03.12.23 turning the tide

When my intellectual work is gummed up, I turn to fiction. That’s often where I find the clarity necessary to move forward with my intellectual work.
And I’m a bit gummed up at the moment, So I’ve been back at a fiction project that I first started writing in 2018. Essentially, it’s fan fiction based on The Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings.
I wrote a sort of prelude: Dagor Dagorath in my own imagining. It turns out, a little permission can go a very long way.
I had an idea for what happened next: a very simple seed that I planted then mostly ignored. I didn’t bother to work any more with it.
And then I heard, last year, that they had made a Rings of Power series. As soon as I saw an ad for the series, it ignited something in me and I began writing the story out in earnest, discovering far more than I had ever expected at the beginning. It continues to surprise me, nearly every time I sit down to it.

You could probably call it a divine comedy.

Here’s a little excerpt. It’s part of a dream that one of the main characters has:

“He watches the golden orb float gently back to Nienna’s hand with dismay. She holds her palm out for the silver orb, too.
‘Think not too much of sorrow,’ she says, with a note of consolation. ‘But know it for what it truly is: a displacement, an upswelling tide; one that rises in volume to match the pressure of joy already dawning inside.‘”

The whole excerpt can be found here:
The Leryavalatúrë: Return of the Ring