The Root of Light by Anérea  

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Fanwork Notes

Inspired by Melesta's art Yavanna Dreams of Middle-earth  and created for the Tolkien Short Fanworks prompts: Gold and silver / a fixed-length piece of 222 word, this was sparked by my two ficlets about the meeting of Melian and Thingol reigniting my perennial thoughts about just how those trees of Nan Elmoth grew so tall and dark about them, under starlight.

First posted for Scribbles & Drabbles on AO3 and on TSFW in 2022. 

Ficlet is 222 words, the rest are more thoughts.

Fanwork Information

Summary:

In the years before Arien bore the fruit of Laurelin aloft, just how did Yavanna's olvar grow?

Major Characters: Yavanna, Ulmo

Major Relationships:

Genre: Fixed-Length Ficlet, General, Nonfiction/Meta

Challenges:

Rating: General

Warnings:

Chapters: 2 Word Count: 609
Posted on Updated on

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Table of Contents

The Root of Light

Melian may have had the magic power to make Nan Elmoth grow, but even magic requires raw materials, in this case, photons.

A few extra words on this idea ...

This is the general gist I wrote up initiall  in other, unTolkienesque, words, before I managed to convince my brain's creative-writing hamster to run for me that morning:

Comments on The Root of Light

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this was unbeliavably, utterly beautiful. It made me pause and consider: have I ever truly stopped to think about things growing? And am I a bad person for calling this process ''trivial''? Well, you turned something seemigly trivial into something magical, revealing the beauty, the poetry of it all. I loved the worldbuilding and how magical it all felt, how seamlessly it could fit into one of Tolkien's works. This is perfect. Thank you for sharing <3

I like this idea - I've been working with the notion that the Light of the Trees is "bendier" than normal light, so that we don't have to worry about things like hills and trees and walls making most of Valinor completely dark:D - presumably due to some quality of the Trees themselves, such that Light that is filtered (such as through the Sun and Moon vessels) or reflected becomes "normal" light. So, for example, if you have a room lit by a glass window, as long as it is open there are no shadows in the room, but if you close the window, you get "normal" shadows.  This would be weird to live with, and interesting to write!   It also gives us liquids distilled from plants related to the Trees that can store Light in lamps (or the Sun and Moon) and whatnot (some of which might end up in Frodo's phial!) - and, indeed, the ability to send Light through "fiberoptic" roots!  

However, my thought about the plants beyond the reach of the Trees is more that there is power stored in the earth itself (interestingly, first thought of this right before the episode of Enterprise where they ran across a rogue planet whose ecology was powered by internal heat) - but both concepts, or a combination of them, work just fine.  Cool!