#annatar

skyeventide:

that one Celebrimbor post is making the rounds again and now the latest reply* is giving me another thought but I’m posting it separately for convenience and cohesion and —

I feel there’s something to be said about the tension that exists between wanting to embalm (tolkien’s own very colourful word, peep that value judgement… but that’s a whole different post) Middle Earth, that is, wanting to preserve it or recreate it as heaven, to make it exist and function the way Valinor does, and therefore issuing a challenge to Valinor (it may not be an active challenge, I don’t think it necessarily is — but it is, inherently and personally, surely one)

between that and accepting the help, to do so, of someone who poses as an emissary of Valinor. 

I don’t think it had really struck me until now how deep the deception might well run there. because of course, we don’t really have much at all, that I recall, about what Sauron says specificallyto gain Celebrimbor’s trust, and his people’s. but it’s not difficult to imagine that being given these powers and this lore by someone who is, in theory, a herald of the group you supposedly challenge might in some measure be instead read as a blessing of your endeavour. the narrative of the challenge to Valinor (while I think it remains personally and perhaps subconsciously relevant in the deeper motives; I can’t imagine it isn’t part of it all in some measure, not when the doors of Durin sport a nifty star of Feanor right there — it’s also a semi-textual reason, I say semi cause that’s somewhat debatable, but not for this post) might well shift into an acceptance from Valinor. an emissary of the Valar is offering that very knowledge? it almost reads like endorsement.

at which point it could also well give yet another layer to the distrust Sauron-as-Annatar encounters from Galadriel and Gil-Galad. it isn’t just that they refused return, it’s also, potentially, that they cannot believe that an Ainu would, at this late hour in the Second Age, offer up the means to halt time, stop decay, and preserve memory, make their own paradise. 

and granted, we don’t know how Sauron spun it in detail; there’s ways to present all of this very subtly (the time-honoured tradition of Ainur sharing knowledge and teaching among the many). but this is apossibility, which gave me some thots, as after all the people of Eregion cannot have had monolithic thoughts on the matter.

Sauron over the ages