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Wow! What a really interesting concept. Good luck to Celebrian on her project! What we preserve and we lose is a fascinating topic to me. The recovery of oral traditions has always intrigued me. One of my brother's best friends spent decades working on that sort of thing, beginning as a very young man with becoming an expert on Child ballads collected in Indiana and Kentucky in the late 19th and early 20th century and moved on to studying other folklore and trivia than had never been collected in print. I always thought it was a wonderful career choice.

Thanks! Celebrian will need the luck. :P It's a fascinating topic to me as well - one of my friends hopes to study folklore if she gets to attend grad school. While I'm not studying folklore directly, it's all over anthropology since there's so much we don't know (and in a lot of cases, have little to no hope of ever actually recovering knowledge of). There's just so much that we have bits and pieces of and so much we've entirely lost, and then there's the stuff we have but don't know if we're reading the same way the people who originally said it would have. Your brother's friend's career choice seems wonderful to me as well.

Well, that's going to be a massive challenge! Good luck to Celebrían! If I were Elrond, I'd marry her on the spot ;). I can't help wishing that she finds some way not only of fixing the elements of the performance, beyond the mere words, but also of reconstructing the way in which the poems of long-dead people were recited. What a great story idea!

Thank you! Celebrían definitely has her fair share of work ahead of her! Honestly, while I was writing this I was thinking "And here is the point at which Elrond falls in love, because she is as dedicated to knowledge and lore as he is, if not more so". If she doesn't figure out how before she leaves M-e to reconstruct them, I'm sure she can find somebody in Valinor who knows how to view the past with a palantír or something. :P Or push Námo to let Celebrimbor out, so she can work on some new invention with him that will let her not only view the past, but also record it...

Thank you! I'm glad it makes a good point, and feel free to steal her purpose for a fic. I literally only thought of her doing this because she's one of the few female characters that appears to move somewhere with no real reason, and I needed someone to move in and get access to new documents. :P

That's an extremely interesting project. After all, language seems to have changed, so no doubt performance practices did as well, especially with so much war and migration, so that it is not only texts that were lost.

Celebrian joins Daeron, Feanor and Rumil as inventors...

I like your description of that page: "Maglor’s sprawling handwriting twisting around Caranthir’s cramped hand, asking questions that remained unanswered"

 

 

Thank you!

Exactly - if it was just the texts, that'd be one thing. But in addition to texts, there's probably entire cultures gone. And that's something that in our real world is painful but we have to deal with, but I don't think it would make as much sense in an immortal culture for all memory/knowledge of entire cultures to just vanish.

She does. :D She would probably get along quite well with all three, if they could move past everything else.

I'm glad you like that description!