In The Interest of Historical Accuracy by Duilwen

Prologue: In which the author, noting the inadequacy of existing accounts of the motivations, movements, and dispensation of the supporters of the House of Fëanor, sets out to redress such

Read Prologue: In which the author, noting the inadequacy of existing accounts of the motivations, movements, and dispensation of the supporters of the House of Fëanor, sets out to redress such

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For ships and jewels they sold their souls,

And ships and jewels they burned;

The Dark they named their blackest foe,

but 'twas his ends they served.

                        - children's rhyme recorded in Eregion, S.A. 1531

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If I'm truthful with myself (and I do try to be; self-deception, it is said, is at the root of greater evils), it started because I was bored.

I had no right to be; I was young, still, barely out of my first century, and already accounted a notable scholar. I had achieved something approaching notoriety, in truth,  through my work on recording the everyday life of my people.

(It had surprised me, when I first arrived at Ost-in-Edhil, to realize that this was not already done. Epic tales we had aplenty: magnificent tapestries depicting the High Kings of the first age in all their heroic glory, lays beyond count celebrating the splendor of the Host of the West, when at last it arrived, hundreds of leather-bound books recounting, and recounting again, every detail of our military triumphs and even our defeats. All of the latter, of course, were laid squarely at the feet of the Kinslayers.)

 But there was not a single book in the vast libraries of our capital city describing, for instance, our marriage customs. What the commoners ate. What songs the children sang, and how they passed their time. If some stranger encountered the libraries of our people ten thousand years hence, they would know precisely how many troops came forth from hidden Gondolin on the morning of the Nirnaeth, and how they were arrayed, and how their banners were decorated; but they would be left completely ignorant of how a hidden city in a forbidden mountain range managed to grow its own food.

I was (I shall not bother with false humility) brilliant, precocious, and driven, prone to noticing things that other people missed; so when I noted this glaring inadequacy in our historical records, I set about redressing it. I recorded the traditions of our people. I set our children's rhymes to paper, ignoring the mutterings of those who thought it a waste of good parchment. I interviewed the Exiles about the customs of Valinor, the refugees of Gondolin about the agriculture question, the survivors of Doriath about ventilation and waste disposal in Menegroth.

I was, in hindsight, terribly insensitive, but everyone tolerated me, perhaps because I was young and looked even younger, or perhaps because I sincerely had no idea how rude I was.

By the time I had reached my majority, I had written three books and invented an entirely new field of study, and I happily spent the next several decades expanding on it.

And then I got bored.

My first treatise on child-rearing customs across the Elven-Kingdoms of Middle-earth was groundbreaking; my second, though far more thorough and more accurate, was passé. When I published the third, people smiled politely at me and asked behind my back, "Is he still going on about that?"

I came to understand that it was the idea of my work that interested people, not the work in itself. The idea that our daily lives, as much as our battles, were a matter of study and interest, to be recorded - that was fascinating, groundbreaking. It challenged our whole notion of our roles as scholars. It was tremendously interesting to debate over, and everyone had an opinion.

The actual work - well, that was dull, and rather tedious, and unnecessary now that the point had been made, wasn't it?

I suppose that the principled thing to do would have been to stand firmly on the ground I'd staked out for myself, and proudly continue my research. But, see, it's easy to stand undaunted in the face of criticism. What's difficult is to stand undaunted in the face of indifference. And so when the disapproval of my ideas faded to indifference, I got bored. I gave up.

And that meant I needed a new project. Preferably something highly controversial, problematic, and yet intellectually defensible - something that would again set the scholars of Ost-in-Edhil  snapping at each other like wargs. 

I told my tutors that I thought our people needed a version of our histories written from the perspective of the Kinslayers.

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"But the Kinslayers are dead!" you say. Strictly speaking, the bodies of Maedhros and Maglor were never found, and there are more than a few witnesses who insist they have heard Maglor singing on the shoreline (always from a great distance) - but yes, you're right. Trying to find a Fëanorian to ask my questions was obviously a futile endeavor. 

(No, I did not even consider troubling Lord Celebrimbor. I like stirring up trouble, but I am not suicidal.)

But the very fact that you would ask such a question reflects the appalling gap in the knowledge of our people about the Kinslayers. Because, of course, there weren't just the seven of them. Mighty fighters though they were, the sons of Fëanor did not singlehandedly conquer Doriath, or ruin Sirion; they did not raise the Peredhil twins alone in the wilderness. Even at the bitter end, when it is said that they themselves regretted their terrible oath, and begged the One that it be lifted - even then, they had followers. A whole army of followers.

And the followers were bound by no Oath.

Why, then, did they stay? What could possibly have drawn them to murder Elves? Beleriand was flooded with refugees in that time; they could have found shelter anywhere, joined the flood of the displaced and frightened, fought with their people instead of against them.

These were the questions I meant to get answered, to the horror of the scholars of Ost-in-Edhil (though their eyes lit up with delight at the prospect, and they debated it long into the night, and I knew that their horror was for the sake of propriety; their naked curiosity was as strong as my own.)

I had a long list of questions for the Kinslayers.

 

The only problem was finding them.

After the War of Wrath, they had moved east and south; they were not welcome in Mithlond, for obvious reasons, and in Oropher's kingdom (where the remnant of Doriath had settled) they had been outright threatened with another Kinslaying. It was said that some of them had gone farther east still.

 But some of them had returned here, and Lord Celeborn and Lady Galadriel had reluctantly granted them permission to settle in the hilly lands in the north of Eregion. Their settlements (assuming that they indeed existed) were marked on no maps, and paid no taxes; they had not been seen in Eregion's cities in ten yení. 

I was no adventurer, but to a scholar the call of knowledge is as the call of the Sea to the Teleri, or as the call of the Silmarils to the madmen I was about to seek out, and once the thought was in my head I could not be free of it. So in the spring of my hundred-and-seventh year, against the advice of everyone I knew, I packed an obscene amount of lembas, a bow (with which I was barely competent, but no one needed to know that) for protection and game, and several leather-bound, empty books for my research, and I set off to find the Kinslayers.

 

I found them.

 

This is their story.

 

 

Chapter 1: In which the author’s journey and first encounter with the Feanorians is detailed; appended is a description of the Darkening and the murder of High King Finwë

Read Chapter 1: In which the author’s journey and first encounter with the Feanorians is detailed; appended is a description of the Darkening and the murder of High King Finwë

Chapter 1: In which the author’s journey and first encounter with the Feanorians is detailed; appended is a description of the Darkening and the murder of High King Finwë 

I am not certain what I was expecting. A fierce, grim people, more like Orcs than Elves? The Star of Fëanor flying proudly over every home? Stone monuments of One-Handed Maedhros the Terrible, bloodied sword in hand?

No, of course not. I was a scholar; I knew better than that. I had recorded all of those myths, converting them from terrifying stories to be told around the campfire into elegant, perfectly lettered documents, suitable for scholarly analysis on the legends of the First Age and how they'd altered with the passing centuries. I was not a foolish, ignorant child, and if I had thought that these Kinslayers were any threat, I would not have come. 

(I record history, but I have never had the slightest desire to take part in it.)

But it is fair to say that I had begun my expedition without thinking overmuch on how I would identify the Feanorians, should I run across them. And once I had come across ten or so humble villages of Elves in the northern hills of Hollin, I was starting to realize that distinguishing Kinslayers from ordinary elves might be more challenging than it seemed. 

Of course, one couldn't exactly stop Elves on the road and ask if they were Feanorians. The ones that were would probably lie, and the ones that were not would probably be terribly offended. And as no one was obligingly flying the Star of Fëanor, subtlety was obviously crucial.

I stopped for a day beside a small lake on the edge of a forest, so I could give this question the consideration it was due. Also because every muscle in my body was aching with exhaustion, I badly needed a bath, and I was going to be sick if I ate any additional lembas.

(A detailed accounting of my trip would be replete with such minor annoyances. I have omitted them for the sake of the reader, and also because my pride does not permit me to dwell on them overlong.)

The solution I eventually settled on was one of half-truths: I inquired at every village I came to, explaining that I was a scholar from Ost-in-Edhil, trying to get a better account of the history of our scattered people. Fifteen hundred years of peace had made people trusting, and they answered readily enough: they had followed their lords southeast after the Bragollach, for the most part, or fled here after the Nirnaeth. Those who would admit to being originally of Thargelion, or Himlad, would quickly clarify, “But I never saw the Feanorians after the Nirnaeth.” Or “I lost a sister in Sirion.” Or “Even back then, you know, I knew they couldn’t be trusted.” 

(A full account of the populations I encountered on my journey, and their origins, can be found in the appendices).

I am not sure why it affected me so much, hearing these references to days long past. I had read all of the histories – I had written some of them. I had studied alongside people who had lived through them. And no one I encountered during my long months of searching said anything shocking – no one spoke of blood and gore, or shared the names of their lost loved ones or the manners of their deaths.

Maybe it was because there was so much unspoken that their words haunted me – because I had assumed that we had healed enough to speak those words out loud. Because I had never realized that these wounds, after 1500 years, still hurt to touch, still burst open to bleed anew at even the slightest pressure.

For the first time I began to wonder at the wisdom of my mission.

(I wondered only briefly. Self-doubt is virtuous, a characteristic of a healthy and skeptical mind, but it should not be crippling.)

And then, finally, I came to a town[1] of perhaps 5,000, nestled in the foothills, where the woman I stopped in the street would not answer my questions, but met my eyes (the light of the Trees shone in hers) with a sort of dry amusement. 

“That is not your reason for being here.”

I was tired and irritable; I had been camping for nearly three months and having nightmares about One-Handed Maedhros the Terrible and reluctantly beginning to admit to myself that perhaps everyone else had been right. This does not excuse my lack of diplomacy, but perhaps it in part explains it. “That is my reason for being here, I assure you. Do not presume to tell me my own goals.”

She smiled, then. It was not the wicked smile you would expect from a Kinslayer, or the bitter, wise smile of those Exiles I have encountered in Ost-in-Edhil. If not for the Treelight, I would have thought her around my own age. “We trailed in the wake of the Host of the West, when it came, and watched the world sink below the waves. We wandered for a while, and then we settled here. You will hear the same story in every town, city boy; surely you already have. You are dirty and unhappy and near-fainting with hunger; you did not make this journey to ask people where, precisely, were their homes beneath the sea.”[2]

I sighed. It stung a little to realize that my pretense was so obvious.  “I’m looking for Feanorians.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to talk to them! Why else?” And then, when her eyes darkened with disapproval and something that looked vaguely like disappointment, I clenched my teeth and tried diplomacy: “I am a scholar in Ost-in-Edhil, and I have set before me the task of writing a more accurate account of the events after the Nirnaeth Arnoediad and before the War of Wrath. All our accounts are very incomplete, and I desperately need to speak to some people who were with the sons of Fëanor – you know, all the way until the end.” 

She turned around and started walking away.

“There are none.”

“I’m sorry?” 

“They were alone at the end.” Her voice wavered just slightly.

Then she continued down the path, and I was left standing there like a fool, fighting the childish urge to run after her.

(Fighting the childish urge to run after her was a very silly thing to do, of course, because I have never been able to constrain my impulses for long and so the only effect was to ensure that, when I did run after her, I had a longer way to go.)

