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2* AccidentalInnuendo: The name of Curufin, it may not be obvious to English-speakers, but it has a funny meaning for Romanians. Curufin means "smooth/fine ass" in Romanian, as in "curu=ass" and "fin=smooth/fine".
3* AngstAversion: Coming off of the lighter tone of ''The Hobbit'' and ''The Lord of the Rings'', the darker tone of the various stories of ''The Silmarillion'' may be off-putting to some readers. A number of notable stories are outright tragedies (such as the War of the Jewels and the Children of Húrin), and the defeat of Morgoth comes at a high cost, with the setting of the stories sinking into the ocean, a large chunk of the world's beauty perpetually destroyed, and magic being much more diminished than before. And even then, Morgoth's influence will [[AsLongAsThereIsEvil continue to "mar" Arda until the end of time]].
4* AlternativeCharacterInterpretation:
5** While Melkor/Morgoth is usually recognized as evil (see DracoInLeatherPants beneath), the Valar are often cited as morally ambiguous or outright in the KnightTemplar territory. The reason why it's not RonTheDeathEater is because Tolkien did originally write the Valar as more morally ambiguous, before rewriting them to be more angelic.
6** Celegorm. Oh boy. What exactly were his intentions with Lúthien? Did he intend to wed her (and therefore, ultimately have sex with her) entirely against her will, or did he in his arrogance believe Lúthien would come to love him back? Why he was ready to let Finrod, his cousin, to die like that? Was it all for the greater good, or for his own glory? What was the nature of his relationship with Aredhel? And these are just the starting questions...
7** Curufin. What made him and Celegorm turn against their cousin in such heartless way? Was it fear of Morgoth and of the destruction of all the Elven realms - they were living as refugees with their people themselves at that point, thanks to Morgoth overpowering all the Ñoldorin might in the Battle of the Sudden Flame. Was it ego and pride of their elder house, and wish to see it restored back to power - as some of the Sons had not agreed with Maedhros turning down the crown of the High King.
8** Maedhros: anti-hero, tragic hero or anti-villain?
9** Tar-Palantir, the last faithful king of Númenor. Though the narrative portrays him as [[HopeSpot the last chance the Númenóreans had to turn their society's decay around]] and blames the people for not immediately following him, he really doesn't do anything to reverse the corruption except hollow virtue-signalling, and despite claiming to be among the Faithful, he doesn't do anything to promote their side or refute the beliefs of the King's Men, even though he could easily have educated the people. Heck, the fact that Pharazôn made his fame in the army conquering Middle-earth before he usurped the throne himself means that Palantir didn't even stop Númenor's most obvious corruption, its imperialistic conquest and subjugation of the Men of Middle-earth. Not even Amandil and Elendil seem to oppose this, only opposing the paganism and literal HumanSacrifice, so even the Faithful took part in some of Númenor's corruption. On the other hand we know his brother Gimilkhâd was in rebellion against him and there was civil war in Númenor for most of his reign, so its just as likely he had no real opportunity to actually enforce his reforms while dealing with the King's Men. Heck the King's Men were already in control of the southern colonies (their descendants were still there as the Black Númenóreans thousands of years latter), so its equally possible Tar-Palantir had no control over their campaigns in Middle-earth.
10* BaseBreakingCharacter: Túrin. Some fans think he’s an interesting and compelling tragic antihero, others think he’s a {{Jerkass}} and blame him for the misfortunes that he caused under the curse.
11* CargoShip: Fëanor loves those Silmarils more than anything except his father. So does everyone else apparently, even [[EvilOverlord Morgoth]].
12* CompleteMonster: See [[Monster/TolkiensLegendarium here]].
13%% Bring CompleteMonster examples to this thread before adding any: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=6vic3f9h1cy5qivsenw8llok&page=1. Check the FAQ first to see what would qualify characters for the trope, and if there has been previous discussion on the work.
