#very much inspired by outofangband’s tulkas headcanons which I love!

[forestials]

Tulkas is a cat person. There is no textual evidence for this but I read it on Tumblr and now I have accepted it.

#the silmarillion #tulkas #my art #very much inspired by outofangband’s tulkas headcanons which I love! #why did I pick a serval? no one asks #I found my childhood book of African folktales called ‘how the serval got his spots’ or something like that #and was catapulted (no pun intended) back to a happy place #no wait I went and found it. it’s ‘when lion could fly: and other tales from africa’ #HIGHLY recommend #anyway sorry yes #I’ve drawn tulkas before but this is a younger more elven looking version #if I can’t draw ridiculously shiny hair then what’s the point #valar #ainur #the silmarillion art #tolkien art #forestials art

[tolkien-feels]

Random fun fact: in many versions, most of the Valar are not officially married or at least they had no ceremony. The wedding of Tulkas and Nessa during The Springtime before the lamps were destroyed was the first m wedding.

I think that the Valar do not feel romantic or sexual attraction in the way that humans or even elves do. Their original forms have no body and therefore no sex (like physical sex the noun not the verb).

Their marriages differ in meaning from what might be described as a mutually beneficial working partnership to a more traditional bond of love and companionship to something else entirely

The marriages before Tulkas and Nessa are certainly bondings of some sort but I think calling them marriages is the intentional application of a human or elven lens to relationships. The Valar permit this with gentle confusion because they desire to be comprehensible to The Children, at least in some ways

I also think that not all emotions or forms of attraction are shared between all of the Ainur. And there are phenomena they experience that are similarly foreign to The Children.

That being said the Maiar do usually feel an intense loyalty to their Patron Vala. This isn’t universal but it’s one of the more common emotional experiences.

Of course this is just my interpretation! I think it does draw from canon information but it’s still largely my reading.

-@outofangband

@outofangband Sorry it took me forever to post this, but I wanted to share my own thoughts and my brain didn't feel like letting me

I agree so much with this. Things such as gender, marriage, siblinghood... for me these are things the Valar "translate" into shapes the Children can understand, much like they take elvish-looking physical forms, and much like they describe the Ainulindale in terms of sounding like harps and lutes and other instruments. It's a concession to limited understanding, not an accurate representation of truth.

There seem to be commonalities between spouses, siblings and Valar-Maiar relationships, which makes me headcanon the Ainur are attempting to describe specific bonds when they use these relationships.

This is informed by my utter confusion when allo people try to explain sexual attraction to me. I'm ace and biromantic, so I understand easily enough the difference between platonic and romantic attraction, but when someone tries to explain sexual attraction I'm just like "HOW is finding someone hot different from aesthetic appreciation??? It literally sounds like you're making up feelings that don't exist. It's the shrimp colors of human experience, wtf" and my brain explodes.

That's more or less how I feel this works for the Ainur. The Ainur feel drawn to each other in specific ways, but because the Children don't experience these kinds of attraction, they try to find analogies.

An easy example is Valar-Maiar relationships. I feel like Maiar just naturally experience devotion towards the Valar they serve. They are under no oath to serve, and they couldn't even necessarily word what it is that is inspiring devotion in them, but they feel it. The Valar in return want to guide these Maiar specifically for some reason (bonus! Incorporate rejected canon and have the Valar say their Maiar feel like they're their children!) But elves don't normally look at each other and feel the urge to serve nor the urge to rule (in a non corrupted way, at least), so the Valar go "Hm... They serve us? We are lords and they are our servants?" not because it's the same thing (serving is who Maiar are, not what they do, it's a very different thing from even the best of elvish servants), but because there's no real way of explaining what the experience really is like.

Even things that seem pretty straightforward, like Manwe and Ulmo's friendship, strike me as being just translations. It seems like they feel a great affinity that they don't feel towards the other Valar (who are also what elves would conceptualize as being their friends!), but it's not the affinity of "marriage" or of "brotherhood" so they settle for "close friends" even though that's not really what it is. It's more like... Their role in the Music is neither a matter of complementing one another (marriage) nor of developing the same theme together (siblinghood), but their melodies are in great harmony. But that's just me disliking elvish translation and coming up with my own, which is probably just as inaccurate.

#ainur break my brain tbh