Comments on The Emperor's Goodbye

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I love that you incorporated the dancing bears. :D
Weirdly, I had the impression that Elros was getting younger as he walked through the forest and talked to Maglor, although there isn't really anything in the text on which I can fix it (except maybe the leaning on Maglor's shoulder, but that happens very late). Although the unavoidable ending made me sad, it feels reassuring that Elros died knowing that it's been a good year (if there are bad years in Númenor at all) and that everything was in good order.

Thank you! I love those bears and how they link up with the bear lore in The Hobbit! But my head has trouble seeing them literally on the same island with Aldarion and Erendis and the others. I can see them as a Beorian folk tale, though, for instance!

I hadn't consciously thought of Elros getting younger, when I wrote, but it fits very well with what I meant to suggest about how he was feeling!

I think of the beginning years in Numenor as being quite tough for the new settlers, but by the time this is set I envision them having no disastrously bad harvests, although not all of them equally good, and enough planning in place to deal with any less good years without much strain (quite unlike the later distribution issues in Azruhar's time!).

 

I absolutely love the dancing bears of Númenor (out of place though they feel at first) because Númenor was on my mind when I was travelling around Hokkaidô, a long time ago, and the bear is majorly important in the Ainu culture of Hokkaidô. It makes no actual sense, and it certainly doesn't fit with the southern Mediterranean vibes of the rest of Númenor, but it makes me happy. XD

For all we know from canon, there may have been no distribution issues in the days of Tar-Ancalimon and Tar-Telemmaite either. Perhaps those days were just golden and happy and I'm just an evil author! ;) I agree that the beginning years must have been a challenge! In that context, the observation that all of the trees are younger than Elros was very poignant. They not only had to settle a country where nobody had settled before, it was a country that literally hadn't existed before, and that must have been tough. And that isn't even getting into how different peoples had to grow together as one people, and how plenty of them were probably bringing generational trauma and defensive residue from Middle-earth under Morgoth's rule! Elros surely had his work cut out, but he seems to have managed to leave his descendants a well-functioning kingdom at the end of his long life.

Oh, this is so beautiful, tears spontaneously came to my eyes when I reached the ending.

I love that he let go in the comforting presence of both dads (comforting despite all the reasons for the (justifiably) loud words he'd like to say!) And also comforted that the trees they'd planted, along with the other agriculture, had become so well established by now that the island wouldn't need as much tending at the start of his grandson's reign as it did at the beginning of his. (This made me picture Númenor as a kind of inverted Easter Island, relatively barren and harsh initially and gradually forested. And with mystery bears instead of mystery statues, I guess!)

Comparing his age to the great girth of common trees really does give an impression of how old 500 years really is!

I'd love for Maglor to be there on the Island with his fostor son, and then it suddenly made me so sad that Elros is leaving most of his ancestral family here in Arda, inside Mandos and out — although they're mostly people we've come to know and love and of course he didn't.

I do like the implication that Tinfang plays, and in a way calls, to people when it's their time to depart, and that Maglor somehow made a deal with him to play in his stead for Elros. (And bringing in the Warble at the end was a touch that made me smile.)

Really loved this!

It felt like a nice ending for Elros and the bears were an interesting feature.

Also fits the time of year really well, since all the acorns and chestnuts and beechnuts are currently falling from the trees and try to hit you when you least expect it.