14* CrossoverShip: Some {{Fanfic}} authors have paired Maglor with [[Literature/TheChroniclesOfNarnia Susan Pevensie]], due to both characters being "lost souls" of unknown fates and the [[spoiler:sole survivors]] of their respective families, both being archers, and both having a sort of musical connection (Maglor being a great singer and Susan possessing a horn).
15* DracoInLeatherPants:
16** Fëanor. So, ''so'' much. Possibly because (as JerkassWoobie notes below) despite making things far worse, and being a total dick, he was also a badass.
17** Maeglin gets it too, though not as much. Even though he betrayed his city to Morgoth, lusted after his cousin, and tried to murder her seven-year old son.
18** So does [[BigBad Morgoth]]. Apparently, he looks like TheWoobie for some. There is even a major Russian fanfic, ''The Black Book of Arda'', that was even pirate-published as a book, that retells Silm from Woobie!Melkor's viewpoint. Alternately, Melkor before he corrupted himself into Morgoth and [[PrettyBoy lost his]] [[{{Hunk}} good looks.]]
19** Sauron too especially since people got to see his first official fair form in the [[Series/TheLordOfTheRingsTheRingsOfPower Amazon show]], with a combination of EvilIsCool. No matter how abhorrent are his evil deeds, there are enough people who believe that his enemies and victims asked for it. He even has a [[https://www.reddit.com/r/SauronDidNothingWrong/ a subreddit called Sauron Did Nothing Wrong]], full of people who believe he is a WellIntentionedExtremist who fell victim to Elvish propaganda painting him as an EvilOverlord.
20** Readers will tirelessly insist the elves are completely incorruptible and all their wrong doing can be justified. Obviously their war crimes, child killing, and stealing the Petty Dwarves' land count for nothing. Those readers usually cite ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings'' more than ''The Silmarillion''.
21** Eöl, of all people. Nevermind that he was a controlling {{Jerkass}} who deliberately got his wife lost (so she'd have to stay with him), or that he refused to let her leave the forest or ''go out in daylight'', or that the circumstances of their marriage are QuestionableConsent at best (the best the text can do is to say Aredhel was "not wholly unwilling", and that her life "was not hateful to her")... and that's ''before'' he tries to kill his son, and kills Aredhel instead. He (and his marriage) still have defenders.
22** The King’s Men of Númenor have quite a few readers who insist their actions are at least justifiable, [[HumanityIsSuperior if not admirable]]. This usually takes the form of blaming the HumanSacrifice and Morgoth-worship entirely on Sauron, and ignoring both their willingness to listen to him despite him being their enemy, and that the Númenoreans had been oppressing their fellow Men in Middle-earth (in a way that’s doubtless meant to evoke the atrocities of the Congo Free State or the Triangular Trade) long before Sauron was brought to their shores. Granted, at least some of this is due to these fans thinking [[StrawmanHasAPoint the kings have good arguments against the Ban of Valinor, which the Valar and Elves cannot answer]].
23* EnsembleDarkhorse:
24** Nerdanel. The amount of fanfiction and fanart she has received is in no proportion to the very limited pagetime she has in the published ''Silmarillion''.
25** The same goes for Idril Celebrindal. Despite her brief time on page, she is the single reason why anyone made it out of the city of Gondolin alive. She's also got a good deal of description on her appearance for the book, making it easier for cosplay and fanart.
26** To a lesser extent, King Azaghâl of the Dwarves is quite famous for his epic showdown against Glaurung the Golden during the Battle of Unnumbered Tears. This despite the fact that showdown is essentially the extent of the character's appearance.
27** Ancalagon the Black, despite his limited page-time, is surprisingly popular among the Tolkien fandom, especially those that are fans of dragons.
28* FandomSpecificPlot:
29** There are a non-insignificant amount of fics, thinkpieces and even fanart about {{Alternate Universe}}s where Tar-Míriel, the abused and [[TheyWastedAPerfectlyGoodCharacter hardly-developed]] wife of Ar-Pharazôn, becomes the Witch-king of Angmar.
