Tolkien OC Week
A fandom event for OCs and underdeveloped characters in Tolkien's world!
This event celebrates both characters of Tolkien's world and our own characters that need more love, by creating and reblogging all kind of fanworks, like fanfiction, fanart, fanvideos, fancrafts, headcanons, playlists, edits, moodboards etc.
The event is modded by @yellow-faerie, @elamarth-calmagol and @stormxpadme and will take place between 21st August - 27th August 2023 for the third year running.
NSFW text entries are allowed and we’ll tag them accordingly when we reblog them, but please put them behind a “read more”.
We'll also be tracking the tag #tolkienocweek during this week!
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Event schedule for 2023:
Day 1 (21st August): Family members
Tolkien often neglects to mention the family members of major characters: for example, leaving both Celebrimbor and Fili and Kili with only one named parent. In others cases, such as Bilbo's family tree, he gives a name and nothing else. Share a character who fills in a gap in a family tree, or create a speculative family member, such as siblings for Legolas.
Day 2 (22nd August): The Bad Guys
Share an OC who belongs to the wrong side of the story, whether they're knowingly evil, misguided, or just doing their job. Maybe they're an orc or a balrog, an unrepentant kinslayer, a Southron or Easterling soldier, or one of the hobbits who worked with Saruman in the Shire. Explore their life and point of view and why they went down the path they did.
Day 3 (23rd August): Diversity
Share an OC who adds diversity to Tolkien’s world, whether it is their race, gender, disability, neurodiversity, sexual orientation, or another characteristic.
Day 4 (24th August): Forgotten Characters
As Tolkien created his stories, he abandoned some characters, such as Eriol the Mariner, and changed major characteristics of others, such as the idea that Erestor was a half-elven relative of Elrond. Other characters, such as the Dunedain chieftains fostered by Elrond before Aragorn, are forgotten by the fandom. Create a fanwork focusing on one of these forgotten characters or characterizations.
Day 5 (25th August): Shipping
Share an OC that you ship with a canon character. It could be a marriage, queerplatonic relationship, or one-night stand, canon compliant or AU, or any other sort of ship you want!
Day 6 (26th August): Alternate Universes
Share an OC who couldn’t be part of the canonical story, such as Boromir's child in an "everyone lives" scenario, a roommate or professor in a college AU, or a dimension-hopping "tenth walker".
Day 7 (27th August): Freeform
Did you have someone who doesn’t fit any prompts, or too many characters for one of them? Today, share any OC that you want.
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Since we want to celebrate creations about neglected characters all year long, the mods will occasionally reblog posts and fancreations about OCs and underdeveloped characters. If you would like to see your post on our blog, you're very welcome to tag tolkienocweek. Since tumblr's tagging system is often being faulty, don't hesitate to message us, too!
We are looking forward to see and share all the awesome work you come up with!
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Ancestry Makes the Man
For @tolkienocweek day 1: Family, here's a chapter of a long-neglected WIP about a Second Age Numenorean settler who lived in Lond Daer.
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I’m an old man now. If the Enemy returns again, as the Elves say he may, one day, I shall not be here to see it.
I saw him once and did my part, when he came in flame and fury with his hosts even to the western coasts, and that was enough.
Now I sit under the big oak tree and look out over the shining blue waters, and I am glad that I and the oak tree are still alive under the spring skies.
But this account is not for me. I am writing this, my last report, for my distant kinsman, Elrond.
He writes in his letter, ‘that it would be well for these matters not to be forgotten’.
How can I answer no? I shall write my story, and then, he tells me, he will have copies made, and it will be remembered among the immortal Elves, and a copy sent Over Sea to Númenor, to the King’s own archive, and maybe even into the Uttermost West. Such fame, to send word out among those who have never heard of me! I know it’s an old man’s vanity, but I don’t care. I’ll take my small immortality in words. It’s better than being dead and forgotten, for I know Death is beginning to come close at my heels now, a hunt with only one ending..
So. I should speak first of my family, of my ancestors. Thus, you shall know who I am, and how I came to write this account.
Ancestry makes the man, so the saying goes.
My name is Berengar, and I am called a Númenorean, but I have never been to Númenor.
It was my great-grandfather Derufin who came here to Eriador from Númenor.
In those days, the word goes, the harbour of Lond Daer was the main settlement on the coast, and Tharbad, which is now a great trading town, was little more than a market-village for the growing timber-trade. It was timber that first brought Númenor here: timber for buildings and ships, but as the forests fell, meadows spread out where they had been, feeding the great herds of Númenorean cattle and sheep, for Númenor needed more and more leather and wool.
Nobody was too concerned that the woods already had people living in them. There was a lot of woodland, in those days. They used to say that a squirrel could go from Lond Daer all the way through the mountains to the Great River and beyond, without setting foot to the ground.
To eyes from Númenor, one forest is much like another. My great-grandfather did not, I think, understand why the people who lived in the woodlands along the River Gwathló would not simply move away from the timber-works and the herds, or better still, buy cattle and build herds and timber-yards of their own.
I am none too sure myself how to explain that choice, even though I have kin on both sides and have lived my life, to some extent, upon the cusp, neither Númenorean, nor a Woodsman. I find myself unable to speak for either side.
The common way of thinking is that the Men of the Wood had no desire to sail beyond sight of land, or build tall towers, or change the ways of their fathers.
