal.com]

I find interesting more than annoying, because they enhance the impression that this is a series of myths, possibly taken down at great haste, rather than a perfectly constructed fantasy

Tolkien's Elves are mythological, he did not * create * them, even some of the legends crop up in northern European legend, so I view it as notes of a * real ancient history *. :)

http://www.shelltown.net/~dangweth/elfsaga.html

It's also why I cannot slavishly follow canon, since in * real * history, much is forgotten, unrecorded or deliberately altered, according to who is writing it.

I was thinking of Amroth being Galadriel's son, I did not go for that one, besides it would have made the character too potentially * famous *, and that was not on.

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

Yes, I know that Tolkien's Elves are modelled on the Celtic legends (although his Elves, it must be said, are generally more kindly disposed to humans).

Huh. I completely forgot the story about Amroth being C&G's son - and I don't really like it either. I can see them acting as parental figures/mentors to him after his father dies in the Last Alliance, but flesh-and-blood parents? No, that doesn't sit right with me.

[lethe-lloyd.livejournal.com]

Huh. I completely forgot the story about Amroth being C&G's son - and I don't really like it either. I can see them acting as parental figures/mentors to him after his father dies in the Last Alliance, but flesh-and-blood parents? No, that doesn't sit right with me.

I couldn't go for it either, and never intended to use it. I preferred the son of Amdir and a Sindar prince. But you're right, it does look as if Tolkien was himself sifting through piles of old texts. :)

Yes, I know that Tolkien's Elves are modelled on the Celtic legends (although his Elves, it must be said, are generally more kindly disposed to humans).

Perhaps back then, but as Mortal's spread and grew they became less kindly disposed " more dangerous and less wise " as Tolkien says in the Hobbit about the Wood-Elves. d;-)