Beneath Starlight Singing by Laura Elizabeth

Beneath Starlight Singing

The care of Doriath is mine. I roam it from end to end, singing new life from bud to open flower, from green sapling to full-grown beech. My mother gave me this charge long ago, to dance, to sing, to make and maintain the beauty which she bestowed on this forest when she first came.

I know every leaf and blade of grass; I know when they are born bright and green, and when they fall golden and silver. I know the rippling water's music, the swaying of oak and beech and elm, the golden sunlight as it falls through the leafy roof.

I know the soft-eyed deer and the swift hare that make their homes in hollows and vales. Each of these things is familiar as my own hand, but new and beautiful as I see them and make them spring to life by my song.

I do not dwell often in Menegroth; my heart is given to the green places, the open glade, the quiet brook and the trilling birdsong. The whole wood is my home, from north to south. I stand upon a hilltop of a night and sing the quiet stars into the sky, and lie down upon a soft tussock of grass to walk in memory through summers passed away, and wake again to join in the dawn chorus.

On a day I wander far and near, singing, dancing through silent shadowed stands of oaks and out again into far-flung open spaces where the sun rejoices to shine upon the soft violets, who turn up their faces shyly to greet her. On and out into cool dewy valleys carpeted in daisies. The sun moves through the heavens and I follow her until the evening comes. The moon rises and I dance within a ring of hemlocks and call the stars one by one to shine on this place until I am a-glimmer in starlight.

Of a sudden, a tremor runs through the whole wood, as if a harpstring were tightened and plucked. I stop for a moment. This has never happened before. The trees are not afraid, but everything has stopped still as if listening or holding its breath. Then the nighttime comes back to life and I bathe myself once more in starshine.

Long weeks pass in a heartbeat. Ever as I move through the woods I know that there is someone who follows me. I turn and see no one, but he is there, and I fear him. Not as I fear evil, but as I fear one from whom I can never turn back. My dancing is a kind of fleeing, but I know that one day I will turn and he will be there before me, whoever he is, whatever our entwined doom.

The winter passes and I sing of young flowers bursting from ancient earth, of sun-warmed tree-skin and thrush's eggs, of speckled fawns and tender shoots of newborn grass.

Beneath my feet they spring to life and I go on, to dappled glades and cool babbling streams.

"Tinuviel!"

Though I have never been called so, I know that it is my name, my own name, and I turn half-unwilling, to see him at last.

"Tinuviel!"

He is weary, earth-stained, starved and sorrow-eyed. Not an elf but a man. I halt with my last notes falling raindrop-soft to the earth. He looks upon me and I know as surely as day gives way to soft gloaming that here is my heart's desire, though I never desired him before this moment. My mind reaches out to his, my soul entwines with his even before his outheld arms embrace me. His hands are rough and scarred, but gentle as a doe's velvet muzzle.

My doom has come upon me and I take it openhanded, willingly. His name whispers in my mind. Beren. And hard upon that name I see a swift vision of things half-guessed, of mighty deeds and aching sorrows, a man's life passing before me all in a moment. Treachery. Outlaw. Ered Gorgoroth. Hunted. Alone. Despairing. Horror. Freedom. Tinuviel.

I take his hand in mine and sing a song of calm and resting, of dark rippling waters falling down into night shadows, of stars and moon and heart's ease. Together we wander through the forest of Doriath, hand in hand beneath the glimmering stars.