Museum for the Forgotten by Dawn Felagund

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Fanwork Notes

This story was written for Kenaz for the Around the Fire challenge. Kenaz requested:

3rd/4th age Valinor-- Culture clashes and unanswered questions! For example... How do the Vanyar feel about the influx of relative "newcomers" to Valinor at the end of the 3rd Age? What happens when all of the Elves who can claim right to the title "High King" are re-embodied? Are any of the sons of Fëanor ever released from the Halls of Mandos, and if so, what is the reaction from the Teleri? What happens when members of a family who left Valinor for Middle-earth reunite with family members who didn't leave? Lots of territory to explore here! :)

Fanwork Information

Summary:

It's the Fifth Age. Tirion has developed suburban sprawl, and psychotherapists are in high demand. An unkinged Finarfin experiments with political radicalism and has turned the palace into a memorial of the kinslaying. Amarië composes beat poetry. And Finrod has been reembodied into a world and among people he barely recognizes. Dark humor, for Kenaz for the Around the Fire challenge.

Major Characters: Amarië, Caranthir, Finarfin, Finrod Felagund

Major Relationships:

Genre: Drama, Humor

Challenges: Around the Fire

Rating: Teens

Warnings: Mature Themes, Violence (Moderate)

This fanwork belongs to the series

Republic of Tirion
Chapters: 1 Word Count: 9, 824
Posted on 20 September 2016 Updated on 19 July 2021

This fanwork is complete.

Table of Contents

Museum for the Forgotten

Comments

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This was stunning and lovely. i really liked the first person point of view of Findarato. You put so much thought into what it must have been like to be reembodied--there must have been so much psychological turmoil and trauma. The comparisons he makes to life in Beleriand really underscore the differences between the Exiles and those who stayed. I particularly liked this phrase "in Beleriand, we suppressed our emotions by chiseling out cities and dying heroically." You summed up so much in one phrase.

The political situation and modernization is fascinating as well and I like how he is so skeptical of it all--his life experience has been so radically different. The assimilation process proves far more challenging than he is willing to admit. Lots to think about here.

Thank you! It's really hard for me to write third person. I just like that intimacy, to be inside the head of the person whose story I'm trying to tell.

I really wanted to show the effect that ruling a realm in Beleriand had on him, but I didn't want to beat the drum too hard. Finarfin and Amarie haven't had the easiest go either--they also survived the Darkening and the loss of their loved ones--but at the end of the day, they've had the luxury to play with ideas in a relatively protected place, and Finrod's reality has been very different. And it makes him see life in Valinor really differently.

I had no idea where this was going, and when I revised it, I had to stitch together pieces to make it a little more coherent! I had a lot of ideas spinning through my head, and I'm not sure I made sense of them all, but the story was fun to write and I hope interesting to read. I'm glad it gave you something to think about. :)

Thanks so much for reading this monster and commenting on it! :D

That's really reassuring! It was hard to choose a genre. I wasn't sure if calling it "humor" was appropriate; I was certainly trying for a wry tone in places that I hoped would be read as being somewhat funny. I qualified the "humor" to "dark humor" in the summary because I wasn't sure the genres in the dropdown really described at all what I'd written! :)

"I wanted you to have a full glass of water because I am about to tell you something momentous," he told me carefully.

I don’t know why I am dying at this. Probably because it sounds a lot like Laura.

 "How does it make you feel that someone with his checkered past has been returned to life so shortly after you have?" and I wondered if I was the only person in Tirion who felt charitably toward Morifinwë Carnistir

OMG! You nailed the shrink voice here. Poor Carnistir. I‘ve always had a soft spot for him. That first view of Carnistir with his mother is heartrending.

This was supposedly for the Teleri, although why they'd come all the way to Tirion and climb to its top to mourn their dead was beyond me. All I saw there were tourists.

For some reason this reminds me of the tourists wandering around the area of the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan. I would never go there if I did not have unavoidable business in that area or needed to catch a train to New Jersey.

(They still weren't happy about her untitled but celebrated poem about the final time before I left that she and I made love, upon a worktable in a smithy. In truth--and I never told her this--it made me uncomfortable too.)

I love this! This is so authentic. I am dying here! It reminds of showing my fiction to my family. All but one person (my m-i-l of all people) have been terribly uncomfortable with the details--sex scenes in particular. TMI!

