reply rambling stuff

gurguliare replied to your post:
                   gurguliare replied to your post:
               …                

   also i have never helped anyone with facts in my life but my
IMPRESSION is–well, one, yes, definitely enormous porousness in
practice. two, i guess, that most people most places had a firm grasp on
‘fiction’ and ‘truth’ as distinct concepts, but like, often in the
sense that truth is IMPORTANT, and lying is bad! so even if everyone
knows entertainment is entertainment, the artist should still make a
show of claimed legitimacy/historical antecedents. 

Yeah, it’s funny to think about what “legitimate historical antecedents” would qualify as if, like, there are people who can say “um, I was ACTUALLY THERE BRUH this is totally wrong”….like we were discussing in that other convo a few weeks ago. It would be like being able to time-travel back to the proper time period, except if the time-travel wouldn’t even necessarily be mind-blowing or anything because it was something people were always able to do?

ANYHOW I AM REALLY NUTS about that meta which @kareenvorbarra wrote about Sirion perhaps being a big cultural center and the period between the second and third kinslayings being this cultural explosion due to everyone being mashed together and in the same boat and…being able to actually ask each other what happened! except lol.

but like, it’s that… performative paranoia… about all the liars and
storyfrauds out there that informs so MUCH of the way bullshit eclectic
histories and legends and so on are framed, and that almost compels the
weird admixture of accepted history and real history and total nonsense,
for sales…… anyway uhhhh i’m trying to think how to connect this back
to elves    

Heh yeah well for elves I’d think that like…I’m thinking again about the BOLT version of the Fall of Gondolin, where it’s like, one guy’s attempts to piece together what he saw with what someone told him that his sister told him about what her friend told her about what her dad saw on the other side of the city, probably, maybe. And like, it’s actually just “well this is about 40% made-up but all the other accounts are like 70% made-up so idk?” and it wouldn’t calcify in quite the same way intergenerational human incomplete stories calcify, but it might still calcify in terms of…idk themes? aesops? I feel like we already had this discussion…

                   slice of life elf koans is REALLY DELIGHTFUL. or not
koans, i guess, enlightenment still being resolution of a kind. elf
koans are the saddest koans because they end with “then the master smith
cut off his finger!”                

I feel like, the idea of enlightenment could be a Thing for elves but more like, something they made up and they fake it hoping that it they fake it hard enough it will come true or something. IDK I really like the idea of….non-monolithic elves. Whose experiences are so extremely different early on in history but slowly become more and more similar to each other as the common denominators between their experiences become more and more frequent and obvious. Or the opposite, where some who share the same history decide to adapt and develop and interpret the world/the meaning of life one way and others do it a different way…anyway that’s one of the fun things that stand out to me about the Rivendell elves featured in the Hobbit, how they seem to be trying to commit themselves to this philosophy where they accept the transience and changeability of the world joyfully because the moon and stars and the water is still there! though that’s not 100% workable in the long term either because…nature is even less permanent than they are. Plus like, they’re obviously not at all actually unattached to the past. I know Tolkien hadn’t come up with the idea of the three rings yet, but it still works without them given how long the timelines involved are…

simaethae replied to your post: gurguliare replied to your post:
                   When the tale of…

                  digression, but my theory tends to be elves’ own
memories of cuivienen are often vague and confusing – like, the
equivalent of childhood amnesia, preverbal memories are difficult to
translate across? so there’s a lot of… did that happen, we don’t know
either        
                  
elwe and olwe THINK they PROBABLY had parents?? at
some point? …they don’t *think* they made that up?                

OMG yes!!! I love that! That would…explain a lot about how even early on elves seem to have had some ingrained ideas about how the world works and how culture works, some of which make no sense and have this irrational detached quality that is not entirely dissimilar to humans’ irrational ingrained subconscious impressions of how the world works. For humans it’s kind of imprinted on us due to absorbing the legacies and leftovers of tens of thousands of years worth of societal history, but the Cuivienen elves of course have none of that so those concepts would have to come from a different phenomenon…

I really like theories that can sort of, thematically approximate reality when in-universe it obviously can’t factually be like reality? Like idk this is why I love pseudo-Lamarckian conceptions of ’’’’’’evolution’’’’’’ in Tolkien, re: Orcs etc – Darwinian ones obviously do not fit into Arda at all, but like, I would like to be able to fit in the idea of adaptation to the world over time?