Finrod: 30-Day Character Study - Study Days by cuarthol

13. Home Sweet Home, Part Two

Home Sweet Home, Part Two. Where does your character live? What are their domestic arrangements like? What do their sleeping/dining/cooking/working areas look like? Where do they go to pee and poop? What about their tastes in interior decoration? Take the time to think about one habitation of your character in as much detail as you can come up with.

Outside of luxurious, sensuous, steaming baths, nobody really wants to consider Elven plumbing. Specifically: Elven toilets.

And I don’t either.

But I will.  Nargothrond is underground.  It’s delved into stone. That leaves precious few options for addressing sanitary needs, but it is undeniably a foundational consideration for a city that held as many people as Nargothrond must have held.

Obviously there are three main considerations - accessibility, containment (especially prevention of contamination), and disposal.  When talking about a city that lasted for over three-hundred years, but could theoretically have held up for thousands, that’s a lot of waste to design for.  You can’t just dump it and hope the ‘tank’ never fills up, you have got to address this mess.

Accessibility: you can’t have sanitation facilities that take an hour to walk to and from.  That’s not reasonable.  They must have been regularly located throughout Nargothrond.

For the purposes of this headcanon I am going with chamber pots as not a viable option for long-term use, as they drastically increase the contamination hazard and disposal efforts.

Containment: You don’t want sewage seeping into your water supply, into your food storage, into your living quarters, into … well anything, really.  You also don’t want the fumes getting into the air and fouling up life underground.  So proper venting is a part of containment.

Disposal: Again, an entire city over hundreds (potentially thousands) of years needs a proper method of dealing with waste that is sustainable for the long-term.

Chutes from well-ventilated blocks of latrines direct all waste into containers far down where they are heated using residual energy from the forges to destroy pathogens and remove all moisture.  The resulting dry matter is incinerated and the ash may be disposed of alongside forge and fireplace ash.

I am not actually going to create a fully functional civil design for Nargothrond’s septic disposal.  But I was amused that this was part of the prompt, and I thought I’d throw some brain-cells at it because, as mentioned, it is oft overlooked in all forms of media - from fantasy to sci-fi.

This does bring up a fun idea of Nargothrond being fully plumbed.  Heat from the forges can keep water tanks hot, pipes can run along auxiliary halls to dispense into kitchens, sanitary stations, bathing rooms, and, as necessary, crafting halls.

I imagine Finrod can be extravagant but not stingy with such amenities.  He would have private bathing chambers and a luxurious sized tub for soaking, but there would also be public hot baths that would accommodate anyone in Nargothrond without regard to rank.

Of the many gems he brought out of Valinor which confer light, he has some set in the ceiling of his bedchambers to resemble stars, so he can lay and watch them at night.

Not all of his favorite places are private, however.  There are fountains, garden sanctuaries, acoustically ideal music halls, libraries and scriptoriums, galleries for art and sculpture, and more, all for public appreciation.  

There are forges and armories, workshops for armor and weapons of all kinds.  There are whole wings dedicated to cloth-working.  Kitchens and pantries, cellars and storerooms, stables and coops.  It is both a palace and a city.

There are also infirmaries and places of healing, and often Nargothrond took in the grievously injured from Dorthonion and Tol Sirion.  

Nargothrond, more than any other city among the Exiles except Gondolin, was built with an idea of recreation and delight rather than merely war and defense.  Finrod was not arrogant but he certainly enjoyed his little vanities and comforts. 

But for all of Nargothrond's splendor, it wasn't really "a home".  It was a realm, or a city, or however one wishes to view it, but not really a home as such.

I imagine Finrod had a small set of apartments he could use to actually have time away from others and be alone.  Smaller, more intimate sized rooms where he could relax. 

The bedroom, obviously, and whatever wardrobes that might entail.  A small study where he could read, write letters, or conduct business beyond the counsels.  A private dining room when he wasn't in the main feasting hall.  Maybe a small room just for music and meditation. 

Perhaps he even indulged himself with a private hallway to his own toilet - not attached directly to his suite, of course, but accessible without necessarily leaving the privacy of them entirely.

For as friendly and welcoming and indulgent as Finrod might be with others, a place he could escape to would truly have been a 'home'.