Maedhros Attempts To Speak With Luthien by Himring

Chapter 1

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In the summer of that year, Maedhros departed Himring in secret, leaving his affairs in the care of his brother Maglor and none but Maglor knew whither he had gone. But Maedhros took from his treasury such gifts as he yet possessed that might please a princess and went south alone, for he purposed to speak with Luthien, if he could. And, in this, his purpose was twofold, for it appeared to him that, if anyone might move Thingol to give up his Silmaril, it was Luthien and, if anyone might move Thingol to join in an attack on Morgoth, it was Luthien also.

Yet he had little hope of success on either count, for he knew that his brother Curufin had attempted to kill Luthien in their last encounter and his brothers had also plotted the death of Beren, which in Luthien’s eyes might be worse. But Luthien had spared Curufin’s life when he had been in her power. What little hope he had Maedhros pinned on that and so decided that an appeal to Luthien must be tried, but if his purpose failed, as seemed likely, it must not be widely known so that his allies should not be discouraged.

Thus he went southward by Gelion, avoiding well-travelled paths, until he thought that he must not be far from Tol Galen. From there on, he proceeded more openly, lest anyone mistake his approach as hostile. But he saw no one, neither any of the Green Elves of the land nor any other being that he might announce himself to or ask his way. However, he struck a faint path through the woods and followed it without hesitation, until he heard the rush of water ahead and concluded that he was nearing the river Adurant.

He crossed a clearing and as he passed beneath the shadow of an elm, there was a palpable shift in the air that startled him. Yet he saw and felt nothing else, so he walked on and suddenly found himself back on the other side of the clearing where he had come from.

‘It seems I have found Luthien’s front gate’, he said to himself. And aloud he called: ‘I am Maedhros, son of Feanor, and I am come to speak with Luthien, Thingol’s daughter’.

There was no answer. He strode forth across the clearing again and as soon as he reached the elm, the air shifted and he found himself back on the other side once more.

He took off his helmet and shook out his red hair. Then he held the stump of his right arm aloft, for anyone who might be watching to see.

‘I am Maedhros,’ he called out again. ‘I come in peace and I would speak to Luthien.’

He set forth across the clearing again and, again, as soon as he reached the other side, he was suddenly returned to the same spot as before.

‘I come in peace!’ he called again. ‘I merely wish to speak with you!’

But again, as he walked forward, he found himself in the same spot that he had started out from.

He shook his head and smiled at himself and his predicament.

‘I guess’, he remarked, ‘the answer is no.’

And he turned about where he stood and returned north to where his friends and his allies—and his enemies—awaited him.

***

It was some time after the Nirnaeth Arnoediad—after his crushing defeat, retreat and flight—that Maedhros decided to try a second time. This time, his brother Maglor was unwilling and argued that Maedhros could not be spared on another wild-goose chase—that in these desperate times, the Feanorian remnant in their daily struggle for survival needed their leader.  But they had learned that Beren Erchamion had set foot outside Tol Galen, that he had drawn sword again to avenge the destruction of Menegroth at the hands of the dwarves of Nogrod and that Luthien now held the Silmaril. And so Maglor could not persuade Maedhros to refrain.

He set forth alone once again and, as before, entered the deep woods north of Adurant. As he went, he reflected how humbled he had imagined himself to be the last time he had come here, sent away from Luthien’s gate like a beggar, and how much farther he had fallen since. Soon the stands of elms crowding in on him began to seem familiar and yet not so. He recognized the same faint path under his feet that he had taken the last time, but the feel of the landscape, the atmosphere, had changed. It was the light—and yet the light, too, seemed both familiar and strange…

He went on, the feeling of unease in the pit of his stomach growing, and the light intensified. He came to the clearing—the one he had not been able to pass beyond—and it glowed with a light that was clearly not the light of the sun.

His mouth was dry. ‘Luthien, Luthien’, he cried out, but his voice sounded feeble and flat in his own ears in that bright silent glade.

He took another step forward and it was as if he had stepped into a memory. It was his memory, the memory of the Light of the Trees, but it seemed wrong, all wrong, here on this side of the Sea and it disturbed him so much that he forgot most of what he had meant to say to Luthien and Beren, if he could achieve a meeting—all those courteous, clever, political arguments he had so carefully thought out—and instead standing there, at the edge of the clearing, he cried:

‘Have pity on those whom the Oath constrains! But if you do not, at least remember that it is your kin, Luthien, that Morgoth hunts by the seashore! Beren, it is your kin that groan under the lash in Dor-lomin!’

A moment longer he stood and then he turned and fled the clearing as he would not have if a dozen balrogs had been after him.

‘For’, he said to Maglor, ‘as I stood, I felt that shadow of pain that has been on me since Thangorodrim lifting and, with the lifting, a kind of drowsiness befell me.  And maybe it was a gift of healing that was being offered to me and I was graceless to reject it, but it seemed to me that with the pain my memory of the world outside was beginning to drain away so that the power of the Dark Foe and the desperate need and loss of the Noldor grew hazed over as with distance in time and space.  And a Maedhros who went to sleep in a grassy glade, forgetting the needs of his kin and his people as much as the Oath, would not revert to being whole or being Maitimo—he would be nobody at all! And so I fled and returned to you.’

‘But’, Maedhros added, ‘the Dead That Live do not speak to such as us.’

‘Maybe--or maybe they are blinded by their own light,’ said Maglor.

And he carefully draped his arm around Maedhros’s shoulders.