In The Interest of Historical Accuracy by Duilwen

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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. 

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