{podfic} Lúthad "Enchantment" by Anérea

Fanwork Notes

Gifted to Shihali, in gratitude for not just helping me accurately translate my titles into Sindarin but also taking the time to explain her process and reasoning so I could learn from it too.

Podfic of a pair of ficlets written for the Tolkien Short Fanworks formal challenge of a fixed-length piece of 222 words (for that lovely date, the 22.02.2022) and re

The first, Lúthad Dúlin "Nightgale's Enchantment", filled the thematic prompt "a sudden change of the weather". I literally dreamed this ficlet, although my subconscious was quite likely influenced by the bonus quote prompt from John Greenleaf Whittier's poem, The Singer:

Again the blackbirds sing; the streams
Wake, laughing, from their winter dreams,
And tremble in the April showers
The tassels of the maple flowers.

The sequel Lúthad e-Lach Albelui "Enchantment of the Flame Imperishable", was inspired by Rocky41_7's comment about the first ficlet having "a kind of dreamy quality that suits this moment (if you can call 200 years a "moment") between Melian and Thingol so well", which got me thinking about just what exactly the couple experienced while standing entranced for all that time.

I chose to write them as something of a pastiche in a Tolkienesque style, melding phrases from The Silmarillion into both pieces. I ran into another challenge when concepts I wished to convey, such as inhaling and exhaling, microcosm, infinity, dark matter, as well as the word "complex" all stuck out like, well, like Latin words in an Old English text, so I had a lot of fun figuring out ways to express these in a Tolkienesque way. I hope you enjoy them too.

:|:

Recorded for the Kings & Queens and Love Actually Jubilee challenges.