Nerdanel and the doll by Valentis

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Chapter 1

All characters, places and shiny objects belong to Tolkien's estate. Nothing belongs to me, save for the silliness, which I happen to have in spades.

 


Nerdanel is a smith's daughter, raised among the smothering heat of the forge, the strong smells of molten metals and paint burned into her nostrils since childhood.

 

Nerdanel is also an artist and that her equal as a sculptor doesn't exist is no mere opinion.

 

Nerdanel lives by creating illusions and that is the reason she has stopped believing in them. She, who knows better than anyone else the mirages her craft creates has become immune to them. She stopped searching for the flame of life in the jeweled eyes of a statue or the softness of skin in the perfect curves of a marble face, Nerdanel doesn't see the pliable fall of fabric in the drapery veiling a body of stone or the glow of living flesh in the thinly veined white marble. She knows that creation is an impossible act in the celibacy of the artist facing his work.

Nerdanel looks at the throat, between the skillful games of light and shade and relief, where blood should run strong under the skin ; she recognizes where the vein pulses with its red burden and where lies nothing but the craft of one whose hands can make silent unmoving stone quiver to a viewer's eyes.

 

 

That is why she is deemed the best, even among the Noldor, in sculpting the shape of living things, in shaping Valar and Valier whose lips appear on the verge of opening to speak, sing, whose bodies look as if ready to dance and start a new creation in the creation itself, in crafting birds that seem so near to taking flight that people tiptoe around them, waters that skim over the bodies of swimmers that seem to be really slowly dripping from the skin.

For, knowing well the nature of the fëa, she can see the border where dreams become allies of illusion. Indeed Nerdanel has learnt full well what is the nature of illusions and knows how to stop believing them real without stopping to love them.

 

Her works are the best, neither because of an innate gift, as many would say, nor as a result of mere experience, but rather because they are the only ones still able to deceive her.

 

Illusion is the very objective, the ultimate purpose, of art and Nerdanel is familiar with it as one is acquainted with an old friend, she knows what the beholder wishes to believe. Few of the others' wishes are unfathomable to her for Nerdanel herself has harbored illusion and, most of all, long ago, she has watched a figure wishing to believe it was hers. 

The daughter of a craftsman her father's talent proved to be in her blood since she was a child playing in his workshop, but her love for sculpture began the day she, for the first time, looked around herself and noticed, among her father's apprentices, the young maidens bloom into age like flowers and capture the gazes of the other gender in a dance that never seemed to include her. So Nerdanel watched herself in a mirror and saw neither rose nor lily. In the smooth metal leaf behind the glass, where the image forms, another image looked back at her with eyes that became darker and darker. Her eyes ran from thick arms better suited for the hard toil of a man in a mine than for a mother's gentle hug, a ruddy face peppered by freckles instead of the bright clear cheeks of the others, to strong legs and wide hips. She saw how her body looked and understood that she would have never been beautiful in the eyes of one of the Eldar.

 

Nerdanel, her father had given her the right name: man maiden more suited to forging metal than be desired.

 

That very night, in her room lit by Telperion Nerdanel brought in secret a log of the best wood she could find in her father's workshop and started to slowly carve it, night after night, paying close attention to each and every change brought by the blade, until the image of a tall lithe maiden emerged from the wood. Then she painted it, giving the doll straight red hair with powdered ruby paint, a perfectly white skin of lead varnish, barely touched with red on the cheeks, rose colored lips and emerald green eyes.

The doll was beautiful, stunningly so, she was what Nerdanel would never be and her perfect lips were bent in a hinted mocking grin. The result of all of her efforts sneered at her face in the faint light filtered by the curtains. To this day Nerdanel can still feel the flare of rage and envy surging from her stomach that cut off her breath and clouded her sight.

 

She threw the doll in a furnace and watched her burn more than happy to blame her tears on the melting paint. Nerdanel stood there long watching the fire devour her work until nothing was left of the doll but a foul odored firebrand, until nothing else remained of the countless grooves carved by the blade on the wood and sleepless nights that it was made of.

 

It wasn't long before Nerdanel started studying under a master the art of sculpting; at first she still searched for an idealized image in the wood but, through years of study, as she learnt how to handle that living material and then discovered one by one new ones from which freeing her dreams in her mind the raw material itself became as important as the shape she saw hidden in it.

