I really had fun writing this one! I loves my purplish prose. :) The lines that you chose were favorites of mine as well, so it's good to know that what resonates with me resonates with at least one other person! :D

I'm glad someone picked up on the allusion to AMC too ... ;)

Thank you--I blame Oshun for this one as well! :D

(The database crapped out on me last time I tried to post this reply--let\'s see if I can re-create what I wrote the first time! :)

Oddly enough, I wrote this happy little prose-poem in my head while eating lunch at Q\'doba. I rushed back to work to write it down before I forgot it.

I thought you would like my version of Namo; you know that my Namo won\'t ever be caught in a rocking chair coddling elflings. ;) I wanted to show a certain distance in his character--and, actually, I think this might well be characteristic of the Valar in general, some more than others--where Elves and mortal humans are concerned. To draw an awkward metaphor, our house is invaded by ants every spring. Namo has a similar attitude toward life or death of Elves as I do when I come home and find the sink full of ants and turn on the tap anyway. Or when I annihilate them by the hundreds because they interfere with my plans and defy my will for an ant-free house!

Of course, the slightly heretical view is that Melkor was far from alone in enabling the torment of Maedhros. ;)

Finarfin\'s character fascinates me because he possesses courage that is much quieter than his brothers\'. Yet it seems that Eldarin culture (and, based on the way he is treated in Silmfic, our fannish culture) certainly value marching off to war rather than quietly rebuilding a damaged land. Since my own inclinations tend more toward the latter, I find the intrapersonal conflicts he likely experienced irresistable!

I first started considering the question of Elven aging when I was writing AMC and had to address the question of Elven inheritance. Clearly, they had a tradition of inheritance--but why? In an immortal race? That, in turn, got me thinking about how younger generations had to compete with people literally thousands of years older than them. Would it even be possible for them to catch up?

So this ficlet was based on these musings, looking at it from the perspective of the elder and wiser as he underestimates the younger generation quite badly! (Poor Finwe, I don\'t usually depict him very positively ...)

I\'d sooner have your ear for poetry than all the knowledge in the world of poetic form! :)

I suppose I\'d call this (like \"One Thousand Times\") a prose-poem more than anything. I seem to be in a rut in writing repetition-based ficlets of late! :) (I\'ve forbidden myself from writing any more for a while and am so far successful, which isn\'t saying much since I\'ve only written one since this one!) In any case, I wanted to get more into the mind of Curufin in this piece. He\'s probably the most difficult of the Feanorians for me to understand, and I\'ve written very little from his perspective. The temptation, I think, is to be too \"canonical\" and write him as an image of his father with no embellishment aside from that. It seemed easier to approach him in a moment of frailty in beginning to consider the nuances of his character. I agree that the death of Feanor must have been awful for them all but Curufin in particular.

Pandë, thank you so much for the reviews of my ficlets! Finding them this morning was quite a pleaseant surprise! :)

I still have hopes of finishing all of the challenges. (I haven\'t even finished last year\'s B2MeM yet, though, so that might be a while in happening.) Even though, when I start a project like this, I always say that I\'m going to really try to branch out from the Feanorians ... I always come back to the Feanorians in the end. *sigh* ;) As for writing them generally, so far, my summer is wide open; I am taking two undergrad linguistics courses for my certification but otherwise have nothing on my agenda (and have forbidden myself from building any new websites! ;) and so hope to write, write, and write some more, including working more on the saga that includes AMC. (The prequel is already underway, but I also have an odd hankering to work on the sequel. Time will tell, I suppose. :)

Thank you again, so very much, for your ever-insightful comments!

Thank you, Lyra! I can\'t help but to think that there must have been more to Tulkas than acting as the Guy Who Punches Things and Laughs about It! :D I could have also had him invent Risk or Warhammer, I suppose ... or, eegads, the B2MeM Final Battle game! But I suppose I\'m swayed by all those movies set in medieval times where the nobility sit around and play chess. I always like to imagine my Elves playing chess.

I had my own thoughts on what went on between the brothers to spark Fean\'s outburst, but you\'re totally right that there is actually a lot of ambiguity there. It\'s always fun to discover new angles to my own writing based on reader comments! :)

Thinking about Finarfin and his perceptions of the Noldorin rebellion and what follows has provided me with hours of diversion! :D (<3s Finarfin) I don\'t think that remaining in Tirion was at all easy at first; he might even have had a more difficult job than his brothers, given the abrupt reduction in population that he had to work with. But, over time, I do also wonder if he regretted not being in a position where he could be more proactive in the fight against Morgorth. Certainly, he didn\'t seem to hesitate when going forth to the War of Wrath.

Thank you for reading and reviewing, Lyra! :)

I\'ve always seen Maglor as the most similar to Feanor of the seven sons (no matter Tolkien\'s opinion that it was Curufin. ;) And you\'re right that my Maglor\'s jaw would fall on the floor to hear me say that! Feanor too, probably! :D I\'ve never felt like Curufin is depicted as having Feanor\'s creative genius, even if he shares Feanor\'s skills. Now Maglor ... he certainly knows what it\'s like to have the muses constantly raging at him, to be compelled to create without reason, to have that drive dominate his character. It creates irresistible possibilities in stories, to have Feanor and Maglor so often at odds with each other but also with so much in common.

