Pages from the Archives of Cîr Imladris by Lferion

Cîr.Im-2637-p-145r | A Note on Noroth Gondren (Stone Giants)

Written for the Fan Flashworks prompt 'Teaching', and posted there here, and on AO3 here.

Also written with the SWG April 2022 challenge 'On a Different Page' in mind, though Tolkien himself never did a bestiary.

Many thanks to Zhie and Runa for encouragement and sanity-checking.

A double-drabble text with single-drabble note, not counting the headers.

Text of Cîr.Im-2637-p-145r | A Note on Noroth Gondren (Stone Giants)

The Stone Giants were not Melkor or Sauron's work. Nor Aule's, except by accident or remove, for having Made mountains by Song, and imbued them with a kind of life. No, if anyone's, the Stone Giants are ours. (The were-worms most emphatically are not: they were there long before any Elf had ventured to those deserts. That we awakened them to understanding and speech is true, but that they exist at all cannot be laid at our feet.) The Stone-giants on the other hand.... Perhaps if that group of travelers had not been a building-crew, led by Singer-of-Walls, perhaps if that party of yrch had not tried to ambush them in that precise spot, but they were, and they did, and lightning came to the call, the living rock arose with heads and hands and arms well fit for tossing lumps of mountainside for the pleasure of it, and the travelers made it safely over the pass. The fate of that party of yrch remains unknown.

A new elaboration of the Song they are, to be seen in mountain thunderstorms, and not in the Ered Luin only, but in every mountain range we know, and likely those we do not.

Archivist's Note

A faithful copy of a note taking up all the margins of the page illustrating the Noroth Gondren in Elendirion Falariëmor's Book of Creatures. This volume is a restoration or replica of the original book as annotated in various hands, apparently used as a teaching-text. The copy-scribe took pains to replicate the scripts, though not the inks, and it is possible to follow the notes of the individual annotators. This hand appears primarily in the section on 'Song-Creatures', mobile and rooted creatures that appear unique or unnatural, made not born, or changed from what they might have been before.