B2MEM 2011 - The Silmarillion Extracts by Dwimordene

Love in other languages

Prompt: Bree: Hobbits are well known for their gift-giving traditions. Write a story or poem in which the exchange of gifts is featured, or use "gifting" as a theme for a piece of art.

He'd come to share, to struggle and to save. Yet giving wasn't straightforward – one had first to be given.

Pallando had not expected gifts, but Children were prodigious! He found 'his' people ardent, violent, fractiously pious, wounded, passionate – desperately desirous of courageous, all-giving love.

Unbearable, his fiery brother's vicious perversion of that desire!

Yet even Sauron had had first to be given their language: their yearning for wholeness, for god-like union with God in life's grey years.

As they gave, so did Pallando:

For frail flesh, to be living flame is to live where God dwells: patiently in each other...

Chapter End Notes

Building off of “False Fire,” where it's a question of whether the interpretation of Denethor's death through the figure of "heathen kings" doesn't do an injustice to both Denethor *and* the "heathen kings," whether one agrees with their practice or not.

Pallando is one of the Blue Wizards sent 'East'. I had him veer south eventually and settle in with the Haradrim. See "The Istari" in Unfinished Tales. I hope this is appropriate for SWG, even though it deals with a Maia in the Third Age and is prompted by an issue that comes to light in the Ring War era.