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They call the town Ndûn na Thrûn, Uttermost East, and they agreed to answer my questions on the condition that I not reveal where it is; they have kept to themselves for a long time, with good reason, and have no desire to rejoin the rest of our world. 

I agreed readily to keep their secret – I am a scholar, not a cartographer, and in any event I rather liked the idea that anyone who wants to replicate my research will have to endure the same hardships that I did. 

(I am not entirely without empathy for the entrepreneurial Elf who does follow my path, though, so I will mention that Uttermost East is not, in fact, in the East. I pointed this out to my hosts, who explained that it is named as a reminder of the Curse of the Noldor: that those who follow the House of Fëanor face the wrath of the Valar from West to uttermost East, will see all they achieve fall to ruins, and will find no joy in Middle-earth. I enquired as to why they would possibly wish to remind themselves of such a thing, and received no satisfactory answer then, though in time (see Chapter 4) I think I came to understand.)

And so the following day, having slept in a bed and bathed and told my hostess with genuine joy that it was wonderful to have returned to civilization (which comment, for whatever reason, earned me a disdainful glare), I sat down to begin the investigation which had dragged me halfway across Eriador to these Valar-forsaken lands.

I had a detailed and thoughtful list of questions prepared; every night on my miserable journey I had reread it, adding to it and altering the wording as I saw fit. And yet, somehow, when I met those Tree-lit eyes and opened my mouth, none of my careful scholarly questions could find their way out. 

I opened my mouth, and then closed it again, and then opened it again and finally managed only a single word: “Why?”

She reached out and plucked the leather-bound book from my hands, flipping deliberately through each blank page, leaning in to enjoy the scent of new parchment. “Lord Maedhros would have appreciated this, you know. He was a scholar before it all began. An acclaimed one.”

I had not known this.

“You bring a great deal of paper.”

“There is not enough paper in all the world to record all that I wish to learn, but there is sometimes enough to record all that I will forget.”

I thought it was a clever answer, but she shook her head impatiently. “There is not nearly that much to say. And it is not a tale that… I will not aid you in embellishing it, or in adding glory and tragedy where there was none.” 

“There was, though.” I said quietly, wondering how little they know of the tales that fill our libraries. “Great glory and tragedy both. That is why this story still speaks to everyone, why it will be remembered unto the ending of Arda…” 

She let my book fall to the floor. “The story speaks to everyone because they do not know it. They fill in the details with their own hearts, and then marvel at how closely their mirror resembles them. You will color in the lines, and then the story will be complete, and they will not wish to hear it any longer.” 

“I want to hear it,” I said, “all the moreso if we’ve got it wrong.”

We sat in silence for a very long time. I watched the shadows inch down the wall. (Sometimes Elves who were old before the sun first rose forget how slowly time passes for the young; a responsible researcher should be willing to work around the shortcomings of their interview subjects. I was not new to this.)

That said, there are limits to my patience, and I was reaching them. Just as I arrived at the conclusion that it was bad academic practice to talk to the first person you encountered in a town, and that I could probably go out and find a neighbor less inclined to poetry and more inclined to explanations, she spoke.

And after that, I did not note the passage of time at all.

 

“If Fëanáro had never been born, if Morgoth had never been released, if the Trees still shone … the Rebellion would have happened eventually anyway. That is the first thing you have to realize – he did not start it, he captured it. We were not happy there. We could not have been happy there. The Valar – you will find plenty of people in this village who believe them evil, and will tell you why, and if you truly mean to make an accurate study of the question you ought to talk to them. For myself, I do not believe them evil. I believe them ignorant.

They say that Manwe freed Morgoth because he was incapable of truly comprehending evil. Have you ever thought about what that means? To just look out at the world – the world the way it really is, not the way you sing of it in Ost-in-Edhil, and to find fully half of it beyond your comprehension…”

I knew, of course, that Fëanor’s rebellion was against the Valar; I knew there was a philosophical element to it. But that was not what I wanted to hear about. Objecting, though, earned me a sharp glare and an invitation to leave. “But if you want to hear this tale from me, you will have to listen to it as I tell it, without interrupting.”

I could not let an ultimatum like that go by without at least challenging it. “Except for clarifications.” 

To my surprise, she does not argue. She just continues.  “I think he was also incapable of understanding disobedience. I think that, as he saw things, if you were Good you would follow the path set out for you; all that was necessary was to inform you of it, and aid you on it, and praise you for reaching its pinnacle – it never occurred to him that anyone Good would be informed of their path and choose a different one. 

And for a while, we didn’t. We thrived there. We made jewelry so beautiful that now, here, it is prized beyond measure – but there, we gave it away freely, and the beaches were strewn with gemstones, and even the homes of peasants – for my family was neither rich nor important – were lit in the silver hours by Fëanorian lamps… though they were not called that at the time…” 

“I have already published several detailed accounts of daily life in Valinor,” I interrupted, hoping that this would be counted as a clarification.

She gave me the sort of smile that one grants a very small child who has successfully written their name but has gotten one of the tengwa backwards.

“In Tirion you could not see the stars. Telperion was too bright. But in the North, in Formenos, where I grew up, you could, and astronomers came there to study them and watch their movements, and to wonder at the explanations we were given by the Valar – because there were some things that did not make sense, even then.”

“You speak of the controversy over the orbits of the stars? I am familiar with it.” 

This time she continues as though I had not spoken. “We had learned all we could from them. We had surpassed them in the areas where we could – Fëanáro’s work, of course, comes to mind, but he was not alone – and in the other fields, where we could not surpass them, we stood ever impatiently at their shoulder – for who would tell the Star-Kindler that her stars do not move as they should? Who would tell the creator of the world that under certain conditions the elements did not behave as he claimed?

Morgoth was credited for setting Fëanáro and Nolofinwe at each other’s throats, but in truth, they were fighting over their father's attention for years before that… because there was nothing else to fight over. When everyone has everything they need, when there is no death and no evil and nothing to expect from the future but eternal bliss in paradise, there is nothing left to fight over except status. And we were excellent at that.” 

She was not half as eloquent as the theologians who have made the same arguments in the great debates in Ost-in-Edhil, but I was nonetheless impressed. There are not many people who could have developed such a sophisticated philosophical framework for rebellion alone, without the benefits of the academic community to point out wrong ideas and build on right ones. (It is easy to say such things with the benefit of hindsight, but even then I had a feeling that she would have something very interesting to say about Doriath and Sirion, when she finally got around to speaking about them.) So I did not point out that she was, once again, off topic.

“In later days, you know, when everything had fallen to ruins and it was absurd – utterly absurd – that we had once worried about growing bored of eternity, we used to debate who would have lead the rebellion if Fëanáro had never existed. Findaráto was the favorite, of course. Though personally, I always thought that it would have been his sister. ”[3]

I swallowed and disguised my consternation by scribbling furiously. That would cause some debates in Ost-in-Edhil. 

And then, finally, she came to the topic that I had been hoping she would begin at. “But, of course, it was Fëanáro. And once I first heard him speak of these things it was impossible to imagine that it could have been anyone else.

They say nowadays, in your stories, that he was evil, yes? Jealous, prideful, a traitor…”

She was not really looking for an answer, and I did not interrupt her with one. I was, in any event, not sure what I’d say. 

“When he spoke it was as if the world ceased to be, and his thoughts could remake it. He was the most brilliant of our people, and the most gifted, and some would say the most beautiful – and it was as if he encompassed us, as if every objection that we would think of in a thousand years he had already thought of, and improved upon, and presented in its strongest form and then rejected. And yet he was not distant. He was not jealous. He was rarely rude… 

If he had been the monster they painted him as, do you think we would have followed him? There were those who never heard him speak before the Darkening who packed up their families, their children, all their world, and followed him to Araman, and when he left them there the dream he had planted in their heads still burned so brightly that they crossed the ice for it.

“About the burning of the ships-”

She shook her head. “I’ll get to that. I was telling you about Fëanáro. He was not jealous, not until Morgoth’s lies started to tear our people apart. Every work of his hands save the Silmarils, he gave freely – I don’t think there was a soul in Formenos who did not treasure at least one gift from him. He remembered our names, and our begetting days. His sons went hunting with ours. 

I have told you of his gift for words, how he could make a crowd believe anything – and yet he never lied to us. He always told us exactly what he wanted, exactly what he planned to do, exactly what he wished for us to be a part of. He was above the courtly intrigues and careful half-lies. When he was angry, we knew it. When he was pleased, we knew it. And when he grew troubled, when he told us that the peace in our lands would not last, when he began forging swords… we knew, even then, that if trouble came we would stand with him until the bitter end.

We swore fealty to King Finwë every year, did you know that? It was a tradition carried over from the Outer Lands, but stripped of all significance: we would dress up in our best robes and braid gemstones into our hair and kneel (they had an especially thick carpet for the occasion, so that it would not pain our knees) and make promises that carried only the weight of tradition. 

It was then, more than ever, that we felt the emptiness of paradise. Because we admired Finwë – it was impossible not to – Finwë who had led our people out of darkness, Finwë who seemed always to float above the gossip and intrigue of his court, Finwë who stood for the promise that, should darkness ever trouble our people, we would know who to turn to and we would know him worthy of the burden. We wanted to offer him something that mattered, and our oaths of fealty didn’t. 

Except, of course, for when they did, and by then it was too late.

 

 

No one born outside of Valinor can understand the Darkening. Here Tilion rests once a month, and you can experience the world as the One made it for us, lit only by the stars and the light of our own faer.  Perhaps the Valar have learned wisdom, and that is the reason they permit us our one night of darkness, or more likely they have their own, complicated reasons in which we are incidental.

But in Valinor it was always light. Formenos was far to the North, and the Tree-light was fainter there, but still it was always bright enough to read well into the silver hours without a lamp. Our home had no curtains on the windows. I do not think I had ever experienced total darkness, until the moment that it devoured the land.

Unlight, they called it later, what that monstrous spider did – but at the time we did not know the cause, or the name. Which is well, for if we had we would have been even more frightened. We knew only that we were all blind, that the homes that had sheltered our family since we first arrived in Valinor were strange places to us, walls reaching out to smash against our elbows as we tried to find our way down the hallway. My sister was screaming from her bedroom down the hall but her voice echoed like it was ten leagues away. Something cold closed around my shoulder and I punched and kicked and it was my brother, trying to drag me away from the house to safety.

So we fled. With nothing – we hadn’t even put on shoes – and we had no way of knowing if there was safety anywhere in the world – if the world still existed – but we fled and met with others who were fleeing, and when the ground had torn the skin away from our feet at last we reached the edge of the Dark and saw the starlight.

My first thought was that we had been running so long we had accidentally crossed the Pelori, but then I heard someone shout “The Trees are gone!” and I knew in my heart that it was the truth.

I wandered through the crowd of shocked and terrified refugees, looking for my brother, and when I found him we crumpled to the ground and wept together for a very long time.

King Finwë was absent, and in his absence no one was certain what to do; we huddled with our families, and everyone who had a sword nervously fingered it and paced the camp.

It was there that Fëanáro’s sons found us. They had been out hunting, as is their wont, when first the Treelight vanished, and they had sensed the moving of that terrible evil in the Darkness and ridden towards it – towards us – as swiftly as they could.

“They felt… that… and rode toward it?” my brother whispered, and then, as if taking heart, somehow, from their bravery, he jumped to his feet and went to join them.

