ok but what if
the tolkien dwarves invented the printing press
give me that fic
I never thought about it, but, I mean…of course it’s the dwarves.
The elves would never think of it, fading out of Middle Earth with their perfect memories entirely intact, bearing the lore of ages in their own lifetimes. Elrond would never think to write down the story of his life, for all that it stretches back to the Silmarils’ crafting. When they do write things down, they believe in taking the time to inscribe the words with their own hand–no one knows the hard truths of permanence and impermanence like the Firstborn, and if you are going to take the time to make something ephemeral into something lasting, you do it right. And besides, Quenya and Sindarin and forgotten Noldorin, all are made with elaborate curling letters, intended more to be written with a brush tip or a calligrapher’s pen than printed for clarity. A printing press would never capture the fluidity quite right.
The race of men…well, they’re still trying to recover. The great kingdoms of the human race–hard Gondor and broken Arnor, wild Rohan and poor shattered Harad to the South–took the brunt of the Ring War hardest of all. Even the strongest of them is left in fragments. New rulers, damaged walls, burned cities. Not many have time, in those first years–and it does take years–to worry about the lore that might have been lost or muddled by water and fire and falling stone, not when there are still leaderless orcs roving and people starving as they try to stretch the harvests. By the time they do, they’re trying to piece together what they used to have. No one thinks twice about trying to piece it together the way it was, and the way it was, was handwritten. Someday the race of men will be great innovators, reaching toward the stars with sure hands and bright eyes. Now, though, the race of men is enduring, is rebuilding and making alliances, trying to prevent the losses of the war from reappearing ten, twenty, a hundred years down the line. They are doing well, at enduring–pragmatists, grim and tough and determined–but they hardly have the time for mechanical marvels that don’t aid building, speed farmwork, or otherwise smooth the path.
The hobbits persist in being stubbornly hobbitish. Oral history is what they do, and their memories for family ties and dramatic gossip could give the oldest Eldest a run for their money. Who’s going to bother to write down the story of the time Athella Proudfoot–no, not that one, the other one, Odo’s great-great-great aunt–drank half the tavern under the table, got up on the bar, did a jig in nothing but her bloomers, and then settled in to drink the place dry? (And still looked fresh as a daisy, if quite a bit less sober, the next morning.) No one, because anyone you ask knows the story of everyone who ever did anything worth knowing the story of. What do the hobbits care for legends and lore? They know who they are and where they come from, songs and stories and all, and there’s a certain level of strength in that. Strength enough to walk into Mordor, strength enough to reclaim the Shire.
The dwarves…the dwarves are a people who once had libraries, sweeping and beautifully full of knowledge. The libraries in Khazad-dum have rotted, by now, ransacked by orcs and goblins or burned entire by Durin’s Bane. Books and scrolls, illuminated with precious metals and expensive inks by the finest scholars, are worth nothing to a dragon, nothing but fuel for amusement, things to send sparking. The library where Dis learned to read, where Thorin and Thrain before him learned statecraft, are nothing but ash. The Iron Hills, Ered Luin, those places were filled by a people seeking refuge. Few dwarrows snatched tomes as they fled Erebor. Fewer still kept them at the ruin of Azanulbizar. The dwarves escaped their ancestral homes with the clothes on their backs and scraps of bread baked on stones, with the pyres of the burned dwarves still smoldering behind them.
It’s a survivor of that flight who scratches down the first idle plans. She remembers seeing Dain Ironfoot, barely more than a child–but then he seemed such a grown-up to her, at the time, when she was still a beardless babe only just walking–bloodied and limping on a crutch as he stood up to claim the leadership his father had left in his wake. Dain and Thorin, young dwarrows still, but already old with the weight of the world. She remembers that better than the dragon, better than the battle. Her mother died in Ered Luin, but not before writing a poem for the burned ones, a poem for the two dwarves who had surrendered their own youth for the sake of their people. She can’t stand the idea of her mother’s poem being lost, the way so many things were lost in flight after flight.
That dwarrowdam dies, an old dwarf in her bed with her loved ones around her, and it’s her best friend’s daughter who comes across the plans, many years later. Yes, she thinks, looking at the levers, at the vague notes about possible lettering methods, yes, that could work.
