Title: Through the Blue Vault of Varda
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis/Lord of the Rings
Categories: SF/fantasy
Length: Medium (3,900 words)
Warnings: None

Author on LJ: jedibuttercup (ditto on Dreamwidth)
Author on AO3: jedibuttercup
Author on TtH: jedibuttercup
Author Website: Jedibuttercup.com

Summary:
The city sang to John, and he understood at last why the scholars always spoke of the earliest days of Middle-earth through the medium of music.

Review:
When you think about it, there is an epic sweep to the whole idea of Stargate Atlantis: going to another galaxy to find a city out of legend is about as epic as it gets. Mix this with the epic that is the Silmarillion, and you could end up with a clash of gears as two mutually inconsistent background fight for supremacy.

Fortunately, Jedi Buttercup is a lot better than that. "The truth was probably a lot less metaphorical," the narrator muses early on, and just like that the backgrounds are sweeping in the same direction. That's typical of this story; gentle writing, perfectly evoking Tolkien, leads you through this short story in such a natural way that you accept the incongruities as perfectly natural. At heart it's a character study of someone bridging the gap between the two backgrounds, and it works so well that by the end I was completely sold.

This fic is quite simply beautiful.

Through the Blue Vault of Varda