The Death of Fëanáro by Dawn Felagund

Ah, I'm glad (and relieved!) that you found it worth sharing! I don't really consider myself to be a poet. I don't write a lot of poetry. But when I do, it hits me like a wrecking ball. (Like this. I had settled down to do some reading and it would not leave me alone.) For some reason, mediocre poetry is more painful than mediocre fiction, imo. (Probably because the attempt to adhere to rhyme and meter makes for some forced and awkward turns of phrase. I also find that people tend to confuse "hard to understand" with "deep" in poetry more than fic. In fiction, there is at least an attempt to carry a story most of the time.) I read some real poetic doozies in my editor's days! One love poem that feelingly asserted, "One of your smiles keeps me going for miles." Ouch.

"Eldarin pop music as polemics and politics!"

Absolutely! It's all in keeping with my almost-decade long obsession with the sources of the texts and how they might have been used as propaganda or for other purposes other than factual accuracy.

I like the Second Prophecy of Mandos as a happy resolution for everyone. Except that I've given it a sad ending in a story before. Typical! But not taking my version, I like the "Morgoth is defeated and everyone lives happily ever after on Arda Unmarred, Elves and Mortals together, all singing folk music and making daisy chains." And Feanor gets to come back then.

That's pretty much what I want too, although the stories set in such a world would be boring as hell! So if we've been given Arda Unmarred to work with, I'm going to exploit the misery to its fullest extent. ;)

I was in denial for a long while about the Second Prophecy. I didn't want to believe that JRRT actually rejected it. I just wanted to think that it wasn't written into the published Silm but it really does happen at the end.

"But a poem has to do it all for me before I can enjoy it."

Yes, me too. As you note, aspects of a story can be enjoyable or entertaining but poetry? Notsomuch. It's kind of like bad music. If something about a song is unlovely (or senseless, since some music is deliberately unlovely in a way that works), it just doesn't work for me. I suppose it's the auditory component, for me anyway,whereas prose can be more straight imagination.

Thank you for commenting, Himring (and for kudos on AO3 :). Here are my thoughts on your questions; your mileage may vary! I don't think the author holds the only "right" way to read a text.

"So the bards imagine Feanor resisting Namo, but he goes willingly? Is it because he is in a state of shock at his death?"

I think it's because he becomes aware of a process larger than himself and that he risks not being able to be a part of it. The last stanza of the first section:

Life groaned on without him
and upon the west-borne wind there was a sudden awareness
of the whole of it
of all the dying and eating and growing and living
only to die and eat and grow and live again.
He was part of none of that.

We have from L&C that Elven spirits can remain in the world and "haunt" a place. In this piece, Feanor's followers like to imagine that he did just that, so important to him was going to Middle-earth (or so abhorrent to him was living in Aman). But the truth is that he realizes, in the moment that he has the choice to stay in M-e or go to Aman, that to stay would be a loss; that he would cease to have influence over the world in any way that he would define as meaningful.

"Does the fire that makes Feanaro blow away as ash also not allow him to become part of the cycle of the world ..."

Yes. At that moment, he regards his current life as physically and spiritually lost if he chooses not to go to Aman. He doesn't even get the benefit of one of JRRT's favorite death images of the flowers growing on the grave mound. :)

There was no torrent of flowers
garish upon naked stony earth
to mark the life he had been.
There was not enough of him left to nurture even weeds.

"And in your last line, the story that was wrong somehow becomes true? Is that because Maglor is singing or in spite of him or unrelated?"

I meant it to be metaphorical. The "pilgrims" go to the place of his death in search of these supposed stones that have fires in their cores. Such things don't exist there (or if they do, Feanor had nothing to do with them). But in the form of songs and tales--which do continue to inspire his followers to rebellion or at least persistence in their cause--his death *does* serve such a role. So regardless of what he chose, he would have lived on in that sense, and given that, what he really did choose (which version of the tale is "right") matters little. It's a way of thinking about himself that he didn't consider when he made his choice to go to Mandos in order to have a chance of continuing to influence the world. (Which, since I take the Second Prophecy as "canon" in my verse, he does do ... about the happiest ending I can squeeze from his story! :D)

You're welcome--and thank you! I think good imagery is essential to poetry; there are lots of poems that I don't feel like I fully "get" but love reading because the imagery omg ... :D