30** Fics about the Noldor who stayed in Valinor, such as Nerdanel, Finarfin and the many wives and sisters of the Elven Kings are also quite common. Most often these fics revolve around the characters wondering if they made the right choice or, if set after the war, how they feel about their loved ones dying and currently being kept in Mandos.
31* GatewaySeries: This is basically a rite of passage for any serious Tolkien fan. While not everyone who reads the book has the patience or willpower for the hardcore notes, family trees, conjecture, and scholarly work with ''Unfinished Tales'' or ''The History of Middle-earth'', it's still a great crash course of the mythos.
32* HilariousInHindsight:
33** During the creation of the world, Melkor is constantly undoing the work of the other Valar. They raise mountains, he smashes them. They make bodies of water, and he fills them in. He was basically Arda's equivalent of a {{griefer}} on a ''VideoGame/{{Minecraft}}'' server!
34** One of the minor characters is an Elf named Elmo. [[Series/SesameStreet We'll let that one sink in]].
35** Celeborn's Quenya name is 'Teleporno’.
36** Aredhel leaves Gondolin and winds up having a son with Eöl, but is forced to stay with him for so long that their son grows to manhood before they can escape, and when they return to Gondolin, because Elves are immortal, Maeglin’s cousin is still considered close enough in age that he lusts after her, Idril still being young and there being no indication that any time had passed within Gondolin at all. It’s kind of like how ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'' or ''WesternAnimation/FamilyGuy'' treat their {{Floating Timeline}}s.
37** Tulkas is described as being an immensely strong PhysicalGod with large muscles, ruddy skin, HairOfGold and a matching [[ManlyFacialHair beard]], who [[BarefistedMonk prefers hand-to-hand combat to using weapons]]. Who does that [[Wrestling/HulkHogan sound]] [[Creator/ChuckNorris like]]?
38** The universe of ''The Silmarillion'', and thus ''Literature/TheHobbit'' and ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings'', is referred to as Eä. What video game company would eventually make games based on these stories? [[Creator/ElectronicArts EA]].
39* HoYay:
40** [[KissingCousins Maedhros/Fingon]], interpreting their story as a RescueRomance. That their story hits a lot of the same story beats as the tale of Beren and Lúthien helps.
41** And on the other side, Melian/Galadriel, which tends to be written as a TeacherStudentRomance.
42** Glorfindel/Ecthelion is quite popular on Tumblr as well, mostly in the form of fanart.
43** Túrin and Beleg also have a following. Beleg's devotion, Túrin long lasting HeroicBSOD and heartbreak, and the fact that there's canonically three kisses between them, (though two of those are after [[spoiler: Beleg's death]]), doesn't really do much to dissuade people.
44** To a lesser extent, there is some subtext behind Finrod/Turgon.
45** And then there's Melkor/Mairon, affectionately named Angbang. That Melkor "seduced" Mairon to evil helps.
46** Annatar and Celebrimbor gets some for the same reason as Melkor and Mairon, as Celebrimbor is often depicted as too in love with Annatar to notice how ObviouslyEvil he is. Slips straight into NoYay when Annatar reveals his true self.
47* JerkassWoobie:
48** Fëanor, so much. He gets a ''lot'' of sympathy and apologetic fans for someone whose actions directly set in motion a series of events that led to so much suffering and death, including genocide and a world-shattering cataclysm. This is because as well as being an asshole, he was a total badass and unlike every other Elf in the story, his life in "paradise" was full of sad occurrences like his mother's death, his manipulation by the local GodOfEvil Melkor and the murder of his father.
49** Túrin Turambar. The guy's life is basically a TraumaCongaLine (lost his little sister as a child, his father never returned from war, being sent away for his safety as a child, accidentally killing his best friend) but a good chunk of his problems are brought about by his own pride and stubbornness.
