The Sleeper in the Tower of Pearl by Anérea
Fanwork Notes
I bought polutopos' Jumble Sale prompt motorboat in a bottle: create a fanwork about heroes (for the Heroes challenge) in the Seventh Age (for Back to the Future) and including a named ship ... as in the boat, not the relationship.
I've always imagined the Tower of Pearl to be a beacon, so I started this as a gift for Dawn (for her lighthousephilia) and then polu's prompt went and got my thoughts going off odd directions, as these things do.
Since Tolkien never definitively told us who the Sleeper was, I've decided that the Tower is a time portal, giving us over-stressed and under-slept Seventh-Agers a little bubble where we can catch up on sleep, or reading or writing, or making art or music, or simply looking out behind the moon from the white and windy tower. And the isolation and enchantment of the isle precludes the possibility of time travellers changing the history of Middle-earth. (Except when Eärendel landed there, and while they had a very interesting conversation, he probably decided the idea of time travel would not be believed and so didn't tell anyone. At least, no-one who had a hand in writing the histories...)
In my original message to Dawn, I said that in a few years hence she'll discover the Tower's spacetime wormhole and will be able to go back in time to the First Age and pop back at the moment she left the future. So the prompt-required hero here is Dawn and not Eärendil, because she is, whatever she says!
Fanwork Information
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Description: painting of the Tower of Pearl in the Western Isles Major Characters: Major Relationships: Genre: Type: Drawing/Painting, Illustration, Landscape Challenges: Back To The Future, Heroes, Jumble Sale Rating: General Warnings: |
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| Posted on | Updated on |
The Tower of Pearl
I know a window in a western tower
That opens on celestial seas
And wind that has been blowing round the stars
Comes to nestle in its tossing draperies.
It is a white tower builded in the Twilit Isles
Where Evening sits for ever in the shade;
It glimmers like a spike of lonely pearl
That mirrors beams forlorn and lights that fade;
And sea goes washing round the dark rock where it stands
And fairy boats go by to gloaming lands.
from Þá Éadiȝan Sǽlidan: The Happy Mariners by J.R.R. Tolkien,1920
click the image to view it full screen/uncropped
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