 

She mastered stone, so hard yet so delicate in its inner structure, and marble,of which you must guess the veins before the first hit of chisel to achieve beauty without chinks, of which you must recognize the weak spots to make it strong and where intuition is almost more important than familiarity.

 

Nerdanel learnt, she learnt to be an artist, learnt to stop resenting her work for getting the delighted looks she would never have elicited herself finding instead a deep pleasure in the recognition of her talent, she resigned herself to the looks of admiration without the slightest hint of attraction, to the odd pleasure of being an anomaly.

 

She learnt not to envy those gifted with virtues she would never have and stopped mourning the knowledge she would probably never have her own family like most of her kin and friends did. 

 

In those years alone Nerdanel learnt to travel alone in the lands far north and west searching for new things to create from, learnt the pleasure of independence. Like a small part of her people she learnt how to be strong and happy while alone rather than with a companion.

 

Her hands mastered the way to touch wet clay and shape it until between her fingers stood the body of an elf, how to press and touch to shape it letting her hand follow a well known route down its length, how to brush her fingertips against it to give the finishing touches adding every time a little different flaw that would make each and every figure unique.

 

She learnt by heart the characteristics of every kind of stone, developing her own techniques to analyze new ones found in her travels before deciding wether there was any use for them.

Still, during the coldest nights, the doll's memory never stopped to make her eyes sting with its mocking smirk.

 

It was exactly during one of her long lone voyages that she met him for the first time, today she doesn't ever remember the reason for that travel anymore. Yet she remembers the place she was in: a desolate wasteland near the north western borders of Aman where only enormous green granite boulders whipped by a merciless wind broke the monotony of a flat empty horizon. 

 

He was young, but he already burned like a tongue of fire that surges sudden scourging the air around and blurring the shape of what is behind it. His face was beautiful, his eyes shone grey like clouds broken by lightning, his figure tall, his pride deep and dark like the abyss of Ulmo and he need her more desperately than she had ever needed anyone. Fëanaro was capable of anything then, even to, when he felt she was right, bow his will to hers.

 

Long they traveled together afterward through the forgotten plains laying between perfection and the abyss on the extreme borders of Aman, in places nobody else had seen, in that nothing thrown by uncaring gods just out the threshold of the promised land. Their searches led them far enough that even the reflection of Laurelin light faded swallowed by darkness like a wave by the sand and the starless sky became an empty whirlpool ready to swallow the earth. 

In those first days they learnt to recognize each other's worth and respect each other's weaknesses, to regard the other with esteem and even to disagree without being enemies; it was the same fire they huddled in front of on the borders of Araman when the flowers of Laurelin faded back in the east and even the scarce heat disappeared, the sky becoming dark like a hidden courtyard of Tirion. It was so that Nerdanel discovered how desire and passion do not only stem from the harmony of bodily shape, but the fëa, like the veining of stone, is what can give the whole statue a shape capable of holding the passage of time. 

 

He might have given her the epessë Istarnië, still wisdom was not what led them to each other, what did was walking where no other foot had ever stepped, letting their joint gazes brush over the border where Arda fell into emptiness and dare together what they wouldn't dare alone. 

Both were craftsmen before anything else, thus creating together came naturally to them: shaping metal and gems with their hands and devising new cuts, techniques and ideas with their minds. Together they found a way to make some crystals shine like lamps that didn't need oil or even air to produce light. It was their combined effort that bore much of what still today makes the pride of the Firstborn. They joined in body giving life to theirs sons, creating around themselves what she had lost any hope to have.

 

Still, while Nerdanel accepted the beauty of illusion, Fëanaro kept chasing the dream of true creation, a colossus that had always engrossed his mind and, little by little, was becoming an obsession in that paradise of smothering perfection, while the poison of complacent torpor dimmed her fire more than any child could.

 

After the birth of Ambarussa he distanced himself for long until, one morning, he came to the chamber she had claimed as hers while recuperating and, with a beaming smile of triumph, led her by her hand to the forge.