Thank you for reading and reviewing, Ithilwen! :)

I was worried that the misplaced r would escape many people\'s notice--a worry not helped by the fact that, almost immediately after posting this piece, I received an email asking if it was intentional or a typo. >.< I\'m still not sure if it works, but I\'m glad you picked up on what I was trying to do! :)

We do need a word that means \"nicely written about an unpleasant subject,\" don\'t we? I find myself in that conundrum all the time! :D

In my mind, Namo is certainly withholding his help because he knows how much Maedhros desires it. It is a bit of cat-and-mouse; my version of Namo certainly is not one of the more benevolent of the Valar, and his idea of \"recreation\" is often a little on the dark side. ;)

Thanks, Ithilwen! :) I agree--they also lost their king (and father, in Finarfin\'s case) and would have felt the same loathing for Morgoth. It must have been frustrating, at times, to feel hobbled by the choice they had made.

I find myself fascinated by how Elven culture would have responded to aging. I imagine what if, as a writer, I had to compete with the person who wrote Beowulf? Or even, more recently, Virginia Woolf, John Steinbeck, Walt Whitman ...? Since achievement in our culture involves the earlier generations getting out of our way, it\'s a bit challenging to wrap my brain around how an immortal race would handle the same questions. That was certainly on my mind in writing this: that Feanor and Fingolfin will never be viewed as fully adult by the likes of Finwe. I certainly think there\'s a good bit of the wishful thinking going on as well in my \'verse. Finwe just can\'t imagine how his two eldest sons could not love each other as he loves them.

Thanks so much, Ithilwen, for all of your reviews. I\'m sorry it\'s taken me so long to reply; it was like Christmas morning as a kid, finding in my inbox so many reviews at once, and always so insightful and thought-provoking. :)

You\'re exactly right, and I enjoyed leaving it open-ended (though I have in my mind what I think happened ;). Once again, too, we see Finwe\'s wishful thinking that made an appearance in \"Temperance.\" On the B2MeM site, someone commented that leaving those two alone together was not the wisest of choices! Finwe, of course, is unable to see that.

Thank you, Sitara! I am of the opinion that you can\'t be wrong in how you interpret a story ... and as it happens, you picked up on one of the things I was trying to do in that last paragraph, so I\'m doing a little happy dance right now. :D I definitely indulged in some wordplay there. The idea of the head wearing the crown hadn\'t occurred to me, but this is a really cool way to look at it (I love when readers point out things in my stories that never would have occurred to me! :) I certainly did have in mind the Final Battle and Feanor\'s return to rekindle the Trees; this is one idea that I cannot get out of my mind, and I sometimes feel as though all of my stories about the Feanorians flow towards it these days.

Thank you again, so very much, for taking the time to read and review and for your kind words about my story!

Most of my writing tends to be dark. And, in my personal life, I tend to be a pie-eyed optimist. 8^) Perhaps this lends support to your point in the first paragraph! ;)

The captives also know who Varda is, so I think their concept of pity comes from the same sources. Some (many?) were likely not born there and remember life \"on the outside\" and the emotions that motivate people who don\'t live in such a black hole for empathy.

Being fascinated by human behavior, the potential for seeing through Maedhros\'s eyes the culture of the Elves held captive in Angand is tempting. I think this may be one of my first attempts, though I\'ve thought about it a lot.

Thank you, Himring, for the insightful comment! :) (And you can see that the note on my sticky-pad did eventually work! :D)

I can say that I, personally, do not need to hear \"I liked it\" about my work. I never turn it down ... but insightful comments give me something to really mull over and challenge me to think about my own ideas as a writer. So I think your first comment was lovely! :)

Okay, I'd buy that if you had requested it and I'd told you I had written it and you hadn't even been able to squeak out a "Thanks" (one syllable!) because "You liked it so much that you didn't know what to say." ;^D I don't expect anyone to comment on my work, although I'm always thrilled when they do. ;)

However, I liked this particular comment so much that I don't even know what to say. *hides*

Anyway, I'm glad you liked this piece. It's certainly one of my more ... errr ... off-the-wall pieces. It was fun to write though. (And there's a birthday theme where it fits--yay! So it will see light of day again!) He certain was shit-faced, indeed.

Thank you for commenting. (Six syllables! Still not that hard! ;)

I agree that I think Nerds probably had at most ... mixed feelings. But I think she was wise enough to know that the past simply couldn't be undone without consequences greater than her simply being happier and more content.

I also (probably my bias showing!) think that she and Feanor had many, many happy years together. (And now a plotrabbit the size of a T. rex just stomped into the study. Eegads.)

Thank you for reading, and for commenting. :)

Thank you--I'm glad you liked it and appreciate that you let me know!

(And welcome to the SWG too! :)