Also I am NOT 84% Eol, who said that I will fight them?!!!!!
All is well, @woodlandcrowns will trade me Fingon for Eol, which seems like an excellent bargain: I would be happy to be 84% Fingon, and can strive in future to be more Fingon and less Feanor & Thingol.
The bargain has been accepted! I shall battle my demons until my last breath! (Which, considering I had 80% Finrod, this may bode ill. Yet, there’s a chance I shall die in glorious combat. Just minus the werewolf, which has been replaced with Eöl.)
the lay of leithian makes a lot more sense if you imagine it as a
dungeons and dragons-style tabletop rpg game between a group of
dangerously eager players and an increasingly frazzled DM
“something about the orcs’ demeanor seems…suspicious”
“okay. sauron, roll for a perception check.”
“dude, come on, his nickname is literally ‘The Great Eye’, that’s not fair -”
“finrod, beren, roll for charisma”
*groans amid rattling of dice*
“the werewolf licks his jaws, which are dripping with gore and saliva. he tenses, as if to spring -”
“I FIGHT THE WEREWOLF”
“finrod, you’re chained up. you don’t have any weapons.”
“I FIGHT THE WEREWOLF WITH MY BARE HANDS”
*sigh* “roll for constitution”
“i use my musical abilities to seduce the dark lord!”
“luthien, you can’t just seduce the dark –nat twenty???
…alright, i guess you can seduce the dark lord.”
[some time later]
“luthien, i know it worked before, but this is the god of death, singing him to sleep just isn’t going to work this – nat twenty again, are you fucking serious -”
the thing about writing fantasy stories is that language is so based on history that it can be hard to decide how far suspension of disbelief can carry you word-choice wise – what do you call a french braid in a world with no france? can a queen ann neckline be described if there was no queen ann? where do you draw the line? can you use the word platonic if plato never existed? can you name a character chris in a land without christianity? can you even say ‘bungalow’ in a world where there was no indian language for the word to originate from? is there a single word in any language that doesn’t have a story behind it? to be accurate a fantasy story would be written in a fantasy language but who has the time for that
Tolkien had the time apparently
LIsten. Linguistics Georg, who invented over 10,000 conlangs each day, is an outlier and should not have been counted.
Linguistics georg aka Tolkien named a place Avallonë in his world and cherry picked some of his character names from old ass literature and yeah, you could invent a whole new word and a whole history of the concept…..or a French braid in a world without France could be a Frànchë Brædë, which is actually Elvish for Cool Ass Hair. It’s your world, make shit up.
Also, if that’s not your speed, try another trick linguistics georg used, aka pretending that your fictional story is just a translation of an ancient historical record, and that you use the term French braid because that’s what We The Modern Audience call it ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Mashups and Exports 