"An Elopement With Life": The Spectacular Fading of Celebrían by Zara BalrogBalls
Fanwork Notes
An Elopement with Life is a 9-part essay collection that intertwines literary fan/fiction with the nonfiction essay form, exploring the idea of a Celebrían who stays in Middle Earth.
The fictional narrative follows a year in the life of Celebrían who, across conversations with various 'lost women' of the legendarium, makes the deliberate choice to not-sail to Valinor.
The essays in An Elopement with Life use Celebrían and “courtesan laments” as a general framework but traverse a wider thematic landscape, engaging with historiography, investigative environmental journalism, and critical queer/disability theory to unpack how mythic and literary narratives shape our understanding of loss, resilience, and reclamation.
The introductory essay Dazzling Despair considers the radical potential of performing one’s own ‘death’, as Celebrían’s search for the Elessar transforms loss into an act of deliberately poetic spectacle. The Art of Dying Twice deconstructs Lúthien’s legendary defiance, revealing how even the most celebrated figures of resistance may be vexing in their contradictions. Sea-cure is an intertextual meditation on the sea’s ambivalence—both vessel of liberation and instrument of dispossession—as Elrond attempts to communicate with the Valar across an unfathomable divide. The Poster Child examines the distortions of historical memory, positioning Celebrían as an uneasy object of mythmaking who must navigate her own commodification into a cautionary tale, paralleling a “poster child” in narratives of disability.
The collection then shifts toward a mode of speculative investigative journalism with The Crab-Eaters and The Crab-Saviours, in which Celebrían, Arwen, and the elusive Fëanorian wives cross paths with an eccentric cryptid who runs a farm of extinct-yet-not-extinct shellfish, mirroring the author’s real-world pursuit of brutalised waterfowl in the United Kingdom. Does Your Mother Know? takes on the ethics of retribution, as Celebrían and Elrond are at odds after she demands to see her sons' orc hunt, raising fraught questions about complicity, cycles of violence, and the power of bearing witness.
The collection concludes with the two-part essay The Bravest Girl in Arda, where Celebrían, alongside her father Celeborn, constructs a living reconstruction of Taur-im-Duinath, a sunken forest in Beleriand. This final couplet articulates restoration as a quiet, persistent act: the renewal of the self through reconnection with the nonhuman world, the submerged histories that whisper beneath dominant narratives, and the “little revolutions” that exist under the weight of the great ones — resonating with Tolkien’s own attentiveness to the dignity of small acts and overlooked labours. Across these independent essays, An Elopement with Life engages with resilience as both concept and praxis, unfolding through a dialectic of rupture and repair, disappearance and re-emergence, myth and materiality, and the histories we choose—or refuse—to inherit.
No academic background is required. The work will update every 6-8 weeks, hosted exclusively on the SWG, and each essay in the collection can be read standalone.
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Zara is an essayist and novelist who works broadly across queer world literatures and ecocriticism. She holds degrees from SOAS, the University of St. Andrews and The University of Oxford.
Fanwork Information
Summary: An Elopement with Life is a 9-part essay collection that intertwines literary fan/fiction with the nonfiction essay form, exploring the idea of a Celebrían who stays in Middle Earth. The fictional narrative follows a year in the life of Celebrían who, across conversations with various 'lost women' of the legendarium, makes the deliberate choice to not-sail to Valinor. The essays engage with historiography, investigative environmental journalism, and critical queer/disability theory to unpack how mythic and literary narratives shape our understanding of loss, resilience, and reclamation. Major Characters: Celebrían, Elrond, Nerdanel, Elwing, Arwen, Finduilas Major Relationships: Genre: Experimental, General, Nonfiction/Meta Challenges: Bollywood, Jubilee Rating: Creator Chooses Not to Rate Warnings: Check Notes for Warnings |
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Chapters: 1 | Word Count: 5, 077 |
Posted on 30 January 2025 | Updated on 30 January 2025 |
This fanwork is a work in progress. |
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