I hesitate to say they felt no discontent, because can there be any Man of whom that is true? At any rate, their discontent did not lead them to fell trees, or make cities.
But the Men of the Sea desired all those things and more.
Further east, in Tharbad, it was different. Númenor brought trade, new knowledge and unknown luxuries, and in Tharbad, there were many who took to the new ways and made the best of them. I’ve kin in Tharbad, and the people there call themselves Númenorean, though there are those who are no more than five feet tall, bald as an egg on top and bearded beside. In Tharbad, almost all the children learn Navigation, Architecture and Law as matter of course.
But not so in the coastlands around Lond Daer.
Kinsmen I never knew were among those who raided the Númenorean settlements, stealing sheep, killing cattle. Sometimes they went so far as to attack the trading ships passing up and down the Gwathló river, and that was a perilous enterprise, for if caught, the attackers risked death or transportation to Númenor or Pelargir or perhaps some still more distant colony.
There were few who could hope to make their way home again to the western woods after many years of servitude to the Crown estates. Life is long for Numenoreans, and so are the sentences they hand down upon their enemies. And yet the attacks went on, and along the rivers, fort after fort was built, to ward off the men of the woods.
So the world stood when my great-grandfather came here from Númenor as a young man: a younger son eager to make his way in the world. He was not himself counted royal, as these things are reckoned in Númenor, but he was a great-great-great-grandson of Elros Earendilion, via the great king’s youngest son’s youngest daughter.
Or... so he said. I believe there are a great many of our kin at home, by now, and it’s a long, long way from Númenor to the mouth of the shadowed river Gwathló.
I only remember him as an old man, stiff in the back, with a great craggy nose much like my own. But in our family, we say that in his youth he had the height and shining dark hair from the portraits of King Elros Earendilion himself. He was beardless as one of the king’s line all his life, as I am myself.
That would be an advantage for a young man even now, and more so then, when there were none too many sons of Númenor on the western shores of Eriador. With this advantage, and, I must admit, a certain lack of scruple, he rose to second-in-command one of the new river-forts, built to ward off the people of the woodlands.
I remember, even as a very old man, he always dressed very much in the old Númenorean style, with the long wide belt double-wrapped, and he wore his grey hair long and loose, with just a head-band to keep it from tangling. He used to say it made the right impression. Though, I don’t know if they even wore their hair like that in Armenelos.
He said they did, but then, he said he was a great-great-great-grandson of Elros Earendilion, and I’ve had my doubts about that, too.
I cut my hair short, and wear a good woollen hat on top. It’s warmer in the winter, and I can’t imagine anyone hearing my manner of speech and thinking I am from Armenelos, even if I wanted them to.
Ancestry makes the man, so the saying goes, but thinking of my great-grandfather, I wondered if it was the man that made the ancestry. Or I always did, until I went out to war, and met Elrond...
No matter. I was writing of my great-grandfather, founder of our house.
So: he had his navy pay and a little investment of some kind from Númenor. He said it came from a childless kinsman at home in Númenor, who died before I was born. But I don’t think he ever intended to go home to Númenor, where descendants of Elros are unremarkable, and land and houses expensive.
Wherever he got the money, he invested in shipping; part-shares ships sailing home with cargoes of wood and leather. Small cargo of gems from Eregion, and metal-work from the great and renowned smithies of Khazad-dûm.
And people, too. It was his duty to deal with those who attacked Númenorean traders, stole Númenorean goods, and deal them justice, even if that justice was none too particular, and carried heavy chains.
If it had not been him, it would have been another man. Númenorean thralls eat well. Some of them do come home afterwards. But I cannot feel easy in my mind about it.
He was a hard man. My great-grandfather’s name is remembered among my kinsmen in the wood, and it is not remembered fondly.
The usual tradition for those not destined for high office was to leave the navy at the age of sixty years. By that time he already had a house in the port of Lond Daer, and another in Tharbad.
In Tharbad, he married Abrainzil, a lady with no great ancestry to boast of for all her Númenorean name, but whose well-established brewery in Tharbad produced ales that were much in demand by the Dwarves, who in those days often paid in gold for goods that pleased them.
A prosperous ancestry to be born to. A thought comes to my mind, which I shall write down here, in this report that will be sent to Numenor. And that is: A man can choose his path. He cannot choose his ancestors.
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An Element of Noldorin Design
Drabble featuring a Noldorin OC, posted here for @tolkienocweek
(Day 7, Freeform).
Summary: Melimo, Fingon's architect, defending the fortress he built against overwhelming force, after the Nirnaeth Arnoediad.
Warning for implied character death.
Melimo knocked out the single strut that would collapse the scaffolding that supported the drawbridge and send the enemy troops assailing the gate plummeting into the depths of the ravine. It had been his own addition to Curufin’s design, a fail-safe for the kind of attack he had hoped would never come.
Now, even this turned out not to be enough, not after the disastrous defeat out on the plain. The fortress in the Ered Wethrin would fall, like the rest of Hithlum. But they could hold out a little longer, take a few more of the enemy with them.
This is a fixed-length drabble (100 words) written earlier this year for a SWG Challenge. Previously posted only under lock, now it has received a title.
The drabble is a sequel to my more light-hearted ficlet Engineering and Diplomacy.
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