@simaethae replied to your post “gurguliare replied to your post:
gurguliare…”
see i find all the sense of loss super effective, that line about “
and Númenor went down into the sea, with all
its children and its wives and its maidens and its ladies proud; and all its
gardens and its halls and its towers, its tombs and its riches, and its jewels
and its webs and its things painted and carven, and its lore: they vanished for
ever” completely fucking guts me
like, suggestion always works better for me than
the specific because it lets the imagination latch on to the bits i
find personally affecting – you know, you inevitably fill it in with
your personal iconography of drowned cities and the lost past
like, if he’d been more specific about the
detail it might have made me more upset about specific PEOPLE,
tar-miriel is more of a symbol than anything else, i don’t feel like i
really get to know anyone in the akallabeth well enough to be sad about
them as individuals… but the broad strokes of imagery and symbol and
myth have their own effect? idk i’m sorry about this string of
incoherent replies but 
omg i’m sorry i was so unclear but no no I actually 100% agree with you about the effect of that akallabeth line!!! i was complaining with totally different lines in mind – i love THAT line so much for exactly what you said, and for the precise reason that I think it…doesn’t fall into the category of not-effective broad-strokes stuff that I was whining about. I think it’s more a case of proportionality – because the akallabeth is so short and concise and the narrative of it is so narrow, that line works for it perfectly – his sudden litany of the loss that actually stops the summary dead in its tracks and sort of…mentally expands the story, like a curtain suddenly rising up so you are suddenly bowled over by the multitude of what is contained in it – and as you say, your brain fills in all the rest of the list too
this is ofc TOTALLY subjective, but i would say that in contrast, in the silmarillion proper, with its varied windingness and the sprawling interconnected stories that branch off and stuff, this sort of summarizing of things lost doesn’t work as well as it does in the akallabeth – because the proportion of the summary of lost things to the summary of other ideas and actions (which works a lot better) going on doesn’t have that effect, instead it has the effect of hidden little unexplained nuggets that you have to poke at to figure out – which I also really like! but also leads to those nuggets having less of a presence than i think is most ~effective as storytelling or whatever. but idk if i would think this if it weren’t for *waves* the…fandom…
simaethae replied to your post “gurguliare replied to your post:
gurguliare…”
on second thoughts maybe i’m biased because,
like tolkien, i… don’t care about material culture >_>
sudfhkdjshs TBH i don’t care too much about it for ITSELF either….i just care about it as fucking…story props, especially since i am a super visual and sensory reader and can’t properly grasp things i can’t see/hear/etc in some form of imagined-experience
ephal ephalak idon hi-akallabeth 