(Vote) Up Not Down by Himring

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Fanwork Notes

My prompt for the Competition Challenge was this:

"Wer Liebe Lebt" by Michelle (video | lyrics).

You wouldn't image that even I would manage to inject a touch of melancholy into my response to this very upbeat prompt, but I did.

Fanwork Information

Summary:

Life is too short for some kind of contests.

Maybe it's possible to love one thing without knocking the alternative.

(Especially if both of them happen to be fictional, in any case.)

 

Free verse (pretty much extra free)

Major Characters:

Major Relationships:

Artwork Type: No artwork type listed

Genre: Poetry

Challenges: Competition

Rating: General

Warnings:

Chapters: 1 Word Count: 169
Posted on 28 May 2018 Updated on 28 May 2018

This fanwork is complete.

Chapter 1

Read Chapter 1

Do you prefer dawn or dusk?

Do you prefer Arwen or Galadriel?

Shall I fetch my axe?

It is not a competition.

Let us enjoy the company of both together,

while there is time,

before the ship sails from the Havens,

before leaves deck a grave on Cerin Amroth.

 

Do you prefer songs of unrequited love

or songs of fate and doom?

Do you prefer Daeron or Maglor?

It is not a competition;

both are great matters.

Let us listen to each in turn,

while there is time,

before each song falters with distance,

before singers wander and are lost.

 

Do you prefer sunshine or the evening star,

Arien’s blossom or the light of the Trees?

It is not a competition.

Do not make me choose

between Celebrimbor and Enerdhil,

between Nenya and the Elessar.

Who cares who stands taller,

Turgon or Thingol? Or forgotten Argon?

 

Even forever isn’t here to stay—

let us love what we love

in the time that is given to us.

Comments

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Nice work! Unlike others who've commented, I like the style and organization better than the moral instructive tone of the poem. But it certainly works extremely well within the context of the text. Always been one of my favorite little disputes in the text--two valorous knights defending two worthy ladies. It really reeks of the courtly love tradition, doesn't it? So chivalrous in tone and resolved so nicely in the story itself.

Another of those instances where the reader is reminded that Tolkien was not only a linguist but a medievalist.

 

Thank you very much, Oshun!

I hadn't set out to write meta or instruct, really.

I was mulling over the prompt and thinking that I had already written about Daeron and Maglor and probably couldn't say anything else worthwhile about them.

Then this happened and I thought I'd better go with it and stand by it...

In a way it's quite odd for a quasi-Scandinavian dwarf and a quasi-Anglo-Saxon king to be indulging in a cleaned-up version of courtly love. But really, no odder than some of the things that go on in the medieval texts Tolkien was familiar with; they weren't purist either.