Numenor That Was by Himring

Vanimelde Dances

The Third Ruling Queen of Numenor--as a girl, as Queen, and in old age.
A slightly revisionist account of the importance of dancing.

Rated Teens for Mature Themes (Numenorean politics)

Originally written for Marta for Fandom Stocking 2014 and simultaneously (in the form of a true drabble) for  Tolkien Weekly for the prompt "ballroom".

In the king’s palace in Armenelos, in the disused ballroom in the old west wing, Vanimelde dances. She dances, all by herself, to the music in her head.

She lifts her arms, she twirls, she leaps… Dancing, she is beautiful. She is powerful. She is at the centre of the universe. She is Luthien, whose dancing ushered in the spring after the harshness of winter each year in ancient Doriath. She is the Valie Nessa, who, swifter than the deer, danced at the world’s first wedding, her own, in Almaren before the destruction of the Lamps.

Some of Vanimelde’s teachers—those of the King’s Party—frown on these stories. Vanimelde herself does not quite know what she thinks of them, but she hears their music and so she dances.

***

She knows they say she should have renounced the sceptre, should have allowed herself to be passed over in favour of Herucalmo. She has no head for economy or legislation, they say. (She would never admit to anybody that it is not for want of trying.) Herucalmo can juggle figures and paragraphs much better than she. That is all that they think it takes to rule.

Is that all that it takes to rule? The people of Numenor are well-fed and well-clothed; Herucalmo has seen to that. But their hearts are restless, threadbare with longing. And always they are drifting further apart. Hardly a conversation that does not threaten to become a dispute—about the Valar, about life and death, about policies in Middle-earth—and, increasingly, each dispute ends in bitter quarrels.

Vanimelde has no real answers, no final cure. She offers beauty instead. If the people of Armenelos cannot speak without quarrelling, she will make them sing. If the nobility of the Yozayan cannot meet in amity, she will make them move in harmony together on the dance floor. Even if they must make do without words, they shall not forget they are parts of a whole, as long as Tar-Vanimelde rules from the ballroom. She issues commands and Herucalmo grudgingly pays for an academy of music, open to anyone with talent, an opera house in Armenelos and theatres in the provinces, annual festivals. A waste of money, Herucalmo thinks.

Tar-Vanimelde thinks: let the Dunedain express their fears and desires in music and movement rather than allowing them to poison their lives. In the ballroom, members of warring parties bow to each other and walk hand in hand to music, King’s Man with Elf Friend. And so, in their midst, Vanimelde dances.

***

She is old now. Death is a gift, the Elf Friends say, although it is three generations since those of the line of Elros willingly accepted it. Occasionally, she finds herself rattling the box to guess what might be in it.

For some time now, she has been limping behind in life’s dance. But she cannot freely leave. She has allowed Herucalmo to become too powerful and now she worries for her son. It is bitter that she should have to spend her last years trying to wrest power back from her own husband. All her life, she has tried to be serene and impartial, above party strife, to be equally beloved of all. Now she finds she has few allies.

But even when in the end her legs refuse to bear her, in her heart, Vanimelde still dances. To her son Alcarin she says on her deathbed: ‘I hope there will still be music.

Chapter End Notes

It's possible that the King's Men called themselves Queen's Men during Vanimelde's reign. I have continued to call them "King's Men" to show that the party antedates her and that, although they are nominally royalists, that doesn't necessarily mean they would support Vanimelde's own policies.