Interview with Dr. Zara Ashkenazi-Khan by Saelind by Dr. Zara Ashkenazi-Khan, Saelind

The third kinslaying that took place at Sirion is one of the most discussed and controversial moments for fans in the Quenta Silmarillion. In her upcoming paper for Mereth Aderthad 2025, "Exile, Ruin and Resistance: Beleriand as Postcolonial Palimpsest," Dr. Zara Ashkenazi-Khan considers that moment and why it stands apart from the many other acts of violence in the Quenta Silmarillion. Saelind recently spoke to Zara about her paper, her application of postcolonial theories to The Silmarillion, and the role of fanfiction versus scholarship in making sense of this messy text.

Saelind: Starting with the central question right off the bat: why did you choose this topic?

Zara: So it started with rereading the section of the Quenta Silmarillion tracing the Third Kinslaying at Sirion—one of the most 'controversial' events in the story as far as the fandom is concerned. The legendarium, when read as a long history of attritional conflict, contains many moments of spectacular violence—both physical and cultural. The Oath of Fëanor, the ship-burning at Losgar, the suppression of languages, two other kinslayings, Celebrimbor’s body, Gil-galad’s fiery end—the list is long. And yet Sirion holds a distinct symbolism even amidst that. Not just another moment of violence, but one that seemed to generate an unusual level of discomfort, disagreement, and moral ambiguity. That tension between the narrative’s internal logic and the response it provoked was what drew me to study it as a moment of rupture.

In the study of dissent and resistance, rupture refers to a moment that disrupts the dominant order—whether in terms of power, identity, narrative, or legitimacy. These ruptures can be historical events, cultural expressions, or symbolic acts that resist or reconfigure the idea of 'order', not by unleashing chaos but by questioning the meaning of 'order' itself.

The acts at Sirion mark a moment of rupture in that they expose a faultline in the narrative’s presumed moral and civilisational order. On the surface, the violence is yet another extension of the Oath of Fëanor and the internecine conflict among the Eldar. And this act targets a diasporic, interethnic community ruled in part by two Half-elves, who had formed a tentative refuge in the wake of Doriath. As such, the violence enacted at Sirion does not merely continue the violent legacy of the Oath; it interrupts a moment of possible reconstruction, where cultural hybridity and survival outside of inherited structures were beginning to take shape. And yet, the events still lead to the progression of the narrative: the tragic displacement of a mother figure, as in Elwing's terrified flight with the Nauglamir, catalyses the end of the war against Morgoth. The violence the oldest sons of Fëanor commit fractures their own psyches further, marking the beginning of the end for the Oath, and the mercy and subsequent care they show to Elrond and Elros directly gestures towards a new Age for both Elves and Men, with both children playing a foundational role in the restructuring.

Essentially, it is an uneasy moment with so many ways to read it, and so much contention around it. And I chose to focus on Elwing and Maedhros because they're the least controversial ch ... obviously, I'm joking. But yes, I thought it would be interesting to read them alongside each other, and centre that section of my paper on their respective 'falls'. Maedhros, who jumped with one Silmaril into a chasm and Elwing, who jumped with another into the sea: both seeking an end to violence, both intending to cut short their own lives. I don't want to give away too much about this section right now of course, but yes, these two characters are VERY compelling to me in both a fannish and a scholarly sense, and I've really enjoyed getting to grips with their colliding narrative.

Saelind: Besides Nehru, what other postcolonial writers/theorists have influenced your work on this topic?

Zara: With Nehru specifically, it’s less that his writing is particularly progressive or disruptive, quite the contrary—the creation of a postcolonial “palimpsest” in the way he does it with India is in itself a 'tell', so to speak, of his own somewhat detached, clinical viewpoint. The main reason for choosing Nehru’s Discovery of India as a way to read the Quenta Silmarillion is precisely because of Nehru's voyeuristic, fantastical way of looking at a place and trying to create literary 'order' out of it, and in doing so, flattening out elements deemed by the historian-archivist as being too complex or unpalatable. As such, Discovery of India becomes an interesting lens through which to navigate the tensions and slippages between 'Tolkien as Writer' and 'Pengolodh as Narrator', wherein Nehru is not actually read as a postcolonial or anticolonial scholar but rather as a Pengolodh-like archivist and historian, whose own narratorial biases and rigid perspectives affect the writing of history itself.

So it goes without saying that Dawn [Walls-Thumma]'s foundational work on Pengolodh-as-narrator is very influential to such a reading, especially when setting up the initial comparison between Pengolodh and Nehru. Aside from this, I’ve had a keen focus on literary dissent in general: and I’d say Priya Gopal’s Insurgent Empire and Aijaz Ahmed’s In Our Time are scholarly books that have really influenced my own thinking, as well as the nonfiction works of Arundhati Roy and Ken Saro-Wiwa.

