he made no secret that he owed his recent knowledge largely to Farmer Maggot, whom he seemed to regard as a person of more importance than they had imagined. 'There's earth under his old feet, and clay on his fingers; wisdom in his bones, and both his eyes are open,' said Tom.
Farmer Maggot appreciation post
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farmer maggot and tom are friends!!!!!!
i love that- it also really highlights that the hobbits might pretend to all be quite docile, but there’s the odd adventurer among them
although with that i find it hilarious that farmer maggot finds hobbiton suspicious, but going to the crazy forest to visit an eldritch and eternal forest fae? all in a day’s work!
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For Innumerable Stars 2022
Prompt by BloodwingBlackbird for the character group "Farmer Maggot's Dogs & Oromë"
Inspired by the Strength card from the Rider–Waite Tarot deck and an abundance of existential terror. More after the jump.
(Fish's note--Noodle didn't quite finish this note before life intervened but says that the gist of it is here. Having listened to endless moaning about this for the past two months, I can confirm.)
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I probably intermittently screamed for about half an hour when I saw this character group nestled amongst other (ostensibly) more... approachable groups, but I like to suffer, so I sorrowfully set aside my draft of a M*A*S*H* pastiche set in the Houses of Healing and went on a journey through the gurgling bowels of the internet.
Eventually, I somehow stumbled on the Strength card from the Rider-Waite deck:
"Ah," I said to myself sagely after reading precisely half a Wikipedia article, "Yes."
The Strength card depicts a lion and a woman with a lemniscate (infinity symbol) over her head. Some cards place the woman in a more explicit position of power, while others simply have them cuddling and the like.
Wikipedia says that A. E. Waite says that this card is associated with "power, energy, action, courage, magnanimity; also complete success and honours" while, when reversed, it is associated with "despotism, abuse of power, weakness, discord, sometimes even disgrace."
"Tulkas," I mumbled feverishly, "Melkor. Trees."
Sluggishly, I plumbed Google for some inspiration on Farmer Maggot's dogs. I emerged from that dark road with nothing but their names, which I promptly forgot.
"That lion looks like a hairy dog," I said, "And sure, let's make Oromë genderously ambiguous and worry about everything else later."
Oromë, along with most of the Valar, have always felt a little sinister to me, so the initial plan was to draw Oromë smilingly slitting lion-dog's throat, with the corpses of Nahar and the other two dogs lying around in the foreground. When I proposed this to my dog-loving friend, he stopped just short of attempting to execute me, but it was a near thing.
"But dogs," I pleaded, "Hunting. Death."
"No," he replied.
Defeated, I returned to the internet for inspiration. In the pits of delirium, I stumbled upon this Wikipedia article about Sköll, a wolf that supposedly spends its time chasing the sun.
"Wolves are basically dogs, but hairier," I declared.
From there my fate was sealed. I'm not a fan of hair in general, so Oromë was given a skull to wear, and I made some half-hearted attempts at mushrooms.
As the Strength card is the eighth card in the eight card in the Rider-Waite deck, I had the brilliant idea to substitute an eight-rayed sun for the Roman numerals at the top. Suddenly, I had a draft.
Another early idea I'd had was to show Oromë being hunted by the three dogs, but that didn't seem to fit with the general theme of "Oromë, the magnanimous despot" I was going for, so I nixed it. I did want to have some sort of theme of vengeance, however, so the sköll-dog emerged from a blackened tree, which I imagined to be the withered remains of Laurelin (or even just your run-of-the-mill dead tree) to suggest the role of the Valar in the Darkening.
Time passed. Things got more dramatic. Sköll-dog became a limbless dragon-dog. I became geographically confused, found myself in Japan, and then the sun tragically lost both sunglasses and rays. Lion-dog became problematic. I helpfully forgot Nahar existed.
Eventually, I lost my mind, gave lion-dog a mushroom infection, and decided to digitally burn out the ugliest tree I have ever drawn in my life.
I'm going to take a nap now.
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