Closing the Circle by Gadira

Notes

Boring Author´s Note (for clarification): This notion of Fate being composed by remembrance/ reflection/ repetition and the resulting impotence is of course a very archaic one (which Tolkien´s world reflects to an interesting degree). It means to understand the world as operating in circles, with no real option to change, and always depending on the previous actions. Someone with an exact knowledge of the past in its correct order (which in archaic Greek tradition is the dominion of the Muses, daughters of Memory, who gifted the singer of true facts with their knowledge) is a Seer. This Seer, the poet, is useful for the community because he keeps its past events in his mind.

For this conception of the world, the different paths laid in front of a man are already determined by what happened before. Míriel´s decisions and fate conditioned Fëanor´s decisions and his fate, and this, in turn, conditioned the decisions and fate of his sons, and of his grandson. This is an inexorable fate, which provokes a feeling of impotence in the individual who discovers that it´s impossible to stop the flow once that it has been started. (The most famous example of unstoppable "flow" of events of European tradition is the Iliad, and its main theme of deaths that must result in other deaths)

Also, the most reasonable incarnation for this conception of Fate is Vairë, and not only because she weaves like the Fates, but mainly because she is the one who is in posession of the most detailed and orderly knowledge of the actions of all beings in Arda since the beginning of times. Like the Muse, she is a recorder, and therefore a seer. (Which means: The bits of theology surrounding her figure in this fic have been created by me, mostly without expressly contradicting canon. Besides, the mythological mind thinks in genealogies –see Hesiod for details-. "Mandos has foresight" and "Mandos is married to Foresight" would be synonyms.)

Another note: (because I´m afraid that people who read this as a separate thing are going to miss this point) This work, as many others of mine, tries to bring out elements of Mediterranean myth and/or to do a reinterpretation of canonical events under this new light. That is their purpose, and that is why they have a somewhat alien and maybe unTolkienesque air. ^_^