A Sense of History: Straight Road
The next in a series of articles about ships passing to and from the West, Simon uses "The Fall of Númenor" to attempt to arrive at Tolkien's reading of the exordium to "Beowulf."
Aman, early in the Second Age. Prompts: resurrection, tower, unscathed, whispering.
She did not call it resurrection, for she did not think she had ever actually died. But every evening she awakened in her own form, unscathed, and looked out her tower window eastward across the Sundering Seas felt like a reincarnation.
By day her hröa took the form of a great seabird, playing touch-and-gone with the tall waves, wheeling and feeding with a colony of gulls. She rarely flew inland or touched the earth. At eventide she returned to her tower.
By night she watched her husband as he sailed the heavens, whispering "which of us will stop flying first?"