She wore all black to her readings except for a floppy Telerin fisherman's hat and dark makeup on her mouth and eyes, and she pressed the easy wave out of her hair until it looked like she'd styled it with gardener's shears. She wore a wristlet of withered roses. She looked nothing like Amarië.

Dawn, you are killing me!! I love the new Amarië! Perfect. Amarië has turned the tables. I love watching Findaráto try to figure out how he feels about it all. This is great stuff. I loved your skill with the small, realistic details, how she plays with crowd and their varied responses.

Ruined: something destroyed by violence and time and resistant to repair. I wondered why I'd been reembodied. I still ached in my body at times, but it was in my memory where the most grievous hurt lay. Námo had explained to my father and me, as I sat before him, newly reembodied and clad in the silk garments given to new bodies, that he was left with a delicate choice for each reembodied Elf: healing too many hurtful memories meant erasing parts of the essential person I had been.

This is very powerful and exactly how I imagine it would work. This next part it just devastating and perfect also! Whoa!

It's not a quick thing, to be eaten alive. The wolf was well-fed; it did not gulp its prey. It browsed with the same leisure that Amarië and I used to allow our fingers to wander and select over a plate of fruit between us. We could not see much: We heard, we smelled, we imagined. My skin thrilled with the expectation of being next. I simultaneously wished it to be over and yet hoped (oh the shame of it, for I was called loyal and brave in the songs! here was the inferiority of the vaunted ones!) that another would be chosen and that I'd live another day or few with the pain behind the screams, dulling eventually to sobs, then moans, still only in the dark corners of my imagination.

You certainly have not lost your knack! This is strong stuff. I really do love the threads of his father and of Carnistir running through the entire piece. You do something in this story that I aim for—realism in a fantasy piece. I believe this story.

The shrink voice: I'd like to say it's because I worked on the fringes of the mental health profession for five years, but none of the clinicians I worked with (some of whom were/are good friends!) talked that way. So I suppose I was more pulling on a stereotype, trying to represent the awkwardness of the Noldorin manner of trying to cope with so many people coming back to life in their midst.

Tourists: While the WTC wasn't exactly on my mind when I wrote this, my discomfort with it and other things like it certainly were. It always feels ... self-serving? To make one's grief into a monument? (While often simultaneously denying meaningful help to the victims or their families.) In this particular case, I wonder what else Finarfin and the Noldor had done for the Teleri. (Nerdanel in my verse--and I'm probably telling your something you already know--dedicated years to making statues of the slain for the beach in Alqualonde, which feels a more appropriate response to me because it responds to the needs of the victims rather than the attackers.) The museum seems clearly aimed at soothing Noldorin guilt rather than helping the Teleri to cope with what was done to them.

The sex poem: I found Finrod so conservative in this story, and oddly for me, I was really able to connect and sympathize with where that was coming from. (The sex on the worktable also comes from my verse: the story, the title of which I always forget, when Amarie goes to see Finrod for the first time after his return, the companion piece to "Return to Me" [about Finarfin going to see him reembodied], both of which inspired this story and "Bone-White." I clearly have a fixation going on here ... I'm working on an o-fic at the moment for Haunted October but am curious where my mind will wander once I pick up Silmfic again. I'm hoping the AMC prequel!)

I don't know who of my family has read my work, with a few exceptions. Probably only those I know about: my family does not have the interest in art and literature that yours does, with few exceptions! One relative reads my femslash. My cousin mentioned finding my fanfic with the implication that she read it, but she didn't say which ones. (I joke with Bobby that she probably read the slash!) So I suppose the limited readership I've had within my family has had the opposite reaction!

Amarie: I love her new character too. She makes sense to me. She lived in a place where she could turn her anger into art (and political activism), which was not a luxury that the Exiles had, but she is also undeniably and understandably traumatized by what happened to her (even if Finrod envies a little bit the relative mildness of what she and his father have suffered compared to him and others of the Exiles).

The wolf: Because I have a penchant for the dark and horrible, I have thought about Finrod's experience then perhaps more than I should ...

Thank you, thank you for reading and for such a kind review! This was a little different for me, so I wondered how people would respond. I'm so glad you liked it and that it worked for you. It was a super-fun story to write; I wouldn't turn away a story set in the same verse if it happened to inspire me.

