He is making a choice to abandon pursuit of a line of thought that is both troubling and going to cause him trouble. I don't think he is making a conscious decision to lie or even bend the truth but rather to not examine his assumptions, as we are all guilty of doing from time to time. Is there a person who hasn't given up on a thought that could lead to unacceptable realizations or conclusions? And for much less cause than he had: His people had ample reason to bear the resentment they did toward the Feanorians.

Of course, the end result is a subcreation of a much more complex story. My old song and dance, in other words. :)

Thank you for spending so much thought on a mere 100 words!

I wrote mine in under ten minutes! It was a necessity and even kind of the point. Subcreation on the fly. ;)

That ambiguity is precisely why I write Silmfic and no other fandom. The story seems to invite--even require--those other hands in mind. You have this "vast backcloth" and then only a quick glimpse of it from a rather problematic (heh) PoV. To someone like me, who is always wanting to challenge the "authoritative" view on everything, that's like kicking in your open door! :D

It is probably heretical to say but I am glad Tolkien didn't do much more with the Silm than what he did. Not only because MT shows he was contemplating some big changes that I'm not sure would improve the story but because my sense--never quantified! someday!--is that, as he aged, he moved away from the morally complex and almost openly pagan mythology he initially created to something that fit a lot better with his own Catholic sentiments. Which makes sense: the difference between a young man writing to entertain himself and an author who has become, like it or not, part of pop culture currency and whose message carries weight. Hence his despair over how some people were using LotR ... I can see why his Silm myth would become also problematic (heheh) to him in places.

> Impressive bit of organization that you have the skill and the authority to pull that together virtually overnight on practically no notice at all.

Thank you! It took a lot of time I didn't have and a lot of angst, truth be told! I didn't expect the response I got, which was rather stupid ... one would think I would have figured out by now that I'm going to get more rather than less. It then became a feat of organization (and HTML on the fly!) more than anything. And I've only caught one mistake I made so far, which is fixable. Not bad.

I didn't finish till 11 PM, mostly because I an after-school meeting at the district office, then a meeting for a friend's organization ... I didn't even get home to start working on Silm40 till after 8 o'clock!

But last night it took all of six minutes to do the day's posting. That will be the norm.

There is a certain loveliness to the time when a story exists only in your mind and is still perfect, still exactly as you imagine it, before it becomes diluted by the attempt to put it into words. ;) Thank you for reading and commenting, Binka!

Thank you, Jenni! It probably helps that I've thought more than any healthy person should about Pengolodh and his worldview. :D I rarely write drabbles anymore but found the minimalist form fun for this project--trying to put as much meaning into those 100 words as I could.

If you get to "Stars of the Lesser," I hope you enjoy it! I wrote it for Pandemonium now some years ago, but it is definitely a fave among my own stories.

Thanks again for reading and commenting! <3

Exactly! :D I suppose it's abundantly obvious that Pengolodh and I have been palling around for years now, eh?

Thank you! I do like to think that Pengolodh was aware of the responsibility behind what he was doing ... and would be vaguely mortified to know that "his First Age" has become "the First Age." But I'm sympathetic to the guy despite disagreeing with him on nearly everything! :D