In the Hills of Emerie by Himring

Chapter 1: Mouth Music

Young Ancalime sits and thinks about music and other things.

Warnings for dysfunctional family.

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Ancalime sat half-hidden in a dell of the green hills. There were sheep droppings and the sound of faint baas of sheep, from a certain distance, but most of the flock was out of sight. Above, a skylark rose in the clear air, its liquid warble seeming now closer, now farther away.

Ancalime was singing to her doll Nuneth, making mouth music, the way the shepherdesses did, when there was no piper around for them to dance to his music. Nuneth, the doll, was named after her grandmother, because she had been her grandmother’s present and because the many small grey braids reminded Ancalime of how her grandmother wore her hair. Maybe that was how they did it in the Westlands or maybe it was her grandmother’s personal style. Ancalime had seen her grandmother once, when she had visited, but Mother and Grandmother had had words and Nuneth had not come to Emerie since. Ancalime had been rather indignant at the crushing hug Nuneth had inflicted on her as soon as they met, without asking first, but afterwards she regretted her instinctive protest, a bit, when she realized she would not be hugged that way again. Ever since then Erendis had intercepted any letters from Nuneth to Ancalime, reading only selected bits, and Ancalime had been afraid she would not be permitted to have the doll her grandmother sent.

But something in Erendis had softened at the sight of the doll, perhaps precisely because she was not life-like, with her paddle-like body and black-and-brown markings, less realistic than the well-mannered princess doll that grandmother Almarian had given her, which hadn’t quite survived the contempt that Erendis poured on it and sat neglected in a corner in Ancalime’s room.

‘I had a doll like that myself, once,’ Erendis said, holding the paddle-like body almost tenderly, before passing it to her daughter.

And so Nuneth had become Ancalime’s doll and companion on all ventures, and now she was the admiring audience as Ancalime practised mouth music, the way she had heard Zamin and the others do it. Ancalime feared that Nuneth was being too uncritical. It didn’t sound quite right.

What a stupid custom this was anyway! Why was it “simply not done” for a woman to play when there was no man around to do so? In fact, why should a woman not play, if she wanted to, even if a man was around?

One would expect her mother to have sharp words to say about this custom, the way she sometimes talked about other customs that favoured men, but Erendis had never objected to it, as far as Ancalime knew. Probably that was because this particular custom suited her mother down to the ground. She didn’t even encourage singing, in the white house, not if it was louder than a hum.

Ancalime sighed.

‘When I am Queen, Nuneth, I will have a band of pipers and they will all be women.’

Except, she thought, she actually liked the sound of mouth music. Sometimes she liked it better than the sound of pipes or a fiddle.

‘When I am Queen, Nuneth, I will have a band of pipers and another band of women who make mouth music for me!’

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Chapter End Notes

Outside Arda, mouth music is a Scottish and Irish Gaelic style of traditional singing, sometimes said to have developed because people were too poor to own instruments or because bagpipes were banned. Here is a sample from YouTube, performed by Elisabeth Kaplan of Quadriga Consort.

Chapter 2: No-Man, Whom I Prefer Above All Others

Ancalime in the aftermath of Hallacar's declaration of love and the revelation that he is in truth a relative of hers, who had assumed a false identity.

Read Chapter 2: No-Man, Whom I Prefer Above All Others

Ancalime sat among her own green hills and wept tears of rage. He had laughed. Not only had she been deceived, but he had laughed before revealing the truth. It was clear that he saw nothing fundamentally wrong with lying to her, making a fool of her, and would do so again, if it suited his purpose and if she was fool enough to let him.

She had, of course, suspected he was not quite the humble shepherd he had introduced himself as—he clearly had more schooling than was common among those who had no choice but to keep flocks—but she had still believed he was not someone who she could have met, outside the hills of Emerie, on an even footing.

‘How else could any wooer find you?’

You are a cousin of mine, Hallacar, and my father favours yours. You could have come to Armenelos and sought an introduction at any time. To be sure, I might have been less approachable there, but it would have been the honest thing to do, if you wished to meet me. Instead you sought me out here in the hills of my home, invading the place where I felt safe and at peace, because you wished to gape at me as a curiosity.