I think one could read one strand of this as a cross-over between the respective myths of the survivor of the trenches of WWI and the Vietnam veteran--somewhere in the undercurrents. But maybe you would feel this is too far-fetched.

That nostalgia for really rather awful things that you've said in advance is one of the main themes has some surprising twists and turns here. Finrod is so very defensive here, consciously so, as with the therapist, but also surprising himself repeatedly.

Somehow, that horse, although it has nothing to do with the experience that was Nargothrond and Beleriand, does come to stand for it, even if at the same time, that museum is absurd and a joke. (I'm also remembering a very impressive description of Nargothrond you wrote, although I think this may not be the same verse.)

That relationship with Amarie seemed pretty unsalvageable--and yet it seems to have a future again, by the end, which I was somehow rather glad of!

Also, I was rather struck by Finrod's memory of the council scene where Carnistir attacked Angarato. 

Many other interesting things in here, too!

 

I wouldn't say anything that takes into account "shell shock" or PTSD (in conjunction with the glorification of the soldier as a hero too brave to allow room for those reactions) is too far-fetched for me; my undergrad research as a psychology major was on PTSD in childhood victims of political violence. That was a long time ago now but the interest certainly remains, and I don't doubt that it has colored my idea of reembodiment, especially given Namo's stated conflict in deciding how many memories to restore in order to make a person whole, even if those memories are painful ones. Since I don't view the Valar as not having limits, I don't think he could have healed a person completely from those.

I can see how Finrod's grief over the loss of Nargothrond and Beleriand--not an entirely acceptable emotion to feel at this point, since he went there in rebellion and is now lucky enough to have been restored to the "superior" land of Valinor--would be projected onto the foaming horse statue: something that he knows it is beneath him to miss but that is part of the background fabric of his memories and so was loved nonetheless. I really like this observation. It is not how I would have explained it before reading your comment, but I think you're onto something! :)

Amarie: I intended from the outset that they would eventually learn to coexist and continue to love each other. There is no outright conflict between them at any point--Finrod is more than willing to accept how she has changed and his own fault in that--but you are right that their relationship seems unsalvageable. He doesn't think highly of what means a lot to her (or his father), and she would probably be horrified to know how conservative his own political views have remained. I initially intended that Finrod would make his "confession" to Carnistir about how he died and his relief that others were taken by the wolf before him, but since I wanted his relationship to continue with Amarie, I decided the confession had to be made to her. There is some willingness to understand and accept each other emotionally, even if they have deviated politically, philosophically, and artistically. (Also, I think Amarie doesn't fully support Finarfin's museum either! :)

Thank you so much reading and for the longer review! I appreciate it so much! :)

I loved it so much! Definitely a keeper! I think I picked up on most of the references to your previous works.

I love the way that I could fall so easily into Finrod's head. You did a great job with that. I could have also continued to cut and paste sentences and paragraph's I loved. There were so many! Here is another favorite.

I still fell asleep sometimes with the moon in my window and laughed to think that when I opened my eyes again, it would be the suffused light of Laurelin slowly overtaking Telperion at the Mingling. And yet I always opened my eyes to the unsparing light of the sun that had watched me die.

It's just tucked in near the end of a segment talking about all kinds of other things. While you've been wondering how it felt to be chomped to death by a well-fed wolf, I've spend truly an inordinate amount of time trying to imagine the light of the Trees and came up with the idea that sunlight is harsher--both on the skin and the eyes, but also in that it reveals more in many cases and hides other things in its shadows. OK, my point is that the story really caused me to think about a whole lot of things, both trivial and deeper. That's a good story.

I agree that the Light of the Trees was different and think it's reasonable to assume that the Sun is probably much harsher. (Likewise, night is not as dark under Telperion.) Something that I think gets downplayed both in the Silm and in Silm fandom is the trauma of those who survived the Darkening. (Finrod mentions this in this story! How so much of what people struggle to explain comes back to the Darkening.) The focus tends to fall on travesties with human actors--the kinslayings, the endless betrayals, character deaths--without too much being said about what it would be like to have one's world so fundamentally and permanently changed as it was during the Darkening. (I'm guilty of this too!) It's like if the Sun went out and the great minds of the world managed to scramble a solution in time to save humankind, but it was like living under a neon sign or one of those sickly, awful yellow lightbulbs that people think keep bugs away. That just seems to me to be a traumatizing event: not only that something so fundamental and seemingly unassailable can, in fact, die but then the constant stress of having to live with a subpar replacement.

