Fingon's Lament by Fadesintothewest

The death lament tore at the depths of his soul. His anguish now greater than the torment he endured at Thangorodrim. The Laegil song was strange to his ears, the melody haunting and searching. The voice searched his soul finding what he hid in the depths of that darkness.

“O, love love

accursed torture

why did you not blossom

on every treetop?”

Unlike the Noldorin laments of death, the Laegelrim sang of love, of loss, of the fates of star-crossed lovers for death was an end to love. They did not sing of great deeds, of battles won, heroic ends.  The story told was of an elf, his love for life, his love for his family, his people, but a finite love. The story that reached Eru told of the heartache of love, a love extinguished by the cruelest of all that was the grace for the Second Born, now a torment for the Eldar. Death was a cruel lover that left no passage, no path to explore other desires and heartaches. An utterly devastating nothingness, he was no more.

“On the top of every tree,

on the leaf of a walnut tree,

so every maiden and unmarried young man

would have plucked it.“

The single ethereal voice graced the heavens, “Oh, love, love…” In his mind the words were perverse reminders of his fate, the fate his father, his family had brought upon his kin, upon him. Others around him cried out, their wailing terrifying and beautiful. They too loved him.

“Because I too plucked it 

and I let it slip away. 

I too plucked it 

and I let it slip away.”

The lament was born from the roots of ennor, earthen and ephemeral, it reached into the very center of his body, slithering, climbing, suffocating him. A carnal lament, a lament born of blood and birth, not letting you turn to look away from his body burning upon the pyre. His body broken.  He envied the Nandor. They released their rage, their sorrow. He could only stand, feeling as if he too had been cloven into the earth. To see his beautiful face again in life, if only for a moment.

O, I would pluck one again

if I found a good one,

if I found a good one, a beautiful one,

my old lover.

The Green elf was singing his lament. She was stealing his sorrow, exposing it for all gathered to know the depths of his love.

“And for my old lover 

what wouldn't I do for you? 

I would skim the water 

from the sea with a spoon.”

Indeed it seemed life had stolen his love, played a cruel trick. For in a fit of uncharacteristic desire, months before the fall of the Valiant, he forged a delicate silver net in which he inlaid tiny pearls, a wreath of pearls made for his beloved. Into the wreath of silver and white he had poured beauty, love, and hope, those things in him that should not be in that darkness.  The last verse of the lament broke him. From deep within him came a sound so broken, so utterly sorrowful, it is said that the whole of ennor mourned.

“From the bottom of the sea

I would gather small pearls 

and for my old lover 

I would braid a wreath of pearls.”

He had laid the wreath of pearls upon Fingon’s broken body before the fire took it and Maitimo’s love with it. 

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