Fëanáro’s sons rarely dressed as the princes of the Noldor they were. They took their example from their father, perhaps, who went about more often than not in his soot-blackened work clothes. But that night, in contrast to the rest of us half-undressed, ragged and bloodied by our run through the forest, they shone. All eyes turned to them, and at the news that King Finwë was missing Prince Nelyafinwë jumped back onto his horse and said, “We will return to Formenos. We will find the King, and we will see what damage was done in that evil creature’s wake, and whether it is safe to return.” His youngest brothers, though, he left with us, which was sufficient reminder (as if anyone needed to be reminded) that terrible danger might still face them in Formenos.

And yet – they were Fëanáro’s sons, their weapons forged by the greatest hand the world has ever known, their training begun in early childhood at the knee of our peoples’ greatest teacher. No evil could touch them. It was unimaginable. As I watched Fëanáro’s sons ride off for Formenos I felt safer than I’d felt since the Treelight vanished.

Everyone else must have felt the same, for we wept no more; those with knowledge of healing started gathering herbs and bandaging wounds, one of the lords organized the armed men into a sort of watch over our camp, and – tentatively at first, but then louder and louder – someone began singing one of the songs of the Outer Lands, a hymn to Varda sung before our people even knew her name, a song of the glory and beauty of the stars, and more voices joined in, and soon we were scuttling around the camp organizing things properly, and one could almost pretend that things would be all right.

And then the sons of Fëanáro returned, their faces twisted with an emotion which would soon become far too common but which, at the time, was strange to me. They stopped only briefly, to share their news with a few whose face twisted in the same terrible way, and then two men joined Prince Nelyafinwë and Prince Tyelkormo and the four of them rode off, their forms quickly swallowed by the dark.”

“Tyelkormo?” I whispered, and she blinked, trance interrupted. 

“Celegorm in this tongue.”

I knew Quenya well enough to know that. “I was merely surprised. Do you know how they chose –”

“Ah, yes,” she said with a bitter laugh, “in the stories they tell in these days he is the especially evil one, is he not? They chose Tyelkormo because he was the only one who could control the horses. Valinorian steeds, you know – they were as unaccustomed to darkness as we were, and thrice as twitchy. But Tyelkormo could calm them, and somehow when he was riding, with Huan at his side, no horse ever stumbled. Did you never wonder how they reached Taniquetil so quickly? That’s not a trivial journey even with the best of light.” 

It was another question that she did not really expect me to answer. I stayed silent, and after a moment her eyes softened with something which might have been approval. Then she continued.

“My brother came running to us, sobbing: King Finwë was dead.

It felt like jumping into freezing water – for a few moments all I could feel was the pain and shock and horror, surrounding me, squeezing the air out of my lungs, and though I thought I had already cried as much as was possible I cried some more.

Word spread around the camp almost instantly: all around us I could hear voices in song abruptly cut off, replaced with shrieks of anguish and grief. I hugged my brother and we sobbed together, and I was clutching too tightly at his arm which I’d injured earlier, but if he felt it he didn’t say anything. 

I doubt he felt it. Once the pain faded I couldn’t feel anything at all. Just a dreadful sort of calm, numb horror. This could not have happened. The King could not be dead. 

And eventually – we had always known the passage of time by the Treelight, and without it I could not tell you whether minutes passed or days - the numbness and disbelief faded too, and all that remained was the guilt.

We had fled.

We had sworn oaths to defend our King with our lives, and we had run and left him to die alone. And our crime was worse than that, because by now we knew more of the story: Morgoth had come to steal the Silmarils, the only hope left in Arda now that the trees were dead, and Finwë had tried to stop him and died facing him.

A Vala. 

Alone. 

Even all together, we might not have been able to stand against Morgoth. But better to have died by our King’s side, defending the most precious treasures of our people, then to have abandoned him like this.

The sons of Fëanáro felt the same; I could see it in their faces as they patrolled the camp even when it wasn’t their hour, their eyes smoldering with the emotion that I was now all too familiar with: the special guilt born of grief.

I could hear it in their voices when at last Macalaure, who had sat alone since he returned from Formenos, pulled his fingers across his harp and began a lament which seemed to draw the raw emotion from our bodies and weave it through the air so that, shared, it was lessened.

And I could sense it in their posture when Fëanáro returned, his own grief too wild for Macalaure’s song to catch it. His sons stood stiffly before him, and the rest of us stiffened as well. We failed. We failed our King. We failed you. We failed our people.

“No,” he said, and no one needed to ask what he was refuting. “To aid him was beyond you. Only I could have saved him. But I obeyed the summons of the Valar –” he spat the word – “ and so I was at a festival on Taniquetil the one time – the only time – my father needed me.”

He looked around, and once again he seemed to encompass us, his rage and grief and pain so much greater than our own that we were free to release it to him, to know that he would tear the world apart to set our failures right without ever once blaming us for them.

In front of me, Lord Nyellaurë knelt. He looked up at Fëanáro, and in that instant the Greatest of the Noldor looked more a Vala than a man. Then Lord Nyellaurë spoke. “To you, my King, I swear my life for good or ill, in peace and war.”

For an instant I was startled; then I understood, and at the same time so did many others, and on the cold rocky ground outside of the shattered town that had once been our home, we knelt to our King.

And one by one, we said the words that we spoke, every year, to King Finwe. 

 “I pledge my honor and my fealty to you and your House, unto the ending of Arda. This I swear before all those I love, and all the powers of the world.”

At first I tried to hide my tears, but then I realized that I was not the only one weeping.

This King, I promised myself, will not die alone.

 

 

---

[1] I have, above, stated that this place was a village – but I feel obligated to clarify for any potential future audience unfamiliar with Eregion that it was an Elven village, and a Noldor Elven village besides that, and so it was more glorious than most Mortal cities. The paths were stone, evenly laid so it exploited the curve of the land and gave the impression of a river painted alongside the hill. The houses were also stone, well-built and decorated with the unapologetic frivolity that characterizes everything – calligraphy, architecture, jewelry, weapons – our people possess from before the Darkening. 

 

That surprised me, a little. I had expected that they would want to forget.

 

[2] She had the strangest accent I had ever heard: measured, precise, so that even though she was pronouncing everything completely wrong she left you with the disconcerting impression that it was you who had no comprehension of the language.

 

[3] An astute reader will note that, while my interlocutor spoke Sindarin fluently, she occasionally still spoke of those Elves and Valar who feature prominently in this tale by their Quenya names. I have tried to be loyal to her original usage, capricious though it may seem.

Chapter 2: In which are recounted, among other details never previously recorded, the events surrounding the Oathtaking

Read Chapter 2: In which are recounted, among other details never previously recorded, the events surrounding the Oathtaking

I spoke once with a mortal from Númenor who was under the misapprehension that elves have perfect memories. Over the span of a mortal lifetime, I suppose, our memories are close enough to perfect as to make no difference – but nonetheless it was a mistake, and a mistake that no one could ever make if they possessed even the most elementary knowledge of how memories are formed.

Our minds do not shelve thoughts like books, to be pulled out again at leisure and reread; a closer analogy would be sketches on a slate. Every time we call a memory to mind, we erase it and draw it again. The Eldar, of course, are more precise in their recollections than Men (the Eldar are, in my experience, more precise in all things than Men), and so the redrawn picture will closely resemble the original – at first.

But just as in “Great Journey”, the children’s game where a phrase is whispered down a line of people, eventually the changes grow less subtle. Memories dragged through six hundred years of war and hardship, and then through fifteen hundred years of bitter peace, will change quite dramatically. I do not believe that my interview subject is a liar – but nor do I believe that events happened precisely as she recounted them, and I would encourage the reader to maintain a similar degree of skepticism.

(I had to keep reminding myself of this, because at the moment I was feeling a strange – and rather frightening – urge to jump to my feet and follow Fëanor off to Angband.)

Instead I thanked her and asked if we could spend the afternoon discussing some less intense topics; she agreed, though I could not read in her eyes whether she approved, and we talked about what the people of Formenos packed as they prepared for their journey, what the weather was like in Valinor, what sort of food grew best by Treelight, how she first met Fëanáro (an amusing story only with the benefit of hindsight; I have included it in the appendices), and any number of other trivialities.

By suppertime the urge to join the Kinslayers had faded entirely, and I concluded (over a delicious meal) that my excessive emotional impulses were probably a consequence of the extended lembas diet and sleep deprivation.

The following day my hostess was absent for most of the morning, which I spent recopying the previous day’s notes. I inquired after her line of work, but my inquiries were born more of politeness than genuine curiosity and she must have sensed that, for her answers were vague. I suppose in a town of that size, everyone does a little bit of everything. In any event, she returned that afternoon and I pressed her to continue.

“Tell me about the Oathtaking. About the first Kinslaying. The burning of the ships.”

And she laughed, and told me about something entirely different. (But by then, I suppose, I was coming to expect that.)

 

   “I don’t remember where I heard the rumor from – I suppose that is the nature of such rumors, is it not? - but by the morning of the second day every soul in Formenos had heard whispers that Nolofinwe was planning to seize the Kingship. We wanted – desperately – to disbelieve it. Setting aside that Nolofinwe was half-Vanyar and a Prince of the Noldor only by a questionable remarriage, Fëanáro was the eldest and the King by all the laws of our people. That his brother would even consider usurping him in a time like this…

And yet we had heard about the events that prompted the interference of the Valar and the exile of the King, and we could not wholly doubt the rumor. ‘Two sons at least thou hast to honor thy words,” Nolofinwe had told his father five years before, and in the darkness those words echoed around Formenos and seemed to grow louder with each repetition. Nolofinwe had all but named his half-brother a traitor before all the court of Tirion. What if some of the people there believed him?

‘What kind of person,’ we asked ourselves, ‘hears news of his father’s death and thinks only of how to take the throne from his own brother?’

‘Are they mad, in Tirion, to follow him? When Finwë made no secret of whom he preferred as his successor? Did their loyalty to Finwë expire the moment he died?’

That question provoked uncomfortable glances all around. We still felt, you know, as if our own loyalty to Finwë was suspect. But if we had failed the King, we who fled in the face of Morgoth himself and the nightmarish darkness that Ungoliant brought with her – what were they, who abandoned the King with far lesser cause?

You think ill of us, trading rumors like children or bored housewives. But you did not know the Dark. By starlight everything was foreign, and the memories of grief and terror were still fresh in our minds, and the children would not stop screaming, and their parents’ voices were breaking as they told them words of comfort which were lies – and when King Fëanáro gave the order to pack up everything and leave – forever – we were grateful. We could not have returned there. We could never return there.  

And so we packed. And while we packed we talked, because the Darkness was too much to bear unless we filled it with words. Questions, mostly – why had the Valar not come to the scene of their brother’s crime? What were they doing? (“Sitting motionless on Taniquetil,” Prince Tyelkormo told us, with the air of someone sharing confidential information under great duress. “If Valar slept, I would have guessed they were sleeping. Ingwë says they are thinking.”) Was it true that they did not mean to pursue Morgoth?

King Fëanáro did not make any grand speeches. He did not need to. The Darkness spoke for itself, and the Valar left us to fill the silences as we pleased. And by the time we departed Formenos forever, Fëanáro leading and flanked by his sons, the questions about the Valar had stopped. We had stopped believing in them.”

“Stopped believing in –” It feels blasphemous to even finish the sentence.

