Abundance [ Nerdanel ] by Lordnelson100

Chapter 1

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Journeyman

On a summer day, she began the work that would become the most famous of all the creations of her hands— except for one.

It began as if from nowhere (or so it seemed to her at the time).

True, by then she had spent many years as her father’s apprentice, praised for her skill and her industry, her patience and her delicate touch in shaping surfaces.

Also true, that when she had turned from forge work to creating likenesses— when she had found her own proper gift in sculpting the faces and forms of her people, and of the living animals and growing things— then she had begun to win great praise. Then the Noldor rejoiced in her work, and passed her figurines from hand to hand, and set them upon pedestals and hearth-mantels.

They began to say that Mahtan’s daughter had his spirit in her fingertips. A few, even, whispered that now they understood how she had caught the eye of the prince, her father’s master student (thought they managed to sound as if it were Fëanor’s achievement, discovering her hidden worth, more than it were her own merit for having it).

But this new work: this was different.

She had returned upon the eve of summer from a long ride at Fëanor’s side in the distant wild edges of Aman. There lay in her studio an enormous length of wood, hard, dense and richly colored, with a scent redolent of warm far-off forests far to the south. It was the huge bole of a mighty tree, split and stripped and dried, and brought here as a gift by a travelling friend of her father’s.

Till now she had had no idea what to do with it.

But on this day, with the golden treelight just rising, and the air promising summer heat to come yet still slightly chill, so that she had wrapped an old shawl about her shoulders when she came out to her workshop—

On this day, she took up her tools and began to carve, and worked as she had never worked before.  With axe and adze, she roughed out the form that took shape in her thoughts. Before the light changed, a great figure had begun to spring forth from the wood, as if it— as if she — had always been there.

Yavanna strode forth, in the woman’s body in which she cloaked herself in Eä. In Nerdanel’s shaping, the noble body, twice as tall as an Elf, walked amidst her meadows, a long robe in graceful carven folds swirling after her, which yet did not obscure the curve of a mighty hip, the generosity and delicacy of her broad bare bosom, the merry roundness of the belly, the vulnerable, powerful cleft between her legs.  Her curling hair flowed in a river over her shoulders, with flowers all among her endless, wild locks.

Nerdanel’s own cloak had long been dropped into the sawdust and shavings on the floor; her red hair was damp and tangled with sweat; her arms ached. She was half aware of sending several people away with abrupt words, when they intruded into the corner of her vision. Water was left at her elbow, and she drank it; bread, and she put it into her mouth. But she did not cease.

When nightfall came for second time, her mother came and urged her to take rest; and sometime later, Mahtan followed. He watched his daughter at her work in silence for some time, without comment; and then at last said, “Not as your father, and no more as your master, do I speak: but as your fellow artist. Only you may say how the hours of your inspiration run: when to take up and when to cease. But you are making my wife, your lady mother, worried.”

Abashed, Nerdanel laid down her tools at last, and went into the house, and embraced her mother, and her father too, and allowed them to bring her food and send her to the bath and bed. But the next day she rose early and fell at once to work, and the next, and the next.

After some weeks, the as yet-nameless work had grown in size till it stretched for many yards down the enormous slab of hardwood. She had begun in the very middle, with the centering figure of Yavanna. Now on either side, as if emerging from the wood in the Vala’s wake, were laughing maidens and youths with their arms full of fruit, were tree boughs swaying laden with blossom, and meadows full of ragged wildflowers. With chisel and mallet she refined each figure in minute detail; hollowing the space between until the figures seemed all but ready to leap from the background.  Deer paused among the shadows of the woodland, shy and fleet. Small plump birds cocked their tiny heads and gave a sideways look. Rabbits ran among tall grass, throwing up their hind legs in saucy pride at their speed.

At some point, Nerdanel realized that Fëanor was standing in the studio; his arms folded and his gaze intent. She had not seen him in — some time, and yet: he was in everything, in all of this. He gave her a very small smile and cocked an eyebrow at her. She did not say, “I am working; I must do this; this is the best thing I have ever made, and it is the most important thing right now.” For she saw that he saw; it was one of the reasons she loved him.

