Taking Readings II by Himring

A Glory of Colours

Egalmoth, Lord of the House of the Heavenly Arch in the city of Gondolin, is asked how he came to adopt the rainbow as the device of his house.

Rating: Teens for brief references to canonical violence and alcohol consumption

It was known in Gondolin that if you asked Egalmoth how he had come to adopt the rainbow as his device, for the most part, he would change the topic or turn it aside with a joke at his own expense. It was rare—and always unexpected—that he would consent to speak, late at night, it might be, in a smoky tavern, across a table top dripping and reeking with spilled beer, but stone-cold sober, drawing his blue cloak more closely about himself.

How even in Valinor he had loved the refracted light, the partial glimpses of rainbow in fountains and waterfalls, bands of half-seen colour shimmering in rainwater dripping off the leaves of Laurelin, had been haunted by it, like a word he could not quite pronounce. How in Valinor he had not been a traveller until swept up in the Flight of the Noldor, had never passed the Calacirya or even guessed how much darkness there might be in the world outside. How the darkness, despite the light of the stars, had only seemed to deepen after the Kinslaying at Alqualonde, how even the whiteness of the ice floes of the Helcaraxe had only seemed another shade of black, how losing all sense of colour out there he had tried to remember the colour blue and could not. How he had thought he would never see blue again, but how first the Moon had risen and then the Sun. How they had set foot in Middle-earth and how they had, for the first time, encountered the Enemy. How it had rained over the battlefield, a brief downpour washing away blood, and how sinking to his knees, entirely overwhelmed, he had looked up and seen it in the sky: not only blue, but bands of yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, all the colours of the full rainbow.

Chapter End Notes

Written for the LOTR Community Challenge on Livejournal for August on the theme "rainbow", for the element "blue".

Title taken from the description of the folk of the House of the Heavenly Arch in "The Fall of Gondolin".
Egalmoth's blue cloak is mentioned in the same passage.

The idea that it was easier to see a full rainbow by the light of the Sun than by the light of the Trees is not canonical, but at present I'm not aware of anything that explicitly contradicts it.