Inedibles by Dawn Felagund
Fanwork Notes
Grundy did most of the heavy lifting for the Great Beleriand Bake-Off challenge, but when I copyedited it and put it on the site, I kept noticing prompts that had some delicious double entendres. When writing challenge descriptions, I often include the reminder that challenge prompts are always open to twists and loopholes, so when Himring and I decided to cohost an instadrabbling session together, we decided to head in this direction: challenge prompts that were taken beyond baking, exploiting all those twists and loopholes and myriad meanings.
These works come out of that instadrabble session. They are called "inedibles" because they do not mention baking at all. They definitely don't have anything to do with Christmas. They definitely do allude to the Solstice on which they fell: the constant cycle of life, death, and renewal; the clinging to light amidst the deep dark; senescence and cold and promise.
As such, some of them are dark. Check the notes on each piece for warnings. Quenya names, when used, are translated in the endnotes.
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Summary:
Various short pieces for the Great Beleriand Bake-Off PLUS! Instadrabbling session that Himring and I cohosted on the SWG's Discord. Maglor learns perfectionism from his father. Nerdanel becomes of the subject of the national epic of ugly girls. 1980s!Maglor discovers Lúthien as a calendar girl, and medieval!Maglor gets paid in gold. Tilion muses on the end of the world and his prophesied violent death.
Major Characters: Maglor, Fëanor, Lúthien Tinúviel, Nerdanel, Tilion
Major Relationships: Fëanor/Nerdanel
Genre: Ficlet, Fixed-Length Ficlet, General
Challenges: Great Beleriand Bake-Off
Rating: Creator Chooses Not to Rate
Warnings: Check Notes for Warnings
This fanwork belongs to the series
Chapters: 5 Word Count: 1, 439 Posted on Updated on This fanwork is a work in progress.
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Table of Contents
Maglor wants Fëanor to teach him a new game so that he can fit in better with the young intellectuals of Tirion. What he learns instead will prove far more enduring. A triple drabble.
Prompt: fatherless pie
Excerpt from the song "Cat's in the Cradle" by Harry Chapin:
My son turned ten just the other day.
He said, "Thanks for the ball, Dad, come on let's play!
Can you teach me to throw?" I said, "Not today,
I got a lot to do." He said, "That's okay."
And he walked away but his smile never dimmed.
It said, "I'm gonna be like him, yeah,
You know I'm gonna be like him."
And four words from "The Fall of Gil-galad": harpers - keen - afar - none
This work is also personal. I am a workaholic, and I come by it honestly. I did not even think my dad liked me until he and I worked together at a restaurant when I was sixteen, and he realized my work ethic was like his. My dad taught me to use computers (as a girl, when this was not the way), so the SWG is partly to his credit.
Lúthien danced into the most romantic of legends, but Nerdanel is renowned by the ugly girls for a different sort of triumph. A drabble.
Prompt: toad-in-the-hole
“There was panic in the parlour and howling in the hall” (From "Toad’s Last Little Song" in The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame)
There is a nod to the "buns" prompt in here too.
Dedicated to my fellow fans who have been or are ugly girls.
Maglor is an accountant in the 1980s, trying to blend into his world but unable to resist collecting artifacts that allude to his past. When a Tolkien calendar arrives with Lúthien presented as a pin-up girl, he contemplates her depiction through the centuries compared to who she really was. A triple drabble. There are allusions to sex and violence and their overlap in this one.
Prompt: cheesecake
Cheesecake has a rather old-fangled double meaning as a sexy image of a woman. The specific prompt for this piece is Rowena Morrill's (in?)famous artwork of Lúthien dancing for Beren. Is this how I imagine this scene, Lúthien, Beren? Not at all, but I give Rowena credit for seizing on 80s fantasy and popular culture and going all in. Feathered hat off to you, Rowena!
Maglor-in-history again, now in the Middle Ages, receives a payment in gold that does not meet his expectations of the past. A perfect drabble.
Prompt: gold coins
Tilion has a lot of time to think now that steering the Moon has become a routine job free of dragons and dark lords. He knows his place in the prophesy and that he will die violently, and he wonders if he can aspire to the dignity he has observed of the mortals in Middle-earth. A ficlet with dark themes related to death and references to blood and violence.
Prompt: mooncake
This ficlet responds to the quote, "not until the Sun passes and the Moon falls, shall it be known of what substance [the Silmarils] were made," with another nod to the "buns" prompt.
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