The Chief in a Village by Himring

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Chapter 6

The Failure of the Feminist Agenda in Beleriand

Lalwen (Irime) is said to have followed her brother Fingolfin to Beleriand but we don't seem to hear of her arriving there or indeed doing anything at all in Middle-earth. Tolkien being Tolkien, this doesn't actually need explanation but I'm not the first to try and explain it anyway..

Warning for character death in this chapter.

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Irime’s directions were clear and concise. I found Little Gil right away where she had hidden him, in a hollow space under a loose hearthstone in a cottage nearby. She must have given him something to make him sleep and not draw attention to himself.  When I pulled his basket out of the dark hole, he barely stirred.

She cannot have counted on an errant nephew to find him there. When she hid him, she must still have thought there might be survivors. I grabbed the basket with the baby and raced back to the village square.

This time I insisted on having a look at her wounds, ignoring her protests.

‘I tell you there’s no point’, she muttered crossly as I cautiously removed cut and torn fragments of blood-caked leather.

‘No’, I agreed. My voice was steady now. ‘I don’t think I can save your life. An expert battle surgeon in Barad Eithel—just possibly. But I out here, I don’t stand a chance. You’ve got as many holes in you as a sieve, and if I make a serious attempt to do anything about this one here in your side I’m fairly certain I’ll just kill you straight away. But if you let me, I can try and slow the blood loss and buy us a bit more time.’

After that, she subsided and let me get to work. I did as much as I dared. Then I sat back on my haunches and rubbed a blood-stained hand across my forehead.

Her eye-lids were drooping. She was dazed with pain and thoroughly exhausted, and it seemed cruel not to let her rest. But she might well not wake again. I had not put her through this ordeal only to let her drift off in her sleep.

‘Irime’, I asked her, ‘how come you are here?’ I hesitated; then I added: ‘Father said you had remained behind in Tirion.’

She opened her eyes wide and glared at me. All traces of exhaustion had disappeared.

‘He tried to forbid me to come’, she said—and even centuries later, her voice was filled with wrath. ‘He wanted Anaire to come, wanted that so much. A wife belongs with her husband and children, he kept on pleading.  With tears streaming down his face! As if it wasn’t evident that the woman was married to Tirion as much as to him! Anaire—and abandon the city she had grown up in and given her life to like a pair of old dilapidated boots by the side of the road?! She was far too good a housewife for such disorderly proceedings! And all the while Earwen was standing right there with her face white as a sheet, not daring to utter a word because she wasn’t a Noldo. She gave Anaire the courage to go on refusing, I think. 

He wanted Anaire to come. But me—me, the one who wanted out of Tirion so badly, even before the Darkening, that on some days, when the foul compromised peace of Valinor seemed to hang over the city like Midsummer in a swamp, I felt the overwhelming temptation to throw open the door with a crash and rush all the way down the Calacirya, screaming like a maniac!—me, he tried to forbid to come.

He had decided I was frail: artistic, weird, not up to it. It wasn’t worth arguing with. I did the only possible thing. I went home, put on men’s clothes and followed you.’

‘You followed us’, I repeated.

There had been so many of us when we left—the overwhelming majority of the population of the city of Tirion—and although we were noticeably fewer by the time we had reached Beleriand, there were still far too many to pick out a face in the crowd if the person in question was trying to stay concealed. Irime had already been used to wearing workmen’s clothes in her workshop to lug around those heavy tubs of clay, to stack pots and fire her kiln. She had been leading her reclusive life for quite a while before our departure. The times when she had been much in the public eye as the king’s daughter were long past and, even then, how many had seen past the long flowing dresses and the jewellery and the sparkle? Without the princess’s outfit, Irime’s features were strong and not particularly feminine.

‘But Irime, he wouldn’t have sent you back. He couldn’t have, after Araman… Did you tell no one? Nobody knew?’

She was staring past me, not seeing me, I think.

‘There were so many times, on the Ice, when I almost made up my mind to reveal myself’, she said. ‘When Elenwe died, how much I regretted not having done so yet! Only, it never seemed quite the right moment. I put it off. And then I put it off again.