She went back to work, and he went away. But he came again and he brought with him apprentices carrying many trays and vessels. “I had an idea,” he said gruffly. “It is an experiment. You need only use them if you like!”

The workmen set their trays on the side table, and wiping the sweat from her brow, she came to gaze at the array of bowls and jars before her. Colors in dense, rich liquids, opaque as milk, were found in some jars. Red ochre she recognized, and yellow orpiment — but here were shades of pigment she had never seen in any artists’ work, even among the most cunning Noldor artisans. In one jar, gold was made liquid. Scarlet bright as winter berries pooled in another, while a blue as of a living iris-flower filled its neighbor. Yet again,  a translucent glaze like the delicate skin of wrist wherein the blood gives faint color to the surface. Beside this, in other samples, rich powders of crushed crystalline minerals glistened; when mixed with oil, they smeared into a hundred subtle gradients.

Delight swelled within her.

Fëanor was talking now, half nervously: “The greens and blue were difficult: that one is copper acetate, and that one, azurite — you must wear gloves, and mind you do not bite your brushes —”

She threw her arms around him, tucking her head into his muscular neck, and he fell quiet. She took in his scent: chemical buzz of the laboratory and warm work damp of his skin and ash of the fire and the good plain linen of his work-robe. She held him tightly, saying little, but she felt his heart beating within his broad chest. Soon she returned to her work, but Fëanor went smiling when he left.

The great sculpture went on towards its final form. Now Yavanna’s cloak in its swirling folds was edged with gold, and the silver stars sprinkled on it were picked out against a background of deepest blue. Now each fruit was touched with glistening red, or bright yellow tinged with green, or wine-dark purple, and tree-blossoms were dressed in frothy white just tinged with pink.

She had a brush in her hand — sable fur, just freshly dipped in gold flake— touching the tracery of jewels around the neck of a dancing handmaiden — on the day that Mahtan came to her and said, “Aulë has come to our house, daughter.”

Of course she gave it to them, to Aulë and Yavanna, without their need to ask. In all the time of working on it, she had never stopped to think what or who it was for, only that it come to be. And the Giver of Fruits and the Smith set it up in a great plinth amid her own meadows, the ever-verdant gardens of the Kementari, where it could be visited by all who came that way. Often in the days of festivals, the Elves would come and raise their voices in song at this place, and children would run and play near it and shyly touch the wooden figures in their lifelike joy.

In later years, Nerdanel was to make statues of all — of most — of the Valar, as well as of the famous and the great among all the Eldar kind. She worked in those later eras in many noble materials — marble and bronze, truesilver and alabaster, ivory and basalt — for wood came to seem a material rather humble for the splendors of Aman at its noontide.

And yet the image of Kementari, Queen of Earth’s flowering,  made in the very freshness of Nerdanel’s heart in its first youth, remained her most famous and beloved work for many a long age. 

Innovation

Down at her waist, right over each hip, nodes of a curious warm tenderness bloomed, almost but not quite painful. Her breasts grew sensitive to the touch: they felt as they were swelling, like buds on the tip of a branch in springtime. Even her walk changed, she felt: It was far too early for any real weight to belong to the small form inside her, and yet she planted her feet differently, as if she carried in her hands a vessel that she must not spill.

Many months later, when her time drew near,  her belly swelled out before her like a ship in sail; her back ached, and other parts, and it was wearisome to sleep or to rise from sitting. Sometimes cramps and pains ran through her like a hot knife:  her own body stretching and rolling in its new, unpracticed art, in which her own self was the material from which an experiment was shaped. Inside her the coming child moved and shifted, a stranger and yet an utterly known and familiar companion.