She laughed. “It is another thing that one born in these lands cannot understand, perhaps. I do believe that there is a spirit out there with exceptional powers over growing things, which occasionally likes to adopt an Elvish form and call itself Yavanna. But believing in the Valar meant more than believing they existed – it meant believing that what looked like their failures was really just a deeper sort of wisdom, that we could trust them no matter how strange their claims, that our very happiness was a gift from them to us. That was the promise – and the prison – of Valinor, and it died when they never visited Formenos to ask if we were all right and tell us how they meant to stop Morgoth.”

 “So you switched to worshipping Fëanor.” I am not usually so blunt. Were this an academic paper, I would have obfuscated the accusation with half a paragraph of dense rhetoric so that I could nimbly duck away from it when it seemed prudent.

But she didn’t seem angry. “Perhaps we did. If so, we did him a great injustice. He was not a Vala – only the greatest Elf who ever lived, or ever will. Far worthier than the Valar of our respect – but no one, Vala or Elf, will ever merit worship. And to the extent we worshipped him, we failed him.”

“You mean, perhaps if-”

“There is a rule in this village,” she said softly, “against saying ‘perhaps if’, and all its variants. Bearing the burden of what happened is enough – no one could possibly bear the burden of all the things that did not happen.”

We stared at each other for a moment across a gulf that I could not – still cannot - fathom.

And then she continued. “We barely rested on the way to Tirion. Fëanáro had devised a way of counting time from the motions of the stars, and by that new count it took us thirty days to reach the city.[1] No army or host matched that pace for such a distance until the retreat south after the Nirnaeth. But we were stronger, in those days, and Fëanáro’s energy was seemingly limitless. I think he could have run the whole distance without rest, if he hadn’t known that we needed him.

Of course, they needed him in Tirion as well.

The Valar still had not moved, and the Vanyar sat vigil with them on Taniquetil, but the Noldor had slowly made their way back to Tirion.

Tirion, which we finally approached as the stars wheeled through their thirtieth day. Tirion, where our people had built a home meant to last forever – Tirion, which looked like a vision from a nightmare. Seeing it, my mother (who grew up there) fell to her knees and started weeping; all around us there were cries of dismay.

By the light of Laurelin, Tirion had been the most beautiful city in the world. But in the darkness, it was dying. The fountains were silent; sculptures had been knocked over by frightened and fleeing people, and none had bothered to repair them. A headless Yavanna and a Manwë missing both arms greeted us as we entered the city; both were the Lady Nerdanel’s work and (if it was possible) Fëanáro’s face grew even grimmer. There were torches everywhere, hanging raggedly from improvised brackets and filling the alleyways with flickering red light and choking smoke. People were terrified. People were starving – because, of course, all the crops failed when the light did. Later, of course, Yavanna took steps to sustain them – but in those first dark weeks when the Valar sat motionless atop Taniquetil, the plants were dying, and the people of Tirion dying with them. But they crept to the windows when our host approached the city, and they opened their doors to look outside when our trumpets blew, and when we marched through the streets in Fëanáro’s wake they followed us.

I had visited Tirion only once before, you have to understand, and seen the palace only from a distance. In later days across the Sea our lords lived among their people, and ate with them, and fought beside them, but in Tirion they lived in their own world, and we ordinary people brushed against it only occasionally. So I had never seen the glorious high court of the King until we entered it. It was enormous; that was my first thought and the only thing that really sticks in my memory, though I am sure that it was magnificent, the walls and floor studded with jewels of surpassing magnificence, any one of which would buy a kingdom here in this world – but all that I noted at the time was that it was enormous. All of Tirion could fit here comfortably; all of the Noldor could fit at a squeeze. 

Fëanáro strode fearlessly to the front and stood there, waiting, and thousands upon thousands they came, emptying the haunted streets of Tirion, pouring into the city from the outlying areas, and soon we were standing shoulder-to-shoulder, torches alight, the air thrumming with countless voices… Being so thoroughly surrounded should have been terrifying. But instead it was empowering, exhilarating, thrilling. I felt complete for the first time since the death of the Trees. I was not an insignificant little girl in a world that had proved to be cruel – I was a Noldo, the people who had built this city from nothing and could do so again. I was an Elda, the people who had awakened under starlight and found joy in the darkness. Suddenly Tirion did not seem terrible by torchlight. By torchlight the stonework possessed a magnificent and savage beauty.

So did Fëanáro. When he spoke, it seemed that we ceased to breathe; when he paused, we drew in air as one. One being. One people. I could see us, for a second, as he saw us – resilient, courageous, and capable of defeating Morgoth, taking back the Silmarils, building anew.

And I believed it. I could see it in his eyes – this was no pretense. It was no lie. He – who had lost more than any of us – believed that there was still joy ahead of us, that we could make it be so, that we could recover what was lost and build something better.

Tears were running down my face. And when his tone changed – when he finally allowed grief and pain to flare across his face, when his voice grew deeper and fiercer, when his eyes found the horizon, when he spoke the words of the Oath – we watched in awed silence and shivered, because it felt as if, somehow, Morgoth was watching from his lair across the sea and trembling.

This was an elf who could face a Vala and win.

And then his sons stepped forward and spoke the words as well, all together, and their voices blended into a terrible roar, a promise of such power – such fury – such strength – that it was impossible to doubt them. It was as if they had cast aside the pretense of normality, and now spoke directly to the god that had betrayed us and the ones that abandoned us.

Their words did not echo, as if the walls themselves were sucking them in to hold forever. There was complete silence. We watched the torchlight dancing on their swords.

And then Nolofinwe and his son started arguing. They had charged through the crowd to reach Fëanáro’s side and they climbed up to stand beside him and call his oath blasphemous and his plan madness, and the magical moment vanished as all of the House of Finwë crowded around to challenge each other.

It seemed to me, in that moment, that Morgoth was watching still; but now he was quaking with laughter at the incompetence of our people, who watched their King die and were content to fall to quibbling. “How can they?” whispered my brother, next to me, and then answered his own question: “They were not there. They did not feel it. They did not see it. And so they want to still pretend that things can be the same…”

His hand was on the pommel of his sword. The thought should have sickened me – my own brother, angry enough to draw a weapon in a crowd – but I was equally angry, and the torchlight made everything surreal and devastatingly real at the same time, and there were Fëanáro’s seven sons, with their own swords still drawn…

It was an absurd image. Fëanáro – King Fëanáro, because now his brother had indeed proved himself willing to usurp him, and now the title we’d so readily granted him actually needed defending – stood there, tall and majestic, his sons beside him in perfect unity of purpose, all of them blazing with brilliance and confidence and the sheer power of the vision they had just shared with us. They represented the only hope of our people – couldn’t Nolofinwë see that? Couldn’t everyone see that?

And to contrast them with Nolofinwë’s children – because Findekano was standing aside looking pained, neither supporting his father nor arguing with him, and Irissë looked just about ready to defect to Fëanáro’s side, and no one could see Arakano at all, and Arafinwë was pulling on his brother’s arm like a good-natured golden retriever, urging everyone to just calm down – to compare them to Fëanáro- Fëanáro’s focus, his singularity of purpose, his fire - it was impossible to doubt that Fëanáro was our rightful leader; I couldn’t understand why the question was even being debated.”

She paused for a moment while I transcribed that grammatical monstrosity of a sentence, her eyes glazed slightly. (I could not meet them. I was afraid I would see the reflection of torchlight.) 

“And it wasn’t debated for very long – very long by the standards of Valinor, I mean. The torches had burned down nearly to our hands and Nolofinwë had made himself hoarse with shouting when at last someone tired of the argument and shouted ‘Let us be gone!’ and all the crowd took up the cry – ‘Yea, let us be gone!’ and as all of our voices rose again I felt again that power, that vision, that unity of purpose –”

“Was Fëanor wielding it?” I interrupted, incredulous – if there had been any power at work in compelling the Noldor to leave Valinor, no tales told of it.

But she laughed. “An angry, frightened crowd is a power all its own, child, and no one wields it.”

She paused. 

“That night, we left for Alqualondë.”

 

---

[1] It is 1500 miles from Formenos to Tirion, which would require approximately 100 days of the Sun to travel with wagons at an ordinary pace; there is too little information available to speculate about precisely how long the journey took, besides noting that the public perception that it all happened very quickly (and was, some imply, merely a moment of rash madness) is profoundly misguided. 

Chapter 3: An oral history of Y.T. 1945 – 1947, which includes (but could not accurately be characterized as) an account of the Kinslaying at Alqualondë

Read Chapter 3: An oral history of Y.T. 1945 – 1947, which includes (but could not accurately be characterized as) an account of the Kinslaying at Alqualondë

Our host left the city at once, and camped outside the walls while King Fëanáro and his sons remained to help organize the people of Tirion; we had no desire to remain behind those walls one second longer than necessary, and we would only have been in the way.

For now Tirion had come to life; people bustled through the streets like on the market days of old, gathering things they needed, finding loved ones, trading their delicate goods for durable ones that would stand the journey… they were taking an exceptionally long time about it, of course, and we were impatient to go, but we could hardly begrudge them their time. They were not as eager to leave Tirion as we were to leave Formenos. Morgoth’s evil had not touched them as closely as it had touched us. 

Or that was what we thought at first. When the stars turned through three more days and still their host would not assemble to follow ours, we realized that perhaps Morgoth had done as much harm in Tirion as he had in Formenos – but whereas he had struck at us openly, with all his power, he had struck at them with his subtle lies and done perhaps greater damage.

For still Nolofinwë refused to renounce his claim to the kingship, and many of the people of Tirion still followed him. The rumors ripped through our camp, accompanied at first by disbelief, and later by outright anger: Nolofinwë still called our departure foolishness. Fëanáro had offered Nolofinwë the Kingship in Tirion, so Fëanáro could lead our people to war and Nolofinwë could rule the remainder. Nolofinwë had refused. He was coming with us. As the King of the Noldor – and he had enough followers still to enforce that claim.  

That last claim was repeated to me by my brother, sputtering in outrage. It was hard to imagine what contortions Nolofinwë must be going through to justify all this to himself – usurping his brother’s throne, only to have his people support Fëanáro’s proposal to leave Valinor, whereupon he reversed himself and decided to leave as well, but still refuse to acknowledge Fëanáro as his leader.

Tirion’s betrayal of our King hit us all hard. We could have headed directly to Ennor from Formenos, you know, following Morgoth’s path, but instead we had exhausted ourselves traveling south to reunite with out kindred. We had brought them hope when they were huddled helpless in Tirion, waiting on the actions of the Valar who still had not moved from Taniquetil, nor sent word. They had stood beside us when Fëanáro spoke, and wept with us, and even now it was easy to see the spark in their eyes that Fëanáro had lit – he had shown them hope, purpose, the strength of our united people. And still they clung to Nolofinwë.

“They want to have it both ways,” someone said bitterly on the tenth day of waiting. “They want Fëanáro’s leadership, but they won’t give him their loyalty. They want a King who will demand nothing of them – the way Finwë did – they don’t realize that Finwë had that luxury only in peacetime, that in war it is the right of our King to demand our loyalty, even our lives.” And maybe if we had realized that earlier, Finwë would still be alive. It was never said but always it hung over us, unspoken.  

When Fëanáro at last gave the command to resume our march for the Calacirya, no one much cared if they followed.

But, of course, they did – under Nolofinwë’s banner.

