Tag: valar

Manwe

squirrelwrangler:

The kindly-faced man sits on a corner of the streets in Valmar, appearing to do nothing at all except bask in the warm golden light and listen to the clarion bells. Sometimes pigeons bob at his feet, or a wandering cat or dog curls their heads on his lap. His eyes are a brilliant blue, when they are not lidded in the peaceful countenance of a man who delights in a warm day and the pleasing tones of the city’s many bells. 

“You are one of the Maiar,” says a pedestrian with tightly coiled golden hair, standing just so their shadow does not block the light upon the bald man with stunningly clear blue eyes. “I can feel the difference in the souls, between Eldar and Ainur. I apologize that I do not recognize you, though I believe you must be one of the minor servants, for you do not blaze in my senses like many I have met. Is there something you need? You appear tired.”

The man sitting on the corner of the street smiles. “A little weary, perhaps. The war has been long, my task longer. But the sound of the bells helps to soothe, and the warm air rising up from the stones, and the kind offers from strangers.” He laughs, the creases around his brilliant blue eyes folding up to cover their brightness, the sound of his laugh as pure and light as the smallest chimes. “Air has a great weight. You don’t feel it, as it is always pressing in from every direction. You don’t see how much it weighs.”

stephescamora:

Varda & Manwë 
I wasn’t planning on drawing any Silmarillion art tonight but the inspiration hit so I decided to sketch and post this before I head to bed (besides…its been some time since I drew Silm art</3). 

Hope I can work on this more once I develop their designs again! 

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Some thoughts on Numenor, the Valar, Dunedain, and Morgoth

yavieriel:

  • I can agree that the Valar choosing to completely destroy Numenor (given Tolkien’s assertion in the Letters that the power to do so came from Eru, but the Valar chose the method of wielding it) does seem like overkill, but I’ve generally just shrugged because Tolkien wanted his Atlantis. (I mean really the Numenorean fleet was not a substantial threat, just destroy the fleet and leave the island alone, that’ll probably take out the leaders anyway.)  However, the Valar are as a rule not the type to take that sort of aggressive action.  Even leaving aside that I firmly believe the Valar to be fair and just rulers, I just can’t think of any other time they take action that abruptly and dramatically.  That leaves the question of why, exactly, the Valar chose to wipe out Numenor, and particularly in that specific and dramatic a fashion.  
  • The question of why exactly Numenoreans/Dunedain are so wildly different from regular humans – practically half-elves.  @anghraine‘s posts about Numenoreans as parallels to orcs* seemed close, but not quite right, the orcs required a lot of hands-on intervention while the Valar seem to have been pretty hands-off w/r/t Numenor, and it doesn’t really explain the variance in lifespan we see with later descendants of Numenor or the general waning lifespan over the history of Numenor.  Orcs stay orcs, but Numenoreans start losing some (some! not all) of their elvishness just from turning away from the Valar, even without the genetic dilution that happens in Middle-earth.  (Other aspects seem to be stable traits that don’t need maintenance, so to speak.)** 
  • Valinor is what it is – deathless, holy, preserving various species that are extinct elsewhere, etc. – due to the presence of the Valar and not of it’s own nature by right.  We know that Melkor dissipated a great deal of his power by sinking it into Middle-earth in order to contaminate and control as much of the land as he could.  So it seems self-evident that a great deal of Valinor’s character is due to the Valar’s power having rooted there in the same way, though less-intentionally, and to a much lesser degree on an individual basis.  Each of the fourteen Valar sinking a small fraction of their power into Valinor could easily have a cumulative effect just as substantial (if not more so) than Melkor’s influence on Middle-earth.  Or, thinking about it from another angle – the Valar (and their Maiar) on some fundamental level are the spiritual manifestation of the [meta-]physical universe itself.  I.e. we know their visible forms are just constructs they use to interact with the embodied races; their ‘true bodies’ are in a sense the physical and metaphysical matter which they are responsible for.  So Melkor’s contamination of Middle-earth is at once a direct conflict with them over territory, a way of taking control of some portion of them, and an indirect method of poisoning their very nature both by metaphysical contamination and by forcing them to make no-win choices where every possible outcome makes them complicit in death, destruction, pain, despair – the Trolley Problem writ large, only Melkor is driving the trolley while the Valar can only control the tracks.  
  • In the Athrabeth, there’s discussion of whether the race of Men in their current state exist as they should and/or what influence Melkor has had on Men since he discovered them before the Valar did and thus had a chance to poison them unopposed.  There’s a school of thought that says Men were originally immortal.

All this taken together, my conclusions are:

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