yavieriel:

actualmermaid:

chestnut-podfic:

Partially inspired by this post of @actualmermaid‘s. Down with swan!Elwing, long live pelican!Elwing. 

Practical considerations:

• Swans are not seabirds- swan!Elwing would not have done terribly well flying from Sirion to the middle of the blasted ocean whereas pelican!Elwing could use her special drag-reducing low flying technique or just swim ragefully underwater
• Pelicans are very large indeed, among the heaviest of all flying birds. Even a Vala must have some trouble with the law of conservation of mass, and elf->bird poses some definite dilemmas. Go for the largest bird possible!
• Why dangle your Silmaril precariously off a scrawny little bird-neck when you could make a bird with a built-in Silmaril pocket 
• But if you really have to have the Silmaril hanging from the bird neck for ~ambience or w/e, pelicans are still superior. Swans fly with their neck parallel to the ground, making it very easy for a necklace-mounted Silmaril to slip tragically into the ocean, whereas pelicans fly with their heads practically resting on their bird shoulder blades, like a girl whose unnecessary male dance partner at the club has just tried to kiss her. Far more stable. 
• Pelwing
• And lastly, this image: 
• Judgy black-and white sword bird, neck bag glowing with all the glory of the light of Aman: Plummets sword-first to the deck
• Eärendil, struggling to “take into his bosom” an enraged 25 lb bird with a hallowed combination pike/satchel bag for a face: “It’s me wife!” 

And lastly lastly, if you’re into that depressing symbolism, how about the pelican who pierces her own breast to feed her young, or sometimes kills them herself and revives them with her own blood and suffering. How about that, huh.

tfw you get Elwing Discourse adjacent material in your mentions and you wonder what’s going down this time

j/k, this is great

While this is an excellent argument, I would like to offer as a counter-argument albatross Elwing.

Albatrosses are exceptionally large birds, with wingspans of up to twelve feet.  At twenty to twenty-five pounds, they offer as much or more advantage regarding conservation of mass as the pelican.

Their enormous wingspan is because albatrosses specialize in long-distance flights across open sea.  They’re highly efficient in the air, using dynamic soaring and slope soaring to cover great distances (up to 1000 kilometers per day) with little exertion.  Great for chasing your husband’s sailing ship across the vast western sea between Middle-earth and Valinor.  In contrast, pelicans inhabit shoreline and inland waters, and their flight range is substantially shorter.

Look at that beauty.  That’s a Southern Royal Albatross, appropriately regal for our Doriathrin princess.

They’re exceptionally long-lived birds; one albatross still alive today was banded in 1956 at the approximate age of five years, and is now the longest-lived wild bird known to science at the ripe old age of at least sixty-six.  While obviously not the same as immortality, for a wild bird that’s a pretty impressively long lifespan.

While pelicans mate for a season, albatross pairs are monogamous for life.  So even bird!Elwing would instinctively seek out her wandering mate.

The symbolism of the albatross is also delightfully on the nose.  The Latin name, Diomedea, references the mythical metamorphosis of the companions of the Greek warrior Diomedes into birds, so we’ve got magical transformation right off the bat. Then there’s the tradition that albatrosses were the souls of lost mariners, also very apropos. And of course the classic “albatross around the neck” a la Coleridge signifying a burden that feels like a curse, both in terms of a literal burden and a psychological burden.  So you have Elwing as both the metaphorical and literal albatross around the necks of Maedhros and Maglor, but also Elwing carrying her own ‘albatross’ in the form of the Silmaril.