Of Finrod and Bëor by losselen

Coda

The branches bare, the mountains old
the land now under roaring tide
the grasses high and rivers cold,  
all buried beneath the ocean wide.
And even in Ossiriand
on leaf and stone the ages lay
and gone of old are Elves from land,
for long ago, they passed away.  
And gone is Finrod Elven-king,
long he left the Hither-shore
into the West where warblers sing
and comes to Middle-Earth no more. 
He walks in Elven halls of old
beneath the shinning silver eaves
beneath the rustling boughs of gold
and wind among the dancing leaves.
And there the green, undying plains
roll on beside the Shadowmere
and earthen time like chiming rains
still fall in countless Elven-years.
But Bëor and his folk of Men,
where now they walk, none can tell,
away afar, beyond the ken
of Elven-kind, beyond the bell
of the changéd and the edgeless world
beyond the crowns of oak and elm,
beyond the staves of Music furled,
beyond the night’s murky helm.
The lands they walk, no one has seen
what sight or music, none shall know,
what azure skies and grasses green,
what air or water, joy or woe. 

But long ago, in Ossiriand
they walked the woods of hinterland
beneath the sunlight’s eastern rays
when the world was fair in Elder Days.

Chapter End Notes

This monstrously long poem took almost 10 years to write!

Several phrases, rhymes and lines are borrowed from various Tolkien poems—e.g. “grey the Norland waters [run]” (Bilbo’s Song of Eärendil) and “silver fire / of old that Men did call the Briar” (used several times in the Lay of Leithian), among many others. Of course the writerly reason is that sometimes I can’t resist how beautiful the imagery are, or that I’m not sufficiently inventive myself. And yet I think these lyric echoes are also true in a in-universe sense: in Medieval ballads can be found similar stock phrases or allusive echoes to older or contemporaneous poems. Therefore it’s nice to think of these echoes as evincing the poem’s literary lineage.