Despite these ills, never had she felt as strong: she was as full of satisfaction as a feast-cup overflowing with wine. At her side Fëanor was both joyful and tense, prideful to the point of arrogance about his coming fatherhood, and strangely timid as he touched her rounded belly. He ran to fetch her tea, a silken cushion, sandals when she would walk: shouted at the servants to quiet the least sound of their work; came back again and again to the house from his own workroom, still smeared with soot, to see if she were well.

Her mother took her to the warm springs to rest in the water, on a time. There came suddenly about them the feeling of awe and strangeness that presaged the goings of the Valar. Suddenly, Estë and Irmo were there among the Elves who bathed amid the mossy rocks, and their attendant Maia with them. The mists of the hot springs swirled into shapes of half-seen winged forms and ghostly hands, which caressed the two tall beings as they passed, and faint silvery bells and sighing chants were heard as if at a great distance.

With gentle hands, Estë reached down to Nerdanel from her own great height, and touched her shoulders and then her swollen belly. At once, her aches and tiredness lifted, and she felt the child within her leap and play as if in response. And Nerdanel to her surprise saw that there was a sort of wonder in on the strange, fair face of Estë, who reached out a hand in turn to Irmo beside her. With a look of sorrow, the Lady of Healing said to her spouse, “But this pain to come — must it truly be so?”

The Lord of Dreams, as ever, walked with with his face shrouded in shadows under his deep hood.  If he shared his lady’s emotion, they could not see it. But he bowed his head and answered in his strange cold voice: “So it is with the gifts of Ilúvatar in Arda marred. Great works are achieved through pain and labor proportionate to their excellence; and abundance creates the potential of absence, as an object brings with it its own shadow.”

When they had gone away, Nerdanel said this aloud to her mother, surprised: “Surely Estë has seen many Eldar bear their children, in the ages since we came came to Valinor, and knows the workings of our bodies? The pangs of childbirth are hard, you all say, but I am strong and ready!”

“You see,” said Nerdanel’s mother, whose face was troubled: “They do not themselves give birth. Bodies are as garments to them: a thing which may be cast off or altered, and are not in essence themselves. And seeing children is not like having them. They who have always been, and always will be, how can they understand what our children mean to us?” 

“I suppose,” said Nerdanel, musing,”we Eldar are like unto their children, in some senses.”

 “It is not the same,” said her mother with finality.

Soon after, Nerdanel’s labor began: the pangs that tore a shout from her, the gush of fluid and blood, the hours-long striving that drenched her in sweat and made her grind her teeth and clutch her mother’s hand. And then in her arms and Fëanor’s, at last the small, warm, and well-made child, a fine red-gold down on his head: he peered at their faces with enormous eyes, his spirit reaching out wordlessly, instinctively, to touch their own.

“Look what we have made!” she said to Fëanor.

Masterpiece 

On the road between Tirion and Valmar, there was an unlovely place where the road passed through a narrow, rocky valley.

On a morning when the heat of the Sun beat down and the air was like the fiery breath of a forge door opened,  she took her chisel and began to carve.

Week after week, she worked at it. Her hands were worn and bruised, the skin dry and cracked with stone dust, her nails broken. Her boots and leggings were covered in a thick paste of slurry, and even her tunic and other clothes were frankly unclean. Her hair was stuffed carelessly into a rough cap, from which it escaped in ragged ends.

Figure after figure, body after body, began to take form.

She made no portraits: scrupulously, she did not shape the image of a warrior one-handed; or single out a figure with a harp or a hunting hound; she did not make a king with a seven-pointed star on his armor, a son beside him as like as a young tree to a mighty oak; she did not add a pair of twins.

It was not her own emptiness alone that she made visible.

First, she carved a file of tall warriors with high-crowned helms and swords in their hands; grim faces, glimpsed beneath, fell and fair. And at the feet of the striving warriors, other figures, fallen; pierced, dying, broken.

But she was not done.

Dark forests of trees twisted and infected she carved, and between their rotten trunks the figures of swollen spiders and slinking wolves. And she did not forbear to add amidst them torn and twisted bodies, dragged away as prey.

But she was not done.