 

The people I admired most, when we saw Nolofinwë’s host trailing after us, were actually those who stayed in Tirion. Courage it took to follow our King, and a different sort of courage to remain behind; the cowards were those who followed and yet held themselves apart, and told each other that this was only being level-headed and sensible.”

At this I had to interrupt her. “Do you still believe this? Or is this what you thought at the time?”

She looked up, startled, as if she had forgotten I was in the room. “I still believe that united we could have defeated Morgoth. I still believe that we should have left Aman under one banner. But – crossing the Helcaraxë was not an act of cowardice. Whatever their failing, it was something different – the conviction, perhaps, that benefitting from the evil acts of others does not make you complicit in them as long as you keep a little distance and shake your head disapprovingly? Were I a Vanya, I would invent a word for that. It is a common enough phenomenon to deserve one.

Now, where were we? This is why you should not interrupt me, child…

Ah, yes. We were at last departing Tirion.

I had never felt as much a prisoner as I did while we waited for the political disputes to be settled and for the people of Tirion to join us. It felt like the sky was getting lower, pressing in, and the choking smell of the smoke from the torches – so different than the smell of a bonfire, somehow, though I cannot explain why – and the grim, shattered statues – have you ever been to a mortal settlement? They have designated places where they bury their dead, which they call grave-yards, and no matter how carefully kept they all have the same feeling about them…. that was the feeling of Tirion.

When at last Fëanáro announced that we would depart, we were ready to leave in almost no time at all. Tents folded, bundles packed, weapons sheathed, food carefully parceled so we could eat a midday meal without stopping… we did it all in only a few minutes, our hearts singing at the mere thought of at last departing. It was like coming to life again. Even the animals felt it.  Our trumpets echoed through the air and I was happier, in that moment, than I ever was in paradise.

Just then a herald of Manwë appeared. It was the most unexpected – they had not come when we were abandoned and bleeding in the woods near Formenos, they had not come to see the body of our King and the destruction Morgoth had wrought; they had not come to starving Tirion, they sat idle atop Taniquetil while we prepared for war… and now they arrived? Some people were angry, I suppose, that they would have the nerve to appear after those repeated betrayals and still expect us to heed them. More people were angry that they had not bother to come themselves and had instead sent a herald. But most of us did not really believe they were evil yet, and so it did not occur to us to be afraid.

 As for what the herald actually said: I can only say that, though the herald advised us to stay, if Manwë had long considered the words most likely to ensure the Noldor continued on their path, he could not possibly have chosen better. Fëanáro and his sons were exiled: a juvenile sort of  ‘you’re leaving? No, we’re throwing you out!’ that even a man far less stubborn than Fëanáro would have scorned. Then the herald warned him that he was no match for Morgoth, to which I imagine Fëanáro, were he not constrained by diplomatic courtesy, would have answered, “I’m well aware of that – that’s why I have an army of a hundred thousand behind me.”

And… that was it. No explanation for the agonizing absence of the Valar since the Darkening; no reassurances; no hope that the Valar were considering a better way to defeat Morgoth; no mention of the dead crops and waning food supplies; no regrets expressed at the murder of our King by their own brother… 

Fëanáro turned his back on the herald and spoke to us, and his words I will remember until my dying day, and they ought to be recorded: “So! Then will this valiant people send forth the heir of their King alone into banishment with his sons only, and return to their bondage? But if any will come with me, I say to them: Is sorrow foreboded to you? But in Aman we have seen it. In Aman we have come through bliss to woe. The other now we will try: through sorrow to find joy; or freedom, at the least.”

Even Nolofinwë’s people wept. The herald bowed deep before our King and departed (and I wondered if some of the Maiar perhaps also began to doubt the wisdom of the Valar), and the trumpets blew again and we departed, and his words rang in my head all through the long march. Through sorrow to find joy.

Through sorrow to find joy.

I imagine that ruined statue of Manwë observed our departure, but I did not look back.

If Nolofinwë’s usurpation and the long days of trying negotiations and delays had hit us hard, that is nothing compared to the effect it had on Fëanáro. Fëanáro had endless patience for important things, but none at all for duplicity and navigating power dynamics. Every day he spent in Tirion trying to marshal our people for departure wore at him; it took him a little longer each day to hide his anguish and manage a smile when he returned to our camp. 

Marching at last restored him. He smiled again, though it was the burning smile of one whose only true joy would come when his father was avenged and the Silmarils restored to our people. When we would stop to rest, he and his sons seemed to be everywhere at once. Did you know that Prince Morifinwe was an unreasonably good carpenter? Our wagons would break and he could always get them moving again in no time at all… and the princes Ambarussa would somehow find time to ride out hunting and stay up all night roasting a wild boar over the fire… they were both excellent cooks… you know, there are times when I think that the greatest tragedy of Beleriand is how it flattened people. The twins? Hunters. Curufin? Sneaky. Moryo? Rich and ill-tempered. Tyelko? Had a dog. Macalaure? Singer. Maitimo? Maitimo Nelyafinwë, the most beautiful of Finwë’s grandchildren, who remembered the names of everyone he’d ever spoken to, who carried our crying children and lulled them almost instantly to sleep, who taught our sons to swordfight when the host paused for rest – a single word of praise from him would have my brother glowing for a fortnight – Maitimo, who had written books on every topic known to Elves, who let my little sister try on his copper circlet once when she asked, who insisted our neighbor ride his horse when she injured her ankle – Maedhros the One Handed. That’s how they remember him. Am I right?”

It was, again, not a question I was intended to answer. So instead, I tried, tentatively, to prod her back on topic. “Alqualondë?”

“Oh, yes, we walked past it after a few weeks of travel and continued north. We did not exactly stop to say hello, but it appeared from a distance to be doing better than Tirion – Ossë had not abandoned them as the Valar had abandoned us, their King had not been murdered, the fish were still plentiful –”

I gaped at her. She pretended not to notice (or perhaps she really did not notice) and continued. “The northern coast outside the Pelori was rocky, the safe passes narrow. The wagons broke down more frequently. King Fëanáro sent scouts out ahead, and they returned with grim news – the mountains grew higher and colder, and swiftly became impassable. The North was a hell of ice. There was no way out.

Just like the Valar! ‘We will neither aid nor hinder you in leaving’, they promised, knowing that without their aid departure was a death sentence. But if they had hoped that we would feel chastened, they were wrong. We were angry. Word sped swiftly around camp – the most extreme of our King’s words had been nothing but fact. We were prisoners here. 

Fëanáro spoke to the lords of Formenos that night, and his eyes were so fierce that, briefly catching a glimpse of them, I thought that he might be able to melt the ice of the North just by looking at it. They conferred for a long time, long enough for the mountains to begin feeling like prison walls pressing in on us, long enough for the darkness to grate at our nerves again, long enough for the rumors to start flying again. The Valar had exiled Fëanáro and his sons; would they arrive soon to enforce their exile? Force us into that nightmarish wasteland?

It was then that my mother raised – for the only time – the question of turning back. “If we have no choice but to cross the ice,” she said softly, “maybe you children…”

“We go with our King,” my brother said fiercely, and I just nodded.

But my father jumped to his feet and nearly overturned the tent. “That,” he hissed at his wife, “is what the Valar are hoping for. They say we cannot defeat Morgoth – well, they’re damned right that we cannot defeat Morgoth if they deliberately sabotage us every step of the way. They know that Fëanáro is right; they are too cowardly to attack him directly, so instead they strike at the loyalty of his people. They ask if we’re afraid to die for him, and then they see to it that we will. We will not turn back. We will cross the ice, if our King commands it. We will swim the damned ocean, if our King commands it. We will show the Valar that the Noldor cannot be so easily turned from our path. We will not be manipulated like a rabble of children!”

It was the first argument I ever heard between my parents. I cried myself to sleep that night and dreamed of Morgoth – only I had never seen Morgoth before, so he bore a striking resemblance to Manwë, whose image was everywhere in Valinor. When I woke up, the thought on the tip of my tongue was that the two were, after all, brothers.

Shortly afterward Fëanáro announced that we would return to Alqualondë and seek the aid of the Teleri in crossing the Sea. 

Nolofinwë’s host followed us, of course. By then our anger with them had died into smoldering resentment, but we rarely looked back and never spoke of the elves who marched behind us flying the banner of a different King.”[1]

 __________________________________________________________________________

            “Alqualondë. The beaches were strewn with gemstones; I am sure you knew that, because all of the poets like to mention it. The ships were white, and graceful, and in the shape of swans; this you also know. Songs of that day will be sung for a long time, because it is rife with symbolism and tragedy, and poets love both.

If you were a poet I would have turned you away.

Alqualondë. After seeing what occurred in Tirion, I was not surprised that the Teleri did not wish to join us. Distance, it seems, insulates. Every line you can draw in the sand is a reason to pretend that it did not happen to you, that it could not happen to you.

And there are a lot of lines in the sand between Formenos and Alqualondë. Their King was alive and well; gemstones glinted on a crown Fëanáro forged for him, and the walkways of the city were lined with Fëanorian lamps at regular distances. The black vapors with which Ungoliant marred our lands did not reach far enough to poison theirs; their fountains still bubbled with music. I have mentioned already that Ossë and Ulmo had taken at once the steps that Yavanna did not take until later, to preserve the living things under their domain; the Teleri were not hungry.

So I was not surprised that they did not wish to come. They had not seen. They did not know. I was surprised, though, at how vehemently they refused us any aid. They would not ferry us across the sea for any price. They would not loan us the ships. They would not aid us in building our own. 

“Do they want to watch us die?” my mother said angrily, and the terror in her eyes, which had lifted since we had turned away from the Ice, returned in full force. “Our King is exiled; we are condemned to depart by whatever means we can. If they will not help us build boats, that means the Ice, and on the ice we will die by the thousands. Friendship does not bind them to fight beside us, but it does, I think, bind them to offer us what little aid would be required to give our children a chance of a safe journey.” And she looked worriedly at my sister, who was only ten; but she did not speak of turning back. 

We did not know at the time that Fëanáro was having similar words with Olwë, but that evening the echoes of Olwë’s answer spread about the camp.

“The Valar were kind enough to us, too, until we sought to leave their protective custody,” someone spat over the fire that night. “We all believed their lies until  - by their absence when we needed them - they showed their true colors. We can hardly fault the Teleri for being ensnared by the same lies.”

That was the kindest thing said about the Teleri that evening.

“To refuse even to aid us in crafting our own boats… there Olwë slips from disagreeability to outright madness. Are there secrets between our people now? Is the knowledge of how to depart Valinor the special right of the Teleri, the gatekeepers of the Valar?”

“Manwë will not weep to see us die in the Crossing; he has shown already how little he cares for the plight of our people. But Olwë – I would have thought better of him.”

“And who are they, to claim to know better than us whether our parting is folly, and to restrain us from it? If they had seen Tirion they would know that our people will find no joy on this side of the sea. If they had seen Formenos they would know –”

But there he halted. We did not speak of that, though it was, I think, the thought lurking at the back of all that was spoken.

“Clever of the Valar, is it not? We will neither aid nor hinder your passage – but we will order our servants to hinder you as best they can.”

And then Fëanáro emerged from his camp. Again his sons flanked him, and all of us flinched at their expressions, and steeled ourselves for his command. 