 

There she saw them for the first time, the Silmarilli. All three of them, resting on a cloth of dark blue silk and shining like beacons of light, they appeared even more brilliant then the trees themselves and a wave of awe left her breathless. Still her joyous wonder was soon marred by an horrible suspicion and she turned to him searching his eyes. The moment their gazes met she knew it was the end. Everything that came to pass afterward was nothing but a consequence in her eyes, the landslide that follows the fall of the first boulder down the slopes of a mountain. 

After the flight of the Noldor many said that the end of Valinor's glory came shrouded in veils of darkness, still she knows that for the falsity it is. The end came in the blinding blaze of an illusion become more real than reality, it weren't obscurity and deceit that made the Noldor fall, but that shining light and the truth that every true creation has a price.

 

It is said in the chronicles that she didn't follow her family out of respect for the Valar, but that is not the whole truth. Still Nerdanel has also learnt that is easier to let people create their own truths than to try and explain what even to her sounds like madness. 

 

History writes how the world changed afterward, taking a new shape, until nothing but a single thread remained to still bind Aman to Arda, but it is known how the Eldar live of memories and so does she, torn between reality and illusions, careful to walk on the fine thread stretched over the chasm of apathy.

 

From time to time Nerdanel finds herself thinking about that old doll carved in her youth, now so far, but her feelings aren't anymore the envy of someone seeing something he'll never have.

 

The doll isn't the smirking symbol of what she'll never be anymore, ready to remind her of her failures and shortcomings, what then sat on the center of her fears became almost laughable in the weave fate embroidered around her. Still that doll had already become far more than it was, the emblem of her darkest moments and came back to smile before her pains.

 

It has tormented her long, after the Noldor left Tirion, the thought that a maiden such as that doll maybe wouldn't have been left alone, would never have married a fire spirit such as Fëanaro, would not have borne and raised seven sons only to see them vanish bound by an oath in pursuit of a nightmare, would not have barely recognized her loved ones in the tales told by others that saw them as monsters and wouldn't have hid to cry over an old chest full of memories without knowing wether she would ever find the strength to stop.

Yet, and this Nerdanel has only understood with time, that person would never have experienced all that she has.

A fair maid such as the doll would have had a long and chaste engagement without ever knowing the passion that consumes the soul together with the body, would not have learnt how to be strong on her own before than with someone, maybe would still have lost someone dear but she would not have found herself the last one of a dishonored line and would not have understood the pride that keeps people standing before the bitter waves of desperation and the sweetness of forgiving your own memories. She would not have felt on her skin just how far can the consequences of an action fall, wouldn't have known the joys and pains that made Nerdanel strong, not as the granite she works, but as an old tree still capable of bending under the fury of the winds to survive and protect the load of life and memory hidden in the rings of its body.

 

That maiden would not have been her, even were she born of the same mother and father.

Now, when Nerdanel thinks about the doll her eyes light up and, strangely, she smiles.

 

 

 

Chapter End Notes

1) First of all I must apologize for each and every grammar horror error. Unfortunately English is not my mother language and this is a translation of an old fanfiction of mine, so I would really appreciate each and every correction, insult and/or suggestion any of you might have. Thank you in advance.

2) Nerdanel is a character that I have a particular fondness for, thus I hope to have done her justice. About her  looks I hope not to have over stressed her 'flaws'. Still, since Tolkien writes that she was not among the fairest of her people but was extremely intelligent my interpretation is that she must have been rather different from the usual pretty elven lass. As for her age she is, if I'm not mistaken, said to be elder than Fëanaro (who married extremely young), but I made her significantly elder. Concerning, at last the name Istarnië, that was a possible name for her later discarded by Tolkien.

3) This interpretation of the character is, of course, extremely personal and ignores some information given in the Shibboleth of Fëanor (H.O.M.E), which I personally interpret as an heavily biased history book. Thus this Nerdanel did most definitely not go live with Indis and Fëanor didn't accidentally roast a twin. Same goes for the Silmaril(s); what is written here suggests something slightly different from the canon.

4) As for the mirrors I took the liberty to have ancient Noldor able to make glass covered mirrors when the eldest real world method (that uses mercury to join the metal leaf with the glass) dates back to the fourteenth century. Still they are able to make lamps with what sounds awfully like a light bulb so glass covered mirrors sound plausible.

 

 

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