Out of the rock she brought forth the images of Morgoth’s thralls: their bodies attenuated to  near-skeletal thinness, loaded with chains, surrounded by leering, monstrous guards, who mounted with triumphant lust over dishevelled captives.

Rivers of flowing fire rolled down from grim mountaintops. Fell winged monsters sped aloft. Fragmented skulls and the shattered bones of once-lovely bodies were scattered before broken towers.

Nerdanel had never seen the Aftercomers, the Children of Men, or Aulë’s people, the skilfull Khazâd, but she used her artist’s eye to guide her hand. Her tools worked out the shapes: there in stone the younger peoples fought their hopeless war against the Imprisoner, amid a sea of raging foes. Little villages burnt away, and helpless beasts of the field ran distraught, and children raised their hands to an empty sky.

On a time, her father came to her. “Daughter,” said Mahtan. “What are you doing?

 “They said,” Nerdanel replied. “That this land of bliss has been fenced against those across the seas, so that even the echoes of the Noldor’s lamentation should not come to our ears. And so they raised up the mountains to these terrible heights, and set their nets of dark enchanted seas to bar all comers. They call me the Wise, and yet I am confounded: for it seems to me, Father, that they have walled out repentance, if it comes, as well as guilt — and shut out as well the screams of those who never saw a Silmaril as effectively as those who went forth to avenge Finwë.” 

She threw down the weighted hammer she had in her grasp, and wiped her dusty hands on her cloak. 

“But there are tears and cries of anguish closer than Middle-earth, if They have not stopped their ears. You know as well as I the dark tidings that have reached us, ever bloodier as the centuries pass. Would you know what I see of my sons in my tormented dreams? The great towering mountains do not keep those out!” Her father made a sorrowing gesture, as if he would bid her to peace, but she clenched her fists defiantly. “Praise I was given — I did not ask for it — because I did not join in Fëanor’s rash rebellion, because I bid patience to my people to wait on the Valar’s acts when we were foundering in a sea of dark that Morgoth created. I would ask you: how was that patience rewarded?  If the Valar do not like my grieving — well, I would remind them that they were not the givers of all I have lost.”

She took up a fresh sharp chisel. “I ask nothing of Them, but that if They pass by, They may look — or close their eyes, if They will. Some are skilled at that, methinks.”

Mahtan went sadly away.

At first she labored alone. And then one day, she found some women standing in a knot behind her on the edge of the road, looking upward. Ladies of the Noldor: once she had known them, though not well, when all her own hours were overflowing with children and mate and her art. 

There stood a tall matron whose own husband had gone with Fëanor: and with them went her sister and brother, also. She lived now all alone in a tall white house, where a single lamplit room was visible in the evenings to passersby.

There was another, a fierce politician and mistress of a weaving-guild, who had been a partisan of Fingolfin. Yet she had stayed behind, a tiny babe clasped in her arms, when her haughty grown sons had marched out of Tirion with their father. It was whispered that her spouse and children alike had been shades in the halls of Mandos before ever the new Sun rose, dead among the salt waves of Acqualonde or on the grinding ice of the crossing.

Others there were, both young and ancient, all soberly cloaked and solemn. And one came forward bearing a lamp and said to Nerdanel, “Sister, the shadows grow long here, and your eyes must be weary. Let me light your work.” Another lady came with a jug in her hands and begged her to ease herself with a draught of wine. Yet another, a brawny maid with the arms of a smith said, “Mayhap you do not remember me. I was in Mahtan’s shop when you were a little red-haired thing still playing at carving with an apple. An you give me the task, I would help you with the rougher work.”

Father and brothers, sons and nephews: men came too, mostly Noldor: and they spoke or sang of the brothers and sisters, the betrothed maid or the the beloved student, who had rebelled and gone into Exile unrelenting with their Kings and lords. And even, to her shock, there came a few from Olwë’s people.  “We have not forgotten Alqualondë,” they said grimly. “But what of our kin and cousins long parted? What of the Woodland Elves who tarried on the journey, or lingered in the ancient forests east of the Ocean, or cling to the last seaside havens of its shores?” And so she added these, too, to the unfolding tale of stone.

