Mechtild's

Shirebound, it has been a pleasure to get to know you, virtually speaking, these past months. I hope it was great. Did I browse correctly that I should be welcoming you to your fifties? I am a forerunner. ;)

Well, a very happy "50th". I don't think I'll be around for my daughter's fiftieth, so I think I won't ever feel what your mom feels. But I can get a sense of it -- this month my older sister was 60. Sixty! Our resident Haight Ashbury hippie! (She's still hipper than most people her children's age.) How could my sister who took me with her to squee over the Beatles and Rolling Stones during their first U.S. tours be SIXTY?

What hits me, too, is that if she's only going were I will follow soon enough. My mom always said it would feel short -- life, once I got old enough.

Yet I can't help feeling I've entered a new period of vitality in my life. When I read about people like Tolkien, people who had major bursts of creativity in their middle and late years, I feel very uplifted and inspired. I am guessing you have felt that way, too.

It's been a whole new world for me, too. And one that I am SO glad I didn't miss. Thank you, Peter Jackson. If it hadn't been for fervour over the films, I would never have bothered to learn how to use the internet or enter a messageboard, never mind LJ.

Mariole! Good morning! I often think of this picture when I read of the revels on the Party Field. I thought of it when I was reading the other Birthday Girl's fic, Before I Go To Sleep. When I read her story, I saw her Hobbiton as a lively place, full of noise and smells and colour. I had pictured more of a rural, sleepy English hole-in-the-wall for Hobbiton (literally), but hers makes me think of visiting medieval towns in northern Europe, as if Hobbiton had winding streets, hobbits working crafts in little establishments with signboards suspended from beams into the streets, with bustling market days and fairs.

And open-air parties. Parties with tipsy hobbits dancing in a *very* happy manner.

Those who don't get to touch merely haven't tried hard enough. They should take a page out of the Ripper's book. ;)

Ambush him first. You don't have to be obvious about it. Frodo is clueless in some ways (especially your modest, unassuming version of him). He'll never get it.

Could she be looking at me? Heavens! What an expression! It's put me all in a dither! No ... No, she is looking at the handsome hobbit next to me. Botheration. Wait -- she's coming this way! No, it's only to talk to him. But what's this I feel brushing up and down my thigh? Oh, she's only fiddling with the ends of her sash. Yet, I could have sworn... that touch felt so.....

*resolved, girds loins, and screws courage to the sticking place*

"Erm, miss, I believe your sash has come untied. Might I possibly assist you....?"

*Mariole feigns surprise, bats eyes, etc.*

Believe me, you'd have him begging in two shakes of a lamb's tail.

Frodo begging?????

STOP IT, YOU TWO.

*smiles dreamily*

Yeah. Too bad the peasants in the painting don't look like hobbits - cheek-pinchingly cute with mops of curls. I have thought of doing a manip of this, you know, putting film hobbit's faces in for the peasants, but I never could find an image big enough and with good enough resolution. If I couldn't blow it up and make a detail of it, no one's face would be better than a blur, anyway.

Belegcuthalion/Mona, you know I was quickly browsing LJ entries this morning, and, coming right after things you said in entries introducing your latest (and last?) installments to your Lily/Frodo story, it sounds as if you are saying goodbye. At least, that you are finished writing Frodo fic, or, that you are finished producing English versions of it. Would that be right? I can see that you might feel as though you've said what you wanted to say writing Frodo fic, since you didn't write snippets but a full-blown saga into which you poured all your energies and expressed your major themes. (If I ever, ever finish mine, I don't think I'll have anything to add -- not to my "Frodo in love" vision, anyway.)

But it sounded, too, like you were planning to take your fic down from your LJ. Does this mean you are going to be taking down your fic everywhere -- from the archives where it's posted? Tell me it isn't true! Heck, I only have read two or three of the fics you wrote after you'd finished BIGTS. I thought I had all the time in the world to catch up on them. Maybe you made it all clear in your entries. Perhaps I was reading too much between the lines. Forgive me, if that is so. My brain cells have been firing poorly this year.

~ Mechtild

Whew! What a relief!

Good luck, and have much pleasure working on your original fiction, Mona. It will be in German, I take it? I wish I could read more of it than signs for the toilets.