‘Tonight,’ he said, (he had been the one to reinstate the custom of speaking of nights and days, which both provided some thankful semblance of normalcy and reminded us how very far from normalcy we were), ‘when Olwë’s guards sleep, we will take the ships from the harbor and ferry our people safely across the sea. When we are victorious we will return the ships with Morgoth’s body and forgive Olwë his effort to condemn our people to our deaths.’

No one argued.”

Here she paused; her hands were shaking slightly and for the first time I could see the weight of two millennia in her face. “I am not sure I can tell you anything useful. It has all been recorded. What more do you want to know?”

Eyewitness accounts to all of the major battles of the First Age – even the ones that are not nearly as emotionally charged as the Kinslaying – are notoriously unreliable. It is a phenomenon that the scholars of Ost-in-Edhil (who have never seen war) call the “fog of war”, and it is the single largest barrier to reliable and accurate reporting on the great battles of the age. People confuse chronology, lose track of time entirely, are utterly unreliable with respect to the number of the enemy… war causes the Elven mind to go just a little bit mad.

Or perhaps you have to be just a little bit mad to survive war. 

She started talking again, and it was only much later, looking back through the transcript, that I realized that I never answered her question. 

“We were all exhausted. Not physically – we had rested for nearly two entire days then, the longest we had remained in one place since Tirion – but emotionally. Elves can die of imprisonment, you know. It’s not the physical restrictions on mobility  - it does something to your spirit, the thought that you are trapped. A voice starts screaming inside you and doesn’t quite stop. By the time we arrived at Alqualondë, we had travelled countless thousands of miles on foot and we had never felt so imprisoned in our lives. We were alone; we were being betrayed at every turn.

If I was to describe the atmosphere that evening, I would have to call it – feverish. Though I did not learn that word for another four hundred years. We were frightened; we were exhausted; we were a people of craftsmen reduced to desperate nomads, a people of song who spoke mostly in whispers, the Valar’s promise of exile hanging over our heads like an anvil poised to fall… and the darkness. Always the darkness. We startled easily… My mother’s hands were shaking that evening when she helped my father and brother put on their armor.

I remember thinking that everything would be all right once we only reached the Outer Lands.

I kissed my father and brother goodbye, mostly envious that I was too young and couldn’t go with them. We didn’t conceive of it as a battle, not really. You have to remember, only two people had died in the Blessed Realm in all of history. If you had asked us, “Would the Teleri think their ships worth killing for? Worth dying for?” I would have stared at you in wide-eyed astonishment… it was Valinor. Nothing was worth killing for. Nothing was worth dying for.

I still remember lining up at the edge of the camp with my little sister’s hand clasped in mine, enthusiastically waving to our departing host with the other. 

When the screaming started we did not believe it.

“Something’s wrong,” a boy a little younger than I shouted, and ducked through his mother’s arms and raced down the hill; I tried to follow but my own mother grabbed my arm. Her grip was weak, her hands shaking, and for a second I thought to pull free, but then I saw the expression on her face, and it froze me in place more effectively than her hands ever could. 

It was like being back in Formenos in those first moments when the Darkness came. The distant screaming, the shock and horror, the dawning feeling that you are trapped inside a nightmare and you will never wake up…

All we saw, from that distance, were snatches of movement against the glowing white ships. Arrows were raining down on the docks. Barbed fishing spears clashing against swords. Our people were being driven backward along the beach, the fallen trampled where they lay. We were too far away to see faces, but people were dying on both sides, we would have to be fools to doubt that… 

I cannot tell you how long it was until Nolofinwë’s host came up behind us. I can tell you that I watched a man drown: he had been thrown off the docks fully armored, and the weight was dragging him slowly beneath the waters as I watched, and he reached out desperately for the pier but an arrow pierced his hand just as it closed around the wood and the waves swallowed him. That one instant seemed to last three Ages.

I did not hear the thunder as Nolofinwë’s host came up beside us, and charged toward the melee; by then there was a strange ringing in my ears. I don’t think I even consciously noted that they were Nolofinwë’s people. But I saw the tides turn; I saw the Teleri driven back across the docks; I saw the ships cut free of the harbor and start haphazardly north. 

The screams stopped. The silence was stifling, absolute, choking. I became suddenly aware that my mother’s grip on my arm had tightened until she’d cut off all circulation (later there would be ten deep bruises in a ring around my shoulder).

And then, all as one, we charged towards the docks, pregnant women and terrified children and grown men alike, all convinced – well, at least, I was – that we would get there and it would all prove to be some kind of terrible illusion.”

She was unconsciously massaging the shoulder that had been bruised two millenia before. 

“Do you need to stop?” I asked.[2] 

“If I stop here, I will never start again.” 

But a long time passed before she continued.

“Alqualondë. The tide was not red with blood; the ocean is enormous, and all the blood of all the elves in Valinor would not suffice to change its color. The people were soaked with blood – leaking out of arrow wounds and the ragged holes left by barbed fishing spears, drenching their swords and splattered across their armor – I vomited on the gemstone-strewn beach and afterwards did not have the strength to stand, so I crawled…

I suppose someone took command and started making arrangements for the wounded. I suppose there were recriminations, arguments, orders given. I do not know, because my world had narrowed to the bodies. Our new swords had proved themselves spectacularly effective; I saw men with their heads only half hanging on, men with glassy eyes and arms still wrapped around their guts as though trying to hold their intestines in. And then I stopped seeing the injuries at all: my vision had gone entirely black except for the faces, as if my mind was trying to shield me. It was far too late for that.

And then I saw them. My brother, haggard and horrified but alive, clutching a bloody sword, his eyes glazed and panicked – at the sight of him strength surged back into me, and I blundered across the sand into his arms, the rest of the world fading from view.

So it was that I did not see the body at his feet until a moment later.

Two arrows had lodged themselves in my father’s skull; somehow, neither had been fatal, because he must have still been standing when someone put a spear through his throat. (Perhaps they did it after he had fallen. But that I refuse to believe.)

I know my mother found us there a minute later, my brother’s bloody hands knotted in my hair as we kneeled together by Atar’s side. I know that she clapped her hands over my sister’s eyes and screamed in anguish and horror, and was ignored; I know that a little while afterwards some people came to lift up my father’s body and take my hand and walk with us back to the camp to continue the march north. I know that we lost more people that day and the next, in the terrible storms that the Valar sent down on the boats and to the lingering injuries that none knew how to treat.

But all this I know because I was told it; I do not remember those weeks at all.

Alqualondë. They ask, did you feel sympathy for the people you slaughtered? Yes, of course; such pain as I suffered that day I would not wish even on Morgoth. But has anyone asked them the same question? 

---

[1] There, to my great annoyance, she stopped for the day; I fear that the mundane details of the time that passed before we continued the conversation will bore the reader thoroughly and disrupt the narrative, so I will say only that my dreams were troubled.

[2] In doing so, I displayed a degree of courtesy and emotional maturity which would have been unknown to me ten years earlier.  That it was insufficient… well, emotional maturity is not easily learned from books.

Chapter 4: Regarding the Repurcussions of Alqualonde, the Doom of the Noldor, and the Departure From Aman

Apologies for the delay in uploading this chapter! I've been involved in a writing challenge that sapped more of my time and energy than I expected. It's my hope to return to regular updates soon.

Read Chapter 4: Regarding the Repurcussions of Alqualonde, the Doom of the Noldor, and the Departure From Aman

I suppose I should not have been surprised that they tried to rationalize it; it is, after all, a fundamental part of our nature to see our own actions in the best possible light, and no one could have gone through the next centuries believing themselves monsters. I suppose it is thoroughly unsurprising that, as far as the defenders of Fëanor were concerned, the Teleri were Kinslayers. I suppose I should not have been horrified to hear that the villains thought they were victims – isn’t that, after all, the story I came here to record? And I suppose it was thoroughly unprofessional to do anything more than record her words and prompt her to continue.

But I was surprised, and I was horrified, and I was thoroughly unprofessional.

“But you were the aggressors – they were just defending their property.”

“Yes.”

“If they’d tried to steal the Silmarils you would have tried to stop them – with violence, if necessary!”

“I’m not sure about that. You have no idea how unimaginable it all seemed back then… I suppose. If King Fëanáro had been fighting to defend them, and his life was at risk – then yes. We would have.”

“You were the first to start the killing, too.”

“No one will ever know that for sure, I imagine. Arrows and barbed fishing spears are just as deadly as swords… when armed groups clash, killing happens. The moral responsibility, such as it is, falls on whoever saw to it that the armed groups clashed in the first place.”

“On Fëanor.”

“You know, he would have hated that name. It’s bastardized Thindarin, and all of our names are only known in that tongue because our native one was forbidden to us.”

“On Fëanáro, then.” I said, uncomfortable primarily because she is the only person I have ever heard say that name, and she says it with a lilting accent that can only be characterized as loving.

“Yes. And we who followed him, and Prince Findekáno who rushed in afterwards, and Olwë – every person there decided, that day, that the ships were worth killing for.”

“Olwë had no choice,” I said stubbornly. It is highly unprofessional to argue with interview suspects about their own recollections, of course, but this interview was turning into something different and quite disconcerting, and so I argued. “Should he have just let you steal the ships?”

“Would that not have been a better outcome, all things considered? But no – he could have offered to teach us how to build our own ships. Or, if he was determined to aid the Valar in imprisoning us, he could have ordered the ships taken out to Tol Eressea, instead of parking them in the harbor and daring us to try –”

“You cannot seriously believe that by leaving the ships in the harbor he was expecting or encouraging you to attempt to steal them! And even if that were true, you can’t – you can’t just – your people died, sure, that’s sad, but that doesn’t give you any moral license – if a cause wasn’t right to start with, it doesn’t become right when enough people die in defense of it. And it was wrong. It was evil. The Valar were right to curse you all for it.”

My outburst surprised me more than her; I became suddenly aware of how loud my voice had become, and shrank a little into the cushioned chair.

She did not appear upset. But I suppose anyone who survived three Kinslayings is not easily shaken.

“I’m sorry.” I said weakly, after a moment. “About your father.”

 

I had offered awkward condolences to lots of people reliving old memories, of course. But never to Kinslayers! I could not exactly say “He died defending his loved ones,” my go-to phrase for dignified comfort, or “May Mandos heal him swiftly.” For a long moment we sat in silence, and I worried that I had offended her so badly that our interview was over.

Then, suddenly, she relented; even before she opened her mouth to speak I could see a softening in her face. “May you never know such grief. Shall I continue?”

“Please.”

“We had fought beside Nolofinwë’s people; it should have united us. But instead, if anything, it tore the wounds between us open. They had very few losses, you see. They arrived late, and with overwhelming force… the horror we shared, but the grief was ours alone, and so was the anger … we could not say out loud that we were in the wrong, because that would mean calling our own dead murderers, implying that they deserved what they got… We all felt ill when we looked at the ships. We were fiercely possessive of them – after all the people who had died to get them, how could we be anything less – but we hated them.

The blood came out of the wood easily enough. I heard a song once that said the blood would not wash out of our tunics, that it sank into the decks of those accursed swan-ships and dried there, dark brown. That’s not true. Blood comes out easily, in cold water.