And so the work went on faster.

And one day, they came. Yavanna as she paced slowly down the road had a crown of winter thorns in her hair, and a sober robe as of snow; Aulë had his great golden beard and long locks closely bound, and had put off the beautiful jewelry of craft and wonder that once he had rejoiced in.

The crowd of Elven men and women moved quietly aside, as the Vala approached.

Yavanna ran her hands over the stony trees of the sorrowful forests, and touched the carven forms of children amid their ruined homes. Aulë, his brow drawn, put a great work-roughened finger to the place where she had shown small, brawny warriors, beards flowing, as they lifted carven axes in defiance. They both lingered over the panel in which she showed a fallen king in the dark pit, torn by wolves, and a pair of lovers bravely striving to overcome a cruel foe amid the broken world.

 And they turned to her with sorrow and sympathy in their eyes.

“Someone is coming,” said Yavanna. “He is on the road even now. The salt wind of the wide ocean stains his cloak, still, but now the white dust of Aman gathers on his shoes as he treads the empty highway to Valmar. And in his hand he bears a treasure that you know of old — for in your home dwelt he who made it.”

Her heart raced, and she turned to them with a question in her eyes. The Great Smith saw it, and shook his head. “He who bears the Silmaril is a stranger, in more ways than one. Alone among all the mortals of the world he has been permitted to alight on our shores. Out of love for all the Children of Iluvatar, the Eldar and Men, he has come to call out pity and aid from the Lords of the West.”

“The world is changing, and a new era dawning,” Yavanna followed in her sweet ringing tones. “The cry shall be heard at last: for pity, pardon for the exiles, and succor beyond hope for those who suffer in the darkened lands, ere Morgoth ascends to final and lasting victory over all.  And it will be given! War against the Enemy who has despoiled the world — it is coming!”

Then Aulë said, with pity softening his craggy looks: “But lady, the tale is not yet all told. For I foresee that this jewel that comes back across the sea is the only one of the Three that shall ever come here. But of those who were your own treasures, they have soiled their claim in blood unjustly shed, falling from noble war against the Enemy to needless crimes against their own kin. A choice still lies before the few who remain, ere the close; to choose a path of repentance or despair. But a dark cloud lies over their end, and little hope, I ween. My guess is that none of your own shall come among us again, unless first they pass through death and the halls of Mandos and win release. And maybe that will not be until the world is remade.”

Yavanna had tears in her eyes, and on her sun-burnt cheek. “Perhaps it would have been more merciful to you if such sons had never been, then the fates to which they have come. To have them and to lose them all, ending in such evil downfalls: perhaps it is worse than never having — “

“No,” said the sculptor with finality. “Would you rather your Trees had never lived? Or that they grew, and once were happy, but were destroyed?  And it is not for myself alone that I have been laboring. A million mother and fathers have lost their sons and daughters since Morgoth passed over the seas. And all is all: if a mother had only a single child, and lost them, then she has lost her whole joy, as much as I who have lost seven. My poor Fëanor could not bear it — to make and to love and to lose. But love in full brings with it the risk of losing and parting, as all things in the world cast their own shadow.”

She swiped a grimy hand across her cheek: ”If something is to be done about all this, at the last — good. Now I will finish.”

Then Nerdanel put down her tools and rested.

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Chapter End Notes

Thanks to the Art Museum of Smith College, where a recent visit made me wonder at the beauty of polychromed wooden relief carvings from the Middle Ages. I imagine Feanor might have excelled at the same sort of brilliant experimentation in color materials, just as Nerdanel would have tackled the complexity of form, emotion and interaction in her sculpting.

And also this story came from trying to write some missing elements that elude the high heroic mode of the Silmarillion: the way that neither art nor birth are clean and tidy: they are things of the body and mess and materials and dirt, at least for all us incarnate beings.