Mona, I so hear this. I feel the same way. Fanfiction has been a wonderful workshop for me, but it does take time! I, too, have an unfinished novel that my writing group is kicking me to get back to. I hope I won't have to give up fanfic altogether; these short stories sometimes come together pretty easily. But a big work like BIGS or Devoted would be out of scope. I can't have _two_ big projects going on at once. Best wishes with your novel! Oh, that's exciting news. :)

Belegcuthalion! Hi! Read what I wrote in reply to Mariole. It says why I chose this picture for this particular birthday greeting. I said a little more in this vein months ago, in the K-D fanfiction thread. But I didn't post the painting there.

Many happy returns of the day!

Yes, I find that very dear in him. It's his modest "English gentleman" aura.

Fanfic Frodo runs the gamut, as you know since you read a lot. But the "shy, unassuming Frodo," whom "every male and female in sight is panting over" - yet he doesn't know it - is charming in the extreme. The second erotic Frodo fic I ever read was Cara Loup's "Winnow and Rhyme." In an extended dialogue we had after that she said she had come to consider her pre-Quest romances as AU. But I thought this was a very, very charming story, with its shy, reserved, bookish, virginal Frodo, as if straight out of the films (I thought). Film Frodo appeared to me not to have done any erotic dallying, he seems so dewy and chaste. (Not with Sam, anyway -- maybe he snogged the saucy baggage from the dance sequence, but that was all.)

I read it right after I had been shocked to death reading my first erotic fanfic, in which a very knowing, very seductive Frodo mounted an open-mouthed young Sam on Bilbo's kitchen table. Two more different Frodo's (amorously, anyway) I could not have imagined. Now I'm used to reading many different portrayals of Frodo, but I wasn't then! Now, only when Frodo seems caddish do I balk.

Oh, I love Frodo in Rites of Passage. Were you thinking the other story I talked about was RoP? It wasn't. No, you couldn't have thought that.

Willow's Frodo was not at all what I pictured Frodo to be in either the book or the films, but I think he's a thoroughly interesting, engaging, and fully-developed character. In the couple of years since I first started reading RoP, I have been wrestling with my feelings and thoughts about it. Why do I so love this piece of Shire AU melodrama -- and the angst-ridden Frodo who is its star? Well, for one thing, it seems to be developing into something beyond "melodrama," but I also think I hit the nail on the head -- for me -- when I realised how intensely I identify with her alienated, fraught-yet-dreamy teenager, Frodo of RoP. What happens to her Frodo, because of her vividly conveyed POV, happens to me. And I love all the work she has put into her OC's -- Mac, of course. But not just Mac. Although these characters never get recognized as OC's, they are: the Sackville-Bagginses, for instance, have tiny characterizations in the canon text but she makes them full-blown characters. The parents of all the canon hobbits are fleshed-out in her fic, too, but what are they in canon but names? Sometimes, they are not even named except in the family trees in the Appendices. Besides her work imagining real lives and histories for all these "nothing" characters, she has created vivid settings that just let me sink into her world, whether they are the baths at Brandy Hall, the rooms in the Hall itself, the tree fort over the Brandywine, the stables, the fields, the orchards, the Old Forest, and, now, the setting of Mac's hobbit-manned boat on the Brandywine.

I have not warmed to her depiction of Bag End or Hobbiton as well as I have the other locales - the Hobbiton settings seem far more un-book-like. Why, I have asked myself. I really am not sure ... but, perhaps it because Hobbiton and Bag End are somewhat described in the book, while Brandy Hall is practically a blank page just begging to be filled in.

In her universe, sex is not considered wrong between young males and young females who pair up in same-sex couples for a while, before turning to the opposite sex. Of course, Frodo is desirable to both. I like that portrait of him.

I liked that about her Frodo, too. I liked that he seemed keen on persons of both sexes; he was just so yearning to connect, and so hot to have some real sexual contact with somebody, it was bound to happen with someone. That it was Willow's perceptive if rustic Mac, in my opinion, was a great gift to him. A person like her Frodo, who alternates between extreme self-protection and extreme self-abandon couldn't have put himself into the path of a more caring and suitable first lover, in my opinion.

Anyway, yes,