The Fairest Vessels That Ever Sailed by Lindariel

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Chapter 7: Woven by Our Wives and Our Daughters

Wherein Alatáriel learns that everything old is new again. This chapter takes place in early summer, about three months after the trip to Nimbrethil. Anor and Ithil have been ruling the skies for a year by the new reckoning.

Alatáriel carried the last hamper of clean fleece into the storeroom and set it down on a shelf. Círdan had kept his word handsomely, Alatáriel thought. He had renovated this long, low building down by the harbor into a sail-weaving workshop just as she had asked. The Falathrim were capable of making boats, but generally they produced only rafts or individual pleasure-vessels. While Teleporno was making great headway in instructing Cirdan and his chief shipwrights in the creation of larger vessels, it fell to Alatáriel to solve the Falathrim's problems with sails.

Princess or not, Alatáriel's mother had not been above the weaving of sails which was an essential element of the Telerin culture of Alqualondë. Naturally she made sure to instruct Alatáriel thoroughly in all the aspects of sail production. This knowledge had sat ill with Alatáriel's father: anything to do with weaving tended to make her grandfather Finwë at best uneasy, at worst (if Indis were elsewhere) downright maudlin. Alatáriel's amilyë and ataryo had both reminded her many times never to speak of weaving around Finwë or Fëanáro. Reminding Fëanáro of his lost mother would be cruel, by tacit agreement of the entire extended family, and one simply did not remind Finwë Noldóran of his first wife Míriel who now works with Vairë in the house of Námo to weave the story of Arda. Finwë had methodically redecorated each of his dwellings after his remarriage, swapping out all his lost wife's tapestries and embroidered hangings for frescoes, bas-reliefs, and mosaics. Not one of the Noldor royal house for the last two generations was taught even the basic elements of weaving. But Eärwen was having none of that foolishness; she and Arafinwë had had to come to an understanding about how important the production of sails was to the family of Alatáriel's other royal grandfather, Olwë Aran Telerion. So the young Alatáriel may have learned nothing of the art of tapestry weaving, but she knew everything there was to know about sailmaking.

Círdan's builders, with no little prodding from Alatáriel, had raised the roof of the old warehouse to incorporate a clerestory that let in abundant light and sea air. Orderly storerooms for raw materials and completed cloth filled one end of the building, while the other end had been set up with many of the comforts of a dwelling. A capacious kitchen and dining area shared space with a comfortable sitting room full of seats convenient for combing and spinning workers. Across the back wall of the spinning room was a spot furnished with cradles, small beds, cushions, and low tables. Spinning is such a pleasant social activity, she had assured Círdan, that parents of small elflings would appreciate having the opportunity to come here and spin also. As a small elfling, she herself had spent plenty of time in Alqualondë's biggest weaving atelier while visiting her mother's people. She remembered playing with the spindles and eating meals with the children of the spinners and weavers, listening to her mother singing as she wove.

Alatáriel emerged from the storeroom empty-handed and stopped to look down the newly created great hall. The central area of the building was to be the weavers' domain. Two rows of pillars held up the new higher roof, forming a large central area with aisles on each long side. There she had had Círdan install rows of transverse beams connecting the roof supports. The two rows of beams provided secure rests to lean the forthcoming looms against, while low chests and bins for storing loomweights and weaving tools lined the walls.

Even now three of the women she had picked as supervisors were helping to stow the newly delivered loomweights in the chests. The local potters had looked askance at her order for 720 closely matched fired clay weights and balked outright at the request for a dozen dozen ceramic spindle whorls in a range of weights. "I don't make beads," one potter had protested. Today's delivery suggested they had taken the challenge seriously, but she was reserving judgment until she saw how they did with the spindle whorls.

As she stood watching, six women entered the hall led by Brûniel, the person Círdan had advised Alatáriel to place in charge of spinning. Each of the women carried a small, damp-looking rush basket. Brûniel directed them to the spinning area as Alatáriel trailed behind, confused. Where was their wool, and where their spindles?

The women spread out among the tables and chairs and began to work. Each of their soft baskets contained coiled sheafs of long, fine off-white fibers. The fibers gleamed faintly, looking a bit damp and sticky. Alatáriel watched the woman nearest to her beginning to stretch out the sheafs on a table. This was nothing like any fiber processing technique she had ever seen, and Alatáriel was very curious. "Tell me what I am looking at," she said to Brûniel.

"This is the bast of nettle plants," Brûniel said. She looked surprised by the confusion on Alatáriel's face. "Nettles are harvested and turned into thread for weaving within a very short time, no more than two trips of Anor as we reckon it now. There must still be some juice on the fibers in order to make the thread fine enough."

