camwyn: Me in a bomber jacket and jeans standing next to a green two-man North Andover Flight Academy helicopter. (arf)
camwyn ([personal profile] camwyn) wrote2004-09-27 02:00 pm

Sinking realisation that struck me at lunch

I've just started playing Finrod Felagund, one of the more fascinating background characters in the Silmarillion, in an RPG called New Menegroth. It's MSN-based but there's an LJ community for it here and most of the characters to date have LJ's of their own... anyway. Here's the realisation:

Finrod is intelligent (he learns languages just by listening to them being spoken, because he can pick up the meaning of words from the speaker's mind), outgoing (he was on a hunting trip when he overheard human voices for the first time and went over and made friends with them despite never having seen their species), fond of humans (made friends with them, sang for them, taught them Sindarin, got them homes, accepted some into his service), fiercely loyal (he left Aman only because he felt family ought to stick together, and Feanor was his uncle, not to mention that he left his kingdom to help Beren in the quest for the Silmaril because he felt duty-bound to the descendants of his former vassal), protective (despite being chained himself he fought Sauron's werewolf with his bare hands to keep it from killing Beren), and blond (his grand-mum was Indis of the Vanyar, who passed on golden-hair genes to her descendants, particularly Finrod's sister Galadriel).

He's a yellow bloody Labrador retriever.

(ETA: Oh, and he gets mopey when he can't be with his particular people, either. His beloved Amarie didn't come with him into Middle-earth, so he never married and claimed to have a foresight flash of a grim fate that kept him from turning to someone else. Right, honey. We all know you were secretly hoping that if you lay on the rug and stared at the door long enough, she'd come walking through. And jeez! One of his names was Friend-of-Men! That's barely a step removed from Man's-Best-Friend...)

[identity profile] ebony14.livejournal.com 2004-09-27 11:24 am (UTC)(link)
None of the Labs I've met were really that good at languages. Drooling and fetching, yes, but not languages. :)

[identity profile] finrod-f.livejournal.com 2004-09-27 12:31 pm (UTC)(link)
Well, hey, as someone here on LJ put it... Ever notice how most fantasy quests are basically games of Fetch the Stick? It's the gods going, "Get the stick, boy! Get the stick! It's really important that you get Daddy the stick! Gooooooood doggy!"

Finrod's just helping someone else get the stick, that's all.

[identity profile] dormouse-in-tea.livejournal.com 2004-09-28 07:11 am (UTC)(link)
. . . WHO said? I wish to go pounce on them.