50** Mîm the Dwarf. He sells out Túrin and the outlaws to Orcs after he's captured and hates Beleg and the elves, but he's also the last of a dwindling people once hunted by the Sindar (they thought the petty-dwarves were animals until they met other dwarves), who loses his son, and did try to ensure Túrin wouldn't be harmed.
51* MagnificentBastard:
52** [[KnightInSourArmor Fingolfin]], [[TheHighKing High King of the Ñoldor]], is the second son of King Finwë and the first son of Finwë's second wife Indis. Believed to be the most martially skilled of his brothers, Fingolfin leads his host into Middle-earth, inadvertently participating in the massacre of the Teleri Elves and committing his host over a dangerous trek that [[NominalHero sees many killed]]. Inheriting the title of King from his late brother Fëanor, Fingolfin is the one to establish an Elven presence in Middle-earth and maintains a siege of Morgoth's capital Angband for four centuries. When the siege is broken, Fingolfin personally challenges the Dark Lord himself and shows his skill and tactical prowess, [[DyingMomentOfAwesome wounding Morgoth so much before his own death]] that he suffers eternal pain from his wounds.
53* MemeticMutation: Feanor did nothing wrong.
54* MoralEventHorizon: See [[MoralEventHorizon/TolkiensLegendarium here]].
55* NeverLiveItDown:
56** Isildur. He performed many great and heroic deeds in his life, not least saving the White Tree and defeating Sauron. Nevertheless, the White Council (and real-life Tolkien fans) remember him mainly as the man whose hubris allowed Sauron to survive, completely forgetting the good things he did before his MomentOfWeakness.
57** Thingol was a genuinely [[ReasonableAuthorityFigure reasonable]] king who cared about his people and his wife and daughter, but most of his detractors come from his bigotry towards Men, and specifically sending Beren on a suicide mission, even though he learned his lesson and got better after that. His equally strong bigotry towards Dwarves, which eventually leads to his downfall, doesn't help.
58** Caranthir is mostly remembered by his angry outburst towards Angrod. This is enough for some people to consider him equally evil to Celegorm and Curufin. While he certainly didn't have great diplomatic talent, you really can't compare his behaviour with everything Celegorm and Curufin did in Nargothrond. Otherwise, he doesn't seem worse than, say, Amrod and Amras (the Silmarillion version at last) and his later rescue of Haleth's tribe and his allliance with Ulfang's people show that he revised his racist beliefs to some point at least.
59* ObviousBeta: Tolkien died before he could complete the book, and it shows.[[note]]Christopher Tolkien had to piece together his father's (often incomprehensible) notes, which is why it was not until four years after JRR's death that the book was published.[[/note]] Pieces of the work make little sense [[FridgeLogic when looked at critically]] (if Anfauglith was 250 miles across, how did the orcs march across it in what seems like a matter of minutes?), and sometimes outright contradict each other (does Lammoth echo with Morgoth's voice? Or does it amplify the voices of anyone crying aloud there?). Then again, [[FridgeBrilliance this works in the book's favour somewhat, because the old legends it tries to imitate were often contradictory and larger-than-life]].
60* OlderThanTheyThink:
61** [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earendel "Earendel"]] is an old Northern European name for a god or a star or something along those lines. It seems to be one of those words that stick in people's heads: names like Earendel/Horwendill crop up in the oddest places, including the works of Creator/JamesBranchCabell and John Fowles's ''Literature/TheMagus'', and ''WesternAnimation/Frozen2013'', for that matter.
62** The DarkerAndEdgier narrative {{Deconstruction}} of typical fantasy novels. While they tend to be praised for subverting what seems like a simple good vs. evil story of Tolkien's writing, more often than not they're specifically thinking of ''The Lord of the Rings''. Reading the Silmarillion for the first time, several may be surprised to find a bleak, depressing story where the forces of good are fighting a slowly losing battle, several characters are some flavor of anti-hero or another, a distressingly large number of Elves are imperialistic, genocidal racists that [[BlackAndGreyMorality still oppose the forces of evil]], humans fight to live short, violent lives in a world that's doing everything it can to kill them, and ambiguity and pragmatism is the rule, not the exception. Most coming in to read a prequel to a work that's commonly seen as somewhat simplistic and sappy nowadays don't expect a tone and setting more akin to ''Manga/{{Berserk}}'' or even ''Literature/ASongOfIceAndFire''.
