Comments on Sunday Scriberies

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Thank you very much. Tumblr can be bewildering, and it's definitely not the best place for easy accessibility, so it seemed appropriate to post them here as well - especially since Dawn mentioned that there was a shortage of meta posts in the archive proper. I'm glad you think these are worth tracking. :)

I am happy to see that you are posting these here! Thank you for sharing them.

One the absolutely most appalling and horrifying example for me of slaves of Morgoth comes from this passage from the account of the Battle of Unnumbered Tears:

Then the Captain of Morgoth sent out riders with tokens of parley, and they rode up before the outworks of the Barad Eithel. With them they brought Gelmir son of Guilin, that lord of Nargothrond whom they had captured in the Bragollach; and they had blinded him. Then the heralds of Angband showed him forth, crying: ‘We have many more such at home, but you must make haste if you would find them; for we shall deal with them all when we return even so.’ And they hewed off Gelmir’s hands and feet, and his head last, within sight of the Elves, and left him." The Silmarillion, "Of the Fifth Battle: Nirnaeth Arnoediad"

The incident, of course, cause a break in the ranks and preemptory assault on Morgoth's forces which resulted in great loss of lives. The implication also is, which is backed in other locations, that there were a lot of captives in Angband talen during the Battle of Sudden Flames.



I agree that that was one of the most horrific incidents, and it does show how widespread captivity (I made a distinction between that and slavery, although there likely was a great deal of intersection between the two unless the captives were spared for some purpose, e.g. Maedhros, Finrod, Húrin) was in Beleriand. The wakes of the Bragollach and Nirnaeth are mentioned in the original article, but the quotation certainly drives the idea home on a personal level. Thank you for commenting, again.