The House that Fingon Built by Himring

Chapter 3

Fourth Age

After my return to Tirion, at first I hesitated to ask. My grip on my emotions was shaky still; the sight of a butterfly in the garden could reduce me to sudden tears. Could I even speak your name without revealing what you were to me?  You had kept the secret so religiously, more for my sake than for yours, that it seemed wrong to give it away now.

Besides, I knew the answers could hardly be good. The last I had seen of you was your army retreating across the plain, drawing your share of Morgoth’s troops after you—not enough, sadly, to give any of my own people a chance to fight free and survive, but still easily enough to cut you all to pieces. Had you lived, that day? And if you had—what then? What would be left to you—for had we not staked everything on one throw?

I did not expect the answers to be as bad as they were, although the fact that none of the family broached the matter of their own accord was a warning in itself. When I finally dared to break the ominous silence and ask our uncle outright about your fate, it turned out that my fears of betraying myself by my reactions had been unfounded. It was Arafinwe who hemmed and hawed and in the end spoke haltingly, averting his eyes from my face.

My apparent calm clearly unnerved him even more. I wondered at it myself and decided that this shattering news must surely begin to hurt at some point, but it seemed that that point was not yet. Meanwhile, I took care to thank him politely for telling me.

Afterwards, the silence about you in family circles became deafening; it descended like a very thick blanket. Our relatives were relieved that it was not they who had had to inform me and tactfully avoided the subject. That was no help at all. I found I had stopped weeping at the sight of butterflies.

It fell to a comparative stranger to explain things to me, a woman who had never set foot outside Tirion. I met her at a ball I had not wished to attend. Turukano had wanted me to come and I had failed to come up with a plausible reason not to go. The woman was the niece of a friend of mine or his aunt or his granddaughter—it was very embarrassing but I could not remember which—and to try and compensate for my confusion I asked her to dance and, when the set was over, procured a plate of hors d’oeuvres and a glass of white wine for her.

She turned out to be the kind of woman whose idea of conversation is to tell you everything she knows about you, in the most benevolent manner possible. Before she had half emptied her plate, she was telling me that, yes, it was a great pity about Nelyafinwe Maitimo, wasn’t it, but he was a Feanorion after all, probably couldn’t help it, poor thing, all of a piece throughout; there had just been something not quite right about that family from the start—creepy she’d always thought them, beginning with that unwomanly behaviour of Miriel’s—unreliable, inherently violent, quite incapable of true loyalty—of course I couldn’t have been expected to see through him, impressionable and idealistic as I was—so brave,  so noble! Fingon the Valiant!—far too innocent to plumb the depths of a Feanorian heart and realize that of course he would desert me at the earliest opportunity once again…

Her unrelenting flow of well-meaning chatter had lulled me into inattention, so that it took me a while to process what she was saying. When I finally grasped what she was driving at, I opened my mouth to give her a piece of my mind, when, suddenly, finally it struck me, there in that over-crowded ball room. That you would have agreed with her. That in fact you had. That any of the glaring inaccuracies in her account would have struck you as minor and completely irrelevant, for you had always regarded mitigating circumstances as something that only applied to others. Where you yourself were concerned, intentions had never counted, only outcomes. I wanted to stretch out my hand and pull you out of there, away from all that, but I was on the wrong side of the Sea and a couple of thousand years too late.

Such terrible times, she was saying comfortably, how awful it must have been for me…

Of course she was right, in a way. That had been a cold, raw moment when I had seen your troops beginning to retreat and knew we had failed, had simultaneously lost our throw and the whole game. I would not see you again; we would not get another chance to sit down, to compare notes on what had gone wrong, to consider how to do better next time. I would not even learn whether that flicker of red that I had briefly been able to make out near your banner was really you… 

We had known that leaders of armies hardly ever get the opportunity to die together, even in defeat—not unless they are even less competent in their duties than we turned out to be. After that one half-joking conversation, we had not mentioned the subject again. I had no time to think about it then either; I had no more time to think about you at all. I had my people to think of, those of them who were still alive; they had stood by me until now and must not falter for lack of leadership in this final hour. And there were orcs, far too many, to keep me busy and trolls and balrogs—and, in the end, of course, Gothmog. When next I had a moment to remember you, I reached out for you, blindly, but was no longer sure I even had a hand…

It was all so long ago, she was saying, and surely I was happy finally to be back in Tirion where I belonged…

I looked at her, in her sumptuous ball gown trimmed with lace, spearing a piece of puff-pastry with a dessert fork as she spoke. Cheery dance music tinkled in the background.  She had never known you—or if she had, she had forgotten completely who you were. I could not even begin to tell her…

All I managed to say, in a brittle voice, was that I imagined you would hardly have enjoyed fleeing all the way to Mount Dolmed. That little piece of geography was lost on her, of course. She told her friends, I heard later on, that poor Prince Findekano was taking his cousin’s betrayal very hard.

***

When I began to venture out more often and further beyond our immediate circle, I discovered that she was not alone in her opinions and that it was by no means only those who had not set foot in Middle-Earth who shared them. I never needed to ask anyone for their opinions about you; it was my appearance on the scene itself that triggered their memories and set them talking about the First Age. These people were less careful of the sensibilities of Poor Prince Findekano—or less well informed—and so I heard much about their views on those long-past events.

We had all of us, I learned, been brave and steadfast and unshakeable in our determination throughout—except, of course, for the Feanorians. We had been loyal and true to each other, in all and every circumstance—except for the Feanorians.  We had been heroes, every single one of us—except for the Feanorians! (We would have won, they oh-so-carefully never said, if it had not been for the Feanorians.) It occurred to me after a while that, thousands of years later, my long-memoried people were still smarting a little at having had to be rescued by a host made up largely of Vanyar…

***

Unchanging Valinor! As I wandered through the corridors of the palace in Tirion, there was no trace to show you had ever lived there. Space being always at a premium, the rooms that you had occupied had been cleared out and given to another already when you left for Formenos.  Since then, the palace had been rebuilt bit by bit over the years, as the need arose, and if any of the mementoes our fond grandfather had kept of his eldest grandson’s childhood were still gathering dust in some forgotten attic, I never found it.

Formenos, I was told, had been razed to the ground by the order of the Valar. Every trace of the Dark Foe’s attack had been eliminated—together with any reminder that the Valarin defence of the Undying Lands might have been less than perfect and impenetrable at any time. Now, not one stone remained upon another of Feanor’s place of exile, and it would have proved vain to sift scattered masonry for the belongings of his eldest son. I had not gone to Formenos while it was still occupied, feeling both hurt by your defection and unsure of my welcome; later, I had regretted that I had not taken a chance on it. There seemed to be no point in going now.

The Feanorian homestead on the outskirts of Tirion was deserted; it seemed nobody had wanted to live in such an ill-fated place. A neighbouring farm had absorbed the grounds; what had once been Nerdanel’s vegetable patch was now a corner of a large field. The walls were tottering under the weight of the brambles and vines that grew all over them and were slowly pulling them down. The roof had clearly fallen in a long time ago. I saw one of the farmer’s goats clamber across and dislodge a few more tiles as it went and heard the falling tiles shatter inside on the kitchen floor at the bottom of that large gaping hole. At some point, somebody had bricked up the door to Feanaro’s forge, as if something dangerous might escape from there.

Only the lane that wound gently through stands of trees dotted about the landscape, leading by degrees from the homestead to the main road to Tirion, seemed unchanged. It was true that maybe it had sunk a little with the passing of feet over the years, and it was just then, as I slowly walked back along it towards the city, baking under a sun hotter than Laurelin’s light had ever become even at noon…