But I was telling you about Nolofinwë’s host. They shared our shock, but they did not share our pain. And so they could whisper that Fëanáro had been a fool to take the ships, that they would never have done such a thing, and at the same time demand first passage in those ships that they would have left with Olwë…

“What would you have done instead?” my brother shouted, and my mother shook her head and dragged us farther forward, among our own people, until the accusing eyes were well behind us. The pain was – you cannot imagine, truly, but I wanted to kill them for saying that, for calling my father a murderer, for arriving too late, for pretending that they wished that had not arrived at all.

Or maybe they truly wished it; maybe they wished my brother had died alongside my father, that our King had fallen surrounded by his sons, butchered by the Elves who would rather see us die than let us depart. But that would be unforgivable and so I did not quite believe it, even after it had become obvious that we were all capable of doing and thinking unforgivable things.

I did not see Fëanáro or his sons. In truth, I barely saw anyone. The host moved in utter silence…Outside of drills we did not speak to each other, we did not meet each other’s eyes. Once when I woke up crying in the middle of the night I found my mother frozen over me, her hand half an inch from my back, as though she had been trying for a long time to muster the courage to reach out and touch me. I looked up at her but our eyes did not meet and after a moment I fell back asleep…

“How long was this?”

“I don’t know. We had stopped counting time.[1] Nothing but marching… we were all so exhausted, and so afraid.

The Doom. If the Valar had spoken so when we were first departing they could have swayed us. Even Fëanáro, I imagine. As it was, it was too late. To go back and ask the Teleri for forgiveness we might have tolerated. If they apologized also. To seek the pardon of the Valar for profaning the peace of their holy prison… no. Oh, some were afraid and turned back, but very few from our host. We had learned the worst things war could deal us already; we were not afraid of Morgoth. But to spend the rest of the lifetime of the world in Valinor…

So they cursed us. In vivid detail. I remember my mother smiling grimly and saying, “I imagine Mandos spent an hour practicing in front of a mirror,” and everyone around us was shocked into laughter.

 

There is a spectacular, giddy sort of freedom that comes with the knowledge that the gods have washed their hands of you.

When the ships were out of sight we could almost pretend it was worth it.

 

It was only later, of course, that I realized what had prompted her bitter outburst. Mandos had just promised that our father would not be swiftly returned to life – maybe not ever returned to life. And even if he was, we had chosen exile. There was no return to Aman. We would be sundered until the end of time.

The realization did not hurt as much as it should have, perhaps because by then everything hurt and you just became accustomed to it.

 

We camped in Araman. It was the first time we had stayed in one place for more than enough time to sleep since shortly after Alqualondë; we were Noldor, as so as soon as word got out that this was a somewhat permanent camp we started improving it, making the walkways even, staking the tents symmetrically, placing lamplights so we could walk between them in the dark.

We were running military drills nearly every day. If Alqualondë has reinforced anything it was the need for communication, for discipline, and besides that it just felt useful to be doing something. I had picked up a sword and started participating and my mother didn’t argue at all…”

“Tell me about the drills,” I interrupt, more eagerly than I expected – military history is not my area of expertise.

“You know,” she says instead – I am starting to suspect that she purposefully goes off on tangents whenever I try to direct her toward a particular subject – “I read an account once that said Fëanor was insane and shortsighted and impatient, have you read that one?”

 

She pauses.

 

“Of course, by now probably all of the accounts say that. Tell me, does it take two Years to hike a thousand miles if your leader is impatient?

Tell me, when we arrived on the shores of Beleriand, when Morgoth sent all of his armies against us – armies that had been intended for the conquest of the whole world, armies that had trampled Sindar with ten times our numbers – when we were taken by surprise and surrounded - did coordination and discipline break down? Did we successfully execute a cavalry charge that flanked the orcs besieging Cirdan’s people? Did we thoroughly and completely crush them? Did that, at least, make the histories?”

“Yes, that’s in the histories, and I regret if I prompted you to get ahead of yourself. You were in Araman – ”

“Yes, we were in Araman. We were in Araman, training, like we’d been training all along, because Fëanáro was an intelligent man and not so impatient to depart that he would take an undisciplined rabble off to war. And if you doubt that, you’ll have a hard time explaining the Dagor-nuin-Guilith.”

“Are you claiming that Fëanor – Fëanáro – was sane, at that point? Or just that he was not as reckless and impatient as he is portrayed?”

“I was hardly close enough to him to judge his sanity. We did drills constantly, presumably on his orders, but that doesn’t mean he was leading them. After Alqualondë, even his sons weren’t leading them. Perhaps they were trying to keep the peace with Nolofinwë’s camp – sometimes, when they were doing drills also, things would get tense… perhaps they were learning how to sail the ships… But every decision Fëanor had made since the Darkening had been the right one, the only one. It would be an odd coincidence if a madman happened to make all the same decisions as a sane one. His grief was deeper than ours, his pain was deeper than ours, but he was our King and he was leading us to war and he was doing a damned good job of it.”

She stiffens her shoulders on finishing, as if she is expecting me to offer a rebuttal. But I have remembered my academic dignity, and so I record all of that without the slightest twitch of emotion – and then, to fill the silence in the room when I finish writing, record the last sentence over and over again so as to pretend I’m not lost for words.

and he was doing a damned good job of it

and he was doing a damned good job of it

and he was doing a damned good job of it

“And then you left?”

“No. We should have – we should have left at once. That was the time to be impatient, because Araman was a horror. The mist would settle in your throat, in your lungs; the air was cold enough to take the tips off your fingers if you spent too long outside. We needed to find friendlier shores. We needed to go. We had made our choice, there was no turning back, it was time to leave – and still Nolofinwë’s people stalled.

They wanted first passage in the ships. Rumor had it Fëanáro told Nolofinwë he could renounce the Kingship, admit taking the ships from Olwë had been necessary, and start loading his people on board. Nolofinwë told him that their father would hate Fëanáro for what happened at Alqualondë, that Finwë would be sickened to think this was done in his memory, and that he’d renounce the crown when Fëanáro renounced his rebellion, which was to say, never – but, mind you, these were all rumors.

Rumor had it that Arafinwë’s daughter had killed some of our own people at Alqualondë, and was continuing on the journey swearing to destroy Fëanáro and everyone who followed him. Outright treason, if true, and the sort of thing that if false is easily debunked…I started thinking I could see my father’s murderer lurking among Nolofinwë’s host.

We could not sleep. We could not breathe. We could not see past the swirling mists, or hear past the swirling rumors - some of them were even wilder -  as if we didn’t have enough to despise Nolofinwë for, the consensus was that he caused the delay. Every meeting between our host and theirs ended with raised voices and hands on swords and one or the other of them storming out in a fury. And every day our food supplies ran lower, our fuel supplies lower still,[2] every day the darkness seemed to press down a little heavier.

When word came, finally, that we were leaving at once we were grateful – and that tells you something about the living nightmare that was Araman, if we were grateful to get on those ships. We had a Year marching up the coastline to have learned how to sail them, and I suppose they were relatively good sailors. That did not stop me from feeling sick the whole time.

Ungrateful, because so many good people had died to buy us safe passage on these ships, and ungrateful, because I had sworn to follow my King through any hardship and surely there would be hardships greater than leaning against the wooden walls of a sleek white ship and continuing to breathe.

I held my mother’s hand so tightly her fingers went purple, and then gray. I was horrified when I realized, but she didn’t say anything. I don’t think she even noticed.”

 

We concluded there for the day, not because the light was failing (it was only mid-afternoon) but because this next subject was touchy ground, and I was determined to approach it with more maturity than I had approached the subject of the Kinslaying. I spent that evening writing out in my journal the most compelling defense of Fëanor’s decision to burn the ships I could possibly come up with, so I would not be taken aback by hers. The exercise was enlightening in more than one sense, and I would highly encourage anyone else interested in this area of study to attempt it themselves, with the obvious caveat that the resulting writings should be burned, unless you wish to be tarred forever as an apologist for the greatest murderers in our history.

As is probably self-evident, I do not believe that entertaining and engaging with the defenders of Fëanor is inexcusable, as long as a purely academic interest is maintained.

 

---

[1] I note here for the benefit of the reader that the departure of the Noldor from Aman took 2 Years, or nearly 20 years of the sun. This implies a startlingly measured pace of less than a mile per day, though perhaps they were slowed by treating injuries and by gathering food and fuel.

[2] I was unable to suppress the urge to ask about what they used for food and fuel on the long march up the coast; the conversation that followed I have excluded from this transcript as only tangentially related to the topic, but it is recorded in the Appendices. 

Chapter 5: Regarding Losgar and the Dagor-nuin-Giliath

Read Chapter 5: Regarding Losgar and the Dagor-nuin-Giliath

Alqualondë is, of course, the proof of Fëanor’s evil; Losgar was the proof of his madness.

 

That is how the histories put it. Because – and such things must be stated delicately, lest the writer be accused of defending a crime for which the Valar have only reluctantly forgiven us – Alqualondë made sense, to a particularly ruthless mind. It diminished the grace of Valinor, and strengthened the desire to depart in the hearts of those who otherwise might have returned happily to Tirion when cooler heads prevailed. It gave the Noldor a means of transport out of Valinor. It was evil. But it was a particularly comprehensible sort of evil.

 

Losgar was insanity. For surely any brilliant and ruthless King would know he needed more than a third of his army to triumph against a Vala; for surely any competent King would be secure enough in his rule that he need not tear away the only means of his people of returning. Surely only a madman would leave his brother to die on a distant shore for the crime of being better-liked by the people who followed both of them.

 

And so the two great crimes of the Flight of the Noldor form two lenses to see Fëanor’s fall: evil and madness. Either one, alone, might not have cost him everything. I will confess to having seen a sort of poetry in it, in the rash gesture, in an entire shoreline glowing with the light of an unspeakable crime. It is, I think, the same impulse that drives artists to draw Morgoth ten times the height of a man: a desire for the enemy to be larger than life and the scope of his evil larger than our own imagination.

 

Needless to say, she saw it differently.  

 

“Word spread almost as soon as we disembarked that Fëanáro had no intention of returning, that he had given the order for the ships to burn. We didn’t do it immediately, of course – we were miles from where he and his son had disembarked and to follow merely rumored orders would be madness – but when confirmation came we lit the torches without hesitating. Everyone who remained on the opposing shore had declared their allegiance to the usurper. Furthermore, they had delayed our departure complaining about how they would never have taken the boats. So now it was as if we hadn’t taken the boats. If they had a better solution, they were welcome to follow it –”

 

“Did you realize-”

 

“That they would cross the Ice? No, of course not. We assumed they would slink back to Valinor. You have to realize, they had been complaining about having left Tirion in the first place for the past Year.  We thought they would be glad of an excuse to abandon their mission, that they would return home and spend the rest of time in the Valar’s gilded cage, complaining about how they would have found glory in the war against Morgoth if only Fëanáro had sent the ships back for them.”

“If you had known –”

 

I did not expect that question to stump her, not when many more difficult ones had been answered with the effortless grace of one who has asked them all of herself and found the answer satisfactory.

 

But there was another long moment’s silence.

 

(I took to doodling in the margins during these pauses, and as a result my notes form an elegant map of the pace of her speech – sloppy shorthand without tehtar where she spoke quickly, elegant letters where she was slow, extravagant marginalia when her words ceased entirely.)

