Cradle of Stars by Dawn Felagund, Elleth

Creation from Word

After Fëanáro made the Silmarils, he stopped coming to the Lambengolmor for many years. Many had been waiting for any reason to despise the most eminent of the Noldorin linguists and had it in his sudden neglect of the guild he himself had founded, claiming his fame had made linguistics—the science behind the very trait that defined our people—no longer worth his while. What worth were words to one who had tamed Light? Nolofinwë, who always sat beside me at meetings, as he had from the earliest days of our courtship, would periodically glance over his shoulder at the door to see if his brother might yet appear.

One day he did.

We took our seats to find he’d already arrived, the first there as had been his wont, scribbling in haste in a ledger. (Many claimed he wrote the papers he was to deliver in the minutes before the meeting began.) Nolofinwë stood in the aisle for a moment, watching his brother, before he took his seat beside me.

You should go to him. Part of me wanted to whisper those magnanimous words but always I was terrified to interfere in their relationship, like pushing my husband closer to a roaring fire.

Fëanáro’s linguistic work had lately concerned neologisms, namely the coinage of new words and their connection to the oral histories many of our folklorists had collected. He spoke on neologisms that day, leaving the ledger—as he always did—at his seat. He did not stand behind the podium but neither did he stride wildly, as many scholars did. He stood in front of it, upright and his hands open and imploring, his eyes overbright as though made so by the Silmarils.

“You see, our people made real what they saw and experienced through the making of words. In that way, they created those things—confined them phonologically and semantically within certain boundaries—from what was otherwise an abstraction of experience. Take death—when they named death and defined it, they put it apart from life. But there is nothing in death that requires it be so. It was the neologists who made a thing apart from our experience as Quendi, a thing to grieve. Had they drawn the boundaries otherwise, we might recognize the dead even now among us.” He swung out his arm at those of us who listened before him.

He was mad. I was careful not to let my glance slide toward Nolofinwë, sitting stiffly beside me. He’d laid the pen he used to take notes carefully on the paper.

“But it is the prototype, is it not? What the Valar tell us of the cosmogonical act is that Eru Ilúvatar brought the universe into being with a word: Eä. Let it be! With that word, Eru Ilúvatar drew the confines of the universe. A different word and different boundaries and reality would look different. We might all push up from and then fall back to the earth, akin to the trees—”

There was a burst of laughter, choked off when the laugher realized that Fëanáro was not making a joke. A few people shifted in their seats to look for who had laughed, trying to shift their embarrassment for the illustrious Fëanáro onto that unfortunate boor. Fëanáro did not dignify the laugh with so much as a hesitation.

“With this notion, we may—”

“Are you claiming that we have the power of The One to create with mere word?” someone shouted from the crowd.

I never knew who it was. Decorum required questions be held till the end, and many lectures were given where the audience nearly hummed with all the squirming and scribbling of suppressed questions; I’d been behind the podium once when this happened, and a terrified sweat was pooling in my shoes beneath my heavy scholars’ robes by the time the question session arrived and they unleashed the full force of their disapprobation in the form of questions upon me; it was the only time I wept after giving a lecture, at home, in Nolofinwë’s arms while a newborn Findekáno wailed hungrily. There was an uncomfortable shuffling at the solecism, and I thought Fëanáro would plunge ahead, as he had with the laugh, but this time he paused. His brow knit in confusion, and I remarked the irony that the heretical Fëanáro would be unseated by a breach etiquette, before he remarked, “Why of course.”