As they spoke the other woman was separating out individual fibers. She took two and laid them parallel across her lap. She rolled one side of the pair down her thigh with her hand, holding the twist while she did the same with the other side. Then she rolled the pair together in the opposite reaction. As quick as thought, she had produced the beginning of a strong gossamer-fine thread. Then she overlapped a new fiber at the end of each original fiber with a pinch and repeated the movements. She continued to roll and splice in individual fibers as the thread lengthened and Alatáriel's astonishment mounted.

"I have never seen anything like this," Alatáriel admitted. "Nettle plants! I would like to see how the plant is processed to get the fibers to this point. Is that possible?"

"Yes, my lady," Brûniel told her, "I can take you to the field this afternoon; it is inland, east of the river."

"Thank you," Alatáriel said. She was still uncomfortable being my-ladied by the Falathrim, but at least it was no longer coming as a surprise. On the other hand, almost everything to do with Falathrin textiles was coming as a surprise, often a very large one. She knew there were people in Aman who still remembered how they had once worked with nettle fiber before the Great Journey, but she herself had never seen it done. In Aman it was much more common to work with bast from malinornë or linden or the lovely blue-flowered flax plant, although never for sailmaking. Evidently the Falathrim were making nettlecloth sails. How had she missed this important fact up until now?

Alatáriel remembered how surprised she had been to encounter the limitations of the two types of looms the Falathrim used. The looms used for traditional garment cloth were so old they had no name. Truly archaic in design, they consisted of little more than two beams pegged out on the ground with a shed stick floating above the warp on supports. Alatáriel had heard about looms like these, but they had not been used in Aman since well before she was born, and she was fascinated to learn about them firsthand. The finely patterned bast or wool cloths the Falathrim produced on these looms were thin and supple, some undyed, others multicolored, and yet others with delicate patterns woven in via supplementary warp or weft. Some of the oldest Falathrim preferred to wear elegantly simple garments formed solely from draped, wrapped, and folded rectangles of this cloth, while most people had moved on to shape-woven or cut and stitched garments made from cloth produced on the other type of loom.

Here at least Alatáriel had felt on more familiar ground. The Falathrim called their simple upright frame looms tulu nathron, and they used them to weave a wide array of clothing and domestic furnishings. The tulu nathron were similar to the Telerin sail weaving looms. Alatáriel expected it would be easy to adapt them to the kind of sail weaving she needed to teach them, although she foresaw difficulties in convincing the female Falathrim to try weaving on them. There seemed to be some kind of cultural association of the newer loom with néri rather than nissi. But she was sure she could convince the nissi to try weaving on the upgraded tulu nathron she was about to introduce. "I must ask Teleporno to check on the progress of those carpenters," she reminded herself aloud, as Brûniel and the splicing woman looked at her in confusion. She laughed, realizing she had spoken in Quenya, and quickly complimented the woman on the high quality of her fine thread in proper Falathrin.

* * * * * * *

If Alatáriel took the path along the east bank of the River Nenning, Teleporno's new shipyard would be on the way back to Eglarest from the field where the spinners were harvesting nettles. Accordingly Brûniel parted ways with her a couple of thousand rangar northeast of there to continue home, while Alatáriel strode on into the shipyard. Her eyes moved across the expanse of it, assessing. She had not been there since Canyalqua had been ceremoniously moved into the smallest of the three drydocks a moon ago. The largest drydock lay empty still, but in the medium-sized one a bustle of activity caught her attention. At the center of the bustle she recognized Teleporno's silver head towering above several other heads bent over workbenches. She moved closer and watched for a few minutes.

Teleporno stood amid six workbenches, watching and instructing as a dozen workers ran planes over rounded timbers. She smiled, knowing he was doing what he loved best: making sure more swan prows came into being. Círdan and Teleporno had assessed the skills of several aspiring shipwrights, and she guessed these must be the ones who had shown the most aptitude for the most sculptural aspect of building a swan-ship: making it look like a swan. Teleporno loved that part of shipbuilding so much he had tried to teach even her how to do it, until he figured out how much better she was at shaping wood in other ways. Today's lesson was clearly a low-intermediate one. From the look of it, these workers were better with planes than she had proven to be, but it would take yéni until any of them could approach Teleporno's skill at shaping.

Periodically Teleporno scanned his charges, looking to see who needed a word of advice next. On one of those scans he caught sight of Alatáriel watching. He grinned at her so brightly it made her heart do a funny little flip, and he moved over to where she stood. "How do they look?" he asked proudly.

"Very dedicated," she said. "You have succeeded in inspiring them."

"Not I," he said, pointing toward the river where Alatáriel saw three swans and a number of cygnets swimming among the clumps of flowering ninglor on the riverbank. "Here they can work from nature. I am just here to show them how to hold their tools."

"You underestimate yourself," Alatáriel declared, "but no one else here makes that mistake." They looked at one another, smiling, for a moment, until she continued "I am on my way back to town. Can you walk with me?"

