In The Interest of Historical Accuracy by Duilwen

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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.

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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.

 

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[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.