Pins by heget

The Seventh

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Tacholdir used to manufacture pins in Tirion. Tacholdir’s family made pins in Tirion, hundreds and thousands of the tiny metal pins for hats, dresses, and those starched and folded linen collars. Tacholdir - Tancildo in his first tongue - was named after those pins. Tacholdir hated those pins, hated to make them, to feed the thin wire through grooved slots in a carved cow bone so the points could be filed sharp after cutting them to the precise lengths, and to solder or cold forge the pinheads after wrapping those ends in another piece of wire. Dull work, needing skilled fingers but requiring almost nothing in skill and artistry, and time-consuming, for Tacholdir and his family could only make four or five dozen an hour, which sold together would only yield a few of the smallest coins. Most of his days had been spent making enough pins to sell for money to afford the basics and the little left over his parents used to send him to the local tutor up the street. Tacholdir had preferred pens to pins. His original aspirations centered around books, but falling asleep his thoughts and dreams were full of pins, of making them and feeling them prickling his skin. His family had been poor, their shop one of many situated beside the butcher shops in the narrower alleys on the western side of the city, away from the Tree-light and far from the king’s palaces, a hot and cramped and unpleasantly smelling neighborhood. Closer to the wind coming down the Pass of Calacirya, not that any of that breeze came through his father’s cramped shop to cool the forehead or remove the odors, but the idea of the scent of the Hinder Shore had inflamed his heart.

No, Tacholdir was honest to himself. His overwhelming desire had been to escape the banality of pins. Hours he had wasted on the fiddly yet repetitively boring task of making hundred of plain brass and copper pins, a thing to shrivel the soul of an artist and intellect of a scholar. Pins were necessary, countered his father, who knew that everyone in Tirion bought handfuls each week to hold the shapes of their garments - but Tacholdir gladly abandoned all of it for a sword and a crusade to the unknown lands of the far shore. Fighting against Morgoth’s monsters was infinitely more exciting than pins. Tacholdir chose to gamble on the chance of death to fulfill these new aspirations. Even the misery of the ice crossing had not matched the horror he imagined if he had remained home in that little shop, facing an eternity of making nothing but pins.

Oh, life as a soldier in Beleriand had plenty of boredom and tasks requiring that combination of mindless repetition yet constant alertness to fine detail that had made pin-making so loathsome. Inventory maintenance and record keeping for the regiments stationed in Nargothrond required long hours staring at and counting stacks of food, armor, clothing, and bedding, and then writing everything down in the captain and steward’s books. Tacholdir had a steady and legible hand unencumbered by flourishes, and his tengwar shapes were always uniform, never cramped and almost never marred by blotched ink. Edrahil, the head steward, was enamored with his penmanship, exactly the hand needed for soldiers’ records. Not the penmanship to write inspiring accounts of feats of valor and bravery, but after a few centuries and having faced the Helcaraxë and Morgoth’s hordes, Tacholdir’s enthusiasm for martial glory had muted with some needed maturity. 

Tacholdir still patrolled with the other rangers and soldiers, and his woodcraft was respectable for a boy who grew up in the stone streets of Tirion. The native Sindar thought he was hopelessly clumsy, but then they were glad that Tacholdir was the one patient enough to count arrows so everyone was issued enough for patrols. Tacholdir’s patience and penmanship also meant that he was the natural pick to teach the new arrivals how to read and write tengwar, which both sides accepted with good humor. The rangers unanimously agreed Tacholdir was an excellent tutor. His students were not only Sindar, for several of the mortals served for years in Nargothrond, and Tacholdir was as close to them as the king. He even translated some of the books into Taliska, for he had time, and others had already translated the Quenya to Sindarin or the other way around, or the bits of Khuzdul that King Finrod Felagund spoke. The mortals did not always find the topics interesting, for the botany of plants that only grew in Valinor or the mechanics of aqueducts meant little to them, and the metallurgy texts grew too complex and in-depth. The Bëorians that came to Nargothrond for learning were rarely smiths or needed to know the precise chemical proportions for certain steel alloys. Nowhere in those text mentioned pin-making. 

Loyalty to his king, captain, and steward played a role in Tacholdir’s decision, but also his love of those mortals and the memories of many hours spent teaching young men and women of the People of Bëor how to shape letters and read well-worn books. And maybe a little of that old folly wishing for an escape to adventure and danger and glory. So Tacholdir stood with King Finrod and rode with Beren and was captured by Sauron.

Weeks shackled to the lowest dungeon in Tol-in-Gaurhoth, Tacholdir tested the iron manacles chaining him to the wall. Naked and cold, covered in filth and reeking with the odors of waste and dirt and butchery, Tacholdir’s eyes tried to avoid the remains of his companions. It was hard not to stare at them. Half of the company had already be killed and devoured by the werewolves, leaving only bits of decomposing gore and bones grooved deeply by fangs. A mindless yet tedious terror it was to wait, but death the only hope of escape. Made of fresh iron bolted to the stones, no mere elven strength would pull the chains free of the wall, nor even would dislocating joints and slicking wrists wet with blood pull limbs free. That had been tried.

Worst of all to Tacholdir, staring at the iron manacles that trapped him, was he could deduce clearly how to pick the lock.

All he needed was a pin.

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Chapter End Notes

Tony Robinson's Worst Jobs in History is an entertaining and informative series, and this clip from the section on the Tudors was the inspiration. 

While not poverty on the human scale, it is preposterous to think there was no economic or social imbalance in the monarchical system of the elves, and someone had to be handcrafting all the pins or nails, just as there were those needed to grow the food, clean, and all the tasks the princes had no time (or temperament and ambition) to do.

Taliska is name for the language of the Bëorians, distantly related to Adûnaic.