‘And then we reached Beleriand. And I watched, watched as the heroines of the Crossing, Irisse and Artanis, crawled meekly back into their gilded cages, doing as they were ordered to. I wouldn’t let him do it to me. I am a daughter of Finwe! I am not somebody’s prop or an ornament on somebody’s mantelpiece.’

‘All that freedom we had been promised! The wide realms of Middle-earth! And then it came only to this: that they would keep trying to erect another Tirion in Beleriand, that they would slavishly copy the ways of Aman in exile.’

‘But I would rule, at least, and if it was only to be the chief in a village. I would not be imprisoned in high royal estate, in Hithlum…’

‘Irime’, I said, trying to soothe her, not knowing how. I was distressed at what I was hearing, but just then I was even more worried about the effect all this was having on her.  Her anger had seemed to revive her, but now it was as if she was scarcely able to contain it as those past resentments took hold of her, so strong still after all the time that had passed…

She remembered my presence.  She looked at me and frowned. She peered over at Gil, still quietly sleeping off whatever drug she had given him in his basket. I moved the basket closer. Her fingers touched the rim.

‘You will bring up my son as your own’, she said. ‘Promise me that.’

‘Yes, Irime, but… Who is his father?’

It was the wrong thing to say.

‘Who is his father?! You will not promise me to look after him before I tell you who his father is? Is it not enough for you that I tell you he is my son?!’

‘Irime…! Irime, no! Don’t!’

My cry of warning came too late. In her fury, she had made a violent movement towards me. Something inside her that was already torn tore further, and my makeshift bandages slipped. There was a terrible sound and a lot more blood—and then all the anger and pain went out of her, together with her life.

‘I just thought Gil would want to know’, I whispered.

But she could no longer hear me. Only a moment ago, she had been the daughter of Finwe, brimming with energy and tension, as monumental in her wrath, in her own way, as my father or even Feanaro. Now I was merely holding a dead woman in the village of the dead.

One of her braids had come free and flopped across my arm. I saw she had tied a bit of yellow ribbon into it. Maybe it was no coincidence that the hairstyle she had worn into her last battle was reminiscent of the one notoriously associated with Fingon the Valiant. Maybe she had tied that ribbon in it to give her courage.

‘If I were truly valiant, you would not have died like this’, I said.

The sound of my voice was ugly in my ears and I realized I was weeping. I wept bitterly there for a while. In Tirion, I had prided myself on my superior sensitivity and perceptiveness, flattering myself that because I was capable of appreciating her art, because I was able to see things my father was missing, Irime and I had a kind of understanding, a deep affinity.

But she was of my parents’ generation. I had admired her, but it had not occurred to me that she might require my support. And she, in her turn, had not trusted me. When it came to it, to her I was just one of the family, one of the Others—no more than that.  And so, when she was killed, I had been oblivious, had not even realized she was nearby. I had not moved a finger to help her.

I calmed down after a while and thought that maybe she had been right not to regard me as her natural ally. Yes, I had understood some things about her, but we were not two of a kind. It showed clearly enough in the different motives that had led us here, into this patch of wilderness. We had both been trying to escape and in that much we were perhaps alike—but with me, the escape had been meant to be purely temporary and its extension accidental, just a blip, so to speak. Irime, on the other hand, had ended up deliberately cutting herself off from the rest of us, a decision she had maintained for centuries, whatever her intentions had been to begin with.

If she had taken me into her confidence, during the Crossing on the Ice or after our arrival in Beleriand, I thought I would have sympathized. But would I really have understood? And whether I understood or not, would I have consented not to tell my father that his favourite sister was venturing forth without any of the protection her family could give her, into uncharted territory? Perhaps I might have, but not without a severe struggle of conscience or without doing my very best to dissuade her.

It occurred to me that I would not be able to ask either Irisse or Artanis about gilded cages or tell them what Irime had said.  Irisse was immured in Gondolin. Artanis was almost equally inaccessible in Doriath, within the bounds of the Girdle of Melian, where a kin-slayer cousin could gain no admittance.

Meanwhile, I was alone in the middle of miles of forest, with too many dead people and a baby—the first time I had ever had the sole responsibility for a child quite this young.