Was reading up on Maiar recently, brushing up on my lore, and there was a mention of the fact that a lot of them just don’t bother to take physical form. Even the elves in Valinor aren’t sure how many of them there are. They’re just like, weird invisible ghost friends, creeping around Middle-Earth, observing things and giving people weird dreams. Having a good time in general.
This leads to the obvious question- did Morgoth have any followers who just couldn’t be bothered with physicality? His whole evil power shtick doesn’t seem like it would attract that sort of personality, his ethos is built on interfering with things, but there had to be at least a few who hung around him just to watch the fireworks. (Sauron: Come on, guys, you’re being a real drag. At least make the effort to do a wraith form.)
Does this mean that the War of Wrath had a post-mop up ghostbusting component? Some poor Edain watching Eönwë
shout at the empty halls of a liberated Angband about “going home and facing consequences” and “I mean it this time, don’t make me come get you.”
One corner of Lórien is mildly haunted for a few millennia by some Ainur who are under house arrest for Enabling This Nonsense.
It’s fanwanky, but I can’t figure out
any rational way of the world working otherwise unless you go the Myths
Transformed route. (Pre-Akallabeth that is. Post-Akallabeth Arda works
like our own world.)
I have no scientific explanations (other
than that prototaxites are totally worth reading about), but my general
thoughts are that the Valar are quite literally sustaining Arda and
making it habitable, so that Manwe is responsible for the Coriolis
effect even though the world is flat, Varda is actively keeping
electromagnetism working, Yavanna and Aule are doing…something to ensure
that earth systems are working in a way that maintains a breathable
atmosphere, etc.
Well, saying “these things need to be happening to make the world habitable and the Valar are doing that” is also a solution. I agree that ultimately has to be the case anyway, though when it comes to vegetation it was possible to come up with lots of ideas about how they were doing it and what effect it had on the Elves.
And post-Akallabeth Arda working like our world is always making me think: were the Sun and Moon still Arien and Tilion sailing those ships, or were they “redesigned” into what we know eventually. Is the Morning Star still Eärendil or does he get replaced with a planet at some point
@thepioden I love the idea of Ulmo ensuring the continuation of life withing the water (and I can’t believe I totally ignored that part :0) Would also explain why Cuivienen seems to take such a central place in Elvish cultural heritage/nostalgia. Personally I have a hard time imagining the Elves cultivating lifestock at the time, but it’s certainly possible (and the more I think about it the more likely it gets, after all it took a long time for Orome to find them), and I can imagine them growing some of the water-based plants you mentioned. And anything involving prehistoric megafauna is great!
@ivanaskye The chemotrophs/chemotrophic autotrophs idea and the giant funghi towers are amazing!! And of course someone noticed the hole with “if the Elves had a carnivorous diet what would the animals eat”, but tbh I just liked the notion that the Elves’ diet at the time resembled Gollum’s Idk why. I think the stasis is still less of a problem than constant winter would be, because then they have something to eat at least. But while I like the ‘nomadic Elves’ thing, I believe they actually stayed at Cuivienen for a long time until the journey to Valinor began, so I prefer the ‘Ulmo kept the ecosystems in bodies of water alive’ idea (see above). Chemosynthetic autotrophs as the bottom of the food chain make a lot of sense, though funghi can also use organic waste (not sure if that’s the right word in English, basically I mean dead things) as a food source. Those organisms wouldn’t die out at once, but they might be at an evolutionary disadvantage compared to other plants because of some other factor, so that’d explain why there’d be only a few of them around in the next Ages.
@vardasvapors yes the remnants of the Lamps being involved fits perfectly
So the solutions to the oxygen problem are: cyanobacteriae and algae thanks to Ulmo, bacteria that produce oxygen as a waste product from methane, and my own version, the oxygen from the trees in Aman “spreading” to Middle-Earth (with help from Manwe). I’m not going to pick one, it’s all headcanon material now. And of course, there are areas in which magic (Yavanna’s, Melian’s) keeps thing alive and out of stasis too – if those are proportional in size (compared to the rest of ME) and productivity to the modern rainforests (compared to rest of our world), it’s fine.
And @nipahgirl you mentioned that there would’ve been enough oxygen left over from the time of the Lamps, but (according to a timeline I found on tolkiengateway) over 14000 sun years passed between the destruction of the lamps and the creation of the Sun, and I’m fairly certain the oxygen would’ve run out in that time, so the other options would probably work better by then.
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