It doesn’t work, at first. It doesn’t work a lot, really, but the dwarves are a stoneheaded bunch and not in a rush to be put off by a few petty failings. Or by a total collapse of the base mechanics, the first time she tries to pull the lever. The dwarrowdam unearths herself from a pile of metal and gears and wood, with the help of a few other folks who heard the complicated crash and weary cursing, and starts again.
It takes most of two years and a lot of brainstorming–first with her friends, then with her guild, then with any poor fool careless enough to wander into her workshop–but the scribe-machine works. She shrieks and bursts into tears when the first page comes out crisp and clean and beautiful, and sprints into the great hall waving it triumphantly over her head.
The paper says, in kuzdh runes, plain and clear, We are Mahal’s children, and we are yet unbroken.
YALL OUGHTA READ THE TRUTH
DWARVES MAKE THE PRINTING PRESS THETE
YES.
YES YOU SHOULD!
Tag: lord of the rings
When fandoms dream
So, I had a dream last night that Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanova, and I were sent on a mission by Nick Fury. While walking down the New York street together (because this is how you get somewhere when Bad Things Are About To Happen), we were picked up by a trio of women with black hair and even blacker leather, in a black convertible.
Sure, Captain America said, we’ll get in your car and let you give us a lift.
Uhm, said I, I’ve got a bad feeling about this. (Perhaps it was the black hair, black leather, and black paint job combo.)
The sardonic lift of the Black Widow’s brow suggested she was a tad skeptical, herself. (Perhaps at the fact that all six of us somehow fit in the two seater). But, still, she said nothing. In fact she said nothing throughout the whole dream and instead let her eyebrow do the talking for her.
But you know, we’re cool, we can handle it, right?
In the car we go and proceed to a small apartment where the trio is quite eager to demonstrate their hacking prowess. (A little Too Eager, if you ask me. Natasha’s eyebrow remains skeptical.) They know where the bomb is!
Great! exclaims Cap. Why yes, I WILL push that big red button there to disarm the firing mechanism, or whatever it is that sets off bombs.
Mayhem ensues and though the giddy laughter of the trio, it is revealed that the Big Red, Not At All Ominous Button had, in fact, detonated the bomb we had been charged to find and defuse in the first place.
Great, what exactly had you expected, said Ms. Romanova’s eyebrow to Captain Rogers.
The scene changes, as dreams are wont to do. I have been separated from the Shield unit and found myself wandering the catacombs in my parents’ basement.
I am lost! Alas, Captain Rogers and Ms. Romanova will be very worried. I hoped it will not distract them from Things That Must Be Done.
Just when I was about to give up hope of finding my way out in time to catch up with them, my name was called from the shadows of a crumbling arch.
There I looked to find a tall man wearing a worn cloak, muddy boots, and a rather long sword by his side. His hood was drawn over his features (of course).
He stepped into the light and I cried, But you were dead!
I am and am not, said Aragorn, revealing his elvish heritage in his reply. He is about to give me some advice.
You must use this, said Jesus, I mean Aragorn, as he pressed a silver brooch into my hand. (It is important to note that this piece of jewelry was NOT the Elessar. It instead had a black stone fixed to uhm, some flying animal that I never got a good look at, not green.)
But don’t you need this? I asked, clued in by the the sudden appearance of an audience of Italian monks who had just cried out in dismay. (They were doomed! Surely the wizard will slay them all now, in this alternate universe!)
No, said the noble Aragorn, because he was Aragorn, and if Strider Telcontar knows anything, it’s that there’s no use relying on a piece of jewelry to give you the power to stop an impending apocalypse.
I closed the wardrobe doors behind me to emerge onto the concrete patio behind my parents’ house. (Okay, who I am kidding. It was actually the doors to the walnut cupboard where my mother keeps the good china.)
And so ended my adventure, as I found myself pressed to Luke Skywalker’s (old man Luke, not young boy Luke)’s chest (actual body part, not where he keeps his linens).
I talked to Aragorn! I gently sobbed into Skywalker’s fuzzy robes.
He said nothing in reply but gazed sadly out over the cliffs of the rock quarry next door to my childhood home. He needed no words to comfort me. I trusted that he, who had met Aragorn in the Battle of the Pelennor fields, would understand my plight.
Hearseeno 