"Yes, I think so," he replied. "Just a moment." He stepped away, giving a quick set of directions to one of the workers, and then returned. "Echadil will see to the cleanup. I think they have all made a big enough pile of wood shavings for one day." He held out his arm to her. "Shall we go?"

"We shall," Alatáriel smiled, laying her arm atop his and clasping her palm over his fist. Thus formally and with consciously exaggerated grace they exited the shipyard, skirting the many worktables, tool stands, and stacks of support timbers.

"Where have you been?" asked Teleporno after a few dozen steps south along the river path. "I thought you were supposed to be in town sorting out the loomweight delivery."

"I was, but I had an opportunity to see something extraordinary so I took it," Alatáriel said, unconsciously falling back into speaking Quenya. "Did you know, Teleporno, that they weave their sails with nettle here? And that they splice the thread for weaving from freshly cut nettle stalks with barely any processing, certainly without any retting or heckling? I never thought I should see such a thing!" she declared, dropping his arm and turning to face him.

"I did notice their sails were not wool, from the few times Círdan asked me to examine one of their little boats," he answered, stopping and also switching to Quenya. "But I paid little attention to it at the time." He began to walk again, and Alatáriel moved to keep up with him. "They use nettle and not flax? That is unusual, and very ancient. My amilyë sometimes talks about how they made nettle cloth before the Great Journey, but the only people who care to listen are the traditionalists of her generation. The younger generations have embraced the improvements we developed in Aman."

"You are fortunate that people speak so openly of such things in your family. Every time my amilyë talks about anything to do with textiles, my ataryo's face darkens and he changes the subject," she said, reflexively kissing her thumb. "I know so little about any textile traditions that have to do with anything other than Telerin sailmaking. How can I teach these people so many new skills when I lack all their old skills? They will think me a disruptive upstart, arrogant like my cousin."

"You are not like your cousin," Teleporno countered, careful not to name him.Alatáriel had become surprisingly insecure about her skills and knowledge over this last year of living in exile among people who did things very differently. He knew if he spoke Fëanáro's name it would take her much longer to restore her optimism. "Right now the Falathrim are eager to learn what we have to teach. The desire of their hearts is to learn to make ships as fair as our little Canyalqua. If they knew the heart-stopping beauty of a whole fleet of Telerin swan-ships, they would barely let us eat or sleep for demanding we teach them how to build like that. So they are already prepared to respect and heed you for your expertise. But if you are concerned that they will think you disruptive to their traditions, then take the effort to learn the techniques they know at the same time as you are teaching them ours. They will see how you respect the old ways and they will respect you for teaching them the new ones." He held out his arm to her again as they walked, and she took it as before although without any flourishing. "It will be fine, Alatáriel. You will see. And if you choose not to believe me, you can take your concerns to my uncle. He is very wise, and I know he cares for you as if you were family." He managed to say this last without letting slipthat he and Círdan already did consider her family.

"Thank you for this counsel. You are right that I should learn how to process and splice nekellain in the old way, and perhaps I should also learn to weave on the old loom. I will think on the rest of what you have said as well."

Teleporno winced. Alatáriel had just made up a name for nettle thread that was half Quenya, half Falathrin, and it was making his head ache. She was never going to become either a poet or a linguist, he thought for the thousandth time. But since he could not remember what the old word was for nettle thread, he thought it best to say nothing, and so he did. He smiled, putting his other hand over her hand to enclose it between both of his, and began to hum a walking song.

Chapter End Notes

malinornë (Q) -- mallorn

tulu nathron (S) -- weaver's support, i.e., frame loom

néri (Q) -- male Elves

nissi (Q) -- female Elves

rangar (Q) -- yards, roughly

ninglor (S) -- yellow flag iris, Iris pseudacorus

nekellain (Quenya-Sindarin) -- "thorn-thread"

The words for weaver in Sindarin are early (from the Etymologies, in the 1930s) and typically masculine. However, "Laws and Customs among the Eldar" (HoME, Vol. X) notes that the nissi, Elven women, were the textile workers. This essay dates to approximately 1959, after the publication of LotR, and accords with the published description of Galadriel "and her maidens" weaving cloaks for the Fellowship. I solved this canon conflict by imagining a time when male and female Elves weave on different types of looms, as was done at certain historical points in human history.

The technical descriptions in this chapter crept in gradually. Wherever possible I have tried to use simple explanations. I'm sorry if you get a little lost in the terminology, gentle reader; but these descriptions are necessary in order to fulfill my vision for the story line and to contrast with some of what is coming later on down the line. Everything is grounded in the development of textile technology on Planet Earth, and I am happy to talk about that subject for hours with anyone who is interested. The pegged-out groundlooms in this story are based on Bronze Age Egyptian looms and the surviving traditional looms of (among others) the Bedouin. The upright frame loom is common to many cultures' early history, but I was thinking most about the Iron Age Egyptian ones because they too were used by men whereas the earlier groundlooms were used by women.

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