 

“We would never have disobeyed the King,” she said after a moment’s silence, “and the knowledge that they would cross the Ice would hardly have obligated us to risk our own lives and the wrath of the gods in returning for them. But it would have meant – did mean, when it happened – rethinking their devotion to the cause, their valor, their desperation – which by then, of course, nearly paralleled our own. If we had known, I think we would have be more prepared to treat Nolofinwë’s treason as a spat between grieving brothers, more prepared to treat their accusations about Alqualondë as misdirected shock and grief. It would have cast their other actions in a different light, and I imagine the King would have chosen to send the ships back for them.”

 

“It is said that Maedhros argued –”

 

“Oh, he did,” she said at once. “Publicly. He really should not have, though in the end it made mending those bridges easier. Maybe he saw the courage that Nolofinwë’s people hid behind their distance and their arrogance and their rationalizations. Maybe he and Findekáno were – well, I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors –”

 

I will confess that I turned quite red and was utterly incapable of thinking of an adequate response.[1] Such an accusation, of course, would have been cruel and malicious even before Maedhros proved himself one of the greatest monsters of the age. Now, it was outright heresy to imply such things of the former High King. I was startled, moreover, that Maedhros’ defenders would not hesitate to mention it.

 

She was again watching me with the patience one affords a small child. “I forgot,” she said after a moment, “everyone save the Kinslayers spent the Age leaping from one deed of valor to another. No wrongs were done in their name, nothing impolitic can be said of them, their only failing was in failing to recognize the evil that had gripped their cousin’s hearts. And, of course, in following Fëanor in the first place. A single mistake for which we all unjustly suffer, yes? Would your suffering be just, little one, banished by your blood from the Undying Lands, if the heroes you descend from were flawed?”

 

“I claim no descent from the House of Finwë,” I muttered, and it only occurred to me much later that this was a digression from our supposed topic far greater than the ones I had otherwise tolerated.

 

But, in the end, it was she who returned us to the topic. “Is that synonymous with ‘heroes’, now? Because I knew many heroes, little one, and only eight of them were descended from Finwë, and your histories don’t count them either.[2] But the ships burned, and we marched inland, and the armies of the enemy converged on our people, and I dare you to tell me that what followed was not heroism.

 

We were utterly unprepared, but it was not time that would have prepared us. There is nothing at all like war, child, and drills will not teach you about it. I suppose the best way to explain is – it is hard to imagine how intensely liberating it was to watch those ships burn. They were, as I have told you, sickening; better, the fire lit the coastline so for a second we could see the new lands in a light as bright as the light of the old one. I had forgotten what light was like. Beleriand was nothing like it is now – the sort of plants that grow in darkness are utterly unlike the sort that thrive under this sun – but it had the same feel to it – wild, uncultivated, dangerous, and yet far more welcoming than Valinor. We charged inland on feet no longer weary. No one said “It was worth it”, but I know my father would have… would have been glad that by his sacrifice we had come to reach these lands, would have wished only that he could have lived to see them himself. And to think that some had spoken of turning back! We marched inland and blew our trumpets and even when the dark had fallen, again, it was the dark of a night which will pass.

 

They swarmed over the hills by the thousands, and the first sign of them was the cries of our host when they charged. They had dipped their weaponry in mud, you see, so the glint of metal would not betray them, and if each individual one was weak, pathetic, clumsier than I with a sword and quick to die, there were so many of them…

 

I had barely seen Fëanáro’s sons since Alqualondë. Only to lead drills, and to communicate orders, and in that they were distant, mouthpieces of their father… in war they were terrifying, and reassuring, and constantly, relentlessly, present. They were, you know, the ones who rode towards the Unlight when even the Valar were thrown back from it. They were, you know, the ones who held the North for centuries. Macalaure was travelling with our part of the host, and he had us organized into proper ranks in no time at all. His voice carried like no other, and the orcs shrank from it alone, even before he gave the order to charge. Fëanáro himself, of course took the lead, and even in the distance he was distinctive, brilliant, utterly fearless, and not a single orc could touch him though they flocked toward him by the thousands.

 

The hardest thing about a battle like that is remembering that you are winning. When your arms grow heavy and the blood soaks through your armor and through your clothes and dries on your skin, and they keep coming, and a moment’s failure could cost you your life – when the people you love are out there somewhere, and you cannot lift your eyes from the enemy for even a second to see if they are still alive – when your father’s body keeps flashing before your eyes and giving you at once the strength to lift the sword again and the terror to blinker your vision – it does not feel like victory, not at all, no matter how many enemies lie dead at your feet.

 

Fëanáro adapted quickly. A mind like his, I suppose, can entertain a single-minded desperate design for vengeance and worries over his children and the tactical complications of a massive battle on an open field against a limitless enemy all at once. Or perhaps killing orcs made thinking easier… it was so for me, much later, and perhaps it was so for him, even then. He ordered fortifications built as soon as our offensives had cleared some ground for us to defend. They were shabby, built quickly, but they were a place to drag the wounded and dying, a place to rest in quick shifts of a few hours-”

 

“You took naps during the battle?”

 

“It lasted 12 days,” she said, “by the old count of days, not the current short ones. Of course we rested. We were not invincible – well, Fëanáro was. He did not rest. His sons did not seem to either, although the younger ones were assigned the final defense of our hasty fortifications, a little back from the front lines. I think I slept five times, each only for a few hours, and then there would be a cry where our lines had broken or where a captain had fallen and we would rush back into the midst – you never felt ready, of course, but exhaustion fell away when you first felt your sword meet bone again.”

 

“You had heavy losses.”

 

“We had losses. Not as bad as Alqualondë – ironic, no? Morgoth could not harm us as greatly as our own kin – but then, we expected the orcs to try to kill us. If we had gone into Alqualondë expecting our kin to turn on us in murder, things would have ended very differently.”

 

I gritted my teeth. “They didn’t-”

 

“No, of course not, they were totally innocent,” she said agreeably.   “So were the orcs. Just defending their property. It was the sixth day, I think, when the tides began to turn, when we truly took the offensive…”

 

In the histories of our people, most accounts of the Dagor-nuin-Giliath are brief. I suppose that never bothered me – it was, after all, a brief battle in which our victory was complete, notable only for Fëanor’s foolish charge and his death. I suppose it felt longer to those who participated in it. But even as I dutifully recorded their minor gains of territory, I could not help regretting that my correspondent was not among those who fought with Celegorm in the south, riding down upon and utterly routing the orcs that besieged the Havens, or among those who reached Eithel Sirion and first sighted Angband. “I don’t suppose you know anyone who-” I mentioned, and she looked startled.

 

“They are all dead.”

 

“Surely not all of them.”

 

“All of them. Why do you suppose I came out to greet you?, None remain who were close to the princes of the Noldor, or among their personal guards. Forty thousand, I suppose, departed Tirion under the banner of our King. Less than a hundred of us remain, and thirteen who were with them until the bitter end. The other twelve did not wish to talk with you. You should realize, little scholar, that you are a very lucky man.”

 

Which was, of course, cause for me to gape at her disbelievingly and permit another diversion. “Why do you suppose you survive, when all the others-”

 

“Isn’t that a little like marveling at the fact you exist, of all the children your parents could have conceived? Had some other person survived in my stead, you would be talking to them… I am excellent with a sword, but so were many who died. I can keep my head in a fight, but I can tell you the names of a thousand who had the same strength, and died anyway. I am lucky, I suppose.”

 

“Lucky hardly seems to describe it,” I muttered. I was referring, of course, to the shocking magnitude of that slaughter – forty thousand -  but she misunderstood me.

 

“I prefer the hardships of this land to the questionable mercy of Mandos,” she said, “and we hold, here, that to feel otherwise dishonors the dead. Ours was not a happy life, or even, often, a life better than oblivion– but the living are always lucky, because for us there is the hope of brighter days. Or at least freedom…”

 

Those words I recognized, of course, though I had only heard them quoted ironically. She was entirely sincere.

 

“The battle ended when there were no enemies left to kill. It was a strange thing – we found ourselves standing there, shocked, tired – for the fatigue only truly reaches you when the fighting stops. I think I was still caught up in the haze of war, really, had stopped thinking of either enemies or allies as people, had stopped thinking of blood as anything other than a sticky inconvenience – that is my only explanation for why I was not sickened. But I was not. I just felt curiously empty. We had triumphed. Someone started going around dispatching the wounded among our enemies. Others were dragging our own wounded back to safety. I wanted to look for my mother and my brother, but I hadn’t the slightest idea where to start, and fear was dull, compared to the sheer exhaustion. I carried a dead man back to our camp and fell asleep.

 

We woke to the news that Fëanáro was dead. I do not know for how long I had slept – I do know that while I had seen a thousand things that would haunt me in nightmares later I slept for the time without nightmares, and woke feeling as if it were only a moment later. The trumpets were bleating- not in mourning, in horror, in anguish, in shock, because it should have been impossible, because all of us should have died in our King’s defense. We had sworn, after all…

 

I do not know how long I slept, but I know I was not tired in the slightest. The battle was over. The Noldor were victorious. And the King was dead, which meant, in the end, that everything else was nothing more than a spectacularly extravagant failure. Now I felt sick.

 

People who had witnessed the deaths of their children, their parents, their husbands and wives with a weary stoicism fell weeping to their knees. It was not – it was the one thing that was unimaginable. I don’t – I can’t – I’m sorry,” she said and I realized to my everlasting astonishment that she was crying, even now.

 

I felt nothing at all, of course. For the sake of the Noldor it would have been better had Fëanáro died in Alqualondë – it would have been an outright disaster if he had lived long enough to greet the host that crossed the Ice.

 

Perhaps this opinion showed on my face, because when she began her tale again her voice was considerably colder. “I found my mother eventually, of course. We were Noldor, and we were practical, and we had a system for reuniting families and organizing guard rotas and treating the wounded and burying the dead in place even before the sons of Fëanor returned – they were a long time in coming, and it took us a long time to learn the reason. But when Canafinwe, and not Nelyafinwë, led the banner of their return host, there was no grief left, only a dull sort of shock.

 

He spoke only briefly. “We have not the strength to assail Angband at the moment, but nor has Morgoth the strength to attack us. All of the armies he raised for the conquest of these lands lie dead at our feet. Clear their bodies away! Build walls! Build homes! Forge swords! And the gates of Angband will crumble when the time is right.

 

He had a marvelous voice, you know. If you had heard it, you would almost have believed it.”

 

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[1] There is, of course, no basis for supposing any such thing; if the accusation is unfamiliar to the reader, I will not claim responsibility for putting it in print, and hope indeed that all traces of it vanish from our histories.

[2] I had, repeatedly, told her my name; she never used it, though she did vary her endearments whenever I objected to one. 

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Chapter End Notes

Although, as readers have almost certainly have noticed, this story mostly tracks the Shibboleth of Feanor instead of the Silmarillion, I've decided to keep the version of Losgar in the Silmarillion. The version where Feanor burns the ships in secret with only a few dozen trusted followers, while the rest of his host sleeps, doesn't make sense to me. It unneccessarily absolves the rest of Feanor's followers of guilt. And if Maglor had nothing to do with the ship burning, nor did the vast majority of the host, it's hard to explain why they wouldn't reunite with Fingolfin's people more easily. As for whether Amras died... when I can, I like resolving different versions of the mythology as in-universe confusions. 

My population estimates are detailed and justified elsewhere; I'll include them also in the Appendices (yes, the Appendices our darling narrator keeps mentioning do exist, and I plan to append them to the story when it's complete)!