63* OneSceneWonder:
64** Azaghâl shows up in exactly one scene of the Silmarillion: during the Battle of Unnumbered Tears. And yet, his role (essentially saving Ñoldor from being wiped off the map by holding off ''an army of dragons'') is quite memorable.
65** Ancalagon is there for a handful of paragraphs, demonstrates no personality to speak of, and gets killed, but his status as the strongest dragon in the Legendarium and possibly one of the largest dragons in fantasy fiction (if the accounts of him breaking the mountains are anything to go by) has given him a good deal of fame--even more than Glaurung, who is far more notable to the story.
66* RealismInducedHorror: While ''The Silmarillion'' is not a horror story, Aredhel, and Eöl's DestructiveRomance is a rather disturbingly accurate portrayal of how some actual abusive relationships function. Eöl puts on a [[BitchInSheepsClothing facade]] of being kind and helpful to draw Aredhel in, only starting to reveal his darker nature ''after'' they've married and had a child. He controls Aredhel by isolating her from the outside world and cutting her off from family and friends, forcing her to rely on him. When she does get the courage to leave he stalks her, tries to kill their son, and ends up killing her (in the real world many victims of domestic abuse are at a higher risk of being killed by their partner when they're trying to leave).
67* StoicWoobie: Maedhros. Being tortured at the hands of Morgoth and Sauron, losing a hand, most of his family (including Fingon, who meant a lot to him), and being the ''only'' known Elf to ever commit suicide qualifies him for woobie status. Letting absolutely ''nothing'' of this show through (aside from a few instances) got him the stoic part.
68* TheyWastedAPerfectlyGoodCharacter:
69** Ungoliant. She poisoned the Two Trees, devoured their light, produces an extremely potent darkness that could keep ''Tulkas'' at bay, nearly defeated Morgoth himself, survived the subsequent retaliation by the Balrogs, and mothered countless demon-spider hybrids (including Shelob). You would think these infamous deeds would qualify her as a major character in the story, right? Nope, she slinks off from the story [[KarmaHoudini unscathed]], and is never seen again. Instead, it's only speculated that she [[DroppedABridgeOnHim devoured herself later on]]. Then again, [[HesJustHiding she might still be holed up somewhere in the South]].
70** Tar-Míriel. Daughter of Tar-Palantir, apparently sharing his desire to undo the corruption of Númenor, and forcibly married to her evil cousin; you'd think she'd either be mentioned as using what influence she had to help the Faithful, or that it might be mentioned that she'd been broken into despair or actually turned evil. Instead she just vanishes from the story until it's mentioned that she was one of the many who died when Númenor fell beneath the waves.
71* TheWoobie:
72** Túrin Turambar, who also qualifies as a JerkassWoobie.
73** Maglor. By the end of the Silmarillion, he knows that nothing good has come from their oath, and wishes to ask forgiveness from the Valar. Maedhros talks him into one more attempt to take the Silmarils by force. It ends poorly.
74** Just about every character in The Children of Húrin, but especially Gwindor. His betrothed, who he was still in love with, no longer had feelings for him, and the new man she liked got him and pretty much all of Nargothrond killed.
75** Celebrimbor. He desperately wanted to rebuild his people to their former glory. For his efforts, he was seduced by Sauron, tricked into making the tools of his conquest, and killed after long torture.
76** Poor Míriel, who loses her father and is forced into wedding her loathsome cousin who usurped the throne from her. She presumably has to watch as Sauron turns Númenor to the worship of Morgoth and winds up dying when Númenor is destroyed before she can reach Meneltarma.
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