Saelind: What draws you to Tolkien and/or what is your favorite part of the legendarium?

Zara: Frankly, how messy it is!

Not the narrative itself, but the form the legendarium takes due to the way so much of it was posthumously collated and edited: a floating, perpetually unfinished amalgam that repeatedly contradicts itself, reaching for mythic cohesion while continually revealing its own ruptures. I’m not interested in Tolkien as a source of timeless 'canonicity', but as a text full of fault lines: histories overwritten, languages lost, loyalties undone, both in form and structure. My favorite parts of the legendarium are often the least resolved—places like Cuiviénen, Sirion, or Númenor, where clarity breaks down. I guess I’m drawn to the spaces where the narrative falters under its own weight: unresolved griefs, moral ambiguities, the places which are palimpsests of forgotten, obliterated, or lost languages and identities.

Saelind: This bit of your presentation abstract really stood out to me: "my study takes a theoretical-critical approach: unpicking acts of resistance and destabilising the moral certainty of Pengolodh’s framework." In many ways, I see this in your fanfiction as well. How (if at all) does your scholarship overlap with your fanfiction? What can creative works accomplish that scholarly works can't, and vice versa? What factors do you consider when deciding to approach a topic as a scholar or a creator?

Zara: I can actually point to a direct correlation, and in fact it was writing this story that led to the idea for this paper. In my longfic Prayers to Broken Stone, I directly transpose the characters into an imperial/post-imperial setting, with the events of Sirion serving as that moment of rupture. To put it very simply, the teenaged Indian revolutionaries Maedhros and Maglor acquire the British infants Elrond and Elros in a moment of mass chaos, where nobody present in said moment was 'in the right place at the right time', a rupture that has reverberating effects later on for all the characters involved, including those not yet born.

What fanwork allows me to do is explore ambiguity without the pressure to resolve it or serve as an informant. As in, I can deal in unpalatability, contradiction, and explore multidirectional consequences of structural violence in a way that scholarly writing, with its emphasis on clarity and positioning, often cannot. In Prayers to Broken Stone, I could move across decades, not to create a neat historical arc, but to evoke the cyclical nature of violence and the uneasy transformation of India from a subjugated nation to the dominant state apparatus. For instance, what I describe as 'homegrown atrocity' in the story is a way of showing that dissent doesn’t just oppose the dominant narrative; it can also replicate its logic once institutionalised. In a side plotline set at Oxford, the violence is epistemic—rooted in knowledge production—which further complicates things.

On the other hand, scholarship allows for a different kind of precision. It helps me trace intellectual genealogies, engage with theoretical frameworks, and position my interpretations within broader conversations. Scholarship absolutely does give me the tools to name the structures I critique, learn how to navigate them remotely, et cetera. But through fiction, I can step inside the ruin, I suppose. It's a viscerality you can't get through the narrowness of academic convention: the ability to not simply deconstruct or define a structure or historical narrative but to move through it, trying to find where the echo falters, where the shadow starts to bend.

When deciding how to approach a topic, I often ask: Is this an argument or a question? If it’s an argument I’m trying to make, I tend toward scholarship. But if I’m trying to ask myself something, hold a tension or explore some sort of uncertainty, I turn to fiction. And sometimes, like with Prayers to Broken Stone, the creative and the critical bleed into one another, and I enjoy myself quite a lot more!

Saelind: What do you hope people will take away from your presentation?

Zara: I'd love for people to leave with a clearer sense of the progressive potential of reading the legendarium, which is sometimes taken as a unified mythos, immovable canon, or direct reflection of its author's 'values' or 'morals', as a series of contradictions, tangles, and moral ambiguities. By exploring the Third Kinslaying at Sirion as a 'rupture', the effects of Maedhros and Elwing's fated collision course, and reading Beleriand as a frenetic 'postcolonial' palimpsest, I hope to demonstrate how Tolkien’s work can reflect the complexities of power, cultural destruction, and shifting identities, but also use this sort of reading as a way to unsettle the real-world history-writing of figures such as Nehru being taken as immutable fact.

Saelind: Finally, do you have existing work (scholarly, fannish, or both!) that you would like us to highlight?

Zara: Ooh, so if we're thinking fanfiction, Prayers to Broken Stone which I mentioned above might be a good one in this context. For a blend of both, perhaps the essay collection on Celebrían I'm posting on the SWG, which uses Celebrían's narrative as a general framework to engage with historiography, investigative environmental journalism, and critical queer/disability theory to unpack literary and mythic narratives of loss and reclamation.