Beacon of Calmindon

The name of this outfit is borrowed from Calmindon, the great First Age lighthouse sitting in the Númenórean Bay of Rómenna. I may not be the best at recalling the lore from the Unfinished Tales or The Silmarillion, but I believe it was erected as a warning not to defy the Ban of the Valar. For the Númenóreans, it meant they could never sail so far west that their own lands would disappear from view, for attempting to see or visit the Undying Lands was forbidden. This lighthouse, along with Númenór, was sunk into the sea towards the end of the Second Age by Eru Ilúvatar, when the Númenóreans corrupted by Sauron and Melkor challenged the ban and tried to forcibly reclaim the immortality they felt they were denied. Only the Faithful, a very small group of Númenóreans loyal to the Valar, were allowed to escape destruction and found the kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor some years later.

I think that's enough of a history lesson for now. Hopefully, I interpreted the lore correctly.

Dorthonion Scout

Meet my Beorning. This is the only character I've been playing since January, when I cut LOTRO down to a minimum. I hadn't bothered with making outfits until I felt I had distanced myself from this blog. For months, I was content to simply play and enjoy adventuring in Middle-earth without attachments or distractions. When I made it to the North Trollshaws (the much needed revamp was amazing, by the way), I felt the need to make an outfit. The abundance of evergreen trees reminded me of Dorthonion, the pine-covered highlands north of Beleriand. I've always imagined it to be similar to the other great forests of Middle-earth before Morgoth corrupted it. Thus, greens and browns became my central colors.

Drake-bane

Posting here again is an incredibly surreal experience for me. A part of me feels like it never left. The rest feels like it's forgotten how to do everything. The last time I wrote a post was back in January of this year. Can you believe it's been eight months? Originally, it was my intent to leave LOTRO entirely, as I had been fed up with the development of the game, the mass exodus of players I knew, the rampant negativity of the official forums, and cosmetic blogging had become a chore. You'd think I'd have been over this MMO entirely by now, but I discovered that I could never truly bid farewell to Middle-earth. Casually leveling my baby Beorning without any attachments to other players allowed me to experience and appreciate the early areas of LOTRO for the first time in years. I fell in love again, having a second romance. It also doesn't help that Tolkien's lore has been a part of me since I read the Hobbit nearly 20 years ago. And then there are the other reasons included in the last post I made.

An Unexpected, Yet Temporary Return

Good morning everybody!

I bet you're surprised to see a post appearing here (assuming I'm still in your RSS feeds). This certainly makes that gigantic farewell post feel anticlimactic.

After careful thought and certain circumstances, I've decided to return to cosmetic blogging, though it is most likely a short-term, temporary thing. Unfortunately, there is much more to this decision than I'd like to admit, most of it personal. I'll tell you a few of things that led to this unexpected return.

First of all, I suffered a significant reduction in hours at work, leaving me with some financial strain and much more free time. That's something I hope to have fixed soon by looking elsewhere for full-time employment. Second, I just had my car's transmission rebuilt. Good grief, those are expensive. Third, within the past few months, I had a rather sizable amount of money stolen from me, some of which I have recouped. I had to cancel all my game subscriptions (FFXIV especially) and seriously curtail my spending. This has led me back to F2P games, LOTRO in particular. Lastly, a small part of me never stopped outfitting my characters. I've slowly been leveling my Beorning since January (she's somewhere around level 40), dressing her up from time to time. You'll get to see those outfits soon. That's as much as I'm willing to say here. The rest cuts too close to home.

Blogging, for me, is very time consuming. Just collecting screenshots could take two or three hours. That's why I retired in February. I can't promise I'll be posting on a schedule and neither can I tell you how long I'll be hanging around. However, let it be said writing and creating content for Material Middle-earth brought me joy in the past and I hope it will continue to do just that. And I need a little of that happy in my life again!

See everybody around!

~Nathrien

Here's a vintage picture from 2010 of Nathrien!

Melody of the West

My grey ship has arrived and it's time I sail into the west, away from LOTRO's shore and towards Valinor.

Four years ago, I started dabbling in cosmetics. Three and a half years ago, I began to share outfits with some close friends, embarrassed to admit I played "virtual dress-up," as I had once put it. Three years ago, I began sharing them with all of you...and it's been a glorious three years.

It's with a heavy heart I make my final cosmetic entry here at Material Middle-earth. I thought it appropriate to end on an outfit using the same location and similar colors as my very first--sea blue and the elven homesteads in Falathlorn--which can be viewed here.  Even though this blog opened with a cosmetic contest I held for Forgottten Darkness in April 2012, it wasn't until June that I mustered the courage to post my own creation.

There have been 150+ posts here, ninety percent of which have been outfits. The other ten has been about beta previews and updates regarding cosmetic additions to the skirmish camps. I honestly never expected to reach that number. From June to December of 2012, I was an outfitting machine. I had a new outfit every two to four days (some of which I think are absolutely ugly...and it's not because I was new to this) and I quickly burned myself out after making fifty-something outfits. I returned in April 2013, just in time for a server fashion contest and the release of the Wildermore zone...and then a computer hardware failure left this blog suspended until September. I returned again and managed to ahdere to a weekly posting regiment on Saturdays, which has worked very well. I've never felt any pressure to make an outfit or haphazardly throw one together under that system.