Oubliette by Dwimordene

[dwimordene_2011]

Title: Oubliette
Author: Dwimordene
Challenge: Writing: Note
Summary: Turn the page…
Characters/Pairing: Faramir, Éowyn
Rating: K
Book/Source: LOTR
Disclaimer: I'm neither JRRT nor making money off this.

Comments

[kortirion]

That garden of buried horrors…

That's a great line!

“Not nearly enough,” he answers.

...and that one's so shivery sad! Yes, I'm sure Faramir has a great deal that he would prefer to consign to the written page rather than keep hold of in memory. Very nice response to the prompt.

[dwimordene_2011]

Thanks, Kortirion! This Writing challenge promises to prove interesting, since despite the presence of books in M-e, I think most cultures are primarily oral - even the Elves'. So memory houses like Faramir's seem likely to be the norm, and that makes books and notes and what not assume different functions, I think, or else brings out how books really work for us.

Of course, traumatized war survivors probably wish they didn't have that mental garden that keeps sprouting nightmares, but who could possibly put a stop to that? I imagine Éowyn's garden is just as... fruitful.

[kortirion]

I think most cultures are primarily oral - even the Elves'.

Really? Hobbits write genealogies, Bilbo writes his adventures down, he also writes down his poetry before reading it to the Elves, and it is noted that he reads 'the many books of lore' in Rivendell, plus there's 'elvish script' inscribed above the doors to Moria, which any traveller has to be able to read to 'speak friend and enter'. There's Tengwar inside the One Ring in the Black tongue - so that obviously could be written down, even if Orcs don't seem likely book readers.

Minas Tirith holds an extremely extensive library that takes Gandalf some time to go through... dare say Dol Amroth held written records also, although that would be speculation but if the Book of the Kings and the Akallabeth exist, then what of the histories of the Princes of Dol Amroth

[dwimordene_2011]

It's true that there's plenty of writing in Middle-earth, but I think it's also historically true that just having writing - even putting writing up all over major monuments, as in ancient Egypt or on Greek steles - does not imply that a culture is print-based or relies mostly on the written word to communicate its history and important ideas. It may not even have a high literacy rate. As a technology, writing requires a certain level of infrastructural support, as well as technical development (like punctuation to make texts truly friendly to the eye, rather than forcing one to rely on how the text sounded when read aloud in various ways to figure out where all the stops were

[kortirion]

I think I may have thought about this more than is healthy.

I agree... and the challenge is still 'Writing' - do with it as you will.

Remembering that the source for all that erudition came from a series of books written by a scholarly man who loved the written word, and without that... we wouldn't be here.

[dwimordene_2011]

Oh I plan to - that's what's fun about this challenge to me. Books and writing have different values for different cultures, so it'll be fun to play against our more usual assumptions about them.