I'm completely sold on your modern Valinor (and I say that as someone who is no particular fan of modernised settings)! I love every new detail you give us. The tree in the middle of the road (now gone), for instance, is fantastic and needs to be adopted into canon! ;)

I'm completely sold on your Finrod, too. His sympathy for Caranthir and his reservations towards his therapists were rather telling! His act of rebellion in recreating that horrible thing in the Museum made me smile! His memories of Tirion-as-he-knew-it and the way it clashes with its modern incarnation were almost painful, and I love that he misses even the absurd fountain (though perhaps he would not miss it quite as much if it had been replaced by something different than the sterile Peace Garden, I guess). His observations about how he bestows meaning to meaningless memories in order to justify his nostalgia were brilliant.

Loved, loved, loved the (grim! what's wrong with me!) bits about Mandos and re-embodiment, how Námo would start with the "ruined" body and then remake it rather than recreate something from scratch, or how he explains that he cannot heal all memories or there would be nothing left of the person. That's deep! And fantastic! And making me feel more friendly towards Námo than I've felt in a long time!

Now I'm wondering whether Amarie is going to write a poem about getting eaten alive by a wolf. That was my first thought when they had that conversation -- that it sounded exactly like the sort of thing, ugly and horrible but true, that she'd want to talk about!

Wow, I'm using a lot of exclamation marks for this review. Sorry about that. I'm so excited and so glad that you're finding the time to write these stories!

You're having a Findekano moment is all, with the exclamation points! :D Totally not bothered here; this comment made me smile. Thank you so much.

I enjoyed reading Tolkienfic that incorporated modernisms (Darth Fingon's hilarious diaries of Elladan come first to mind) but never really imagined writing it myself. Then Kenaz's challenge happened. I had been thinking that Feanor wasn't so radical after all, wanting to preserve the monarchy and no semblance of equality (no matter what he says). And then I thought, why not give that radicalism to Finarfin? I've always felt he is unappreciated anyway, like there is more going on between those ears than we know, and he had plenty of centuries to spend while his brothers were off killing Orcs and each other in Middle-earth. What was he doing in that time? And this idea was born.

The foaming horse statue was inspired by some truly awful landmarks in Ocean City, Maryland, that I would find gaudy and cheesy until they were gone, and usually replaced with something sterile, lacking gaudiness but also personality: usually a condo complex. It's been interesting: I've gotten so many wonderful, thoughtful comments on this story (like this one :), and almost inevitably, people connect with that foaming horse statue. I guess we all have had--and lost--a foaming horse statue in our lives. :D

The concept of reembodiment as an unpleasant, painful, and even violent act is one of my oldest ideas, going back to one of my oldest stories (about the reembodiment of Finrod alluded to in this story), "Return to Me." The funny thing is that that story caused a stir back in the day, with people offered backhanded compliments about how they liked it even though it was "clearly AU," and this story--with the same concept but embedded in much more divergent verse--has gotten no such critique. How times have changed! (I am not going to wax nostalgic over canatics sticking an AU label on anything that displaying an iota of original thought. ;)

I love the idea about Amarie's poem! I might use that (with credit, of course.)

Thank you again for such a thoughtful and kind review!

(I went on something of a binge yesterday and read all of your Republic of Tirion stories, so prepare for incoming comments!)

This is splendidly done! I've always admired how effortlessly your prose seems to flow across the page—I'm sure it's not always effortlessly written. And I'm extremely in love with this vision of Tirion: democracy, open mic poetry nights, family therapy. It's fitting, and so, so clever. I also think that what you've done with Finrod's character is excellent. His voice here is very "voicey"—which is to say that I can tell it's him talking and that his words are informed by his unique experiences. Each of the characters in this series have a distinct narrative style, and that is certainly not effortless.

Anyway, as I said: I love this. I love the way the horse-fountain bookends Finrod's experiences adjusting to a new Aman, and I'm fascinated by Amarië's character and how it plays off of his. Well done!

I love this world you've built for post-canon Valinor! It's unexpected and so interesting. It really does spark the imagination. 

This is the first thing of yours I've read with Finrod featuring prominently and I really like the narrative voice you've given him.