hm.

[nsmorig]

Spent a long, long time this weekend playing the Song of Durin on repeat while doing combinatorics problems and . . . gods, Tolkien just made the world's most interesting character and fuckin' forgot about him, huh? He just made this awesome dwarf mythology and then did almost nothing with the coolest bits of it. Fucked up. Man had a fixation on elves that led him to ignore The Best Boys. We* need more dwarf mythology, as a society.

I figure it's my responsibility, then, to make a proper dwarf-based legendarium. With dwarven women. And funky little goblins. And gratuitious descriptions of rocks.

*Read: I. I need it.

Comments

we have a draft of half a creation myth, i guess?

[nsmorig]

"She woke adrift on an underground stream, and it seemed as though the stone and water gave off light to her; she saw in the endless velvet-dark the unknown paths and caverns, and named the nameless places as the river flowed. Her black hair shone, and she knew it was beautiful.

The river was clear and empty yet of living things, and cold; the silver light of the stone broke and shattered on its surface, and so she called it the Gleam, and she knew that it was beautiful. She set her feet upon the stone below the water, and in a cavern far below the stone she walked for the first time, and nothing was dark to her.

She spoke into the silence. She asked the Mountain: “What am I?”

Her voice came back to her in echoes and ripples, and so she named herself One, in her new tongue, because she knew she was alone. That was beautiful, too. There would never be silence again, in the Mountain, for she had made words, and echoes would live in the small places and the deep places and the cracks and fissures, and never die.

She asked the Mountain: “Am I like you? Am I stone and water and empty spaces and light?”

The echo came back: stone and water and empty spaces and light. Her reflection was shining in the Gleam, and she looked upon herself and knew it to be true. Broad she was, and small to walk in the low caves, and her hair was upon her head and her jaw and straight with water, and she was strong, for she was shaped of stone.

Away went her reflection, made of the light that was not light, away down the Gleam, there to run in the endless waterfalls into the deep places yet unknown."