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.
@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.
Feanor will not admit this to anyone, least of all himself, but he actually liked Indis back when they first met and she was just his father’s nice friend who took him for walks and answered all of his questions about the different plants in the garden. Afterward he recontextualized her kindness as nothing more than an attempt to get closer to his father (which in a sense it was, of course, but not in the manipulative way he makes it out to be.)
Obviously starlight is most likely not enough for photosynthesis. (Of course, there has been no
need for such a plant to evolve in the real world…)
What we know: There were plants everywhere during the Spring of Arda, thanks to the Lamps. After their destruction, Yavanna grieved because their growth was “stayed”, and she “set a sleep
upon many things that had arisen in the Spring, so that they should not age”.
There is, however, a mention of growth in dark Beleriand – Nan Elmoth where Elwe and Melian
met and “the trees of Nan Elmoth grew tall and dark before they […]”. Hmm. Of course, that could be an exception due to Melian’s presence, seeing as it’s also mentioned how Doriath is a place of “life and joy” because of her, in contrast to most of Beleriand, and Niphredil blooms there when Luthien is born.
So, the explanation is that the vegetation is under the Sleep of Yavanna, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few things to consider:
– Yavanna kept the plants from dying, and if that means they were frozen in time, the Elves could presumably eat them, though they wouldn’t grow back. If “Sleep” means they were like our plants in winter, nutrition becomes more problematic. Their diet might have to be mostly carnivorous, maybe supplemented with roots and nuts or fruit remnants. (Again, since none of it grows back, they’d have to forage and put themselves in danger more and more.)
– Also, there’d be funghi. Lots and
lots of funghi, possibly everyone’s main food source.
– I’m also worried
about the oxygen – the ‘easiest’ explanation I can think of
is that the trees in Aman produced it and Manwe made sure
it was distributed to Middle-Earth, too. (Sounds better than ‘the
Elves didn’t need oxygen’, anyway.)
– Some plants could be getting glucose from somewhere else and transforming
it into other chemicals they need, more like heterotrophs. Maybe the
soil is just full of glucose at the time, courtesy of Yavanna. They’d have pale or unusually colored leaves.
– Any exceptional plants that managed to adapt to the darkness could have died out soon after the Sun rose. Which could have been
hard to get used to for the Elves and possibly Dwarves of
Middle-Earth. Imagine desperately missing your favourite plant or mushroom that used to be really common, went extinct because of the Sun and may or may not exist in Aman but the damn Noldor can’t tell you because they had so much other stuff to eat they never paid attention to the thing you’re describing (this could be part of Eöl’s villain origin story…)
I started thinking about the fact that Elves have survived so many significant climate changes etc., and that their bodies must be really adaptable (it wouldn’t even be evolution, more like a string of major modifications)… it was a slippery slope from there to ‘coming up with horrible ideas that I don’t want to sneak into my headcanons’.
(I wrote them down anyway, but I’m not sure if I should post it.)
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