do you think vampires and werewolves are an exclusively human phenomenon or are there dwarfish werewolves and elvish vamps and shit??
would you fucking go to bed
*griffin voice* come plaaaaaay with me in this spaaaace
centaurs but the human part is a dragonborn
mermaids but the human part is an orc
HOBBIT ZOMBIES
i’m coming to your house and turning off your wifi
it’s a new month I have data for days bitch
I’m sorry but imagining the personality of the typical elf combined with the personally of a typical vampire is the most INSUFFERABLE individual I’ve ever even dreamt of
I recall someone making a joke about a centaur that combined “The Digestive Tract of a Hippo with the throwing arm of an Orangutan” and I think that’s the best argument For and Against this kind of fantasty hybridization.
I just want a mermaid where the fish part is a mola mola. Why is this too much to ask for?
Carly Simon writing You’re So Vain about such a specific man, yet including the line “you probably think this song is about you” so that if he took it personally he would prove her point? Unparalleled power move
Legolas pretty quickly gets in the habit of venting about his travelling companions in Elvish, so long as Gandalf & Aragorn aren’t in earshot they’ll never know right?
Then about a week into their journey like
Legolas: *in Elvish, for approximately the 20th time* ugh fucking hobbits, so annoying
Frodo: *also in Elvish, deadpan* yeah we’re the worst
Legolas:
~*~earlier~*~
Legolas: ugh fucking hobbits
Merry: Frodo what’d he say
Frodo: I’m not sure he speaks a weird dialect but I think he’s insulting us. I should tell him I can understand Elvish
i mean, honestly it’s amazing the Elves had as many languages and dialects as they did, considering Galadriel (for example) is over seven thousand years old.
english would probably have changed less since Chaucer’s time, if a lot of our cultural leaders from the thirteenth century were still alive and running things.
they’ve had like. seven generations since the sun happened, max.
frodo’s books are old to him, but outside any very old poetry copied down exactly, the dialect represented in them isn’t likely to be older than the Second Age, wherein Aragorn’s foster-father Elrond started out as a very young adult and grew into himself, and Legolas’ father was born.
so like, three to six thousand years old, maybe, which is probably a drop in the bucket of Elvish history judging by all the ethnic differentiation that had time to develop before Ungoliant came along, even if we can’t really tell because there weren’t years to count, before the Trees were destroyed.
plus a lot of Bilbo’s materials were probably directly from Elrond, whose library dates largely from the Third Age, probably, because he didn’t establish Imladris until after the Last Alliance. and Elrond isn’t the type to intentionally help Bilbo learn the wrong dialect and sound sillier than can be helped, even if everyone was humoring him more than a little.
so Frodo might sound hilariously formal for conversational use (though considering how most Elves use Westron he’s probably safe there) and kind of old-fashioned, but he’s not in any danger of being incomprehensible, because elves live on such a ridiculous timescale.
to over-analyse this awesome and hilarious post even more, legolas’ grandfather
was from linguistically stubborn Doriath and their family is actually from a
somewhat different, higher-status ethnic background than their subjects.
so depending on how much of a role Thranduil took in his
upbringing (and Oropher in his), Legolas may have some weird stilted old-fashioned speaking tics in his
Sindarin that reflect a more purely Doriathrin dialect rather than the Doriathrin-influenced Western Sindarin that became the most widely spoken Sindarin long before he was born, or he might have a School Voice
from having been taught how to Speak Proper and then lapse into really
obscure colloquial Avari dialect when he’s being casual. or both!
considering legolas’ moderately complicated political position, i expect he can code-switch.
…it’s
also fairly likely considering the linguistic politics involved that Legolas is reasonably articulate in Sindarin, though
with some level of accent, but knows approximately zero Quenya outside of loanwords into Sindarin, and even those he mostly didn’t learn as a kid.
which would be extra hilarious when he and gimli fetch up in Valinor in his little homemade skiff, if the first elves he meets have never been to Middle Earth and they’re just standing there on the beach reduced to miming about what is the short beard person, and who are you, and why.
this is elvish dialects and tolkien, okay. there’s a lot of canon material! he actually initially developed the history of middle-earth specifically to ground the linguistic development of the various Elvish languages!
Legolas: Alas, verily would I have dispatched thine enemy posthaste, but y’all’d’ve pitched a feckin’ fit.
Aragorn: *eyelid twitching*
Frodo: *frantically scribbling* Hang on which language are you even speaking right now
Pippin, confused: Is he not speaking Elvish?
Frodo, sarcastically: I dunno, are you speaking Hobbit?
Boromir, who has been lowkey pissed-off at the Hobbits’ weird dialect this whole time: That’s what it sounds like to me.
Merry, who actually knows some shit about Hobbit background: We are actually speaking multiple variants of the Shire dialect of Westron, you ignorant fuck.
Sam, a mere working-class country boy: Honestly y’all could be talkin Dwarvish half the time for all I know.
Pippin, entering Gondor and speaking to the castle steward: hey yo my man
dear anon, i want you to know that this morning i listened to this song, read the lyrics, listened to multiple covers, and had a lot of thoughts & feelings about:
Three centuries thereafter, I take passage overland In the footsteps of brave Kelso, where his “sea of flowers” began Watching cities rise before me, then behind me sink again This tardiest explorer, driving hard across the plain.
And through the night, behind the wheel, the mileage clicking west I think upon Mackenzie, David Thompson and the rest Who cracked the mountain ramparts and did show a path for me To race the roaring Fraser to the sea.
How then am I so different from the first men through this way? Like them, I left a settled life, I threw it all away. To seek a Northwest Passage at the call of many men To find there but the road back home again.
because it gives me so many fraser feelings & also thoughts about the ending of the show, and my preferred reading of it as being about – well, both the literal journey they’re taking, but also about venturing into a less-trodden path for their lives & also about this idea of love as an adventure/voyage that doesn’t end.
in the scene where ray and fraser are trapped in an ice crevasse, and they both think they’re going to die, ray says he wishes he’d ever gone on a real adventure. and so when they’re saved, this is the adventure they chase after.
and of course it’s all tied up in love – when ray faced down death previously he sang, and he says that it was also some kind of romantic gesture. and here again they sing – and this is the song they sing. one of the things i like about this song is how thoughts about history & the narrator’s own life mix together and reflect on each other. that’s one of the joys of due south. so much is mixed up in that scene, in this choice of song.
(there is also a lot in here about the colonial idea of the canadian wilderness as a frontier, and the romance in the idea of searching for the northwest passage, of the idea that these were “the first men through this way”. but settler colonialism in due south is a whole book waiting to happen, and i am not equipped to write it. but you can’t talk about this song or its use in the show fairly without acknowledging this, i think.)
p.s. i just rewatched this scene and HOW had i not noticed the cheery reference to the argentinian football team in the mountain who had resorted to cannibalism, and fraser and ray’s utter lack of concern? ah, due south.
most instruments, i get how they were designed, but bagpipes? who the fuck thought that was a good idea? it wasn’t!
Oh what, you have infinite breath control?
My impression is that the various bagged pipes were designed on the same basic logic as the hurdy gurdy… or for that matter the accordeon. “You know, I could hold this note a lot longer if I built a machine to do it for me.”
Contrast the digeridoo, which is on the logic of “you know, I could hold this note a lot longer if I ascended to a higher plain of existence and completely redesigned the way breathing works, making my basic autonomic functions consciously controlled instead.”
…
Hot take: the digeridoo is a bagpipe where the bag is your own lungs
missionlameturtle 