1. Love the idea of scholarship being among the most honored things in Numenor. Peaceful isolated island specially crafted and gifted to them by the Valar, massive wealth and overabundance of natural resources, exactly 0 wars and negligible if any strife or hardship of any sort, no travel to speak of in the earlier days, and no real conflict-centered deeds to be done. But so much leisure and wealth and time to study all the things, imagine the libraries and the proto-universities, the loremasters and the scientists and the historians and the architects and the botanists and the mathematicians and the poets and the philosophers…and kids with long childhoods to indulge in it….

2. One of the most fascinating lines in the UT is what is transparently a wink-wink cop-out on Tolkien’s part to explain why there isn’t more Numenorean content: “when it became clear that the Land of
Gift was taken away and that Númenor had disappeaed for ever, all but a
few regarded study of what was left of its history as vain, breeding only
useless regret.” Lmao, the fuck guys. But this is just, fascinating? It’s so completely the opposite of elves, I love it, but it’s also such an intense reaction when compared to what happens in real life – because the situations that happen in Arda are not comparable to real life! – that the conformity and unbiquitousness of this idea/emotion is so compelling. The idea of grief and loss and dull horror sick enough to batten down willful amnesia and cringe away from even academic study and preservation reverberating down the generations so engrained in one’s cultural dna that the study of history lapses is…damn…

3. The components of all the great stories being rearranged with each successive era of history to thematically fit the Numenoreans’ evolving self-image and actions with regards to the rest of the world – not as a survival mechanism or source of inspiration, because they need none, but as a source of direction, momentum, and meaning. And I don’t mean like, lying or suppression or whitewashing or twisting or propaganda or anything intentional at all tbh (though later on there would be some of that too.) I mean, like, folklorically, migration and mutation of stories bouncing from one end of the island to the other, being passed to, and then back in telephone-like altered form from, the various diverging cultures. Just natural unforced alteration that would be totally blindingly obvious normalcy if it were taking place in any world but Arda, where there are immortals hanging around with a curve-breaking perspective.

4. One of the more godawful things I’ve run across in Tolkien linguistics research is that one of the possible translations of the name “Gimilzôr” – as in Ar-Gimilzôr, the absolute Worst™ of them all imo – is “Star-Foam.” As in, “Elros.” dsfhksfjjsdhg. Fuck. Like. Everything. Which inspires me in the direction of, I’m wondering…tbh while I could definitely see later King’s Men Numenorean propaganda blaming Elros for, like, selfishness/presumptuousness/whatever in thoughtlessly sticking all his descendants with his Doom and not caring that they didn’t get a choice; I wonder also about like, the suppressionist/revisionist option that would lead to this sort of ancestral naming if you go for that interpretation. Elros the victim of an injustice who nobly sacrificed his chance at immortality for the sake of his people because the Valar maliciously coerced him into it for [insert excuse here], but whose descendants have been denied their due long enough and ought to avenge him against the Valar for stealing the immortality that ought to have been his/theirs by right, or something….lmao