Tar-Ancalime

Aaand back to the strong women.

Tar-Ancalimë here is both one of the obvious choices - first ruling queen of Númenor, very strong-willed and independent, etc - and one of the tricky cases, since on the whole she gets some not-so-good press. (The biased chronicler again, no doubt!)

I cannot currently brain enough for a deep, insightful essay on how she's a strong female character aside from the obvious, which you know anyway or can at any rate look up at the Ardapedia or something, so I'll instead focus on some "external details" and be done.

So! Ancalimë was especially fun to draw because I played around a lot with the style of clothing and jewellery etc. I know that Tolkien said something about how the Númenoreans "should be depicted in Egyptian terms", but I always thought of them more like Ancient Greek (where we get the Atlantis myth from, after all), so her clothing and jewellery designs are inspired from childhood memories of Mediterranean stuff (at which point I cannot resist noting that if you translate the Latin, "mediterranean" of course means "middle-earthly" - and yeees, I know that in this case it's a geographic rather than a cosmologic feature). Yes, you can see part of her left leg. A young confident Númenorean woman can show leg if she wants to. (You be grateful I didn't base her clothing on Minoan court fashion! ) A "normal" skirt is just bloody awkward when you're climbing a mountain.

The jewellery was a bit difficult - it is stated that Ancalimë liked display and jewels, and as a queen she'd doubtlessly be wearing some, but at the same time a necklace or wrist bracelet is too much like chains, which would be kind of awkward, symbol-wise, in this context. As you can see, I cheated myself around that.

Generally I tried to avoid either overly girly or overly masculine imagery. Accordingly the sceptre was a bit of a pain, since those just tend to be... well... kind of phallic. I tried to get around that with the reed-kind of ends (which are also a nod into the Egyptian direction, hurrah). Not having a sceptre was not really an option (unless I would've depicted Ancalimë in her role as Emerwen, but I didn't want a meek little sheperdess ) since the sceptre is mentioned quite a lot throughout the Akallabêth and the Unfinished Tales.

Which kind of should have tipped me off about the next point.
*LadyElleth and I tried to figure out what the Númenorean crown would most likely have been like, and didn't get to any satisfying conclusion, at which point I decided for a tiara as a reference to the later crown of Gondor (high domed helmet, albeit with extra wings - certainly not that tiny thing they have in the movies!). Of course now that I'm done I find a footnote in the Unfinished Tales stating that the Númenorean royalty didn't actually use a crown, only a kind of diadem with a star-shaped diamond - at least after the days of Tar-Aldarion. (It doesn't say what they had before that, but since Ancalimë is Aldarion's daughter, it doesn't matter at this point anyway.) I find that hard to believe, but there it is - and of course that would also explain why there's all this talk about "passing the sceptre" and "took the sceptre" and "counsellors of the Sceptre" instead of "passing/taking the crown" etc...

On the other hand, the Númenoreans-in-exile must have gotten the idea with the crown from somewhere - and I doubt it was Gil-galad who told them that they had to have one because all the cool kids do. Ar-Pharazôn, at any rate, is mentioned as wearing a crown; and though of course he might have gotten the inspiration via Sauron, in that case I'd think it unlikely that Elendil (of all people!) would later be caught wearing one. So I'd think it logical if there was a crown tradition before that.
As long as the only note that we have is just a footnote in the UT, I hope I'll be forgiven for adding an arguably uncanonical crown. Tiara. Thingy.

A tiara on its own looked stupid, though, and since I drew and coloured this in the days before Thanksgiving (in Germany, Thanksgiving's on the first Sunday in October, which means that while we can't have Easter and Christmas on the same day, it does regularly happen with our mereth aderthad and Eruhantalë - not that many people notice, because neither holiday is all that grandly celebrated except in politics (the former) and church (the latter)) - anyway, I decided that Ancalimë might just as well be wearing one of them garlands they're wearing when climbing up onto Mt. Meneltarma for the holidays. (A harvest-wreath was also handy in that it's more gender-neutral than, say, spring flowers - still trying to avoid girly imagery, here!) That also explains the eagles.

Chose an olive-tree for the frame. Ancalimë gets that very lovely speech from her mother that uses all kind of tree-ish imagery ("Sink your roots into the rock, and face the wind, though it blow away all your leaves"), so some kind of tree that doesn't bend in the wind was appropriate. Of course oak trees are traditionally associated with strength and endurance, but oaks are again so masculine - and while there actually are species of oak around the Mediterranean, those aren't exactly what you associate with that region (or at least I don't). Olives also have very deep roots, so that works fine. Interestingly, this particular olive tree is bearing flowers, not fruits (despite the otherwise autumnal setting!) - make of that what you will.

Yet more difficult decisions (always a favourite in the Tolkien fandom): What would Ancalimë have looked like? We're told that she's very beautiful, and that's about all. No hair colour (that I could find), nothing. Just great. We are told that her father was golden-haired (as was his mother) whereas her mother was dark-haired, so genetically we have a wealth of options. I went for dark-haired a) because I could and b) because Ancalimë is likened (in beauty only, but still) to Tar-Míriel, who in turn is likened to Lúthien, of whom at last we know the hair colour, and it is black. But mostly because I could.

This turned out terribly awkward as far as stance and proportions are concerned. I'm sooo feeling that I haven't been drawing much this year - I'm forgetting everything. But I'm fond of the designs, so it goes on here nonetheless.