Gwaith i Innas Lain: Quenta Ando Rauco Notes
Notes
Chapter 1
Maglor’s dating of AHBL is based on the Reckoning of Rivendell and a note in the Encyclopedia of Arda, which is in turn based on one of Tolkien’s letters, speculating that the Sixth Age ended with WWII and that AD 2000 is Seventh Age 56.
I’ll assume at least a passing knowledge of Lord of the Rings in my notes. If you haven’t read enough of The Silmarillion or The Children of Húrin to know Túrin’s story, I won’t spoil it for you in this note; just know that Túrin was cursed by Morgoth and that the Elves believe he will come back at the end of time to have his revenge. Maglor assigns each Winchester one of Túrin’s aliases according to his personality. (CoH fans, if you’re at all interested in Sam and Dean as Túrin and Nienor, check out my “Don’t You Cry No More”-it’s gen, Jossed by 6.16.)
Maglor’s hiding his ears with a headband is a nod to Star Trek IV, though I daresay Maglor would have hit on the idea several centuries before Roddenberry did.
Chapter 2
I did fiddle with the timeline quite a bit in this chapter-originally, according to hells_half_acre’s timeline, it took Dean a full 24 hours to find Sam, but that included a detour to the Roadhouse and the time it took to comb through the rubble. (The episode probably also didn’t start in Colorado; there’s no indication of where they are when Sam is grabbed, though, so I chose someplace west of South Dakota because Maglor’s first instinct would be to look east with the palantír.) Traditionally, 3 a.m. is when demons are most active because it’s the time furthest from the hour of Christ’s death.
Several lines of dialogue are taken from AHBL 1 and 2.
Chapter 3
On names: Ash’s surname is not given in canon, so I went with something of an inside joke-“Buchholz” means both “beech wood” and “book wood,” since early books often had covers made of beech (or ash!). “Rincaro” is Quenya for “trickster,” and I chose to make him purely the Trickster because in Tolkien-verse, it’s highly unlikely that Eönwë, the herald of the Valar, would pull the vanishing trick that SPN-Gabriel did. Alatar is one of the two Blue Wizards (hence the “Blues Brothers” crack); he and his friend Pallando came to Middle-earth with Saruman in the Third Age and promptly disappeared into the East, never to be heard from again. Tolkien speculated that they were responsible for founding the major Eastern mystery religions.
There will be more explanation of the conversation between Rincaro and Cas in the sequel! And yes, there will be a sequel later this summer.
The idea for using the barbecue pit as a makeshift forge came from Mythbusters (the “Sword vs. Gun” myth). The exchange between Andy and Azazel is adapted from the exchange between Azazel and Jake in AHBL 2.
I had already decided to make Cas a Maia of Manwë before the “family resemblance” line came to me. Manwë’s chief messengers are birds, particularly eagles, and fandom’s always going on about Cas having birdlike traits-I don’t think that’s what Maglor meant (he was referring more to character traits), but it definitely fits.
Translating the inscription on the Colt, “I will fear no evil,” into Sindarin for Maeglach the mini-Colt gave me quite a lot of trouble, for two reasons. First, the inscription on the Colt uses the feminine adjective mala for “evil,” whereas the Vulgate uses the noun malum. Second, the extant Sindarin vocabulary doesn’t have an abstract noun for “evil,” and it doesn’t look like the adjectives um and ogol can be used as nouns like evil is in English. Eirien Tuilinn’s Neo-Sindarin dictionary has ulug as a reconstructed Sindarin form of the Quenya noun Tolkien used in a translation of the Lord’s Prayer, but it’s too uncertain whether ulcu means just “evil” or “the evil one” for me to be confident using it in Psalm 23 (where the Septuagint uses a different word from Matthew 6); and in any case, the purpose of the Colt was never to fight evil in the abstract but to kill evil creatures of all sorts.
Postlude
This conversation was inspired by Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth (The Debate of Finrod and Andreth), which appears in Morgoth’s Ring. Maglor alludes to it when he talks about the problem of pain. There are also echoes of Dean’s argument with his dream-self in “Dream a Little Dream of Me” and of “Houses of the Holy” and “Sin City” as well as Laws and Customs among the Eldar, another piece that appears in Morgoth’s Ring, and Deborah Judge’s fic Bringing Gifts-I’ve taken a very different tack with Maglor here, but it’s a great story nonetheless.