And still he professed to love her and clearly thought that made everything all right, that lying to her, manipulating her, was the fair and noble thing to do, as long as it was done in the name of love. But what kind of love was this, that had no respect for the wishes of the beloved? It was a man’s view of things, her mother would have said, and, as it had turned out, she was, after all, right.

She had almost managed to trust him. Love was neither here nor there, it was trust that was the important, the difficult thing. A wasted effort. He would never even appreciate what he had almost gained, what he had irretrievably lost. He was merely disappointed that she was unwilling to comply with his wishes, after his fervent declarations of love.

‘I love Emerwen and care not now who she may be.’

That was what he claimed. But she was Emerwen Aranel, both shepherdess and princess, and he clearly had not understood either part of her as well as he assumed.

She thought with regret of the songs he had sung to her, from the time when the Edain had been pasturing their flocks out east, before they had crossed the Ered Luin into Beleriand and encountered the Eldar, remembered how he had improvised upon them to make the old songs their own story, his and hers, and themselves the subject of old songs. It had pleased her to be woven into those songs, age-old and yet new, as if he and she were all part of one rich cloth and that cloth stretched all around them and a long way back.

But no, that was just another way of being taken in, an excuse to have another’s will imposed on hers. She would not consent to become merely part of another’s song. It would always be her own song, from now on.

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Chapter End Notes

B2MeM 2018 prompt: Initial prompt no. 10: Improvisation: the art or act of playing music, harmonies or variations that are composed on the spot without previously learning them; making it up as you go along

Epilogue: Her Son

Ancalime's son Anarion has not learned anything of his mother's recent humiliation at his father's hands.
But the effect on her does not pass him by.

This chapter uses the following prompt of the SWG's Middle-earth Museum challenge:
Headdress
(alternative link: Queen Puabi’s headdress).

The relevant B2MeM 2018 prompt is: Initial prompt no. 20: Nocturne: a night-piece, music that evokes a nocturnal mood

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I asked her: ‘My Lady Mother, will you take me to Emerie to see the sheep?’

For always, she had seemed calmer and spoken to me more openly in the green hills than elsewhere, not indeed as women commonly speak to children in Numenor but sharing her thought, so that some things she said to me there I stored in my memory as she had spoken them and only understood years later.

But this time she spoke sternly: ‘Do not ask, Anarion, for now we can never go there again.’

I feared then that I had angered her without knowing. I hesitated to enquire further, in case I angered her more, but my eyes filled with tears. I weep easily, like my great-grandmother Almarian and her daughter, my great-aunt Almiel. Some say it is a weakness in a king.

My mother perceived my tears and said more gently: ‘Hush, my son, it is none of your doing.’

And on the second evening she came to me, as I lay in bed, tended by my attendants and prepared for sleep. It was late and already beyond the window the sky was dark, although the night was not yet unbroken but disrupted by the flicker of lamps and torches at this hour, as commonly in Armenelos. My mother took off her starred golden head-dress, with its triple wreath of willow and poplar leaves, set it aside on the chest, and sat beside me on the bedstead. As I watched her in wonder, she bent her head down low, almost to my pillow, and then she sang softly in my ear, so that none other could hear, three of those songs of Emerie that she had otherwise abjured. And I understood that this was just for me.

It is not seldom seen that the unhappiness of parents is bequeathed to their heirs and the strife between them is visited on their children. But I was luckier than most, for I had good friends and, when I came to marry, my wife and I understood one another.

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Chapter End Notes

The humiliation referred to is the occasion on which Ancalime had forced Hallacar to leave his family farm and he responded by arranging a multiple wedding ceremony for her female staff behind her back. (I've written about this elsewhere in the series.)

It is possible to read the canonical account in the Unfinished Tales as saying that Ancalime had a bad relationship with her son.
She certainly seems to have fought over him with her husband. She also rejected her society's expectations of motherly behaviour.
I think that his relationship with her could not have been an altogether easy one, but not necessarily therefore a bad one, or not entirely so, at any rate.